Fall is here!

Workout notes 10 miles walking (3.2 before yoga, 6.8-7 after), and yoga. My teacher helped me with half-moon and triangle.

Science: Cosmic Variance talks about an experiment (trying to deduce the existence of a certain “heavy” boson) and why one often needs lots of data to confirm something. Sometimes a statistical “bump” is just a random “bump”.

There is basically nothing we can do about a statistical fluctuation – you get what you get. What keeps us awake at night is the prospect that we had made a mistake, or overlooked some detail. And so for months now, we (and when I say “we” I mostly mean Anton Anastassov, a postdoc at Rutgers, and my student Cris Cuenca) worked very hard to make sure that we hadn’t missed anything.

As far as we could tell, we hadn’t missed any problems, and so by late summer we decided to “open the box” again on a sample with 1.8 times more data (but containing the original sample). So it was not totally new data, but a sample with 80% more statistics. Was the bump still there? Would we see an even more significant excess?

We already kind of knew, given that the D0 experiment had not seen a similar excess, that we might not see the bump. So finally, after we had dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, we took a look and there it was: [...]

Follow the link to see the graphs

Gone! The data points all fell within an error bar or so of every bin…no excess, no bump, no Higgs… I am sure you are thinking “no tickets to Stockholm” too. Were we suprised? No. Once you’ve been working in this field awhile you realize that this is what happens with two-standard-deviation effects very often: they go away with more data. If you want all the gory details you can find them here.

If you do go back and read the original posts, you’ll find that we assumed that a statistical fluctuation was one very possible explanation. Unless we had auxiliary information that said that there should be a Higgs at that mass with that production rate, etc., it was much more likely than not to have been a statistical fluctuation. And in the end that is what it was…even with a probability of 1 in 50 or so. It happens.

So the quest for this beast continues. Mother Nature is a big fat tease!

Now, gentle readers, one thing we’ve learned is that among you are many science journalists who use blogs as a means to catch wind of breaking news.

In other words, people often prematurely jump to conclusions when there really isn’t enough evidence to support a conclusion.

Of course, any regular reader of this blog knows that! (both of you )

Politics:

Huckabee misleads (I am being charitable)

At the GOP debate the other night, Mike Huckabee made an odd claim.

“When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen, they said that we have certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator.”

“Most” of the signers were clergy? Is that true? Actually, no.

Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).

A few more of the signers were former clergymen, though it’s a little unclear just how many…. We’d like to give Huckabee every benefit of the doubt, but even if you consider former clergymen among the signers the best you could come up with is four. Out of 56. That’s not “most,” that’s Pants-on-Fire wrong.

It’s a common problem at the Republican debates — why let facts get in the way of a perfectly good soundbite?

One thing to keep in mind: it is POSSIBLE that Huckabee may have counted people who were, say, deacons or eucharistic ministers as clergy. That would, of course, been very misleading, as even I was once a lay eucharistic minister. I know, “lay” means “non clergy” by definition. But who knows. Perhaps his deity fed him this information?

Liberals Must Die sets us straight about illegal immigration.

More Science

Lack of Sleep: makes you emotional and grumpy.

Duh? But it is nice to see the physiological reasons for this:

Without sleep, the emotional centers of the brain dramatically overreact to negative experiences, reveals a new brain imaging study in the October 23rd issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. The reason for that hyperactive emotional response in sleep-deprived people stems from a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe—a region that normally keeps emotions under control.

The new study from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Berkeley is the first to explain, at the neural level, what seems to be a universal phenomenon: that sleep loss leads to emotionally irrational behavior, according to the researchers. The findings might also offer some insight into the clinical connection between sleep disruptions and psychiatric disorders. [...]

Scientists have known that sleep deprivation impairs a range of bodily functions, including the immune system and metabolism, as well as brain processes, such as learning and memory, the researchers explained. Yet, evidence for the role of sleep in governing our emotional brain state had remained surprisingly scarce, they noted.

In the new study, Walker’s team assigned 26 healthy people to either a sleep-deprivation group—in which participants were kept awake for about 35 hours—or a normal sleep group. On the following day, the study subjects’ brains were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which measures brain activity on the basis of blood flow, while viewing 100 images. The images were at first emotionally neutral, but became increasingly aversive over time. [...]

zzzzz

Humor: Bad yoga advice from My Third Eye Itches:

Once you decide on a Yoga teacher and attend your first Yoga class, it is advised that you figure out fairly quickly whether your teacher is nuts or not. This was not much of a concern when Yoga was being practiced, as explained by John Schumacher (minor American Yoga Star) by “hippies, retired little old ladies, weirdos” and people from California as they were easily recognizable from the general public. But now that Yoga has gone mainstream, cuckoo Yoga teachers might now be more difficult to identify. So with that in mind, here are signs that your Yoga teacher might be a wack-job:
[...]

Wears a Unitard (Yikes, run for the exits as this teacher will also show one or more of the above signs).

Uh, if the teacher is female, this is actually a good reason to show up and pay attention!

Photo from here, which from the looks of their webpage, looks like a great place to learn yoga. Perhaps this is a bad attitude on my part, but I am always encouraged when the teacher is actually good at what he/she is supposed to be teaching!