WTF. A pleasant, unexpected surprise awaited me in the CMS Times, the online periodical which reports on the status of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, the research activities, the people participating in the experiment.
The surprise is that my piece on Upsilon suppression, which you, dear readers, got to read first on this site, is quoted and linked in the front page of the last edition. If I were just an ounce more arrogant and proud, I would claim that they just did the right thing, and that my piece was more accurate in a few details than a similar one appeared on the CERN site on the same topic. But I am not that arrogant. I think they paid me a very nice courtesy, and I feel honored by their act.
I perhaps should explain. These things may mean nothing to you, until your blogging takes you in bare-handed fights against thousand-strong scientific collaborations. Okay, I may not always be a good boy -I sometimes piss off whole collaborations by speaking my mind about their results here, or by publicizing the occasional rumour. but I am honest at least toward my readers.
Through six years of blogging I got heat by quite a few institutions, and countless individuals. Believe me, it is not my job to upset people or make them jealous, but it is sometimes hard to report news without being frowned upon by colleagues or plainly boycotted. A scientific collaboration I belong to even blacklisted me for a while in the past, without even paying me the courtesy of letting me know.
Now, with the link and the piece in evidence on its front page, the CMS times shows me they respect my outreach activities. I am honored and humbled.
And by the way - check out the piece by my friend and colleague John Conway at the bottom of the page! John is a veteran blogger at Cosmic Variance, but I prefer to link him when he talks in CMS Times after the personal attacks I received by the owner of CV.
