The 3-sigma bump reported by Fermilab on Wednesday has garnered a lot of attention. Understandable, since it might be a precious sign of particle physics beyond the Standard Model -- but it's also just a 3-sigma bump, and usually those go away.
Via Matt Strassler and Lisa Randall, here's a set of plots that helps indicate exactly how hard this game really is. The plots can all be found on this web page at CERN. In comments Matt and Peter note that they were made by Tommaso Tabarelli de Fatis, as explained on Tommaso Dorigo's blog. Here is the original plot from the CDF paper:
We’re looking at the number of events that produce a W boson and two jets, as a function of the energy of the jets. The bottom plot is all the data, while at the top they’ve subtracted off most of the Standard Model background, leaving ...
