pontiff
Posts by this author
November 29, 2007
One of the funniest abstracts to a paper on the arxiv in many moons appeared yesterday, authored by Carlos Mochon:
arXiv:0711.4114
Title: Quantum weak coin flipping with arbitrarily small bias
Authors: Carlos Mochon
"God does not play dice. He flips coins instead." And though for some reason He…
November 29, 2007
One good reason to subscribe to the New York Times is that they have what I consider far above average science reporting for a newspaper. Their Tuesday Science Times section is a must read for me pretty much every week. Over the last three weeks I've been keeping track of the stories that were…
November 27, 2007
My grandfather liked to write letters to the editor. I think I inherited this disease from him. Here are the contents of a recent letter I wrote to the editor of Physics Today which I hope some of you may find amusing.
I greatly enjoyed reading N. David Mermin's last two Reference Frame columns…
November 24, 2007
Paul Davies essay in the New York Times on "Taking Science on Faith" is sure to raise some hackles from the science community. Me, I'd just like to point out how silly some of Davies arguments specifics are. Yes, its another edition of "Nitpickers Paradiso."
Davies begins with a mantra yelled by…
November 24, 2007
Well it is certainly true that Mystics and quantum physicists speak the same language, that language most probably being Mandarin, English, or Hindi, but I'm guessing that's probably not what they meant by that title. I should have stopped reading at the title, but instead I actually scanned down…
November 21, 2007
Books recently removed from the queue. "Mathematicians in Love" by Rudy Rucker, "An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets" by Donald Mackenzie, "Financial Calculus : An Introduction to Derivative Pricing" by Martin Baxter and Andrew Rennie. "109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer…
November 21, 2007
Postdocs, APS GQI quantum newsletter, Quantum computing in Waikiki, quantum chicanery, quantum foods.
Postdocs at NIST: National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associateships at Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division of the NIST Information Technology Laboratory
The fall…
November 20, 2007
So you want to learn quantum theory in ten minutes? Well I certainly can't give you the full theory in all its wonder and all its gory detail in that time, but I can give you a light version of the quantum theory in about that time. And won't that impress your friends!
To learn quantum theory you…
November 19, 2007
Commenter Michael J. Biercuk asks about D-wave's machine:What is the fundamental experimental test which would demonstrate the system is not simply undergoing a classical, incoherent process?
Of course there are answers to this question which involve some technically fairly challenging experiments…
November 19, 2007
So did anyone at MIT go to this talk and care to comment:Mohammad Amin (D-Wave)
Adiabatic Quantum Computation with Noisy Qubits
Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) is an attractive model of quantum computation as it may naturally possess some degree of fault tolerance. Nonetheless, any practical…
November 19, 2007
Here is a picture I call "STOC 2008 deadline":
STOC 2008 will be in Victoria, British Columbia. I was just across the border in Surey, BC, and shot this picture which I call "Crazy Canadian Fireplace Channel":
November 16, 2007
Will the real quantum pontiff please stand up? From the Taiwan Journal:Lee Yuan-tseh, a Taiwanese-born scholar and the 1986 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, was named Oct. 9 as a new member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Benedict XVI. He is the fourth ethnic Chinese scientist to…
November 16, 2007
Seems it 'tis the season for warnings about the security of cryptosystems. The New York Times has an article on the latest issue here. It seems that Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) has a note out describing how faults in chip hardware could render cryptosystems insecure. It's not at all clear to me…
November 15, 2007
Is there a backdoor in NIST's SP800-90 Dual Ec pseudorandom number generator?
According to a presentation by Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson from Microsoft given at CRYPTO 2007, there is a backdoor in this pseudorandom number generator. While the authors don't know how to use the backdoor, they…
November 15, 2007
Uncertain Chad asks "What's your favorite dubious proof technique?" I just don't have one dubious proof technique: I have an entire book of dubious proof techniques! Seriously, I have a book where I write them all down.
