Gerardo Rojas
Your awesome Tagline
Operation Twist and its implications for QE2
Italy: population pyramid 2011
“The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity. Innovation changes the world but only because it aids the elaboration of the division of labor and encourages the division of time. Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment. This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention they have called forth, the ‘creation’ of time. The rational optimist invites you to stand back and look at your species differently, to see the grand enterprise of humanity that has progressed – with frequent setbacks - for 100,000 years. And then, when you have seen that, consider whether that enterprise is finished or if, as the optimist claims, it still has centuries and millennia to run. If, in fact, it might be about to accelerate to an unprecedented rate.”
Matt Ridley1
To ease or not to ease that’s the question..
Has Molyneux’s Question Been Answered?
In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke takes up a question that had been posed to him by the Dublin politician and intellectual William Molyneux. Molyneux had asked Locke whether a man born blind who had learned to distinguish cubes from spheres by touch would, upon having his sight restored and being presented with the same objects, be able to match seen shape with felt. In the Essay, Locke agrees with Molyneux that the answer is “no”: the sensory ideas of sight and touch are intrinsically too different, they argued, for the connections between them to be uncovered except by building up associations between the different modalities. And with few exceptions - among them G.W. Leibniz (in the Nouveaux Essais) and a handful of more recent theorists (see Thomson 1974, Evans 1985, Campbell 1996, Noe 2004, Gallagher 2005) - the majority of those who have reflected on this question have taken something like this view…
Trolley problems..via Tomkow
Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the “transcendent” and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
Christopher Hitchens
Letters to a Young Contrarian
Why we must be using an IPad
whakahekeheke: The political evolution of Christopher Hitchens (and me!)
Christopher Hitchens, more than any other single intellectual, has influenced me. I first came across Hitchens during the Iraq war debate in the early 2000s. I was in my last years of high school (class of ‘05) and then starting at college in Connecticut. At the time, I was something of a…
Computers
Google did it again
Ani – some call it the City of 1001 Churches, others the City of Forty Gates. Yet no one has called it home for more than three centuries.
Kurds celebrating. Fire is the symbol of Nowruz
Internal Note
Report number ATL-COM-PHYS-2011-415
Title Observation of a γγ resonance at a mass in the vicinity of 115 GeV/c2 at ATLAS and its Higgs interpretation
Author(s) Fang, Y (-) ; Flores Castillo, L R (-) ; Wang, H (-) ; Wu, S L (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Imprint 21 Apr 2011. – mult. p.
Subject category Detectors and Experimental Techniques
Accelerator/Facility, Experiment CERN LHC ; ATLAS
Free keywords Diphoton ; Resonance ; EWEAK ; HIGGS ; SUSY ; EXOTICS ; EGAMMA
Abstract Motivated by the result of the Higgs boson candidates at LEP with a mass of about 115~GeV/c2, the observation given in ATLAS note ATL-COM-PHYS-2010-935 (November 18, 2010) and the publication “Production of isolated Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider Physics” (Letters B 683 2010 354-357), we studied the γγ invariant mass distribution over the range of 80 to 150 GeV/c2. With 37.5~pb−1 data from 2010 and 26.0~pb−1 from 2011, we observe a γγ resonance around 115~GeV/c2 with a significance of 4σ. The event rate for this resonance is about thirty times larger than the expectation from Higgs to γγ in the standard model. This channel H→γγ is of great importance because the presence of new heavy particles can enhance strongly both the Higgs production cross section and the decay branching ratio. This large enhancement over the standard model rate implies that the present result is the first definitive observation of physics beyond the standard model. Exciting new physics, including new particles, may be expected to be found in the very near future.
