The tirade below (a bit over the top, admittedly, but I'm in the middle of a stressful week) is inspired by a post written today by Chad Orzel in his blog, Uncertain Principles. It is a breath of fresh air to hear that scientists outside high-energy physics (Orzel works in condensed matter) actually see things for what they are:

While Higgs rumors are appearing in blogs of the usual suspects, I cannot comment on those -and I decided it is better if I do not even link them here (I have grown wary of oversensitive reactions in my colleagues).

The only thing I think I can discuss with you here now is the predictions on the Higgs boson significance level produced by CMS in October 2010 - a couple of geological eras ago, that is. Those predictions can be trusted because 2011 data showed to be perfectly in line with them, both for the 95% CL limits and for the significance -of course the former are valid in the full mass range and provide more verification power than the single significance number, which is only valid if the Higgs boson exists and has a particular mass.

With the approach of Summer conferences -most notably, ICHEP, which alone has set a make-or-die deadline for the LHC experiments- physicists in ATLAS and CMS are frantically producing their results with data collected in 2012.

Two days ago I discussed at ICFP 2012 the most recent results of the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In the allotted time of my talk I could only cover few analyses, and I obviously chose some of the most interesting ones, so that was already a summary. Here I am bringing the information collapse one step further, by giving a itemized summary of some of the points I made, just in case you are interested. If you want to, you can also download the original slides of my talk from here (but be careful, it's a 8Mb file).

The International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics (ICFP) 2012 started today with a rich program of experimental and theory talks. I should be swimming in the Cretan sea in front of the nice conference venue (which is 40 meters away from the water), but my sense of duty forces me to give you some impressions of the presentations I heard.