During Christmas holidays I tend to indulge in online chess playing a bit too much, wasting several hours a day that could be used to get back on track with the gazillion research projects I am currently trying to keep pushing. But at times it gives me pleasure, when I conceive some good tactical sequence. 
Take the position below, from a 5' game on chess.com today. White has obtained a winning position, but can you win it with the clock ticking? (I have less than two minutes left for the rest of the game...)

As part of my self-celebrations for XX years of blogging activities, I am reposting here (very) old articles I wrote over the years on topics ranging from Physics to Chess to anything in between. The post I am recycling today is one that describes for laymen a reason why it is interesting to continue going after the top quark, many years (10, at the time the article was written) after the discovery of that particle. The piece appeared in July 10, 2005 in my column at the Quantum Diaries blog (https://qd.typepad.com/6/2005/07/ok_so_i_promise.html).

As part of my self-celebrations for having survived 20 years of blogging (the anniversary was a few days ago, see my previous post), I am re-posting a few representative, old articles I wrote in my column over the years. The selection will not be representative of the material I covered over all this time - that would be too tall an order. Rather, I will hand-pick a few pieces just to make a point or two about their content. 

Twenty years ago today I got access for the first time to the interface that allowed me to publish blog posts for the Quantum Diaries web site, a science outreach endeavor that involved some 12 (then 15, then 25 or so IIRC) researchers around the world. A week before I had been contacted by the Fermilab outreach team, who were setting the thing up, and at that time I did not even know what a blog was!

At the IV Workshop in Valencia a student from my group, Emanuele Coradin, presented the results of a novel algorithm for the identification of charged particles in a silicon tracker. The novelty is due to the use of neuromorphic computing, which works by encoding detector hits in the time of arrival of current impulses at neurons, and by letting neurons "learn" the true patterns of hits produced by charged particles from the noise due to random hits.

Last week I got to the part of my course in Subnuclear Physics for Statisticians (yes, there is such a course at the Department of Statistical Sciences in Padova, and I have been giving it since its inception 6 years ago!) where I discuss CP violation in the system of neutral K mesons. In one of the most surprising experiments of modern physics, the group of Cronin and Fitch proved in 1964 that the combination of the two symmetries operations called "charge conjugation" C and "parity inversion" P could in some cases modify the properties of physical systems.