pontiff | March 12, 2008How cut-throat is arXiv:0803.0272? This cut-throat (taken from v2 of the paper):X. CONCLUSION AND FURTHER READING
This section will be completed when our error correction simulations have generated more data.
Reminds me of my idea to write a paper and submit it to the arxiv entitled "An Efficient Quantum Algorithm for the Graph Isomorphism Problem." Sure, version 1, won't have the algorithm, but hey, why should I make you wait?
pontiff | March 12, 2008I'm heading home from the March meeting, after giving my talk this morning and then having a nice lunch with graduate (and one undergraduate) students at a "Meet the Experts" lunch. Yeah, somehow I slipped by the guards! Luckily a real expert was there, in the form of Paul Kwiat, so all was good and the students didn't learn anything to disastrous. "What I learned at the March meeting" below the fold.
Things I've learned at the APS March meeting:
There are a lot of physicists. Even if you don't count the particle and nuclear and gravitational physicist who have their own meeting. Oh,…
pontiff | March 9, 2008Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to the March Meeting I go. To run and play, and talk all day, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho.
Talks I will most likely be attending: these. Food I will be seeking out this. Exciting physics works I will be on the outlook for: here
pontiff | March 7, 2008Hurray! My letter to Physics Today along with a delightful response from N. David Mermin has been published. I particularly enjoyed Mermin's closing line:It may be quixotic (but certainly not Qxotic) to try to correct the spelling of an entire community, but I owe it my best shot. What else is retirement good for?
Sweet! Now I can check off from my list of things to do in life: "Get published in Physics Today over issues related to my literature degree."
pontiff | March 7, 2008A day in the life of a traveler. For your amusement?
2:15 Shuttle caught after giving lunch time blackboard talk about adiabatic quantum computing and huffing it back to the hotel.
2:30-3:00 Wait in parking lot of a Courtyard Marriott. Twenty person shuttle remains occupied by me and the driver. Other passenger, to fill out the space, a no show.
4:00 Arrive at airport. Check in. Drats looks like the flight is packed so can't change to better seat.
4:05 Is there really only one security line open for all of these people? Newark is the Newark of airports, so to speak.
5:15 We're…
pontiff | March 4, 2008Visiting Princeton, the American home to Albert Einstein, I'm reminded of one of my favorite "paradoxes" of special relativity. And, even more so, one of my favorite versions of this paradox which, when I first heard it, it blew my mind. What paradox is this of which I speak? The twin paradox of course! Really just the plain old twin paradox? No. Much better than that: the twin paradox in donut space!
The twin "paradox" of special relativity is really one of the classics of undergraduate physics. Two twins, born minutes apart, over the years drift apart. One becomes an astronaut and…
pontiff | March 4, 2008Visiting the Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics. Talk Wednesday morning (slides posted later.) The car driver claimed to have taken Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Larde to the airport last week.
Update 3/5/08: Talk is now posted here.
pontiff | March 3, 2008Over at Information Processing, the InfoProcessor talks about teaching Bell's theorem:I find that the hardest thing about teaching this material in class is that, after half a year of training students' brains to think quantum mechanically, it is extremely difficult to get them to feel the weirdness of Bell's theorem and spooky action. It all seems quite normal to them in the context of the course -- they know how to calculate, and that's just how quantum mechanics works!
In the comments an anonymous commenter says that this is all backward, that Bell's theorem isn't strange, and that we…
pontiff | March 2, 2008On the arxiv Friday:
arXiv:0802.4248
Title: Coexistence of qubit effects
Authors: Peter Stano, Daniel Reitzner, Teiko Heinosaari
Comments: A paper with identical title is being published on the arXiv simultaneously by Paul Busch and Heinz-Jurgen Schmidt. These authors solve the same problem independently with a different method.
