i got a little sassy at this year's canadian association of physicists conference
and bet that the LHC wouldn't find the higgs boson in the next couple years.
It's my stupid "professional opinion" that the higgs mechanism is a little oversimple...
gravity is all "I'm nonlinear", and particle physics is all "LINEARITY IS MOST IMPORTANT"
and then the higgs mechanism is all "looks like a mass parameter is generated in a linear expansion"
and then it's all "wooo! we've discovered mass"
and i'm like "shenanigans! first you gotta tell me how energy works, because renormalization is a hack job that only works because of magic. once you do that, you can tell me about gravity and discovering mass."
and then i stick out my tongue and flip them off.

anyway.
i hope they don't discover the higgs boson.
and imade a bet with a particle cosmologist that they wouldn't.
in any case, they've got circulating beams
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR17.09E.html
it's only a matter of time now before EVERYONE (or me) IS WRONG!

so ,
as often happens
i go to bed, but i'm too silly to sleep
this is especially a problem with my computer about, because I'm an information addict and there's always something to read.
so one thing i do to combat this is i turn on one of my audiobooks.
so john hodgman is very good for this, since his books are mostly nonsense,
though the "area of my expertise" is better then "more information than you require"
because his voice is more monotone.
anyway it's good because if it invades my dreams, i don't notice much.
anyway, last night i decided to listen to an al franken audiobook
and i spent all night dreaming of tax reform and republicans
blegh.
not restful at all.

i feel that all us unhelpful jerk physicists should be promoting the idea that,
not only will the LHC create a black hole which will eat the earth,
but that all black holes we can see in the universe were created in such a way.
and that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies were created when a a
"star trek" type civilization got too big for its britches
and got eaten by a black hole!

hahaha
bwa ha
bwa ha ha
bwa ha ha ha
BWA HAHAHAHAHAHA
BWA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
BWA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
BWA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

i guess...
what other explanation is there for it?

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/091118/national/afghan_prisoners_controversy

man i love these stories.

so i'm taking my first leaps into a literature review so that i can write a paper on my silly (serious) research.
and i'm learning about crazy "loop quantum gravity".
and i have a metaphor.

see. (a solution in) general relativity is like a player piano with a tune-scroll in it. a 4-dimensional object, complete and in need of nothing.

(a solution in) the ADM formulation of GR is like the player piano, but you take out the tune-scroll and you try to read it and poke the keys. it's a 3-dimensional object, and there's an illusion of interaction on the part of the physicist, and there's evolution.

so then there's this "loop representation of general relativity", which uses holonomies and other really strange new objects to talk about curvature. and it's like you've disassembled your player piano onto the living room floor, and it's in pieces but you know how to put it all back together. anyway so it's like that?

and then loop quantum gravity is like, you disassemble your player piano and then replace the hammers with bees. and then speculate about how to play rachmaninoff on this pile of stuff and bees (jack corrects: "speculate about how to play 'shave and a hair cut'")

jack also says "and then string theory is like a guitar"...
and i'm inclined to agree for all sorts of hilarious anti-string-theory/anti-guitar-player parallels.

okay, so there's a really fun science podcast.
"science... sort of"
http://www.sciencesortof.com/

some dudes talk about science.
i found out about them because they wanted to interview me about superman.
in any case, it's a rad podcast. i say this as a person who listens to a lot of podcasts.
it's way better than the scientific american podcast.

http://www.salemnews.com/punews/local_story_313233045.html?keyword=secondarystory





(meep is what pikas say)


in related news, this is a perfect example of an Ex Tempore opinion... where you try to come up with a decent logical sounding argument against something after you've made up your mind. we all do it. not just jerk, anti-pika principals. that's why politics are so stupid.

why are these nature documentaries so rad?

so i've made bunny lunchbags
and i just realized that i can ALSO make WALRUS lunchbags
using the a similar design.

so i swear, i'm trying... TRYING to do real work. but stupid things keep cropping up.
1) can a warp drive escape from a black hole?
-I say it might be able to, depending. but sanjeev says that it'll be able to all the time, because in the approximation of a large enough black hole with a small enough ship, the ship will effectively be a tachyon. now i want to do simulations but it's too silly and also very tricky. too tricky, actually. and quite not worth it.

2) key vs. importance function?
so, you know how we don't give keys to unimportant people? like toddlers? but how as you go on and get more important you get more keys? but then, really important people don't have keys either, because everything gets taken care of for them? so janitors have more keys than CEO's?

if we were to graph the number of keys a person has versus their importance, we'd see that there's a maximum at some level of importance. :p

booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

c'mon. jeez.

how come doctors back when i was a kid were always portrayed wearing those head reflector things?
they're still kind of portrayed with them...
http://www.hollywoodtoysandcostumes.com/0515326.html?zmae=froogle&zmam=99371410&zmas=2&zmac=2&zmap=0515326

http://www.offthemarkcartoons.com/cartoons/2008-05-09.gif

but like. when was the last time you saw a doctor wearing one?
EVER?

it's an artifact of the equations, but simply put: when there are fewer than zero zombies (a negative number), every time an antizombie bites you, it makes a NEW antizombie AND a new healthy person...so the reaction rates of the antizombies attacking people skyrockets.. PLUS soon the population of healthy people skyrockets and the earth becomes overpopulated.

it's like a big rip. but with (anti)zombies.

i don't know much about parliamentary history, or about whether it's contextually appropriate to act like question period should be a heckling match.

but i do know that back in john A's day, there were fist-fights down the center isle of the house. that sounds awesome... but that stopped when they closed the bar under the house... but they should totally open it back up again because if our government is going to be uncivil, it might as well be dramatic and exciting.

i love watching al franken yell at people.
he's just like "stop being full of shit" and the people he yells at are like "pooooooo" and he's like "no that doesn't help"

guys did you know that in some places around the world the gas pump box thing is called a "bowser"?
i think that this is awesome and i'm gonna start.

they make john hodgman's silly drinks in the audiobook