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What is the image you get when you think of a scientist?

I bet it’s usually a middle aged guy, most likely wearing a lab-coat, probably classes and definitely not cool.

But we all know by now that TED does not promote the ‘normal,’ so, when they have somebody on to talk about the Large Hedron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland we do not necessarily expect a guy in a lab-coat.

I still was positively surprised by Brian Cox’s talk. There is a cool guy who not only makes it interesting to show what the LHC does but also represents a new breed of scientist that seem to be in awe of creation and taken by its extent.

When I turned my back to physics after I was all done with my degree, the scientific scene was immensely more arrogant. So, listening to Brian Cox made me happy because I think that science will succeed when it develops the right amount of humility and recognized that it, itself, is part of that creation and is searching for itself.

You want to know where the LHC actually is? Glad you asked because it has a some fascinating facts about its location. CERN, which is also the mother of the World Wide Web, is located in two countries, Switzerland and France. The Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) is located close to Geneva, Switzerland and stretches across the Swiss-France border. So, you might cross the border between the two countries many times during the day while remaining in the CERN complex. Nowadays that has not much of a significance, but when I was there it was a fascinating fact, that you could go across the border without showing your papers.

So, here it is…

View Larger Map

Sometimes two email that first seem to be unrelated, turn up to create a 9 on the Richter scale of synchronicity.

Today I got first such a self-evident definition and explanation of a free society that I wonder why there are so many who don’t get this…

You may watch the full Flash Animation.

It might not be quite easy to follow in some areas of the text, but I think everybody must be able to get the gist of it!

The next on is a more practical application of the first…

If you combine those two little clips and form an action item out of them, what would you get.

No, this is not a rhetoric question – I would really like to get some answers because I am not so sure what to do.

I had heard about the Wim Wenders movie “Paris, Texas” but never attempted to see it. It came out in a time when I had been very busy moving my life around and there never was time enough to sit down for two hours and spend them on a movie. It took me many years for it to sink in that the title actually referred to a town of Paris in Texas. Never nurtured the idea that there was any other than THE Paris, the capital of the country right over there.

But now that I have seen these two pictures…

Paris, Texas, and …

Paris, France

… maybe I should see the movie.

Joking! – Obviously the movie has nothing to do with the subjects of these images (just a cheap hook), but it’s about Travis, an amnesiac who has been lost for four years and is taken in by his brother. He later tries to put his life back together and understand what happened between him, his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and his son Hunter – I mean, it’s a Wim Wenders film!

I want to pass on a story I have heard/read before at least once but maybe more. I am sure that it is on the internet many time. As a matter of fact, just let me check…

… hmmm, it’s actually less than I thought, Google only found about 200 instances of the story. But then again, Google eliminates duplicates and so there will be more. I just checked Yahoo and then find about twenty thousand instances of a key phrase of the story I’m about to give you – that’s more like it.

But before I get into any ranting and philosophizing, here’s the story…

Jerry is the manager of a restaurant. He is always in a good mood.

When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would always reply, “If I were any better, I would be twins!”

Many of the waiters at his restaurant quit their jobs when he changed jobs, so they could follow him around from restaurant to restaurant.

Why?

Because Jerry was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was always there, telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Jerry and asked him: “I don’t get it! No one can be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?”

Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, I have two choices today. I can choose to be in a good mood or I can choose to be in a bad mood.

I always choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be victim or I can choose to learn from it. I always choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I always choose the positive side of life.”

“But it’s not always that easy,” I protested.

“Yes it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk every situation is a choice.

You choose how you react to situations.
You choose how people will affect your mood.
You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood.
It’s your choice how you live your life.”

Several years later, I heard that Jerry accidentally did something you are never supposed to do in the restaurant business. He left the back door of his restaurant open.

And then ???

In the morning, he was robbed by three armed men.

They want?

#123*+!@$%&*~

While Jerry trying to open the safe box, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jerry was found quickly and rushed to the hospital.

After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Want to see my scars?”

I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. “The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” Jerry replied. “Then, after they shot me, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or could choose to die. I chose to live.”

“Weren’t you scared?” I asked.

