In a couple of hours (6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern) I’ll be joining Alan Boyle and Matt Strassler for a chat in Virtually Speaking Science. You can listen along on BlogTalkRadio, or the more adventurous among you can join us in Second Life. After consulting the Twittersphere (and our own inner dialogues), we’ve settled on the topic “Curious things that may or may not be true.” Should be fun.
This is what Jennifer and I would look like if First Life were more like Second. For one thing, apparently we’d be like nine feet tall.
Seth MacFarlane will probably do a good job hosting the Oscars, although he’s bound to rub some people the wrong way. Indeed he’s already started, with this little jibe at James Bond.
Not that anyone really objects to poking fun at Bond, of course (especially during the Brosnan era). But the joke hinges on the idea that real martinis are always shaken, as Bond prefers, rather than stirred. Which is crazy talk. A prescriptive attitude toward food and drink is usually a bad idea — who am I to judge another person’s abiding love for deep-fried Twinkies? — but when it comes to martinis, it becomes time to lay the truth on folks. And the truth is: stirring is clearly preferable to shaking. (I used to be more agnostic on the question, but age has conferred wisdom.)
The problem is that, while the superiority of stirring is widely accepted amongst the cognoscenti, many silly reasons are put forward therefor. The most common is that shaking “bruises” the gin, as if gin were the kneecaps of a spirited youngster. As far as I know, there is no evidence that this actually happens (corrections welcome). More plausibly, it is claimed that shaking dilutes the martini with water. This does make sense, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing; you would have to shake for a really long time to dilute the liquor noticeably, and a small amount of water can help release the flavors of a spirit. The real reason stirring is better is simple: shaking introduces tiny bubbles into the martini, giving you a cloudy drink. It’s a matter of looks, not of taste; the perfect transparency of an ideal martini can only be attained by stirring. (And any competent stirrer should have no trouble bringing the drink to the appropriate temperature. To wit, very cold indeed.)
Of course, James Bond prefers a vodka martini, which every right-thinking person recognizes as an abomination. And he wears dive watches with formalwear. So why was anyone ever tempted to follow his lead on anything at all?
This new video has been bouncing around the blogs and Twitter feeds I read: excerpts from internal (i.e., non-public) talks at the CMS collaboration, as they revealed to themselves the new Higgs results from this summer. When you started hearing rumors last June, it was from these meetings that they emerged.
First we see two talks at internal collaboration meetings, by Mingming Yang on June 15 and by Andre David on June 28, then some of Joe Incandela’s public announcement on July 4 (along with Fabiola Gianotti’s talk about the ATLAS results, of course). In the first talk the significance was poking past four sigma, but not yet reaching five sigma, which took a bit more work (and data).
You might expect a lot of whooping and hollering on the part of the experimenters as they see how good their data is, but for the most part they are pretty quiet. It’s not because they don’t recognize the importance of the moment — it’s because their brains are working at full capacity, taking in the information on the slides and trying to understand exactly what it means.
The first talk is advertised as “unblinding,” when they first look at the results that they have intentionally hidden from themselves to prevent cheating. That seems like a tiny exaggeration, unless they’ve written a script that takes the data, turns it into a pretty plot, and uploads and captions that plot on a PowerPoint slide without any human being seeing it. (I suppose it’s possible…) But this is when most of the collaboration first heard the news, which is an historic moment by any measure.
