Data concerning the parties with 30 young beauties (paid 1450$ each for their time, plus various benefits and gifts) held by the Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi in his residences in Rome and Sardinia, between September 2008 and January 2009, have been disclosed the other day by the provider of the girls, Giancarlo Tarantini. Tarantini is under investigation for several charges (including, it seems, drug abuse and distribution at his own parties), and he is spilling his guts.  We thus learn from him that many of the involved girls allegedly spent the nights at the Premier's house providing sexual favors to their host; the fact appears to be confirmed in at least one case with video and audio recordings taken by escort Patrizia D'Addario.

Sometimes I come to think this blog is overextended: it happens when I realize it contains more things than I can remember, even ones I would really like to have at my fingertips. I was reminded yesterday of a very funny story which a reader left in the comments thread of a rather meaningless post, and decided I should make a separate post of it, since it made my day reading it and it might make yours too...

The story was told by Leon Lederman in an introduction to Carlo Rubbia in the proceedings of a conference held in 1984 in Santa Fe:

"... Now I have some interesting news, a story that is at the least apocryphal. It concerns the heroic contestant in one of those ancient trials by strength which are so natural for our "Carlo". This trial was

"It is better to treat p values as nothing more than useful exploratory tools or measures of surprise. In any search for new physics,  a small p value should only be seen as a first step in the interpretation of the data, to be followed by a serious investigation of an alternative hypothesis. Only by showing that the latter provides a better explanation of the observations than the null hypothesis can one make a convincing case for a discovery."

Luc Demortier, "p values and nuisance parameters", CERN-08-001, p.24.