Rambling Hadrons

… 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

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…

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!

White moves.

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!!!

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 )

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

Cow gone mad at http://cowgonemad.wordpress.com

Update your bookmarks (I updated mine only today… Quite a long time since the last time I worked on the blog…

Silicon photo-multipliers, from a National School in Legnaro

I went to the meeting, found it interesting and longed for the pdf: today I finally downloaded and re-examined it.

Cool, isn’t it?

A seminar from Nicola Cabibbo… It was nice, interesting and stimulating! Perhaps I will write something about it later.
The painter who came to my home to paint the walls used a tricky method to check if the first stratus of paint were still wet: he used an Ohmeter!!! He did not know how it works, but he used it. I was fascinated by discovering that some people applyied to painted walls the concept of different resistance between  wet and dry objects ! Cool!!!

I had to remove 16,478 spam comments held in moderation queue, and I still have to remove 2,000 spam comments that passed the filters. I am growing a bit tired of removing thousands of spam  without findind among it any true comment…
The Italian government crysis? Oh well, this is what you get when you mix together in an ally Communists and Christians… I am convincing myself that no politician is better than the others indeed… All the same crap.
Upgraded to Edgy Eft the laptop, I want ATI to release decent drivers, to make them usable with compiz…

… god himself!

Think about it: an usual definition of “atheist” is “a person who do not believe in a trascendent entity who eventually created him”.

God cannot believe that he has been created by another thing… So God must be an atheist event if he exists.

Find the faulty logic