pontiff | January 6, 2009For those of us quantum computing folk heading to QIP 2009 in Santa Fe, NM, a few recommendations from someone who once called Santa Fe home.
Food
The first thing you must realize is that New Mexican food is not Mexican food, nor is it Tex-Mex (bleh: worst food ever), but is really it's own form. In addition, Santa Fe has a ton of good food (for a town so small) which is not New Mexican. The second thing you must understand is that New Mexico has a state question! You will be asked this question at dinner. The question is "Red or Green?" an refers to what type of chile you would like.…
pontiff | January 5, 2009It is nearly impossible for me to believe that five years have passed since you passed away.
And hey, we're still waiting for Mt. Shasta to explode, could you get working on that?
One day, when I was an undergraduate at Caltech, I received a package in the mail from my father. In it was a small yellow squash with red dots painted onto it along with a strip of paper which read "what is this?" Well, Caltech is full of some pretty smart people, so we spent a few days trying to reason what this strange package that my father sent was. Small. Yellow. Squash. With red dots. Huh? After a…
pontiff | January 5, 2009Anyone else catch Little Miss Sunshine on USA this weekend? The scene where the brother Dwayne breaks his vow of silence has to be one of the longest silence bleeps of all time. Anyone know of of a longer one (for one word, not for a string of words)?
pontiff | January 1, 2009Quantum Loonies
Alán Aspuru-Guzik
Brissie to Brizzle
Cohærence*
Complementary Slackness
David Deutsch's Blog
not exactly in focus
Physics and cake
Quantized Thoughts
Quantum Algorithms
Quantum Moxie
Quantum Quandries
rdv live from Tokyo
rose.blog
Shtetl-Optimized
we don't need no "sticking" room 408
Zeroth Order Approximation
Physics and Astronomy Propoganda
Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line
Angry Physics
Arcane Gazebo
Asymptotia
atdotde
Backreaction
Cocktail Party Physics
Cosmic Variance
Dynamics of Cats
illuminating science
incoherently scattered ponderings
Information Processing
Life as…
pontiff | December 31, 2008Like the title says: Happy New Year!
Looking back at the list of top scited papers on scirate.com, shows some good fun indeed:
23 SciTes - 0811.3171
Title: Quantum algorithm for solving linear systems of equations
Authors: Aram W. Harrow, Avinatan Hassidim, Seth Lloyd
23 SciTes - 0809.3972
Title: A Counterexample to Additivity of Minimum Output Entropy
Authors: M. B. Hastings
19 SciTes - 0807.4935
Title: Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels
Authors: Graeme Smith, Jon Yard
18 SciTes - 0804.4050
Title: Matchgates and classical simulation of quantum circuits
Authors: Richard Jozsa…
pontiff | December 30, 2008Moving on to Chapter 1 in my ongoing pedantic plodding through Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. See here for what this is all about. Note that I really am doing this as I read the book (I'm reading it really really slowly), so what I say here may be outdated by the time I get further into the book.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1.
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…
pontiff | December 29, 2008So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's newest book Outliers: The Story of Success the other day, as I'm sure many of you will be doing on your next trip to the airport (where stands of Gladwell's hardcover book, marked down thirty percent, block your every exit through the already cramped airport bookstores.) Gladwell's books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. Well "entertaining" in that "holy shit dude you are pedantic" sort of way. Note that I really do…
pontiff | December 29, 2008A while back, Aram commented on how he had trouble trying to get arXiv links into a paper he had written (read the further comments for a comment indicating that it was not the policy of the journal to do this.)
Which reminded me: I believe I've submitted papers with arXiv references to Physical Review A, but looking back over the papers I don't see any such references unless the paper was never published. Does anyone know Physical Review's policy on this? A quick scan of the guidelines didn't yield anything. Shouldn't Physical Review be allowing these links? Sure if I want to be careful…
pontiff | December 22, 2008Skiing past our home in Seattle:
Later a group of local kids made a snowboard jump...I would have used it but it didn't look all that sturdy, and I probably would have ended up with an action shot of "Dave destroying local kids joy."
pontiff | December 21, 2008Whew. That was quite a quarter! Talk about drinking straight from a firehose. Okay, okay, I still have a long list of missed deadlines that I need to get to ASAP, but at last it feels like maybe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (don't tell me its the next quarter, I want to be delusional for at least a few days.)
