pontiff | February 2, 2009Compare and contrast.
That first one has some good book review snark:
T. C. Boyle's dreary new novel, "The Women," isn't a rewrite of Clare Boothe Luce's wicked 1936 play "The Women." It's a rewrite of the life of Frank Lloyd Wright that somehow manages to turn the gripping, operatic saga of America's premier architect and the women in his life into a tedious, predictable melodrama.
Ouch. Followed by a discussion of the backwards in time narrative technique:
Unfortunately for the reader, this inorganic, needlessly complex architecture -- of the sort that Wright would utterly disdain in a…
pontiff | February 1, 2009Amusing line from a New York Times article this morning:
"Are you aware under what conditions I worked in 1996?" he said by telephone from Mexico. "It's only because of my lawsuit that you or anybody else can pick up a tape. In those days, I could not leave the archives with that material. I used state-of-the-lost-art equipment. I brought in a team of court reporters to help me with the first drafts.
State-of-the-lost-art? He used a telephonoscope?
pontiff | January 30, 2009Like many an arrogant kid before me, when I graduate from high school in my podunk hometown (no, it wasn't marshy, and I say podunk with all the warm feelings of a idyllic childhood), I was filled with confidence that I was one of the smartest people I knew. Oh, I'd never say it, and yes I knew I was good mostly at only one small thing, mathematics, but I'm pretty certain looking back that I was a pretty confident ass. As you can well imagine, then, transitioning from my high school to Caltech, an institution filled with near-perfect-SAT-scoring students, Nobel laureate faculty members, and a…
pontiff | January 28, 2009Via Alea: the CME trading simulation game. If only it were this easy:
I suspect that in the real world, doing the opposite of what I did would be required to actually make money :)
pontiff | January 26, 2009Amusings.
Good: temperatures higher than freezing!
Bad: conference schedule at awesome resort which just taunts you cus you're stuck inside (that withstanding the talks are awesome but due to a turn of events, I will have to leave early.)
Good: Did you know that there is a part of Florida which stretches way down towards Cuba? Holy crap am I a west coaster.
Bad: Toll roads.
Good: Alligator crossing signs!
Bad: Alligators!
pontiff | January 22, 2009Part three in my continuing pedantic slow-as-molasses walk through Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1, ch 2.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I'm an idiot, please tell me why!
Having, in the past chapter (hopefully) convinced us that…
pontiff | January 20, 2009My favorite line from today's inauguration speech:
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
The following…
pontiff | January 19, 2009From a crazy model to a concrete question: is there a nice mathematical structure hidden here?
Once upon a time I wrote a crazy paper (arXiv:quant-ph/03091189) on quantum computation in the presence of closed time-like curves. In this model, one identifies two types of quantum systems: those that are "chronology respecting" and those that traverse "closed time-like curves." These two types of quantum systems can interact amongst themselves and also between each other. A typical setup is as in the figure at the right, where n chronology respecting qubits interact with l closed time-like qubits…
pontiff | January 16, 2009Method for using Ecto and LaTeXiT.
I've been playing around with a workaround for using LaTeX in Scienceblogs (the powers that be have promised this power, but I need my equations now!)
The solution I've found is a bit of a kludge, but not that bad. First of all I'm using an offline blogging software: ecto. Ecto has a rich text editor (and a good switch to html without a bunch of ugly html code) and a nice feature of drag and drop for images. Then I use LaTeXiT to create a png of the equation I want to insert (LaTeXiT needs to be configured to export png) and then just drag and drop. Of…
pontiff | January 16, 2009The Perimeter Scholars Institute is a Masters level course designed to prepare students for cutting-edge research in theoretical physics. It looks pretty cool with some outstanding lecturers. The application deadline is February 1. All accepted students will be fully supported. Details below the fold.
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) is a leading international research centre whose goal is to catalyze breakthroughs in our understanding of the physical world. PI strives to create a lively and dynamic research atmosphere where many approaches to fundamental questions, both…
pontiff | January 16, 2009The last day of QIP in Santa Fe. Also note that Joe has posted some nice notes on additivity on his blog: part I and part II. Oh, and QIP next year will be in Zurich, and QIP the year after next will be in Singapore.
computing, conference, quantum
Lluis Masanes, "Towards device-independent security in QKD"
Paper: arXiv:0807.2158. I cam in late, so was a bit lost. But basically Lluis talked about secret key distillation under weaker assumptions than just assuming quantum theory. It seems that one an do secret key distillation from accessing the correlations that violate Bell inequalities…
pontiff | January 15, 2009Stuff learned while at QIP.
