US LHC Blog » Higgs Hunting News "Depending on what the mass of the Higgs boson is, it will decay into other particles that are easier or harder for an experiment to detect. So for example if the mass turns out to be about 170 GeV, the Tevatron experiments say their chances are almost 100 percent of finding it by 2011. If the mass turns out to really be 135 GeV, the chances are below 30 percent." (tags: science physics blogs experiment particles) RESONAANCES: Pauli's Other Principle "Fermions are discovered in the US, whereas bosons are discovered in Europe. " (tags: science physics…

My cold from last week has shifted into a bit of bronchitis (and here I thought my virus-fighting strategy of staying up really late drinking beer would clear everything up), so I'm kind of groggy and lethargic. And I have book edits to work on, which precludes taking a long time to write blog posts about science, so here's some babble about card games. Saturday night at the Tor party, a bunch of people started playing poker using Tor.com buttons as chips. They were playing the obligatory Texas Hold 'Em, and there were a couple of guys standing off to the side (one of whom reminded me of…

I no longer remember the context, but the Gravity Probe B experiment came up in discussion around the department last week, and nobody could really remember what the status of it was. It came up again during the "Physics: What We Don't Understand" panel Saturday morning, where Geoff Landis was able to supply a few details from inside NASA. It came up again during a later panel on the year in physics and astronomy, and again, Geoff was able to supply some details. I'm not sure what the deal is, but there's evidently something in the air at the moment making people think about Gravity Probe B,…

immlass: You have no privacy. Get over it. "Facebook may be sleazy and selling more of your information than you like to advertisers, but the idea it wants to steal your IP and do something with it seems vanishingly unlikely. I suspect the change in TOS has something to do with protecting their asses against overzealous privacy claims or their right to hang on to data under some jurisdiction's stringent laws instead. If I really wanted to know, I'd ask Facebook, which nobody, including the authors of the article above, seems to have bothered doing. "Treat Facebook with some caution, people…

On Saturday at Boskone, I gave a talk on the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM. This was held up a bit by waiting for the projector to arrive (I was busy enough with other stuff that I didn't notice that I hadn't received confirmation of my request for a projector until late Thursday night, so this was entirely my fault). They were able to come up with a projector, sparing people the need to squint at my tiny tablet PC screen, but it took some time off the beginning of the talk. The talk consisted of me reading the dog dialogue from Chapter 4 (not to different from the original post), then…

Sunday morning at Boskone, I moderated a panel on "Global Warming: Facts and Myths, (and all that jazz)", featuring James Morrow, Mark Olson, and Vince Docherty. As noted previously, I was a little worried that this would turn out to be absolutely awful in one of a couple of obvious ways, but it wound up being pretty good, all things considered. The panelists were all pretty much on board with my request to try to keep from being soul-crushingly depressing, and a lot of the discussion focused on things that can be done to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. The whole thing was…

Notes on sociopathy "Sometimes, a day of interacting with the rest of the human race on the roads and streets leaves you convinced that the world would be a much nicer place if most newborn humans were tossed in a burlap sack with some stones and then deposited in the nearest pond. But hereâs the funny thing - thereâs the rest, which we tend not to notice. " (tags: blogs society culture) blarg? » Additional Songsmithery "That Johnny Cash thing is the one thatâs going to keep the developers of Songsmith awake at night, staring at the ceiling and hoping thereâs no afterlife in which…

I've been a Grumpy Blogger this week, what with one thing and another (some of my general malaise has finally resolved into a cold, which I suspect explains a lot). I'm headed to Boskone for the weekend, though, so let's end the week on a positive note. I'm declaring this a Happy News Open Thread: if you've got something positive to report, leave it in the comments. some happy thoughts to get things started: Two of Union's librarians (one of whom is a regular in our lunchtime basketball games) have won an award from the American Library Association. Congratulations, Bruce and Gail! One of…

It's Darwin's 200th birthday today, and SteelyKid is wearing her ladybug outfit to celebrate: If you can't make it out, the outfit is pink, and covered with little pink and orange ladybugs. The feet are larger ladybugs, complete with antennae. Why is this an appropriate Dawrin's Birthday outfit, you ask? Because God is inordinately fond of beetles.

