A Quantum Diaries Survivor

food ? Well, maybe, but I had another answer in mind: life expectancy. The new data by ISTAT (the italian institute of statistics) confirms some preconceptions I had: italians live longer, and better, than other europeans.

2007 data on life expectancy in Italy gives 84.1 years for women and 78.6 years for men. I have no access to similarly updated numbers for other european countries, but life expectancy has been following a similar growing trend everywhere, so we can have a look at less updated numbers (dated June 2005) from Eurostat:

In the table, the first column refers to men and the second to women. The third and the fourth are life expectancies at 65 years of age, for men and women respectively. As for the countries: BE is for Belgium; CZ for Czech Republic; DK for Denmark; DE for Germany; EE for Estonia; EL for Greece; ES for Spain; FR for France; IE for Ireland; IT for Italy; CY for Cyprus; LV for Latvia; LT for Lithuania; LU for Luxembourg; HU for Hungary; MT for Malta; NL for the Netherlands; AT for Austria; PL for Poland; PT for Portugal; SI for Slovenia; SK for Slovak Republic; FI for Finland; SE for Sweden; UK for United Kingdom; BG for Bulgaria; RO for Croatia; TR for Romania; IS for Iceland; NO for Norway; and CH for Switzerland.

One clearly sees that Italy does quite well. But even more striking is a table showing the number of years of good health one is expected in european countries. The indicator, called “healthy life years expectancy”, HLYE (also known as “disability-free life expectancy”, DFLE), is a composite attempting to express how much one is expected on average to live without disability. See the table below:

On the DFLE scale, Italy scores way better than other countries! The influence of our better eating habits ? Or is the cause to be sought elsewhere ? Let us look at the incidence of cancer. In the table below are reported the age-standardized rates of incidence of cancer per 100,000 population. The columns indicate rates for men and women in 1995, and men and women in 2002.

Italy does not score well on the table above: cancer has a larger incidence on average in Italy than in Euroland. So let us look at obesity for another hint. The following tables (for men and women, respectively) list the percentage of population with 25<BMI<30 (overweight) and BMI>30 (obese).  BMI, the body-mass index, is a number determined by dividing weight in kilograms by the square of height in meters. The tables clearly show that italians are on average more fit. The first table is for men, the second for women.

In Italy, obese men and women (BMI>30) are a smaller fraction than in other countries, particularly at a young age - 3.8% of men and 2.3% of women are both record lows in Euroland. A casual correlation between life expectancy and obesity ? Of course not. Let us compare the numbers shown above with those in the US, where obesity is a plague and a major cause of mortality. From the site of the NCHS (National Center for Health Statistics) I found this document, which contains the information. One learns that men have a life expectancy of 74.7 years, and women of 80.0 years.

The fraction of men with a BMI>30 in the US is quoted as 29.5% here, and 33.2% for women. And it seems that obesity has little to do with genes, and a lot to do with lifestyle: in fact, the percentage of obese men and women has shown a dramatic increase in the recent years, as the graph above shows.

So, let’s all stop eating junk food! Particularly you. Yes, you. You know I am talking about you. Put that bag of chips down!

The CMS collaboration is having its last “CMS week” of the year this week. This evening at 6PM many of the attendees gathered in the big industrial building where the detector components have been assembled and lowered bit by bit in the pit, down into the cavern where the whole thing is being put together. Below you can see one of the few pieces still waiting to join the rest: a wheel of muon chambers, designed to detect forward-aiming charged particles penetrating enough to punch the whole central structure of the CMS detector - muons, that is. One cannot avoid feeling awed while walking under these giant structures.

There was good food and drinks available to the participants. Too good food - it speaks of an army not aggressive enough. But anyway, things unrolled easily and as I left to go back to work everybody seemed to be having a good time.

Yes, I said I am back to work… I have been fighting with some analysis code this afternoon, and I promised it I would come back in the evening to finish it off. Tomorrow I will be flying back to Venice, so I have to see the results of the code tonight or wait next Monday for them.

