pontiff
Posts by this author
This spring/summer has been particularly cloudy in the northwest. But today it is sunny and looks to get to the pleasant high 70s. This, obviously, is due entirely to the fact that Bill Gates controls the weather and today is his last day at Microsoft. Seattle is of course, introspective on the…
A topic of much discussion I see in the Science 2.0 world (it's like the Renaissance, but with more Javascript!) is the idea of Open Notebook Science. In one version of Open Notebook Science, one simply opens up ones research notebook (or other equivalent) to outside access. For an example see…
One of the most interesting talks that many of us in the quantum computing world have seen is the talk by Manny Knill on fault-tolerant quantum computing. Above and beyond the interesting content, what was cool about this talk was that, as far as I could tell Knill used a linked PDF for the talk…
No, no, I'm not leaving academia (yet :) Pfffffft! That's the sound of me thumbing my nose at the world.) But recently I was thinking about about people who get a Ph.D. in, say, physics, or are a new postdoc, and then are faced with what to do next. As Peter Rhode, writes in a post today (or…
So you really think the LHC is going to swallow up the Earth by creating a black hole or a quacking duck with X-ray super powers? Why don't you put your money where your mouth is? Not to be confused with other famous black hole bets.
I'm always behind the times. I just discovered Tiddlywiki and I love it!
What is TiddlyWiki? Well, okay, first of all it is a kind of wiki. But, here is the first interesting fact, it is a serverless wiki: TiddlyWiki is exactly one file. This file is written in a combination of html/Javascript/…
The first edition of the newly revamped Communications of the ACM is out. And I must say, so far I'm greatly impressed. First of all it seems that they've gotten rid of the absolutely horrible front pages for all articles that were (a) ugly (I'm not a font nazi, but sheesh that font choice was…
Pascal's Wager is a classic for those who want to argue about the existence of God, but now, according to Peter L. Bernstein, of the New York Times, we should be using it for financial risk calculations. Say what?
Bernstien starts out fine:
For example, the average annual inflation rate in the…
Real? I always wanted to design bumps in the road so that vibrations in your car would say something when you went over them...
rpenner passes on some of the latest news on the black hole lawsuit against the LHC:
Update: The trial has been scheduled for June 2009....
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4830&view=findpost&p=349304
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4830&view=findpost&p=…
One of the most amusing things about writing a blog is that people you've never met form an impression about you from your blabberings, and then, often, when they actually meet you they are astounded that you aren't "an old grumpy guy" or whatever image they had in their mind. So, in order to…
Running a process to fix the utf-8 support on scirate.com using the unix "screen" command I got the following crash:
Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die...
Doh!
David Brooks, has an op-ed in the New York Times about Tiger Woods and his astonishing string of triumphs in the golfing world (including last weekends U.S. Open which I watched the end of on both Saturday and Sunday: my wife was right he did make that last put.) Brooks piece waxes on and on about…
I do believe this is the first time I've performed the paper dance on the scienceblogs incarnation of this blog. Yep, it's that time again: it's the paper dance!
"A far away light in the futuristic place we might be; It's a tiny world just big enough to support the kingdom of one knowledgeable; I…
Writing grants and teaching, not to mention trying to get some actual research done, has taken up a considerable amount of my time this quarter. I mean, sheesh, I've barely had any time to read! This has, of course, made me grumpy. So when the publisher of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness…
The New York Times has a policy on anonymous sources. Great! But do they have a policy on statistics? They certainly need it. I mean, take a look at the graphic from an article on women and smart phones:
I mean, sure the numbers on the right hand side could be used to support the caption "…
Today is the final exam for the course I've been teaching this summer. So I need some reading material for when I'm not watching the students take their exam. Here are two fun ones I just downloaded (one via Alea):
arXiv:0803.3913:
The Reverse of The Law of Large Numbers
Authors: Kieran Kelly,…
I'll admit it: I like reading George Soros' books. I mean, here's a guy whose made a godzillion dollars in the financial markets, has been behind political destabilizations/stabilizations worldwide, taken on a U.S. president (can you guess which one?), and yet, in spite of this, can write a book…
Blessed be Mike Lazaridis:
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, June 4, 2008 - In a new and generous act of personal philanthropy, Mike Lazaridis has provided an additional $50 million (Canadian) to Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI). This private donation increases his personal contributions…
Hoisted from the comments, Robin asks:
So, with that in mind, here's a question. What do you think about teaching quantum mechanics as noncommutative probability theory? In other words, by starting with probability theory and alluding to probabilistic mechanics (e.g., distributions on phase space…
Sometimes you find one that is just so over the top that it brings a smile to your face. It starts out okay,
The doughnut shaped universe spinning about a central axis of quantum singularity
India Daily Technology Team
May 26, 2008
An unexpected patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) -…
The scientific data, it wants to be free! San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth: "You are currently viewing Hole E - Run 1 - Section 1" Cool.
Bill Gates thinks that robots are at the equivalent stage that computers were when he and Paul Allen and a ton of hobbyists helped fuel the PC revolution. But is he right? Here is a radical proposal: might not bioengineering be the next field where amateurs have a huge impact? Such is the…
A story, from Jeff Silverman:
Whenever you build an airplane, you have to make sure that each part weighs no more than allocated by the designers, and you have to control where the weight it located to keep the center of gravity with limits. So there is an organization called weights which tracks…
For fun, answer the following in the comment section, without reading what others have left in the comment section:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and…
I am now the sum of the first four positive factorials of positive numbers!
The most depressing thing about the age of thirty three was that Alexander the Great died at 33. Dude, to be 33 and not have people putting "the Great" after your name is super depressing.