About one year ago I started playing competitive chess again, after a hiatus of almost a decade. Because of the hiatus and some change in the organization of chess in Italy, my status from that of candidate master (with an Elo rating of about 2120, which however would correspond to something like 2020-2050 in fide rating) was taken back to the status of a first national category, with an Elo in the lower 1800's.
Venice is a wonderful place to visit, if you have a week or even a weekend to spend immersed in art and history, or just to get lost in it and enjoy the romanticism of the place. However, if you live there you tend to hate the town as much as you love it.
Take a house move for instance: nowhere is a house move a kid's game -it is in fact a well-known cause of stress in any circumstance. But in Venice it may become a real trauma. The problem is multi-fold: houses do not usually have an elevator; stairs are usually too narrow for any piece of furniture; space in front of one's windows may be too limited for any manouver.
The conceptual design report of the Mu2E experiment at Fermilab is
out in the arxiv for you to browse. Mind you - it is a rather thick document, 562 pages in all, so if all you have is 15' of lunch break you have better try something lighter.
"
While looking for the decay pi+ -> e+ nu_e, we focused all our attention on reducing backgrounds, since a prior experiment had set a limit at the level of 10^-6 on the branching ratio. When we heard that an experiment at CERN had seen a signal around 10^-4 I switched from delayed to prompt. The signal was right there, and could have been seen on the first day."
Burton Richter, quoted in J. Klein, A.Roodman, "
Blind Analysis in Nuclear and Particle Physics"
A reader correctly mentions that it is not exactly trivial to understand the above quote without some explanation, so here it is.
Update: I got a confirmation that at the latest INFN board of directors meeting the news was given that the Super-B factory to be built outside Rome is no more. Super-B joins other remarkable projects in high-energy physics -notably the SSC, the American 40-TeV super-collider to be built in Texas, and killed by Congress in 1993- in the dust bin.
With this move the Italian government shows again how little they care for basic research in Italy, and provides further fuel to the escape of bright researchers to other countries.
The top quark is the heaviest of the six known hadron constituents, discovered at the Fermilab Tevatron collider in 1995. Because of its quite large mass -over forty times more than the second-heaviest bottom quark- and because of a few additional interesting properties, the top quark has stimulated in the past two decades a large amount of theoretical work, well matched to the Tevatron investigations.
In fact, one of the explicit goals of the CDF and DZERO experiments for Run II of the Tevatron, which lasted from 2002 to 2010, was to study extensively the top quark both as a standard model object, subjected as it is to electroweak interactions which can be studied and compared to predictions, and as a portal to new physics of various kinds.
The Problem With Peer Review
Interna
The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown
Summer Lectures In AI 
