What cup size are you?

By The rambling hadron | Published: March 20, 2010

Google results for various phrases

Thanks to xkcd

Posted in Funny things, Statistics | Comments closed

Mindfuck Patterns

By The rambling hadron | Published: March 20, 2010

While writing the sliced veal recipe, I realized that when we want to discuss a procedure (let it be a cooking recipe, or a numerical recipe) we usually tend to organize our thinking in order to emphasize one-by-one all the steps of the given procedure (should I say “algorithm”?).

This is a general feature of our brain that in mankind is, it seems, more developed than in other animal species, and allowed us to reach 2010. Well, I should have said: it allowed us to be able to think about the time passing and to think about the possibility of organize our perception of the time passing in a structured way with was possible once concepts like “measure” were defined. It is not fortuitous that I cited the concept of “measure”: after all, this is a strong “procedure-oriented” concept ;)

The very fundamental feature of our organizing-oriented brain is not our algorithms definition, but it is the pattern recognition. The ability of our brain to recognize patterns is the basis for all our basic abilities, like seeing (for example).

Read More »

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Sliced veal with tuna and capers

By The rambling hadron | Published: March 20, 2010
  • Time needed: two or three hours, plus cooling time
  • Ingredients: 700g veal (“magatello” is the meat cut you have to use: I did not find an english translation, could anyone provide one?), 150g oil-preserved tuna, 1 bottle dry white wine, 25g capers, 1 lemon, 1 medium carrot, 1 celery stalk, 1 onion, 1 clove, 1 bay (dictionary says it is the culinary english name for “laurel”) leaf, 1 garlic clove, 1/4l mayonnaise, some parsley (from the Scarborough Fair? :P ), salt, pepper
  • How to realize it:
    1. Clean with water the veal, then bind it with twine (this is to allow it to retain its shape during the cooking process)
    2. Take a big casserole (it must be deep enough to allow completely covering the veal with water)
    3. Cut in pieces the carrot, the celery stalk and the onion, and put the pieces in the casserole Read More »
Posted in In the Kitchen | Comments closed

Apocalypse now?

By The rambling hadron | Published: September 9, 2008

Repubblica sulla fine del mondo

Posted in Funny things, Physics, Science | Comments closed

John Wheeler is Dead

By The rambling hadron | Published: April 17, 2008

… age 96.

In Italy, politics made the news “unimportant”… As far as I and a couple friends of mine know, italian media were too occupied in commenting the elections…

New York Times obituary

Posted in Physics, Science | Comments closed

Fast claws

By The rambling hadron | Published: December 13, 2007

I don’t understand the very reason pop3 email clients cannot download 10646 messages all in-a-row…

You cannot even say that they download messages one thousand a time, because for every “Get New Mail” you click, they download a number of mails randomly oscillating between 400 and 600…

Furthermore, the new phaenomenon is that every click creates a queue of little more than 500 messages, but only the last 50 or so are truly downloaded… If the rate remains constant, the migration from gmail-web to gmail-downloading-mail-on-my-laptop will be very long…

Oh, if you do mind: I’ve started to use Claws-mail. Why? Because I found out that it boots up in less than a second, and performs every action nearly immediately!!! I think I’ve never seen a piece of code as optimized as Claws-mail…

Posted in Linux | Comments closed

Comments activated…

By The rambling hadron | Published: December 8, 2007

Funny thing: I deactivated some time ago comments to be able to check for spam the old comments (deleted 15.000 of spam comments…). I forgot to reactivate comments… But spambots were still able to spam!

Now I installed an antispam filter, and reactivated the comments… Let’s hope the filter will work!

Posted in Blog technical news | Comments closed

Chess problem

By The rambling hadron | Published: December 6, 2007

White moves.
Draw

White moves.

Unfortunately I was black… A couple moves before, with arrogance I chose not to do N. … c1 N+1. …, with promotion of the pawn, hunting for a nice checkmate. I should have promoted the pawn, because we saw only the following lines:

1. Qe8+, Kf6 2. Qf8+, Kg6 3. Qe8+, Kh7 4. Qh8+, Kg6…… 1/2-1/2 This is the only way black cannot win, so this will be the “correct” line for the white. There is no way for the black to deny the continuous checks made by the white queen. This was the actual ending of the match (I was black, damn it… If only I had promoted the c2 pawn before…)

1. h5+, Kxh5 2. Qe8+, g6 3. … Qg2# 0-1 Black’s plan was to cover the king with the g7 pawn: this was impossible as long as the check in g6 was made by white queen covering also h5, but becomes possible in this line.

1. Qe8+, Kf6 2. Qd8+, Kg6 3. Qxd5, exd5 4. Rb6+, Kh7 5. Rc6, Qf1+ 6. Kh2, c1 0-1 White resigns: black can no longer checkmate in one move after 3. Qxd5, but the pressure on the white king is too strong, and the white tower alone (no white pawn can be promoted in these conditions) has no chance to delay the inevitable.

Apparently, every line must start with a check, otherwise the first black move will be 1. … Qg2#

If somebody sees some other possibility, please let me know!!!

Posted in Board games, Chess, Games | Comments closed

∅νββ decay: seen or not seen?

By The rambling hadron | Published: December 6, 2007

There are mainly two ways to take into account non-zero neutrino masses…

  1. Let’s modify the fields of the Standard Model (SM) by adding the right-handed neutrino. The main consequence is that in the SM lagrangian a mixing term for neutrino flavour pops up, parametrized by a matrix called the Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata matrix.
  2. Let’s remove the renormalizability requirement from the SM: in the lagrangian we thus can have terms with dimension (in mass unit) of five or more. A consequence is that the SM can be valid only at energies lower than a certain energy scale Λ.

Fortunately, we have a way of deciding which one of the two is the more correct theory:

  • the first solution breaks the individual lepton number conservation (flavour oscillations are allowed), but still conserves the total lepton number L.
  • the second solution violates also the total lepton number.

Experiments were thus set to search for a violation of L in some physical process.

A process used for this purpose is the neutrinoless double-beta decay, (A,Z)→(A,Z+2)+2e-, in which the variation of L is ΔL=2

At the Gran Sasso Laboratories, using 11 Kg of 76Ge, some people searched many years for this decay.

Voices say something like: “the collaboration closed saying that no signal were found, but a few physicists (a so-called “Heidelberg-Moscow group”) published a bunch of articles claiming the evidence of a signal: however, there is criticism on their claim, concerning the correctness of their analysis, and on top of that their is the only such analysis existing, so it is not confirmed by anyone“. I read some of the main articles on the topic, and I have to say that the criticism seems to me to be well justified.

A couple links:

Evidence for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay: the claim by the Heidelberg-Moscow people

Neutrino Oscillations and Signals in β and ∅νββ Experiments: review and criticism of the Heidelberg-Moscow results (yes, I admit, Ferruccio Feruglio is the professor here in Padova who taught me the details of the SM, but I assure you I’ve read the paper without any influence :P )

Posted in Physics, Physics Today, Science | Comments closed

Shit happens

By The rambling hadron | Published: May 21, 2007

I admit I am surprised : the situation of Lebanon was quite unknown by me.
Dozen slain as Lebanese Army fights islamists

Posted in Politics, Society | Comments closed