Today’s talks at the Outstanding Questions in Cosmology conference left me quite exhausted, after ten hours in the conference room spent trying to make sense of complex talks on a subject unfamiliar to me, and blogging about them. So I went back to my hotel, had a shower, put on more casual clothing, and went out to explore London’s night life.

A taxi brought me from High Street Kensington to Piccadilly. It was an experiment, and it failed. I wanted to see if it was a reasonable alternative to the tube or the bus these days, but I found out it is a bit too expensive, especially during rush hour. Anyway, I wanted to discuss something else here. 

Wandering around in Soho, a few drinks past what’s advisable, I stopped at a nice little restaurant, which eventually provided me with a filet mignon, a half-bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from Chile, and a creme brulee.

The food was good, but the wine was -surprisingly- just as good if not better. I am now feeling sorry for not having taken a note of the name on the bottle… I am not a real expert with wine, but I have gotten to the point where I can tell you with a sip if a white wine is worth more, less, or about 10 euro at retail. Which is more or less what I need to know.  

And I do not want to get any better in my wine-tasting capabilities: if I did, I would certainly end up escalating to appreciating only more expensive wines, and I would have little more to enjoy if not the thrill of drinking down a full week of salary during a happy evening. No, I think I got to the point where I would become concerned with details too subtle to tell if I learned more. So it is actually ok if I did not take a note of the name of that good Chilean Sauvignon.

I am happy to have been tagged by Andrew Jaffe (http://www.andrewjaffe.net/blog/) for a silly blog-game, consisting in posting five things you might not know about me. As with most die-hard bloggers, I think most of myself is here for anybody to read already, but let me see… I unfortunately have to dig deep in my personal life. Here is my list.

1. I played several tournament chess games against grandmasters (among them Delchev, Vogt, Dizdarevic, Godena), losing every single time, and a dozen or so against international masters, drawing once (against Deev). I won simultaneous display games against Wojtkiewicz and Skembris, drew against Karpov, Ehlvest and Benjamin (plus a few more I can’t recall). Online, I won several times against grandmasters in blitz games.
2. I have not spent even a single night in a hospital as a patient. It did happen once when Ilaria was born, but I was just little more than a by-stander then.
3. I practiced discus throw in the nineties, never making it to the 30 meters line.
4. According to a recent estimate, I had about 15,000 orgasms in my life - roughly two thirds of which without external help. 20,000 seems a quite reachable goal if I live long enough.
5. I can’t eat cheese.

Ok, so I now need to tag three blogger friends. Let’s see. Ok, be it Pietro (http://pietrovischia.altervista.org/blog/), Louise (http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/), and Helge (http://cow-gone-mad.blogspot.com/).

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!  

Yesterday’s party began in the worse possible way, with a phone call from Dario, the big boss of our group, who announced he would not make it, being stuck at the Fiumicino airport due to a lost connection.

Despite that initial setback, things got merry very soon as people started flowing in. I was especially pleased to see Elisa and Michele, and Chiara and Giulio. Both these couples had been invited quite late for different reasons: Elisa, who did her thesis with me four years ago, had not read my messages of invitation; Chiara, a summer student at Fermilab 10 years ago, lives in Grenoble and it was only by chance that I met her in the basement of the physics department this Tuesday.

It was also nice to have at the party a few people I did not know: Federica, Julien’s new girlfriend, and Diana, Mia’s cousin - especially since they are both young and pretty.

In the end we had about 30 guests, as predicted. There was a huge amount of food, because many had brought a contribution. And very good wines too, some of which has stayed with me. I am in fact presently serving myself an appetizer as I write these lines, and along with the appetizer an exquisite Sylvaner 2004 by Gruss.

Especially appreciated were the tartines (my concoction) which disappeared in the first five minutes, the pasticcio with mushrooms, the calamari, and the roast-beef. And of course, two large bowls of Tiramisu, a dessert made with coffee-dipped savoiardi (a particular kind of cookie), mascarpone cream, and a cocoa topping.

Below are a couple of pictures I took during the party.

