I think there's a word missing from the second sentence.
Dear Stanley,
You can update your understanding with a visit to GOOP.
xoxo,
me.
Her mom was murdered in an episode of Columbo.
Wait. Her mom was in an episode of Columbo but not in a murdered or murdering capacity.
Anyway, the article at the link was very funny.
Dear redfoxtailshrub,
Thank you. Traversing that website's many pages has answered a myriad of my questions.
<3,
stan
4:Blythe Danner was a highlight of my 1970s. She and Langella's Seagull put Redgrave and Warner to shame. Several other wonders. Too Far to Go with Moriarity, Zelda Fitzgerald. Probably lacked the charisma to be a top star, but had all the talent and brains. Christ, she was radiant.
Paltrow is a boring semi-flake, a Rodeo Drive spiritual awakener. I don't think of her very much at all.
I should think Gwyneth Paltrow would know that "wainscoting" is spelled with one t. This comment is dedicated to neb nosflow.
Probably lacked the charisma to be a top star
Or should would have been a murderer on Columbo.
The article reminded me of a burning question I had about the Spain-Italy final. Were the Spanish fans humming the guitar riff from "Seven Nation Army"? And if so, why?
Because the winner gets to go play in Wichita.
You, Moby Dick, are a komodo dragon, the largest member of the lizard family. And a filthy liar.
15: Huh! That's interesting. I just looked at the video on YT, and the top comment is "Euro 2012 Poland Ukraine !"
As far as I could tell, fans were humming "Seven Nation Army" during literally every match at Euro 2012. Somehow it's become the new "Olé, olé olé olé ... olé ... olé".
re: 17
When a goal was scored, yeah.
'Meh meh meh meh meh MEH meh'
As far as I could tell, fans were humming "Seven Nation Army" during literally every match at Euro 2012. Somehow it's become the new "Olé, olé olé olé ... olé ... olé".
There's even a http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18673916BBC Online article about the phenomenon. The funny thing is, you could probably sing "Olé, Olé, Olé" to the tune.
Was it going on at the World Cup too, and we just couldn't hear it behind the stupid plastic horns?
I did and do still love Blythe Danner. Comity, bob!
I know Gwyneth is a horrible person and all, but I really enjoy her performances whenever I run across them (most recently on Glee and in The Avengers.)
I'd love to see more things with Blythe Danner, but I don't know much about her now.
20: Trick question. Everyone knows the White Stripes' music is indistinguishable from stupid plastic horns.
I was just discussing the parody at the link with my good friend Camilla Gibb, who is here promoting her new holistic literary spa at Lake Louise. We read the piece while munching on some delightful mini-sandwiches made with organic roast tofu and cale on fresh gluten-free rye bread. We saved on the zesty mustard topping by getting it straight off the shelf at the Real Canadian Superstore, and it certainly spiced up our opinions as it tickled our tastebuds.
Camilla and I both agreed that while the author nicely captures Gwyneth's stilted and pretentious prose style, he could have been a bit more precise about the specific dynamics of her name- and brand-dropping. She truly has this down to an art, and is the kind of person who can know the brand and price point of your designer trainers at a glance, but will also be able to identify which big box store your blazer could have come from. In this way she is similar to ourselves, sophisticated but also enjoying the popular touch and able to bring Luis Vuitton and Skechers together in a single outfit, although differing in that -- Camilla and I have been forced to conclude after some debate -- her popular touch is perhaps a bit less authentic than our own.
We also agreed that the parody is a bit over-explicit in trying to bring out Gwyneth's pervasive self-involvement. We are both sure that Gwyneth would never outright say that she is capable of fronting the band Coldplay, nor that she was the most important person in the auditorium, because that is information she could and would assume that her readers already know. The small personal details are what she would focus on. To give you an example: when I was last at a Coldplay show with my good friend Billy Bragg in tow, I had a very special experience where a momentary freak silence came over the crowd, and it felt like I was unified with them as one vast and beautiful organism. As the band started playing again, Billy and I exchanged a look of wonder about what had just happened. I am sure Gwyneth must also have lots of moments almost as self-affirming as that one, and would do her best to try to portray them in the same way.
able to bring Luis Vuitton and Skechers together in a single outfit
BURNS: Get me Louis Vuitton!
SMITHERS: He's not available, sir.
