Its not actually amazingly impressive, its made to sound a lot more impressive than it actually is. One the meeting in question was "CMS week", one of several weeks a year we get all our collaborators together at CERN not CERNs annual meeting. She's basically improved our jet algorithm (as far as I can tell, the article is woefully lacking in details), a decent job for an undergraduate and will certainly help her walk into a PhD place as a shes clearly good enough but she's certainly not the only undergradute to have made a contribution such as this.

I'm with you. I take out 100 euros and 200 CHF a week and its much easier to stick to a budget than doing it by cards. I probably spend less this way, if somebody says lets head out for meal, I can just look at my wallet and see if I can afford it. Although maybe I do spend more because on friday nights it can be, hey I've got 150 CHFs left, lets hit Pickwicks in Geneve and taxi back home to France :)

The Higgs would just be the icing on the cake of an already highly successful Tevatron physics program which is coming to its end. The Tevatron was built to find and measure the properties of the top quark which it did. It also produced valuable Bs mixing measurements sheding light on mater-antimatter asymetry. It has produced many fantastic results (sadly) confirming the correctness of the Standard Model (at this energy scale) and has set stringent limits on many beyond the Standard Model theorys like extra dimensions and SUSY.

they are and they arent. Fermilab is a big contributor to the LHC (although some of the contributions did go bang, hmmmm) and will play a big role in its future. Lots of scientists are on both an LHC experiment and a Tevatron experiment (although they tend to be senior, PHD students and postdocs who do most of the work tend to be on only one). It would be actually hard for the labs to work together more than they actually are. But there is also definately a little bit of a (friendlyish) race on to be the first ones to see it. In the sense, we'll help you as much as we can but we also want to beat you, its a little odd to explain.

somebodys not a Bayesian :)

Anyway theres pretty reasonable indirect evidence for the Higgs, lets just say to make all our measurements consistant, it would be nice if a fundamental scalar existed around 115 GeV. And it would be even nicer if it generated all the masses in the Standard Module while it was at it. There is certainly enough to have a reasonable Bayesian prior.

I suspect most people have 3 phones where they can be regularly reached. Mobile/cell, home landline, work landline. The poll results seem to support this theory.

You might ask why I dont consolidate into a single phone, my answer is each phone is registered to seperate country. I know a lot of other people who have serveral mobile phones each from a different country as it works out cheaper with only moderate use just to buy a phone in the country you're in if you visit regularly.

Imperial College used to have this policy cira 1999. However there then was a major push by the then new rector for entrepreneurial spirit and using our degrees to come up with new practical commercial ideas. To his credit, he saw the policy that Imperial would own all the ideas as counter productive to his aims and gave us ownership of anything we came up with.