pontiff
Posts by this author
How did I miss this, an obvious entry into the best title ever contest:
arXiv:0810.2587
A photonic cluster state machine gun
Authors: Netanel H. Lindner, Terry Rudolph
Quick, duck for cover, Terry is shooting us with cluster states!
Today is the 149th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. I'm probably just suffering from a bout of dewy eyed pastoralism, but when was the last time a book which was readable by the general public was also a major work of science? (Not Here That's For Sure…
This is rivalry week
In a battle of two of the most craptacular teams in college football, Washington State turned out to be less craptacular and beat Washington 16-13 in double overtime. Congrats Washington State, you stink just a little less than the worst team in football (okay maybe Wyoming is…
Johnny Chung Lee has some cool videos up about wiimote tacking mods and.....more.
Tell me which of these is stranger:
or
?
A reminder from Ivan for those who want to attend SqUinT
Dear SQuInTers,
Please remember that abstract submission for contributed talks and posters are due in one week, Nov. 26.
http://panda.unm.edu/SQuInT/contribute.php
Registration payment deadline -- Dec. 12.
http://panda.unm.edu/…
If only I were Michael J. Fox, a letter I would send back in time.
Dear Respected Mathematician/Scientist/Researcher:
First of all let me tell you want an honor it is to write to you from the future. Your work is so important in my time that we have named the main theorem which you proved in your…
Over at Uncertain Principles, the uncertainty father has a couple of posts up about parallel universes the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory. Which reminded me of a rant I've been needing to write (sorry a bit of technical jargon to follow.)
History adds that before or after dying he…
Observations on time.
One hour of exercise is much more important for my well being than one hour of sleep.
Why does the physics department at the University of Washington have a sundial on the building? I mean, yes it is very cool, but no there are not many opportunities to use it!
Michael…
Registration for QIP 2009 is now open:
QIP 2009 -- 12th WORKSHOP ON QUANTUM INFORMATION PROCESSING -
Santa Fe, New Mexico USA. January 12-16, 2009.
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN at http://qipworkshop.org/
Deadline for special conference hotel rates: December 1st.
Quantum Information Processing is the…
Engadget picks up on the bacon theme, a bacon iphone case:
You can buy one for your favorite vegetarian for only 25 euro.
In other bacon news, five pounds?!?!
I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia...eh. For some reason they have a parade at night in November with floats containing Santa and reindeer (obligatory crappy cell phone picture to follow):
Yeah, what the hell?
Interesting conference, I'm attending. I haven't been at a conference in ages where disagreed…
Direct imaging of extra solar planets. The cat dynamicist has the details. (because, linking, I've heard, is good.) Fomalhaut b, a nice name.
When I was on the road to becoming an astrophysicist, as a young grad student, I remember thinking how cool it would be to join the planet hunters. I mean…
Melody 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…
New NSF policies on faculty salaries:
A major revision of NSF's faculty salary reimbursement policy, to limit compensation for senior personnel to no more than two months of their regular salary in any one year from all NSF-funded grants
This pretty much eliminates any NSF funded research…
John Baez (via Zoran Škoda) points to the case of M.S. El Naschie. El Naschie is apparently the answer to the question "how do you publish over three hundred papers of craziness in an Elsevier journal?" Simple: just become the editor and chief of the journal!
Tell me again the argument about…
The 11th Annual SQuInT Conference (dude that makes me feel old) will be held in Seattle this year. Seattle is in the southwest because Southwest airline flies here (quick book the direct flights from Albuquerque!) In conjunction with this there will also be a satellite meeting, the Workshop on…
If you want to have a productive day I suggest avoiding Assembler.
Via: "Phd"ed Man
When sky's fall, apparently they do not fall equally everywhere (contrary to popular theory.) A partial is of those who've held up the sky (and even pushed higher) in this New York Times article:
Bernard V. Drury is a rarity on Wall Street: a hedge fund manager who is making money rather than…
Zotero is a Firefox browser plugin for keeping track of citations and is very useful in an academic environment. I've played with it from time to time and with each progressive version it is getting better and better. Apparently now its even good enought that, Thomson Reuters, makers of Endnote…
Science on blogs? We don't need no science on blogs! We need more Bacon on blogs:
Bacon Versus Fries. Not what you think.
Bacon Maple Donut. Or how about Diet Coke with Bacon. If you've ever seen me you are all ready likely to have seen a Bacon with a Diet Coke.
I wrote a paper with David DiVincenzo once. Now he is in the title of a YouTube video. Some things you can never predict.
Part of me wants to say very loudly OMG. The other part of me watched the full six episodes.
Parts 2-6 below the fold. Hat tip Aggie.
Part II:
Part III:
Part IV:
Part V:…
"Local" politics.
Siskiyou County, CA (on the CA/OR border), where I grew up (population 44301, population density 8 per square mile, median household income $29530), voted 53.6 percent for McCain and 43.7 percent for Obama. That's extremely close for a very red county (2004 it was 60 percent Bush…
A common refrain among members of the left in the United States in the last two presidential elections has been that if the right wins then they would "move to Canada." This was, of course, recently one-upped by Tina Fey who quipped that if McCain-Palin won this year, she would "leave the Earth…
Shor's algorithm is an algorithm for quantum computers which allows for efficiently factoring of numbers. This in turn allows Shor's algorithm to break the RSA public key cryptosystem. Further variations on Shor's algorithm break a plethora of other public key cryptosystems, including those based…
This weekend the grapes for my second "real" batch of wine were delivered to Mountain Homebrew and Wine Supply. Last years vintage, Villa Sophia "La Gruccia" was a success in that it didn't turn to vinegar and that over time it is definitely mellowing out, but I wouldn't say it was a fantastic…
I've spent the last two days in the San Francisco bay area visiting first Stanford and then Berkeley.
Highlights of the trip included:
Talking to Jelena Vuckovic about the work she and her group have been performing on strongly coupling photonic crystals to quantum dots.
Talking to Thaddeus…
Turn your face into a name (via torque). The "quantum pontiff" apparently has long hair: