Funny Ha Ha
pontiff | June 6, 2010
Yes, dear Gray Lady, you certainly sound more sophisticated when you use the word "prime number" in your newspaper. But perhaps you might want to look up the actual meaning of the word before placing those words prominently beside two times five times five.
pontiff | February 10, 2010Some confusing headlines:
Quantum Theory's Release Date Now 'TBA'
Quantum Theory Faces Delay Due to Quality Reasons
Quantum Theory Delayed
pontiff | November 19, 2009Too often in life I am sending out a check to some charitable organization, or to resubscribe to Bacon magazine, and I think "damn this would be a lot better with Bacon." And now via the honest one, I find out that there is a solution to this vexing problem: Bacon flavored envelopes! From the "learn more" section of the webstie:
Technology has given us a lot lately. The car. TV. X-rays. The refrigerator. The Internet. Heck, we even cured polio. But what have our envelopes tasted like for the last 4,000 years? Armpit, that's what.
Really, people? If we can't overcome this kind of minor…
pontiff | November 13, 2009Friday the 13th is, apparently, a day of must read articles. This time it's Steven Pinker's review of Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. Readers who have taken linear algebra will be amused:
He provides misleading definitions of "homology," "saggital plane" and "power law" and quotes an expert speaking about an "igon value" (that's eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert…
pontiff | October 14, 2009From the annals of high idiocy, I enjoyed this sequence of emails at BofA:
"Unfortunately it's screw the shareholders!!" Charles K. Gifford wrote to a fellow director in an e-mail exchange that took place during the call.
"No trail," Thomas May, that director, reminded him, an apparent reference to the inadvisability of leaving an e-mail thread of their conversation.
...
Shortly after Mr. May's remark about an e-mail trail, Mr. Gifford said his comments were made in "the context of a horrible economy!!! Will effect everyone."
"Good comeback," Mr. May replied.
You have to give Mr. Gifford at…
pontiff | August 11, 2009How did I miss this one from 2005? And how come no one told me to take off my tinfoil hat? Via @kmerritt, "On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study" by Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter.
Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either…
pontiff | July 30, 2009Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is "Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking." Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don't know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is one who is doing cool quantum computing research ("cracking?" and "hacking?" btw.)
I open up the article and who is the police woman? It's Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described…
pontiff | July 13, 2009Over at the optimizer's blog, quantum computing's younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I'd only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave…
pontiff | June 24, 2009When I was a postdoc, I made it a habit to try to spend at least one week a year visiting Isaac Chuang's lab at MIT. There were many reason for this, including that Ike has been a collaborator of mine, and Ken Brown, another collaborator was working as a postdoc in the lab. But another reason was...it's damn nice for a theorist to sit in a real experimental lab. Oh sure, you need to keep the theorists away from all the cords and knobs for fear that they might actually touch something. And don't ever let a theorist chose the music being played in the lab or you'll end up hearing some real…
pontiff | June 3, 2009In the University of Washington's "The Daily" in the lost and found section:
FOUND - PANDA head, appears to be a part of a missing suit. Recovered near 45th and Memorial. presumably stolen by ill-advised sorority girls during their week-long, drunken stupor
pontiff | April 12, 2009I am always greatly amused by the display of frustration in which one threatens to leave a country if things don't change. During the end of the first term of Bush the Second, it was common in the United States to hear liberals express their anger as: "If he wins a second term, I'm going to move to Canada." (If you go too far to the left, you end up in Canada?) The expression reached spectacular heights, in my opinion, however, when Tina Fey said of Sarah Palin that if McCain/Palin won the presidential election, Fey would "leave Earth."
But now that the evil liberals have taken over the…
pontiff | April 3, 2009..asks a facebook application.
Apparently I am the kind of physicist who likes proper spelling and proper capitalization, and who thus, will not take a quiz with bad spelling. Which physicist is that? Gell-Mann?
pontiff | February 26, 2009For those scientists out on the job market this year, the following from TheLadders.com might be a little scary:
Two annihilated industries and...science.
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 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 | 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 | November 13, 2008Melody points me to this gem of an advisory from the NSF:
In the event of a natural or anthropogenic disaster that interferes with an organization's ability to meet a proposal submission deadline, NSF has developed the following guidelines for use by impacted organizations. These guidelines will take the place of the previous NSF practice of posting notices to the NSF website regarding each specific event.
Flexibility in meeting announced deadline dates because of a natural or anthropogenic disasters may be granted with the prior approval of the cognizant NSF Program Officer. Proposers…
pontiff | September 28, 2008From this Sunday's New York Times in an article entitled Wall Street, R.I.P.:
In search of ever-higher returns -- and larger yachts, faster cars and pricier art collections for their top executives -- Wall Street firms bulked up their trading desks and hired pointy-headed quantum physicists to develop foolproof programs.
Quantum physicists? Come on media get it right. I'm pretty sure those were string theorists who ruined America ;)
Personally I think we should use the association of Ph.D. physicists as the cause of the Wall Street mess to lobby for higher science funding. "Sure you could…