A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Polonium 210 is one of the most poisonous substances on earth. A powerful alpha emitter, with a half-life of 138 days and an emission energy of 5 MeV, Polonium is not a substance anyone should mess with.

As with all alpha emitters, this substance is not dangerous by itself if kept outside of one’s body: alpha projectiles only travel few millimeters in air, and fail to create a danger. It is only through inhalation or ingestion that the horrible effects of this substance become evident. The energy released by this fast-decaying isotope is quite high (a unbelievable 140 watts per gram according to wikipedia), and the amount of damage manifests very quickly in the hosting body, as was demonstrated a few days ago with the death of the russian spy Alexsandr Livitnenko in London.

Livitnenko was allegedly poisoned while eating at a sushi bar near Piccadilly Circus, in the center of the city: most probably his killer sprayed a small amount of the substance over his meal. In any case, the substance is volatile -probably the radioactive decay spontaneously sublimates atoms of the material by spallation- and its nasty effects are so powerful that even less than a nanogram can be deadly. Quoting wikipedia again, the maximum allowable amount of ingested substance is 7 picograms - a sphere 1 micron in diameter is already harmful!

I think it is wise to wait for at least 10 half-lives to visit that sushi bar now. That’s 7 years!

I admit it: I am slightly obsessed with watching my weight. My explanation for that is that I was overweight for twenty years, and I had resigned to the idea that losing those five to eight excess kilograms was simply not possible. But then I learned how to do it, and gradually became able to control extremely well my body mass.

After three diets, the major one which allowed me to lose 10kg and get in shape, and two more “control” ones, I think I master it. I know how to lose 100 grams a day without too much effort. It gives me a warm feeling to know I can do it whenever I want.

So when, after the QCHS7 conference in the Azores, I came back to my scale and found out I was 76.5kg, I decided I would go back to 70 in a little more than two months (6.5 kg/100 grams is 65 days: from September 10th to November 14th).

It’s November 14th, and my scale gave me the pleasure to read 70.0 this morning… Now a little more effort (I decided I will need to stay below 70 for three consecutive days before I call it off), and I can go back to a normal regime.

The diet I have started almost two months ago is bringing my weight down effectively enough, but I will have to suffer for a while longer in order to reach the optimal 154 pounds (70kg) I decided was my goal.

Things had been going pretty well until two weeks ago, when I left for Fermilab… It is quite hard to keep control of one’s eating habits when traveling. And in the US it is usually hard for me, since I either dine out or cook for myself - and in both cases I cannot contain my hunger (as opposed to what happens in Italy, when it is my wife who cooks for me, and usually does it very well).  Moreover, this time it has been especially difficult to refrain from nibbling on the food always available in the CDF control room, where I spent a full week from 8AM to 4PM…

That’s right. The CDF control room has a table - part of the desk of the Operations Manager - where food is available to all the poor souls having to spend their time watching at monitors to ensure data quality. The food is mostly provided by the Scientific Coordinator running the shift. The logic is that by providing food and drinks in situ people have no reason other than physiologically unavoidable ones for taking a break. But it becomes extremely hard to avoid the temptation of food in plain sight. 

So indeed, after the first couple of days on shift spent in denial, I agreed with myself it was hopeless to pretend I was still on a diet, while munching chips, cookies, and whatever else was available. And I suspended my diet officially.

Back in Italy, my scale shows that indeed I not only have lost the decreasing trend I had established in the former weeks, but I also gained more than a pound during the 10 days stay in the US! Oh well. It will take me three more weeks to get to the weight I wanted. That is a promise.

The shift crew is formed by two Aces - experts in data acquisition and monitoring that are chosen typically from the graduate students -, one consumer operator and one SciCo.

Ok, here is a pic of yesterday’s creation… By looking at it I get hungry again!

Yesterday evening I was feeling in a cooking mood. So I left office early (well, 7.30PM actually, but still early for the typical rythm when I am at Fermilab) and headed to Dominick’s to get the necessary groceries for an experiment: pasta with sea scallops and asparagus tips.

I got a large bag of frozen bay scallops and two pounds of asparagus. At home, I cut the better part of the asparagus in half-inch long bits, placed them in a large pan, added salt, extra virgin olive oil, and parsley flakes, and half a glass of water, and cooked at medium temperature.

The scallops were thawed in warm water, washed, and placed in another pan, where I sprinkled them with salt, again olive oil, black pepper, and lemon juice. I cooked them at low temperature for quite a while, subtracting the excess water they were giving out a couple of times, and consuming the rest until there was a thick broth left.

I cooked the pasta al dente, added the asparagus to the scallops, got rid of the boiling water of the pasta, and added the latter to the mix. Then let the whole thing mix together by cooking for a couple more minutes at high temperature.

Just as I was doing that, Julien and Silvia arrived from Fermilab, and sat down for dinner. The pasta was quite good, although there were mixed opinions on whether more pepper would have improved the taste (Julien) or more salt (me) - I always like things a bit more salted than what others do.

