"I learned the stopping-rule principle from Professor Barnard in conversation in the summer of 1952. Frankly, I then thought it a scandal that anyone in the profession could advance an idea so patently wrong, even as today I can scarcely believe that some people resent an idea so patently right."
L.J. Savage
I am very happy to report here (after having done the same
on my Greek blog first, for a change) that the "Max Planck" medal for 2011 has been assigned to Giorgio Parisi, a distinguished Italian theoretical physicist. I first got the welcome news from Facebook, thanks to my e-friendship with Parisi.
They start bad but they improve with time. I cannot say I like Pope Benedikt XVI yet, but I have the feeling that he is getting better as he ages, pretty much like Pope Johannes Paul II, Karol Woytila. Woytila started his adventure as a Pope by playing the head of state, flying overseas to shake hands with dictators, spelling pages over pages of reactionary speeches -and then he improved. He become, so to speak, more human: a strange feat for a man whose mandate was to impersonate the link between Man and God.
A really interesting piece of news comes from the CERN laboratory today. The CMS experiment has detected a handful of Z boson decays in events featuring the collision between heavy ions, accelerated to energies of hundreds of GeV per nucleon.
Scientific American
features an excellent article by Garrett Lisi and James Owen Weatherell, with title "
A Geometric Theory of Everything". It is a rather clear explanation of the ideas behind the recent articles published by Lisi on the E8 group and how this exceptionally rich mathematical structure could embed the representation of all particles and forces of nature.
The DZERO collaboration
published a few days ago the results of their search for multi-b-quark signatures of Supersymmetry in a large dataset of proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV. The possible large coupling of higgs bosons to b-quarks makes searches with many b-quark-jets worth pursuing at the Tevatron.
Enrico Stomeo - A Lifelong Passion For Meteor Studies
Surviving Queues: 1 - At The Airport
Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias
