Comments for The Quantum Pontiff

Comment on So Long and Thanks For All the Fish! by Neil B

Neil B — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:36:16 +0000

I’ve enjoyed your blog at both places for years, and wish you a good time at the re-newed location. But (by implication) not having good LaTeX access at Scienceblogs puzzles me. It seems that would definitely be a feature they’d provide and even boast of.

For comparison, is ScientificBlogging gaining on Scienceblogs even though I think the latter has more “prestige” as bastion of establishment science bloggers? Do they offer LaTex?

Comment on Ecto and LaTeXiT by Si-Hui Tan

Si-Hui Tan — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:12:01 +0000

Yes, Keynote accepts pdf exports from LaTeXit. However, Keynote is unable to save the LaTeXit equations that have been exported as a pdf. You will get a whole bunch of gibberish that was originally the LaTeXit equations when you try to open the exported pdf.

Comment on Google Hella Cool by evden eve nakliyat

evden eve nakliyat — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:17:23 +0000

Hi all;
A fatal flaw was that they failed to have any representative posts ready to go up when the blog went live.

Had they done so, and had the content been surprisingly acceptable, the reception might have been better.

Instead we get this “Hi! Welcome to ShillBlog!” (crickets) and everyone, quite reasonably, expects the worst.

Comment on Google Hella Cool by Peter Lund

Peter Lund — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:52:09 +0000

Hella. Another bright idea from the people who gave us the footpound.

May I humbly suggest syvto- and syvta instead?
There is prior art (femto-, atto-).

Nino- and nina- would also be nice but there is a problem with the letter abbreviation (lower-case n is already taken).

Comment on So Long and Thanks For All the Fish! by wolfgang

wolfgang — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:35:14 +0000

Dave,

>> being indoctrinated into the liberal media that is the New York Times

you should balance it with some WSJ; Babies need a fair and balanced diet…

Comment on So Long and Thanks For All the Fish! by Rod

Rod — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:06:04 +0000

Enjoy Baby Bacon. Sometime in the last ten seconds, my six-month-old baby turned into an eleven-year-old girl. There’s some time warp phenomenon there…

Does this mean you’re not coming for AQIS this year? My own team and collaborators are planning on dominating the poster session this year, with various quantum computer architecture and engineering-related things.

P.S. Getting peed on from three feet isn’t as bad as #2. Um, TMI?

Comment on So Long and Thanks For All the Fish! by Art

Art — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:36:41 +0000

It has been nice. I’ve enjoyed your blog. You will be missed. Good luck.

Comment on Dead Spins And The Dirty Ground by John Sidles

John Sidles — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:32:54 +0000

JVP, we’ve updated our MRFM home page to provide links to some of the issues that you raise, under the aegis of a debate between quantum “skeptics” and quantum “Boeotians”.

Comment on Dead Spins And The Dirty Ground by Jonathan Vos Post

Jonathan Vos Post — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:25:54 +0000

There was much conversation about von Braun, with whom my father worked, and one of my brothers met, at Westercon 63. There were several panels on human space travel, and a space historian corrected me as we were Giving Panel. I’d said that von Braun was smuggled into Alabama via Operation Paper Clip, and he said (rightly): no, El Paso. Again, there was conversation with Karen Anderson (widow of Poul Anderson) and others in the Green Room about the A-9/A-10, 2-stage V-2 successor designed for transatlantic strikes against New York and Washington D.C., a universe in the multiverse which appears in a nearly completed novel manuscript of mine.

But back to Quantum Computing: any thoughts on Wan-li Yang et al. One-step implementation of multi-qubit conditional phase gating with nitrogen-vacancy centers coupled to a high-Q silica microsphere cavity. Applied Physics Letters, 2010?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100629170945.htm

Now a team of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale at the University of Science and Technology of China has made a step toward a warmer solution. As reported in the journal Applied Physics Letters, published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the team is exploring the capabilities of diamond nitrogen vacancy (NV) materials. In this material, a “molecule” at the heart of an artificially created diamond film consists of a nitrogen atom (present as in impurity amid all those carbon atoms) and a nearby vacancy, a place in the crystal containing no atom at all. These diamond structures offer the possibility of carrying out data storage and quantum computing at room temperature.

Comment on Dead Spins And The Dirty Ground by John Sidles

John Sidles — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:51:26 +0000

I just added to my BibTeX database the following quotation from Michael Neufeld's Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War: "Most touching for von Braun was the enthusiasm of children and teenagers, who wrote in large numbers, many asking how they could get an education suitable for a space program." It is sobering that in quantum information science, there is nowadays not much evidence of comparable enthusiasm, anywhere in the Blogo-sphere. The intellectual vigor and cheerful optimism of blogs like Quantum Pontiff, Shtetl Optimized, and Quantum Moxie serves a vital social purpose ... and conversely, when blogs fall silent, it's mighty discouraging to prospective young mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.