Killing Santa April 1, 2007
Posted by dorigo in humor, personal.6 comments
Filippo is growing up quite quickly… Today, he started questioning my wife about the existence of Santa Claus, based on objective reasoning on the amount of work involved during the night before Christmas.
He also reasoned on the existence of another entity which brings a gift every time a kid loses a tooth. The story is that a little magical ant collects the tooth, left outside of a window, and pays back with a gift. Filippo was really suspicious because of the large size of some of the toys he had been receiving - when Mariarosa reported on that I could not help laughing!
I thought it was due time to have a frank chat with him, so I brought him upstairs, far from Ilaria’s earing reach, and I took him to the rather uninspiring conclusion about these traditions by helping him reason on the observed phenomena. He really did not believe in Santa any more, but he had no candidate alternative for an explanation, so he was surprised to learn that it is parents who are responsible for putting gifts under the christmas tree.
I was happy to see how smoothly things went. It was also fun to determine together that Santa would need to spend no more than a few tens of millionths of a second on the delivery of each toy, something that really helped putting things in perspective…
In the end, I had him swear he will not tell any of his friends or other kids, especially Ilaria, and I assured him he will continue to receive lots of toys under the Christmas tree for a long time…
Three years of delay for LHC startup! April 1, 2007
Posted by dorigo in news, physics, politics, science.38 comments
I would never have wanted to post such dreadful news this morning… The structural problem found with the magnet enclosures of the Large Hadron Collider is going to have a horrible effect on the start-up schedule of the machine.
A stress test of the structures performed a few days ago demonstrated that they are quite vulnerable to quenching conditions of the magnets, as explained in this press release by Fermilab .
It now appears that a completely new design of these components of the beam is necessary. Details are still sketchy in the CERN press release, but the most optimistic estimates have been placed at three years for redesign, production, and installation.
This is very bad news for science… I wonder how fresh new graduate students working in CMS and Atlas will feel today, knowing that their PhD will probably end without any collider data to base a thesis on.
UPDATE: ok - this post got far too much exposure and I think it is beyond its original scope to leave it uncommented. It is an APRIL’s FOOL. Sorry to those of you who got hurt by not understanding that in the first place… I made it a bit too credible, and for that I apologize (I find it pointless if an April’s fool is too easy to recognize).
Please understand that there are no official news on any delay in the LHC schedule or in the CMS and Atlas experiments. I simply do not know, until CERN releases some statement. It is possible that the schedule will suffer some delay, but that is only my personal guess.
UPDATE 2: this post continues to draw too much attention…. Which is fine, but it starts to bother me that people continue to click on the CERN link. Please understand that the CERN link does not work because its not working is part of the prank!!!
