Free Thought
drorzel | May 5, 2009As I understand it, the Physics ArXiv Blog is not affiliated with the people who actually run the Arxiv (Paul Ginsparg et al.). Which is probably good, as I'm never entirely sure how seriously to take the papers they highlight.
Take yesterday's post, Diamond Challenges for Quantum-Computing Crown, which is about a paper that asks the question Could one make a diamond-based quantum computer?. It's an interesting idea, and something I wrote about last year, so it seems like a promising topic.
The preprint in question, though, is a little dodgy. It's indifferently proofread, with all sorts of…
catdynamics | May 4, 2009Obama announced members of the Presidential Council of Advisor's on Science and Technology (PCAST)
via ScienceDebate team
It is an august group.
Physical scientists you might know:
Christopher Chyba - Princeton - astrobiology and arms control
S. James Gates - Maryland - particle theorist
Shirley Ann Jackson - RPI - oh yes!
William Press - Texas - astrophysics and computing
Ahmed Zewail - Caltech - femtosecond laser
Plus a bunch of industry, chem, bio, enviro etc types.
Including someone from Microsoft and someone from Google/Apple... Hmm.
catdynamics | May 4, 2009General introduction to optimal control theory and how to control matter at the quantum level
David Tannor gave the Director's Blackboard Talk at KITP today:
Quantum Control: From Chemistry to Cooling to Computing
Very nice talk, goes on a bit in the middle talking about the time dependent quantum mechanical picture vs use of phase control.
Very nice finish on mathematics of optimal control theory and the physical picture of how to use variational schemes to implement practical control.
Things I took away from this:
optimal control theory is underway but has a lot of open interesting…
pontiff | May 2, 2009Quantum 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 Discrimination." Phys. Rev. Lett., 102, 160502 (2009) arXiv:0801.3831. The idea is to discriminate "non-orthogonal" quantum processes via the use of entanglement, which is cool. (I'm a bit surprised that this classic paper is not referenced.)
Optimized dynamical decoupling performed in ions at NIST.…
drorzel | April 30, 2009
theweaselking:
Never trust a marsupial.
(tags: silly video animals)
Do You Have Swine Flu?
Because you need confirmation from the Internet.
(tags: silly medicine internet)
Jacks of Science » Blog Archive » Learning Science through Comic Books, A List
"Reading textbooks gives me scary flashbacks of my days as an undergraduate (about 2 weeks ago). I did a little research on the internet and supposedly there are these things kids are calling "light reads" that make reading fun again. Comic books/Graphic novels are the pinnacle of fun, so I put together a quick list of illustrated reading…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009Via emails, comments, and so on, quite a few people offered their own explanations for why mortality might be higher in Mexico (as of yesterday), the subject of my Slate piece.
First, though, a correction: I punched my numbers a bit too quickly in computing the flue's hypothetical kill ratios in Mexico, and had everything a decimal point over, and -- and therefore tenfold too understated.
Alert reader johnshade called this to my attention:
You'll want to fix your own "bad math":
"about 100 deaths?suggesting a mortality rate of 6 percent. This is
almost certainly bad math, as the total case…
pontiff | April 21, 2009In 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 workshop, this is a bit deceiving, as from what I understand this workshop is supposed to provide the impetus for a report arguing for a major spending for quantum information science in the United States, especially from the National Science Foundation. The Quantum Pontiff, unfortunately, is stuck…
drorzel | April 17, 2009
North Of The Border Case File #135: Canadian Bacon  | DVD | A.V. Club
"Just as Ned Flanders likes Woody Allen movies except for âthat nervous fella thatâs always in them,â I like Michael Moore movies and kind of hate Michael Moore himself. "
(tags: culture movies review avclub world)
Solar power sats get real; and more on the Verne gun â KarlSchroeder.com
"Solaren corporation has signed a deal with Pacific Gas & Electric to orbit a 200 megawatt solar power satellite by 2016. I mention this not because the news is amazing (it was inevitable, really) but because their plan gives me…
drorzel | April 16, 2009Physics World has a nice news article about a new experimental development in quantum computing, based on a forthcoming paper from the Wineland group at NIST in Boulder. I'd write this up for ResearchBlogging, but it's still just on the arxiv, and I don't think they've started accepting arxiv papers yet.
