You've hit the nail on the head with that link. Glad you were modded up!

My take on this is that alternative theories to dark matter are always welcome but they have a lot of explaining to do. If there is no dark matter then how else can we explain the galactic rotational velocity profiles, gravitational lensing maps, AND cosmic microwave background fluctuations fitted to cosmological models. For me the strongest evidence is found in the lensing study of colliding galaxies. The mass (dark matter) distribution has separated from the visible light distribution.

In science, it's particularly exciting when new theories are proposed that not only explain previous observations but predict new, unknown phenomena that can be tested. Sure that doesn't always happen even with good, valuable theories but this dark matter alternative theory falls well short of the "exciting" mark because it fails to explain the bulk of the existing evidence for dark matter. It also smells strongly of computational error. Being able to investigate and rule out or reveal computing errors is probably what best separates mediocre scientists from great ones these days.

I'm way behind on this discussion but it looks like people are misinterpreting this report. The CDF experiment at Fermilab had reported last April on a possible observation of a new particle. They say that it is *not* a Higgs candidate, but could be something else (even more startling than a Higgs, such as a supersymmetric particle). Something with a mass of about 140 MeV/c^2 appears to be decaying into W and two quarks. This report is here: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2011/today11-04-07.html

TFA is a report from the D0 experiment that they do not see this same thing. They should have been able to see it if it were real, but they did not. If D0 had also seen the same kind of signal that CDF did, then things would really get exciting! But for now I guess one could say that results are inconclusive on whether or not there is new physics here.

1) This is (probably) not about the Higgs at all.
2) This is not (yet) about CERN/LHC. D0 and CDF are the two collider experiments sitting on Fermilab's main ring, and they share a healthy kind of rivalry. The LHC at CERN hosts six experiments: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/LHCExperiments-en.html . The beams at these accelerators are designed to intersect (collide) at certain points around which various impressive arrays of detectors are built. Hence we have multiple experiments with independent data sets and their own unique strengths and systematics running in parallel at the same lab.

Disclaimer: I'm not really current on any of this but I can at least point out that all this discussion is off-topic and even the /. post title, "Data Review Brings Major Setback In Higgs Boson Hunt", is completely off the mark.

I'm typing this response using a Colemak keyboard layout. I'm still really slow at it since I only started learning it two weeks ago. But I decided to (temporarily) sabotage my typing speed because I want to be the kind of person who is willing to make the effort to break out of this kind of vicious cycle. My fingers are putting up a good fight - they really long for the old days - but screw them!

Qwerty is a "bad" layout for lots of reasons, so why does nearly *everyone* still use it even some 130 years after its beginnings? One reason is that Qwerty is not actually "awful", because most random layouts are a bit worse. But the main reason (after Dvorak came out in the '30s) was that schools taught Qwerty because businesses bought those typewriters, and businesses bought them because schools taught to them. These days Qwerty is still ubiquitous simply because it is.

Machine shops and hardware stores buy and stock tools designed for the US customary system because stuff needs to be made compatible with all the old stuff that's in inches & feet. Well, that and many other reasons that are similarly circular. It's like a function minimizer that's gotten stuck on a local minimum because it cannot find a downhill path to the global minimum. Sorry that's an obscure analogy, but free markets act kind of the same way, and are unable to pop themselves out of a local optimization. The US takes great pride in being a slave to market forces, no matter where they take us.

MS Windows and Office are popular for the same kinds of reasons.

I don't know what the solution is, but I also have to point out that the US equivalent to the kilogram is the slug, not pounds or ounces. Technically we should ask for food boxes to give a net mass in slugs (yummy!), not a net weight that for all we know could have been measured in a centerfuge. Fluid ounces are a stupid unit, but technically a measure of volume and are used correctly AFAIKT.

I liked parts of the letter too, but I can't easily judge how much wisdom (or lack thereof) is being expressed. There seemed to be a lot of exaggerations but to some extent that's the norm for corporate management-speak. A couple easy examples:

This strikes me as a particularly desperate statement that struggles against reality.

How dramatic? Isn't outsourcing done (like it or not) to reduce costs? Distributed software development can be made to work fairly well. Multiple R&D sites allow you to attract talent from a wider pool of applicants.

Big corporate shakeups like this are a sign of a struggling company. There are enormous costs involved in doing this. In some cases it works well, but it may also be posturing by some few investors that are hoping to dump the company later on for personal profit. If I were a shareholder I'd need a lot more convincing, more details, real data, and some independent confirmation of the data before I went along with it.

I think you're right here. "Relatively" is the key word. The trick to the standardization of SI units is that one cannot measure anything in units that involve mass to greater accuracy than the kilogram itself is known to. As technology advances we bump up against these standards every now and then, when certain other kinds of ultra-high precision measurements become possible.

