Whether it's a British thing or not is beyond my knowledge. I just wanted to celebrate something that made me happy :).

Regarding Richard Muller's proposals: I don't -- confusingly, I am familiar with Holger Müller's proposals, and it would appear that they are both at Berkeley.

Experiment is the arbiter of truth; whenever any new instrumentation can demonstrably reach the relevant sensitivity and systematic-effect rejection necessary to do a job better than it has been done before, we'll all switch to it.