Last week I traveled from Venice to Tokyo through Zurich, and during the flights I could do some more tests of the RadiaCode 103 - the nice spectrometer for gamma radiation I have been playing with as of late (for a couple of earlier posts and tests see here and here).

I remember having been flamed, a long time ago, when in this column I ventured to claim that there was an inflation of physics conferences and workshops around, which to me looked both counter-productive (if there are too many such events, they become a distracting factor from research work, and returns are diminishing) and, I went as far as to propose, even unethical in some cases. I do not like being flamed, if only because it is yet another unproductive distraction, so I will not fall in the same mistake again here; rather, I have to observe that these days I am rather on the offending camp, so who am I to cast the first stone?

Each man kills the thing he loves, sang Jeanne Moreau in a beautiful song some thirty years ago. But the sentence is actually a quote from Oscar Wilde - aren't all smart quotes from that amazing writer?
Anyway, in some way this rather startling concept applies to every man except researchers in fundamental physics - both male and female, in fact. There, all of us love our Standard Model - it is a theory so wonderful and deep, and so beautifully confirmed by countless experiments, that it wins you over forever once you reach enough understanding of its intricacies. And physicists have tried, unsuccessfully, to kill the Standard Model for over fifty years now. 

Anomaly! Anomaly!

In the previous post I have described some of the main functionalities of the RadiaCode 103 radiation spectrometer, which the company graciously made available for my tests. Here I want to discuss some additional tests I have done, using radioactive samples from my minerals collection as well as a couple of test sources we have in our Physics department in Padova.

A few days ago I put my hands on a RadiaCode 103, a pocket radiation counter, dosimeter, and spectrometer that has recently appeared on the market. The company that produces it, RadiaCode, is located in Cyprus (see https://radiacode.com). The instrument is a portable device that pairs up with a smartphone or a PC for maximum functionality, but can well operate as a standalone unit to provide quite a bit more functionality than the standard monitoring and dosimeter capabilities of other instruments.
Here is the unit as it comes, packaged in a style similar to that of smartphones. The package contains the unit and a USB-C cable, plus a card with a QR-code link to the manuals and software.

Time and again, I play a "good" blitz chess game. In blitz chess you have 5 minutes thinking for the totality of your game. This demands quick reasoning and a certain level of dexterity - with the mouse, if you are playing online as I usually do.
My blitz rating on the chess.com site hovers around 2150-2200 elo points, which puts me at the level of a strong candidate master or something like that, which is more or less how I would describe myself. But time is of course running at a slower, but more unforgiving pace in my life, and I know that my sport prowess is going to decline - hell, it has already. So it makes me happy when I see that I can still play a blitz game at a decent level. Today is one of those days.