The three large pans of lasagne (one containing bucatini with mushrooms and meat sauce, one with pine nuts and ham, and a third “regular” one) are ready to go. The calamary are done. The tuna steaks with olives are baked. Polenta is on its way. The large chunk of roast-beef is waiting to be sliced. An obnoxious amount of tartines with caviar, salmon, crevettes are all set in their trays. Some 20 liters of good to very good wine are waiting, either on the table (the reds) or out of the window (the whites and the cartizze).

All we are still missing is the guests! In 20 minutes they will start coming. You sure you cannot make it tonight ?

Tonight we have a party, to get together before the Christmas holidays. I invited 40 colleagues from my department as well as others that have found a job elsewhere.

Last year the party was on December 23rd. We were 45 people in the end, and it was a really wonderful evening. We had friends coming over from Indiana, Fermilab, New York, Eindhoven, Cantabria, Geneva… This year many have been unable to arrive in Italy so early before Christmas, and we will be more like 28 or 30. However, I organized things targeting 40 guests. So if you are around Venice and want to have a nice evening, and most of all enjoy good food and great wines, let me know and I will be happy to welcome you too… Just drop me a line here and I’ll send you directions. But hurry, I can only accept 12 more guests!

Here are a few of the word combinations people who were directed to this blog entered in search engines.

• “lisa randall girlfriend“: no comment
• “lisa randall personal life marriage biography“: I can’t believe it but there’s quite a few people trying to mess with her private life - probably inspired by her good looks and successful career.
• “lisa randall naked“: as above.
• “is lisa randall married“: wow people, get a life!
• “lisa randall email“: ok, enough of that, let’s move to other searches…
•  ”e scale“: actually this is interesting - I do play the piano but reading that term I realized for the first time there is a double meaning to it. A scale starting with the “E”.
• “weight loss + partying till late night“: maybe this guy or gal is trying to determine whether partying all night helps reducing one’s body weight…  
• “carlo rubbia undeserved nobel prize“: I respectfully disagree - not because he’s a fellow italian, but because of love of truth. Rubbia deserved his Nobel prize as much as any other winner.
• “distance of callisto from earth“: I strangely continue to get a few hits every week from people looking for this useless datum. I suspect it is part of a math assignment in a high school textbook.
• “600 calories/day diet“: wow that is a bit too much, I do not advise such a small calories intake. My experience is that it is better to stay on 1000/day, and keep it steady.

Last Saturday, upon arriving in Chicago, I went downtown and spent a couple of hours at the Borders of Michigan Avenue. Time really flies there… In the end, I bought two books, one by Raymond Kurzweil (”The singularity is near”) and another by Lee Smolin (”The trouble with Physics”).

I will post about my impressions on Kurzweil’s book later. I rather started reading Smolin’s book, which has been at the center of a heated debate lately, together with Peter Woit’s “Not even wrong”. For details, a good site to visit is Peter’s blog, http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/.

I only read a chapter and browsed carelessly through the rest, but I can already say I find Smolin’s “Trouble with Physics” a very pleasant reading and a well-written account of the situation fundamental physics has been facing in the last thirty years. The book has no formulas whatsoever, and I am sure outsiders will find it just as good a reading as insiders.

Which brings me to my thought of the day. The fact that people like me ends up reading about the status of theoretical particle physics in a divulgative book rather than in scientific journals is kind of depressing. I am no theorist, but I did study physics for ten years. A laurea, a PhD, several schools, plus 15 years of experience as an experimentalist. Notwithstanding all of the above, the level of theoretical discussions in most of today’s scientific papers is way above my head, and I have to settle on material such as Smolin’s or Woit’s book to know what is going on in theoretical physics.

Sure, I do follow theory seminars in my Physics department now and then (more then than now). But most of the times things get too complicated after the first 20 minutes. This is frustrating and is a side-effect of the complexities into which theoretical particle physics has spiraled in the last years of unbound speculation.

By the way, in the evening I visited the “Cafe’ Iberico” on La Salle Avenue with Giorgio and Simone (the new Ph.D. student for CDF in Padova, who took the picture below). The tapas were as good as ever… I only advise to get there early (as we did - we were all jetlagged and hungry) or an hour wait is quite normal on Saturdays…