Go Ahead, Waste Your Time

Watch Bill Gates unleash that 'swarm' of mosquitoes on crowd - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source Earlier this week, Bill Gates got a lot of attention for releasing some mosquitoes into a crowd while talking about malaria. The video is now available for viewing, and you can watch it below. The incident comes about 5 minutes into the speech, but the entire presentation is worth watching if you have time. (tags: malaria bill gates stunts) Predictive Bet « Masteroftheuniverse's Weblog A good friend of mine and I have been discussing the predictive nature of the markets, or as I…
Madoff Victim Map "Search the Interactive Madoff Victim Map" SciRate Page For 0902.0912 We introduce the concept of mutual independence -- correlations shared between distant parties which are independent of the environment. This notion is more general than the standard idea of a secret key -- it is a fully quantum and more general form of privacy.
Biocurious: Drew Endy on group meetings Via he of uncertain principles "OpenWetWare tweeted an interesting link to Drew Endyâs take on how to give a good group meeting presentation (though it is clear that this is useful advice for any presentation). Here are a few of my favourite slides:" (tags: group talking speaking meetings)
ReadWriteWeb - Web Apps, Web Technology Trends, Social Networking and Social Media What do you do when your industry is shifting under your feet? Taking the lead with radical steps is one strategy. The New York Times did just that this afternoon when it announced that it has released a new Application Programming Interface (API) offering every article the paper has written since 1981, 2.8 million articles. The API includes 28 searchable fields and updated content every hour. (tags: web 2.0 data new york times) Different meanings of Bayesian statistics - Statistical Modeling, Causal…
A Simple Introduction to Quantum Groups « XOR's Hammer (tags: quantum groups) Backreaction: Corot-Exo-7b: A Venus in another World the discovery of an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star in the constellation of Monoceros, at a distance of about 450 light years. (tags: planets astronomy) You Can't Count on the Data, from George Zachar : Daily Speculations "We document widespread changes to the historical I/B/E/S analyst stock recommendations database. Across seven I/B/E/S downloads, obtained between 2000 and 2007, we find that between 6,580 (1.6%) and 97,582 (21.7%) of matched…
Computational Complexity: While I was Gone "Paul Goldberg is looking for permanent faculty members (plural again) for a new Economics and Computation group in Liverpool. Economics is becoming the new quantum." If only this implied golden-ness about quantum were true (tags: computing, quantum faculty positions, doom)
Via Alea: the CME trading simulation game. If only it were this easy: I suspect that in the real world, doing the opposite of what I did would be required to actually make money :)
Part three in my continuing pedantic slow-as-molasses walk through Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. List of posts here: introduction, ch 1, ch 2. SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading. IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I'm an idiot, please tell me why! Having, in the past chapter (hopefully) convinced us that…
Stuff learned while at QIP. A solution to the more cranky P versus NP problem: simply send those who claim P=NP the papers claiming P does not equal NP, and vice versa I did not know that the cell phone ring tone which is hard for older people to hear was first used by restraunts to keep away kids. That's pretty evil. When the question says he used to work in the earth sciences as a preface at a quantum computing conference, you should update your prior about the person being homeless I now understand arXiv:0810.3695 better and particularly am interested in the trick of using an automorphism…
Scienceblogs is upgrading. This site won't allow comments from 10pm Pacific Standard Time on Friday, January 9 until...well until the upgrade is complete (possibly Saturday sometime.) So instead of being frustrated at not being able to comment why don't you instead go waste your time by: By reading some provocative statements about teaching over at the information processors blog. If you need to procrastinate about preparing a referee report, you might check out Michael Nielsen's Three myths of scientific peer review The Statistical Mechanic is back, and discussing thermodynamics,…
Special relativity holds a special (*ahem*) place in most physicist's physicists' hearts. I myself fondly remember learning special relativity from the first edition of Taylor and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics obtained from my local county library (this edition seemed a lot less annoying than the later edition I used at Caltech.) One of the fun things I remember calculating when I learned this stuff was what "right in front of your nose" meant in different frames of reference. Suppose you've got your own handy dandy inertial frame all set up. You've got your rules and you're your clocks and…
Johnny Chung Lee has some cool videos up about wiimote tacking mods and.....more. Tell me which of these is stranger: or ?
xkcd is just fantastic, of course. "A Bunch of Rocks":
If you want to have a productive day I suggest avoiding Assembler. Via: "Phd"ed Man
I wrote a paper with David DiVincenzo once. Now he is in the title of a YouTube video. Some things you can never predict. Part of me wants to say very loudly OMG. The other part of me watched the full six episodes. Parts 2-6 below the fold. Hat tip Aggie. Part II: Part III: Part IV: Part V: Part VI:
Turn your face into a name (via torque). The "quantum pontiff" apparently has long hair:
Take a look at Google circa 2001. Yes that's right you can search like it's 2001! Oh my: apparently I was everything and nothing: 2001 Google search for "Dave Bacon".
There are many things I do not understand in the wide world of finance, but the one which perplexes me the most is why people believe that their money is safe under their mattress. I mean come on people: mattresses? The odds of a fire in your household serious enough to call the fire department during the year are about one in three hundred. Sure the odds of the whole house burning down are lower, but do you really want to put it under a mattress? And what about residential robbery? Your odds of a break in are somewhere around one in 250 per year. And if I'm a robber in these dire…
Physical Theories as Men, a tit for tat response to Physical Theories as Women. Go ahead, you know you want to click on both of them.
One of the subjects of great debate in physics goes under the moniker of "the arrow of time." The basic debate here is (very) roughly to try to understand why time goes it's merry way seemingly in one direction, especially given that the many of the laws of physics appear to behave the same going backwards as forwards in time. But aren't we forgetting our most basic science when we debate at great philosophical lengths about the arrow of time? Aren't we forgetting about...experiment? Here, for your pleasure, then, are some of my personal observations about the direction of time which I've…