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Travel With Two Infants

The other day I traveled with Kalliopi and our two newborns to Padova from Lulea. After six full...

A Nice Little Combination

Although I have long retired from serious chess tournaments (they take too much time, a luxury...

The Strange Case Of The Monotonous Running Average

These days I am putting the finishing touches on a hybrid algorithm that optimizes a system (a...

Turning 60

Strange how time goes by. And strange I would say that, since I know time does not flow, it is...

Tommaso Dorigo

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

$Luminosity, Michel Parameter, Phase Space: What A Lousy Title For A Great Post$

Luminosity, Michel Parameter, Phase Space: What A Lousy Title For A Great Post

Jan 02 2010 | comment(s)

After re-emerging from a rather debilitating new years' eve banquet, I feel I can provide my own answers to the second batch of physics questions I proposed a few days ago to the most active readers of this column.

Be sure about one thing: the answers to the three questions have already been given in some form by a few of the readers in the comments thread; I will nonetheless provide my own explanations, and in so doing I might pick a graph or two to illustrate better the essence of the problems. But first, there was a bonus question included in the package, and nobody found the solution to it. Here is the bonus question again:

"What do you get if you put together three sexy red quarks ?"

The answer is

One year in review -blog aside

Jan 01 2010 | comment(s)

Rather than writing down my new year's resolution, I find it more constructive to look back at the past year and draw some conclusions on it. I have already done some analysis concerning this blog in a recent post; this one is a more personal view of what happened to me in 2009, and you might well consider it not interesting at all for you -but it is my blog, and it belongs here.

So, let me start with my family. In 2009 neither I, nor my wife or my children, had any major health problem. That is for sure an important thing of which I consider myself quite lucky. Heck, I did not even have to run to the emergency room once! (If you have small kids you know this does happen).

$Quote Of The Week$

Quote Of The Week

Dec 31 2009 | comment(s)

No, not a modification of the now classic "Say of the week" series. Rather, a quote from a very famous Physical Review article which is of relevance to a couple of questions I offered here and here this week:

My Best And Worst Of 2009

Dec 30 2009 | comment(s)

Okay, the year is not over just yet, but it is already time for a little accounting of the traffic on this site in the course of the last eight-and-a-half months -that is, since I moved my blog to Scientific Blogging.

For this year's summary I have been inspired in part by Alex Antunes, who decided to pick his least read articles to draw some conclusions about what really does not sell well here. But I have of course also given a close look at what appears to appease your taste, dear readers.

$More Physics Questions$

Answers To Physics Questions

Dec 28 2009 | comment(s)

Two days ago I offered you three problems in experimental particle physics, of varied complexity. Three readers tried answering the test in the comments thread: a rather underwhelming turnaround, but what did I expect - we are deep in Christmas vacations after all.

I will give below my own answers to the questions, and then comment some of those I received. For ease of reading, I paste here again the three questions.