The winter break is always a great time, most importantly because "OMG snow!" (Seattle got another four plus inches of snow last night. Dude, that's like a two feet equivalent in most of the rest of the northern U.S.!) and because of all the great Christmas cheer (…
pontiff | December 17, 2008Amusing, in a twisted an irritating sort of way.
Who's on first:
Dear scholars:
Here is an invitation letter from 6th International Conference on Service Systems and Service Management(ICSSSM'09) which will be held in Xiamen in June next year. We hope you can submit your new papers and exchange new ideas with us. There is a call for letter in attachment. And if you're interested in,please login our conference website: http://sm2.xmu.edu.cn/icsssm09/index.htm.
Looking forward to your participation…
pontiff | December 15, 2008Oh noes: Scientists Warn Large Earth Collider May Destroy Earth:
BATAVIA, IL--In October, Fermilab scientists joined a growing number of physicists around the world in warning that the Very Large Earth Collider--a $117 billion electromagnetic particle accelerator built to study astronomical phenomena by colliding Earth into various heavenly bodies--could potentially destroy Earth when it sends the planet careening headlong into Mars, Jupiter, or even the sun.
...
Physicists at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who underwrote the VLEC's construction with donations from the Bill and…
pontiff | December 14, 2008Who can find what is wrong the quickest in arXiv:0812.1385 (or verify that it is correct!)? 1,2,3,....go!
pontiff | December 11, 2008Holy mole: a $50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme run by Bernard L. Madoff. That's an astounding amount of money if true.
Update: This is now big news, of course. For an interesting read of someone who has been pursuing this fraud since 1999 see The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud by Harry Markopolos. h/t nakedshorts.
pontiff | December 11, 2008The Optimizer ideas on Worldview Manager gets written up in Forbes.
The program will work by showing users a list of statements about a topic and then asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with each. At the end, the system will present users with a list of the statements they endorsed that contradict one another. It will also suggest that users reconsider those views and the assumptions behind them.
Similar teaching programs already exist for narrow fields, especially in technical areas of philosophy. Aaronson, though, is extremely ambitious for Worldview Manager and wants it to…
pontiff | December 11, 2008Well I'm sure the physics blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Steven Chu is expected to be named by President-elect Obama to head the Department of Energy. Wait let me look. Yep: heisendad, varyingsean, chunothsu, angryphysicist, nanodude, lubotic, toinfinityandbeyond and thedeterminantsnotzero. (OK that last comes from non-physicists, but I couldn't resist a linear algebra joke.)
Since I have little to add besides the fact that laser cooling rocks, I present the first few lines of a song that was sung by a band at Berkeley concerning the person Chu shared the Nobel prize with, Cohen-…
pontiff | December 10, 2008Via Zz, a link to Symmetry Breaking's list of physics based license plates.
Sweet I'll have to submit my old California plates:
If there is one thing I will regret in life it is that I missed one of the most "terrifiq" opportunities of all time. While I was at the Santa Fe Institute, I had my QUBITS plates and sometimes would park beside Murray Gell-Mann's car which had a QUARKS license place. At one point Ben Schumacher, who invented the word "qubit", visited the Santa Fe Institute. Damnit that was my opportunity to get a picture of two people who invented words in the dictionary…
pontiff | December 10, 2008Reminder: the deadline for the registration for the SquInT conference (to be held in sunny partially sunny cloudy rainy Seattle) is this Friday, Dec 12. See here.
pontiff | December 10, 2008Guffaw!
Mr. Blagojevich seemed not to mind earlier news reports that his conversations had been recorded. "I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it," he said, though he added that those who carried out such recordings sneakily, "I would remind them that it kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate."
pontiff | December 9, 2008A while back I added my library to librarything.com. In adding this books I tagged my books with various keywords. As you can imagine there were a lot tagged as "physics." Indeed when I entered the books there were only a few people who had a comparable number of physics tags, among them a user called lasermazer. Recently I checked in, and damnit, there is now a library that has a lot more physics tags books:
Yes that is the Thomas Jefferson! A cool feature of library thing are "legacy libraries" where you can compare your overlap with other historic libraries. But wait. Thomas…