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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...

On The Illusion Of Time And The Strange Economy Of Existence

I recently listened again to Richard Feynman explaining why the flowing of time is probably an...

RIP - Hans Jensen

Today I was saddened to hear of the passing of Hans Jensen, a physicist and former colleague in...

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 »

Have A Virtual Tour Of CDF Control Room!

Sep 06 2010 | comment(s)

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.

The Say Of The Week

Sep 05 2010 | comment(s)

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

Oscar Wilde

Aftermath Of A Rumor

Sep 04 2010 | comment(s)

Back to breathing the air of Fermilab after a full year away, I got to gauge a bit better the aftermath of the little incident created by a posting of mine in July. As often happens with internet bubbles, they look quite dramatic as they inflate, but they leave no big scars. Two months have passed, and this looks like a good time to post here some ruminations about the general issue.

Physics Experiments And Confidentiality

Another Week On Shift For CDF

Sep 03 2010 | comment(s)

Since today, and for a full week, I will be serving as Scientific Coordinator (SciCo) of the crew operating the CDF experiment at Fermilab. This honorable task (or in alternative, the serving as "Consumer Operator" or "ACE") is required to all collaborators once or twice per year, in order to provide 24/7 operation of the detector and supervision of the data-taking activities.

The crew is formed by a SciCo, a CO, and an ACE.

What Can You Do With A Million Z Bosons ?

Aug 30 2010 | comment(s)

A new paper produced by the DZERO collaboration got me quite interested today, for several reasons. The analysis is based on a large data sample: over seven inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions! This is a huge dataset, the result of about 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions! In fact, the measurement these data has made possible is extremely precise and it exposes quite strikingly the shortcomings of our present modeling of the production of vector bosons.

Another Sheep Back In The Yard - The Late NuTeV Anomaly

Aug 27 2010 | comment(s)

The Standard Model of particle physics has been under attack since its original formulation, in 1967, and yet it has so far resisted every assault; in so doing it has become one of the most thoroughly tested physical theories. Like it or not, the construction has stood the test of time so well that theorists and experimentalists alike feel threatened by the chance that the Large Hadron Collider, too, will fail to find new physics beyond what the model predicts.