“…after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine.” is quite a thing to read here in the year of our Lord, 2024. Feels like one for the @pluralistic files.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/vending-machine-error-reveals-secret-face-image-database-of-college-students/

The Republican Party is the Nazi bar.

You know what they call a political conference that lets Nazis mingle openly? A meeting of the Nazi Party.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/nazis-mingle-openly-cpac-spreading-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-fin-rcna140335

It seems, at the very least, a bit unjust.

@cstross Never say never!

@StrangeNoises @cstross Maybe we will find out! Or wait, maybe we will not find out? Or, uh… wont not find out?

@Wikisteff We do! There is a very specific sort of coupling between the Higgs and fundamental fermions known as a Yukawa coupling. The value of the coupling for each particle determines its mass. (For composite particles, like protons, the Higgs is responsible for only a fraction of the mass.) We don’t know why these Yukawa couplings take the values they take; they are inputs of the Standard Model.

@SnoopJ I agree. This is an simplification of course, but building bigger rings is an unsustainable plan.

This all changes if there is new physics at higher energies. Stuff we're not yet aware of may shore up the stability of the electroweak vacuum, or it might provide new avenues for the catastrophic decay of everything.

The curiously precarious values of the Higgs and Top Quark masses is known as the "Higgs naturalness problem." It is often invoked as a reason to expect new physics around a TeV. What are the odds we'd occur in a Universe that was only sort of stable, instead of very stable?

Luckily, one recent estimate expects the lifetime of the present configuration of the Universe to last for at least 10⁶⁵ years (95% CL). So we've got a while.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08124

Which is to say, we might exist in a quantum mechanically precarious reality which has the potential (no pun intended) to spontaneously deconstruct itself and revert to a simpler configuration.

It goes without saying that a reality in which the basic rules all change spontaneously, would not be compatible with physics or chemistry or us.

Assuming there isn't new physics out past the energies probed by the current generation of accelerators, these masses are consistent with the electroweak vacuum –– the field configuration that governs many features of the Standard Model of particle physics –– being "metastable."

If that were the case, then the arrangement of particle properties and interactions we're familiar with, would be unstable in the long term against quantum tunneling to a simpler configuration.

That week, the meeting announcement for Fermilab's top quark research group read: "Since the top quark has been discovered, there will not be a top group meeting this week."

The top quark was found to have a mass of around 173 GeV/c², making it the heaviest of the six known quarks. It's an unusual value, given the Higgs boson mass of about 125 GeV/c².

Herb Greenlee and Mel Shochet, representing the DZero and CDF experiments, respectively, simultaneously submitted papers to Physical Review Letters OTD in 1995. They were announcing that their collaborations had discovered the Top quark at Fermilab.

Image: FermiNews newsletter (https://history.fnal.gov/criers/FN_1995_03_17.PDF)

👆Supernova-versary!

More recent examples of multi-messenger astronomy have paired electromagnetic and gravitational wave detections to study, for example, the merger of two neutron stars.

Anyway, share this post if you had this same before-and-after poster of Supernova 1987A on your bedroom wall when you were a kid. Mine came from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum gift shop.

Image: David Malin / Australian Astronomical Observatory

@amanda I’ve been! https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/109909173484369123

@stevesilberman We happened upon his house once! https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/109909173484369123

@stevesilberman In Yarmouth? My brother in law grew up around the corner; it was their family spot. He says Gorey was always there, and was always nice to the kids.

@acm_redfox A thread!

https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/109909173484369123

Gorey often published stories with tongue-in-cheek anagrammatic pen names, like “Ogdred Weary” or “Groeda Weyrd.”

Perhaps my favorite Gorey-esque fact about Edward Gorey is this: "writer and artist Edward Gorey" is an anagram of "great weird story and weird art."