For those of you in the science “know” you might have heard recently about the mysterious results vortex surrounding PAMELA and what it might mean for a major breakthrough in the study of Dark Matter…more specifically a possibly first glimpse at real super symmetry! Or as I like to call it: “Holy crap, we need twice as many particles - or chips - if we are ever going to finish all this salsa con queso - or symmetry”
I’ll admit that last sentence was pushing the boundaries of coherence, but I saw some Salsa con queso at Wegman’s but didn’t buy it out of respect. What I actually wanted to mention about this amazing physics discovery was how the first people to publish got their data:
The preliminary data points for positron and antiproton fluxes plotted in our figures have been extracted from a photo of the slides taken during the talk, and can thereby slightly differ from the data that the PAMELA collaboration will officially publish.
OH MY GOD. These people are actually slowing the progress of science by being total jackasses (albeit hilariously awesome jackasses). That’s right folks, during a preliminary results talk, they took a photo of the presenter’s slides (camera phone?!?) and are now publishing before the presenters’ collaboration has agreed upon the analysis. I don’t want to say something I’ll regret later in life, but this is the kind of cut throat atmosphere that I experienced working this summer at CERN…and it is in fact just wrong.
But back to real life, people at Cornell are really proud of Cornell. Hans Bethe this…Feynmann that….It’s getting pretty boring. Although I guess they still open the theory building at 5 am and close at 4:30 pm cause those were the hours Bethe liked to keep? I find that mildly amusing. I’m pretty profusely confused about what I will do research in here, but I have finally decided on classes: QFT I and Solid State I. I don’t think I have too much to worry about, but we’ll see once they kick into high gear.
In addition to all that, I ordered a television at the behest of my roommates: it will arrive sometime before the LHC turns on (hopefully). Also I saw rjd2 in concert, he was pretty cool. Oh and in even stranger news, I hear Felicia Day is kinda like a unicorn which I also find hilarious.
grief replaced pity for a city barely coping
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I like the rocks they are not pointy