pontiff | December 18, 2007Startup weekend will be coming to my backyard in January (literally in my backyard, Adobe is just down the hill from Villa Sophia.) Startup weekend, you say? What the heck is that?
I'd never heard of it either. Luckily, these are computer scientists, so they have a FAQ:What is Startup Weekend?
A 54 hour event where a bunch of technologists get together to build a community and company.
What is the weekend like?
The weekend is fun, and intense! It starts Friday at 6pm and finishes up Sunday at midnight, the hours in between are up to the community.
Who is the CEO of the weekend?
No CEO,…
pontiff | December 17, 2007The grades are all done, and the students are gone, and now I'm conferencing. (That sentence should be sung to the tune of "Busted") After a mere hour and a half delay at the airport I arrived last night at USC for QEC07.
Day one is a half day of tutorial talks and then a half day of talks. I've posted slides of my talk here: "Topological Codes and Subsystem Codes and Why We Should Care About Them..." Hopefully I'll have some interesting things to post about in the next few days as I listen to the latest and greatest from the world of quantum error correction.
So far the highlight of the…
pontiff | December 17, 2007News from Computing Research Policy Blog that the new omnibus appropriations bill will totally hammer the NSF and NIST. Effectively, factoring in some accounting and inflation, both budgets will be shrunk. So much for the America Competes Initiative. I've appropriately updated the probability that I will be employed in the next few years.
pontiff | December 14, 2007Murray Gell-Mann always makes me laugh. Via Asymptotia here is what Murray said while giving a Ted talk:I won't go into a lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and what it's like and so on...you've heard a lot of wrong things about it anyway!
Which got me wondering: is more said which is wrong about quantum theory than any other theory in physics? Now certainly there are those who will interpret Einstein's relativity (which one they probably won't tell you) as some postmodern "everything is relative" mantra. But (and maybe because I'm locked in a quantum closet all day) it seems to me that…
pontiff | December 14, 2007Last week Mitt Romney, in a speech on religion, said that "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom." Or, as I like to put it, "Religion iff Freedom." This bothered me more than a little bit, until I realized that I could turn it into an empirical question. Or a least a question where I could make a plot! Below is a plot of importance of religion in people's lives versus their political freedom for a 39 countries:
The views on religion were taken from a 2002 Pew survey and the political freedom index was taken from the 2007 Freedom House's survey of political freedom…
pontiff | December 10, 2007There's a new initiative to get a presidential debate on issues of science and technology: Science Debate 2008 (list of supporting Important People (capital letters) and bloggers (no capital letters).) I'm all for the idea, since I know little about the candidates positions related to science and technology. Which of course, is a bad excuse, and thus led me to try to dig deep into the intertubes and see if I could find a list of the candidates positions on science and technology.
Here is a collection of some of the relevant links I could find. For some candidates it was quite hard to find…
pontiff | December 7, 2007Addition, for me, is intimately connected up with my concept of a number. When I think of numbers in my head, I often think of the number in connection with its constituent parts, and when I divide these parts up into equal pieces I "get" multiplication. However, on top of this bare bones thinking, I also conceptualize numbers strongly by their size, thinking about the number first as the most significant digit in the number and proceeding down to the less significant digits. Which makes me wonder, do we teach addition backwards?
The standard grade school algorithm we are taught for adding…
pontiff | December 6, 2007Compare and contrast and compare and constrast.
John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1960:I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
Mitt Romney, December 6, 2007:Freedom…
pontiff | December 6, 2007There's some interesting new work out on supersolid helium, a subject of great interest and controversy. The work was performed by John Beamish and James Day at the University of Alberta and is reported in this weeks Nature (Day, J. & Beamish, J. Nature 450, 853-856 (2007). Article here, Perspective here.)
As a refresher for what supersolid helium is, there is an old post I wrote on the subject back in 2005:Yesterday I went to a condensed matter seminar on "super solid Helium" by Greg Dash. What, you ask, is super solid Helium? Well certainly you may have heard of superfluids. When you…
pontiff | December 5, 2007Since I got into trouble for posting about the need for more, not less, funding for science and engineering, (and, I might add, a reengineering of our approach to what it means to produce a successful Ph.D.), I thought I'd continue the trouble by linking to a post over at the Computing Research Policy Blog, "Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations Expected to Grow Quickest Over the Next Decade."
pontiff | December 5, 2007Congrats to Daniel Lidar, Seth Lloyd, and Barbara Terhal, for becoming the first three APS fellows selected through the APS topical group Quantum Information, Concepts, and Computation (GQI). Citations below the fold.