We drank a good Pinot Grigio Albola DOC with the pasta. It is a good wine from Friuli, a wonderful place for whites. However, I would have fancied more a Tocai from the eastern hills of Friuli, which is my favourite wine. Can recommend two lesser known brands: Luisa and Specogna, both excellent… Unfortunately, you cannot find them easily in the US (and if you did, they’d cost a fortune probably!).

By the way, I just remembered I did post a pic of the Specogna here from the Azores conference wine tasting session… I might cut it and paste it here. Maybe later!

And I will post a picture or two of the final result here once Silvia downloads them…

Update: here is how the Tocai Specogna looks like…. From the table at the wine tasting last September:

I have always thought that there is no such thing as too much information. Sure, the more information is available, the better it has to be organized and accessible, but I do not see how it could be a hindrance to a better, more organized, efficient organization of one’s work or day-to-day activities. And yet…

Today’s technology is like a 10 year-old child who is growing too fast for his clothes. We have incredibly sophisticated devices at our service, but we are too slow to learn how to best use them to our advantage.

A small example ? Tonight daylight saving time was ceasing, allowing for one more hour of sleep. Of course I was very happy, since I am on a day shift at the control room of my experiment, CDF, as a Scientific Coordinator. I have to be there at 8AM sharp every day, for a week. Today I would be able to sleep for one extra hour - actually, only half hour, since I had agreed to come earlier than 8AM, to split the extra hour of duty with the former crew which was taking the 0AM-8AM shift.

So when I went to bed last night I set the alarm clock on my cellphone to go off at 7.15, half an hour later than usual - reasoning that the gained hour would compensate: I would then have a full 75′ to get up and arrive at Fermilab at 8.30 DST, which would be actually 7.30 on all updated watches. Wrong!

The devilish little device knew everything, and it went off at 7.15 after having updated for the change of time. So It woke me up one hour too late.  

As a result, I was still able to rush to the control room in time for not pissing off anybody, but I had to take a ridiculously fast shower, run, risk a speeding ticket or two, and most of all I had no time to buy any food for my crew (one of the most important duties of the Scientific Coordinator). Darn!

This year’s Ignobel prize in Physics goes to Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch, from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. They discovered the long-sought reason why spaghetti do not break in half.

The paper, “Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half”, Physical Review Letters 95, 9 (2005) 95505, can be read at the PRL site.

Congratulations to the authors for the advancement of Science!

As I anticipated in a previous post below, I met an old friend after a long time last Friday. David is the CEO of a small firm in Bergamo (http://www.questar.it), and a remarkable person. He has a broad scientific culture and very clear ideas - a better word would be “vision” - on several fundamental issues on science, computing, and technology. He is a sharp guy.

I envy him a lot for his voracious reading and up-to-dateness on several key issues concerning artificial intelligence, for instance. 20 years ago, when we were both physics students at the Padova University, we had been fascinated by books such as “Godel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter, and others by Dennett, Penrose, and the likes. But my ability to keep up with the topic faded, while his has stayed strong, if not increased - probably also due to the specific interests of his firm on those technological developments. That is all the defence I can put up to justify my ignorance to the books he cited

I brought David to a nice restaurant in Campo S.Giacomo dell’Orio, in Venice, where he had dinner while I drank his wine (I had had dinner earlier with my kids, unfortunately) and we chatted about many things. I thus learned that the girl he was with back in the University days later became and still is his wife, and he learned that the girl I had mentioned to him once is now my own.

It was a very pleasant conversation. Of course, with 22 years to fill time flied, and as I cheered him when he left my house after the last glass of a russian cognac, midnight had already come and left.

I stole the picture on the left from his blog, http://www.davidorban.com/blog/ (now in the links column on the right here), since the one the bartender of the Osteria ai Postali took with my camera was badly blurred.

On a side note, in the background is a fresco painted on the wall of the Osteria by Davide dalla Venezia - I like it a lot.

Boy it’s hard.

I have done it in the past, I will succeed this time too. But it is very hard to stick to my very strict diet! No lunch (only 200 calories allowed), very light dinner (no more than 700 kcal, and lots of veggies), no bread, no alcohol whatsoever, no sweets. Lots of water. Only a few coffees during the day.

The problem arises when you have to keep the enthusiasm going as a reasonable weight loss has been achieved and motivation starts fading. I lost eight pounds in less than two weeks, and I am now back to what can be considered a normal weight (73.5 kg for 1.77m of height, or a BMI of 23.5), but my goal was to go down to below 71 kg, to leave a little room for the coming winter and the associated christmas parties.

I can almost hear my stomach saying “C’mon dude, things are under control now, so why don’t you open the f***ing fridge and get a beer out”. 

Because I do have beer in my fridge. That is part of the torture…. But I’ll live through it. The graph above shows my current weight chart, which shows the decrease from 77.5 to 73.6 kg (rightmost points). I will keep going.

Yesterday night we had our conference banquet at a local theater, which had been set up as a dining room for the occasion. Tables were tidily set in the middle of the theater, and later we were treated to local music and dances (check out the pictures below).