So long and thanks for all the fish!

Over the past three years I’ve had a good time blogging here at Scienceblogs. Though I rarely agree with much they say (haha, classic curmudgeon that I am) I can honestly say my fellow Sciencebloggers are a great bunch of people, and I’m sure I’ll continue to get irritated at what they write for many years to come (just kidding, I always agree with the physicists! )

“Great Dave, thanks for taking a stand against the PepsiCo blog!” Well actually, I’ve been thinking about leaving for a while, so it would be disingenuous of me to claim this is all about the PepsiCo blog. You see about six months ago, something quite miraculous happened (for some definition of miracle). He’s pictured above being indoctrinated into the liberal media that is the New York Times. Since baby Bacon’s birth, my blogging has dropped off a cliff (Grand Canyon style.) Choosing between spending time with baby Bacon and quantum pontifficating is, well, a simple choice. In light of my light blogging it seems natural to leave Scienceblogs and return to my original blog http://dabacon.org/pontiff where I can occasionally blog when in between changing diapers and getting peed on from three feet away (dude!)

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Scienceblogs decision to host the PepsiCo blog is “bad! bad! bad!” I’m happy that my fellow Sciencebloggers have protested violently against this. Had I not been on the brink of leaving, I probably would have given the overlords the benefit of a doubt for a few days. Everyone makes mistakes, to get cliche, and I’d rather measure my reaction after watching how people react to their mistakes (I believe this comes from being part California surfer dude.) So I guess what I’m saying is that this is about 80 percent pre-existing condition and 20 percent the Pepsi fiasco. I’m sorry if that offends the more activist passionate among you, but it’s my own truth. Or at least my own biased perception of how I feel. Which is the best you’re going to get.

Anyway, on to more positive thoughts, please come on by and check out my new local: http://dabacon.org/pontiff. Here is the rss feed. Oh, and moving back to my old location means one good thing: LaTex! Mmmm, juicy mathy blog posts.

arXiv:1006.4388
Making Classical Ground State Spin Computing Fault-Tolerant
Isaac J. Crosson, Dave Bacon, Kenneth R. Brown
We examine a model of classical deterministic computing in which the ground state of the classical system is a spatial history of the computation. This model is relevant to quantum dot cellular automata as well as to recent universal adiabatic quantum computing constructions. In its most primitive form, systems constructed in this model cannot compute in an error free manner when working at non-zero temperature. However, by exploiting a mapping between the partition function for this model and probabilistic classical circuits we are able to show that it is possible to make this model effectively error free. We achieve this by using techniques in fault-tolerant classical computing and the result is that the system can compute effectively error free if the temperature is below a critical temperature. We further link this model to computational complexity and show that a certain problem concerning finite temperature classical spin systems is complete for the complexity class Merlin-Arthur. This provides an interesting connection between the physical behavior of certain many-body spin systems and computational complexity.

Also: Colored Bacon and Bacon cupcakes.

As you might imagine, given the above facts, the recent recession has cause some financial hardships for Siskiyou county. It comes as no surprise, then to read an article in the local newspaper, the Siskiyou Daily News, regarding drastic cuts in the funding of the Siskyou County library. The county is running a $3.7 million deficit, and many cuts are now on the county supervisor’s agenda. Among the cuts is one that hits dear to my heart, cutting the county library’s budget from $712,000 to $50,000, the later being enough to keep the utilities running at the library buildings. The county library in Siskiyou county is in danger of dying.

Read about this made me sad. Now I’m not a bystander without personal interest in this situation: my handicapped sister has worked or volunteered at the county library in Yreka for many many years. The “gainful” employment the library has given her has been a blessing for her and, I think, for those who get to spend time with someone who is much more wonderful than her oafish brother. It would be a shame if her job where to end, not because she costs the county much (she is a volunteer now) but because it brings great joy to her day, and I suspect, to many people who interact with her.

But I’m also sad for a different reason. I’m sad because of Spacetime Physics 1ST Edition. 1st edition, peoples, not the later editions! I picked up this book from the county library at who knows what age and learned all about special relativity (chapter 1 is available here: note the dog and spaceship.) Indeed learning about hyperbolic sine and hyperbolic cosine were of great use when I finally, years later, had to learn trigonometry (which I taught myself in order to calculate how the size of the moon’s shadow is changed by refraction in the earth’s atmosphere. NERD!)

I’m sad because of a county library Calculus book whose author I do not remember, but where I first learned about Newton’s (and friend’s) great discovery involving wacko ideas like limits and infinitesimals. It will come as no surprise to learn that I was led to this book by a book on quantum theory. The quantum theory book started out with a discussion of something called blackbody radiation, and it was very important that the big sigma (I new this stood for a sum) was used instead of a big flat “S.” A science teacher said “Ah that’s an integral sign from Calculus.” Ah the indignation of having to learn calculus before you could learn quantum theory (now we know better!)

I’m sad because of all of the back issues of Scientific American with their wonderful articles on the game of life, computer bugs that evolved, and tinkertoy machines for playing tic-tac-toe (and whose author, in later life, seems to have become rather sadly confused.)

I’m sad for all of the many popular science books on the “mysteries” of quantum theory that allowed me, when it came time to really learn quantum theory, to know exactly where the line to those mysteries lay and that crossing that line tonight at 2 a.m. was not going to help me solve my problem set by 10 a.m. I’m sad for A Brief History of Time, From the Big Bang to Black Holes where I learned that I disagreed with Hawking about many things, none of them involving physics.