Jerry continued, “The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the Emergency Room and I saw the expression on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read ‘He’s a dead man.’ I knew I needed to take action.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, there was a big nurse shouting questions at me,” said Jerry. “She asked if I was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’ I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets!’

Over their laughter, I told them, ‘I am choosing to live. Please operate on me as if I am alive, not dead’.”

Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude.

I learned from him that every day you have the choice to either enjoy your life or to hate it. The only thing that is truly yours – that no one can control or take from you – is your attitude, so if you can take care of that, everything else in life becomes much easier.

OK, that’s the story! Obviously I like it, otherwise I would not have posted here on this site together with 20,000 other versions of it. The email in which I got it then continued on to indicate that now I had two choices as well, either to delete the message or pass it on. Mostly I don’t like to pass on email messages like this because, even though well intentioned, they add to the spam and interruption of my work flow. If I want to share I put it up on a blog and everybody interested in what I want to say is welcome to subscribe to the RSS feed for MerlinSilk.com.

If the unsolicited message is small and just contains a little story, then, in my eyes, it’s excusable to send, but many of the mails I get contain megabytes of video attached. It does not matter, time-wise, as I am lucky enough to be on a fast internet connection, but it is still wasted of band-width, as pretty much all those videos are on YouTube or any other video sharing site and a link to that video would suffice. All these extra bytes transferred just wear out the tubes of the internet and they might need replacing much earlier.

But now back to the subject at hand: why, if there are thousands of people posting this story on the internet (guess I am the 20,001st), are there so few practicing what this story suggest? I mean, I am throwing with stones here while sitting in a glass house. I was rather poopy with my loved once the other day. So this question is a real one, not rhetoric.

What do you do to keep up the good mood and don’t react to negativity in kind fashion?

In 2005 Brian Greene explained superstring theory to the TED audience in laymen’s terms in a very engaging presentation.

Three years ago the Hadron collider at CERN, which has one if its goals to confirm string theory, was still a few year away from completion. But now we are nearly there. Interestingly the public is taking notice now as voices have been raised that this machine might be dangerous. Loud voices actually, so that the CERN website for the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) has to address these concerns and dispel them…

TGVs and mosquitoes

The total energy in each beam of protons in the LHC is equivalent to a 400 tonne train (like the French TGV) travelling at 150 km/h. However, only an infinitesimal part of this energy is released in each particle collision – roughly equivalent to the energy of a dozen flying mosquitoes. In fact, whenever you try to swat a mosquito by clapping your hands together, you create a collision energy much higher than the protons inside the LHC. The LHC’s speciality is its impressive ability to concentrate this collision energy into a minuscule area on a subatomic scale. But even this capability is just a pale shadow of what Nature achieves routinely in cosmic-ray collisions.

During part of its operation, the LHC will collide beams of lead nuclei, which have a greater collision energy, equivalent to just over a thousand mosquitoes. However, this will be much more spread out than the energy produced in the proton collisions, and also presents no risk.

Microscopic black holes will not eat you…

Massive black holes are created in the Universe by the collapse of massive stars, which contain enormous amounts of gravitational energy that pulls in surrounding matter. The gravitational pull of a black hole is related to the amount of matter or energy it contains – the less there is, the weaker the pull. Some physicists suggest that microscopic black holes could be produced in the collisions at the LHC. However, these would only be created with the energies of the colliding particles (equivalent to the energies of mosquitoes), so no microscopic black holes produced inside the LHC could generate a strong enough gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter.

If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC are harmful.

By all probability these concerns are in the same category as the fears that people would die when going more than 50 miles an hour on this devil’s machine called train. But there have been experiments in the past that seemed rather harmless and turned out to be deadly. I am thinking of Pierre and Marie Curie,
who discovered radioactivity. They did not know that this new phenomenon they had discovered was poisoning them during their work and I remember the anecdote of demonstrating their discovery to friends at a party by circulating a vial with this new substance which you could see with your eyes closed.

So, there is a chance that this microscopic black hole that might be created by the LHC does indeed attract matter and energy from its surrounding, grows and swallows the universe as we know it.

