Warning: this post contains no physics whatsoever, although some of you might still be interested in reading it...

Relaxing in the hideaway of Elafonisos (see picture on the left) I am led to take a detached look at my work activities, and to try and determine whether I am doing some mistake here and there.

Blogging will be non-existent for three days, and please do not expect me to answer your comments in the various threads -I am going to be on a ship carrying me to Greece, and, God bless it, there is no Internet!

I am happy to read from a message by our publication board chair that CMS has reached the important goal of publishing 100 scientific papers. The majority of these are analyses of collision data (75); 24 more are from studies performed on the three billion cosmic-ray events taken during commissioning; and one is the CMS detector paper description.

I thought I'd share this news with you... I think this is a good start, but of course I expect we will soon reach 1000 papers. It should take us of the order of 10 years.

Another thought is that, CMS being a collaboration of O(3000) scientists, each of us can claim a share of 0.03 papers so far... A sobering thought!

I like to think at this blog as a place where both full outsiders and highly knowledgeable insiders coexist and exchange information. I know I often err on the side of producing posts which are unintelligible to most outsiders, but at least you have to acknowledge that I try hard to make my pieces at least accessible in their introductory part. Anyway, this is a preamble to say that today I am happy to be able to post a quite nice analogy for outsiders, one which will hopefully explain why we high-energy experimentalists are equally thrilled at the prospects of finding a Higgs boson, or not finding one!