My mailbox has an automated spam filter, but often some smarter messages seep through and end in there; since, however, I already receive hundreds of emails a day, I am not too happy to entertain myself with ones I do not need: so I have developed a sort of instinct to automatically ignore messages which are likely to be spam. Wrong!

If you happened to visit this site earlier today, you may have found it devoid of a suitable banner. That is because I took some time pondering on that design detail for this new site. I wanted something that resembled the banner of the old site which hosted my blog, over at wordpress, which showed a starry field; but I also wanted to convey some personality with it -no more anonymous pictures stolen from a prepackaged theme (Regulus in that case); and possibly, some meaning.

This short post is my first contribution to ScientificBlogging: with it I am relocating my blog here from wordpress. I am thrilled by the opportunity to join a larger group of excellent science writers, and possibly reach a larger audience interested in particle physics and in my other occasional discussions of chess, politics, astronomy, astrophysics, or the personal notes I sometimes choose  to dump here.