Today is team Firepear's 18-month birthday, so I guess it's time to say hello!

I'm mdxi, the team captain, and until very recently the only actual member of the team. About a month ago, a fellow redditor asked (very much to my surprise) if they could join, and I figured: why not? So here we are.

Like the team tagline says: we're here for the science. I was around for the early days of SETI@Home and Folding@Home, but I didn't get into community grid computing back then. I got dragged in about 2 years ago, by a Numberphile video where Matt Parker talked about Woodall Primes and Primegrid. I played around with that a bit, but when I discovered WCG everything changed.

Everyone should do work for the projects that they enjoy, but WCG felt special to me because it was real-world research, being done on real-world (and immediate!) questions/problems, for real-world academic teams. The frequent updates from researchers are amazing. And it feels good to turn my computing/hardware hobby toward a meaningful purpose.

I have friends in astrophysics, and paleoclimatology, and other disciplines. I know how little support they get, institutionally and governmentally, these days. I believe what we do here makes a real difference.

So yeah: we're here for the science, and we'll be around for a while. Happy crunching, everybody!