pontiff

The other day I ran into a good friend from Tlön, who told me the most fascinating story about his discovery of a new theory of games. I owe my discovery of the nature of equilibrium in card games to an odd conjunction of mirrors and an encyclopedia. The mirror was in our library, and the…

This weekend was bottling weekend. Bottled up nine gallons of cab, Il Monstro Viola (this was the year that the purple monster in our front yard died) yielding 55 bottles of wine. Interestingly the two carboys I used had distinctively different tastes, one had a much stronger oak taste than the…

Physics is an new APS initiative to highlight select articles for Physical Review journals, very much in the model of the commentaries that appear on articles in journals like Science. Many (all?) of the articles are written by researchers in the field, and are meant to be readable by a wide…

A nice read for the weekend: Michael Nielsen on Doing science in the open in Physics World.

Yes, it's a slow dance: Through the hourglass I saw you, in time you slipped away When the mirror crashed I called you, and turned to hear you say If only for today I am adiabatic Take my pulsed gates away arXiv:0905.0901, "Adiabatic Gate Teleportation" by Dave Bacon and Steve Flammia (As seen on…

After watching Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk* it occurred to me to go back and look at my own scientific papers and try to assess them for how creative they were. Some things you should just never do, I guess, but it did lead me to an interesting question. * The first 2/3 of the talk is excellent,…

Via MarketSci blog, Eric Rosenfeld talks about the collapse of LTCM at MIT. Funny I can't find in any MIT literature an advertisement for the fact that 2/3s of LTCM had MIT roots? (Caltech, snarky snark snark)

For the bus ride home, I'm going to check out "One world versus many: the inadequacy of Everettian accounts of evolution, probability, and scientific confirmation" by Adrian Kent (arXiv/0905.0624) Nothing like ending the day with some against many-worlds reading. That and a fun TED talk should…

I've not had a chance to play with a Kindle, but seen a lot of them in the coffee shops of Seattle (Amazon will soon be moving to a neighborhood very close to mine, in South Lake Union.) My first impression was: cool, but a bit small. Now here comes the Kindle DX with a 9.7" display and better…

Some quotes, with some substitutions, denoted by [], for the actual words: "The famous physicist Max Planck was talking about the resistance of the human mind, even the bright human mind, to new ideas.... And he said science advances one funeral at a time, and I think there's a lot of truth to that…

Personally I'm very skeptical of technical analysis, but that's just because I am skeptical of easy answers. But try to parse this article over at bloomberg titled "Stock Charts Fail Forecast Test in Complete S&P Miss." We begin with Ever since the Standard & Poor's 500 Index peaked in…

Is the Super Mario Bros. theme song the most covered song ever? Via hacklab.to: lazzor music! from hypatia on Vimeo.

Quantum ghosts, dynamical decoupling, why a diamond is forever in quantum computing, transversal press, quantum phrases I can't grok, and quantum jumping. Quantum ghosts: here and here. These articles describe the work reported in Laing, Rudolph, and O'Brien. "Experimental Quantum Process…

In his latest New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks, the conservative liberals can most stomach, attempts to tackle the problem of "what makes a genius". This is, of course, the kind of reasonable length topic that one can explain in a single newspaper column (it's the New York Times, you now…

A few small tips for what to do when starting up programming for the iPhone. Just a few tips from my experience in learning to program apps for the iPhone. Don't begin by using Interface Builder. Interface Builder may be a great tool once you understand what is going on, but it obscures a lot of…

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ArXiview, my iPhone app for surfing the arXiv, spotted in the wild: One of my graduate students is using the app which feels....odd. James Dacey says incredibly nice things over at Physics World. MyOpenArchive tweets just download #arXiview to my iphone. http://dabacon.org/arxiview/ I â¡ #arXive,…

Okay, well he didn't exactly say that, but he certainly is a smug son of a gun who asked a grade school question to a Nobel prize winner in physics, apparently expecting a "gotcha" moment (via TPM): Dudes even so proud of himself that he (or his staff) posted this video on his YouTube page.…

Wednesday, April 29, 6:30 p.m I'll be participating in a panel discussion of science blogging sponsored by the Northwest Science Writers Association: Join local science bloggers, including Alan Boyle from MSNBC.com's Cosmic Log, David Bacon the Quantum Pontiff, Sandra Porter of Biology in a Digital…

In Vienna, Virginia on April 23-25th a workshop is being held in response to a report, "A Federal Vision for Quantum Information Science" issued by the United States National Science and Technology Council. While this workshop looks, from the outside, like any other typical quantum computing…

Story here. Update: Comfortable at hospital, hope for full recovery.

Over at Healthy Algorithms, the healthy theoretical computer scientist, puts up a very interesting graph about spatial variation in Medicare expenditures in the last six months of life. Paper here. Interesting stuff, but am I the only one who gaffs when reading: "Previous studies have shown that…

Catching up with places I've been. Caltech. Steve Chu to be Caltech's commencement speaker. Caltech has found an upgraded mascot. I once wore the old mascot uniform when we were playing Life Bible college. Nothing like signs saying "Darwin was right!" to inflame some sporting events. Who was the…

Random cell phone photos. Blossoms so thick that when they fall it looks like it has snowed on the cars parked underneath. (Location: up the street from Villa Sophia, Seattle) Patience, attention, and territory: The end of monkey the second: Letting nature draw a silhouette

Matt points me to Bacon: the Other White Heat: I recently committed myself to the goal, before the weekend was out, of creating a device entirely from bacon and using it to cut a steel pan in half. My initial attempts were failures, but I knew success was within reach when I was able to ignite and…

Michael Biercuk sends me a note about an upcoming workshop on dynamic decoupling. He's trying to get a gauge of the interest in such a workshop: Upcoming International Workshop on Dynamical Decoupling (IWODD) Expected Date: October, 2009 Location: Boulder, CO By Invitation Only Interested…

Happy Tax Day! Happier anniversary to me and Mrs. Pontiff!

Over 9 months ago I decided to apply for teaching tenure track jobs. Then the economy took what can best be described as a massive, ill-aimed, swan dive. Thus creating an incredible amount of stress in my life. So what does a CS/physics research professor do when he's stress? The answer to that…

I am always greatly amused by the display of frustration in which one threatens to leave a country if things don't change. During the end of the first term of Bush the Second, it was common in the United States to hear liberals express their anger as: "If he wins a second term, I'm going to move…

Can quantum computers efficiently compute factorials? BaconCamp? Day Took Er Silicon Valley Jrbs? I wonder how I'd do on a RQ test?