curious flap over leaked internal memo from LHC's ATLAS collaboration over at "Not Even Wrong"
hints of Higgs at 115 GeV in γγ decay
intriguing but too vague and unconfirmed for the physics to be interesting at this point.
Sociology of the comments is interesting.
More like this
Twitter is telling me that Phobos Grunt is going to do its mostly burning up in the Earth's Atmosphere thing RIGHT NOW. Or it just did. Or really really soon.
#PhobosGrunt is the hashtag.
If you have an aluminum foil hat, now would be a good time to put it on.
On Friday, I got an email from KU's new safety alert system, implemented after the Virginia Tech shootings. About 15 minutes later, I got another telling me:
UNIVERSITY POLICE HAVE COMPLETED A COMPREHENSIVE SEARCH OF CAMPUS IN RESPONSE TO AN UCONFIRMED REPORT.
Carry a cool wand;
NASA announced this morning that the upgraded USS Enterprise successfully launched from Edwards AFB, mounting a new retrofitted main engine system.
Part sociology and part statistics: How much should the threshold for discovery increase as the size of a collaboration increases?
Hm, significance threshold = 3 + ln(N_collab)?
Would explain a lot of the 99.5% confidence null results.
So believe 9 sigma LIGO results and 11 sigma ATLAS results?
I think that is pretty close.
Although, some collaborations have many more trials per collaborator than others (i.e. Auger?). And some communities have many smaller collaborations but too many variables (i.e. biomed).
Fortunately all is saved by the holy logarithm.