Tommaso Dorigo

Benigni, a great artist

Yesterday on the italian public TV broadcasting channel, Rai 1, a show anchored by Adriano Celentano hosted an exhilarating performance by Roberto Benigni, actor and filmmaker (many will remember his Oscar prize two years ago for "La vita è bella").

Roberto, whose political sympathies go to the left, targeted Silvio Berlusconi, head of the center-right government, in a way that for once did not raise harsh criticism or censorship that other comedians have experienced from Berlusconi himself or his coalition members in the recent past. The love for Benigni in Italy is so great that no politician is stupid enough to raise a finger against him.

His mockery reached the top when he invited Berlusconi to join him at the show, to enable him of making fun of his political opponent, Romano Prodi - who will probably steal his charge after the forthcoming elections next spring. Using the fact that no politicians are allowed to participate in a show such as Celentano's,  Benigni invited Berlusconi to present his resignation as prime minister, in order to be able to come on stage and do what he is good at - being a comedian - and publicly say whatever he wants about his opponent. By doing this, the doubts about freedom of satire in italian TV expressed one week ago by other TV personalities invited on stage were masterly used as a weapon to mock the censor - by denying their existence.

In another exhilarating moment of the show, he said he cannot be accused of being partisan, since he's already planned to mock the head of the opposition next year - the pun being based on the fact that next year's premier will most likely be Prodi, and thus it will be Berlusconi the target of his satire again.

Roberto is a great artist. Yesterday he was a comedian, then he turned into a satirist, then into a singer (of dubious talent, something that added to the fun of the show), a dancer, and a transvestite (see picture, which shows Benigni in the dress of a soubrette that was stripped on stage), to end in a very serious recitation of Socrates' Apology.

Reciting Socrates' Apology on the stage of a 50% share prime time TV show was his masterpiece. I've never seen anybody able to catch the attention of the audience by teaching them some important but undeniably not easy pieces of literature. He did it, with his reciting talent and his magnetic eyes. The audience on stage was delirious, and so were the 12 million people who followed it from home.

Bravo, Roberto!

A weekend in Paris

Just bought a couple of plane tickets to Paris for the next weekend. We will fly from Venice in the early afternoon of Saturday, 11/5, and be back to Venice on Monday evening.

Having kids and maintaining a social life is very hard. Whenever we try to organize something with our friends we have a hard time, since all of them also have kids, and the probability of everything working out fine has an extinction factor exp(-Sum(Nkids)), due to the fact that the probabilities that one kid will get sick at the wrong time or that a babysitter will fail to show up at the last minute are small but multiply together.

So rather than pursuing dinners or outings that have a fat chance of not working out, Mariarosa and I decided that we'll just try to escape for a weekend, whenever we have a chance.

The last time we did that was in Barcelona in June (I had a collaboration meeting there so things were easy to organize). The picture on the side shows Mariarosa shopping for orange clothing - her favourite color - in a central boutique there.

The most days I can convince my wife to be away from Filippo and Ilaria is two - but that is ok, if we find a destination that is reachable via a direct flight from Venice. This, however, restricts us to Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, ... well there are many interesting cities to visit, but I confess I had in mind to escape to Stockholm or Oslo this time, but it is just not possible if you consider you have to take a connecting flight in Germany, and your afternoon will be spent traveling. The kids will be fine with their grandparents and babysitter, and two nights away is just enough to relax a little bit and think of nothing else than enjoying the food and the sights.

Does anybody have something good to suggest for us for the evening of Saturday, 11/5, in Paris ? Or the following Sunday ? We are open to suggestions!

From atop

I have been promising pics of my new house for a month now...

So today I'll start posting some.

Let's start from atop... With the help of Google Earth, here are two views of downtown Venice. In the second the red circle shows the roof of my house. The whitish part is the terrace.

the stereo

I spent the afternoon trying to install a new cd player with loudspeakers in my living room, and failed.

I went to a big store and bought a Thomson system that looked good and sounded well. I brought it home (remember, I live in Venice, so I actually carried the darn thing on my shoulders for 700 meters from my garage to my home) and unpacked it.

