That's too bad. Pope Benedict XVI just let go with a very unfortunate judgement, which betrays just how much the catholic church would like to force a control on our society.

In a new-year speech he gave in front of diplomats, Benedict touched the subject of the way sexual education is taught in Europe:

"Proseguendo la mia riflessione, non posso passare sotto silenzio un'altra minaccia alla libertà religiosa delle famiglie in alcuni Paesi europei, là dove è imposta la partecipazione a corsi di educazione sessuale o civile che trasmettono concezioni della persona e della vita presunte neutre, ma che in realtà riflettono un'antropologia contraria alla fede e alla retta ragione."

Quick-and-dirty translation:

Ok, I promise - my next post here will be a highly interesting article on the status of searches for new heavy Z bosons. In the meantime, however, I allow myself another "personal" post. After an evaluation of 2010 from the point of view of research activities and blog activities, I wish to report here on a few things I look forward to in 2011.

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.