I am actually sure that this will happen, at least in a number of parallel worlds. These parallel worlds are, as far as I know, also postulated by string theory, so we are really approaching the unified theory of life, the universe and everything, a theory that contains its own annihilation – cool!

I have worked at CERN for a little bit, being involved with the old myon-neutrino experiments and I have to admit that it would be a fascinating experience to be at CERN for the first activation of the LHC. I imagine a scene similar to the setting in Douglas Adam’s ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe‘ – everybody is seated in an exquisite restaurant expecting a great show watching the universe to end.

And, you know what – in one of the parallel worlds according to the string theory to be tested – that will be so!

This message…

the list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available

must be one of the most annoying messages in Windows you could imagine. You have two computers on the same LAN, you can ping, so you know that the connections are right, but if you want to access the files on a share of the other computer you get this message without any hint what might be the cause.

I could try to explain why you just have to set this registry entry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters

to 1 (instead of the 8 it was set to on two of my computers), but you are probably in a hurry to just access the other file and are not interested in research. If you are interested in the why then continue searching the web. I did and found my answer.

But as I said, you are most likely in a hurry, so set that registry value and reboot, and if you are as lucky as I am then you will be able to see the other machine(s) on the LAN and share happily.

I grew up and live in times when the view of gender and sex certainly changed and is still changing. Initially it was the natural order of things that papa was out to work and mama was home taking care of the house and children.

Then came the ‘sexual revolution’ which changed all that. All was turned upside down and put together in a different way. Somehow I ended up with the deep rooted opinion that it is very, very bad to comment in a way that could be considered sexist. Only the inner values, which are independent of gender, were of relevance.

That naturally created some discrepancy between what I could observe and what I was supposed to observe. Let’s take the example of a very pretty girl. One guy who, like me, was drilled to see only the inner values – even though that was rather difficult to do – started a conversation about philosophical questions of life, the universe and everything to engage the intellectual being inside that pretty exterior, and got nowhere.
The other guy just locked his eyes onto her body, drooling noticeable, only able to utter such intelligent thoughts as “Wow, you are so beautiful, can I have your number?” Not a mention of the inner qualities but he usually got the number.

Often the purely sexual aspect is exhibited – oozing sexuality instead of displaying a masters degree or a doctor title. And funny enough this is mostly done by the female, who officially works on being appreciated for her intellect and not the cleavage. Let’s take a normal business setting. Men are usually totally a-sexual in such an environment, buttoned up shirt with a tie. But the female executive often show off her non-intellectual qualities. What would happen if men would do that?

All these thought, I have to admit, never really surface totally within me, until very recently, when I ran into a picture of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

Ms. Merkel is probably a very intelligent person, why in the world is she sexualizing her appearance so much. There is no beauty in this as she is not a particularly beautiful person, and whom is she trying to attract? There certainly are other options to dress as you notice when you look at the person in the background behind Ms. Merkel.

When I though about how this would look like if the male part of the political world would give up its a-sexuality and let it all hang out as well, I became curious. So I went out to find if it did indeed exist, and to my total surprise, I found it.

Wouldn’t that put a completely new face on politics? Please don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to bash either Bush nor Merkel. It is just that here we are offered by these very public figures and understanding of how much double talk exists in the arena of emancipation. We could use any setting in business as well, we would, most likely, find a similar situation.

Hopefullu, after draining my brain of inner conflict, I will now be able to just compliment a woman on her looks without the idea of violating the emancipation law. Because, quite honestly, I appreciate good looks just as any other male. But what do you think, should we men start fighting for sexual equality in politics and business?

With little kids there is no difference between boys and girls. OK, I know about those differences, but look at the title of the post, here, as in law, it’s context, context, context. To make it clear for everybody, for small kids there is no difference between the sexes when sitting on the thrown is involved.

But when the boy gets a bit bigger he wants to be like papa and ventures into standing up while peeing. This is handed down from generation to generation and never questioned – men stand up while peeing!

In the initial training phases it creates a mess around the toilet, but even mama does not mind because junior is so cute as he wants to be like papa. Over time a percentage of male adults develop a skill to deposit their waste into the container they are aiming for, but take note of my formulation – not all succeed in that laudable skill.

