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Holiday Chess Riddle

During Christmas holidays I tend to indulge in online chess playing a bit too much, wasting several...

Why Measure The Top Quark Production Cross Section?

As part of my self-celebrations for XX years of blogging activities, I am reposting here (very)...

The Buried Lottery

As part of my self-celebrations for having survived 20 years of blogging (the anniversary was a...

Twenty Years Blogging

Twenty years ago today I got access for the first time to the interface that allowed me to publish...

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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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It's been a while since my last "guess the plot" posting. The simple explanation is that I did not happen to run into any fancy graph in the last month or so. Now, today I have one for you to guess, but I must add that I believe it is rather easy to understand what it represents. Less obvious is to completely understand the math behind it, and the implications of the construction.
Today I wish to briefly discuss a recent important measurement produced by the LHCb collaboration, a measurement of CP violation in the decay of charmed mesons. Before I do, I think I need to explain some details of the LHCb experimental arrangement, because it is different from what most readers here are familiar with.

And, update: rather than putting it at the end, I prefer to link Resonaances' post on the same subject here this time - he wrote about the matter yesterday and did a much better job than I do below. Sorry for noticing it after posting mine!

Some pedestrian kinematics
"If we were not ignorant there would be no probability, there could only be certainty. But our ignorance cannot be absolute, for then there would be no longer any probability at all. Thus the problems of probability may be classed according to the greater or less depth of our ignorance. "

Henry Poincaré
These days I am preparing a three-hour course of statistics for particle physicists which I will give at a winter school in a couple of months. This stimulating task forces me to find nice and simple examples of good and bad applications of basic statistics. Stuff with high didactical value, and hopefully also entertaining.
Chess News

Chess News

Nov 06 2011 | comment(s)

Chess is a lifetime passion, there's no doubt about that. In twentyseven years of practice I have often found myself temporarily losing contact with my chess club, with tournaments, and online blitz games, only to return to the game with a renovated interest and hunger for putting my neurons to the test.

The fall of 2011 definitely classifies as one of my "coming back" moments. Here is a summary of the latest tournaments I played:
The Arxiv today features a quick-and-dirty study of the occurrence of electron-positron pair signal in the NOMAD detector, which obtains very strong bounds on the superluminal behaviour of energetic muon neutrinos like the ones whose speed has been recently and famously measured by OPERA.