pontiff
Posts by this author
November 6, 2009
I get a lot of press releases forward to me which usually get forwarded directly into my gmail archive. But this one I'm happy to pass along: Third Man Records is releasing A Glorious Dawn. You know the Carl Sagan remix (w/ guest appearance of the Hawkmeister) that I've been looping over and over…
November 6, 2009
A puppet commenter informs me that El Naschie is suing Nature. El Naschie, you may remember, was the journal editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals who was accused of not reviewing his own papers in the journal. To be expected, I suppose. But the commenter that pointed this out is entertaining…
November 3, 2009
Not helpful:
In Seattle if a road bends ever so slightly you are on a new street, but the above is...confusing.
November 3, 2009
Over the summer I started running a not so insignificant amount: 6 miles in the morning on the weekdays and 10 to 15 miles on the weekends (insert commenter telling me why this is wrong.) So, one or two or more hours out running around beautiful Seattle (My favorite route is Queen Anne to Fremont…
November 2, 2009
SqUinT will be held in Santa Fe, NM from Feb 18-21, 2010. The submission page is now open and available at http://panda.unm.edu/SQuInT. Note that speakers outside the network should contact the organizers if they wish to inquire about attending. It's an El Nino year, so New Mexico should have…
November 2, 2009
The 5th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography has put up its first announcement. It will be held at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, from 13th - 15th April 2010. The first upcoming deadline to be aware of is the submission deadline of Monday…
November 2, 2009
Update 4/5/09: The wandering Australian does an analysis by institution.
Today, because I have way to many deadlines fast approaching, I needed to waste some time (procrastineerering), I decide to take a look at the last years worth of scited papers on the quant-ph section of scirate.com. The…
October 26, 2009
Michael Green's appointment to replace Stephen Hawking as the Lucasian chair, has, quite predictably, brought back into the spotlight the ever simmering STRING WARS!!!OMG!!!STRINGTHEORYRLZ!!. Okay, maybe not the spotlight, per se, but I did find the article about Green in the Guardian interesting…
October 24, 2009
Spotted on the pick your own religion chart.
Also: Bacon Jam!
October 23, 2009
Via the arXiv api newsgroup comes the rumor that soon, perhaps, the arXiv will be available for full download sometime in the future:
or a full copy of (or particular subsets of) PDF for arXiv papers, we are in the process of setting up a service in the Cloud, which will offer the option for bulk…
October 23, 2009
Oh man sometimes even I, a staunch Caltech grad, wish I could be at MIT. The MIT QIP seminar this next Monday looks...intriguing (Monday 10/26 at 4:00 in 36-428 silly MITers and their numbered buildings, so cold.):
David Kaiser (MIT)
How the Hippies Saved Physics
Abstract:
In recent years, the…
October 21, 2009
The Dutch book argument of Bruno de Finetti is an argument which is supposed to justify subjective probabilities. What one does in this argument is gives probabilities an operational definition in terms of the amount one is willing to bet on some event. Thus a probability p is mapped to your…
October 20, 2009
Two notes on chairs. Michael Green is the new Lucasian chair of Mathematics replacing the esteemed Stephen Hawking. Green helped sparked the great optimism in string theory by discovering with John Schwarz the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation mechanism.
Elsewhere, the Perimeter Institute has…
October 19, 2009
The grapes have been picked up
and the fermenting has (hopefully!) begun. This year I'm trying two types of grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese.
October 15, 2009
The deadline for submissions to QIP 2010 is next week, October 22. Website here
October 14, 2009
Blackjack, or 21, is a game that many enjoy wasting their money playing at casinos. For those who don't like to waste their money, or at least want to waste it more slowly than others, card counting is a time honored tradition for moving the odds away from the casino and in the players direction (…
October 14, 2009
From the annals of high idiocy, I enjoyed this sequence of emails at BofA:
"Unfortunately it's screw the shareholders!!" Charles K. Gifford wrote to a fellow director in an e-mail exchange that took place during the call.
"No trail," Thomas May, that director, reminded him, an apparent reference to…
October 14, 2009
You all scoff at me for subscribing to the RSS feed http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/rss.xml but on Oct. 12 it told me
NO AND NOR WILL IT IN 2012
Aha! What will this do to the sales of 2012 end of world books? (Crap, yeah you're right it will probably make them go up.)
October 12, 2009
Update 10/13/09: corrected for ice cream flavor and location, thus merging two related universes.
There is a story about Richard Feynman that while he was at Princeton MIT he had a hard time with dessert. Apparently they always served either chocolate or vanilla ice cream and Feynman would agonize…
October 9, 2009
A physicist at CERN has been arrested for suspicions of ties to Al Qaeda. Don't worry I already checked www.hasthelhcdestoryedtheearth.com and www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com and both assured me that, so far, Al Qaeda has not managed to generate black holes that would consume…
October 9, 2009
James Simons, he of the Chern-Simons form, and also, of late, from the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies Corporation, is retiring. The infamous Medallion fund was up last year, apparently, only a mere 80 percent.
Quite a feat, turning
into
October 9, 2009
Barack Obama has been awarded an honorary degree from Arizona State University the Nobel Prize in Peace for "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
I recommend a bag of popcorn, a big soda, and a nice recliner to watch the…
October 8, 2009
Yes it's that time of year. The nights are cooler and the days shorter and so all thoughts turn to...skiing, of course. Via @dannysullivan and @eric_hoffman, ski resorts on twitter. Who will be the first to tweet opening day?
October 8, 2009
The Nobel prize in Politics Literature has been awarded to Herta Müller "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."
October 7, 2009
The Nobel in Chemistry for 2009 has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome." And because I am (or was, or am, or..whatever) a physicist, I will note that Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has a Ph.D. in physics…
October 6, 2009
Israel Gelfand, one of the great mathematicians of our age, apparently passed away yesterday at the age of 96. Check out the list of results that bear his name on the above linked Wikipedia page. Wow. Today I will, in his honor, think a bit more about Gelfand-Tsetlin basis and what they can be…
October 6, 2009
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 has been announced and goes to Charles K. Kao for "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication" and to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith for the "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit…
October 5, 2009
Postdocs at Caltech's IQI. Now in the new Annenberg Center (named, of course, after Caltech's Ann of the Steele tower :) ):
INSTITUTE FOR QUANTUM INFORMATION
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Postdoctoral Research Positions
The Institute for Quantum Information at the California Institute of…