The problem was, I have a large piece of furniture that holds books, the TV set, glasses and drinks, and fills a wall in my living room. The thing weighs a ton if you have to move it. But I do have to move it if I want to pass wires behind it and install the stereo system. So today I took everything there was on it down - it took a half hour - and then started installing the stereo.

Of course, I was smart enough to try it beforehand. It sounded perfect. So I started working at the wires from the stereo to the speakers: the ones provided with the unit were too short, so I had to find some wires with a similar impedence (to avoid reflections of the signal) and connect them. Then my next problem was that of widening some holes to allow the wires to pass through. Once this was also done, I installed the speakers and the stereo. I then connected everything and tried it again... And it did not work anymore!

I spent 2 hours reading the instruction manual and trying everything possible to make it work again. The cd changer system was stuck, and the cd holder would not open any longer. I struggled and struggled, but then started to shake the thing left and right, with no avail.

In the end I took it off and packed it again... Next Monday I will bring it back to the store, but they will have to open the cd holder to give me back my cd of Alan Parson's Project ("ammonia avenue").

Darn! And the whole living room is invaded with the stuff I had to take off to be able to move the large thing off the wall. I will have to wait for a new stereo system to be installed before I can have a livable living room again...

google earth

Download day today here. After downloading skype, I downloaded google earth as well.

Google earth is a program that lets you browse through the surface of the earth, with very high resolution - stunning in some well-scanned regions of the world, such as around Chicago. Venice did turn out very nice as well, when I found I could see the terrace of my new house from up high. The highest excitement though is when you fly by mountains and valleys. Have a tour of the surroundings of Mount Everest or the Colorado river if you can.

I showed it to a friend tonight. He was impressed, but remarked something that made me think. He said "oh yeah, but this is not a real time image, is it ?"

He was right. The images you can download as you browse through the earth are very nice, but they are not in real time.

I am sure that 20 years down the line our children will have something like google earth that produces real time images, and with of course 1000-fold higher resolution. Imagine looking into your computer screen at an image taken from a satellite of yourself looking at your computer screen. It will happen. The resolution right now is like 10 meters for the most interesting areas. Why should it not be 10 centimeters in 20 years, and real time ?

I'm very much looking forward to it!

skype

Used skype for the first time... Skype is a program that allows you to phone people around the world, for no money.

Nice thing. Could not use my laptop's mike, but was able to hear the voice of a friend online. I could chat via keyboard though... My fingers are faster than my tongue, so I could feel no discomfort from impaired communication :)

2 million people online!!!! I wonder how much this is worrying the big phone companies. I am sure they'll find a way to tax that as well...

Anyhow, if you find me online (Tommaso Dorigo, Venezia, Italy... tonno923 - as in pogo!) please give me a call and we can chat!

Now for some careless eating!

Well, I knew it would happen and it did.

I had predicted I would have no trouble in losing the 15 pounds I needed to, with a gigantic move upcoming and the end of the remodeling of the new house lingering, plus with my own determination in losing the weight I had carelessly accumulated in the last 5 months since my last diet.

I did lose 14 pounds. I am now as lean as ever, that is, well, normal, not overweight. I am now 155 pounds, for 1.77 m of height. I think my ideal weight is around 160, so I am happy about this. In my weight chart here, you can see my last diet as the straight descending trend on the far right. The vertical scale is in kilograms and the horizontal scale is in days. I lost 14 pounds or so in about 70 days...

Yesterday I decided that I need to actually gain a couple of pounds now. I drank a pint of beer to celebrate...

No comments ?

Hmmm... Seems like nobody reads my blog anymore. I had expected somebody to post a comment to my blog about Jennifer (see below, next entry in the blog) to give me a email address, or a phone number. Darn. The web isnt so powerful an advertising tool after all, if you are not selling sex videos or electronics.

I still hope that somebody will give me a trace.... I know you're out there, dubious whether you should give me that email. Please do, I swear I am a good guy and I am not a stalker! :)

Looking for Jennifer Chan

Well, if you know a Jennifer Chan and would like to help, read on!

I've always thought that good friends are a real treasure, and that friendship is to be cherished, to be cared for, and that one must struggle to keep it alive. I have several good friends around the world, and although I do not hear frequently from them, whenever we meet it's always as if no time had passed. I think real friendship lasts forever.

