Off The Deep End
pontiff | November 6, 2009A puppet commenter informs me that El Naschie is suing Nature. El Naschie, you may remember, was the journal editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals who was accused of not reviewing his own papers in the journal. To be expected, I suppose. But the commenter that pointed this out is entertaining:Sarah Limbrick [Pontiff: writer of the above linked article about the suit] would surely be interested to know what the leading libel expert in England had to say about the Nature article complained of. He said he is in a state of disbelief that the worlds most respectable scientific journal Nature…
pontiff | November 3, 2009Over the summer I started running a not so insignificant amount: 6 miles in the morning on the weekdays and 10 to 15 miles on the weekends (insert commenter telling me why this is wrong.) So, one or two or more hours out running around beautiful Seattle (My favorite route is Queen Anne to Fremont to Ballard Locks, around Magnolia and back up Queen Anne.) Which brings us to the subject of time. During my runs it seems that my watch, which runs using mechanical energy, decided that it had a new setting: relativistic mode. In other words I'd go out and run for two hours, and when I got back…
pontiff | October 23, 2009Oh man sometimes even I, a staunch Caltech grad, wish I could be at MIT. The MIT QIP seminar this next Monday looks...intriguing (Monday 10/26 at 4:00 in 36-428 silly MITers and their numbered buildings, so cold.):
David Kaiser (MIT)
How the Hippies Saved Physics
Abstract:
In recent years, the field of quantum information science-an amalgam of topics ranging from quantum encryption, to quantum computing, quantum teleportation, and more-has catapulted to the cutting edge of physics, sporting a multi-billion-dollar research program, tens of thousands of published research articles, and a…
pontiff | October 21, 2009The Dutch book argument of Bruno de Finetti is an argument which is supposed to justify subjective probabilities. What one does in this argument is gives probabilities an operational definition in terms of the amount one is willing to bet on some event. Thus a probability p is mapped to your being willing to make a bet on the event at 1-p to p odds. In the Dutch book argument one shows that if one takes this operational meaning and in addition allows for the person you are betting to take both sides of the bet, then if you do not follow the axiomatic laws of probability, then the person…
pontiff | October 14, 2009From the annals of high idiocy, I enjoyed this sequence of emails at BofA:"Unfortunately it's screw the shareholders!!" Charles K. Gifford wrote to a fellow director in an e-mail exchange that took place during the call.
"No trail," Thomas May, that director, reminded him, an apparent reference to the inadvisability of leaving an e-mail thread of their conversation.
...
Shortly after Mr. May's remark about an e-mail trail, Mr. Gifford said his comments were made in "the context of a horrible economy!!! Will effect everyone."
"Good comeback," Mr. May replied.
You have to give Mr. Gifford at…
pontiff | October 14, 2009You all scoff at me for subscribing to the RSS feed http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/rss.xml but on Oct. 12 it told meNO AND NOR WILL IT IN 2012
Aha! What will this do to the sales of 2012 end of world books? (Crap, yeah you're right it will probably make them go up.)
pontiff | October 2, 2009This morning Mrs. Pontiff read me a review out of the New York Times for the film "A Serious Man." The opening paragraph of the review gives you an idea why she thought it might be relevant to me:Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, "A Serious Man," some details have been changed. He's called Larry Gopnik and he lives in Minnesota, where he teaches physics at a university. When we first meet Larry, in the spring of 1967, his tenure case is pending, his son's bar mitzvah is…
pontiff | September 10, 2009As I discussed a few blog posts ago a serious hole in our apocalypse protection network was about to be compromised with the non-renewal of the website http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/. But it seems that Domenic has come to the rescue! See comment in the above blog post and the RSS feed update:Domenic (a true fan of this site) was so distraught at the thought of missing out on further reassurances of the earth's continued existence that he's ponied up the registration cost for another year. So, we're not going anywhere after all.
1. The world has not ended. 2. The website is still…
pontiff | September 10, 2009I have been riveted by yesterday's re-argument of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission before the United States Supreme Court. I mean who hasn't? At stake, as they say in media newspeak, is the entire state of campaign finance law (the astute reader will note the choice of words in this sentence and smile.) The Quantum Pontiff is not a lawyer, but he is the son of a lawyer, and greatly admires the ability of supreme court justices to herd the truth in directions more palatable to their preexisting exquisite judicial tastes (why is everyone staring at Justice Scalia?) So I would…
pontiff | September 8, 2009One RSS feeds I subscribe to is the one at http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/. I mean, if the world is going to end, I certainly want Google reader to be the first to tell me. But today's RSS update is, instead of the traditional "no", different:Bye bye everyone. This domain is not being renewed. It's been fun.
Which means that soon when you check www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com, you may not get an answer. Which may or may not mean the LHC has destroyed the world (oh noes!) Or it may just mean that your going to find a web page filled with spam from a domain name squatter.…
pontiff | September 4, 2009I'm a pretty optimistic guy. Okay, I'm a really optimistic guy. But even my optimism has its limits when bashing up against the cold hard reality of what experiments plus our understanding of the laws of physics tells us about the universe. Here are my top three most depressing facts about the universe coming from the field of physics and astronomy.
The speed of light. The speed of light is a real bummer, dude. I mean sure, 299792458 meters per second may sound fast, but in comparison to the nearly 40 trillion kilometers to the nearest star, it's not very fast. And considering the…
pontiff | July 30, 2009Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is "Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking." Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don't know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is one who is doing cool quantum computing research ("cracking?" and "hacking?" btw.)
I open up the article and who is the police woman? It's Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described…
pontiff | July 27, 2009A new entry in the best title every contest, arXiv:0907.4152:Born Again
Authors: Don N. Page
Abstract: A simple proof is given that the probabilities of observations in a large universe are not given directly by Born's rule as the expectation values of projection operators in a global quantum state of the entire universe. An alternative procedure is proposed for constructing an averaged density matrix for a random small region of the universe and then calculating observational probabilities indirectly by Born's rule as conditional probabilities, conditioned upon the existence of an…
pontiff | July 26, 2009Writing a blog is for me (1) amusing and (2) amusing. Can anyone take anything that I write on a blog seriously? Well sometimes people do. Many eons ago (okay, I lie, it was 2005), I wrote a post about the then new "h-index." The h-index is an attempt at trying to find a better way of "ranking" citation counts. As such, it is, of course, nothing more than another meter stick in the long line of lazy tenure committee metric sticks. But it's also fun! Why is it fun? Because calculating any "metric" is fun for people like me who spent their childhood involved in such mind expanding tasks…
pontiff | July 16, 2009A fellow quantum computing researcher of mine recently joined FriendFeed. Along with another researcher we got involved in a discussion about a paper concerning a certain recent claimed "disproof of Bell's theorem." (arXiv:0904.4259. What it means to "disprove a theorem" like Bell's theorem is, however a subject for another comment section on a different blog.) But, and here is the interesting thing, this colleague then made a trip to China. And FriendFeed, apparently, is blocked by the great firewall of China, so he had to email us his comments to continue the conversation. Which got me…
pontiff | July 16, 2009Via @mattleiffer, viXra.org:In part viXra.org is a parody of arXiv.org to highlight Cornell University's unacceptable censorship policy. It is also an experiment to see what kind of scientific work is being excluded by the arXiv. But most of all it is a serious and permanent e-print archive for scientific work. Unlike arXiv.org tt [sic] is truly open to scientists from all walks of life.
Maybe I should submit one of my papers with all of the text reversed (yeah, yeah, it would still be incomprehensible.)
pontiff | July 13, 2009Over at the optimizer's blog, quantum computing's younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I'd only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave…
pontiff | July 2, 2009Okay, I'm calling it. We have officially reached the top of the Bacon loving bubble. Why? The dress made of Bacon indicator has been tripped. This indicator has a 50 percent probability of beating the magic 8 ball in predicting the top of past Bacon bubbles. I predict a hard landing for Bacon lovers everywhere. Until they shed their few extra pounds (a lagging indicator) we are entering a dark period for Bacon.
Hat tip: Jorge.
pontiff | July 1, 2009Over at my old blog one thread which keeps on giving is my missive about Dr. Wayne Dyer which now has over 2000 comments. I can always tell when it's PBS pledge drive time by the bump in traffic on my old website and the increase in comments on this post. Today I got a spam comment on the post. Now usually spam comments aren't to exciting (bad Viagra joke deleted), but this one is...well...different.
(Note: Neither I, Scienceblogs, nor my mom endorse what's described below but present the following for your own amusement):You've committed your life to Jesus. You know you're saved. But when…