Monday, July 12, 2004
search phrases in the server log, red herrings, and post titles with a twist ;-)
see, post titles are not overrated ;-) that was an example of the types of internet searches that are finding my website. what a question ! and funny that he landed there. i wonder what drunken physicist typed that one into the search field.
actually, that's just because of search engines that index my amazon wishlist page (which is currently a bit broken due to ongoing amazon web service problems). it's pretty misleading, as that page is about 2mb (yeah, way oversized, tell me about it, i'm still on dial-up [waiting for wireless broadband service]), and contains a wide variety of terms from various science, math and fiction books, among other topics. i'm considering putting a robots.txt file there to cancel the red herring effect, but then, what would i do for a hobby ? on the other hand, maybe they end up locating a useful book that way, but that presumes they will both load the entire page, and then search it to find exactly where their search terms appeared. good luck, as they are by far most likley to be buried in the reviews, which need to be expanded to be seen. hmm, maybe i could help 'em out with an “expand all reviews” button or something.
in the meantime, i would suggest that the original query be directed to the intra-universal dns service. and as an interim solution, 127.0.0.1 should work, since he is currently local. but that doesn't help if he was planning on giving out his address to some interdimensional babe on another brane. hmm, there's a poem in here somewhere...
[***and no, that's not misspelled “brain“, although that would be interesting as well. “brane“ is a word for an extension of the two dimensional membrane concept to p dimensions, also known as “p-branes“. it seems to have first arisen in the work of string theorists, where the string (a 1-brane) was generalized to higher dimensional objects. but it has since been adopted to describe cosmological objects as well. for example, our classical time-space universe would be considered a 4-brane. there has been speculation in recent years that there are more than one p dimensional “universes“ embedded (?) in the Universe proper, and that these may interact in various ways to give us various phenomena detectable from our particular brane. these include things like the big bang (a brane collision, perhaps) and a place to put the “reality“ of infinite parallel quantum universes. there is speculation that “nearby“ branes may also be detectable through gravitational influences, although experiments to date are inconclusive at best.
the brane term is somewhat analogous to the earlier expressions “another dimension“ or “plane of existence“ and the like, but much less fanciful.
- disclaimer: all the above is strictly an amateur's viewpoint recalled on the fly. there's better explanations out there if you search. i'm too lazy.
and yes, i realize that most readers of this blog (you few) probably could offer a better explanation themselves. this is just in case. i have a small paranoia that some people might think that i'm an idiot who carelessly misspells and misuses words, instead of an idiot who intentionally mangles the language for my own purposes.]