Posts by James Butler
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Just have to point out that Stephen Hawking is on my side #proofbyendorsement
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to richard,
But for experimental physics junkies, it lacks a bit of that wow factor
But for actual experimental physicists, there is a fair bit of wow
Sick - but not undeserved - burn.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to richard,
Personally, my feeling is that any mathematical typesetting done in Microsoft looks like arse – I would have used LaTeX.
Hopefully not with Knuth's Computer Modern, which is the Comic Sans of scientific typesetting and ruins 99% of TeX/LaTeX docs :P
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
It's big news for physicists because it helps validate the standard model. If they didn't find it they'd have about a century of really hard work ahead of them.
You see, that would have been exciting!
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And then Richard said:
The #higgsboson is big news – on a par with Rutherford’s discovery of the nucleus, or JJ Thomson finding the electron.
While the news from CERN is important, I'm not sure you can put it up there with Rutherford's or Thomson's results. The thing is that in both those cases the result was surprising, and both required new theory in order to explain them, thus expanding our understanding of the world (although I'm sure the experimenters had some kind of idea that there was something unusual worth finding out). The Higgs Boson, on the other hand, has been predicted by theory for decades, and experimental physicists have in essence been spending the intervening time trying to get particle accelerators up to the energy level where they were pretty sure they would see it. And, voila, there it is.
It's an important result, and a real endorsement of the predictive power of the Standard Model. I also don't doubt that high-energy physics might have surprises up its sleeve for us in the next few years, as the CERN programme racks up more results at higher energies. But for experimental physics junkies, it lacks a bit of that wow factor.
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To me, ‘no sex before marriage’ always sounds like telling kids they’re not allowed to learn to ride a bike because they’ll fall off and get hurt, but on their 21st birthday they’re going to ride the Tour de France.
Plus, not everyone wants to (or could) ride the Tour de France at all.
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That's Gina "Vogon Poet" Rinehart, right? God. What a perfect storm of ignorance, vanity and power.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Russell Brown,
Common misconception. It is not an offence to be intoxicated in public in New Zealand. And I’m actually not sure it should be.
Quite. How would one legally get home from the pub?
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Russell Brown,
Pre-loading seems to be a real problem. The punter who turns up to your club might not even have had time to absorb all the alcohol they've forced down on the way there.
This suggests a real practical benefit to the long lines outside popular clubs: making people wait long enough that the pre-loading kicks in.
The other, well-known benefit is that it signals to punters of taste that the club in question is worth avoiding.
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sonsequently: when two events appear to be causally linked, but only when you're drunk.