A Quantum Diaries Survivor

After a very intense day at work, I sought some relaxation in online blitz chess today. And the game gave me the kick I was hoping I'd get. After a quick Alapin Sicilian opening, we reached the following position (diagram 1):As you can see, black is threatening a checkmate with Qxg2++. However, the last move was a serious error, as it neglected the intrinsic power of my open files and diagonals against the black king. Can you find the sequence with which I quickly destroyed my opponent's position?1. Qc2! 

The highest-mass subnuclear particle ever observed used to the the top quark. Measured for the first time by the CDF experiment in 1994, and subsequently confirmed by CDF and D0 in 1995, the top quark is the heaviest elementary particle we know of, and it is a wonderful physical system per se, which has been studied with momentum in the past thirty years at the Tevatron and at the LHC colliders. The top quark

In a world where misinformation, voluntary or accidental, reigns supreme; in a world where lies become truth if they are broadcast for long enough; in a world where we have unlimited access to superintelligent machines, but we prefer to remain ignorant; in this world we are unfortunately living today, that is, the approach taken by scientists to accumulate knowledge - peer review - is something we should hold dear and preserve with care. And yet...

Perhaps the most important thing to get right from the start, in most statistical problems, is to understand what is the probability distribution function (PDF) of your data. If you know it exactly -something that is theoretically possible but only rarely achieved in practice- you are in statistical heaven: you can use the maximum likelihood method for parameter estimation, and you can get to understand a lot about the whole problem. 

Winter is not over yet, but I am already busy fixing the details of some conferences, schools, and lectures I will give around Europe this summer. Here I wish to summarize them, in the hope of arising the interest of some of you in the relevant events I will attend to.

Pattern recognition is an altisonant name to a rather common, if complex, activity we perform countless times in our daily lives. Our brain is capable of interpreting successions of sounds, written symbols, or images almost infallibly - so much so that people like me, who have sometimes trouble to recognize a face that should be familiar, get their own disfunctionality term - in this case, prosopagnosia.

As artificial intelligence tools continue to evolve and improve their performance on more and more general tasks, scientists struggle to make the best use of them. The problem is not incompetence - in fact, at least in my field of study (high-energy physics) most of us have grown rather well educated on the use and development of tailored machine learning algorithms. The problem is rather that our problems are enormously complex. Long gone are the years when we started to apply with success deep neural networks to classification and regression problems of data analysis: those were easy tasks. The bar now is set much higher - optimize the design of instruments we use for our scientific research. 

As part of the celebrations for 20 years of blogging, I am re-posting articles that in some way were notable for the history of the blog. This time I want to (re)-submit to you four pieces I wrote to explain the unexplainable: the very complicated analysis performed by a group of physicists within the CDF experiment, which led them to claim that there was a subtle new physics process hidden in the data collected in Run 2. There would be a lot to tell about that whole story, but suffices to say here that the signal never got confirmed by independent analyses and by DZERO, the competing experiment at the Tevatron. As mesmerizing and striking the CDF were, they were finally archived as some intrinsic incapability of the experiment to make perfect sense of their muon detector signals.

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!