Careful examination of lots of experimental data suggests that there
is no
Higgs boson, leaving physicists unable to explain mass.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Careful examination of lots of experimental data suggests that there
is no
Higgs boson, leaving physicists unable to explain mass.
members of the Electroweak Working Group say there was no sign of a Higgs at energies up to 115 GeV, well past the 80 GeV where it would be expected. That only leaves around 30 per cent of possibilities.Some physicists remain confident that the Higgs boson exists, but at higher energies than were calculated from what we know about other particles.
The problem for physicists is that without the Higgs particle they don't have a viable theory of matter. "There is nothing remotely as plausible or compelling to replace it," says Wilczek. Supersymmetry, which predicts every particle is paired with a heavier partner, is a popular idea. But LEP's results are even worse news for this theory, as it predicts several Higgs particles. The lightest one would have turned up at even lower energies, and couldn't exist above 130 GeV.
The Times of India reports that, behind an official alliance,
the US and Pakistan are
at
war in all but name.
the Bush administration has begun to quietly punish Pakistan even while publicly upholding a facade of goodwill, just as Islamabad is also maintaining a pretense of cooperation in the fight against terrorism while pursuing its own agenda. Several incidents bear this out, including the latest episode involving two prominent Pakistani nuclear scientists, who have now been detained again at Washington’s insistence over suspicion that they were involved in planning an "Anthrax Bomb."It also transpires that many of the foreigners fighting with the Taleban are Pakistani, not Arab.
[via Red Rock Eaters; I don't know how reliable this is, given the history of tension and conflict between India and Pakistan]
Jonathan Chait
analyses the
set of lies
with which Bush and his people defend their tax cut and claim it has
nothing to do with the deficit:
it's bizarre for Fleischer to deny that the tax cut is going to reduce tax revenues, since that was the point of it: Bush said over and over that "Washington" would spend the surpluses unless they were returned to the people as tax cuts. This contradicts not only what the administration is saying now about the looming deficit but also its case for a second tax cut, the "stimulus bill."...If Bush's you-can-have-it-all budgeting was merely a miscalculation, he could scale back the tax cut to make way for more debt reduction or spending. But the truth--which subsequent developments now expose--is that Bush always placed his tax cut ahead of debt reduction or the various government policies he endorsed as a "compassionate conservative."
It wasn't just some giant miscalculation. It was a lie.
It
can happen here: after holding a foreigner prisoner for three years,
claiming secret evidence, the U.S. government gave in and he had his
day in court.
In a two-week trial the government's lead witness, an Immigration agent, admitted that there was no evidence of Mr. Al-Najjar contributing to a terrorist organization or ever advocating terrorism. At the end Judge McHugh found that there were no "bona fide reasons to conclude that [Mr. Al- Najjar] is a threat to national security."He was released. And arrested again, a week ago, on the same charges that a judge has found to be entirely unfounded. Mazen Al-Najjar is being held in solitary confinement, and not allowed to see or speak to his family. The press release announcing his arrest says there is no classified evidence this time. Which is probably true--because if there is no evidence, there is no classified evidence.
It could be, too, that Mr. Ashcroft wants to use this case to establish the right to use secret evidence against aliens. The practice had been all but abandoned by the Justice Department after several judges frowned on it and more than 100 members of the House co-sponsored legislation to prohibit it.With all the extreme measures taken by the administration in recent days--detaining hundreds of people, ordering thousands questioned, establishing military tribunals--Mr. Ashcroft and President Bush have assured the country that they will enforce the measures with care, and with concern for civil liberties. Their motto is, "Trust us."
The Al-Najjar case shows that there is no basis for trust.
Can an attorney general be impeached? [via Medley; free registration required]
Designing a peace flag was the easy part; getting it made was
more
difficult, both with practical difficulties--every flag maker in the
country was already overbooked--and a variety of political attacks.
Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have the brain structure that is
essential
to speech in humans, according to recent MRI scans.