Yeah, the density of water depends on composition, temperature, and pressure. Atmospheric pressure changes naturally so much, I'm sure that measuring and reproducing any kind of average sea-level air pressure is going to be one of the limiting factors in defining the kilogram that way. It's fine to define mass in terms of fundamental constants, but one has to be very clever and choose this constant to be something that is not only easy to measure, but something that can be measured more accurately than any other mass-related measurement or constant.

I know just enough to see why high precision measurement science is extremely tricky stuff, and how it often comes into direct contact with the definitions of standard units. I also think it's a big deal that the two different experiments to tie the new mass definition to the old one disagree. One cannot just average the results -- that's meaningless. One of the two experiments is wrong, if not both, and so the average result is guaranteed to be wrong. Picking one result at random at least has a chance of being correct, but clearly that's not satisfactory either.

This kind of statement is why I'm an independent. I have views on many issues but they aren't exactly one party platform or another. I think that partisan politics of all sorts in the US are based on us-vs-them thinking and attempt to substitute anger and conflict in place of discussion about important issues.

I never thought of Fox News as libertarian however. More of a GOP mouthpiece, though really the bias is simply against anything center or left-of-center. Most politics is antagonistic. Don't vote for that guy because blah blah blah. If you take a stand on anything then you're more open to attack. Libertarianism is a stand for something. Fox News is a stand against a lot of things.

I really appreciate the Windows-in-VM and Windows terminal server suggestions. I'll pass those along. We do actually have a terminal server set up, so this seems like the easiest way to go. Unfortunately one could not integrate outlook-on-a-TS with a Linux desktop, with new email and meeting notifications. Still all things considered this would be a better way of working for many if not most people here. My office is about 90% R&D.

I still don't think this would fly since the IT is outsourced, security is such a big deal, and so on. Expanding users' choices is always more expensive if you look at IT costs all by themselves. I just chalk this up to the inertia of a large corporation.

We're using Office 2003, and Vista 32-bit, SP1. They migrated from Windows 2000 a couple years ago.

For years (at other jobs) I would regularly organize my email, but I found that this never helps when I go searching for an email. I have never come up with an organization system that is fast, simple, and unambiguous. I like gmail's approach a lot, and I guess I kinda treat Outlook the same way, moving the inbox into an archive folder every few months because of server quotas. But this relies on good and fast searching. Outlook 2003's search capability is neither fast nor complete.

I also don't like how Outlook composes email. It's modal, effectively deciding between plaintext, html, and RTF based on what I'm replying to. New emails seem to pick a mode depending on the phase of the moon. Some modes are buggy and limited. I personally don't feel comfortable sending RTF emails since that's in no way a standard. I want to be sending emails, not "Microsofts".

I'm at a kind of satellite office for a big telecom company, and we all have "managed" workstations -- PCs running Windows, exchange server, lots of 3rd-party security software, internal websites with ActiveX, etc. So we're heavily entrenched in a Windows computing environment.

But ironically almost all of the equipment we're working on is running a Linux kernel. We have to do development on remote *nix servers. So ssh, Xwindows, telnet, scripting with Perl/Python/Tcl/whatever, ... these are the tools for most of the actual work done around here. Windows is a complete disaster for this environment! Some folks install their own Linux in a VM, others use Cygwin a lot, and others struggle along with software like Exceed and Putty. Either way it's very awkward.

So every couple days someone asks "can I _please_ switch to Linux on my desktop? Please??" I can't even pretend to know the whole scope of the answer, but MS Exchange (especially calendaring) and liberal use of Word and Excel documents factor in heavily.

I'll echo the sentiment that Outlook is a horrible, nasty email client! I don't hate anyone with enough savage intensity to recommend Outlook to them. (Just try searching for that email you vaguely recall reading 2 months ago.) But we even use Exchange to schedule our conference rooms! I don't know any other client that works well enough with Exchange to be an adequate replacement.

So my conclusion (if I'm not just ranting) is that if you abandon multi-platform support at an early enough stage within a company (probably starting with an Exchange server) then you can become locked in subtly and deeply. Divorcing Windows on the desktop at my workplace is like pulling a thread on a sweater. Pretty soon the whole thing unravels.

Book burnings now are entirely symbolic. There is widespread access to knowledge, publishing is relatively cheap, so burning books accomplishes exactly nothing. But originally it was much more dramatic, both strategically and emotionally effective at stamping out schools of thought. The pyres probably also symbolized burning clothes and possessions of someone who was infected with some plague -- these books contain contagious ideas that taint the reader in some fatal way.

I think a Quran-burning party is a kind of hate rally. It serves to attack the religion, but also to dehumanize Muslims themselves. It's an early step toward radicalization for those involved in the burning.