phees' dissections - mixed

Creepy computing

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:01:00 +0200

A small guest contribution for Timo Grubing's Zombiblog

2008's Yahoo top ten search words

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:32:00 +0200

A bit late, but according to TechCrunch, 2008's top ten Yahoo searches were:

Britney Spears [+/-0] (2007: Britney Spears)
WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) [+/-0] (2007: WWE)
Barack Obama [new] (2007: Paris Hilton)
Miley Cyrus [new] (2007: Naruto)
RuneScape [+2] (2007:Beyonce)
Jessica Alba [+4] (2007:Lindsay Lohan)
Naruto [-3] (2007: Rune Scape)
Lindsay Lohan [-2] (2007: Fantasy Football)
Angelina Jolie [new] (2007: Fergie)
American Idol[new] (2007: Jessica Alba)

Ok, this can have one or several of the following causes:

Fans of celebrities do not know how to use bookmarks.
Jessica Alba is harder to find than Lindsay Lohan. (In 2007 it was the other way around!)
Wrestling fans don't know how to use bookmarks, either!
A blonde, singing Barack Obama in a skin-tight costume would be number one?

I am sorry, but number two disturbs me a bit. Since I never search for WWE, some people must be really huge fans.

However, marketing strategists must be close to crying, realizing how cemented the simple longings of humans are. ;)

Happy New Year 2009

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:01:00 +0100

A happy new year to you all!

Eater Of The Worlds

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:03:00 +0200

Oh, Black Hole, Thee we fear and adore!

The day the earth stood jittery.

The CERN recently came to worldwide attention in a most flustering way: As a possible father of the Eater Of The Worlds, aka black hole.

The question is, what kind of danger really emerges from CERN's newest experiment, also known as the Large Hadron Collider? And large it really is. Buried, well out of sight in a depth of 50 to 175 meters under ground near Geneva, Switzerland, the 27 kilometer long LHC is the largest machine ever build by mankind. And according to CERN officials, it is perfectly safe. But these denials do sound too rehearsed to contain the whole truth, don't they?

Please, read the whole article. Really, do it!

(And have a look at Timo Grubing's blog, who kindly made the illustrations!)

1 Introduction

The idea to produce black holes on earth is well known and it was discussed over the years by many well known authors. Dan Simmons in example, just to name one.
In Hyperion, Simmons states a situation, where a black hole, accidentally created by a group of physicists, finally destroys the whole earth. In the proposed scenario, by the time of the Great Mistake, mankind gladly is capable of interstellar travel and in possession of a not too small number of extraterrestrial colonies. In fact the larger part of mankind already does live off-earth by then.
Why is CERN doing its experiments now, giving us no chance to leave a possible collapsing earth? The dangers and possible consequences are well known! What are the scientist's true intentions, to put all of our lives at stake?

2 The way of the CERN society

If you have a close look at CERN, you will find, that the Large Hadron Collider is the logical conclusion in the long line of experiments, silently being performed since 1954, the founding year of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which is CERN's obscure, full name. Seen from this perspective, the production of black holes seems to be the ultimate goal of the CERN society.
But why do these scientists want to make those monsters of the cosmos so badly? Even at these risks? CERN still owes us an honest answer.
Some possible reasons are quite easy to guess, though:

3 Reasons

What benefit could a sealed off society of scientists, which CERN truly is, have in mind as a trade-off for mankind? Looking closely at CERN, one comes across some plausible reasons:

3.1 Energy source

CERN could try to use the black hole as a way to tap into the gigantic amounts of black, or "dark" energy. Knowledge in managing an energy source of this extent is very small at best. It might well be a direct way to turn our planet into a burning hell.

(c) by Timo Grubing
3.2 Permanent disposal site

A black hole would be the perfect waste dump site you could imagine! Nothing you put in it will ever re-emerge again. Not even nuclear radiation! If you really want to get rid of something, anything from radioactive waste over exhaust gases to toxic or life-threatening material, a small black hole would be your best choice.
You could even use a small black hole as a perfectly secure office shredder. Not one single document would ever be retrievable. Ever! Intelligence services all over the world would want their own black holes. And possibly more than just one each. Producing them will turn CERN into a goldmine! If you ever wondered over the vast number of countries, funding the CERN, this idea will be a no-brainer.

3.3 Control of Earth's climate

If the black hole was sealed off from matter, it would still swallow infrared radiation (=heat). That way global warming could become controllable and eventually reversible. But at what cost? Since light is radiation, too, and therefore also swallowed by the black hole, possibly at the cost of a life in eternal darkness!
One regularly ignored fact is, that the world's climate is a very fragile system. If the black hole being constructed at CERN is too large, it might actually get too cold on earth to live. The point of absolute zero is -273°C. Not a single human was ever known to be alive after experiencing such temperatures. Mankind would be doomed!