The Physics World piece summarizes the key results nicely:
Now, Brad Blakestad and colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado have created a junction in an ion trap in which there is practically no heating. Constructed from laser-machined…
j7uy5 | April 14, 2009Michelle Obama's White House garden has
href="http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/1309/">attracted some
attention, as noted on La Vida Locavore:
Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to
have an "organic" garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and
vegetables for the Obama's and their guests. While a garden
is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun,
CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder. As a result,
we sent a letter encouraging them to consider using crop protection
products and to recognize the importance of agriculture to the entire…
clock | April 14, 2009There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Genetic Evidence of Geographical Groups among Neanderthals:
The Neanderthals are a well-distinguished Middle Pleistocene population which inhabited a vast geographical area extending from Europe to western Asia and…
razib | April 14, 2009
The Hapsburgs are one of those royal families who are relatively well known, and in the minds of the public are to a great extent the emblems of the downsides of inbreeding. To painting to the left is of Charles II, king of Spain, the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, and an imbecile whose premature death at the age of 39 ushered in a period of dynastic chaos which led to the War of Spanish Succession These conflicts between France and other European powers were one of those turning points in history, a sad capstone to the long reign of the Sun King, Louis the XIV. France's position as the…
gregladen | April 13, 2009It is a ground breaking company, it is a bookstore that is mega mega like few other companies are. It is a bookstore that is a huge corporation. Think about that for a second. Think about bookstores in the old days then think about this thing, Amazon Dot Com. A bookstore that is leading the way in mega cloud computing. It has one of the most effective ways ever of interfacing with its customers. It has become the go to place for many people for the purchase of almost anything one can imagine being delivered by mail. Amazon Dot Com is a thing the likes of which we have not seen before…
pontiff | April 6, 2009The survey of abused words in quantum computing shows the word "exponential" as having an, um, exponential, lead over its competitors. My own personal choice for the most abused word was "scalable," a word that is, in my opinion, the least debated, but most important, concept in quantum computing today. A word which everyone uses but whose definition is strangely missing from all almost all papers that use the word. Here are some thoughts on this word, what it means to particular groups, and what I, in my own pomposity, think the word really should mean.
Note the title of this post is…
goodmath | April 6, 2009Yet More Deceptive Graphs
As you've probably heard, there was a horrible incident in Pittsburgh this weekend, in
which a crazed white supremacist who believed that Obama was coming to take his guns shot and
killed three policemen. Markos Moulitsas, of Daily Kos, pointed out lunatics like this shooter
are acting on conspiracy theories that are being relentlessly promoted by the likes of Glen
Beck and Michelle Bachman. It's not an unreasonable thing to point out, given the amount of
time that Beck and Bachman have spent lately talking about the impending socialist/fascist
crackdowns that will…
clock | April 2, 2009
Mother's Criticism Causes Distinctive Neural Activity Among Formerly Depressed:
Formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never depressed controls, according to a new study from Harvard University. The participants reported being completely well and fully recovered, yet their neural activity resembled that which has been observed in depressed individuals in other studies.
Police With Higher Multitasking Abilities Less Likely To Shoot Unarmed Persons:
In the midst of life-…
pontiff | April 1, 2009Wow, this is a very cool result:
Researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorkstown, NY have announced a breakthrough which they feel could revolutionize power consumption in computers. Today's computers are power hungry: a typical computer consumes hundreds of watts of power. Not only does this power consumption add up to a lot of wasted power, but increasingly the amount of heat generated by the machines is a significant barrier to building faster more powerful computers. The researchers at IBM say they've made a breakthrough in how computers consume power which will…
razib | March 26, 2009New Nail in Google Cloud Coffin:
Here's what Google fears: If its cloud-computing system crashes, or inadvertently lets companies view their rivals' confidential documents all over the world, the entire system of cloud-based business-information processing collapses. Companies' most precious secrets are leaked, as are government files; suddenly, your tax history is available for anyone to read. The world's governments and businesses panic and come fleeing back to software that is embedded in individual computers, but not before incalculable damage is done to the modern economy and the privacy…
jstemwedel | March 24, 2009Today is Ada Lovelace Day.
Regular readers of this blog may recall that I am a tremendous Luddite. Obviously, this should not be taken to mean I am against all technological advances across the board (as here I am, typing on a computer, preparing a post that will be published using blogging software on the internet). Rather, I am suspicious of technological advances that seem to arise without much thought about how they influence the experience of the humans interacting with them, and of "improvements" that would require me to sink a bunch of time into learning new commands or operating…
drorzel | March 24, 2009
Ten photons per hour « A Quantum Diaries Survivor
"The small speck of light shown in the upper left of the picture above, labeled as MGC 10-17-5, is actually a faint galaxy in the field of view of NGC3690. It has a visual magnitude of +15.7: this is a measure of its integrated luminosity as seen from the Earth. It is a really faint object, and barely at the limit of visibility with the instrument I had. The question I arrived at formulating to myself this morning was the following: how many photons did we get to see per second through the eyepiece, from that faint galaxy ?"
(tags: science…