You! Rocket Scientist! Move Away…
…from the dotted hole and no one gets hurt!
Not long ago some creative googler arrived here, at this blog, by searching for these words:
how do you get the rocket scientist to move away from the dotted hole
One of the few things guaranteed to pique my interest and confuse me to atoms is seeing 1) the odd search strings that people google, and 2) discovering that said search strings bring them here. Trying for empathy, I try to imagine the reaction of the googler when faced with trying to figure out why here was an option.
I like the mental image of the rocket scientist standing close, perhaps dangerously close, to the dotted hole. What is being threatened? The rocket scientist? The dotted hole? The entire universe!
The picture I get is of an Einteinian space-time manifold with gravitational deformations — you know, one of those "rubber sheets" with masses sitting on it that is always used to demonstrate the idea from general relativity that gravity is just mass-induced deformations in space-time.
Somewhere in the picture there's the "dotted hole", sort of a monstrous black hole with a perforated event horizon, gaping open like the mouth of Hell, ready to swallow the unsuspecting rocket scientist. Where will the scientist end up? In an alternate universe? Across the galaxy? Wound up tight around an elemental string embedded in eleven dimensions? Perhaps only the mind of the CGI-special-effects designer can come up with a suitable visual concept.
Then again, it might be something more prosaic, but what fun is that? I like my image, and it makes me feel important and powerful. You know, that whole rocket-scientist super-hero thing, what with being the only one able to save the entire universe from the horrors of the dotted hole about to consume all of creation.
Or not. It turns out that there is a simple, not terribly interesting reason that the googler chose the phrase above, but I thought that finding out dispelled some of the inscrutable romance for me, so I'm not going to spoil it by telling. If you want to, google it for yourself with this link; the first entry is enough to reveal the original googler's intent.
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To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Thursday, 4 October 2007 at 22.09
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My goodness, how do you get all these unusual search strings? You're right, the reason for this phrase is not very interesting – I much prefer your explanation!