End of year report December 31, 2006
Posted by dorigo in internet, italian blogs, news, personal, physics, science, travel.3 comments
I am spending my christmas vacations in Padola, in the eastern italian alps, doing some skiing, hiking, and eating like a pig and a half. And… No internet connection.
That is the reason for the lack of reports here… But today I am spending some time at a Internet point (had to travel through a mountain pass to get here!) and I thought I would give to all of my dear readers my best wishes for a serene, joyful and scientifically productive 2007.
I will be back blogging here on the 6th, when I will finally be able to reinstate my posts on the new W mass measurement by CDF (there is a seminar at Fermilab on January 5th, and I have been asked to wait before that date to distribute the CDF measurement…)
So, in the end a word about this site in 2006.
This blog started last January as a continuation of the Quantum Diaries endeavour… In less than a year (precisely, 350 days) the 630 posts I wrote here have gotten more than 67,000 hits and about 1220 honest comments, with visitors growing by the day to an average of about 400 daily hits.
I thank everybody for visiting and please come back soon!
Search engine terms on Christmas time December 26, 2006
Posted by dorigo in games, humor, internet, language, news, personal.1 comment so far
People hooked on their pc during christmas probably make a slightly different sample than the usual mix of internet surfers. Let’s have a look at search engine terms typed in by people who ended up visiting my site:
- “Lisa Randall”: still going strong, apparently.
- “W boson 80413″: somebody in search for leaks or informed browsers ?
- “dorigo origini di venezia”: this one was looking for my father’s work. I hope I was of some use with my pages.
- “string theory wallpaper”: have we gotten to the point of making an icon of it ? I wonder if we’ll have Lubos with his third finger up in place of Einstein showing his tongue in the 21st century iconography of Physics. If string theory is proven correct, he might just as well allow to be pictured like that
- “24 inch dobsonian”: I suggest you go for a smaller diameter if you care for your back… Just my two pence!
- “Polonium for sale”: another big hit even if a month has passed from the heydays after Litvinenko’s death.
- “fellatios”: just that. I almost have sympathy for this honest sex seeker… No complex combination of fetishes, just a plain good old blowjob, and then again, spelled with the correct English word.
Gone skiing December 26, 2006
Posted by dorigo in internet, personal, physics, science, travel.add a comment
Today we leave to Padola, where I have no internet connection and I live merrily nonetheless. We will spend a few days there. We will ski, go on sleighs, walk in the woods when it snows, build snow men…
I think I will be able to post erratically from a nearby internet point, but I expect that before January 7th I will only write two or three things here.
So, just in case you hear nothing from me, please accept now my wishes for a have a happy new year! May 2007 bring joy and serenity to you, and funds to non-string-theory physics research!
The Say of the Week December 25, 2006
Posted by dorigo in games, humor, language.add a comment
“If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.”
DuckStorm(H) - on the Internet Chess Club, explaining some glitch
To all my crackpot friends December 25, 2006
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, humor, physics, science.7 comments
I receive and gladly forward, with a sympathetic thought to the galaxy of borderline physicists out there:
An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of
a pole, which she carried across her neck.One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and
always delivered a full portion of water, at the end of the long walk
from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home
only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was
proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of
its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of
what it had been made to do.After 2 years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to
the woman one day by the stream. “I am ashamed of myself, because
this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to
your house.”The old woman smiled, “Did you notice that there are flowers on your
side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I
have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your
side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them.
For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to
decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there
would not be this beauty to grace the house.”Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it’s the cracks and flaws we
each have that make our lives together so very interesting and
rewarding. You’ve just got to take each person for what they are and
look for the good in them.So, to all of my crackpot friends, have a great day and remember to
smell the flowers on your side of the path!
Another wonderful observing session December 24, 2006
Posted by dorigo in astronomy, personal, science, travel.add a comment
The best occasions are those that are the least planned…
I went to the Cansiglio with my two usual pals yesterday night, equipped with a 12″ Meade Lightbridge dobsonian and Mauro’s 16″ Ariete dobsonian. The sky was very clear and transparent, visual mag above 6, and no wind. Good seeing, although not perfect.
We were able to look at a very nice series of planetary nebulas, seeing detail I had never been able to glimpse. Some views were distinctly photographic, as the Owl nebula, which did show the two “eyes”, darker regions within the nebulosity, and the central star, which is typically hard to see. Excellent views also of the Eskimo nebula, of M1, NGC1514, the planetary in M46, and several other faint fuzzies.
