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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...

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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

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 »

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A Sunday morning browsing through preprints recently posted in the Cornell Arxiv revealed interesting reading material. If you have a couple of hours to kill next week, why not having a look at the following papers ? It will definitely hurt you less than spending the time on your WII or watching Jerry Springer.
My statistics page depressingly shows that a large fraction of readers who visit this site do so for an average of 30 seconds. Maybe they were looking for something different, or maybe they do not like the content offered here. In any case, I have decided that my long, detailed articles about particle physics are not exactly meeting the demand of the audience. I am not going to change my writing style because of that, of course, but I will try to also offer some thirty-seconds physics bits here, every once in a while. So let me make a dry run, using a recent result by the CDF collaboration. The clock may start.
"A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere".

Groucho Marx
I have known Marco Cardin for a couple of years because besides being an accomplished amateur astro-imager he is also an avid visual observer. His encyclopedic knowledge of the night sky wonders is a great help on the field during the monthly night-long observations in dark, moonless nights we spend on the eastern Alps, trying to squeeze the most out of the 16" Dobson telescopes we carry with us. These instruments have no fancy "go-to" features, but with Marco's help and organization we can frame close to 100 rarely seen objects per night.
Mariano Crociata: a name, a promise. The general secretary of CEI (the Italian Episcopal Conference) secures a spot in the front page of Italian newspapers today by declaring that pharmacists in Italy should be allowed to object to the distribution of pharmaceuticals enabling " clearly immoral choices", like abortion. I wonder why he stopped short of asking for the removal of condoms from the counters. Hmmm, let me guess: a sudden change of mind about birth control ? Or just the knowledge that it would be too large an economical loss for pharmacy owners to self-flagellate that way ?
Ready for another turn into National-Enquirer mode of particle physics reporting ? I have a figure to discuss. It is a result now a few months old, but one which received little attention -less than it should have, perhaps. I myself got to see it only a few weeks ago in a presentation given by Jacobo Konigsberg, CDF spokesperson, at a workshop in Bologna.

The scandalistic cut of this article is manifest in the title: facing a dearth of exciting reports of new physics discoveries, we are bound to now and then swerve off the path of our usual responsible handling of two-sigma effects, odd deviations, and assorted zoology. It is, I believe, a necessary resource to rely on, if we are to keep the interest of Science readers on particle physics.