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Prof Peter Higgs didn't actually provide the "god particle" nickname…

Prof Peter Higgs didn't actually provide the "god particle" nickname for the boson that he theorized back in the 1960s. 

Here's an interesting interview with University of Edinburgh physics lecturer Victoria Martin (she studied under Higgs as a student) where she explains that the name is actually a bastardization (my word, not hers) of what Nobel physics laureate Leon Lederman wanted to call it. Because of the difficulty in proving the existence of the Higgs boson, Lederman, author of The God Particle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Particle:_If_the_Universe_Is_the_Answer,_What_Is_the_Question%3F)  wanted to call it "that god-damned particle" a phrase which his publishers objected to. 

So there it is.
#higgsboson  

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'God Particle' Scientist Vindicated 50 Years Later : NPR
Peter Higgs is the name — and man — behind the Higgs boson. He and his team proposed the particle's existence back in the 1960s. Robert Siegel talks to Victoria Martin, a lecturer in physics and astro…

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Verizon makes its arguments against the FCC's net neutrality rules — and they…

Reshared post from +Jeff Jarvis

Verizon makes its arguments against the FCC's net neutrality rules — and they are fraught with danger. 

Verizon sees the net as its newspaper and believes it has First Amendment rights to control what goes on the net. This is why +Doc Searls has taught me that it is dangerous to see the net as a medium. No, the net is a network and Verizon only offers access to it. 

But there's the next argument: Verizon says the net is its private property and so it makes a Fifth Amendment claim that imposing restrictions on its ability to impose restrictions on the net is like confiscating property without compensation. 

Danger, danger! 

[Added later:]

The First Amendment argument is absurd on its face. Does Verizon really want to be responsible for everything distributed on the net, including libel, theft, and other illegal behavior? I doubt it. Verizon is no publisher. 

The Fifth Amendment argument is a corner we've painted ourselves into by finding ourself dependent on a public good privately owned. But just as we make restrictions on private property — I can't build a gas station on my house; I have to give access to public utility workers — so must we here. 

We need a SOPA/PIPA/ACTA-level fight for net neutrality, for not allowing Verizon et al to mess with the net. We need a principle: First, do no harm. You might want to at least start here, by signing the Declaration of Internet Freedom. 

See: My post on a Hippocratic Oath for the net: http://buzzmachine.com/2011/05/23/a-hippocratic-oath-for-the-internet/ And the Declaration of Internet Freedom: http://www.internetdeclaration.org/freedom

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Verizon: net neutrality violates our free speech rights
Company argues FCC regulations run afoul of Fifth Amendment property rights too.

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Oops!

Oops!

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San Diego Accidentally Set Off All Its Fourth Of July Fireworks at Once
Folks in San Diego witnessed either the worst Fourth of July fireworks celebration — or the absolute best — when a technical malfunction caused all of their pyrotechnics to go off at the same time.

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An excellent summary from +Joe Wilcox about his independence from Apple.  1

An excellent summary from +Joe Wilcox about his independence from Apple. 

I totally agree with Joe's rationale for avoiding Apple although I'm not going to abandon the existing Macbooks and iPods in my household. As Joe describes, Apple's method has always been about copying/stealing ideas that were pioneered by others (with the possible exception of Apple 1/2 and the Newton) and then refining and editing to create a superior user experience.

From the original 1984 Mac to the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad each product was done before. What Apple has done is no doubt extremely important to bring new technology to the masses. But that doesn't give them the right to try create a technology monoculture. 

As we learned from our collective experience with Windows security problems monocultures are ALWAYS a bad thing. 

I will continue using the products I have, but I'm not spending any more money on Apple.
#boycottapple  

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I declare independence from Apple
Since December 1998, when on impulse I bought the original iMac from CompUSA, I've used Apple gear. No longer. Late yesterday, I replaced the last fruit-logo with another, fulfilling my pledge nearly …

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When I was a youngster, we were taught that all matter in the universe was made up… 2

When I was a youngster, we were taught that all matter in the universe was made up of various combinations of electrons, neutrons and protons and you couldn't get any smaller. 

Well apparently the more that particle physicists looked at more the more they came to the realization that matter is in fact far more complex with quarks and neutrinos and bosons. 

For those of us that aren't particle physicists all of this stuff can be extremely daunting to wrap your head around. When I took physics III as an elective while studying mechanical engineering we just scratched the surface of relativity and didn't even begin to approach this stuff and it was already making my brain hurt.