A deep satisfaction followed our being able to spot for the first time (me) the horsehead dark nebula in Orion, a tough target even for large apertures if the sky is not completely dark. Indeed, one usually needs a H-beta filter to enhance contrast, but we just had a UHC (which is more or less the same thing but has other few bands of transmission). It took a while, but we did see it!
M82 was remarkable, a perfect photographic view too. I remember seeing ALL of the detail that you can see in the picture on the left, excluding the two faintest stars on the lower left. The three main dark bands were all observable, the “s”-shaped central one quite clearly, and the galaxy cut in two the view through a 5mm Burgess eyepiece. A real treat!
I look forward to the next trip to the Cansiglio… Next time, I want to wait for the Leo galaxies to come up.
I would make a very good single father… December 23, 2006
Posted by dorigo in food, personal.2 comments
On Saturdays, the kids are my business. Mariarosa works all morning, so I have to take care of them, being home in their company.
I am always proud of how I manage them. With me, for some reason, they are much more well behaved than with their mother. And I manage to have them do their homework (Filippo), put order in their room, wash hands before lunch, without effort.
Today, as I was serving them a good portion of exquisite spaghetti with caviar and cream after an appetizer of crevettes (for Filippo) and soppressa (for Ilaria), I could not help thinking I am also cooking somewhat better than the average single father… But of course, I have no wish of becoming one!
String theory and the Iraq war: a surprising parallel December 22, 2006
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, news, physics, politics, science.6 comments
In his blog Not Even Wrong, Peter Woit has finally yielded to the temptation to make a quite interesting analogy between the current status of string theory and the Iraq war. Two failures, two situations difficult to disentangle from, two hopes that the situation will change by the end of 2008, when a change of leadership in the US management and the first data from LHC will possibly change the panorama.
I doubt that these hopes have any chance of becoming reality… Anyway, check out the comments section of the latest post by Peter at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=501#comments .
Blessed, but not public December 22, 2006
Posted by dorigo in news, personal, physics, politics, science.8 comments
Sad, but true. CDF just completed another loop into its own bureaucracy, by deciding that the W boson mass result, although carefully reviewed, scrutinized, unblinded, preblessed, and blessed by the collaboration, is not public yet.
The “rationale” is that the result will be made formally public at the Wine and Cheese seminar of January 5th. So, two weeks from now.
Therefore, I had to make private all my posts on the W mass, and will only make them public again on the said date.
Today I was waiting for a formal complaint from members of CDF about my having posted the W mass result here, in order to jump at the throat of the unwitty soul. But I guess this is not happening, because everybody has a sense of ridicule, even my colleagues in CDF.
Since this is my blog, I feel entitled to express my personal irritation and complete dissatisfaction -as a scientist and as a member of the collaboration- at such a baroque procedure, which is meaningless and pompous.
The result is good, do not hide it! Two more weeks ? That is nonsense to me. I would love it if a re-analysis of Aleph data, published on January 4th with a revised error bar from 51 to 47 MeV, stole the right of CDF to claim theirs is the “best single measurement” of the W mass for even a single day! Aleph guys, can you help ?
By the way, the idiocy of the whole thing is clear if I mention one additional fact: the result, although still technically private, has been included by our spokespersons in a end-of-year report to the D0E. So it is private, but it is public. Oh well.
W mass blessed but not public ? December 22, 2006
Posted by dorigo in news, physics, politics, science.add a comment
I have been informed by the authors of the W mass measurement in CDF that, although their result is blessed, it should not be made public until CDF makes a public announcement officially, at a Wine & Cheese seminar on January 5th.
The publication of this one result by CDF is taking a baroque form. We first blessed the uncertainty without knowing the central value - then the central value was disclosed, but with a 100 MeV offset. Then the offset was removed, and the result was preblessed. Now the result is blessed, and still they tell me it should not be made public.
That, in my opinion, is not the way one should do science… But I am a member of CDF, and will comply with the decisions of our executive board. However, I am not sure what those decisions are in this specific, very particular case - and the Atlantic Ocean makes it difficult to find out, with Christmas approaching. So while I am getting informed on the details, I have removed all the information from this blog…
