3/6/07 Guitar Hero

Probably half my life ago, I remember playing Tetris on Gameboy. I would bring the Gameboy into the bathroom and play on the throne until my leg fell asleep. During the Tetris phase of my life, I'd occasionally close my eyes and see the pieces falling. It's been a long, long time since then. But I'm seeing a game again in my sleep. This time it's Guitar Hero. The story behind getting Guitar Hero is worth telling another day.

While I'd like to think that I have decent hand eye coordination, I searched YouTube to find out that, well... I don't. Check out this 8 year old jamming out. And these dudes will give you an idea of what some of my buddies were up to this weekend. (Except that we struggled with far easier levels). And finally, some dude who might actually be good enough to pull off his act.

The game's pretty awesome. Frustrating. But awesome.

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A couple of weeks ago I said that if you're playing fantasy particle physics that you should draft the Higgs Boson next season. Nearly 8 months ahead of my November prediction, Mike sends an article that Fermilab may have found a hint of the Higgs Boson. You may have to register to read it, so here's some of it:

Fermilab data hint at Higgs boson
6 March 2007

Physicists working at the HyperCP experiment at Fermilab in the US claim they may have glimpsed the first Higgs boson -- the particle many think is responsible for all mass in the universe. However, for their claim to be correct our current 30-year-old Standard Model of particle physics would have to be set aside in favour of an alternative "supersymmetric" model (Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 081802).

The great triumph of the Standard Model is that it unites two of the fundamental forces – the weak and electromagnetic force – into a single, symmetric "electroweak" force at high energies. But at low energies, a symmetric electroweak theory would imply that particles have no mass, which is clearly wrong.

This is where the Higgs boson comes in – a particle that can break the electroweak symmetry at low energies. If our current Standard Model is correct, the much-sought Higgs would have a mass somewhere in the 100 GeV to 1 TeV region, which should allow physicists to discover it at the 14 TeV Large Hadron Collider at CERN once it starts up in November.