A Quantum Diaries Survivor

While reading back my latest post I almost had a stroke. Acknowledgments ????

I rushed to my Webster’s dictionary and found out to my relief it is a legitimate variation of the more common “Acknowledgements”….

I am a very picky person when it comes to writing syntactically and ortographically correct English. I hate it when I get things wrong… Not this time, whew!

Minutes ago I went to the first floor of the Physics department to grab some food and water at the vending machines (being on a diet, I allow myself only about 250 calories at lunch, in the form of crackers), and found a copy of the Moriond QCD 2005 proceedings waiting for me in my letterbox.

Moriond QCD is a particle physics conference which is held every March since 1966 in a ski resort in the Alps. Last year it was in La Thuile (but most previous editions were held in Les Arcs). I participated to the conference by reporting on the latest results on Higgs boson searches by the CDF and D0 experiments - you can have a look at the slides and a plain English comment of them in  

http://qd.typepad.com/6/2005/03/for_your_eyes_f.html#comments .

After the conference is over, speakers are asked to put together a writeup of their talk, to be later published in the conference proceedings. I thus produced a draft of a paper, and to get it proofread I sent it to Demie Cheng (aka Little Miss Demosthenes). Demie is a very talented 14 years old girl, who used to visit my blog on Quantum Diaries and leave witty comments. I tested her by asking to read my paper.

She did, and sent back a copy with her corrections in red pencil. Amazingly, most of her corrections were meaningful (they were not just English corrections) and did improve the readability and clarity of my paper. You can find a scanned page with her handwriting in

http://qd.typepad.com/6/2005/05/proofreading_by.html

I did find a way to say thanks. I included her in the acknowledgements section of my paper before submitting it:

Yesterday evening a 13 year long story, painful for my family and dramatic for my brother, came to an end when I received news that Paolo’s sentence was suspended, awaiting the repetition of the trial which found him guilty of several charges connected to an action by the “Partito Comunista Combattente“.

Paolo was arrested in September 1993 and later sentenced to 13.5 years of jail for participating in a demonstrative action which took place in Aviano, when -on the night prior to a bombing action by US forces in Bosnia- an incendiary bottle was thrown against the outer wall of the american base, causing no injuries.

The European Court declared the trial unjust and demanded it to be redone five years ago, on the basis of the fact that to sentence Paolo some depositions by other suspects collected during the investigations were admitted as proof, but the defence was not given a chance to question the depositions since the suspects never showed up at the trial.

It took several years for the italian judiciary system to acknowledge the fault. In the meantime, in March 2005 Paolo was granted house arrests to allow him to treat some auditive disorders he has been suffering during the last four years.

Since then, Paolo has maintained a web site, http://www.paolodorigo.it , where he continues to fight for the causes he has always supported.

Paolo is now free, and will finally be able to fully cure his disorders in a clinic. I am happy for him, but I must say I am even happier for my parents - especially my mother, who cared for him during 11 years of imprisonment in several penitentiaries across Italy, visiting him and sending him food, books, and of course money to live.