pontiff
Posts by this author
January 6, 2009
For 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.…
January 5, 2009
It 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…
January 5, 2009
Anyone 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)?
January 1, 2009
Quantum 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…
December 31, 2008
Like 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…
December 30, 2008
Moving 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 Note that I really am doing this as I read the book (I'm reading it really really slowly), so what I say here may be outdated by the time I get…
December 29, 2008
So 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…
December 29, 2008
A 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…
December 22, 2008
Skiing 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."
December 21, 2008
Whew. 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…
December 17, 2008
Amusing, 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…
December 15, 2008
Oh 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…
December 14, 2008
Who can find what is wrong the quickest in arXiv:0812.1385 (or verify that it is correct!)? 1,2,3,....go!
December 11, 2008
Holy 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…
December 11, 2008
The 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…
December 11, 2008
Well 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…
December 10, 2008
Via 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…
December 10, 2008
Reminder: 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.
December 10, 2008
Guffaw!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…
December 9, 2008
A 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…
December 9, 2008
In this era of the impending apocalypse, what the hell is a report about United States students actually showing gains in mathematics doing in the New York Times? Dude, media, get on message and send us some more doom and gloom! I especially need more gloom here in Seattle where the sun rises at…
December 5, 2008
News from the other coast: MIT has won an IGERT to start an interdisciplinary graduate program in quantum information science. From the press release:MIT has been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a pioneering doctoral-study program in the growing field…
December 4, 2008
Robert Ebert: Win Ben Stein's Mind.
Peter R. Saulson: Review of "Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture" by Alan Sokal
Skewers of "Expelled" from the first:This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous…
December 4, 2008
Via Michael Nielsen's friendfeed, I am led to ACM Classic Books Series. If you've got ACM subscription access, some of the book are even in electronic form. Cool. I love the introduction to "The Computer and the Brain" by John von Neumann:Since I am neither a neurologist nor a psychiatrist, but…
December 3, 2008
Buried under way too much work right now. So for your viewing pleasure (ha) an epic story of Christmas tree hunting in the great pacific northwest.
They trekked over land (no sea):
And spotted a tree on a small cliff. But how to get it down?
Successful hunters:
And yes, it will fit in the car:
December 2, 2008
Nature article on El Naschie. (See also The Case of M.S. El Naschie, Continued.)
Opening scene from the Nature article, the greatest of all euphemisms, "retirement" starts off the showThe editor of a theoretical-physics journal, who was facing growing criticism that he used its pages to publish…
December 1, 2008
Postdoc with some awesome Canadian quantum researchers:
Quantum Information Processing Program
JUNIOR (POSTDOCTORAL) FELLOWSHIPS
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a private not-for-profit research institute. It is a catalyst for discovery, incubating ideas that revolutionize…
December 1, 2008
The blackberry hole (aka the Perimeter Institute) has swallowed another person. Most fittingly, however, this time the observer will exist both inside and outside of the Perimeter Institute, thus giving us an answer to the black hole information paradox:WATERLOO, Ontario, Canada, November, 2008 -…
November 25, 2008
The deadline for SqUinT abstracts for posters and talks is Nov 26th. See here.