Both the CMS and ATLAS collaborations have already started to exclude meaningful regions of the parameter space of Supersymmetric models with the data they collected in 2010. And Physics World is on the news today with a
online article by Kathy Mc Alpine, the famous rapper physicist who wrote the lirics and interpreted
one of the biggest Youtube hits in the category of science popularization. If you have not watched it yet, please rush to do so now. Six million people (and counting) have done so before you already.
A nice piece of news in my mailbox today: it appears that the CMS collaboration, the experiment I work for at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, has got four different scientific papers approved for publication in the course of the same week. What is more, the four articles will be published on three different international magazines of clear authority. A true success !
Despite my chronic lack of time these days, I always manage to find ten minutes for a blitz chess game on the internet. It is a total waste of time and brain energy, but it never fails to provide some adrenaline shot in my veins. And at times some real satisfaction, when I play a good game and/or I get the better hand with a titled player.
Today I got a little of both, when I won with black against Grandmaster Lars Karlsson (elo 2466), a Swedish player. Not a super-Grandmaster, admittedly, but still a dangerous player with an expected score above 90% against me (I am rated in the 2050 range. Here is the game with minimal commentary.
Karlsson-Dorigo, 20-2-2011
(Jesper(GM)-tonno)
Today I spoke at
a conference on "QCD advances" which is being held in Les Houches, an amiable small town near Chamonix, on the french slopes of Mont Blanc. The content of my talk is
accessible from the conference web site, but I guess that I should provide here a summary of what I discussed.
Finally, it looks like Silvio Berlusconi will be tried. The judge for preliminary investigations has accepted the request of an immediate trial, put forth by the magistrates who collected a large body of evidence on the recent crimes of the Italian premier. The trial will be held on April 6th... Unless Berlusconi manages to produce the umpteenth law to protect himself from the charges of unlawful conduct he has collected in the past 20 years, effectively putting him above Italian law.
The physics with LHC is becoming rapidly awesome, and being part of the CMS experiment and deeply involved in some technical aspects of the analyses (the statistical treatment of the data, and the control of the statistical claims of the scientific papers we publish) I find myself with more things to do in my agenda than I can possibly manage.
On Rating Universities
Goodbye Peter Higgs, And Thanks For The Boson
Significance Of Counting Experiments With Background Uncertainty
The Analogy: A Powerful Instrument For Physics Outreach