But if I had to choose a dubious proof technique that was my favorite, it…
November 15, 2007
Can you be arrested for stealing furniture in a virtual world? The source of this question: Philip K. Dick? Nope, NPR:A teenager faces charges of stealing furniture that doesn't exist. The youth in the Netherlands was on one of those Web sites where you create virtual people to wander around…
November 15, 2007
This glib article from the Wired Blog Gadgets Lab discusses some of the "crazy" ideas for building computers. Among them, of course, are quantum computers, which means, of course that a quantum computing bastardization, can't be far from behind.
Let's begin at the beginning:Quantum Computers…
November 14, 2007
Over at The World's Fair, a challenge:Anyway, this meme asks that you come up with your own scientific eponym. What's that exactly? Well, first read this excellent primer by Samuel Arbesman, which basically provides a step by step description of how to do this effectively. Then have a go at your…
November 14, 2007
In an article on stopping a large spectrum of light with metamaterials in The Telegraph (research which is very cool, but isn't available online, yet, as far as I can tell), I find some lines that would make the Optimizer go bonkers:By contrast, the switches in a quantum computer can be both "on"…
November 14, 2007
This morning I received a funny email from a graduate student here at UW, Nicholas Murphy, which made me laugh out loud (reproduced and linkified here with permission from Nicholas):Subject: Times Higher Education Supplement rankings: a study in spin
http://www.topmba.com/fileadmin/pdfs/…
November 13, 2007
Tonight I watched NOVA's Judgement Day: Intelligent Design On Trial. Ah shucks, us quantum physicists never get to have so much fun (err, I mean, experience so much pain and deal with so much silliness) trying to defend our science. It's not like, you know, there aren't people who think quantum…
November 13, 2007
Grad school opportunities, postdoc opportunities, interference experiments, more D-wave, and sabbatical at the Blackberry hole
Pawel Wocjan writes that he has positions open for graduate students in quantum computing:Ph.D. Position in Quantum Computing & Quantum Information with Dr. Pawel…
November 13, 2007
Okay, there are some weird plots in science papers out there, but something about this one (which Pak at scirate.com pointed me to), taken from arXiv:0711.1751 "Paleontological Tests: Human-like Intelligence is not a Convergent Feature of Evolution," by Charles H. Lineweaver made me laugh:
November 13, 2007
Last night I went to the Seahawks/49ers game at Seattle's spectacular Qwest field. While the field was spectacular, my SF 49ers were less than spectacular, losing the game 24-0. In fact they down right stunk. Ouch. Qwest field really is a rocking venue: I attended a game last year right after…
November 12, 2007
D-wave systems, whose paracomputer, err, I mean quantum-maybe computer, which sparked quite a bit of controversy earlier this year, is back in the news. This time D-wave is at the big superconducting conference (SC07) being held in Reno, Nevada and is demonstrating a 28-qubit quantum-maybe…
November 12, 2007
I'm fascinated by watching the developments in touch and movement based computer interfaces over the past few years. From the Apple iPhone to the Nintendo Wii, it seems that there is a great deal of excitement over these new interfaces. Nearly every week I see something interesting in this domain…
November 11, 2007
Here is the story of a seven year old (supposed) prodigy whose parents are looking for a university which will enroll him. I always find it interesting in these stories that such an emphasis is put on degrees and tests. It also reminds me of my high school math teacher who told us he could teach…
November 8, 2007
Many of you know I'm a big fan of funny/creative paper titles. What with journal editors squashing every last ounce of humanity our of scientific papers, it always makes me happy to see someone else fighting the editorial machine. Today a friend sends me "Heavy Ion Collisions at the LHC - Last…
November 7, 2007
What's that you say Dave? Dogs may be able to think about what their owners are thinking? Sounds like interesting research, Dave. If someone could actually find the real research and not just this science by press release, I would really like to read the paper, Dave! And then I'd like to chew…
November 6, 2007
SQuInT 2008. Quantum postdocs. Christianity as a laser. Toshiba opens lab with a quantum bent.
SQuInT 2008, my favorite conference, has been announced and will be Feb 14-17 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Speakers include
Eddie Farhi (MIT)
Patrick Hayden (McGill University)
Alex Kuzmich [unconfirmed…