There have been a number of articles (written, seemingly, by those with neither the knowledge nor experience needed to check “scientific” conclusions) about the perceived risk of CERN’s new Large Hadron Collider creating a quantum black hole that will swallow the Earth. Well, as a public service, someone has created the Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed The Earth? to monitor the situation. (Be sure to view the page source.) Incidentally, odds are good that every electron in existence already meets the “quantum black hole” criteria, so I wouldn’t be too concerned.
Is It Christmas?
You can’t always go by the page source for this type of thing. For example: this site, which appears to be similar.
I tracked down the isitchristmas.com owner and asked him how he handles time zones without any client-side scripting. He uses the database at hostip.info to estimate the user’s time zone, and then serves up the appropriate HTML.
Re: Is It Christmas?
1) i think fiziko was referring to some of the awesome html comments.
2) the LHC page has a much easier job then the christmas page .. as you say, the christmas site has to worry not just about the date, ut also the timezone of the user (because christmas doesn’t start at the exact same time everywhere int the world). But the LHC website has a much easier job. not only only the activation of the LHC happen at a particular instant in time (that will be hte same instant for everyone regardless of what timezone you are in when it happens), but also because if the LHC does destroy the earth then no one will give a fuck about that web page, so it’s ok for it to just be a static page that says NO.
Better site
I think this
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
is a much better site.
The site actually has an if statement that (sort of) takes into account the possibility of the world ceasing to exist.
Hasn’t even tried yet
All they did yesterday was get protons to run all the way around it. They haven’t yet gotten to any of the high energy collisions in question. On the other hand, at least with everyone thinking they have, they can stop being silly about it…though I loved google’s logo yesterday…
Webcams
On a related note, there are a couple of webcams here, watching to see if the LHC destroys the earth or not:
http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html
Beautiful.
-Erf.