Self: Meet Center. Center: Meet Self.
pontiff | January 26, 2009Amusings.
Good: temperatures higher than freezing!
Bad: conference schedule at awesome resort which just taunts you cus you're stuck inside (that withstanding the talks are awesome but due to a turn of events, I will have to leave early.)
Good: Did you know that there is a part of Florida which stretches way down towards Cuba? Holy crap am I a west coaster.
Bad: Toll roads.
Good: Alligator crossing signs!
Bad: Alligators!
pontiff | January 22, 2009Part 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…
pontiff | January 16, 2009Method for using Ecto and LaTeXiT.
I've been playing around with a workaround for using LaTeX in Scienceblogs (the powers that be have promised this power, but I need my equations now!)
The solution I've found is a bit of a kludge, but not that bad. First of all I'm using an offline blogging software: ecto. Ecto has a rich text editor (and a good switch to html without a bunch of ugly html code) and a nice feature of drag and drop for images. Then I use LaTeXiT to create a png of the equation I want to insert (LaTeXiT needs to be configured to export png) and then just drag and drop. Of…
pontiff | January 9, 2009Scienceblogs 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,…
pontiff | January 6, 2009For those of us quantum computing folk heading to QIP 2009 in Santa Fe, NM, a few recommendations from someone who once called Santa Fe home.
Food
The first thing you must realize is that New Mexican food is not Mexican food, nor is it Tex-Mex (bleh: worst food ever), but is really it's own form. In addition, Santa Fe has a ton of good food (for a town so small) which is not New Mexican. The second thing you must understand is that New Mexico has a state question! You will be asked this question at dinner. The question is "Red or Green?" an refers to what type of chile you would like.…
pontiff | January 5, 2009It is nearly impossible for me to believe that five years have passed since you passed away.
And hey, we're still waiting for Mt. Shasta to explode, could you get working on that?
One day, when I was an undergraduate at Caltech, I received a package in the mail from my father. In it was a small yellow squash with red dots painted onto it along with a strip of paper which read "what is this?" Well, Caltech is full of some pretty smart people, so we spent a few days trying to reason what this strange package that my father sent was. Small. Yellow. Squash. With red dots. Huh? After a few…
pontiff | December 22, 2008Skiing past our home in Seattle:
Later a group of local kids made a snowboard jump...I would have used it but it didn't look all that sturdy, and I probably would have ended up with an action shot of "Dave destroying local kids joy."
pontiff | December 21, 2008Whew. That was quite a quarter! Talk about drinking straight from a firehose. Okay, okay, I still have a long list of missed deadlines that I need to get to ASAP, but at last it feels like maybe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (don't tell me its the next quarter, I want to be delusional for at least a few days.)
The winter break is always a great time, most importantly because "OMG snow!" (Seattle got another four plus inches of snow last night. Dude, that's like a two feet equivalent in most of the rest of the northern U.S.!) and because of all the great Christmas cheer (…
pontiff | December 10, 2008Via Zz, a link to Symmetry Breaking's list of physics based license plates.
Sweet I'll have to submit my old California plates:
If there is one thing I will regret in life it is that I missed one of the most "terrifiq" opportunities of all time. While I was at the Santa Fe Institute, I had my QUBITS plates and sometimes would park beside Murray Gell-Mann's car which had a QUARKS license place. At one point Ben Schumacher, who invented the word "qubit", visited the Santa Fe Institute. Damnit that was my opportunity to get a picture of two people who invented words in the dictionary starting…
pontiff | December 9, 2008A while back I added my library to librarything.com. In adding this books I tagged my books with various keywords. As you can imagine there were a lot tagged as "physics." Indeed when I entered the books there were only a few people who had a comparable number of physics tags, among them a user called lasermazer. Recently I checked in, and damnit, there is now a library that has a lot more physics tags books:
Yes that is the Thomas Jefferson! A cool feature of library thing are "legacy libraries" where you can compare your overlap with other historic libraries. But wait. Thomas…
pontiff | December 3, 2008Buried under way too much work right now. So for your viewing pleasure (ha) an epic story of Christmas tree hunting in the great pacific northwest.
They trekked over land (no sea):
And spotted a tree on a small cliff. But how to get it down?
