I can be terse

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

— Michael Crichton

No comment necessary.

They stand as the last great prediction of general relativity: gravitational waves. They haven't been detected yet, but it seems almost unthinkable for them not to exist. Detecting them though... that is what might be described as a tough problem.

These deformations of space are incredibly tiny. So tiny that making instruments to detect them has produced some of the most challenging engineering problems ever seen. Now, the engineers and physicists can celebrate some progress. Squeezed light has left the lab and is being used to improve a gravitational wave observatory.

Gravity is by far the weakest of the fundamental forces, so building detectors for gravity waves, let alone gravitons, pushes the limits of 21st century technology. The quantum effects are Yet Another Problem, since the quantum fluctuations of space itself add noise to the measurements.

At GitHub, we do not use git-flow. We use, and always have used, a much simpler Git workflow.

Its simplicity gives it a number of advantages. One is that it’s easy for people to understand, which means they can pick it up quickly and they rarely if ever mess it up or have to undo steps they did wrong. Another is that we don’t need a wrapper script to help enforce it or follow it, so using GUIs and such are not a problem.

Read the whole thing. Here's the quick summary:

What is GitHub Flow?

• Anything in the master branch is deployable
• To work on something new, create a descriptively named branch off of master (ie: new-oauth2-scopes)
• Commit to that branch locally and regularly push your work to the same named branch on the server
• When you need feedback or help, or you think the branch is ready for merging, open a pull request
• After someone else has reviewed and signed off on the feature, you can merge it into master
• Once it is merged and pushed to ‘master’, you can and should deploy immediately

"It's a beautiful idea. It explains dark matter, it explains the Higgs boson, it explains some aspects of cosmology; but that doesn't mean it's right.

"It could be that this whole framework has some fundamental flaws and we have to start over again and figure out a new direction,"

This is how Science is supposed to work. Supersymmetry is a beautiful theory with lots of explanatory power. But if the predictions don't match with observational evidence, well, it is just pretty math.

Supersymmetry hasn't been completely ruled out, yet, but the versions that remain viable are more theoretically complex, and that is never good news. Nature usually sides with elegant ideas. Sadly, one of the elegant ideas to lose out will be String Theory, which requires Supersymmetry.