On March 14, I became aware of the CDC’s consideration of adding a wandering code to the ICD-9-CM in relation to autism and other developmental disabilities. ASAN, an organization created and headed by Ari Ne’eman, created a petition calling for people to speak out against the wandering code.

"Sir, if you were to suddenly appear in space would you be able to talk because you already had air in your lungs?"

Sahara Dust In European Skies

The skies over southern England were hazy on Friday April 08 2011.  In the evening the usual colors of sunset were absent.  A muddy grey-brown haze could be seen along the horizon.  That haze was caused by dust from the Sahara.


Dust from Sahara over Biscay, the English Channel and Ireland


Dust cloud from Sahara off the coast of Portugal

How much does science cost-- and how much does it cost to turn science off?  I know science can be done cheaply.  After all, you're listening to a guy who is building a satellite in his basement, for fun.  Yet while the satellite is paid for, even I'm hitting costs for the science part-- the ability to do something useful with the hardware once it's up.  In fact (shameless plug time) I've launched a Kickstarter fund drive where you can get cool Project Calliope space memorabilia for the next month only-- visit it!  Pass this link around through facebook, twitter, your network of choice: http://tinyurl.c

People may object to my calling for Ph.D. programs in Theoretical Phys Ed and Quantum Paleontology, but humor is not far off the mark.  Evolutionary psychology, for example, is practically self-ridiculing.   

But I was somewhat intrigued by recent research I saw about stress being a genetic issue and the person behind it called it theoretical evolutionary biology.    This concerns me on a few levels; first, evolutionary biology has detractors by a fringe religious minority obsessed with what Darwin did not know 150 years ago so slapping the word 'theoretical' in front of evolutionary biology will make people think 'made up', like people do about a lot of the more obscure physics ideas, which is more hypothetical than theoretical.

Entanglement, the quantum mechanical phenomenon, was coined as a term by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 but is still not understood completely.    From an applied perspective, while entangled particles cannot be defined as single particles with defined states but are instead a whole system, that means by entangling single quantum bits, a quantum computer should solve problems considerably faster than conventional computers. 

But understanding entanglement when there are two particles is tough enough.   When there are many, it's even trickier, but a new experiment in the research group led by Rainer Blatt at the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck may provide some insight.

Given the wide interest (about 20k readers in a day) that the new article by the CDF collaboration has attracted (see my original post here), I think I should collect in a separate post some auxiliary information, concerning past searches which might have been sensitive to such a signal in the past.

Generally, coffee can be good for you just like in moderation fast food can be less bad for you.   Together, they are worse, according to a new University of Guelph study.

Researcher Marie-Soleil Beaudoin says a healthy person's blood sugar levels spike after eating a high-fat meal, but also that the spike doubles after having both a fatty meal and caffeinated coffee – jumping to levels similar to those of people at risk for diabetes.   The study in the Journal of Nutrition examined the effects of saturated fat and caffeinated coffee on blood sugar levels using a fat cocktail which contains only lipids. This specially designed beverage allows researchers to accurately mimic what happens to the body when we ingest fat.

UPDATE (4/7): I posted a link to a nice animated GIF which shows the (approximate) effect of scaling up the MC/data jet energy scale factor on the CDF new particle signal. See here.

UPDATE (4/7): I added some considerations on the tentative CDF signal in a separate post today (4/7). You can find there a comparison with older semileptonic diboson searches at CDF and DZERO.