Yes but he is at least honest about that: he is one of America's foremost science educators and he grades America's science education as an 'F' so exactly how good a teacher did you think he was going to be?

Actually I would expect an astronomer to have a level of understanding of the optics in their telescope comparable to that of a physicist's understanding of their own experimental apparatus. If you don't understand the apparatus you use to collect the data then that data is useless because you won't know whether some interesting feature of the data is due to some new phenomena never before observed or because you forgot to plug in your GPS cable properly.

Sorry that should obviously be "dry county"!

Undoubtedly it is - historically neither the US nor Europe had strict gun control laws and neither appeared to need them. However given that both now have a problem with violence in society it is undoubtedly the case that gun control limits the damage of that violence. Having strict gun control laws in one region is useless: it is trivially easy to go outside that region, purchase what you want, and return with it with almost zero chance of being caught. It's like a "dry country": everyone there just drives a few kilometres to the county next door to purchase alcohol.

Restrictions on items only work when you implement them throughout a region where there is some border control e.g. at the national level. Once you have this there is a reasonable chance of being caught and/or the expense to avoid detection limits the number of criminal enterprises who can get around the law and so limits supply.

You might possibly have had a point if we were considering an armed robbery of the mall, although the fact that countries with strict gun control laws have murder rates that are a tiny fraction of the US suggests that the downsides far, far outweigh any small benefit.

However I really don't understand how a civilian armed with a gun will stop a terrorist bomb. Having armed civilians wandering around a shopping mall shooting anyone with a backpack, bag or briefcase who looks "suspicious" frankly sounds like a far more terrifying prospect than a terrorist with a bomb and one likely to result in far more deaths. What we need is a plan to stop them from causing "terror", not one where you do it for them

What is being asked for is not a form of protection but a dangerous abdication of responsibility. Indeed we've known it is bad for so long that we actually have a fairytale we read to our children which cautions against it. Remember the tale of sleeping beauty who was to prick her finger on a spinning wheel before falling asleep and so the king banished all spinning wheels from the kingdom. Since it was impossible to completely enforce the blockade the result was that when she saw a spinning wheel she was so curious abut it she ended pricking her finger.

The same applies to the internet: you cannot block everything. Instead you can just use the same approach that you use for everything else in life: set out the rules, supervise them so you have a reasonable chance of noticing any serious violations (if your kids are human there will be violations and you will not catch all of them), make sure there are consequences for those serious violations you do catch and finally teach them how to deal with any inappropriate content which they do manage to see.

Nobody suggests that we should combine HHGTTG and Google Glass to make glasses for kids that will turn black and the first sign of anything deemed inappropriate occurring in real life. Indeed we set up rules for our kids to help avoid such situations and we make sure that our kids know how to handle such situations if they do occur (e.g. say no to strangers, don't do drugs etc.). So why don't we take the same approach to parenting with the internet?

Do you have a paper to back that up? It seems very surprising that a 2-loop level effect would have the same constraints as something at the tree level.

Not quite. Given our current understanding it would appear more natural to have SUSY at a lower mass scale but if we find SUSY at 10TeV all that means is that SUSY is perhaps less natural than it could have been. It's like tossing a coin: how many heads in a row do you need to get before you conclude that the coin is weighted? You can draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say '5 sigma' but it is just that an arbitrary line in the sand. With SUSY we have the same problem: you can put an arbitrary line on the energy scale and say "above X TeV it is unnatural" but it is just that: an arbitrary line. You might be happier if SUSY existed at a lower energy scale (I would be too!) but the universe is not there just to make us happy.

How is making an arbitrary choice that stop and gluino are both just beyond the current limits "looking at it experimentally"? What's to prevent stop being just beyond our detection range with the gluino being far above it? The argument for a light stop is that the top has a large correction to the Higgs mass due to its strong coupling: I'm not aware of any such argument for the gluon since it is massless. Natural SUSY does not place any hard limits on the upper bounds: things just get less natural as the masses increase but there is no line in the sand where the models cease to be natural. You could perhaps argue that it is unnatural by the time you get to ~10TeV or higher without SUSY but, as you say, it is purely subjective and not at all 'experimental'.

