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Next to Holy Grail, all time record holder in my unholy book, the most rankling cliche in science right now has to be god particle.

Time to retire it. Shame on media for using it. It’s not that scripture bothers me – religious literature and myths are powerful concentrators of meaning and feeling. Leon Lederman may have called this last boson the god particle, or at least was talked into it by his publisher, but he does not like it now. Few physicists do. Few might mean none. Only media foment the term. It’s like Sultan of Swat. I’d bet nobody on the 1930s Yankees roster ever address Babe Ruth as “Hey Sultan” except maybe to mock reporter-talk. One wonders if anybody on today’s Yankee squad ever mouths “A-Rod.”

So what’ll we call it? Make comment with any suggestions. “Higgs particle” and “Higgs boson” don’t count. They’re already the main norm. Let’s hope they run ‘god particle’ out of business.

To prime the pump:

Bod particle, because Higgs [...]

Australian, AP, etc: US weather and Earth warming not the same, but one has Americans thinking about t’other.

The causation confusion cycle has played out again as it will many more times in US and to an extent international media over the last week. Whether it’s a hurricane hitting Florida or New Orleans or Maryland, failing oyster farms in Oregon to British Columbia, absurd drought in Texas and Oklahoma, or tornadoes spewing record numbers of trailer parts to kingdom come, media entertain The question. Is this global warming? Usually, it gets the same fuzzy answer: It could have happened anytime under any climate regime, but such things getting more frequent is consistent with global warming and buildup of greenhouse gases. So true, so tiresome.

So again with Colorado and western wildfires and most important the recent thunderstorm barrage in the eastern US, its ferocious blackout-spawning winds of the terrifically evocative sort named derechos embedded in an epic, early-summer heat wave.

Of all places it was in Australia that the impact on the American psyche got the most succinct description, from NOAA boss and oceanographer Jane Lubchenco at a [...]

Periódicos en los que el Higgs fue portada. Bien por Colombia y España. Mal en Centroamérica. Decepcionante México.

(English intro to Spanish lang post) We’ve used kiosko.net to track all the front pages of the main newspapers in each country in Latin American. We wanted to check which ones had the Higgs boson in the front page of yesterday’s print edition. All Spanish newspapers had it, being the lead story and picture in the principal ones. No single mention in Panamá, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Cuba, and Paraguay. Few small headlines in Perú, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Dominic Republic, Guatemala and Bolivia. Good presence in Uruguay, Colombia and Ecuador. We expected a bit more from Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. Disappointing lack of references in most of the Mexican’ front pages.

Gracias a la web Kiosko.net hemos revisado las portadas de todos los principales periódicos en Español, para ver cuáles ayer jueves (u hoy viernes) sacaban el descubrimiento del bosón de Higgs en sus portadas de versión papel. Continúa siendo un buen indicador de la importancia que un medio concede a [...]

Goodbye, Clark Kent: Superhero journalists disgrace our profession.

The planets will perhaps pause in their orbits, the Sun flicker, and the presses stop rolling for a moment as I report this morning’s mournful news.

An investigative report by Ed Yong, whose tears must have dripped on to his manuscript as he crafted his sad tale, reveals that the practices of our superhero journalists have disgraced our noble profession.

Clark Kent has relied on his inside knowledge as a journalist to go on an entirely unauthorized crusade against evil. Lois Lane has long been romantically involved with her principal source. Peter Parker sells pictures of himself, wearing some kind of ersatz Halloween garb, to his employer, without disclosing that it is actually him in the photos!

Yong’s report sparked a bitter exchanged with Adam Rogers, who disparages Yong and other “self-appointed media ‘watchdogs’” (oh, we feel the sting here at the Tracker). He calls Yong “pitifully misguided.” Yong dismisses the “shameless apologism” from Rogers. A sad day for all ink-stained and ink-drawn wretches.

A moment [...]

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