Links for 2010-01-20

"How much would it cost to rebuild Port-au-Prince with the infrastructure a modern, first-world city should have? Large sections of it will have to be rebuilt so it might as well be done right."

"I think many people, even Sarah Palin's devotees, might concede under pressure that having a President who has a strong baseline knowledge about the world, about American history, about economics, and so on, is a good thing. Not because we necessarily want an executive who is himself or herself a policy wonk, but because it lets that executive make more judicious choices about what policies to approve or reject. Many of the worst policy disasters under Bush the Lesser can demonstrably be traced back to the bedrock fact that he was easy for his courtiers to manipulate because he didn't have an independent knowledge of his own on many issues, just a kind of personal appraisal of his staff that appeared to mostly revolve around obsequious loyalty."

"With the recent success and in anticipation of high energy collisions (and therefore data), it's time to figure out what can be found and what can't given the projected amount of data. (We're going to be running at ~7 TeV for the first part of the year, then ~10 TeV the latter half). Now lots of people are doing cross sections measurements - which is a different beast than searches (see below). Cross section measurements take a particle that we know - Zs and Ws for example - and check to see if we measure what we predict. This is very important to do and I'm over simplifying but that's the basic idea. Despite it's importance, I personally feel like if I'm working on the highest energy accelerator in the world, I'd at least like to try to do a particle search."

"An optical effect first proposed by Isaac Newton has been observed in matter for the first time. The discovery is yet another affirmation of wave-particle duality - one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics. The breakthrough is also the first published science to emerge from a £200m neutron source recently opened in the UK."