pontiff
Posts by this author
July 9, 2009
The report from the Workshop on Quantum Information Science has now been posted. Color commentary soon :)
July 9, 2009
Among the winners of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers this year I find a few familiar quantum names: Sean Hallgren (poor Sean was forced to share an office me at Caltech), Adam Smith, and Jason Petta. +10 tenure points awarded. Via @fortnow.
July 8, 2009
The arXiv is a game changer for how large portions of physics (and increasingly other fields) are done. Paul Ginsparg won a MacArthur award for his vision and stewardship of the arXiv (something other institutions might want to note when they decide that someone trying to change how science is…
July 8, 2009
Has the arXiv been hacked or is it offline? When I connect to arxiv.org it shoots me to mirror sites which haven't been updated since Oct 08. Via @MartinQuantum. Also nanoscale views reports the arXiv down.
Since this is a blog we can easily spread rumors by including a link to an article today…
July 4, 2009
Never a bad time to take a look at Mr. Jefferson's document (and also thank you Thomas, for serving tubers at Monticello at a time when people thought they would kill you.)
July 2, 2009
DARPA, you know the people who invented the internet ("100 geniuses connected by a travel agent"), has a new director: The Department of Defense (DoD) today announced the appointment of Regina E. Dugan as the 19th director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is the…
July 2, 2009
ArXiview, my arXiv browsing iPhone app, has been updated for the new iPhone OS 3.0. New features include:
Search fields now accept boolean queries and exact phrase queries. Touch the little (i) icon to get info on this feature from the search page.
Search by identifier has been added.
There is…
July 2, 2009
Okay, I'm calling it. We have officially reached the top of the Bacon loving bubble. Why? The dress made of Bacon indicator has been tripped. This indicator has a 50 percent probability of beating the magic 8 ball in predicting the top of past Bacon bubbles. I predict a hard landing for Bacon…
July 1, 2009
Over at my old blog one thread which keeps on giving is my missive about Dr. Wayne Dyer which now has over 2000 comments. I can always tell when it's PBS pledge drive time by the bump in traffic on my old website and the increase in comments on this post. Today I got a spam comment on the post.…
June 30, 2009
This last weekend we made it out to artopia in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood. One of the cool event at artopia was the power tool races. That's right, power tool's or other appliances propelling themselves down a long track! Here, for instance, is my favorite, the Piña Collider:
Won the…
June 30, 2009
Summer doesn't officially start here in Seattle until the fourth of July, but the summer vibe is definitely here. Which means no teaching, so it's all research all the time. But a man cannot live by his own research alone, which leads me to the vast brain dump that is the internet.
Things found…
June 29, 2009
Is Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Information the first quantum institute to have a twitter feed?
Update: @WaterlooIQC tells me that no they probably aren't the first. That title probably goes to iqoqi.
June 29, 2009
The Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Control (the palindromic CQIQC) recently established the John Stewart Bell Prize for Research on Fundamental Issues in Quantum Mechanics and their Applications. And the first winner is (opening the envelope, wondering whether he will find a dead or…
June 26, 2009
NSF awards $400K in stimulus funding to study the impact of stimulus funding on science.Researchers at the University of Virginia get $199,951 to study the impact of stimulus funding on employment in science and engineering fields, while the University of Michigan receives $199,988 to develop a…
June 26, 2009
Via @calbucci, classic HP calculators on the iPhone.
Very old school geeky. HP 12c, HP 12c Platinum, and HP 15c.
June 25, 2009
Not sure what it's good for, but heck I'd love to play with one :)
DaVinci (Microsoft Surface Physics Illustrator) from Razorfish - Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.
June 24, 2009
The latest issue of the newsletter of the APS topical group on Quantum Information, the Quantum Times, is now available. Of particular note is the long article summarizing the Workshop on Quantum Information Science.
June 24, 2009
An old friend from my undergrad days sent me a link to Physics discussion ends in skateboard attack:A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics,…
June 24, 2009
When 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…
June 23, 2009
The "slow movement" is a vast beast: there's Slow Food, Slow Travel, Slow Money, and even, I kid you not, Slow Reading. These movements all begin with the premise that modern culture emphasizes ever increasing speed and convenience (cue the Eagle's: "Listen, baby. You can hear the engine ring. We'…
June 19, 2009
Ant 1: Protect the queen!
Ant 2: Which one's the queen?
Ant 3: I'm the queen!
Ant 1: No you're not!
Homer: Nooo! [his head smashed the colony, and the ants float free]
Ant 1: Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!
Buzz: You fool! Now we may never know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in…
June 16, 2009
I've moved my blogroll from the sidebar, to a page accessible from the tab at the top of the page. I've also updated the list a bit, cutting out dead links and such. A few of the new blogs I've put on include One Honest Man (finance, humor), Physics and Cake (physics and, um, cake), TechFlash (…
June 15, 2009
First came the qubits quiz show, and now the qubits construction toy. Okay this later one is cool because...well because it's an awesome toy for kids of all ages (yes, I'm the guy who gives your kids blocks as a present):
June 15, 2009
Dan Reed has a brief note up about a new group at Microsoft the extreme computing group (XCG) which includes among its subject areas quantum computing:XCG was formed in June 2009 with the goal of developing radical new approaches to ultrascale and high-performance computing hardware and software.…
June 15, 2009
I wasn't at Quantum Information Science Workshop in Vienna, VA, but I heard that the topic of quantum computing "going black" came up at least a few times. One speaker mentioned during his talk that several of his former graduate students were now in "the black hole" of secret U.S. research…
June 12, 2009
The "International Workshop on Dynamical Decoupling (IWODD)" now has a web site with information on the conference Oct 5-6 in Boulder, CO:Dynamical decoupling techniques show the potential to dramatically suppress errors in quantum information and quantum control systems. To date, research in this…
June 10, 2009
The astro/physics blogosphere is all atwitter about papers the Nature embargo policy (See Julianne If a paper is submitted to nature does it still make a sound, the cat herder Hear a paper, see a paper, speak no paper, and he of less than certain principles Unhealthy obsessions of academia. He of…
June 9, 2009
David Wineland runs a world class lab at NIST Boulder which has been at the forefront of ion trap quantum computing. William Phillips is a Nobel prizing winning physicist who also does quantum computing at NIST, this time at NIST Gaithersburg. To say that these are two top researchers in quantum…