BURNS: Then get me his non-union Mexican equivalent!
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Just because you've done some federal time for killing a guy doesn't mean you should stop rolling with style.
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29: You busted him for the Double Big Gulp, I take it.
29: The Double Gulp is what really makes that picture.
Yes, and I'm failing at coming up with some kind of mock insult that will turn it to my advantage. Instead I will add vale: Big Gulp just reduced from 64 oz. to 50 oz., because they hate real Americans.
There was a francophile partner at a law firm I was at who saw a big gulp on the cover of Time magazine and had literally had never seen one before. She was asking if they were joking about it.
My memory for actors is such that I keep mentally putting Paltrow in the same age range as Helen Mirren, even though I've seen Paltrow in things.
even though I've seen Paltrow in things.
I saw Gwyenth Paltrow in the woodshed.
37: I used to always confuse Helen Mirren and Glenn Close, a confusion which seems to have been remedied by my recent marathon Netflixing of Damages.
38: If you want to make that more faithful, it should be:
I saw Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love in the woodshed
Great little bar isn't it, The Woodshed? Their selection of craft beers has made my life a better, happier place, and it's refreshing that the crowd is hip without being hipster-ish. I've Gwyneth Paltrow there, too.
I left the verb out of that last sentence to open it up for interpretation.
I de-verbed Gwyneth Paltrow in a piece of toast.
25 and 29 made my day. It's been made twice. Bravo.
Clearly the verb should be "fingerbanged."
Now we know what happens in Alaskan bars.
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29: If this is the rolling with style thread: Stolen lion's head found on man walking down Tacoma street (also Dept. of Ambiguous Headlines).
When an officer asked the man about the lion's head, he said he'd traded some crack cocaine to get it. Police said that story didn't add up and that the man matched a description of the person who stole the lion's head last weekBut if the traded for crack story had held up, no problemo I guess.
47: Grizzly* bars, none the less.
*OK, brown bars for those who like to be precise.
Hey, it's cold. People don't want to take their clothes off.
48: Police said that story didn't add up
If you set out from Tacoma on a train going 80 miles per hour with some crack cocaine, and your buddy leaves Missoula 30 minutes later on a train traveling 75 miles per hour, carrying a lion's head, where will you meet to exchange them?
29: It was the fame (the fame) that they tried to get/ Now their walkin' around talkin' about "represent" and "keep it real"/ But I got to appeal/ 'cause they existin' in a fantasy when holdin' the steel
This one is for Moby and Thorn.
I beg to differ. That was straight-up awesome. (I love Ariel Winter.)
57: See? Hardly anyone had even heard of crack cocaine in 1979, so that's why the story didn't add up!
'cause they existin' in a fantasy when holdin' the steel
Word. A fantasy where riding around drunk with a stolen gun and a bag of meth is a good idea. He was pretty offended that we thought he used. "I don't fucking use meth, I SELL meth." This job is like endless episodes of GI Jose. "Remember kids, don't talk to the cops when you're drunk."
To be perfectly honest, the cops never want to talk to me when I'm not drunk.
I find the cops very helpful, friendly and more than willing to talk to me when I am not drunk. Why, just the other day I was walking through a very toney neighbourhood admiring the lovely houses, and a police cruiser went out of its way to stop for me and ask where I was going. When I told them I was just passing through, they were very effusive and immediately gave me directions to the fastest, most efficient route out of the neighbourhood. It was very considerate of them.
They probably don't tolerate parody of Paltrow round those parts.
immediately gave me directions to the fastest, most efficient route out of the neighbourhood. It was very considerate of them.
I would have gone the extra mile and showed you the nearest seedy motel where you could most efficiently sell your crack and pimp some hoes.
I confess I wasn't aware that Paltrow was prone to this sort of behavior.
I confess that my sole published music review was for Miami New Times... written more than ten years before I ever set foot in Miami.
Speaking of the cops, I wonder if I should call them to see if there isn't some guy living under the steps up the hill. The cardboard wall was reasonably subtle but now there are socks drying on the bushes.
Is it really such an awful thing to let him stay there?
If he puts his socks between me and the bar too often.
Do you often stumble through the bushes on your way?
Anyway, I probably won't do anything but it gives the walk home a sort of troll-under-the-bridge vibe.
