In case you haven't noticed, there is a new paper in the arxiv which you should not ignore if you are doing Higgs physics at the LHC. Of course, most of you are not involved in this, but still, it may feel good to know that there has recently been a collective effort of experimentalists and theorists to put together detailed and precise predictions for the Higgs boson production rate, in a way that can be easily used by the experiments.

I know that some of the visitors of this blog are surprised to find personal stuff in my column every now and then. However, a blog is an online diary, and I do leave here my personal thoughts if I feel like it. This is one of those times. If you are not curious nor interested you are thus advised to visit some other physics-full post, for example this recent one here. In this post I wish to discuss my personal achievements and failures, my highs and lows of the past year.

All in all, 2010 was a good year for me, for several reasons. Let me provide some highlights in random order.

The sudden switch from one to another provider of visit statistics last September prevents an accurate assessment of how this blog fared in 2010. However I can collect some information from some in-site tools.

The pages of this blog have received a total of 716,886 hits in 2010, or an average of 1964 daily hits. The best month was July, which scored by itself about 140,000 hits, largely although not exclusively thanks to a highly linked, controversial post.

Some shameful self-propaganda is in order today... Such posts have usually borne good fruits in the past, so why not!

Dynamics can be surprising at times, even when applied to well-understood and tested physical systems such as a basketball and a basket. Look what happened to a free shot executed by Kamyl Kawrzydek in a match between Idaho State University and  Utah State University, played at Gossner's Invitational: the ball bounces on the basket, and then stops there for three full seconds, before eventually dropping into the basket.