and
arXiv:0802.4167
Title: Coexistence of qubit effects
Authors: Paul Busch, Heinz-Jürgen Schmidt
Comments: A paper with identical title is being published on the arXiv simultaneously by Teiko Heinosaari, Daniel Reitzner and Peter Stano. These authors solve the same…
pontiff | February 29, 2008Happy Leap Friday! For your enjoyment, some ferromagnetic fluids jiving to a piano piece:
pontiff | February 29, 2008Another checkmark in front of the "antrhopic reasoning is whack":
arXiv:0802.4121
Title: Ants are not Conscious
Authors: Russell K. Standish
Anthropic reasoning is a form of statistical reasoning based upon finding oneself a member of a particular reference class of conscious beings. By considering empirical distribution functions defined over animal life on Earth, we can deduce that the vast bulk of animal life is unlikely to be conscious. As a side effect of these deliberations, I also show that naturally occurring fragmentation/coalescence processes give rise to a power law distribution of…
pontiff | February 29, 2008Some of you know (and use) the website I created a year ago, Scirate.com, a place where arXiv papers can be voted for digg style and comments can be left on the papers. After a while of not tinkering much with the website I'm beginning to add more features that I've been thinking about for a while now. The first feature is just a small one: the ability for the website to send trackbacks to the arXiv when someone comments on a paper. After some false starts I think I've got this feature up and running, and indeed the first trackback now appears for arXiv:0802.3351.
Now, of course, the…
pontiff | February 28, 2008Technology tidbits of assorted flavors:
I think I just made myself dizzy.
Multi-touch to the max, dude!
What does it take to build the next Silicon Valley (besides Gallium Arsenide?) Via John Cook's Venture Blog comes this report.
Bill Gates uses LinkedIn and asks: "How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?" (Is it wrong that my knee jerk reaction is "eliminate middle school?" :) Oh and look I have more LinkedIn connections than Bill Gates! He has more dollars, though, I guess. I bet I have more joke-like "Bacon" paraphernalia though!
pontiff | February 28, 2008Coming soon to a desktop near you: Your own digital Jesus. (Someone to hear your prayers. Someone who's there. As much as a collection of bits representing the image of a sheet can be there, I guess that is.)
Yeah I just wrote this post because upon reading the article I couldn't get that damn Depeche Mode song out of my head (or the Johnny Cash version.) Begone you fowl occupier of my neurons which could actually be doing some work!
pontiff | February 27, 2008Quick, Batman! To the trademark-mobile along with a stack of three or four letter company names:
Feb 27 (Reuters) - On-demand business phone service provider Nuvio Corp said it filed a lawsuit against Garmin International Inc...alleging Garmin's Nuvifone infringes on Nuvio trademark, which it uses on its phones and telephony services.
pontiff | February 27, 2008Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette shares her thoughts on good science communicationI've learned over the course of my varied career that the trick to all good science communication is being able to boil a complicated science story down to its most basic components -- the "core narrative" -- to which one can then add layers of detail and complexity to tailor the narrative to a wide range of target audiences.
The main point I tried to get across in that first workshop is that this is not the same thing as the "dumbing down" epithet that many physicists like to fling at popular…
pontiff | February 26, 2008On the intertubes today I'm seeing a lot of references to "Electron filmed for the first time" (digg, msnbc, Live Science.) For a decent explanation that doesn't involve radically distorting quantum theory, I recommend this Physical Review Focus article (and, of course, nothing compares to the original PRL...although it must be said, as always, that four pages is not enough, damnit!) Note that, if I understand correctly, the movie "filmed" above is a movie in "momentum space" and, of course, we're not really talking about the observation of a single electron, but of the momentum…
pontiff | February 22, 2008The man on the lift chair at Stephen's Pass asks me my occupation. Professor, I tell him, at the University of Washington.
Oh, he offers, My daughter is a fourth generation Husky. I was in the class of 1972. Or, well I would have been if I'd graduated, but I knew what I wanted to do didn't need a degree. If I'd wanted to work for IBM or Honeywell or something, then I guess it would matter.
Seattle, he continues scratching some snow from his mustache, used to be such a great city. But now, the traffic is crazy. My wife and I went on a trip and couldn't find a city more messed up than…