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On Progress

The human race has made huge progress in the past few thousand years, gradually improving the living...

The Night Sky From Atacama

For the third time in 9 years I am visiting San Pedro de Atacama, a jewel in the middle of nowhere...

On A Roll

What? Another boring chess game?Buzz off, this is my blog, and if I feel like posting a chess game...

When The Attack Plays Itself

After a very intense day at work, I sought some relaxation in online blitz chess today. And the...

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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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Dibosons Keep Blossoming In CDF

Dibosons Keep Blossoming In CDF

Aug 13 2009 | comment(s)

A couple of months ago I wrote here about the first observation of a process called "diboson production", a quite rare occurrence in hadronic collisions: for the first time, the CDF collaboration could observe that rare process in events containing hadronic jets, which are usually riddled by enormous backgrounds.
The Nasty Paragraph-Vaporizing Key Sequence

The Nasty Paragraph-Vaporizing Key Sequence

Aug 12 2009 | comment(s)

Enough. I have lost to hyperspace too many paragraphs of my scribblings -here, as well as elsewhere- and I cannot stand it anymore. I need your help.

I write on a SONY VAIO laptop, with an English keyboard. The bottom row of keys has the "ctrl", the "Fn", the "windows" key; the second row has the shift key first; and the third row has the "caps lock" key. This information is relevant for what I am about to explain.

It turns out that sometimes while I write I type some nasty combination of shift, caps lock, or other keys in the thereabouts, together with some normal key I am typing at the same time, and the whole paragraph I am editing instantly disappears, vanishing into hyperspace.
Watch The Perseids Tonight!

Watch The Perseids Tonight!

Aug 11 2009 | comment(s)

Tonight you have a chance to contribute to science -namely, the knowledge of our solar system- and have a lot of fun at the same time. Do you want to know how ? Then please read on.

Comet Swift-Tuttle (left, courtesy NASA) may be far away by now, but the debris that gets thrown out in space during each of its passages in the proximity of our Sun traces the full elliptical orbit of the comet, like droplets of sweat of an athlete running the 10,000 meters in a stadium. And tonight, the Earth is going to plunge in the core of the filament of debris following the comet's orbit.
The Say of the Week

The Say of the Week

Aug 10 2009 | comment(s)

"Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness in the desert air."

Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", vv. 53-56. I have always loved these lines, and besides, as I wrote a few years ago, "The relevance of these verses to the general melancholy of the Higgs hunter at the Tevatron is obvious… Suffices to say that the Tevatron is currently producing of the order of 20 Higgs bosons per day in CDF and D0, and yet they blush unseen, born by dark unfathomed caves of
The Continuing Search Of A Dark Site

The Continuing Search Of A Dark Site

Aug 09 2009 | comment(s)

Amateur astronomers fond of visual observation of faint galaxies and other fuzzy treasures of the night sky are always in search of the best observative site, where to drag their large Dobsonian telescopes.

Unfortunately, their road is always uphill - also in a metaphorical sense: light pollution is growing everywhere at a disturbing rate, and it has already erased all but the brightest stars from our urban and suburban skies.

Many of our kids grow without having seen the Milky Way, and the few who are drawn to astronomy are surprised to realize, from the tales of older dogs like me, that it did not use to be that way.
Et Tu, Brute ?

Et Tu, Brute ?

Aug 05 2009 | comment(s)

Stabbed by his once most faithful man after many other blows received by the conjurors, Julius Caesar pronounced those words, according to reports, before falling to death.

Now, is history repeating itself ? Paolo Guzzanti, once one of Silvio Berlusconi's best men, is an aggressive journalist who became a politician under king Silvio the II. Guzzanti always maintained some sort of twisted coherence in his reactionary positions and vitriolic approach to the political issues he handled -one remembers, for instance, his leading of the Italian Mitrokhin commission which tried to assess the veridicity of some files disclosed by a russian ex-spy. From Wikipedia: