Interesting Stuff Thread

Sarky wrote: »

New planet discovered... Made mostly of diamond, apparently.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/25/us-planet-diamond-idUSTRE77O69A20110825

Thats a different giant space diamond to this one, is it?

Sarky wrote: »

Damn straight.

<gets back to work on cyborg shark monkey project>

I saw a documentary on something similar once.

vibe666 wrote: »

so it looks like supersymmetry could well be going out of the window very shortly.

"
The BBC has placed supersymmetry next to the carbon dioxide and the AGW "deniers" as the ultimate enemies of Gaia. A would-be journalist, Mr Pallab Ghosh, chose this title: Oh my Ghosh. ;-) Kilotons of simpletons who have copied this stuff from the BBC have overwhelmed my Twitter Watch Google Chrome extension."

...

"It's still a beginning of the experiment and the total number of collisions inside the LHC will grow by orders of magnitude and the energy will be doubled, too."

..

"It's the beginning but the LHC has already falsified many particular models with new phenomena predicted below 1 TeV or so - or, more precisely, with new phenomena visible in the first two inverse femtobarns. There have been lots of papers talking about possible observations in this region because many people liked things "behind the corner" that could have been a recipe for a quick journey to fame. It didn't work. ;-)

The experiments have surely not "punished" supersymmetry more than any other bottom-up theory even though many ignorant and deluded laymen such as Mr Ghosh are self-evidently obsessed with this utter misconception.

It's not even true that all superpartners with masses lighter than 1 TeV have been excluded. The firm exclusion only applies to superpartners that interact via the strong force - because it's easy to produce them by the "hadron" colliders such as the LHC. The other superpartners may be lighter and in fact, even many squarks may still be much lighter than 1 TeV. On the other hand, squarks may be much heavier and this actually allows the gluinos to be lighter than reported by the generic LHC data."

...

"More generally, there is nothing wrong with the Standard Model at 1 TeV - assuming that it contains something like the Higgs boson (which also remains undiscovered by the LHC but for certain reasons that are usually called "double standards", it wasn't "put on the spot" by the BBC). All imperfections of the Standard Model are of theoretical character and they only start to "scream" at mass scales much higher than 1 TeV."

...

"The possibility that the LHC may discover nothing new besides the Standard Model (including one Higgs boson) is not a shocking new revelation: it's been discussed as one of the most likely scenarios for more than a decade."

...

"So far, the LHC has only excluded models with new physics right behind the corner. Many of them were artificially "adjusted" to predict something new as soon as possible because that's what certain phenomenologists wanted. No doomsday for the Standard Model arrived but new physics may always emerge later.

The energy scale at which we may expect new physics has shifted to higher values. However, supersymmetry remains the single most justified class of models that may be expected to emerge at the LHC - or a more advanced collider in the future. Nothing has really changed about it."

...

"To summarize, Mr Ghosh should splash himself down the drain because his work is a pile of garbage.

BTW, Ghosh also recently wrote a report on the CLOUD experiment designed to test Svensmark's theory - the previous article on TRF - without mentioning Svensmark's name (not to mention other lethal problems with his text). My problems with certain journalists are usually very far from being one-dimensional ones. Some journalists are simply spherical bastards - they're bastards no matter what direction you observe them from."

link (includes a more detailed analysis of that "pile of garbage")

Dades wrote: »

That article kind of annoyed me, though I can't really explain why.

Perhaps it should have been titled:

Is it wrong to note 100m swimming winners are always white?

It's actually to do with centre of gravity. Runners with a high centre of gravity are faster, and swimmers with a low centre of gravity are faster. Since people of African extraction tend to have a relatively high centre of gravity they tend to be better runners, similarly caucasians with their relatively low centre of gravity tend to be better swimmers. Apparently it all hinges on where your belly button is.

Is it wrong to remark on these differences between races. Some people would say yes, but I don't think it is. Blonde people usually get sunburned quicker, African runners tend to be faster than European runners, short people can usually fit into smaller hiding places than tall people. These are nothing but physiological differences, they have nothing to do with a person's worth, and they certainly don't mean that black people shouldn't swim competitively, white people shouldn't run competitively, or tall people shouldn't compete for the 2011 hide-and-seek championship.

Is it wrong to note that the countries with the best drug labs win the most gold medals?

Malty_T wrote: »

Um China?

Yea plenty goings on in Shanghai it seems.

http://irishhistorypodcast.ie/2011/08/24/special-irelands-first-witchburning/

Interesting little listen.