Lesson of the day: if the moderator falls asleep, the loquacious speaker will take advantage of it and will not stop talking. Net result: the coffee break remains a chimeric dream.

Today I am attending a conference on the communication of Physics, at Frascati. They invited me there to present this blog, and discuss my experience with it. I spent last night trying to put together something meaningful, and I am now approximately satisfied with the result.

While I was preparing my slides (which include a online navigation in the site), it occurred to me that it has been a long time since I last played the "top searches" game. If you own a web site, you can play it too: it consists in finding combinations of words that, input in the google search window, will get one of your pages as the first hit.

"I am too shy to express my sexual needs, except over the phone to people I don't know"

Garry Shandling

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