A solution to the more cranky P versus NP problem: simply send those who claim P=NP the papers claiming P does not equal NP, and vice versa
I did not know that the cell phone ring tone which is hard for older people to hear was first used by restraunts to keep away kids. That's pretty evil.
When the question says he used to work in the earth sciences as a preface at a quantum computing conference, you should update your prior about the person being homeless
I now understand arXiv:0810.3695 better and particularly am interested in the trick of using an…
pontiff | January 15, 2009Sorry to those who talked in the afternoon yesterday: I ran off to listen to Michael Nielsen talk at the Santa Fe Institute.
Charles Marcus, "Holding quantum information in electron spins"
Charlie gave a talk about the state of quantum computing in solid state quantum dot systems. Things Charlie talked about:
T1 times of single electron spins of 1 second from Mark Kastner's group:
arXiv:0707.1656. Those are long, and it would be awesome to have those for real working devices!
Delft's work on single electron spin manipulations: "Driven coherent oscillations of a single electron spin in a…
pontiff | January 14, 2009A full day today, after a nice break yesterday (went for a run: yeah for altitude making me winded nearly instantly!)
Andrew Childs, "Universal computation by quantum walk
Andrew Childs talked about a subject whose origin can be pretty much tracked back to Feynman in the 1980s. In particular Feynman constructed a model of computing in which you have a time independent Hamiltonian. In today's language this is equivalent to showing that there is a quantum random walk which is universal for quantum computing (though Andrew mentioned that this was a model for classical computing using a quantum…
pontiff | January 13, 2009A half day at QIP.
The reason I'm having a hard time keeping away this morning:
Avinatan Hassidim, "Multi-prover interactive proofs with communicating provers"
Paper arXiv:0806.3982. Avinatan described work he performed with Michael Ben-Or and Haran Pilpel on multiprover interactive proofs in which the prover/verifier communication is quantum and the provers are allowed to communicate classically. One would expect, at first glance, that this model is very weak. For example if we augment the provers with entanglement they can then communicate and this model is equivalent to a single prover…
pontiff | January 12, 2009Having some glitches publishing, so am trying to split up the posts.
Continuing on the quantum information theory beat:
John Smolin (speaker) and Graeme Smith, "Can non-private channels transmit quantum information?"
John began by explaining the stages of grief and how this relates to the demolishing of the two additivity questions (described above.) He also showed a picture of a certain interesting way to achieve computer privacy...similar to those found here:
The work John talked about is described in arXiv:0810.0276. The private channel capacity is the capacity of a quantum channel to…
pontiff | January 12, 2009QIP 2009 started today in Santa Fe, NM. Since the conference organizers have seen it wise to include wireless access, what better excuse for a bit of liveblogging.
Andrew Landahl gave us a nice introduction to QIP and explained the New Mexico State question (I'm thinking of starting a movement in California to have a state answer. If you've ever lived in California, you'd understand.) He mentioned that New Mexico has a spaceport, but forgot to ask if anyone arrived yesterday via the spaceport. Anyone? Rosewell?
Then....let the talks begin!
Matt "Michael Phelps" Hastings, "A…
pontiff | January 9, 2009Scienceblogs is upgrading. This site won't allow comments from 10pm Pacific Standard Time on Friday, January 9 until...well until the upgrade is complete (possibly Saturday sometime.)
So instead of being frustrated at not being able to comment why don't you instead go waste your time by:
By reading some provocative statements about teaching over at the information processors blog.
If you need to procrastinate about preparing a referee report, you might check out Michael Nielsen's Three myths of scientific peer review
The Statistical Mechanic is back, and discussing thermodynamics,…
pontiff | January 8, 2009I'd never seen this quote from Richard Feynman on the measurement problem:
When you start out to measure the property of one (or more) atom, say, you get for example, a spot on a photographic plate which you then interpret. But such a spot is really only more atoms & so in looking at the spot you are again measuring the properties of atoms, only now it is more atoms. What can we expect to end with if we say we can't see many things about one atom precisely, what in fact can we see? Proposal,
Only those properties of a single atom can be measured which can be correlated (with finite…
pontiff | January 7, 2009Special relativity holds a special (*ahem*) place in most physicist's physicists' hearts. I myself fondly remember learning special relativity from the first edition of Taylor and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics obtained from my local county library (this edition seemed a lot less annoying than the later edition I used at Caltech.) One of the fun things I remember calculating when I learned this stuff was what "right in front of your nose" meant in different frames of reference.
Suppose you've got your own handy dandy inertial frame all set up. You've got your rules and you're your clocks and…