(That wasn't entirely snark; or rather, it was sympathetic snark, seeing as how I bloodied my palms and knees jogging up a hill back to my bike the other evening.)
Maybe I'll give him directions to a set of stairs on a more secluded street and a sandwich.
25 really is all kinds of terrific. Bravo.
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Somehow I never really expected to have a work-related reason to be annoyed the Red Line doesn't run at 3 AM. Yes,
I know, I should get a bike.
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It's not 3am yet. You still have time to buy a bike.
I have a more pressing need for either alcohol or sleep, but I'm too confused about which I want more to get either.
Why do rooms always look much smaller with no furniture in them?
Helps you, that is. Obviously, it helps me.
I live like a block from a decent liquor store now, I think. I should go check it out. I should have organized a H/ggs party tonight with champagne, but I've been too distracted, and champagne for one sounds sad.
I'm drinking the champagne of British beer, Newcastle Brown. It's import night.
Champagne for one sounds awesome, so feel free to pretend you're drinking with me if you need a second. Then I can go to bed and probably not dream about bosons.
If you are going to pretend, you may as well pretend domestic sparkling white is champagne. Economize.
Champagne for one sounds like the best but I'm a champagne hog. Celebrating by one's self is better than celebrating with someone who doesn't really care. But you have physics friends?
I am drinking bourbon and lime and it's not very good
I drink champagne when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it - unless I'm thirsty.
Maybe someone else is having a Huggs party that essear can attend.
There are men who can drink champagne alone, and there are men who can't drink champagne alone but still drink it. The former get pleasure from the agony and joy, and the latter suffer for all those who drink champagne alone without being able to drink it.
Agony from the little bubbles obviously.
I am drinking the champagne of "not much in the liquor cabinet and too lazy to get to the wine store before it closed": Cynar and soda?
That's low-cognition normative. Let's just say you think more often than I do.
I don't even know what cynar is. Should I order one?
It's in the Fernet family. Herbal and bitter but also sweet and not highly alcoholic. So probably only if that sounds good.
But if it does, then you should probably order a Fernet.
I WISH it tasted more like artichokes!
My grandma used to make artichokes stuffed with bread crumbs and cheese. You'd pluck a leaf and use your teeth to scrape off the stuffing with the soft part of the leaf. I haven't had that in a dozen years.
103 + 98 would make a hell of a ... something hellish.
It seems like the other local physicists are either home with their spouses and offspring or have visiting parents in town or are on vacation or something. If I had organized a proper event a week in advance or whatever I'm sure people would have shown -- I know such anything is happening down in Pr/nceton -- but it didn't come together here.
I got a bottle of Gruner Veltliner, which I will go drink in my office because I can't get streaming video on my phone. I hope there isn't a cleaning crew around at 3 AM to notice me there drinking in my office.
103: I had those often with my host family in Chile. We dipped the little pieces of artichoke in a lemon and olive oil sauce.
"such a thing", not "such anything", autocorrect.
106: I thought it was just Italians.
103 and 106 are making me hungry.
Why is it that when I have the most dysfunctional internet access, I seem to comment the most compulsively?
108: The father of the family was Argentinian, and we ate some Italian-ish things like polenta. So maybe that's the connection.
I'm drinking boxed sauvignon and shots of Buffalo Trace. We're watching Master Chef and doing a shot every time someone cries or a judge spits something out.
Okay, well, since I don't stay up late drinking anymore, I'm going to sleep. See you all tomorrow on Revolution Day!
One Solution!
Revolution!*
*Note: I find this chant a little creepy, but the kids like it, so what're ya gonna do?
So the official announcement is supposed to come at 3 am Eastern?
85 - I'm fine, Rolf-Dieter Heuer! How's Meyrin?
115- yup. 9 AM CEST July 4. Because CERN hates us for our freedoms.
I thought it was their way of celebrating.
Anyway, since it's only 11 pm here and the sun is still up I eagerly await your liveblogging of the announcement.
Wheee, live-commenting. Pls not to link anywhere else.
Joe Inc/nd/la -- "one slide for the theorists, that's all they deserve". Sounds about right.
Yeah, I noticed that. (I'm watching the webcast.) He's cracking more jokes than I had expected.
Physicists really say "jev" for GEV?
