Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, likes to say that there are only nine news stories, constantly re-written.
Every once in awhile I like to check the newspaper with his list in mind, to see if he is right. I'll start with his wording unmodified by examples.
1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE
2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE
3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL
4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX
5. EXPERTS WARN OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY
6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY
7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING
8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS
9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL
Does that break-down hold up for the news of the past week or so?
1. The extreme weather story. One word: Australia.
2. Idiots kill innocent people. Always too easy. I won't even include a link. Check your local paper this morning.
3. Politician does something illegal. For this one, I've got a cool link, and it brings us in imagination to sunny Italy!
4. Primate attempts inappropriate sex. A porn-film operation under the primatological name "Cheeky Monkey Inc." seems to have made inappropriate use of a food vending truck.
5. Experts warn of financial calamity. And the municipal bond market is the target of many of the latest warnings.
6. Big Company Buys Another Big Company. These mergers often take on a trans-national cast. That's nothing new. But when the industry that is consolidating is defense consulting, it's still news.
7. Famous Person Does Something Interesting. Ah, the celebrity news category! Ricky Gervais seems to have touched a few Hollywood nerves.
8. The scientific discovery that might be useful in ten years? That CERN thing -- wasn't it supposed to have found that all-important Higgs boson by now? How long will it remain elusive before particle physicists wonder (a) whether it exists and (b) if it doesn't, how to patch up their theories?
9. Government fails to achieve a goal. The governments of Europe have experimented in recent years with the creation of a unified currency zone. That experiment may be crashing to an end. Symptoms of the crash are in all the papers.
Yes, I think Scott Adams has a point.
Showing posts with label sub-atomic particles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sub-atomic particles. Show all posts
30 January 2011
14 August 2007
Put "penguin" in the paper
I love hearing grand things, deep things, discussed. Unfortunately, I also love to understand what I'm hearing. These two loves are of course in conflict because, quite frankly, I'm not equipped to understand a serious discussion of subatomic particles. I'll start listening, or reading, and then when bafflement overcomes intrigue, walk away or close the book.
This is why I was delighted to learn about penguin diagrams. It reconciles my two loves. Physicists use penguin diagrams to help keep track of "deWitt indices." Never mind what that means. When I read the story about a certain barroom bet, I had the feeling both that I understood what I was reading and that it was important and deep. Almost as if I were one of the folks who know what a deWitt index might be.
Here's the story according to John Ellis, a Cambridge-educated Brit who led a particle theory group at CERN for six years.
Mary K. [Gaillard], Dimitri [Nanopoulos], and I first got interested in what are now called penguin diagrams while we were studying CP violation in the Standard Model in 1976… The penguin name came in 1977, as follows.
In the spring of 1977, Mike Chanowitz, Mary K. and I wrote a paper on GUTs [Grand Unified Theories] predicting the b quark mass before it was found. When it was found a few weeks later, Mary K., Dimitri, Serge Rudaz and I immediately started working on its phenomenology.
That summer, there was a student at CERN, Melissa Franklin, who is now an experimentalist at Harvard. One evening, she, I, and Serge went to a pub, and she and I started a game of darts. We made a bet that if I lost I had to put the word penguin into my next paper. She actually left the darts game before the end, and was replaced by Serge, who beat me. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to carry out the conditions of the bet.
For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this b quark paper that we were writing at the time…. Later…I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
ACtually, you have a squint a lot to agree that the diagrams "look like penguins." But he was a man of his word, and the phrase has stuck.
This is why I was delighted to learn about penguin diagrams. It reconciles my two loves. Physicists use penguin diagrams to help keep track of "deWitt indices." Never mind what that means. When I read the story about a certain barroom bet, I had the feeling both that I understood what I was reading and that it was important and deep. Almost as if I were one of the folks who know what a deWitt index might be.
Here's the story according to John Ellis, a Cambridge-educated Brit who led a particle theory group at CERN for six years.
Mary K. [Gaillard], Dimitri [Nanopoulos], and I first got interested in what are now called penguin diagrams while we were studying CP violation in the Standard Model in 1976… The penguin name came in 1977, as follows.
In the spring of 1977, Mike Chanowitz, Mary K. and I wrote a paper on GUTs [Grand Unified Theories] predicting the b quark mass before it was found. When it was found a few weeks later, Mary K., Dimitri, Serge Rudaz and I immediately started working on its phenomenology.
That summer, there was a student at CERN, Melissa Franklin, who is now an experimentalist at Harvard. One evening, she, I, and Serge went to a pub, and she and I started a game of darts. We made a bet that if I lost I had to put the word penguin into my next paper. She actually left the darts game before the end, and was replaced by Serge, who beat me. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to carry out the conditions of the bet.
For some time, it was not clear to me how to get the word into this b quark paper that we were writing at the time…. Later…I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
ACtually, you have a squint a lot to agree that the diagrams "look like penguins." But he was a man of his word, and the phrase has stuck.
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