While answering a comment in another recent post, I was struck by a thought I have had other times, but which I tend to remove. This is about the fact that it is surprisingly hard to produce a paper in a large experimental collaboration in high-energy physics. The amount of work required to put together a sound analysis of collider data is quite sizable, and the pains of going through the internal review process may last months, when not a year or even longer.

Of course it is nice to have the

I was on a plane to Valencia yesterday at the time when Paolo spoke in the Main Auditorium at CERN, and got approved our very first physics result with CMS collider data.

Okay -with a small group we had already produced an approved plot of phi-->KK decays last December, but this is a real, full-fledged analysis! I will talk more about it in the next few days.

A lot has been going on recently in blogs I sporadically visit (I am not a big reader myself). I thus thought I'd put together a list of valuable links here.

"I love work, it fascinates me; I can sit and watch it for hours".

J. K. Jerome

I just read a very nice article by Nature's Zeeya Merali, and I thought I would link it from this blog. It discusses in detail several aspects of the sociology of the very large communities of particle physics experiments taking place at CERN.