Mindy Weisberger reports, for LiveScience: Deceased animals in a range of compromising poses share cautionary stories of times when wildlife interactions with humans turned deadly — for the wildlife — in the unusual exhibit “Dead Animal Tales” at the Natural History Museum Rotterdam (NHMR) in the Netherlands. Recently, NHMR welcomed a new addition to the […]
Tag: CERN
Cafeteria Review: CERN
Several Improbable Research persons (I am one of them) are at CERN for a few days. We sometimes dine in CERN’s main cafeteria, and are delighted at the goodness of the food and the general atmosphere — and equally delighted at the kindness, friendliness, and relaxed cheeriness of the people who work at the cafeteria. It’s […]
A quick look at Improbable bits of TEDx CERN
TEDx CERN Facebook page posted a few photos from today’s event. Here are some of the Improbable people, with accompanying text from that Facebook page: “It’s not usual to have bras thrown into the audience at CERN. Then again, Marc Abrahams is not your usual guy. Marc is the one behind the infamous Ig Nobel Awards and editor […]
Improbable Research and Ig Nobel at TEDx CERN
Geneva, Switzerland (and environs) will host lots of Improbability during the next week or so: two events. Both events will be webcast. Soprano Maria Ferrante and pianist Alice Martelli will perform songs from Ig Nobel operas, at both events. Improbable Research at CERN I will do a TEDx CERN talk on the topic: “Why All Good, and Some Bad, Research is […]
From glorious mud comes forth the Higgs: A song
The CERN Choir performed this song about the quest for the Higgs particle (a quest that, reportedly, has very likely succeeded), using the Flanders and Swann tune from a song originally about “Mud, mud, glorious mud…” and a hippopotamus: (Thanks to investigator James Gillies for bringing this to our attention.) BONUS: The Flanders and Swann song:
Chickens, Consciousness, and the LHC
Dr. Dainis Zeps, a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Latvia, is one of the very few to have investigated “hierarchical multitime notion and of the cone of creation” with reference to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. His paper on the subject, ‘On to What Effect LHC Experiment […]
Ode Upon a Particle, of Doubt
A poem of sorts, in honor of the announcement that researchers at CERN may have found some evidence that might (and might not) indicate whether or not the hypothetical Higgs particle exists: Last night I saw beneath the stair A particle that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there again today. I wish it would just go […]
Wags on Higgs
A fresh heap of rumors say that soon, soon scientists at the CERN particle accelerator will announce that they have discovered evidence that the Higgs boson exists. Or that it doesn’t. Or that they evidence doesn’t quite prove the one or the other. Ian Sample, science editor of The Guardian, wrote a surprisingly-fun-and-fact-filled book, called […]
Black holes and the law
Professor Eric E. Johnson of the University of North Dakota School of Law tries to solve the legal conundrum of the Swiss black hole. In “The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World” (Tennessee Law Review, no. 819, 2009, arXiv:0912.5480v2) he writes: “What should a court do with a preliminary-injunction request […]
Swiss researchers hold their faces
In this photo, three out of four Swiss physicists hold their faces.