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“A major blizzard dropped 20 inches of snow on New York City on Sunday night as it made its way up the East Coast. Monday-morning dog-walkers had their animals decked out in sweaters and booties to protect them from the snow and ice. Are warm doggie outfits really necessary?
They can be. Some dogs are bred to handle cold weather. Labrador retrievers and Newfoundlands, for example, naturally grow out their locks in winter for added insulation. They’re so good at keeping warm that they don’t mind swimming in near-freezing water. But smaller, short-haired dogs are ill-equipped for blizzard conditions. “
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Storchmann wrote to us the other day about an interesting working paper the AAWE has just posted: “Women or Wine? Monogamy and Alcohol,” by Mara Squicciarini and Jo Swinnen. From the abstract:
Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption.
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“So here I am, at the end of this eventful 2010, to look forward rather than backward, with no additional grand to invest but some insight to use, some reputation to waste, and a bit of humour to stuff between the lines.
2011 to me means the summer conferences here. The 2011 winter conferences will happen in just a few months and make any prediction rather dull (I know pretty well what the collaborations are going to show there already), while the 2012 winter conference -well, they’re in 2012, duh. Summer 2011 conferences will occur in the summer of 2011 (this is already a quite definite prediction) and more precisely in July and August. Physicists from the Tevatron and LHC experiments will push hard to produce the best results they can in time for their (or their bosses’) talks. What will they show there ?”
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“The question by our reader, however, is more meaningful: Okay, maybe this is not a Higgs decay (the chance that it is due to simple production of two Z bosons together is way higher, even if the Higgs boson exists). But let’s see anyway what comes up for the Tevatron experiments in the same final state. Would CDF and DZERO have seen more such events in case the Higgs was there, at 201 GeV ?”
4 thoughts on “Links for 2010-12-28”
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Did you look at the figure from CDF towards the bottom of the article? It is AWFUL! The legend is placed in such a way that it almost completely hides the biggest data point.
Reminds me of the old “High Energy Physics Coloring Book” from the JIR: we don’t want anyone to notice the data point that disagrees with the prediction, hide it next to the legend.
I hadn’t even noticed the “hide it by the legend” thing, mostly because I find nearly all particle physics data plots vaguely awful. Something about the plotting package they all use just bugs me.
But, yeah, that’s really bad. You’d think somebody would’ve noticed that.
Something about the plotting package they all use just bugs me.
It’s worse than you think. Usually it’s ROOT, which is an awful analysis/plotting system in C++. Often it’s used in an interactive mode involving interpreted C++, which has to rank as one of the all-time stupidest ideas in software development. Nearly everyone seems to hate ROOT, but somehow it became the standard and there isn’t much inertia to move past it.
It would be an exaggeration, but one containing a grain of truth, to say that I went into theoretical rather than experimental particle physics just to avoid having to use ROOT after working with it as an undergrad.
Err, there’s too much inertia to move past it. Not enough will to change it. Pick some phrasing that makes sense instead of what I wrote.