"The part possession by great apes of a homologue of Broca's area is puzzling, particularly considering the discrepancy between sophisticated human speech and the primitive vocalisations of great apes," [the researchers] write in the journal Nature."This may be explained by the contribution that gestures have made to the evolution of human language and speech," they speculate.
Captive great apes tend to gesture with their right hands, especially when making some kind of vocal noise, they note.
Their theory is that as the ancestors of humans and great apes learned to grunt and gesticulate, the left side of their area 44s grew larger.
In
memoriam, George Harrison.
Ice cream in
extreme
close-up. Don't take the text too seriously (good ice cream does not
contain corn syrup), but a polarized light microscope does remarkable
things to Wavy Gravy. [via Lise Eisenberg]
An (as yet) unnamed planet orbiting the star HD 209458
is the first extrasolar planet to be
observed
directly, rather than just by measuring its gravitational effect
on its parent star.
The planet was discovered in 1999 because of its slight gravitational tug on its parent star. It is estimated to be 70% the mass of Jupiter, or 220 times more massive than Earth.The planet is in a very close orbit, giving it an atmospheric temperature of 1100°C.Subsequently, astronomers discovered that the tilt of the planet's orbit makes it pass in front of the star making it unique among all the approximately 80 extrasolar planets discovered to date.
Poor attitude?
Not allowed to fly.
Poor choice of reading material? Not allowed to fly.
Actually
firing a weapon in the terminal? No problem--c'mon aboard!
[Thanks to Dori Smith, via the muted horn]
Following
up on a conversation:
the
Taliban documents on building a nuclear bomb may well have been a
version of a 1979 spoof from The Journal of Irreproducible
Results.
The US government is holding at least
500 people
prisoner on vague charges: the claim is connections to the September 11
attacks, but
a senior law enforcement official said for the first time last week that just 10 to 15 of the detainees are suspected as Al Qaeda sympathizers, and that the government has yet to find evidence indicating that any of them had knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks or acted as accomplices....[free registration required; you know the drill]An Egyptian antiques dealer from Arkansas named Hady Hassan Omar made plane reservations on a Kinko's computer around the same time one of the hijackers did so at the same place; he spent two months in jail before being released on Friday. A Pakistani gas station attendant was just a few minutes ahead of Mohammed Atta, the suspected ringleader, in the line to renew his driver's license; he was denied bail by a Miami judge.
The Bush
administration's anti-terrorist campaign has
knocked
Somalia off the Internet, because the country's only
Internet company is on a list of companies accused of funneling money
to Al-Qaeda. Also on the list is the country's largest employer, a
telephone and remittance company. The other two Somali telecom services
can't handle the extra load, and loss of the money sent from abroad,
and of the jobs at Al-Barakaat, is expected to be devastating.
The executive order that shut down Al-Barakaat claims that Al-Barakaat's founder has "close ties" to Osama bin Laden, and that terrorists have used it to transmit money and information. This may be true, though it would be nice to see some of the "credible evidence" on which this action is based, since Al-Barakaat was given no opportunity to defend itself. Since it was the only way to get to the Internet from Somalia, it was being used by everyone who needed and could afford Internet access, including the UN, international aid agencies, and the Somali government. The question is, is Al-Barakaat actually connected to Al-Qaeda, or were bin Laden's people using it the way anyone uses an Internet cafe?
At best, this is an example of unintended consequences--and an opportunity for the US, or the UK, or some large company to go in and replace the lost banking and telecommunications network.
This
calendar of
Ethiopian holidays conveniently includes dates in the Gregorian
as well as Ethiopian holidays.
Molly Ivins reminds us that
arguments
over how much liberty to trade for safety are missing the point:
There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack....The U.S. Constitution was written by men who had just been through a long, incredibly nasty war. They did not consider the Bill of Rights a frivolous luxury, to be in force only in times of peace and prosperity, put aside when the going gets tough. The Founders knew from tough going.
There are no correct answers to the wrong questions. The right question in this case, I think, is why are we being asked how much we'll trade, a question that assumes the trade is even possible? Cui bono?
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.