pontiff
Posts by this author
March 12, 2008
How cut-throat is arXiv:0803.0272? This cut-throat (taken from v2 of the paper):X. CONCLUSION AND FURTHER READING
This section will be completed when our error correction simulations have generated more data.
Reminds me of my idea to write a paper and submit it to the arxiv entitled "An Efficient…
March 12, 2008
I'm heading home from the March meeting, after giving my talk this morning and then having a nice lunch with graduate (and one undergraduate) students at a "Meet the Experts" lunch. Yeah, somehow I slipped by the guards! Luckily a real expert was there, in the form of Paul Kwiat, so all was good…
March 9, 2008
Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to the March Meeting I go. To run and play, and talk all day, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho.
Talks I will most likely be attending: these. Food I will be seeking out this. Exciting physics works I will be on the outlook for: here
March 7, 2008
Hurray! My letter to Physics Today along with a delightful response from N. David Mermin has been published. I particularly enjoyed Mermin's closing line:It may be quixotic (but certainly not Qxotic) to try to correct the spelling of an entire community, but I owe it my best shot. What else is…
March 7, 2008
A day in the life of a traveler. For your amusement?
2:15 Shuttle caught after giving lunch time blackboard talk about adiabatic quantum computing and huffing it back to the hotel.
2:30-3:00 Wait in parking lot of a Courtyard Marriott. Twenty person shuttle remains occupied by me and the driver…
March 4, 2008
Visiting Princeton, the American home to Albert Einstein, I'm reminded of one of my favorite "paradoxes" of special relativity. And, even more so, one of my favorite versions of this paradox which, when I first heard it, it blew my mind. What paradox is this of which I speak? The twin paradox of…
March 4, 2008
Visiting the Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics. Talk Wednesday morning (slides posted later.) The car driver claimed to have taken Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Larde to the airport last week.
Update 3/5/08: Talk is now posted here.
March 3, 2008
Over at Information Processing, the InfoProcessor talks about teaching Bell's theorem:I find that the hardest thing about teaching this material in class is that, after half a year of training students' brains to think quantum mechanically, it is extremely difficult to get them to feel the…
March 2, 2008
On the arxiv Friday:
arXiv:0802.4248
Title: Coexistence of qubit effects
Authors: Peter Stano, Daniel Reitzner, Teiko Heinosaari
Comments: A paper with identical title is being published on the arXiv simultaneously by Paul Busch and Heinz-Jurgen Schmidt. These authors solve the same problem…
February 29, 2008
Happy Leap Friday! For your enjoyment, some ferromagnetic fluids jiving to a piano piece:
February 29, 2008
Another checkmark in front of the "antrhopic reasoning is whack":
arXiv:0802.4121
Title: Ants are not Conscious
Authors: Russell K. Standish
Anthropic reasoning is a form of statistical reasoning based upon finding oneself a member of a particular reference class of conscious beings. By considering…
February 29, 2008
Some of you know (and use) the website I created a year ago, Scirate.com, a place where arXiv papers can be voted for digg style and comments can be left on the papers. After a while of not tinkering much with the website I'm beginning to add more features that I've been thinking about for a while…
February 28, 2008
Technology tidbits of assorted flavors:
I think I just made myself dizzy.
Multi-touch to the max, dude!
What does it take to build the next Silicon Valley (besides Gallium Arsenide?) Via John Cook's Venture Blog comes this report.
Bill Gates uses LinkedIn and asks: "How can we do more to encourage…
February 28, 2008
Coming soon to a desktop near you: Your own digital Jesus. (Someone to hear your prayers. Someone who's there. As much as a collection of bits representing the image of a sheet can be there, I guess that is.)
Yeah I just wrote this post because upon reading the article I couldn't get that damn…
February 27, 2008
Quick, Batman! To the trademark-mobile along with a stack of three or four letter company names:
Feb 27 (Reuters) - On-demand business phone service provider Nuvio Corp said it filed a lawsuit against Garmin International Inc...alleging Garmin's Nuvifone infringes on Nuvio trademark, which it…
February 27, 2008
Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette shares her thoughts on good science communicationI've learned over the course of my varied career that the trick to all good science communication is being able to boil a complicated science story down to its most basic components -- the "core…
February 26, 2008
On the intertubes today I'm seeing a lot of references to "Electron filmed for the first time" (digg, msnbc, Live Science.) For a decent explanation that doesn't involve radically distorting quantum theory, I recommend this Physical Review Focus article (and, of course, nothing compares to the…
February 22, 2008
The man on the lift chair at Stephen's Pass asks me my occupation. Professor, I tell him, at the University of Washington.
Oh, he offers, My daughter is a fourth generation Husky. I was in the class of 1972. Or, well I would have been if I'd graduated, but I knew what I wanted to do didn't…
February 21, 2008
QCMC 2008 in Calgary call for abstracts, Quantum Information and Control in Cairns, Australia call for abstracts, Covaqial, Brassard nominated for Herzberg Medal, and the limits of quantum computers.
QCMC 2008, to be held in Calgary (why do I want to say "yippee ki yay" whenever I hear the word "…
February 19, 2008
There are days when I wish quantum cryptography was a mature, installed, technology. Today is one of those days. Why? You might think its because I'm a quantum obsessed physicist whose daily sustenance depends on the future of quantum information science. But no. Today I wish quantum…
February 19, 2008
On President's day I attended the sSQUINT followup conference to SQUINT 2008. sSQUINT? Never heard of it? Neither had I. But when I learned that the "s" stood for "ski" (or maybe "snowboard") and that some of my fellow quantum informationers would be trekking to Wolf Creek Ski Area, well I had…
February 16, 2008
Yes we work on Saturdays. Okay work may be the wrong word. Updated as the day goes along and my brain doesn't fill up (plus I'm chairing a session, so is it ethical to chair and blog at the same time?)
The first talk of the morning was by Edward Farhi. Farhi talked about the NAND tree algorithm…
February 15, 2008
Sloan awards have been announced for this year. On the list I noticed at least two three quantum computing/information related names: Alexandre Blais (University of Sherbrooke), Andris Ambainis (University of Waterloo), and Jason Petta (Princeton.) Congrats!
February 15, 2008
Jeff Kimble, who taught me all about waves as a second year undergraduate at Caltech, is interviewed by Scientific American.
My favorite part:
Switching gears--this new movie, Jumper, is about a kid, and some other people, who teleport from place to place.
I didn't know that.
If you saw X-Men,…
February 15, 2008
Live blogging from day one of the talks at SquInT 2008. Updated as the day goes along. So hit that refresh button :)
In a sign that history may be warping itself into a cirlce, the first speaker of the day was Serge Haroche, who was the first speaker at the first SqUinT conference ten years ago…
February 14, 2008
I've never live blogged before (well I've been alive while I've blogged, but that is different, I guess), but maybe it will make me pay more attention to the talks, so here goes nothing. Oh, and happy Hallmark(TM) Valentines day! I'll be updating these posts as the conference goes along.
John…
February 13, 2008
Yep, lucky me I'm off to Santa Fe tomorrow morning for the tenth annual SquInT conference. Holy moly ten years of SqUiNT conferences really makes me feel old. I wonder how many Chiles I've eaten over all of those conferences (and I don't even want to think about how many Margaritas or quantum…
February 13, 2008
A website dedicated to chronicling the lives, injuries, and money lost due to a lack of critical thinking. Woah. Is it just me or is there is somethink kind of creepy about assembling this kind of website?