A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Anybody should know how to perform these. The more so if you are a parent.

So for your convenience, here are three sites to visit, print out, and keep in your kitchen - possibly attached to your bulletin board if you have one. These save lives!

The first is a site which shows a video on how to perform CPR on a unresponsive, non-breathing child (e.g. after an electric choc). You can even download the video and keep it on your computer: http://depts.washington.edu/learncpr/videodemo/child-cpr-video.html

The second site is a good explanation of how to perform the Heimlich maneuver, with several drawings. You can even learn how to do it on yourself with your fists or by leaning on a chair: http://www.heimlichinstitute.org/howtodo.html

The third site explains very clearly and concisely how to do a tracheotomy to a patient who is choking and to whom the Heimlich maneuver has not produced any result. After reading this, I think I would do it if conditions arose: http://www.tracheostomy.com/surgery/emergency.htm

I hope I will never need to do any of these. But choking is by no means a rare occurrence in children!

LHC has solved the problem of guaranteeing access quickly and securely to working personnel and other authorized persons by installing biometric readers, which take a picture of your eye, then matching the data with that corresponding to your badge.

Read about it in the latest CERN bulletin (also featuring pictures of the nifty device):

http://bulletin.cern.ch/eng/articles.php?bullno=35/2006&base=art#Article1 

Safe, quick, extremely reliable, and almost maintenance-free. Way to go.

Yesterday at 5PM sharp the italian Summer Students were off work. They gathered in the CDF trailers parking lot, eager to embark in some recreational activities. I suggested a beer at the Users’ center - a facility in the Fermilab village, featuring a bar, pool and tennis table. Beer is a diversion that I can still take on at my mature age… 

I joined them for the beer(s), and after gulping them down we were ready for a soccer game. We found a good spot next to the tennis courts, a flat grass field, and soon formed two teams. 12 people, two teams of six.

The game was entertaining: correct and relaxed, a bit like brazilians playing on the beach - Sergio, a engineering student from Pisa, even played barefooted. My team was probably a bit less strong, but we tried to play for the beauty of the game - and in the end, we won 6 to 5. As always, after the game I was ready for ambulance pick-up…

A word about the girls in my team, Viviana, Sara, and Maria: all very effective both as defenders and when attacking. We won thanks to a golden goal by Sara. Below is the winning team: left to right, Angelo, Viviana, Tommaso, Marco, Sara, and Maria.

Yesterday I spent some lines here describing how I shoot for a business class upgrade with Lufthansa, when I fly back and forth across the Atlantic.

Well… It did work today. I am comfortably seated on a business class seat on the Munich-Chicago flight, and I sure enjoy the ride. I did, as I was suggesting earlier, arrive late - and unhurriedly - at the gate, and I did show my card with as good a smile as I could put up. And I was rewarded with a business class seat.

However, I have to say the whole strategy might just be some kind of cargo-cult science. The system just upgrades those frequent flyers who have best rating, when the economy class is overbooked… Sure, there are instances when they will upgrade you manually if they have trouble with seat assignments, but mostly now things work automatically.

Anyway, I am happy of the outcome. And I am surfing the web with the wireless service Lufthansa provides (not for free unfortunately, but admittedly a rate of three USD per hour (27$ for the entire flight) is not too steep. Thanks Lufthansa!

This morning Mia obtained a “laurea magistralis” (aka Masters degree) in Physics, after two years of specialization in particle physics following three previous years of studies.

Mia presented a thesis titled “A new multivariate approach to the b-jet energy measurement at the CDF-II experiment“. Basically, her work concentrated on writing the code of the Hyperball algorithm in a standardized way, then optimizing the parameters for the Z–>bb resonance, and finally testing the resulting jet energy corrections on the Z–>bb signal in experimental data collected by CDF in 2005.

Mia gave a very nice presentation in front of the graduation committee and fifty persons in the audience. She answered exhaustively to three complex questions posed by members of the committee, and in the end obtained the maximum of points, 110 cum laude.

The fun, however, started just then. Padova University has a nasty tradition of a post-graduation rite which involves getting slapped in the back as hard as possible by everybody present, then stripped almost bare, covered with all sorts of obnoxious substances (water colors, flour, a dead octopus in the case of Mia), and forced to read a poster collectioning a few embarassing episodes of the candidate’s course of studies -whenever possible of sexual nature-, drinking alcoholic beverages every time the reading is not perfect.

All this was experimented by Mia this morning. I felt really sorry I did not have a digital camera with me, but I will be able to post a few pics soon.

After this dubious celebration, we headed to a bar where the real party begun. I drank my share… NOw I am going to the second graduation… 

CMS is presently performing a Magnet test. During this test, a part of the detector components are turned on, so that cosmic rays can be collected.

And they have been! It has been more than a month since the first muons were seen in CMS modules. However, last night three full sectors of the muon system were used to catch muons with a regional trigger, and a great many have been collected.

In seven hours of data taking, about 580 thousand events have been collected… The data is useful to help debugging the chambers, the alignment system, test the calibration procedures, verify the detector resolution. Enough to keep us busy for a while…

The picture on the left shows the hits on the four muon stations due to a muon crossing the CMS detector. Yes, they do line up

I am lying in my bed right now, typing a few words on my laptop before taking a nap. It’s been a very stressful couple of days.

Besides dealing with organizational issues concerning the civil ceremony we had today to commemorate my father, yesterday was spent correcting Mia’s thesis, which she had to deliver today. I went to bed at 2AM last night because of that… Feeling guilty for not staying up for a while longer, while Mia was still working after 48 hours awake.

Today I woke up early. I left for S.Michele, where my father was kept, to give him a last salute. Then the grave was closed, and we left for Ca’ Foscari, the main building of the Venice university. There, we had a long ceremony. Very nice words were spent by the Major of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, who happens to be a man of culture (professor of Aesthetics at the IUAV) and a friend of my father. There followed a salute from Paolo Puppa, director of the department of letters. Finally, a former collaborator of my father and now professor of modern history, Mario Isnenghi, gave a long and thoughtful speech on the early years of my father as a journalist and a catholic thinking with his own brain, something that caused a schism from the italian church in the sixties.

We buried Wladimiro at noon, back in the island of S.Michele. After that, we had a very pleasant lunch with Wladimiro’s best friend, Raffaele Levorato. Now, I just need to sleep. Tonight, Italy is playing Germany for the soccer world cup… I do not care much, but I will have guests at my home to watch the game…

I am taking two days off… At the beach with my family.

Will be back in blogging mood on Sunday.

Next Sunday and Monday italians will be asked to vote to confirm a modification of the Italian Constitution. Berlusconi and his allies put their hands on the Constitution last year, and attempted to modify it in a way that could represent the first step toward a division of the north from the rest of Italy - something the Lega Nord has always hoped to achieve, with "democratic" means.

The reform can be criticized in many ways, but the bottomline is that we cannot change such a milestone of our country without thinking it over for a long time, and getting the agreement of everybody -much more than a small majority of parliament votes.

I really hope this reform is refused by my countrymen. Our constitution has worked very well in the last 60 years, and although there are hints that things have to be modified here and there, I object to any modification that is not discussed with a constructive attitude between the political forces, and then supported by a vast majority.

We'll see what happens… I predict a large fraction of people will vote against the change. Maybe 65% against, with a  40% of voters among the eligible citizens.

"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short"

(Blaise Pascal)

This is dedicated to Mia, who is pestering me with pages of her would-be master's thesis!