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Yeah, right on.

To put some numbers behind that it seems only ~1% of London's buses are electric whereas about a third are hybrid.

http://content.tfl.gov.uk/bus-fleet-audit-31-march-2018.pdf


They do try to mitigate this criticism in the first line of the article:

"Light-by-light scattering is a very rare phenomenon in which two photons – particles of light – interact, producing again a pair of photons."

This is the process that they observe (for the first time) whereas E144 observed the Breit-Wheeler process.

You can argue that this is too narrow a definition of light-by-light scattering but they have at least tried to make it self consistent...


RE: Football

Monopolies can have negative effects without trying to extract monopoly rents.

The competition between BT and Sky massively increased the TV rights price for e.g. the premier league, so the clubs got much more money. In theory, they used this to buy better players etc and increase the quality of the league.

Although you now have to pay twice, the quality of the product has gone up. So it's not a zero-sum game. You can argue that you don't think it's worth it, but that's an opinion, it's not true that it's an inherently worse situation.

Until they entered into a rights sharing agreement.


> Until they entered into a rights sharing agreement.

Also worth noting that the rights sharing arrangement on Sky's end is... <drumroll> ...mandated by a settlement from a previous anti-trust case!


That's a really great point which I hadn't considered! Thanks.


I don’t understand this comment... It’s true that the first event occurred after only two days but ligo have 11 events over two running periods at this point.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_o...


I was under the impression from an interview that the first event that LIGO caught was held up so long before release because it was such a stupidly rare occurrence.


Even as there are eleven observed events so far, that is from 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe [1]. So at 100 billion stars per galaxy [2] a guesstimate is that we are talking about 200 billion trillion stars. Seems even divided by eleven it seems pretty rare. (Not sure if the detector can “see” all those stars though.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

[2] https://www.livescience.com/56634-how-many-stars-are-in-the-...


Having a country-wide 1% must pull it down in some cases.

For instance in the UK if you bought the $4.1m London home on a 25 year, 3% mortgage, with a 25% deposit you'd pay about $170k per year. But after tax your $290k "top-1%" income would be about $185k -- only just enough to even cover your mortgage, forget about school fees.

I wonder what the London, NY, LA etc 1% numbers are? Surely that's a fairer comparison to e.g. Singapore anyway, since it's a city-state.


This piqued my interest.

At least according to this site [0] (which references a 2013 report [1]) for instance, to be in the 1% in New York state you have to be making at least $517,557. However, the average annual income of those in the 1% is $2,006,632.

In Mississippi, though, you only have to be making $264,952 to be in the 1% and the average annual income of the 1% in MS is $565,813.

Of course, you have to consider cost of living and what not, but 1% is definitely not the same everywhere.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/12/how-much-you-have-to-earn-to...

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/income-inequality-in-the-us/...


That would be more than a 5 sigma difference which would definitely be significant but that number you're quoting for normal hydrogren is the 1S-2S line.

This measurement is the 1S-2P line which has an average frequency of ~2,466,051.625 GHz (there's actually two levels). Which agrees to within 1 sigma - i.e. good agreement.


Thanks for the correction. I just assumed that the other article was about the same transition and I forget to check the details.

PS: If someone else wants to know why the 1S-2S and the 1S-2P transition have almost the same energy, but no exactly the same energy, it's an interesting weird story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift


Yeah that's right, the red shift is just one contribution to the total uncertainty.

They're all listed in table I and the 4.2 * 10^-15 just comes from adding them in quadrature.


https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07663

Those interested in a (somewhat) accessible view of where particle physics is at in a big sense could read this article from the head of our theory group at CERN.


The article is just discussing a type of data analysis. The machine runs the same way regardless.


The gist is that you would roughly look for deviations from theory on one (probably small) dataset, you'd identify any regions of interest and then run a proper analysis of that region on a different dataset to see if the effect is real.


Caveat: Been a while since I studied this stuff.

The problem with this approach that I see is that it's much more likely to pick up lingering detector issues than the regular test-a-theory. (The difference between looking for a specific thing in a specific place vs picking up anything unexpected.) I wouldn't worry do much about purely statistical artifacts because those can often be worked out with prescriptions and remeasuring. The systematic but not-understood biases are the ones that should plague this approach since in the extreme they would need an independent experiment. I wonder whether CMS and Atlas are sufficient for that.


Testing for detector issues and those sort of things seems like very important groundwork for future experiments.


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