He sounds slightly nervous. Shorter Joe I: CMS has an awesome detector, and it tells them what the particles (photons, electrons, muons, jets that come from quarks) that come out of the collision are.
123: Yes. (I think I usually say gee-ee-vee, but it's not uncommon to hear 'jev'. One never hears 'TeV', 'keV', etc pronounced similarly, though.)
It's funny, because he sounds like he's normally a polished speaker.
It's really a little odd for someone who talks this often to sound nervous like that. I guess he has to get through massive amounts of material quickly, plus, like, most significant talk of his career and the last few decades in the field, possibly.
Arg, get to the good stuff, we trust you by now.
So is CMS going first because they reached 5 sigma? If one experiment reaches 5 sigma, and other one is at 4.5, are they really going to credit the discovery to one experiment?
Last year's ATLAS result was pointing to Higgs to two photons at about twice the predicted (Standard Model) rate. CMS now finds 1.56 +/- 0.43. Higher than expected, but not significant enough to have us jumping up and down yet.
131: Not really. I don't think either one is going to claim 5 sigma by itself. Obviously combining the two gets there.
They will say the combination is a difficult statistical procedure and we have to wait to say that, and it is difficult to do it right, but: come on.
Is it? I would have thought that the errors in the two experiments would be independent.
Last year CMS's ZZ events were at a lower mass. I think they moved after re-analyzing data? He didn't comment on it, though. Odd.
Oh, they are saying 5 sigma. Well done. I hadn't heard that before.
That's some serious number fetishism.
They have 3.2 sigma in the ZZ channel, which is crucial for the Higgs interpretation of the data. Some of the events aren't where one expects them to be -- but they say they're still more signal-like than background-like. Might be interesting to follow that in the future.
140: I know, right? It's pretty dumb, really.
Now on to Higgs -> WW, which has been persistently low in every search so far. But it's experimentally extremely difficult.
And he kind of glosses over it without saying much, except that it looks roughly consistent now.
Now we've been hearing about various less sensitive channels that tell us little so far.
And the possible beyond-SM punchline we've (well, I've) been waiting for: rate to photons a little higher than expected, to b's and tau's a little low (with huge error bars). Could be a hint of new physics, could be nothing. Still consistent with Standard Model within 95% CL. Nothing to get excited about yet. Twenty papers on it on the arxiv tomorrow, probably, though.
On to ATLAS. Fab/ola is too important for anyone to tell her not to use Comic Sans.
That's funny. I've seen that newspaper -- it's the worst piece of crap ever.
Using Comic Sans shows that she's beyond fear.
God-particle my light brown arse. The real news here is obviously that Comic Sans has arrived, motherfuckers! Taaa-DOW! How ya like Comic Sans now?!
You need to learn that no font can save you, LC. Only you can do that.
10 categories: photons that belong to the emperor, photons that from a long way off look like flies, photons that have just broken the water pitcher....
153: I'm leaving my salvation to the most interesting man in the world. He doesn't always find bosons, but when he does... they have five sigmas.
You know, I've never heard an Italian person speaking, under any circumstances, who sounded nervous or hesitant in any way.
She's such an experimentalist. Sounds almost as excited about mundane cross-checks as the result.
Their money plot looks slightly less exciting than the one from CMS; would have to check the choice of axes, etc to see if it's just a matter of graphic design choices...
Actually their diphoton plot was more significant, just less visually impressive. Can't expect attention to visual detail from people who use Comic Sans.
Wait, does "gamma" mean "photon"? I've just been wondering what the fuck this "Higgs to gamma-gamma" thing is.
I was sort of surprised that there wasn't 5 or 10 minutes of either talk aimed at a level that I could follow. The math crowd I was watching with rather quickly turned to figuring out how best to parody experimental physics talks, rather than trying to figure out anything they were saying.
Yes, gamma means photon.
It's the time they save on the extra letter that allows them to reach 5 sigma.
(I think the etymology is that gamma radiation turned out to be photons. I'm unclear on whether gamma is only used for high energy photons...)
More applause for 5 sigma! It's like Pavlov's dogs.
Running out of stream to comment, but: ATLAS also sees Higgs to ZZ, slightly higher than SM expectation but not significantly so, also 5 sigma combination. Crowd goes wild. Fab/ola: "I'm not done yet, there is more to come! Be patient!"
