pontiff | April 7, 2008One of the reasons I signed up to develop for the iPhone:
Accelerometers are so cool. And I don't just say that because I'm a physicist.
pontiff | April 6, 2008The Hawkman Speaketh at TED:
No alien quiz shows? Certainly Professor Hawking did not see Alex Trebek last week, when, for half the show, Alex Trebek had a really alien looking mustache.
pontiff | April 5, 2008This quarter I am teaching CSE 322: Introduction to Formal Models in Computer Science. Good fun. As part of my teaching I am LaTeXing up lecture notes from the class, which follow closely the book we are using, Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation." Here are the first three lectures for those with nothing better to do during their weekend:
Lecture 1: Welcome and Introduction
Lecture 2: Formal Definition of Deterministic Finite Automata
Lecture 3: Regular Operations on Languages
The notes are certainly full of many typos and such, but maybe there is a young teenager who isn't…
pontiff | April 4, 2008The very first AP class I took in high school was the Computer Science AB test. Today, I learn from the Washington Post, that the Computer Science AB test is on the chopping block (along with Italian, Latin literature, and French literature.)
The AP Computer Science AB test is a superset of the AP Computer Science A test, yet I cannot help but thinking that this is a sad day for computer science education. Among the topics which are (or were) in the AB test but not in the A test are (or were)
Two-dimensional arrays
Linked lists (singly, doubly, circular)
Stacks
Queues
Trees
Heaps
Priority…
pontiff | April 4, 2008Previously, I had found a way to get a Mac running Firefox to not choke on recognizing pdfs correctly when downloaded from the arxiv.org. Commenter Dan has tracked down the reason for this and suggested another way to fix this which should be compatible with the latest versions of Firefox:Update:
It seems that the source of this bug is the following problem:
Arxiv.org does not like Macs! :-O
Fortunately, there is an easy work around: Using the UserAgent Switcher extension, you fool arxiv.org into thinking your web-browser is running Windows.
Then the PDF download problem goes away! No MIME…
pontiff | April 3, 2008Today, I looked on the arxiv and found arXiv:0804.0272:arXiv:0804.0272
Quantum computing using shortcuts through higher dimensions
Authors: B. P. Lanyon, M. Barbieri, M. P. Almeida, T. Jennewein, T. C. Ralph, K. J. Resch, G. J. Pryde, J. L. O'Brien, A. Gilchrist, A. G. White
and nearly fell out of my chair. What an awesome title. A least for me, when I first parsed the title of the paper, the first thing that popped into my head was using spatial dimensions to speed up quantum computation (as opposed to using higher dimensional quantum systems.) Gots to get me some string theories to build…
pontiff | April 3, 2008Oh no: do the Christian creationists know that by taking down Darwin they might inadvertently aid Eastern religions? Witness: the Bhaktivedanta Institute Newsletter. Personally I want a grunge match between the Discovery Institute and the Bhaktivedanta Institute to see who can out pseudoscience each other. "No my psychogenetic fallacy definitely trumps your silly fallacy of division!"
Among many gems in this newsletter, I particularly like their statement of purpose:Modern science has generally been directed toward investigating the material world, excluding consideration of the conscious…
pontiff | April 2, 2008Eat anything you want and lose weight? How? By using quantum physics of course!:Freedom From Food looks at food and weight from a unique vantage point. It examines the mind/body connection - how your thoughts and emotions affect your body. The book points out that there is abundant scientific evidence in quantum physics to show that our thoughts and emotions directly affect our physical form. From this perspective, food is not seen as "good" or "bad" for the body.
I'm still looking through the postulates of quantum physics to find how thoughts and emotions are used in quantum theory?…
pontiff | April 1, 2008Is it really true? Is Fafblog back? All that praying to the April Fool's Day Jackalope has finally paid off!"Screw this dump!" says Giblets. "This universe is old and fat and smells like smelling and Giblets is busting out!"
"Should we go over the wall or take the tunnel?" says me. I been diggin a tunnel.
"Nuts to the tunnel!" says Giblets. "What we do is we make like we're sick. Then when God comes in to check on us we punch im in the liver an run out the door!"...
pontiff | March 31, 2008Normally when I think about quantum computers, I think about systems which are pretty cold, since a thermal equilibrium state at high temperature is a very mixed state. But is it really true that a quantum computer needs to be cold to quantum compute? I've often wondered (some would say pontificated) about this, and so I was excited when I found this Physical Review Letter describing quantum computing using plasmas.