The first time I encountered that this law of nature can be questioned was at a friends house. Very progressive guy, married when we were still in high school, driving his VW to school without a driver’s license (a very serious offense in Germany) and being altogether very cool.

He and his wife had their own appartment and so all of us who still lived with the parents certainly loved to hang out there. And he was so progressive that it might have been him and and not his wife to clean the house, including the toilet. He must have gotten tired of cleaning after all those buddies of his because there was suddenly the sign in the bathroom:

I don’t want to clean and have a fit,
therefore please, all men do sit!

The German version was similarly rough in terms of metric, obviously using different words. But imagine the impact. I don’t remember if it actually had the impact on me abandoning my training and actually sitting down – I tend to think that I did not – but I have not forgotten in so many years.

I don’t know why, but over the years I had turned into a sitter-downer and when our son joined us, we brought him up as a sitter-downer as well – there was no dad role model to show him otherwise. But he certainly tried all this when the peer pressure in school kicked in.

And then there were his buddies visiting – all stander-uppers. How do we handle this? As we asked politely, the universe gave us an answer in form of a low resolution jpeg image that attempted to educate in a funny way. The resolution was so low that it was not usable to be printed and used as a sign in the bathroom. It took me considerable time to get my act together and design a new document with appropriate resolution and I hereby offer the world this work. I am deeply indebted to the person who had the idea and made the first graphic – unfortunately I don’t know his identity, I would love to give him – or her – credit.

Here is a low-res preview version, but you can click the image to get a high resolution pdf version of the graphic to laminate (!) and hang in your bathroom.

Found this video on YouTube…

… and now have to wonder if Ludwig van Beethoven was ever married. Otherwise how could you imagine that he made music that matches to much a scene that we can all at least imagine.

You might know the real drama behind this symphony, don’t you? Legend tells that the initial Da, Da, Da, Daaa was the pulsing drum Ludwig Van heard in his ears as he was slowly going deaf and that the last symphony, he wrote, he could not hear at all when it premiered.

But somehow this music with its dramatic tone offers itself to different interpretations. One of the very early interpretations I remember was by a singer songwriter duo in Germany, Schobert und Black. Besides political satire they popularized what they called ‘High Nonsense’ and their nonsense using Beethoven’s fifth was so nonsensical that it taught me to sing that symphony. After forty years I still remember bigger part of the lyrics that dealt with a child genius, that, in his early age, invented things like a thumbscrew for horses, a muzzle for bees, and a red cabbage mixing machine. For all you Germans out there: “Er erfands, kaum ist’s zu glauben, fuer das Pferd die Daumenschrauben, einen Maulkorb fuer die Biene, eine Rotkohlmischmachine…”

But back to this video of an early TV show. Here the text from the description on YouTube by AIAfilms:

No cue cards, no teleprompters, and no second takes–legendary funnyman Sid Caesar pioneered live television sketch comedy with his 1950s sitcoms Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. This classic sketch is “Argument to Beethoven’s 5th,” Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray play a married couple in a argument with pantomimed action and the dialogue is classic music.

Enjoy!

I just installed a plugin to this blog to remove the default behavior to add the nofollow tag to all URLs that a commenter writes.

The nofollow tag was intended to reduce SPAM comments on blogs because it removes the incentive to post these spam comments. Google rates a page largely by the number of links from other web pages to it. The nofollow tag, that is added to a link as rel=”nofollow,” indicated to Google, not to count this link. After this, why would a blackhat SEO add a spam comment to a blog if that link would not help him to reach his objective to rank higher?

In theory that worked, but it had a side effect. Real commenters, who would have added value to a blog by commenting good comments, also stayed away because they also had lost the benefit to get link popularity. They went away to other methods of getting in-bound links. Or they went to blogs that did not have that nofollow tag set on their commenter’s contributions.

I use the plugin Nofollow Free to remove nofollow tags from comment links. It is configurable in that you can choose to remove each and every nofollow tag, or only those of registered users, and you can create a blacklist of words that would trigger to add the nofollow tag again – the male enhancer pill with a V is probably a good member for that field.

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