Yeah, as usual, the summary is terrible. ALL collisions at the LHC are proton-proton collisions, not just the W-W ones.

What they're measuring is one of the higher-order corrections implied by the Higgs mechanism. Without the Higgs field, W bosons wouldn't have mass. Measuring how the Ws interact with each helps verify that the Higgs mechanism for explaining W boson mass is correct. Unfortunately, it's kinda hard to produce a W boson, much less two at once, much less getting them to interact with each other. You have to produce a lot of high-energy collisions to see it happen.

They did, and they got the answer they expected from the Higgs mechanism. Yay, Peter Higgs gets to keep his Nobel prize.

It was sponsored by over 200 people on both sides. It passed by a "voice vote" which means they didn't track exactly who voted for it or against it, but it was overwhelmingly positive. I gather that a few Democrats voted against it, mostly on the grounds that some states tax it and need it as a revenue source (it's a Republican thing to believe that collecting less taxes somehow magically decreases deficits rather than increasing them), but mostly, it's hard to vote against a tax cut in an election year.

Because of that there's a good chance that it will flounder and die in the Senate. The House is 100% up in November, but the Senators are a bit more responsible about forbidding states from raising revenues, and the Senators from Texas (which lose their exemption under the current moratorium) may ask Reid to spike it.

So arguably, this is more about ending the moratorium than extending it: by voting up a permanent ban they've diminished the chances of extending the temporary one. I don't know all of the inside-baseball on this one and there's more that I'm not seeing, so I can't give a confident prediction.

If so, perhaps they their script from when I quit Comcast. I quit because they couldn't or wouldn't fix a very unreliable connection; don't get me wrong, the service sucked. But canceling it took a few minutes; they asked me why, and I told them, and that was it. They didn't try really hard to retain me.

Perhaps the frequent complaints I'd made popped up a box saying "Customer is a pain in the butt, let them go" or "Customer is at the end of a long last mile with outdated equipment, and it would cost more to fix their problem than we'd make in payments, so give it up." Or maybe it was just my very definite answer about why I was canceling. But it didn't take me very long and I got no real pushback on it.

I find that in effect my password-keeper for sites with onerous restrictions, but used only rarely, is my email. I end up using the password-recovery feature which usually ends up as "we'll email you a link; if you have access to the original email address you signed in with, we'll treat that as proof that you are who you say you are."

Losing access to my email account would be pretty disastrous. That can happen not just by forgetting the password, but with any kind of administrative failure, or even simply being out of range (though fortunately, trying to access a web site usually implies access to my email.)

It's very much an eggs-in-one-basket situation, though fortunately those rarely-used web sites are usually of limited importance to me.

What I find particularly perplexing is that if there was a real significant movement, and the request were possible, the White House would already be doing it. It's hard for me to imagine a President saying, "Gosh, 134,000+ people, you're right. This is a really important issue and I had no idea that people cared about it. Thanks, I'll get right on it."

So I'm confused as to what they hope to accomplish with the site. Maybe, maybe they'd end up going to Congress and saying, "Look, we've got ten million virtual signatures here, and that means I've got a campaign issue next time around. So go do something." But shy of that I don't see it giving anybody anything except a place to vent, followed by a quick civics lesson on the separation of powers.

Oh. Duh. That makes perfect sense, visualized that way. Thanks.

I learned to camp during the 80s, when we were transitioning from the "huge swaths of canvas with wooden poles" era to the "flimsy nylon with folding aluminum tubes" phase. It was so, so much better.

Is it that significant of an improvement over the previous blackest thing? I would have expected that solar thermal panels would be limited primarily by the difficulty of generating usable power from the heat differential. I know that there already existed previous really-really-black coatings, though I actually would have thought that compared to the other problems, ordinary black paint would suffice. Is this enough of an improvement to make a difference in that vein?

Have you got a link with more information? (I did try Googling, but words like "wave" and "sphere" and "converge" are used in too many contexts and they drown out specifics.) How does that work?

I wonder how much the illegality of it figures into the convenience. The study implies that copying, as currently practiced, has only a limited impact. But that takes place in a world where copying is illegal: people are repeatedly told that it's a bad thing (ad nauseam; I really don't need to be reminded every time I play my legally purchased movie) and the news is full of horror stories of people being harassed by prosecutors when they do get caught.

So I don't know what policy conclusions we could draw from this study. If we made sharing legal, how much would that impact people? Would they continue to want to go to the theater, which has a much larger screen and great sound, but which also costs a fair bit (and even more for any snacks you want, which are actually the theater's primary profit center) and which isn't as convenient in either time or space as having it at home?

I'm not sure how we could guess, aside from actually doing an experiment in which sharing was made legal, and even that is difficult to control (since the entire marketing process would need to change to accommodate it, and it's hard to predict which movies would have been blockbusters at the box office.)

The hammock is probably unnecessary, and in backpacking, you really need to be prepared to do without.

But I wonder if combining the tent and the pack could work, such that the tent poles form the backpack frame and the tent the body. It would be tricky to get the form factor right on both (and if you're humping it for hours, form factor is crucial) but the tent already has an interior and a waterproof exterior. It could shave a kilo or so off your load, and that would be huge.

Folding it every morning would probably suck, but if it could get down to five minutes it might be worth it.

One possibility would be improving the color range, even if the resolution isn't improved. Rather than cramming in three phosophors per pixel, perhaps we could have four, or more. There's a considerable chunk of color space not well represented by RGB color.

I don't know how much of a difference it would make to TV viewers or gamers, but I know that artists would be grateful for a better color range. The conversion from RGB to CMYK is always a bit of a crapshoot; things that look great on your screen don't look as good when they come back from the printers, and there's a whole range of stuff it doesn't occur to you to try because you can't see it.

I could even imagine that it might be handy for medical imaging and other applications where you want to cram as much information onto the screen as possible: more pixels may not improve things but more colors might. Though more pixels could achieve that as well: it would be nice to be able to zoom in by bringing your face closer to the screen without simply seeing bigger pixels. Head motion is kinaesthetically appealing: you can move in and out without losing your sense of overall place.

Sharp already makes a four-pixel TV, with an added yellow (which is especially helpful in skin tones). I think it would be neat to be able to produce true indigo, violent, and cyan. If this lets you add more phosphors without costing resolution, it might not be a killer app, but it could be a desirable thing.

I am intrigued by your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I think that the combo tent/backpack/hammock would be a challenge, since each has different materials for different purposes. But the weight savings (or comfort from not doing without) could be substantial (at least, in an activity where people are said to snap handles off toothbrushes to save weight), and now that you mention it I'm surprised that somebody hasn't tried before. If I actually see the product on shelves some day I'll raise a glass to ya.

It's time for Congress to do a lot of things. But when was the last time Congress did anything at all? Has there been even a single non-trivial piece of legislation in the entire 113th? Was there any in the 112th?

The bar to legislation is fairly high and there's always a large set of voters prepared to punish their legislators for allowing anything through that would be seen as a victory for the other side or even as a compromise with them, regardless of the issue. Those Congressmen have been trained in a Pavlovian fashion to loudly denounce anything anybody tries to do.

So don't expect Congress to fix this, or anything else.

Interesting.

Given MAD, it's hard to imagine another WWII-type scenario (though it would be a bad day if China invaded Taiwan). But I could foresee something like Afghanistan spreading to the entire Middle East, where they couldn't nuke us (at least, not more than a couple of times, not like Cold War-style "nuclear winter" barrages), and we'd be strongly pressured not to nuke them. But the theater would be so wide that we'd need vast, vast number of ground troops.