Successful hunters:
And yes, it will fit in the car:
pontiff | November 22, 2008This is rivalry week
In a battle of two of the most craptacular teams in college football, Washington State turned out to be less craptacular and beat Washington 16-13 in double overtime. Congrats Washington State, you stink just a little less than the worst team in football (okay maybe Wyoming is worse?)
In the battle that really matters to me, my Cal Bears beat the Stanford Jr. University Red Thingees 37-16. Go Bears!
All right, here we go with the kickoff. Harmon will probably try to squib it and he does. The ball comes loose and the Bears have to get out of bounds. Rodgers is along the…
pontiff | November 18, 2008Observations on time.
One hour of exercise is much more important for my well being than one hour of sleep.
Why does the physics department at the University of Washington have a sundial on the building? I mean, yes it is very cool, but no there are not many opportunities to use it!
Michael Nielsen blogs about Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Story of Success
and about the 10000 hour rule. Supposedly one needs 10000 hours of practice to truly master a subject. That's over a year in time! That's like seven years straight if I work four hours a day with no breaks. That doesn't…
pontiff | November 15, 2008I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia...eh. For some reason they have a parade at night in November with floats containing Santa and reindeer (obligatory crappy cell phone picture to follow):
Yeah, what the hell?
Interesting conference, I'm attending. I haven't been at a conference in ages where disagreed with so many of the talks!
For example, I learned that many many people have got it all wrong and quantum error isn't possible because we haven't thought about the role of phase errors properly (sadly I didn't get to hear about the twin paradox.) I also learned form an older, well established…
pontiff | November 13, 2008New NSF policies on faculty salaries:A major revision of NSF's faculty salary reimbursement policy, to limit compensation for senior personnel to no more than two months of their regular salary in any one year from all NSF-funded grants
This pretty much eliminates any NSF funded research professors, as far as I can tell. Well it was a good run, peoples, but that rule change virtually assures that pseudo-professors like myself don't exist.
pontiff | November 5, 2008"Local" politics.
Siskiyou County, CA (on the CA/OR border), where I grew up (population 44301, population density 8 per square mile, median household income $29530), voted 53.6 percent for McCain and 43.7 percent for Obama. That's extremely close for a very red county (2004 it was 60 percent Bush, 37.7 Kerry.) In other local Siskiyou County news a giant Salmon was found just to the south of Siskiyou County in the Sacramento River.
One can tell that Seattle is once again lagging the nationwide economy (yep), since the voters were in a mood to spend money. (Okay well Western Washington…
pontiff | October 29, 2008This weekend the grapes for my second "real" batch of wine were delivered to Mountain Homebrew and Wine Supply. Last years vintage, Villa Sophia "La Gruccia" was a success in that it didn't turn to vinegar and that over time it is definitely mellowing out, but I wouldn't say it was a fantastic wine. This year I'm a bit more hopeful and have some ideas for how to modify my process to produce a better wine.
Saturday, October 25:
Picked up grapes from Mountain Homebrew. I order 150 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon, a full 50 pounds more than last year which should give me a yield of around 70 to…
pontiff | October 28, 2008
I've spent the last two days in the San Francisco bay area visiting first Stanford and then Berkeley.
Highlights of the trip included:
Talking to Jelena Vuckovic about the work she and her group have been performing on strongly coupling photonic crystals to quantum dots.
Talking to Thaddeus Ladd and Yoshihisa Yamamoto about their work on ultrafast pulses for controlling electron spin which appears in Nature Physics. Picosecond single qubit gates, mmmm.
Talking with Vaughan Pratt. I did not tell him that I am teaching his (and Knuth and Morris') algorithm this Friday! Oh, and I shook…
pontiff | October 14, 2008Self promotion for those around the University of Washington campus: I'm giving a talk in the physics department at UW. Mondays, October 20 at 4:00 P.M. Ronald Geballe Auditorium, Rm. A102 (cookies at 3:45):Title: "Who Will Build a Quantum Computer: the Physicists or the Computer
Engineers?"
Abstract: Building a quantum computer large enough to perform a task beyond the capability of today's classical computers (breaking a cryptographic code or simulating a complex quantum system) is a daunting task. On the fundamental side, this difficulty arises from the fact that quantum systems like to…