It is unfortunate that whenever I have personal stuff to post as a blog here I have nothing else to choose as a tag than the uninformative "random thoughts"... I wish the posting interface in our beautiful site had a wider selection of tags, including ones such as "stuff that does not interest anybody but selected few", or "my own darn business". But perfection is not of this world, that is until Hank decides to work on his seventh day as well.

A very important new theoretical study appeared yesterday in the hep-ph preprint arxiv.
Titled "Precise Predictions on W+4 Jet Production at the Large Hadron Collider", it is signed by a strong team of theorists: C. Berger, Z. Bern, L. Dixon, F. Febres Cordero, D. Forde, T. Gleisberg, H. Ita, D. Kosover, and D. Maitre. I will try to summarize its importance for the physics of the Large Hadron Collider in accessible terms tomorrow; for the time being I just wish to point it out for those who are capable of reading the paper but are too lazy to check the arxiv daily. I know, you belong to this set but you won't admit it!

A Labor Day special: I am offering you to have a short virtual tour of the CDF Control Room today, free of charge. I am currently on shift there, and we are taking data. If you send me an email with your skype account coordinates, I will call you and show you the place with a web-cam. No audio though, since I cannot disturb my colleagues here. I will complement the visual roundabout tour of the monitors with a few short text explanations. The service is subject to abrupt interruptions or delays due to possible emergencies I need to take care of.

My email is firstname.lastname (at) google.com . Beware of the spelling of my first name - 30% of English natives put one M and two S in it.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde