Thursday, September 1, 2016

Google Citizen Scientists

Here's an idea that I pitched to Google.  Their president hasn't responded in an hour, so I throw it out to the world.  Like everybody else, you can take credit for it and make money.

A long time ago, we had Gentlemen Scientists (very sexist). These were rich people like Sir Isaac Newton, who didn't have to grub for a living.  The point is that they were alone in their richly appointed studies.  They could invent and change the world.  Then we had the steampunk era where individual inventors could come up with a new engine (or is that fiction?).

For the last hundred years or so, we only had big institutions who did all the science.  Very boring, they had to fill out reams of paper to do anything.  They just do incrementals.  The last thing we had from those places was global warming.  But why do these big places have an advantage?  They had big libraries, subscriptions to the pay wall, and lots of computing power, plus throw in a few nuclear reactors.

That's all changing.  No more giant mausoleums of paper.  No more paywall (almost).  Google has changed all that.  The only keeping individuals out is computing power.  My idea was to set up something to give free computing power to qualified people (like me) and remove the last barrier.  I can publish in the open journals.

I have a bee in the bonnet about stupid engineers and seismic analysis.  Obviously, if you are an insider, you cannot rock the boat.  But I run some big models to show them they are stupid.  This is something for grumpy retired scientists.

This could be big for them and would advertise their compute power.  I'll give them another 10 minutes and then go to Amazon.  :)

ps.  I haven't heard from anybody.  I guess that the Chinese will take over bland institutional science just they took over industry that hadn't changed in 30 years.  Good for them!

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