At PhyStat 2011, currently being held at CERN, talks are informal and the atmosphere is friendly, but I have heard very few jokes from the participants so far. Just a minute ago I witnessed what might be a pretty strong bid at the best joke of the conference.
Kyle Cranmer was showing results of very CPU-intensive calculations of renormalization-group equations used to derive measurable parameters of Supersymmetry from the value of basic parameters at a high-energy scale. He was mentioning that the original calculation used to take 720 CPU-days, but that they had found a series of shortcuts using neural networks, and the result was a huge improvement in speed: this was now a 1-minute calculation!
Sitting in second row next to me was John Conway -a colleague in CMS, CDF, in the CMS statistics committee, plus a fellow blogger at Cosmic Variance. As Kyle was describing the new program with its speedy calculation of SUSY model parameters and likelihoods, he went audibly: "Is there an Iphone app for that ?".
