A Quantum Diaries Survivor

“The probability that there’s a bomb on your flight is really small, and yet still non negligible for anxious people like me. But the probability that there are two bombs is really ridiculously tiny! That’s why I always take one with me in my carry-on“.

Anonymous

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.“

(Undisclosed source)

Update: Ok, if you happen to not know the author of the above, a hint: he also said…

“If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it ?“

(courtesy Jeff)

Just a note to post here the permanent link to the proceedings of a conference I attended in Corfu (Greece) three years ago. This is a long (32 pages) report on “High- Physics: from the Tevatron to the LHC“, now published in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series [Tommaso Dorigo 2006 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 53 163-194]. I think I did post a draft of the paper on this blog a couple of years ago, but then I forgot to post the final version as well.

The paper is a bit dated in some parts, where the most recent (back then) results from the Tevatron are discussed; however, some parts -especially a discussion of the usefulness of Tevatron data for LHC physics- are still readable IMHO. Also worth noting is the fact that the acknowledgments section mentions the late Riqie Arneberg, a friend who passed away last fall, who had accepted the offer I had made to all readers of this blog to proofread the manuscript, and contributed in several places to the clarity of the text.

The publisher has now made available online all its 100 open access volumes through the JPCS home page. Of course I salute this contribution to the free diffusion of science with enthusiasm.

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between“

 Oscar Wilde

This evening I played a few blitz games on the internet chess club. Here is the position I reached with the black pieces in one of these:

As you can see, black is a pawn up, and has a clearly superior position. Here black is to move (square “a1″ is on the lower left: white pawns move up). White (a 1900-player) probably had reached this position in the hope to save the game thanks to the drawing power of opposite-coloured bishops on the board, but I think he underestimated the fact that opposite-coloured bishops actually increase the attacking power of the offender! They become a drawing weapon only when kings do not risk falling into a mating net…

Anybody willing to test their chess vision here ? What would you play with black here, and what sequence would you envision following your move ? I will post the solution here tomorrow morning.

UPDATE: the full answer is in the first comment below, courtesy of a reader.

I could not resist playing the vacuous game of putting my opinions on a two-axis plane, offered by kataweb. Below you can see the result.

Unsurprisingly, I am close to Veltroni and Bertinotti, and very far away from Berlusconi. Duh!

“CERN TH hosted a workshop on Monte Carlo tools but, since I’m opposed to gambling, I’m not going to cover it here.”

Jester (Resonaances host)

A hot new result from CDF has emerged in a global analysis of Run II data by an automated search called VISTA-SLEUTH. I intend to discuss it tomorrow, but I thought I would in the meantime post just a simple, impressive plot here, together with a test. Mind you, I will be probably criticized for taking the plot out of context, but this is indeed a test -and the plot is goddamn blessed.

The idea is to ask you, dear reader, whether the study of that plot alone - which shows the transverse momentum distribution of muon tracks in events with a muon and an electron having the same electric charge found by CDF in 2 inverse femtobarns of Tevatron Run II data- would allow you to conclude that either:

1. The Standard Model is dead, and this is the first firm evidence of the creation of some new exotic doubly-charged particle
2. There is a mistake in the shape of the background
3. There is a funny fluctuation in the number of high-Pt muon events seen by CDF containing an additional electron candidate with the same charge sign
4. There is a systematic underestimation of the probability of assigning the wrong charge to electrons

A sucked mint will be sent via flying pidgeon to the first commenter indicating which of the above four interpretations is considered the most likely.

PS: since the plot is a .gif file and it shows poorly above, and I am too lazy to fish out a better one tonight, here are the entries in the data (black points with almost invisible error bars) in each of the bins: 0, 2, 5, 4, 4, 7, 7, 7, 2, 4, 2, plus a single outlier far away.

“At least 99% of the 10^500 possible vacua are complete garbage and can be ruled out easily. Thus, the regions of the landscape for which realistic vacua may arise is limited.”

Eric (string theory enthusiast)

I recently gave a look at the statistics table of my chess games on the Internet Chess Club, and was left wondering whether I should rather spend more wisely my time. Indeed, here is the table:

In it, you can read the number of games I played, separately for each of the time controls used. The main categories are “bullet” ( one minute per player),  “blitz” (two minutes to 15 minutes, if I recall correctly), plus the fixed ”1-minute” and “5-minute” category, which include an automatic pairing system.

If you browse the numbers, you can see that I played a total of just about 10,000 games on ICC since I started with the handle “tonno” eight years ago. Ten thousand games correspond, very nearly, to about a thousand hours of play (5-minute games last on average 8 minutes, 1-minute ones on average 2).

1000 hours spent playing blitz chess! A thousand hours is a hell of a lot of time. They correspond to about seven months of work. In that amount of time I write on average two papers, sign 20 more written by others, present a talk at one international conference, and graduate a student. Am I wasting my life ?

I do not think so. Chess is a way to relax for me, and a very intellectually stimulating activity. I generate endorphines while I play. It is very nearly like a drug. And like a drug, it has anti-social connotations: my wife, in fact, hates it when I play online… But there is a sort of equilibrium which allows both of us to spend some evening time taking care of things we like.

Of course, the question remains… Maybe I could play a bit less and do other things instead. Well, yeah. Like, driving three hours to observe the night sky all night long….