Now I can’t say that I’ve been any great contribution to my country, given how big of a user of its library I once was. I live in Seattle and visit Yreka only occasionally now. But I do know with high certainty that a major factor in me ending up with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and performing research on quantum computing can be traced back to that county library. And I’m guessing that for many others the library has provided a path towards their own self-education: may it be on black holes, sewing, or learning about the history of the world. If I had a soapbox I’d probably also go on about studies showing businesses not moving to the county due to it’s low literacy rate. But enough of the political whining. Tonight, I’m just going to be sad for the future kids who don’t even know that they just lost one more opportunity to expand and better their future world.

Turn the page.

Here is a
report from UCSD on “Hot Degrees for College Graduates 2010.” 3 of the top 5 are computer science related, and number 3 is “Data Mining.”

Now I know that database programming does not equal data mining. But it is interesting to contrast these two bits of data (*ahem*), especially giving the dire prediction at the end of Alan Corwin’s article. Besides my tinkering with iPhone apps, simulations for my research, and scirate, I’m definitely not a professional programmer. But I am surrounded by students who go on to be professional programmers, many of them being immensely successful (as witnessed by alumni I have met.) And when I talk to my CS students about job prospects, they are far from doom and gloom. So how to reconcile these two views?

Well, I think what is occurring here is simply that those who view themselves as a set of tools and languages they use to get their jobs are misunderstand what the role of a programmer should be. There are many variations on this theme, but one place to find a view of the programmer as different than someone whose skill set defines them is The Programmers Stone. And indeed, in this respect, I think a good CS degree resembles a good physics degree. Most people who come out of physics programs don’t list on their resume: “Expert in E&M, quantum theory, and statistical physics.” The goal of a good physics program is not to teach you the facts and figures of physics (which are, anyways, easily memorized), but to teach you how to solve new problems in physics. For computer science this will be even more severe, as it is pretty much guaranteed that the tools you will be using today will change in the next few years.

So doom and gloom for programmers? Only time will tell, of course, but I suspect this answer is a strong function of what kind of programmer you are. And by kind I don’t mean a prefix like “Java” or “C++”.

(And yes I realize that this is an elitist position, but I just find the myth of the commodity programming job as an annoying misrepresentation of why you should get a degree in computer science.)

Update: more here.

Also I’m amused to note that the google-monster also recognizes smoots.

Every time I think about this disparity, I wonder why different versions of a paper, the referee reports, the author responses, and all editorial reviews aren’t part of the scientific record. In an age where online archiving of data such as this is a minor cost, why is so much of the review process revealed to only the authors, the referees, and the editors?

In the wake of Shor’s algorithm, one can identify three basic questions:

(1) First, can quantum computers actually be built? Can they cope with realistic rates of decoherence — that is, unwanted interaction between a quantum computer and its external environment? Alternatively, can we find any plausible change to currently-accepted laws of physics such that quantum computing would *not* be possible?

(2) Second, what would the actual capabilities of quantum computers be? For example, could they efficiently solve NP-complete problems? Though quantum computers would break many of today’s cryptographic codes (including RSA), can other practical codes be found that are secure against quantum attacks?

(3) Third, does quantum computing represent the actual limit of what is efficiently computable in the physical world? Or could (for example) quantum gravity lead to yet more powerful kinds of computation?

I would have added (a) are quantum computers useful for physical simulation of chemistry, biology, and physics?, (b) can quantum computing theory overcome roadblocks that have plagued classical computational complexity?, and (c) is quantum computing useful for understanding how to build classical algorithms for simulating physical systems?

After some initial development, however, I mostly stopped working on Scirate. Why? Well first of all because I didn’t think I’d succeeded in a very elegant way. Second there was never much traction: there is a group of quantum computing theorists who use scirate fairly often, but outside of that it is not widely used (though there are around a thousand users signed up.) Probably this is also because the development of scirate was essentially closed, consisting of me, hacking away in his spare time. Third, well this thing called a “real job” called (but I keep getting this “hold” music, heh.) I am, however, very proud that until last week, I basically haven’t had to touch the website in any way (last week my host moved Scirates server and didn’t copy over my crontab jobs, thus there is a day missing where I didn’t catch this) besides fixing a few double votes (that occur via a mechanism I’ve never been able to track down.)

So now the question is: what should I do with Scirate?

Some things I’ve been thinking about.

• One problem with Scirate is it’s closed nature. Thus it seems that it would be useful to open up an API for Scirate, allowing for its integrated functionality in other Science 2.0 websites. Indeed I’ve been thinking a bit about a very general framework for the type of functionality Scirate provides, but haven’t mapped the idea out fully.
• I’d like to learn more about Google App engine. Seems like what I do next would be a good opportunity to achieve this.
• One thing that was clearly missing was the ability to use Scirate for some sort of social networking. I’m a bit of a skeptic of “scientific social networking” sites, simply because I don’t see how scientists are all that special in their needs for social networking. Or to say it another way I don’t quite see how a more general social networking tool can’t be “extended” to be useful for scientists, but also be very useful across a wide swath of society. This would imply that I should investigate integration into other social networking sites. But does anyone really want Scirate on Facebook? (Farmville proves to me, however, that I have no idea what people want with Facebook.) And something like LinkedIn doesn’t seem to me to be as widely used as a social networking site (it’s more of a contacts / job site) nor does it allow for extend-able apps as far as I know. Actually this makes me realize that there is a huge hole in the professional social networking genre, though I’m sure that there are people out there attacking this problem. Anyone have any leads?
• There are rumors that the arXiv will soon be accessible in “the cloud.” What sorts of functionality would this allow that it currently missing?

Anyway it seems that I’m due to be working on something new…and yes I know I need to update my iPhone apps as well