Armed vice president to guard nation's ports

I'm in San Antonio and Austin through the weekend working on the campaign, so here's your news courtesy of Andy Borowitz:

Attempting to defuse the controversy over the decision to place the operation of several key American ports in the hands of a company based in Dubai, Vice President Dick Cheney said today that he would personally patrol those ports with a 28-gauge shotgun.

Calling himself “armed and dangerous,” the vice president used a White House press briefing to put potential evildoers at the nation’s ports on notice.

“If anyone tries any funny business at one of our nation’s ports, they’re going to have to answer to this!” he declared, brandishing his shotgun for the benefit of reporters.

Moments after Mr. Cheney pulled out the firearm, however, the room cleared as reporters ran for their lives. “I have never been more terrified in my life than when Dick Cheney whipped out that gun,” said NBC White House correspondent David Gregory. “I was sure I was a goner.”

In his remarks to the press, the vice president said that he would be “vigilant and on alert” for any suspicious activities at the nation’s ports: “I’ll have one beer at lunch, but that’s it.”

While Mr. Cheney’s offer to patrol the nation’s ports seemed designed to silence critics of thecontroversial port deal, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) said he was “not satisfied” that a shotgun-wielding vice president could provide adequate security.

“Knowing Dick Cheney, if he takes aim at a terrorist, he’ll wind up hitting a bird,” Sen. Biden said.

That had to be Feingold, not Biden. Biden isn't that quick or (rapier-like with his wit).

Collider physics

Yesterday Nima explained the essence of the LHC olympics, including some basics of collider physics for those of us who have never heard an official introduction to it.

The previous blog article about the LHC olympics is here.

He explained that the LHC will start to collide next summer. After some time like one year, they will shut it down for several months, trying to increase the luminosity.

Most events are boring forward scattering blah blah blah, and we are usually interested in rare, special events with a lot of transverse energy which typically correspond to new physics. The LHC will be a TeV machine to produce colored particles - gluinos and squarks are the most typical new examples - and a TeV machine to product new particles such as Z' bosons as resonances in the s-channel. For new non-resonant un-colored particles, the LHC will only be a multi-100-GeV machine: the difference in the LHC capacity to produce these two groups of particles is a factor of seven in energy. With Reagan's SSC, the difference would only be a factor of three.

At the LHC olympics, you obtain a black box which is composed of many lines. Each line has 8 or 9 entries describing the four-momentum of a particle and its identity. An event is encoded in several lines, and a typical black box has 50,000 events or so and it is up to you what quantities you decide to draw in order to find out the secret Lagrangian. If you open Jesse Thaler's website, you will find, among other things, a section dedicated to the LHC olympics, starting with a description of the Harvard box. A subpage contains Chameleon software for Mathematica, a very user-friendly and logical piece of software engineering by Natalia Toro and Philip Schuster.

There have been arguments whether the experimenters would (and should) give the theorists the data in a format that is sufficiently similar to the format of the LHC olympics. Instead, the experimenters will try to generate their plots themselves, attempting to discover the new particles without any help of theorists. But their efforts can get stuck and we will see what happens.

I had to leave the talk before it ended to teach the renormalization group.