163: Yeah, pretty much. Gammas are photons with energies of, I don't know, 1 MeV or above? Not sure at what point they turn into X-rays.
So if you were looking at the 125-photon decay channel you'd have to use a different letter.
So what happens now? Let's suppose the discrepancies from the Standard Model turn out to be real. Is there a simple way to vary the SM to match them, or does it mean that a gigantic revision would be required?
169: Any deviation at all from the SM is huge and means there are other particles we don't know about yet. But the discrepancies are not very significant at all, and have trended downward somewhat. Also, the most plausible explanation of the CMS discrepancies is in tension with what Fermilab presented on Monday. I wouldn't get excited yet; I know good people who will be putting out reasonable papers soon exploring the options, I think, but mostly it's too early to speculate much. Anything beyond-SM would be huge, though...
Thanks for the informed commentary, essear. It was interesting to watch these talks (although I actually missed the first half of the second one to watch fireworks in the rain).
The slight enhancement in diphotons would be completely explained if it really does interact somewhat more weakly with b-quarks and taus -- it usually decays to those (but they're harder to see experimentally), so if you make it decay to those a little less often, everything else happens a higher fraction of the time. So it'll be very interesting to see how this develops.
That's for later in the summer, maybe, or farther off. For now, it's just a truly amazing accomplishment, with thousands of people collaborating on really difficult work and somehow making it all happen. Very, very impressive, and my hat's off to all of them.
Time for sleep now.
Thanks, essear. That was really fun to read.
160 I was sort of surprised that there wasn't 5 or 10 minutes of either talk aimed at a level that I could follow. The math crowd I was watching with rather quickly turned to figuring out how best to parody experimental physics talks, rather than trying to figure out anything they were saying.
I guess they could have had a pre-talk giving the results without the details. But yeah, the style of experimental HEP talks is always very dense-- often just bad, frankly. They give practice talks in front of people from their own collaboration, who viciously attack them on tiny details that outsiders won't know or care about, and the talks end up being weighed down with marginally relevant details in the end. And they don't usually motivate things very much; lots of details about what they did and no so much why they did it. These were unusually clear and comprehensible for hep-ex talks, but still probably not clear at all for people who haven't been sitting through this kind of thing for over a decade.
It's interesting the way talk quality varies by field. For example, computer scientists as a rule give fantastic talks.
Interesting. I don't think I've ever been to a CS talk. In my very limited experience, math talks are really hard to follow....
Math talks are terrible. If you understand ten minutes you're lucky, or it's your field.
Yeah, the typical math talk is very bad. Which is part of what makes CS talks remarkable, it's essentially math but with a different culture. Part of that culture is having great talks (another part is having crappy papers due to deadlines).
I would speculate that this has to do with CS departments generally having closer relationships with the commercial sector than either Maths or HEP.
I entirely agree with the math-talk-hate. They're just terrible.
Would it help if they only used binary numbers?
It's because mathematicians are shut-ins whose biggest fear is being shown to be wrong in public. Being totally incomprehensible is a small price to pay.
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I think the apotheosis has been reached, of the "Vague And Meaningless Phrase: Awkward Fifteen-Word Subtitle That Reveals What The Book Is Actually About" book-naming style.
We have gone beyond "Vague And Meaningless Phrase: Awkward Fifteen-Word Subtitle That Reveals What The Book Is Actually About" ... beyond "Vague And Meaningless Phrase: Random Noun, Random Noun, Random Noun, And What The Book Is Actually About" ... into a world where the title can be "Vague And Meaningless Phrase: Vague And Meaningless Phrase". A book with an entirely generic twelve-word title that does not reveal a single clue of what the book is about. Possibly the worst book title of this millennium. I refer to S.L. Price's "Heart Of The Game: Life, Death, And Mercy In Minor League America".
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It's because mathematicians are shut-ins whose biggest fear is being shown to be wrong in public. Being totally incomprehensible is a small price to pay.
I was specifically coached in the formula that everyone should understand the first 5-10 minutes, half the people should understand the next 30 minutes, and at most 3 people should understand the last 5-10 minutes.
These were unusually clear and comprehensible for hep-ex talks
You don't want to know what the hep-c talks are like.
Reading 184 is one of those serious wtf moments.