Actually that is not quite true. The size of the universe that we can see is actually shrinking. This very counterintuitive result is due to the fact that the universe's expansion is accelerating due to Dark Energy. Hence a distant point in space that is currently moving away from us very close to the speed of light today due to the expansion of space will actually be moving away from us faster than the speed of light tomorrow and so will become causally disconnected from us. So with time our horizon will shrink.

In the very distant future the horizon may shrink to the subatomic level and eventually arrive at the planck length itself at which point nobody has a clue as to what will happen since it needs quantum gravity to understand. This is the so-called "Big Rip" end to the universe.

Actually there is a lot of evidence that the universe operates in a way that correlates directly with mathematics. Using our mathematical models of fundamental physics we used them to predict the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, to solve the flaws in the model. Similarly the same principle applied to the discovery of quarks and the W and Z bosons before.

The fact that we can use mathematical models of the fundamental nature of the universe so incredibly successfully to predict new fundamental phenomena that we have never seen before is clear evidence that the universe does work in a manner that correlates with our mathematics. Indeed I would say that this is one of the truly remarkable things about the fundamental nature of the universe: we can construct mathematical models of it which agree perfectly within our, admittedly limited, ability to test them.

You are completely missing the point. Consider two scenarios: (a) a 1.25 TeV gluino and a 1 TeV stop and (b) a 5 TeV gluino and a 750 GeV stop. Which of these two possible SUSY models is more likely? (a) or (b)? If the answer is (as I suspect) that they are both roughly equally likely then you are just as likely to see the stop quark first as you are to see a gluino first: in (a) you see the gluino and in (b) you see the stop first.

If you want to say that seeing a gluino is more likely then you have to be able to say that models like (a) are more likely than models like (b). For example we do have theory to support that the stop is probably the lightest of the squarks. Without a prediction of the mass of a gluino relative to the squark masses you have no real basis to say that you will see a gluino first because you no idea what the gluino mass is relative to the stop mass. About the only argument you might make is that there is marginally more available phase space for the stop mass because the current limit is below the gluino mass limit but given that the upper bounds are not well constrained this is not much of an argument.

All these arguments are reasons why it is easier to see stops than gluinos which I'm already aware of. However what you are also assuming here is that the gluino mass is comparable to the squark masses. Is there any justification for that because I've not seen it e.g. if the gluino mass is 3 times that of the squarks it will not be seen first.

Unless there is an argument to say why this is disfavoured you are drawing unwarranted conclusions based on detector sensitivities. It doesn't matter how much more sensitive we are in ATLAS to gluinos or how much faster we can do the analysis if we can't produce any gluinos to detect because their mass is too high.

Actually the odds of you being alive for an extinction level event, while low, are far higher that. The odds of winning the UK national lottery are about one in 14 million. The average life expectancy of a human is ~80 years in the western world so if the rate of extinction-level events only has to be one every ~1.1 billion years for the annual probability of one to mean that there is a higher chance of you being alive when one happens than there is of you winning the lottery.

If you look at the frequency of all mass extinction events given here then you can see that the rate is far higher than that. Unfortunately we don't really know for certain how many, if any, of these were caused by asteroid impacts or massive volcanic eruptions but the rate of these natural extinction events is clearly far higher than one every billion years. Hence the data suggest that you are probably many times more likely to be alive when a natural mass extinction event happens than you are to win the lottery even once, let alone twice.

...and what about squarks? These are strongly coupled and there are some arguments to suggest that the stop squark is most likely to have the lowest mass.

The centre of mass energy is actually going from 8 to 13 TeV so it is not a doubling of the energy. However we are increasing the luminosity (number of protons in the beam) too so we will probably have at least twice the reach in energy that we did before. While the article makes it sound like something new looking for Supersymmetry (SUSY) is something we have been searching for since the start of the LHC.

SUSY is the leading candidate theory to explain why the higgs is so much lower in energy that the energy scale at which gravity becomes important: the Planck scale. While there are good arguments to suppose that SUSY is within range of the LHC energy I would put about as much store in a prediction of which SUSY particle will be discovered first as I would in a 14 day weather forecast: there is some science that goes into it but there are so many unknowns that the prediction is likely to be junk. Worse, while we can be pretty certain that there will be some sort of weather in 14 days there is no guarantee that there is a lightest SUSY particle: SUSY might not exist in nature although this itself would raise some interesting questions.