Self: Meet Center. Center: Meet Self.
pontiff | April 15, 2008It was an unassuming blue-grey volume tucked away in the popular science section of the Siskiyou County Library. "Spacetime Physics" it announced proudly in gold letters across the front of the book. Published in 1965, the book looked as if it hadn't been touched in the decades since 1965. A quick opening of the book revealed diagrams of dogs floating beside rocket ships, infinite cubic lattices, and buses orbiting the Earth, all interspaced with a mathematical equations containing symbols the likes of which I'd never seen before. What was this strange book, and what, exactly, did those…
pontiff | April 9, 2008Come on, you know you want to watch it, "How It's Made: Bacon":
That's some awesome background music, I must say. Good to know they check for pieces of metal which might have fallen onto the pork bellies.
pontiff | April 5, 2008This quarter I am teaching CSE 322: Introduction to Formal Models in Computer Science. Good fun. As part of my teaching I am LaTeXing up lecture notes from the class, which follow closely the book we are using, Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation." Here are the first three lectures for those with nothing better to do during their weekend:
Lecture 1: Welcome and Introduction
Lecture 2: Formal Definition of Deterministic Finite Automata
Lecture 3: Regular Operations on Languages
The notes are certainly full of many typos and such, but maybe there is a young teenager who isn't…
pontiff | March 31, 2008...realizing that the class you are teaching for the first time this quarter ends on the half hour, not the hour, and therefore the fact that you are rushing through the material must seem extremely amusing to the students who know the class ends at 20 minutes after. Doh. Doh. Doh!
pontiff | March 31, 2008As part of my switching to a Mac, I've started using Firefox (one reason being that I'm investigating using Zotero for grabbing bibliographic citations from the web.) However, an annoying problem I encounter was when using Firefox and downloading pdfs from the arXiv. The problem was that Firefox failed to recognize the files as pdf files and thinks the pdf for arxiv XXXX.YYYY was a file of type YYYY. Note that this isn't just a problem of downloading any old pdf, but specifically pdfs from the arxiv. I've now figure out how to fix this.
The problem, as was hinted at by a commenter was…
pontiff | March 27, 2008A list of observations I found in moving from a PC to a MAC.
The default on a Mac is that the tab key only moves between text boxes. That's just silly. To fix this, go to System Preferences, click Keyboards and Mouse, and then select the appropriate radio box under the Full Keyboard Access section.
Latex Equation Editor and Leopard don't seem to be getting along well. See here for example. My workaround has been to use LaTeXiT instead. However LaTeXiT doesn't work with Leopard yet, and in particular the linkback functionality apparently causes all sorts of problems. One solution is to…
pontiff | March 26, 2008Well, after the Great Debate, I decided to take the plunge and get....Yep, a MacBook Pro with a top clock speed and a ton of RAM (what you can't infer those later things from the picture?) So far things are so good, although I must say, the "it just works," MacMantra is just a plain lie. Getting LaTeXiT, Leopard, Linkback plugin, and Keynote to play nice together was certainly not something I'd want to force upon most people. However, I guess if your trying to use LaTeX in Keynote, then you're probably up to the task.
pontiff | March 19, 2008Since my laptop was stolen, it's time for me to think about getting a replacement. My last laptop was a tablet PC, a Toshiba M400 Portege, which was "Vista capable," which I'm pretty sure means that it was "just barely Vista capable." I loved having a tablet PC, but the Toshiba wasn't exactly behaving great under Vista (slow, slow, slow.) So now the question is what should my next laptop be. In particular I am almost tempted to (close you ears Seattlites)....buy a Mac.
Tablet PC benefits:
All my notes are on my tablet for the last few years. This is very convenient. Unfortunately the…
pontiff | March 18, 2008To the jerk, or jerks, who broke into my car and stole my laptop and passport while parked in downtown Vancouver. Pfffft! You stink! And just what do you think you're going to do with all those LaTeX files? Maybe you should try to sell them to D-wave! (For the humor impaired: that's a joke.)
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 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 | February 13, 2008Yep, lucky me I'm off to Santa Fe tomorrow morning for the tenth annual SquInT conference. Holy moly ten years of SqUiNT conferences really makes me feel old. I wonder how many Chiles I've eaten over all of those conferences (and I don't even want to think about how many Margaritas or quantum beers I've had.)
For fun, and because I'm procrastinating and because I'm self-centered, I decided to go back and look at how I'd participated in this conference:SqUiNT I (1999): Poster: "Concatenating decoherence free subspaces with quantum error correcting codes"SqUinT II (2000): Talk: Quantum…
pontiff | February 3, 2008Behold: my new research group webpage! This answers part of the question "what do academics do while watching the Super Bowl?"
pontiff | January 15, 2008Speaking of airports, why can't there be more airports like Albuquerque's Sunport: free wireless and even nice places to plug in and lay out your laptop:
Actually this brings up a point I've often pondered while sitting in an airport refusing to pay the $9.99 to connect to the Internet. Seattle is quite the software city (Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) I would expect that a large number of employees from these software companies and their customers pass through the Seattle airport. And yet, when I go to the airport, there is no free wireless connection. :( You would think that it would be to…
pontiff | January 13, 2008Are you a geek if you write a blog post from an airplane seat? And the airplane door is...