Context

Stewart Brand, writing about space colonies, observed that "if you live in a satellite, the Earth is something that goes on in your sky." For Felix Baumgartner, the daredevil skydiver who seduced the world with his chiseled jaw and seeming invulnerability to fear (and who broke the sound barrier with his body last weekend) the Earth is something else. The satellite he leapt from, a weather balloon 24 miles above the Earth, wasn't his home. But briefly, and especially for the millions who watched the gossamer balloon float upwards to the strange blue-black gradient of space's edge, it turned…
Back at the LHC Shows the Way workshop and slow live blogging of the discussion, with random asides for other stuff... Astronomy Magazine has a contest - win Brian May's PhD thesis! - now separate post with added bonus question Today: fake Higgs - are there some new bosons which are not Higgs, but which look like Higgs. Specifically looking at other scalar or pseudoscalars, or the possibility of spin-2 tensor particles. Aside: cool 2D fluid flow web site - GPU powered 512k sim run live through WebGL - hypnotic turbulence to crash your browser Look for general models where some particle…