A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Scene: a fish restaurant in Venice, tonight. A table with a family of tourists - father, mother, and 15yo daugher, next to it another table where I sit with my wife and two kids. We enjoy our dinner. I am sitting close to the other table, and diagonally from me sits the Father. Nice looking, 55ish, lean, almost bald.

I fail to realize they are from Germany - the language does not resonate in my mind, and they speak with low voice, while I have to raise mine quite often to keep my kids at their posts.

After a while, I start a discussion with Filippo. It comes out of nowhere - I ask him if he ever thinks that the people he meets, even the oldest ones, have been kids of his age one day. He sort of understands what is my point: he should not be too shy with them.

So we start discussing how was my mother -his grandmother - when she was 7. She lived in a big villa with a huge garden in Rossano Veneto, and in 1943, at the age of 7, the German army had taken possession of half of the villa and installed there some officials.

Nazis. 

I tell Filippo how my mother’s elder brothers had once stolen the clothing of a few German officials while they were bathing in a lake in the park of the villa, and how she still remembers those funny naked figures running around yelling. Filippo is amused.

I then end up with the following: “my mother’s brothers were very lucky they only got punished by my grandmother, on request of the captain and in front of him - they were 11 to 14 years old, and the Germans could have shot them: those Germans were really evil!”

The moment I spell those words, the Father unmistakably turns his head towards me. I do not catch his stare, since I am looking in the other direction… But I understand he has overheard what I have just said.

Minutes later, I hear him speaking a decent italian with the waiter.

I have a moment of embarassment. But then I shake it off: what the hell. He should be embarassed, not me.

And maybe he was.

The National Geographic Channel was discussing earthquakes and tsunamis tonight, while I was busy with my laptop on a game of Bridge. But I overheard there is a guy in the US who has been collecting statistics from lost cats and dogs ads in California newspapers for several years, trusting that a sudden increase of those figures could be an alarm bell for upcoming earthquakes.

I know too little (maybe I should say we) about earthquakes to either shrug my shoulders at the odd idea that dogs and cats may feel the arrival of earthquakes with days to spare, or consider it a certainty. But the idea of counting ads in newspapers is, I have to say, brilliant!

You sit and wait. Every day you collect one more point in your graph. In a while, you have a rather clear picture of the typical amount of pets that get lost in a sunny April day or in a snowy day in December. Your graph will have two-digit counts each day, maybe 10 or 20 (that’s more or less what I heard from the NGC report). Very easily, you can predict the number of lost pet ads you are going to read about on the next day. Then, one day instead than the usual 10, 15, 20 counts, you get 50. Is something going on ?

Well, from a statistical point of view, yes. 50 is indeed very different from 15. 15 is a number to which we can attach the typical statistical error due to Poisson fluctuations, which is a bit less than 4. And 50 is 9 sigma away from 15+-4. That was the reasoning of that smart guy, when he predicted the 1992 earthquake in California. (Although I have to admit I followed this part of the program only discontinuously, since I was winning a not-so-easy 4-spades contract in a Bridge hand on www.pogo.com ).

So what is the bottomline ? That if you have a bit of free time and you are interested in science, you do not need huge funding to start an interesting project. You just need the wits.