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Dave Bacon is a theoretical ski bum who is also a pseudo 
Summer doesn't officially start here in Seattle until the fourth of July, but the summer vibe is definitely here. Which means no teaching, so it's all research all the time. But a man cannot live by his own research alone, which leads me to the vast brain dump that is the internet.
Things found...
- The Innsbruck group has a new paper out on a very cool way to shuffle ions in a trap: arXiv:0906.5335
- The info processor points to a review of power laws in finance/economics
- Via the one honest man a strangely mesmerizing history of yield curve spreads:
- It looks like a group has finally gotten to the threshold for the NetFlix prize. I'll admit it. I downloaded the data sets and spent a good day goofing around. My first algorithms were....not so good :)
- Lots of news about the recent work out of the Yale group on a two qubit superconducting device. Nature article here. The NSF PR title reads "Scientists Create First Working Model of a Two-Qubit Electronic Quantum Processor." Which is a reasonable title, due to the word electronic. DailyTech turns this into "Researchers Claim First 'Real' Quantum Processor" which is a bit of a stretch, and I'm guessing not what the authors wanted to convey. While chattahbox "Yale Researchers Create First Ever, Two-Qubit Quantum Processor" which would receive some strong debate from quite a few other experimental efforts in quantum computing
Comments
In the best brain-dumping internetty way, connected to your blog title, I'm cross-posting this from Dr. Scott Aaronson's blog.
# Jonathan Vos Post Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Comment #37 June 30th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Thank you, John Armstrong — “pontifices” has the right tone indeed, close in semantic/syntactic space to artifices, simplices, polytope faces, … The Pontifex Maximus (which literally means “Greatest Bridge-maker”) was the high priest of the Ancient Roman College of Pontiffs. This was the most important position in the ancient Roman religion, open only to patricians until 254 BC, when a plebeian first occupied this post. If there was also a Pontifex Minimus, then there was a Lattice of Pontifices. Of course, this also makes on think of Pons Asinorum (Latin for “Bridge of Asses”) for Euclid’s fifth proposition in Book 1 of his Elements of geometry, the theorem on isosceles triangles.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | June 30, 2009 1:04 PM
just what we need, a two-bit computer... :P
Posted by: Jon | June 30, 2009 2:12 PM
Great, now we can factor numbers up to 3 (does Shor's algorithm even work for numbers that small?)
Posted by: sep332 | June 30, 2009 3:09 PM
Hi Dave:
The work in the Chatterbox article is described as being conducted by "a team of Yale theoretical physicists." I thought theoretical guys only are permitted to use pencils and paper. I guess this is what happens when a theorist gets a box of crayons too. Rocky
Posted by: Rocky Humbert | June 30, 2009 7:34 PM
Heh, I'd missed the "theoretical physicists" line. Those are fighting words to an experimental physicist!
sep332: You really need to go to four bit numbers before Shor's becomes interesting. Shor's algorithm can be run, I think for N=3, and it will just loop until it spits out that N is prime with high probability.
Posted by: Dave Bacon | July 1, 2009 11:41 AM