I think the quality of CS talks varies a lot by specialty. People in systems and networking tend to give excellent talks, but crypto is all over the place (maybe 20% excellent, 80% horrible), and theoretical CS is fine but can be a bit obscure (in that it can be hard to see the motivation for why a particular question is important, unless you know the history behind it).
Also, I got the advice in 184 too. I think the rationale was that, when giving a job talk, you need to show that you do interesting research, that the other faculty would be able to understand (hence allowing collaboration); but at the same time the heart of your research is technically very hard, hence it is deep, and not something they could obtain if they hired someone else.
Ended up going with the Weber. Those high end units were really something, but we stayed close to the budget. A good thing since it appears that those crappy cottonwoods over the back fence belong to us afterall. Maybe in can get some cedars and a larch to grow there instead.
So, we watched Contagion, with GP, the other night.
And Tinker Tailor ect last night. My God but the Cold War looks completely ridiculous in hindsight.
184: Ick. Usually now I try to aim for the first half being accessible to everyone (including students, experimentalists, people from neighboring fields) and the second half being aimed at other particle theorists. I was advised for job talks to make more like 2/3 and 1/3, which seemed to go over well. People are surprisingly happy to sit and listen to someone telling them things they already know. Makes them feel smart, I think.
184: By "half the people", does that mean "half of an entire mathematics department, including grad students"? Or does it mean, for a topology seminar, "half the topologists in the audience"?
It's easy to overestimate people's background, anyway. Sometimes I give talks and am reminded by people's questions that string theorists don't necessarily know much about the Standard Model. People can be surprisingly narrow. Best to aim at lowest-common-denominator as much as possible.
191: half the people in the topology seminar, which includes a lot of topology grad students. Or for a talk at a conference.
Thanks essear for the liveblogging, very fun to read.
Fortunately, you can reassemble that half into a seminar of equal size filled with people who understood your talk.
Yeah, that was a little clumsy, but I know, like, three things about topology, and feel obligated to shoehorn them into any related discussion.
It was excellent, Eggplant. I loled.
The Axiom of Choice is no laughing matter, Eggplant. Freedom never is.
My experience of philosophy talks isn't remotely like Heebie's 184. It'd be quite common for a talk to be specialist enough that there might only be a few people in the room who felt able to respond substantively to the more technical bits of it, or who were able to address the topic with equal expertise. But it'd be pretty unusual if most of the people in the room hadn't at least gotten the broad gist of what was under discussion, even if they might not draw all of the implications or immediately see how it related to other (perhaps not obviously related) work. Perhaps that doesn't count as 'understand' if one's adopting a strict standard for understanding.
201
My experience of philosophy talks isn't remotely like Heebie's 184 ...
Maybe that's because philosophy has spent the last 2500 years or so going around in circles. It is easier to keep a talk accessible if it doesn't depend (in an important way) on a large body of existing specialized knowledge.
If you are a non-mathematician, I can give you the subjective experience of what it's like to go to a math talk. Read the Wikipedia page on the Hodge conjecture. That sensation you get from somewhere between "Let X be a compact complex manifold" and "Taking wedge products of these harmonic representatives corresponds to the cup product in cohomology, so the cup product is compatible with the Hodge decomposition"? Cohomology? Hodge decomposition? Cup product? What?That's the sensation you have at most math talks, unless they're right in your specialty.
(That article is pitched so that your average pure mathematician would understand it, so a talk at that level of motivation would be pretty good for a math audience. But math is so technical that it's easy to concentrate on the specifics of your paper to the point that you are the same distance from your audience.)
re: 202
By any standards, there's a large body of specialized knowledge.* Whether or not that's particularly useful knowledge is a separate question.** Irrespective of that, if you think there isn't a vast technical literature you are essentially just showing your own ignorance.***
* nothing that couldn't be comprehended by an engineer, or computer scientist, or some similar heroic intellect in a couple of hours of light reading, mind.
** obviously I think the answer here is yes.
*** shocking, I know.
Does James have to end his comments with "I'm trolling, BTW" to make it any more clear?
I tend to respond quite readily to troll-bait. Although I'm disappointed I didn't swear more in 204. I'm slipping into early middle age.
