Go Ahead, Waste Your Time
pontiff | June 1, 2009So bing, Microsoft's latest search engine, is up and running the tech word is a twitter. I checked it out and...well. On google when you search for "pontiff" my blog comes up as hit number five, after a few silly things like wikipedia entries and dictionary definitions (but no actual links to the *ahem* real pontiff. Sadly the days when I was number one on google are gone. But I will someday tell my grandkids...) But on bing, what happens? I'm down at number nine. Nine, Microsoft, really? I live in Seattle you know: shouldn't this give me extra rank in your algorithms? And among the…
pontiff | May 26, 2009Ah, the games people play:A 23-year-old Tacoma man and an 18-year-old Lakewood woman are suspected of throwing rocks from a railroad trestle onto at least 14 vehicles traveling southbound on Interstate 5 early Monday.
...
Investigators told KOMO-TV that the couple was playing a stripping game that involved each of them shedding a layer of clothing for every headlight they managed to break.
pontiff | May 26, 2009This Intel ad cracks me up:
Reminds me of the classic Onion: Stephen Jay Gould Speaks Out Against Science Paparazzi.
pontiff | May 12, 2009The other day I ran into a good friend from Tlön, who told me the most fascinating story about his discovery of a new theory of games.
I owe my discovery of the nature of equilibrium in card games to an odd conjunction of mirrors and an encyclopedia. The mirror was in our library, and the encyclopedia was called Encyclopedia Equilibria (London, 1942, Enlarged ed. 1983). The mirror was an abomination, for in its reflection, one could see their opponents cards, and thus it led me to a crisis in belief. The encyclopedia, however, was even more of an anomaly, containing a fallaciously named…
pontiff | May 4, 2009Some quotes, with some substitutions, denoted by [], for the actual words:"The famous physicist Max Planck was talking about the resistance of the human mind, even the bright human mind, to new ideas.... And he said science advances one funeral at a time, and I think there's a lot of truth to that and it's certainly been true in [FIELD X]."
and"If you stand up in front of a [FIELD Y] class and say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, you won't get tenure.... Higher mathematics my be dangerous and lead you down pathways that are better left untrod."
and"The more symbols they could work…
pontiff | May 3, 2009Is the Super Mario Bros. theme song the most covered song ever? Via hacklab.to:
lazzor music! from hypatia on Vimeo.
pontiff | April 15, 2009Over 9 months ago I decided to apply for teaching tenure track jobs. Then the economy took what can best be described as a massive, ill-aimed, swan dive. Thus creating an incredible amount of stress in my life. So what does a CS/physics research professor do when he's stress? The answer to that question is available on the iTunes app store today: arXiview. What better way to take out stress and at the same time learn objective C and write an iPhone app that at least one person (yourself) will use?
What is arXiview? It is yet another arXiv viewer (there are two others available, last I…
pontiff | April 12, 2009Can quantum computers efficiently compute factorials?
BaconCamp?
Day Took Er Silicon Valley Jrbs?
I wonder how I'd do on a RQ test?
pontiff | March 23, 2009Sundries.
Warren Buffet is often attributed as saying, "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked" referring to how a bad economy exposes problems in a business. After reading too many comment sections on New York Times articles on the financial crisis, I think it should be "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's a real communist." (Note, dear reader beginning to flame me in the comments, that I didn't say whether I thought this was good or bad or neither good or bad.) Hard economic times really bring out the daggers in economic ideology. I love to…
pontiff | March 16, 2009Every wonder what "The Quantum Pontiff" looks like with a side of Bacon? Me neither. But now you can thanks to bacolicio.us: The Quantum Pontiff with a side of Bacon.
Simultaneous (at least in my reference frame) hat tip to Matt and Jacob.
pontiff | March 9, 2009Via Swans on Tea: Academic Earth: a collection of top lectures on a variety of academic topics. Nothing on quantum computing yet :)
pontiff | February 26, 2009For those scientists out on the job market this year, the following from TheLadders.com might be a little scary:
Two annihilated industries and...science.
pontiff | February 21, 2009
Antenna on the Cheap (er, Chip)
Pringles antenna.
Billionaire Lifestyles: Checking In With Paul Allen and Charles Simonyi | Xconomy
Simonyi is slated to make his second trip to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz rocket on March 26 (at a cost of around $35 million)
pontiff | February 20, 2009With apologies to Radiohead's "There, there":in pitch dark i go walking in your codespace.
broken errors trip me as i speak.
just 'cause you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
just 'cause you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
There's always decoherence
Singing you to shipwreck
(Don't reach out, don't reach out
Don't reach out, don't reach out)
Steer away from these errors
We'd be a decohering disaster
(Don't reach out, don't reach out
Don't reach out, don't reach out)
just 'cause you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
(there's information on your shoulder)
(there's…
pontiff | February 19, 2009
Most powerful ever quantum computer chip in tests - 18 February 2009 - New Scientist
the prototype chip built by D-Wave Systems in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, is designed to handle 128 qubits of information.
Observation of Unconventional Quantum Spin Textures in Topological Insulators -- Hsieh et al. 323 (5916): 919 -- Science
Very cool result and agood step for topological quantum computing.
pontiff | February 18, 2009
CreateSpace - On-Demand Self Publishing, DVD on Demand, CD on Demand, Books on Demand, DVD Duplication and DVD Replication
Amazon's self publishing service
SciRate Page For 0902.2658
Here we study the performance of a concatenated error-detection code in a system that permits only nearest-neighbor interactions in one dimension. We make use of a new message-passing scheme which maximizes the number of errors that can be reliably corrected by the code. Our numerical results indicate that arbitrarily accurate universal quantum computation is possible if the probability of failure of each…
pontiff | February 17, 2009
Picture Gallery for listing 29003112
Now that's a Seattle swimming pool view.
(tags: real networks)
PDF redaction still not working - Hack a Day
Court documents from a settlement between Facebook and ConnectU showed that Facebook values itself at $3.7 billion, much less than the $15 billion that was speculated during the Microsoft investment. The AP uncovered this by cutting and pasting from the redacted court document. It's the same thing we showed in our PDF redaction screencast last summer... and it will never cease to be funny.
(tags: cut and paste)
New Zealand town is in the dark…
pontiff | February 16, 2009
Physics - A quantum phase transition for a spin liquid
In a Rapid Communication appearing in Physical Review B, Vasile Garlea and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Germany, and the Commissariat à lâÃnergie Atomique in Grenoble, France, report an unusual magnetic-field-induced spin ordering in a geometrically frustrated quasi-one-dimensional compound, Sul-Cu2Cl4
(tags: quantum phase transition)
pontiff | February 10, 2009
http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/
(tags: omg)
MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield fixed data on autism - Times Online
THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
(tags: autism vaccines)