Citations from the aps website:
Lidar, Daniel
University of Soutern California
Citation: For his contributions to the theory of decoherence control of open quantum systems for quantum information processing, especially the decoherence free subspace method.
Nominated by: Quantum Information, Concepts, and Computation (GQI)
Lloyd, Seth
Massachusettes Institute of Technology…
pontiff | December 5, 2007His Squidiness points to a real whopper of a silly article titled "Was Einstein Wrong About Special Relativity?" by Darrell Williams who is listed as a "Mathematician" and a "graduate of Arizona State University."
You know you're in for a "good" article when it beginsMany notable scientists such as the French mathematician, Henri Poincaré rejected Einstein's Theory of Relativity due to it's lack of sound mathematical procedures, absence of clearness of vision or rigorous arguments.
If by "many" he means "very few, and old guys who died in 1912" then this is a perfectly cromulent sentence…
pontiff | December 5, 2007Chad of Uncertain Principles asks what's on our office doors. Here in the Paul Allen Center, our doors are too pretty to put things on, but the little square beside our door is perfect for attaching odds and ends. Here is my door in all its glory:
A. Quantum computing warning sign. The cat is in a superposition of sleeping and scratching.
B. Me jumping off a cornice. Weeee! Mmm, cornices.
C. Spherical cow warning sign. This one causes great confusion in a computer science department.
D. Villa Sophia in the snow. Our Christmas card.
E. M.I.A
F. The Clifford group
G. Occam warning sign…
pontiff | December 4, 2007SQuInT program and deadline, Rush Limbaugh on quantum cosmology, and the parallel worlds of Hugh Everett's son
The 2008 SQuInT conference deadline for registration is fast approaching, December 12. The program is now available online as well. Looks like a good lineup.
Rush Limbaugh talks about quantum cosmology. He is completely wrong that man doesn't affect his environment, less wrong that we are insignificant in the universe, and you can imagine that since the paper he is talking about has been filtered through at least one other media organization prior to reaching his hands, the…
pontiff | December 2, 2007Books off the queue and lodge securely somewhere behind my eyes: "A Mathematician's Apology" by G.H. Hardy and "A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation" by Richard Bookstaber
A Mathematician's Apology by G.H. Hardy (with a foreword by C.P. Snow)I was really looking forward to reading this classic, since mathematicians certainly have a lot to apologize for. Sadly Hardy instead writes a fairly depressing defense of mathematics from a fairly dogmatic view of the subject. Of course, he has every right to this view (unlike me, who barely deserves…
pontiff | December 1, 2007Researchers Dispute Notion That America Lacks Scientists and Engineers in the Chronicle of Higher Education is a fine example of how thinking that scientific or engineering degree's are like technical training degrees will lead you to say all sorts of funny things. Yep, it's another edition of Nitpicker's Paradiso.
The article begins with some fun stuff which is ripe for nitpicking:At a hearing of a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives science committee, Michael S. Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, told lawmakers....
Federal policy encourages an…
pontiff | November 30, 2007...is finding a homework stuck to my door, with duck tape, along with the note "Gone to Mt. Baker" (Mt. Baker is a local ski area.) Actually this reminds me of a policy I've always wanted to try: require every student to NOT attend class at least a few times a term. The idea being that it is actually beneficial to at least try to teach yourself the material without guidance from the teacher. Many students probably can learn on their own, but never try, because they equate doing well with attendance. Nudging these students towards that realization, I think, might actually be a good thing…
pontiff | November 29, 2007From the magazine Seattle Metropolitan, comes the article "Smartest city ever: 50 ways Seattle will change the world." I hope the claim is true, but like all magazine articles from rags denoted entirely to a city, the lens is more than a little biased.
What I find interesting about Seattle, and Washington state in general, is that the state has the most engineers per capita of any state, while for the number bachelors granted in per capita of people age 18-24 the state is ranked 37 out of 50 states (and 38 out of 50 in percentage of bachelors which are in science and engineering.) While the…