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A Research Position In Neuromorphic Computing And Nanophotonics Open In Padova, Italy

Five days are left to apply to a 2-year research position at INFN-Padova, to work in the context...

Apply For The USERN Prize, Win Cash, And Get A Keynote Talk In Astana

Nowadays it has become exceedingly hard to distinguish legitimate academic endeavours from scam...

A Record Of Past Activities

Every now and then, for one reason or another, an academic will have to update one's own CV. This...

Surviving Queues: 2 - On The Road

[For the first part of this two-part post, see here]...

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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 a number of exxperiments in physics and astrophysics, including the... Read More »

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Ghost Writer Found, Paper Submitted!

Ghost Writer Found, Paper Submitted!

Oct 18 2009 | comment(s)

Just a note, awaiting for my submission to the arxiv, to mention that my request here for a ghost writer to help me put together a proceedings paper for the PIC 2009 conference has been successful.
Analysis Of A Roulette Strategy

Analysis Of A Roulette Strategy

Oct 17 2009 | comment(s)

As Hank explains in a recent article, when he visits a Casino he plays the Roulette. His simple strategy consists in betting on a single colour, doubling the bet every time he loses; when he wins, he starts back with the minimum bet.
Supernatural Coincidences And The Look-Elsewhere Effect

Supernatural Coincidences And The Look-Elsewhere Effect

Oct 16 2009 | comment(s)

Have you ever caught yourself wondering, upon observing a seemingly utterly unlikely coincidence, whether there was anything supernatural at work that made it happen ? I would guess that all of us, even the most rational thinkers, have caressed that thought for a minute, at least once. A few typical examples can be given of situations which one apparently fails to ascribe to natural causes:

1) Grandma dreams of her deceased husband spelling a sequence of numbers, and the following day she sees the same sequence coming out at Lotto. Was grandpa trying to let her win a large sum ? It will be quite hard to convince her otherwise.
A Quadrillion Collisions

A Quadrillion Collisions

Oct 13 2009 | comment(s)

Americans, but in general scientists, and science-lovers of any country, should be proud of the achievements of the Tevatron collider, the 2-TeV proton-antiproton collider build over a quarter of a century ago under the prairie of Batavia (IL), and which is still the world's most powerful, and may I say successful, particle accelerator ever built by humans.
The Say of the Week: Strumia on Backward Causation and Communism

The Say of the Week: Strumia on Backward Causation and Communism

Oct 13 2009 | comment(s)

"Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernencko: these three premiers of Soviet Union unexpectedly died around 1984, such that Gorbachev could lead the process that ended with the fall of Soviet Union, such that the US congress stopped funding the SSC, such that the Higgs was not discovered.

According to the new theory of backwards causation, you should be proud of having destroyed communism."
Overbye on Backward Causality

Overbye on Backward Causality

Oct 12 2009 | comment(s)

Many thanks to Dennis for linking, from the NYT site, an article I wrote one year ago to comment a crackpotty paper by an otherwise esteemed scientist.
The essay just appeared on the New York Times site is excellent, as always with Overbye, but it is also way more balanced than my rather vitriolic attack on the theory of backward causation and, in particular, the idea that one should use the Large Hadron Collider to test it by deciding to run or not to run based on the turn of a card.