It's difficult to think of an academic subject that doesn't depend on a large body of existing specialised knowledge. History doesn't depend on a large body of specialised vocabulary - military and economic history do, though - but you still can't make sense of a lecture without the background knowledge of period and field, all the same.
re: 207
That's what I was getting at in the last couple of sentences of 204. I'd assume (perhaps wrongly?) that a historian listening to a historian giving a talk on a period or area that wasn't their specialism would understand the talk, but might not be able to meaningfully assess the worth/import of the talk, or respond successfully to it, without the specialist knowledge. But bare comprehension would be there. I had the impression Heebie and the mathematicians meant something different, but we may just be using 'understand' in different ways.
I think a key difference between math and the hard sciences versus everything else is that it can require a lot of background to explain why something is even an interesting question, let alone what the answer is.
Well, for most things in the humanities, you can have the sense that you're understanding something or qualified to evaluate it, even when you're really not. Hence "philosophy" of the Ottonian School, a constant plague on the comment threads of Crooked Timber and ably represented above by James.
Since HEP isn't my field, here's a random question for essear (or any one else who works in the same general area):
How are people posting papers to the arxiv talking about the Higgs results 24 hours after they were announced?
Were the results leaked to a select few a long time ago, or did people have the manuscripts pre-written and were just waiting to plug in the numbers?
re: 209
FWIW, that's not uncommon in philosophy either, which suggests it's probably not that uncommon elsewhere in the humanities either. When I was explaining my doctoral research to people some people got why it was (potentially) interesting or important, but others just assumed there was an obvious answer to the question that everyone must already know even if they couldn't personally think of it right there and then, or even if the one they did come up with could be shown to be easily inadequate.
Also that it takes a lot of expertise to have the barest intuition about what a technical definition might mean when you see it for the first time. If I am given three new definitions at the beginning of a history talk, and maybe shown a visual image to help process them, I can probably follow it when those words are used throughout the talk. Whereas when I get a few new definitions at the beginning of a math talk, I need to write them down and close my eyes and think for a few moments, and usually the butthead at the front has zoomed on through a lot more "elementary foundational" material that I also need to process, while I was thinking about those definitions, and then all of a sudden we're using the definitions and the elementary foundations, and I haven't yet processed that part, and so I'm lost.
I'd assume (perhaps wrongly?) that a historian listening to a historian giving a talk on a period or area that wasn't their specialism would understand the talk, but might not be able to meaningfully assess the worth/import of the talk, or respond successfully to it, without the specialist knowledge.
In my experience, definitely yes. Someone is standing up there talking about how he thinks the Roman Empire's dependance on Egyptian grain affected its grand strategy in the third and fourth centuries, and you can follow it even if you don't know who Septimus Severus was. You might even be able to summarise it afterwards. You won't know why this guy's ideas are interesting or different or innovative, but you'll know what they are.
But the Hodge conjecture is just completely incomprehensible. A compact complex manifold is something that most people expect to find on a car.
History's a wall; maths is a pyramid.
Even worse: maths is an inverted pyramid.
212: I mean something different. There are parts of mathematics -- combinatorics and parts of number theory, for example -- where you can explain why you personally find it interesting. Someone might have the reaction of "that's boring." I don't think I could explain to someone why a human being would want to study the Hodge conjecture in two months, at eight hours a day.
Here's another example. There was a big theorem that was proven in 2009, the Fundamental Lemma. It even got covered in Time magazine. Even though I am familiar with half the technical terms that appear in the Wikipedia article, I have no idea of what the theorem says, or why it's important. I have a vague pop math understanding of it's greater significance, but nothing much beyond what someone would have gotten from the Time article.
pop math
I don't think that exists.
211: The general outlines of what they saw were leaked to, well, pretty much everyone; I also heard specific numbers with error bars that didn't turn out to match the final answer but may have been correct when they had only analyzed a fraction of this year's data. But mostly those papers are trivial and kind of suck. (In December I put out a paper 24 hours after the announcement, but we wrote it over about 10 days preceding the announcement, having heard the one number that really mattered. Still kind of a trivial paper, but not completely worthless, I think.)
I don't think that exists.
At this point Moby is leapt on by a Mathematician of Unusual Popularity (M.O.U.P.).
The concept of "pop math" is kind of like "pop philosophy". You have to undergo years of study to understand one single solitary detail of any of the advances made since 1950 or so, so it's basically a form of science history writing.