I once had a very good friend. Jennifer Chan. She is a chinese-american girl a few years younger than me - I think she's 35 now. She is lean and tall, with long, straight, dark hair. She is definitely a beautiful woman. I met her at a summer school at Stanford, in the summer of 1996. She was the Slac Summer Institute's secretary. We hang around together with several other students during the two weeks of the school, but we became real friends only later, when we started exchanging e-mails and sort of resonated in no time - she and I did not have a lot in common but our ideas on many things were the same - and we both loved to write!

The story of my friendship with Jennifer is long and won't interest the occasional reader here. Suffices to say that I met her again a couple of times in Chicago and then at Stanford the next year, when I attended again the SSI school, and then she decided to come and live in Milano. She had a real love for Italy, and on the contrary she did not like a lot her life in California. I helped her find a place, but as extraordinary as she was, without even knowing a word of italian, she quickly found a way to survive in the jungle of the biggest italian metropolis, Milano. Then we started to see her more frequently, since she visited me and Mariarosa in Venice several times, and we met a few more times in Milano. We exchanged messages almost on a daily basis. We were very close, she would ask me for advice on everything that was going on in her life, and I did the same with her. 

Our friendship lasted four years. In the fall of 1999, something broke among us. I failed to support her in a choice she had made, and for which she very much expected me to give her my full and unconditioned approval. I was trying to be a friend, telling her what I really thought, but that's not what Jen wanted from me. She did not forgive me then, and despite my attempts at reconciliation, she stopped writing to me. We lost touch.

Six years have passed! And I had no news from her whatsoever during this time. Recently, I decided this was simply not right. I would like to be able to talk to her again, to know if she is doing well, to just hear her voice. I am sure she still believes I have failed as a friend six years ago, but I also think that she would like to hear from me.

Jennifer Chan... How many girls with this name exist in the world ? 1,000 ? Maybe more. I tried to search for her on the web, but it is tough with a name like that! The old mail address does not exist any more, the phone number I have does not work. Amazingly, I have no other contact of common friends who kept in touch with her - I tried, but failed to find a trace.

But... Several people in HEP do remember Jennifer, I am sure. She worked at SLAC from 1995 to 1998. Is it possible that some of you out there know how to get a hold of her ? I would really appreciate your help!

People who were in touch with Jennifer, and who might still have a way to contact her, are Alfie Pacheco, a gay friend from Washington State University; Lilian de Porcel, who was head secretary of the SSI at SLAC during those years; or Odd Magne Ogreid, who is a theorist at University of Bergen, in Norway, and who was a good friend of Jen. I have not been able to contact any of them either...

Free from charges

Effective last week, I am free from any organizational charges within the CDF collaboration (or the CMS collaboration, for that matter - I never had any there).

I decided to step down from the Jet Energy convenership to make my life easier in the next few months. I am in fact trying to concentrate on preparing for the tests I will have to pass to get a tenured position, which are going to happen early next year.

For the same reason, I also stepped down from my responsibility as the leader of the Z->bb analysis group. I passed that burden to Julien (on the right, trying to catch the gravitational waves of a liter of chianti), who has been working at it with me in the last two years. Julien well understands that the task is not easy: the plan is to produce a full blessing of the measurement of the Z->bb signal and the b-Jet Energy Scale factor (from fits to the Z peak in the jet-jet mass distribution). That information, a pure number close to 1.0, is going to be used by all CDF top mass measurements in the future, if we provide it with enough precision. It will not be easy to deliver what we somehow promised, that is a 2% measurement (say 1.00+-0.02) with 1 inverse femtobarn of data.

I will still overlook the activities, but really have to concentrate on my future exams.... I have to say, I feel somewhat relieved of the decreased level of responsibility!

Besides, I still am a tutor of two PhD students. Giorgio will graduate next January, but Marco will continue for one more year. And in January I will start working with Elena and Mia, who will start their specialization thesis in Physics...

But writing macros, attending meetings, producing plots, writing talks, coordinating the work of people... That is on stand-by for most of the cold season ahead.