1. Sparticles
2. Light Higgs
3. Muon g-2
4. Permanent electric dipole moment
5. Proton decay
6. WIMPS
7. B_s mixing
and perhaps others. AFAIU, none of these experiments can rule out SUSY by themselves, but taken together they should provide much stronger constraints than each of them taken separately, no?

Nonetheless, there is significant play in the overall prediction due to uncertainties in theoretical quantities such as the B meson decay constant and bag factor. Due to this, I don’t see where this result will place any significant constraints on supersymmetry. Sorry, wish it were different myself. However, there are a few wilder theories that predicted maximal B_S mixing that will now be excluded.

As for a comparison with the D0 result, it’s certainly consistant. But, the CDF result is much nicer, if a bit later. In their amplitude scan (basically, you scan a range of possible Delta(m_s) values, fit the oscillation data and measure a mixing amplitude; this should be 1 at the true value of Delta(m_s) and 0 otherwise), D0 found a 5 ps^-1 window where the data were inconsistant with 0 at a 90% CL. In comparison, CDF actually measured Delta(m_s) to better than +/- .5 ps^-1. If you wanted to put it in a 90% CL range to compare directly with D0, it’d be less than 1 ps^-1 and contained entirely within D0′s range, though certainly on the low side.

More details, the less humour? I hope not:)

As for how the top quark is different, in addition to the usual argument that it is so massive that it disintegrates before pairing into a meson, let me note that the last measure of its yukawa coupling is still one sigma compatible with unity: From http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0603039 we have 0.991 \pm 0.013

Various comments in another blog entry by Sean (about grad school) said:
(Belizean) “… prospective grad students should ask themselves this question, “Do I have a burning desire to be a physics professor, or merely a deep interest in physics?” If the latter, I would recommend skipping graduate school, investing your time and energy in becoming financially independent, and studying physics as a leisure pursuit. …”.
(A Serious Question) “… It seems much more likely to me for a bright person who goes down this path to come up with truly creative and groundbreaking physics, then it is for somebody who enters the modern “publish-or-publish” world of modern grad students and postdocs. …”.
(Anonymous Beaver) “… You shouldn’t do it because you’ll become a crackpot and nobody will pay any attention to you. … In the unlikely event you do discover some great insight, you’ll have incredible difficulty communicating it to people besides your long-suffering colleagues. …”.
(Ambitwistor) “… forgoing an advanced degree and going into academic seclusion without regular contact with one’s peers is a route to crankdom …”.
(Ponderer of Things) “… for incoming graduate students NOT to pick their school based on prestige is a recipee for post-PhD career suicide …”.

Even if Chad Orzel finds it offensive, the very existence of the buzz-phrase

“physics is subdivided into “string theory” and “stamp collecting”"

indicates that theoretical physics in “prestige” schools is dominated by conventional “string theory” which is founded on the existence of “susy” supersymmtry. If that is the case,
then
is it really very likely that anyone following the grad school career advice will be able to construct a physics model consistent with experiment, i.e.,
a physics model either without susy or with it very “cleverly hiding” in some unconventional way ?

I do agree that the above-stated grad school career advice is accurate advice for someone wanting a tenured professorship at a “good” school.
However,
it seems to me that, in times in which the dominant fashion in theory may not consistent with experimental results, the way to advance a “career” may not be the way to advance the “onward march of particle physics”.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

Maybe, it’s taken further, in Dirac’s geometrical thinking?