Working as an experimental particle physicist in a large scientific collaboration, such as the 3000-strong CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, is a (not too uncommon) privilege, for several reasons. 
One of those reasons is of purely numerical kind: the number of publications that bear your name grows by the day, and may reach four-figure values in the course of a couple of decades (I am about to cross that point with my publication list, in fact). But what value do those thousand articles have for the sake of assessing your value as a scientist ? Very little, indeed, and in fact all the selection to which I have participated in my career required one to specify one's specific contribution to all the papers one wished to boast about.

When you create an energetic collision between two protons, as the Large Hadron Collider does at large rates and very high energy, the question is what is the chance that a rare process is generated. In the quantum world, everything that is possible is also mandatory - but it happens with a probability that is sometimes very hard to calculate. 

I was saddened today to hear of the death of David Cline. I do not have much to say here - I am not good with obituaries - but I do remember meeting him at a conference in Albuquerque in 2008, where we chatted on several topics, among them the history of the CDF experiment, a topic on which I had just started to write a book. 

Perhaps the best I can do here as a way to remember Cline, whose contributions to particle physics can and will certainly be better described by many others (for example,

The Marie-Curie network I am coordinating, AMVA4NewPhysics, is going to start very soon, and with its start several things are going to happen. One you should not be concerned with is the arrival of the first tranche of the 2.4Meuros that the European Research Council has granted us. Something more interesting to you, if you have a degree in Physics or Statistics, is the fact that the network will soon start hiring ten skilled post-lauream researchers across Europe, with the aim of providing them with an exceptional plan of advanced training in particle physics, data analysis, statistics, machine learning, and more.

Have you ever seen Venus in full daylight ? It's a fun experience. Of course we are accustomed to see even a small crescent Moon in daylight -it is large and although of the same colour of clouds, it cannot be missed in a clear sky. But Venus is a small dot, and although it can be quite bright after the sunset or before dawn, during the day it is just a unconspicuous, tiny white dot which you never see, unless you look exactly in its direction.