It seems that most of what we think of mass in an atom may come from one of these sub-atomic particles known as the Higgs boson. Some of the smartest scientists in the world (certainly way smarter than myself when it comes to most of this stuff) have been running experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland for the past several years to compile physical evidence that the Higgs boson exists and does what many think it does. They've now compiled enough data to support the existence (you can never conclusively prove anything in science, only fail to disprove it) of the existence of the Higgs Boson. 

Take a few minutes and watch this video to start getting an idea of what this all means. 
#higgsboson  

Reshared post from +C.C. Chapman

This helped explain the whole Higgs Boson discovery a bit to me. Not an area I follow, but fascinating just the same.

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My friend +Alex Nunez showed off the Camaro ZL1 on TV in Manhattan the other day…

My friend +Alex Nunez showed off the Camaro ZL1 on TV in Manhattan the other day. 

Reshared post from +Alex Nunez

Here's my appearance for ConsumerSearch on Good Day New York with the Camaro ZL1 from this morning. Thanks to Sam Abuelsamid for giving me the easy layman's explanation of Magnetic Ride Control in a comment on another social network, which I crib (and partially botch) here. 

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Video Landing Page – New York News | New York Breaking News | NYC Headlines
Watch live breaking news video from Fox 5.

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Just because ACTA is dead in Europe it doesn't mean the big media companies won't…

Just because ACTA is dead in Europe it doesn't mean the big media companies won't keep trying to lock things down.

Reshared post from +Patrick Beja

RIP ACTA!!

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ACTA Is DEAD After European Parliament Vote | TorrentFreak
Today at 12:56 CET, the European Parliament decided whether ACTA would be ultimately rejected or whether it would drag on into uncertainty. In a 478 to 39 vote, the Parliament decided to reject ACTA o…

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Google and Asus show that form doesn't have to completely give way to functi… 1

Google and Asus show that form doesn't have to completely give way to function.

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With one millimeter, the Nexus 7 proves powerful and thin devices can still be repairable
Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet has some impressive hardware beneath its sleek, stunt driver-styled skin — impressive enough, in some ways, to go toe-to-toe with Apple's iPad. But there's one takeaway from peeping at the device's internals that's particularly worth noting: with hardware design trending toward thinner, less serviceable, and thus shorter-lasting devices, the new tablet is still easier to repair than the most recent iPad, despite being only one millimeter thicker.
That one millimete…

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I saw this morning that much of the mainstream media started yelling fire in the…

I saw this morning that much of the mainstream media started yelling fire in the wake of a press release from the Highway Loss Data Institute on driver assistance systems. 

Before anyone panics it might worth actually pausing to read the full report and giving some thought to how the data was derived. (yeah I know, Ready- Aim-Fire is how media handles news these days) HLDI is the branch of the auto insurance industry that compiles data on claims. In general they don't go out and actually test vehicles like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) does. The data in this study is based on real world claims data for various models from five different car makers that are available with one or more driver assistance systems including forward collision alert, autonomous emergency braking, adaptive headlights and lane departure warning.

In general the data indicates that active safety systems that intervene autonomously to avert or mitigate accidents can improve safety and reduce insurance losses. Systems that only provide an alert to the driver but don't attempt to correct the problem seem to be at best neutral or provide worse results although these differences were statistically insignificant and in a larger population of vehicles, the results could go either way. 

Unfortunately these apparent results may be a bit premature and even misleading. Since this is basically a summary of claims data correlated to vehicle equipment it's not really a very good experiment.

The comparisons of cars equipped with/without each system don't attempt to isolate the effects of those systems. For example the Volvos equipped with lane departure warning seem to do better than Mercedes or Buicks with similar systems.  However, the Volvos are also bundled with forward collision alert with automatic braking while the others are available as stand-alone options. The report's authors acknowledge this, but it does somewhat limit the validity of the apparent results. 

Another major factor to consider is that in almost if not all cases, these assistance features can be switched off by the driver and in some cases are off by default. The results do not seem to account for whether the systems were on/active or switched off. This way a car with lane departure warning that was switched off would still be counted in the group of vehicles that had the system if it slid off the road, even though it might as well have not been equipped. 

There are nuggets of very valuable data in this report and the efficacy of these systems is worthy of further investigation. However, this particular report is in no way conclusive of anything at this time and shouldn't be treated as such. 

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http://www.iihs.org/externaldata/srdata/docs/sr4705.pdf

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