Oops.

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Read up to Chapter 21, commenting on chapter 2. Prediction about the physics of HP:MR.

Harry is mistaken about McGonagall's transformation into a cat breaking conservation of energy; indeed, it seems to me that he is not really putting a lot of effort into finding an alternative explanation, but jumping straight to "Everything I thought I knew was wrong". (Perhaps Lord Kelvin's not the only one who gets a charge out of not knowing something; after all Harry has been wanting to do Something Big, and the more laws of physics are broken, the better!) A simple hypothesis which does not break conservation of energy: Rather than McGonagall's human body literally turning into a cat, it is replaced by a cat-body from elsewhere in the universe. McGonagall's human brain continues to operate in its usual fashion (while being physically elsewhere), and this is turned into cat-brain commands by an AI somewhere in the interface. No mass (hence no energy) appears or disappears, there's just an exchange of objects.

Beware Canadians seeking paperclips.

Many != all.

It is also not equal to 'some'. The vast majority of computers today will use more power when running folding at home than they would if they were not running folding at home. There may be some specific cases where this is not true but it will generally be true.

My desktop is old enough that it uses very little more power at full capacity than it does at idle.

You've measured that have you? Here's an example of some actual measurements for a range of current processors' power draw at idle and under load. It's not a vast difference but it is real and ranges from about 30W / 40% increase in total system power draw to around 100W / 100% increase.

Additionally, you can configure (may be the default, not sure) the client to not increase the clock rate.

I couldn't find mention of any such setting on their site. Do you have a link to an explanation of this setting?

Idle could also mean 'off', which would be significant power savings even (especially?) for older CPUs.

Granted that in many cases, it's donating money that you were otherwise going to burn.

No, modern CPUs use considerably less power when they are idle. A computer running folding at home will be drawing more power than if it were not.

So I think I have it working but... theres nothing to tell me if my CPU is actually doing any work. It says it's running but... is there supposed to be something else? I used to do SETI@home back in the day and they had some nice feedback that made you feel like you were actually doing something (of course, you weren't because your computer was looking for non-existent signals, but still).

Donating money to scientific organizations (in the form of a larger power bill). You run your CPU (otherwise idle) to crunch difficult, highly parallel problems like protein folding.

Has anybody considered starting a folding@home team for lesswrong? Seems like it would be a fairly cheap way of increasing our visibility.

<30 seconds later>

After a brief 10 word discussion on #lesswrong, I've made a lesswrong team :p

Our team number is 186453; enter this into the folding@home client, and your completed work units will be credited.