3.4 Beaming & Time travel

Many physicists state, techniques, until now only known from popular science fiction, might be possible in the vicinity of a black hole. The mentioned techniques inspired Philip Eisner to write his famous scenario of Event Horizon. The political, commercial and economical potential in controlling technology allowing instant travel, possibly through time as well, does not need to be discussed at this point. Deploying thousands of Marines all over the world in no more than the blink of the eye should easily be worth the money CERN cost up till now.

3.5 Other reasons

There might be a huge number of other reasons, the people of CERN just don't want us to know. At best we will never know, at its worst, we all will. Terminally.

(c) by Timo Grubing
4 Further information

If you believe anything from my writing above, please read CERN's press release and possibly the Journal Of Physics' paper as well to get an idea of the real situation.

5 My intention

The enormous potential carried by the CERN's black hole conspiracy (CBHC) for conspiracy theorists is formidable, 9/11 alone was good for more than 7 years now. Combining CBHC with 9/11 will bring our conspiracy-screwballs well through the next 20 years without any risk of boredom. I just wanted to write down some of the more obvious CBHCs to come, just to be able to say "I saw it coming," when it is time.
By the way, feel free to tell me of your ideas how to use a black hole in the comments section. I might add it to the article's list.

6 Word of thanks

A big thank you goes to Timo Grubing, my most favourite illustrator, for the imposing illustrations! Have a look at Timo's homepage and at Grubismus, his art blog.

7 Disclaimer

No, this is not meant serious, you should have realized that some abstracts ago, anyway.
I'm sorry for all those who stopped reading half the way through the story and did not get my intention. But just as I told them, they should have read to the end.

Want some coffee?

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:03:00 +0200

From the section:
Don't try this at home

I recently had too much time and started cleaning my PC from the inside, leaving the side panel only leaned-on. Later that day I had a cup of Starbucks' Kenya coffee watching the Simpsons and - against my usual principles - put the half empty cup on the computer.

When it started to rain I turned in my seat to close my window, catching the computer case with my knee, which left the sidepanel tilted sideways. The now falling coffee mug found the panel to be a nice springboard for it's final jump into the casing, spraying lukewarm coffee all over the innards.

Something went 'click' and the computer shut down immediately.

Cursing, I unplugged all cables and connectors and started to take the machine apart. Virtually every single part, even the harddrives and the backpanel of my machine were caffeinated. It took me the better part of two hours to scrub the parts clean. I dried them off as good as I could and reconnected everything, letting it dry over night.

Next morning I connected the cables and switched the machine on - and nothing happened. Frustrated, I switched off and on again and noticed the power LED blinking very shortly. A third try let it stay on a little longer and the fourth made the CPU fan turn a few rounds.

Irritated and in some way curious, I repeated the switching several times until the machine eventually sprung into life, leaving a strange feeling of having done some kind of electronical heart massage. But, anyway, I revived my computer. For a day the box smelled like burnt coffee - apparently I hadn't found all the coffee contaminated spots - but it works fine.

All in all my original plan of cleaning the computer left it in a clean-as-new state, which I would never have cared to work for, voluntarily.

Look! Animals!

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:34:00 +0200

I played around a bit, and here are some samples of SPORE-creatures:

As "caPri" mentioned, my shark "Frette Fiche" is referred to at grubismus.blogspot.com.

Movies & Open Source

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:51:00 +0200

While the media world whines about it's loss of sales, the open source movement produces more and more excellent content. Using up-to-date open source 3D tools, two beautifully rendered movies went public:

The 10 minute animated movie Big Buck Bunny is a must see. It is available on its own homepage in a variety of formats and sizes and completely open source.

Another, older open source movie you should have a look at is elephants dream ( (c) copyright 2006, Blender Foundation / Netherlands Media Art Institute / www.elephantsdream.org), released under the creative commons licence.

debugging brain.d

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:09:38 +0200

I spent the better part of two hours in trying to get my WLAN working again. My router worked flawlessly, winking ironically with it's LEDs, a hardwired XP box was running perfectly, and a ThinkPad (XP again) had no wireless problems. But with the second ThinkPad, boasting Xubuntu, I had no chance to get that wireless working again. I went through countless cycles of reentering my random-generated, super-secure and completely unmemorisable WPA keys, resetting login keyrings, setting up static IPs, trying DHCP, editing config files, pinging around and so on.

From a certain point on, I seemed to gain a foothold and started taking notes to put them on the blog. Some heavy editing on those notes leaves an important lesson for setting up your WPA secured network:

Check the WPA key for typos.

Thanks.