Welcome to the Knights Who Say Ni Website!

Welcome to the new server!

Everybody, meet Ni. Ni, everybody.

Ni is running Toby's Boinc Statistics and The KWSN Forum quite contently from his cage in Atlanta, Georgia. When he isn't out updating statistics for you or making sure posts get posted in the right places, he's crunching away on some SETI@Home workunits via Boinc.

What is SETI@Home?

SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. SETI researchers use many methods. One popular method, RadioSETI, listens for artificial radio signals coming from other stars. Seti@home is basically a RadioSETI project that lets anyone with a computer and an Internet connection participate.

Seti@home is a scientific experiment that harnesses the power of millions of Internet connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running the free BOINC client program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. There is the small but very captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth!

Seti@home uses the largest telescope in the world, the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, to continuously scan the sky for radio signals. So far, nearly all of the sky visible from the Arecibo Telescope has been scanned at least once. As time progresses, the Arecibo Telescope passes over the same point several times. This benefits Seti@home, because it allows us to distinguish between signals that occur due to radio frequency interference and actual extraterrestrial signals. After the data is recorded onto tapes at the Arecibo Observatory, they are shipped back to the Seti@home lab in Berkeley, California. The data is then broken up into work units (WUs), which are sent out to the BOINC client program over the internet for analysis.