Hello @lemouth,
Welcome back. Sounds like Hivefest was fun. Every picture and report I read from participants in that event is positive. Everyone seems to have had a great experience.
Hope you are feeling well. It is relaxing, and taxing, to travel.
Now to your blog: I read it on my iPad before going to sleep last night. Much more relaxing than world news😇. The first thing I noted was the illustration of the trigger mechanism: it looks so unsophisticated. Reminds me of a circuit board in an electronics kit. And yet, so much of the data you analyze depends on the 'decisions' of that trigger.
This part caught my attention especially:
anyone outside the LHC collaborations cannot handle them properly for the simple reason that related information is generally not public.
As a consequence, anyone outside a collaboration must be conservative, and should only rely on a single sub-analysis in any statistics tests. The subsequent results could therefore be quite off from what could be obtained through sub-analysis combinations.
You publish your paper in an open access journal, and yet there is information that cannot be shared. Why? Because the results of these studies could conceivably be used in weapons development?
It's nice to have you back and opening my mind to an area of study that would otherwise be closed to me.
Take care, @lemouth