pontiff
Posts by this author
Scenes from today's CSE 322 (introduction to formal methods in computer science) final:
A former student sent me what appears to be my doppelganger: Danbert Nobacon. Life with no bacon, well that's just crazy.
In other Bacon related news: Jorge sends me Bacon Vodka...from Seattle. This will surely save me time because frying up bacon to mix in my wodka for my bacon vodka martini was…
In the University of Washington's "The Daily" in the lost and found section:
FOUND - PANDA head, appears to be a part of a missing suit. Recovered near 45th and Memorial. presumably stolen by ill-advised sorority girls during their week-long, drunken stupor
The iPhone is a great gadget (as a phone, it's okay. Personally I wish it could be made a bit louder as my ears, they ain't so good at that hearing thing.) Here are the apps I've found that I use the most. (Excluding google maps, the built in email and browser, and the phone functions, of course…
What in the world is a review for Star Trek doing in Nature Physics? (Thank to reader W for pointing this out.) I mean, at least the review of Angels and Demons has references to physics, but the review of Star Trek, is, well, just a review of Star Trek with no reference physics or science or,…
So bing, Microsoft's latest search engine, is up and running the tech word is a twitter. I checked it out and...well. On google when you search for "pontiff" my blog comes up as hit number five, after a few silly things like wikipedia entries and dictionary definitions (but no actual links to the…
Catch the wave. Long but worth watching:
I suspect that collaboration will never be the same after the wave.
Another observation is about gadgets and iphone apps. One beauty of iphone apps is how easy it is to write one. This has always been true of many gadgets (like gadgets for google's…
Recently I finally got a chance to read the new preprint arXiv:0905.2292 "A new physical principle: Information Causality" by M. Pawlowski, T. Paterek, D. Kaszlikowski, V. Scarani, A. Winter, and M. Zukowski. It's been a long time since I spent more than a few spare hours thinking about…
Ditch day 2009 was May 27, 2009. A classic from the past. Our stack involved a multi-storied wooden puzzle and the strong chance we would be taped to a tree upside down.
It seems that astrometry has finally succeeded at detecting a planet. A star and its planets perform a complex dance as they move through space. In astrometry planet hunting one looks for a planet by looking for the "wobble" of a star as it moves across the sky. This is contrast with the two…
Recently I've been thinking it might be fun to set up some sort online weekly colloquia in quantum computing. Fun? Well, okay maybe that's not quite the right word. But it would be an interesting experiment. So I went out looking for good live webinar/videoconferencing software and well...I was…
Katamari Damacy is a very cool game, if for no other reason than it is a game in which "scale" changes. The basic idea is that you roll a ball around which picks up objects that aren't too big for the ball and then the ball grows. Usually you are racing a clock to make your ball big enough. I…
Via his squidiness, a test on which pope you are. Me?
Seek help now!
You are a giddy combo of the weirder Popes, Stephen VI, Benedict XVI and St Peter
But we knew that already, no?
One of the more interesting "problems" in Science 2.0 is the lack of commenting on online articles. In particular some journals now allow one to post comments about papers published in the journal. As this friendfeed conversation asks:
Why people do not comment online articles? What is wrong with…
As an alumnus of the California Institute of Technology (thats "Caltech" not "CalTech" peoples!) and a member of the Caltech alumni association, I get a quarterly copy of Engineering and Science (E&S). In this month's issue there is a letter from the editor concerning the future of the print…
Ah, the games people play:
A 23-year-old Tacoma man and an 18-year-old Lakewood woman are suspected of throwing rocks from a railroad trestle onto at least 14 vehicles traveling southbound on Interstate 5 early Monday.
...
Investigators told KOMO-TV that the couple was playing a stripping game that…
Here is an article at physorg.com about a result in quantum computing (see here for my own article on this result.) And here is an article on the website fudzilla describing this physorg result. How in the world do you get from the physorg article to fudzillas: "Top boffins who have been looking…
This Intel ad cracks me up:
Reminds me of the classic Onion: Stephen Jay Gould Speaks Out Against Science Paparazzi.
Via the man of many B's, dates for QIP 2010 have been set. QIP 2010 will be in Zurich from January 18 to January 22. Website here.
Hmm, Switzerland in January for skiing?
He of uncertain principles asks Which do you prefer: transverse waves, or longitudinal waves? The fact builder chimes in with a clarification of a common misconception.
Myself, certainly I'm going to go for transverse waves. Not only are all the cool waves transverse (well sort of),…
From Pravda, some pretty serious funny: Quantum transition to transform mankind in 2012.
We begin, as on any other day, with prediction of doomsday:
Russian scientists predict another doomsday. In their opinion, quantum transition will begin in 2012 according to the ancient Maya calendar.
But how,…
A letter
Dear My Senator,
Thank you very much for being one of the 90 senators who voted for Amendment 1133 to H.R. 2346. I have long felt, as I'm sure you do, that keeping terrorists out of my own backyard is of vital importance to the security of our Great nation (not to mention to the security…
Jorge sends me a link to The Best (Bacon) Dessert Ever?: a bacon-topped blue cheese panna cotta. Uh oh, Mrs. Pontiff has competition! Luckily this creation is just down the hill from our home at the Palace Kitchen, so we'll be able to compare and really find out if it is the best bacon desert…
Okay, well not quite a music video(!), but my coauthor Steve Flammia has done a videoabstract for our paper (on quantiki at http://www.quantiki.org/video_abstracts/09050901):
A song we (Steve, Elwyn, and ??) wrote while at Caltech. I write it down here because last night I struggled with reconstructing all the verses.
The Frosh Arrived (sung to the tune of "Cat's in the Cradle")
the frosh arrived just the other day
they came to Tech in the usual way
but there was work…
Via the CCC Blog, an announcement concerning an NSF funded opportunity for new PhDs in Computer Science, CIFellows (http://cifellows.org):
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computing Research Association (CRA), with funding from the National Science Foundation, are pleased to…
Via torque: In-N-Out...Now with Bacon. No, unfortunately In-N-Out is not adding Bacon to it's secret menu. But dude: Bacon and a Double Double. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.
If only there had been open access, maybe it wouldn't be called Moore's law:
I didn't go to Midland after all, but went instead to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which has roughly the same relationship to Johns Hopkins that JPL has to Caltech, and where I could continue…
Martin Plenio writes in with a link to a new site he created with Daniel Burgarth Videoabstracts (Joe got an email too):
I am writing to you to bring to your attention some new tool that we (Daniel Burgarth and myself) have developed that has the aim of making science papers just a little more…
Over at TechFlash there is an article about some words Ed Lazowska, professor extraordinaire here in the computer science & engineering department at UW, had for the Seattle tech scene (see also xconomy):
"It seems to me that the issue with this state is that we are one big happy family in…