The idea of this new approach, according to the paper, is to use modes in the Debye sheath as qubits. Because of the Child-Langmuir law, the current in this sheath is quantized…
pontiff | March 31, 2008Postdoc in Italy, AQIS 2008 Call for Papers, the Register reports on QUEST, and the New Scientist morphs into the No Scientist.
There is a postdoc position available in Italy:A Post Doctoral fellowship in Quantum Information Theory is available at the University of Camerino, Department of Physics, associated with the EU project "Correlated Noise Errors in Quantum Information Processing" (CORNER FP7-ICT-2007).
The research work consists in the development of optimal encoding and decoding procedures for quantum memory channels. This should be done in connection with the channels…
pontiff | March 31, 2008...realizing that the class you are teaching for the first time this quarter ends on the half hour, not the hour, and therefore the fact that you are rushing through the material must seem extremely amusing to the students who know the class ends at 20 minutes after. Doh. Doh. Doh!
pontiff | March 31, 2008As part of my switching to a Mac, I've started using Firefox (one reason being that I'm investigating using Zotero for grabbing bibliographic citations from the web.) However, an annoying problem I encounter was when using Firefox and downloading pdfs from the arXiv. The problem was that Firefox failed to recognize the files as pdf files and thinks the pdf for arxiv XXXX.YYYY was a file of type YYYY. Note that this isn't just a problem of downloading any old pdf, but specifically pdfs from the arxiv. I've now figure out how to fix this.
The problem, as was hinted at by a commenter was…
pontiff | March 30, 2008 Last night I got a chance to go see Quantum Hoops which is playing at the Landmark Metro in Seattle for a limited time. For those who haven't heard of this movie, "Quantum Hoops" is a documentary about the Caltech basketball team, which currently owns the longest losing streak without a conference win in NCAA basketball (22 years.) The movie is narrated by David Duchovny, and, with the exception of an opening "old time cinema" introduction to Caltech, is actually quite enjoyable. Of course I'm biased. Not only did I go to Caltech as an undergrad (and returned as a postdoc) and thus knew…
pontiff | March 29, 2008If you really really want to get yourself pissed off about the tyrannical despotic anti-democratic junta that current runs the United States, I highly recommend this week's edition of This American Life (free in about a weeks time, or try here to find a local show time. Hint local shows elsewhere allow you to listen to it over the intertubes.) Dude, shows like that make we want to get all DoI on Bush and company.
pontiff | March 29, 2008Lawsuit brought against CERN and the LHC for the possibility that it might produce black holes which will eat the earth. I look forward to seeing string theory on trial. Maybe something like an inverse "Inherit the Wind" play to follow.
Oh, and this made me laugh:Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.
Probably in Barcelona?
pontiff | March 28, 2008Linear optics quantum computing, where one combines linear optics with the nonlinear processes of single photon creation and single photon detection, is a relative newcomer onto the scene of possible routes toward quantum computing. Whenever I think about these schemes, what jumps into my head is a crazily filled optical bench, like the one below from the Zeilinger group:
Now, I'm but a mere theorist, but I think even theorists like me understand that trying to build a large scale version of this scheme, which has considerable overhead behind it in terms of the number of modes needed, is a…
pontiff | March 27, 2008A list of observations I found in moving from a PC to a MAC.
The default on a Mac is that the tab key only moves between text boxes. That's just silly. To fix this, go to System Preferences, click Keyboards and Mouse, and then select the appropriate radio box under the Full Keyboard Access section.
Latex Equation Editor and Leopard don't seem to be getting along well. See here for example. My workaround has been to use LaTeXiT instead. However LaTeXiT doesn't work with Leopard yet, and in particular the linkback functionality apparently causes all sorts of problems. One solution is to…
pontiff | March 27, 2008It looks like DARPA is getting back into funding academic research in quantum computing. Here is a new BAA for a program called QuEST. And it looks like they want revolution, not evolution:DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the area of Quantum Entanglement Science and Technology (QuEST). Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in the fundamental understanding of quantum information science related to "small" quantum systems. Specifically excluded is research which primarily results in incremental improvement to the…