As much as I find it difficult to imagine someone not liking Buffy (and even tougher, someone who likes Firefly not liking Buffy), I have to admit it's a plausible position for someone to have.... And I'd even accept that enough people prefer Firefly to Buffy to eek out a win for the Browncoats... after all, as MarkS…

The first half of this... yes! (I think we were both writing our pro-Buffy posts at the same time!)

Guys... I think we need to talk.

Which was created by none other than RTD!

A Space Odyssey to into Darkness (sponsored by IBM)

Yeah, it's a pretty technical concept I guess... an interesting one though. And WMAP's results were excellent.. Planck really just confirmed, but they did get the significance up above the magical 5-sigma threshold. I suppose it's about how much significance (no pun intended) you assign to that threshold, as the…

Great write up Dave!

Hey. The ODeck lives here, http://observationdeck.io9.com/ but you probably won't be able to post there directly, due to this new crazy kinja nonsense... so try our Back Deck... here.. http://kinja.com/tag/observatio…

Cute... the landing pad has an S for spaceship instead of an H for helicopter. (Either that or it's sponsored by Sprint)

Man, just with that one image you've reminded me of how much I love W13 and Claudia in particular. I can't wait for it to be back!

Right, but most of these models are really just subsets of larger models, be it SUSY or extra-dimensions or what have you. Certain areas of parameter space in these theories predict no Higgs, certain areas predict vanilla Higgs. So while finding a standard Higgs would reduce the number of viable choices for some…

One thing, the discovery of a "vanilla" Higgs doesn't disprove any exotic physics models. It further constrains a couple of varieties of supersymmetry, but it doesn't really put too much of a dent in the theory as a whole, nor does it do any worse things to any other well-known theories.

This was filmed on my street!

I'm not claiming that it's a complete theory of everything. I am merely saying that, at the energy scales we're discussing, it is a theory that has proved itself time and time again by giving accurate predictions of particles and their properties, and hence is a good theory at these energy scales.

Well, there's something at125GeV for sure. And it certainly behaves like the Higgs. It might be some variant, but it's definitely something!

Nope. This theory is actually based on much more concrete evidence than that. It's based on very carefully measured properties of very real particles, which definitely exist. Those numbers are put into a theory which has, so far, accurately predicted not only the behavior, but the existence of every fundamental…

Actually, these calculations are not only accurate (given correct assumptions), but complex and difficult. If you can do them, there's definitely a place for you in universities worldwide. But I suspect you lack the training.

All particles decay unless there's a rule preventing them from doing so. In the case of the proton it's the conservation of charge rule + the conservation of baryon (neutron+proton) number rule. However, as neutrons don't have any charge, it's easy for them to change into an electron (charge -1) plus a proton (charge…

Johnny-come-latelys is not fair. The comic-book Avengers pre-date Steed & Peel by a couple months at least!

See also, Heroes.