Hey there,

Today we launched our latest citizen science project, and it’s a real beauty!

On Higgs Hunters we need you to look through data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where protons are smashed together at one billion kilometres per hour in order to create new particles and give us a better understanding of the building blocks that make up our Universe.

Specifically we are asking you to search through roughly 90,000 images from the ATLAS detector for tiny sub-atomic explosions caused when a Higgs boson ‘dies’, which some scientists think could generate a new kind of particle, previously undetected.

Begin your search for new and exciting particles now at www.higgshunters.org

Apologies for broken link. Try again. http://www.higgshunters.org/

A billion kph?

Never mind, I’ve just learned that a million million is now out of favour as a billion.

Divine Angel said:

Never mind, I’ve just learned that a million million is now out of favour as a billion.

Um, people stopped that shit long before I, let alone you, we’re born.

The NSW education system must have been really behind the times when I was at school then.

dv said:

Divine Angel said:

Never mind, I’ve just learned that a million million is now out of favour as a billion.

Um, people stopped that shit long before I, let alone you, we’re born.

Are we now

So what is a billion then?

One thousand million. A million million is a trillion.

It should really be a bi million, but it’s not.

The bi millennial falcon just never had the same ring to it

Divine Angel said:

The NSW education system must have been really behind the times when I was at school then.

Probably still is.

buffy said:

So what is a billion then?

FMD you people must be baffled when reading the newspapers.

The UK were the last holdouts in the English speaking world regarding the long billion and even they official gave up the ghost back in 1974.

A billion is a thousand million, a billion-and-one is basically countless.

Bubblecar said:

A billion is a thousand million, a billion-and-one is basically countless.

Almost infinite?

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

A billion is a thousand million, a billion-and-one is basically countless.

Almost infinite?

Nearly Infinite

A billion should be a million million

see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

The former British long scale billion of one million million, 1012, or 1,000,000,000,000

I think rich people and multimillionaires hijacked it to distinct themselves from plain millionaires, because it looks better for them

I think its annoying, and rather silly

Billion should be returned to its proper number value

I think mathematicians use billion as million million

bankers see it a thousand million

CrazyNeutrino said:

I think mathematicians use billion as million million

You think completely wrong. No one has used that in forty years.

dv said:

CrazyNeutrino said:

I think mathematicians use billion as million million

You think completely wrong. No one has used that in forty years.

You didnt read it properly

Apparently it still differs somewhat in various different language regions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Short_scale_users

The former British long scale billion of one million million, 1012, or 1,000,000,000,000

I know we dont use it anymore

But what about maths

mollwollfumble said:

Hey there,

Today we launched our latest citizen science project, and it’s a real beauty!

On Higgs Hunters we need you to look through data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where protons are smashed together at one billion kilometres per hour in order to create new particles and give us a better understanding of the building blocks that make up our Universe.

Specifically we are asking you to search through roughly 90,000 images from the ATLAS detector for tiny sub-atomic explosions caused when a Higgs boson ‘dies’, which some scientists think could generate a new kind of particle, previously undetected.

Begin your search for new and exciting particles now

I tend to find most of these “citizen science projects” too easy, and with inadequate training. If I could download the 90,000 images to work on at home I would. I would also like to see at least ten training examples, difficult cases where the result is known, to check that I was doing the right thing in advance. I had the same problem with the asteroid detection citizen science project.