Aspects of Symmetry

symmetry and beauty hold together the laws of nature.

[fuckyeahsociallylazysloth]

[langer]

[jaywacker]

Steve Jobs at home in 1982

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The world's most brilliantly pointless street flyers. The hand-posted flyer is perhaps the cheapest way to spread the word about lost dogs, found cats, and creepy looking men offering low-cost guitar lessons. But most of the time, those flyers serve as nothing more than reading material for people waiting to get into a bathroom or on a bus. The flyers collected here acknowledge this reality, and they respond by trying to do nothing more than entertain whatever pair of eyes happen to be aimed in their direction. You now have no excuse for wasting all your time on the Internet when it's perfectly clear you could be wasting paper out in the real world.                    Via Happy Place

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Project nearing completion 3400 lines of code. 

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Regression to the mean for an r=0.62 unfair coin.  For a full description see

http://jaywacker.blogspot.com/2011/08/more-regression-to-mean.html

[jaywacker]

The output of of a year-long project.  Benchmark Simplified Models that can't lead to over-tuning of searches. 

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You can't squeeze a dime out of the PC market.  The race to the bottom finally went thud.  The future is bleak for PCs.  Sell off the PC division now while the asking price is good.  Sad move, but prolly the right one.

[jaywacker]

I’ve said this before, but thought it was worth repeating: It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing. And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. And a lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they’re looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies. And they’re talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs. And our experience and every bone in our body says that that is not the right approach to this. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC. That need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC. And we think we’re on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in the organization to build these kinds of products. And so I think we stand a pretty good chance of being pretty competitive in this market. And I hope that what you’ve seen today gives you a good feel for that.

Steve Jobs at the iPad2 unveiling in March 2011

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/04/steve-jobs-post-pc-credo/

[jaywacker]

The Lepton Photon Conference begins on Monday.  This is a biennial conference and this year it is being held at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India.    During the years that Lepton Photon is held, it is the premiere conference for releasing new experimental results.  This being the full year of LHC running, everyone is anticipating the results that are expected to come out.  

Three weeks ago, the first searches for the Higgs came out of the LHC and they showed a subtle, but striking excess for a Higgs mass of 145 GeV at both the ATLAS and CMS detectors.  At Lepton Photon they will present a combined analysis for the first time and potentially update their analysis to include an additional 50% more data.  The talk about the Higgs boson will occur Monday morning India Standard Time (GMT+5:30). 

[jaywacker]

When colored particles (e.g. quarks and gluons) are produced they try to cast off particles through radiation.  These particles then further radiate.  This cascade of particles is called the parton shower. The end of parton shower is a grouping of particles that are near each other and are called a jet.  Quarks and gluons typically split 10 to 20 times.

Gluons tend to split more than quarks and thus produce wider jets.  This is one way we try to identify if a new particle is a quark or gluon.  So far, we aren't very good it at it.  We only get it right 70% of the time.

The above picture shows one way a gluon can parton shower.  It's shown using double line notation.  

Double line notation lets you represent the color flow of particles.  Quarks are single lines with their arrow going forward while antiquarks are single lines with their arrows going backwards.  Gluons are represented by two lines: one going forward and one going backwards. 

The figure shows a gluon splitting 4 times.  

A gluon splitting into two gluons

A gluon splitting into a quark-antiquark pair

A gluon splitting into two gluons

A quark splitting into a quark and a gluon

[jaywacker]

The scale of the top squark mass in TeV versus the alignment of the two vacuum expectation values in Split Susy.  The shaded regions correspond to different Higgs masses.  The supersymmetric flavor problem is solved for squark masses heavier than 1000 TeV and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis constraints aren't problematic for squark masses heavier than 1000,000 TeV.   The dashed horizontal lines correspond to different gluino lifetimes.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.3390

[jaywacker]

A search by some of our former postdocs at SLAC looking for a "dark photon" -- a new massive vector boson that interacts like the photon, but more weakly.

[jaywacker]

One very promising way to see the Higgs boson.  It is created through gluons that are found in the proton. It decays into Z vector bosons that subsequently decay into leptons. This mode is frequently referred as the Golden Channel because all the final states can be easily seen and measured.  If the Higgs is seen in this channel, its mass will be immediately known to 1% accuracy.  

[jaywacker]

fallout from FB wall-spam

Trevor: Did you just post a malicious link on my wall??

Jay: yes.

Jay: I want to take all your personal information and sell it to the Mexican mafia.

Trevor: The Russian mafia pays a little better, FYI...

Jay: The Russians took my thumb last week.

Jay: A little PO'd with them right now.

Trevor: Hmmm...well, I'd suggest Yakuza. But they've been a little strapped since the tsunami and the Sony PS3 hack...

Jay: I still got good $$ for it

Jay: You should feel good.

[jaywacker]

WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?

home

Could be Jerusalem, or it could be CairoCould be Berlin, or it could be PragueCould be Moscow, could be New YorkCould be Llanelli, and it could be WarringtonCould be Warsaw, and it could be Moose JawCould be RomeEverybody got somewhere they call home

Roger Waters

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Another potential signal for a Higgs boson near 140 GeV.

[jaywacker]

A problem from research:

So there are a set of boxes you want to get that are numbered 1 to 5 in the figure above.  There are different methods of getting some of these boxes that are labeled A through D in the figure above.  Method A will get boxes 1, 2 and 5.  So the game is to find the minimum number of methods necessary to get all the boxes.  The example above requires 2 methods:  either A & B or C & D.    Not so bad.  At the very worse, you could try all the possibilities: 

1 method (4 choices):   A, B, C, D  

2 methods (6 choices): A&B,  A&C,  A&D,  B&C,  B&D, C&D 

3 methods (4 choices): A&B&C,  A&B&D,  A&C&D,  B&C&D

4 methods (1 choice): A&B&C&D

15 possibilities = 2^4 -1.  You can see that this is the maximum number because you can choose to either use a method or not -- meaning that there are 2 choices for each method and the one where no methods are used is boring.

My real problem had 8064 methods and 6411 boxes.  This means that there are 2^8064 possibilities (or 10^2400 = (1 Googol)^24 )