The Dichotomous Trekkie 2.0

OTOOS is a really good book, and I must say, Chapter 3 in particular has some great imagery. But, to the task at hand! Its well-known that various antiviruses (antivirii?) have different memory footprints, different scan speeds, different effectivness, etc ... but which is the best? Well, faithful readers, I present to you the somewhat perplexing graph below.

Here, the red line is under Windows Live OneCare, the blue line with no antivirus installed, the yellow line with Nod32, and the green line with VIPRE antivirus. That's right -- it ran *faster* under VIPRE than with no antivirus. My testing methodology was to do a reboot, wait five minutes, and run two benchmarks and use the best one. The benchmark was run with PerformanceTest 6.1 64-bit under High priority, changed from Windows Task Manager. I'm not sure why the NoAV score was so low -- I'm almost certain I remembered to change the priority, but that might be the culprit. In any case, the three antivirus lines speak for themselves, though -- VIPRE wins by a long shot.

So I was going to make a post about how the world hasn't ended, but you know, this time around, doomsayers can't even doomsay correctly.

That is to say, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, turned on today at 10:33 CET, and we're all still here. The test beam went in one direction (not the two necessary you know, for a collision) at less than full power, so doomsayers can't possibly have been correct. However, I think it might be worth listing off a few reasons why the LHC couldn't destroy the Earth:

• You've got protons. Accelerated really fast. So if you make a black hole, its going to have a really tiny Schwarzschild radius, or the radius of the event horizon (R_s). Like, GMc^-2 (to first order). Which is to say, at the speed these guys are traveling, a completely tangential approach would only decay into the black hole at < 1.5R_s. How big is R_s? Ballparking, we have
  (10^-11)(10^-26)/(10¹⁶)=10^-43 m. That's really really tiny. And since black holes evaporate roughly as ħm^-2, really small things evaporate really really really really fast — in this case, 10²⁰ kg/s. This little mini black hole will need to get within 10^-43 m of particles faster than it evaporates, which even at a hairs breadth below the speed of light it doesn't cut it. Really roughly, it'll last:
  10^-17m³ s = 10^-98 s, Which translates to a distance of under 10^-90 m — virtually no distance at all, and an infinitesimal fraction of a nucleus. In fact, being a very small fraction of a Planck length, its virtually meaningless to say it traveled at all.
• This is a bit more complicated by the fact that black holes have no hair but retain charge, so this will be a charged nearly light-speed traveling black hole. Very small correction, but there.
• The strangelet hypothesis also won't happen. Sure, colliding strangelets with normal matter can convert normal matter into strange matter. But, cross-sections are again really tiny, and statistics ensures that the reaction would die out by decaying of the strangel

So, Google Chrome is out, and I must say, its a very attractive browser.

It also doubles FF3's Sunspider javascript benchmark speed, nearly triples Opera 9.52's, and nearly quadruples IE8's. Very slim browser with an installation routine that is under 500 kb and the whole install takes well under a minute, and installs cleanly -- doesn't ask for admin privledges.

On a technical basis, it has uses a tweaked WebKit renderer (after Safari) but doesn't do Safari's horrible proprietary font-smoothing; copies IE8's tab process isolation (thus, if one tab crashes only that tab crashes, not the browser); has a startup page very similar to Opera's speed dial (but lacking Opera's wand feature and speed-dial shortcuts); largely matches Vista's UI conventions in Vista (big plus); renders SVGs like Opera (see if this will render in your browser, and see what happens when you zoom).

Gotta say, I really like it. We'll see if it becomes browser of choice over Opera for speed, or if Opera will end up winning with its extra keyboard and mouse shortcuts.