diazona

In certain TV shows (well, at least one in particular), one gets the impression that some insurance investigators have almost superhuman powers of deduction, advanced multi-step thinking, the ability to read people, etc. Obviously these shows are fiction, but is there any basis for this in reality? In other words, do the best and brightest investigators - people who could excel at being detectives, journalists, or intelligence agents - tend to gravitate toward insurance investigation rather than government or "generic" PI work?

I'm not at ICHEP, but here is the report from CMS showing that they found nothing at 750 GeV.

Any tips for how to keep connections "on the hook"? That is, when you don't need to ask anything of them for a long time, how do you stay in touch so that they'll hopefully be willing to help you out if and when you do need them? I presume an occasional email or phone call just to say "Hey how's it going?" doesn't really cut it :-P

(I guess you're gone by now, no big deal)

I wonder about this as well. I would have guessed (if I had to) that a company would be legally free to share whatever information it has with the government or anyone else, subject to their own privacy policy - but of course companies realize that they're going to piss people off if they don't have a privacy policy that prohibits this indiscriminate information sharing.

Do you have any thoughts on the role of math in explaining quantitative topics (like physics) to laypeople? For example, do you think people should generally avoid showing any math entirely to avoid "scaring off" part of their audience? Or is it good to sneak in an equation or two, with explanations, to demonstrate that math isn't something to be scared of? Somewhat separately, do you think there's a place for more explanations that include a little more mathematical detail, for those people who like that sort of thing? (This was one thing I really liked about The Elegant Universe, but that's just me)

Also, if a parallel-universe version of you were to do an AMA, how would we know?