A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Thanks to the web site of Il Corriere della Sera, one of the leading italian newspapers, I got to see this brilliant video, aired in Australia to instill in youngsters the concept that driving fast as a means of self-assertion can actually backfire.

The message passed by the video is clear: You drive fast ? You probably have a small penis, and you dump on the gas pedal all your frustration.

I cannot express strongly enough my admiration for the matter-of-factness and bold free hand of the authors of the campaign. Like the ad against smoking by Yul Brinner dying of lung cancer, this one is destined to save hundreds of lives. Well done folks!

By the way: strangely enough, I do drive fast, but… Oh well. It is a well-known rule in statistics that you can’t compute a meaningful correlation coefficient with less than five penises.

CDF has recently used the production rate of top quarks to increase by 20% the precision of one of its top mass measurements. A nice new technique and a brand new result, of which I will say more at the end of this post: I wish to explain here a few basic facts about particle production in hadron collisions first.

When you collide a proton with an antiproton with enough energy, what is actually happening is that the two particles “see” each other as drops of liquid within which lie tiny hard spheres. The drops sometimes just bounce against each other without losing their integrity: it is what we call an elastic scattering;  (more…)