Different Cliffs, Different Bottoms, Different Parachutes « Easily Distracted "If one of the goals of stimulus is to get American consumers shopping again, then I think itâs going to take some substantial changes to the entire retail landscape for that to be more than a momentary upward blip in a relentlessly downward spiral. And at least some of those changes will involve rethinking the size, scale and ubiquity of retailing." (tags: blogs economics society culture internet business) Are College Athletes Psyching Themselves Out? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News,…

...Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, most of ScienceBlogs is celebrating Darwin's birthday, but I don't have anything interesting to say about that. Actually, I don't have anything all that interesting to say about Lincoln, either, but given that he's unquestionably one of the two greatest Presidents (neck and neck with Washington, both ahead of FDR), I wouldn't want his birthday to pass without comment. So take a moment from the celebratory contemplation of finches and tortoises, and give a thought to one of the most important figures of American history. Without Lincoln, the world we live in would be…

I usually post something here about what panels look interesting when the Boskone program goes up on the web. This year's program went up over the weekend, and I'm just now getting around to making a list of worthwhile items. This tells you what kind of week I'm having. Anyway, I looked the program over this morning, and here's what I came up with: Friday 7:30pm Independence: Reading Rosemary Kirstein We won't be able to leave Schenectady until 4pm or so, so the odds of making it to this are pretty slim. I'm really curious to know what the status of the Steerswoman books is, though. Friday…

I watched (bits of) a couple of basketball games last night for the first time in ages: Syracuse put up a good fight for a bit more than a half before being put away by a really good Connecticut team, and North Carolina blew Duke away late to win their fourth straight in Durham. These were two impressive performances by two terrific teams. So I flip on Mike&Mike this morning, and they have Jay Bilas on. Who talks for two minutes about UConn and UNC, then Greenberg asks him, essentially, "You have a law degree, so would you care to pontificate about Alex Rodriguez?" And they spend the rest…

I didn't expect the post griping about the Best American Science Writing anthology to generate as much discussion as it did. Shows what I know. In comments, "bsci" made a good suggestion: Instead of complaining about this volume, I'd love it if you and your readers made a list of the best physics writing in the past year. I assure you that I would be one of many readers of the pieces on the list. That's a good suggestion, so let's put it out there: What were the best articles about physical sciences published last year? These could be in general magazines (The New Yorker, etc.), in science…

Back in the fall, I got all caught up in the election, like everybody else, and I added a bunch of blogs to my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I'm thinking that I might need to cut back to pre-election levels, if not lower, though. Following too many political blogs is giving me whiplash. This has really been brought home to me as the progress of the stimulus bill has coincided with a busy patch, meaning that I've been sitting down in the evening to 60-80 posts worth of stimulus bill commentary. Going through a whole day's worth of blog posts about the stimulus reads something like: The bill's in…

Fish Food « Easily Distracted "Let me add to the âStanley Fish is just kind of patheticâ dogpile a bit here. In many ways, Fishâs latest column kind of reveals just how naked the emperor has become when it comes to hack complaints about the leftist intolerant academic-freedom abusing groupthink academy. " (tags: stupid academia society culture) Biocurious: Impact factors and Physical Review Letters "An editorial titled Is PRL Too Large to Have an ââImpactââ? in this weekâs PRL addresses some of the issues surrounding the journal and the impact factor. Not surprising to me, that single…

I'm running a little behind this week, but I wouldn't want this week's Science Saturday bloggingheads to slip by without a mention. It's a conversation between George Johnson and Louisa Gilder about The Age of Entanglement, which I liked quite a bit: The conversation is primarily about her book, the story it tells, and how she came to write it. There's also some discussion of publishing in general, and a bit about the recent teleportation results from Maryland, toward the end.

Like a lot of physics departments, we offer an upper-level lab class, aimed at juniors and seniors. There are a lot of ways to approach this sort of course, but one sensible way to think about it is in terms of giving students essential skills and experiences. That is, i's a course in which they learn to do the things that no physics major should graduate without doing. I'm sure that other disciplines do something similar, so I thought I might throw this out there as a general question: What are the essential skills and experiences a student ought to have before graduating with a degree in…

Backreaction: Singularities in your Kitchen "I was fascinated most by what I've learned since then about singularities in fluid dynamics - singularities that actually occur in the kitchen, every time a drop of water falls off the tap." (tags: science physics blogs liquids backreaction) Attack of the 50-Foot Baby blocks turn your toddler into a vengeful goddess - Boing Boing Oh, no! It's a Giant Monster Baby! (tags: silly kid-stuff toys) The Reality-Based Community: Ice cream in honor of the Beloved Leader "Now that Ben & Jerry's has introduced "Yes Pecan" in honor of our new…

Kind of a belated gripe, but something I was reminded of today that I forgot to blog when I first noticed it. I griped last year about the fomulaic nature of the "Best Science Writing" anthology, but I had no idea that the 2008 version would be worse. OK, I haven't read it, but I leafed through it in the store, and there's not a chance that I would squander beer money on it: there isn't a single piece about physics in it. Not one of the 19 articles highlighted by special guest editor Sylvia Nasar is about physics. Or astronomy. Or geology. Or, really, anything that wasn't essentially…