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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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If you live outside Italy, you read newspapers more often than Italians do. Thus, you probably are more informed about the recent scandal emerging on the private life of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's Prime Minister, than Italians. That is because the news of Berlusconi's private parties with scores of young women, paid or otherwise compensated to cheer up the leader, have never made it to italian television!
Prologue
Stimulated by Michael White  (who just posted his Morning Science Quote,  "Light is the principal means by which we are able to transmit and receive information from objects around us and throughout the universe"), here is my answer, this week's Say of the Week :
"The reason why some people appear bright until you hear them speak is that light travels faster than sound".
After the Pandora vase of Berlusconi's private life got opened, there are news trickling out from it every day. In the last few days we learned that the parties thrown by the Italian premier in his billionaire villa in Sardinia, or at his residence in Rome, Palazzo Grazioli, included scores of young women that were not there by chance, but allegedly with the purpose of entertaining -offering sex- the male participants. There is, in fact, a judiciary action going on, which is trying to ascertain the declarations of a few women who participated to those parties, and who declare they were offered money.
Ok, this is an old story and probably all of you have seen the footage already - but after seeing the video myself, I cannot avoid posting it in my blog too. The recorded ending of a moving story of love between a lion and two young men is still all the rage on YouTube several months after being posted, and if you have not seen it yet, here is your chance to get even.
Below I offer a preview of the slides I will show tomorrow at an invited seminar on the rather technical topic of  "The b-jet energy calibration with Z-->bb decays", which I have come to CERN to give at a meeting of the LHCb collaboration. As I mentioned already in the first part of this two-part article, the topic is rather technical, and I do not expect a large audience -but I will nonetheless make an attempt at explaining the meaning of the slides pasted below. Then, of course, I am available to provide some additional light on any specific issue among those dealt below which you may want to understand more about.