numbers-and-particles
Hipster Pop Quiz: What is the Higgs Boson?
Of course _you_ know what the Higgs boson is -- it's the theorized particle that composes the energy field that endows every other particle with mass. It's the particle that makes the universe possible, let's nature construct things, like humans, or...
Why America's Higgs Party Won't Be a Blowout: Fermilab’s Rob Roser on the View from the Tevatron
Tomorrow, when the world hears a giant announcement about the Higgs boson from scientists at Europe’s CERN laboratory, they might not notice its American accomplice. On Monday, the Fermi National Laboratory, or Fermilab, which is situated in the middle...
For the Love of God Particle, the God Particle Has Not (Yet) Been 'Discovered'
Hey, did you hear the big news? The Higgs boson has been discovered!!!! Oh wait. No it hasn't. Well, at least not yet. So please, for the love of theorized God particles, please refrain for the time being from shitting bricks and/or popping the...
The Big Winner of ObamaCare Decision: Nate Silver
Minutes before we learned Chief Justice Roberts had sided with the majority in ruling the Affordable Care Act constitutional, between 70% and 80% of savvy reality arbitrageurs on InTrade were predicting with their dollars that the Court would strike...
The CFPB is Bringing Social Media to the Government to Fight Credit Cards
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, just launched a new consumer complaint site today. The dispinterest wall, is a forum for credit card holders, with what I'd say is a pretty stylish and readable design for a bureaucratic agency. But...
What Does the Facebook IPO Mean In Terms of Greece?
Facebook (FB) started trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange around 11 AM this morning. The opening price, just decided last night, was $38 per share. (As you might have noticed in the year-long build-up to today, the powers that be seem to be...
The Best Clock In the Universe Is Made of Pure Light
What is a second? You could do the whole "one one thousand" thing and not be terribly far off, and that might be OK for calculating things like how fast you're driving on the highway or how much you should get paid for a certain amount of time worked...
This Is What Pi Looks Like
Last year, a programmer from Japan and a 23- year old student from Northwestern "continued humanity's obsession":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/10/26/occu-%CF%80-the-strange-history-of-counting-to-pi-3-14159265301 with _pi_ when they successfully...
Why Our Dark Matter Ghost Hunting Expeditions Might Be Failing
Dark matter is thought to be the ghosts that helped build the structured universe, ghosts that the universe _needed_ to make galaxies happen. I say "ghosts" because dark matter doesn't interact with the universe in ways beyond gravity; the...
New Research Suggests That My City Is Totally Way Cooler Than Yours
In 1997 I moved from Detroit to Colorado's Front Range. The Front Range isn't rural by any means -- constituting Denver, Fort Collins, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and a great many lesser places -- basically making up a big vertical smear of mile-high...
Energy Real Talk: Our Titanic Hubris Is Not Exactly Renewable
As a species, we’ve done alright. Technologically speaking, we’ve achieved so much in the last couple of centuries. We’ve flown to the moon, invented the Internet, I mean, we’ve even created invisibility cloaks and cloned shit. But there is one part of...
Babies, Death, and Other Things You Might Win In Babylon's Lottery
In his short story “The Library In Babylon,” Jorge Luis Borges "imagines a world":http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/texts/babylon.html when the lottery of trading small amounts for chances at larger amounts becomes insufficient...