pontiff
Posts by this author
October 5, 2009
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2009 has been announced and has been awarded to Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak for "how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." I'm sure the medicalbioblogs here on Scienceblogs will have some…
October 3, 2009
Jorge sends along the answer...Obese skunk put on vegetarian diet to battle bacon addiction.
Mr. Bumble the skunk loves his bacon sandwiches, but his new owners have put him on a vegetarian diet to help shed the extra weight they've added to his frame.
October 2, 2009
This morning Mrs. Pontiff read me a review out of the New York Times for the film "A Serious Man." The opening paragraph of the review gives you an idea why she thought it might be relevant to me:
Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and…
October 1, 2009
Via physicsandcake, on some days I wish I was as dorky and as elegant as Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy…
September 28, 2009
Well it seems that it is that time of year again when grad students and postdocs begin to think about job applications. Last year I had the great pleasure of going through the process (yet one more time!) so yes, I feel your pain. But, at least on the postdoc side of equation for quantum…
September 24, 2009
Note the new location (updated 9/28/09)
The Optimizer is coming to town, which is always fun:
TIME: 1:30-2:30 pm, Tuesday, September 29, 2009
PLACE: CSE 305
SPEAKER: Scott Aaronson (MIT)
TITLE: Quantum Money
ABSTRACT:
Ever since there's been money, there have been people trying to counterfeit it,…
September 23, 2009
Over at Asymptotia, Len Adleman (the A in RSA, founder of DNA computation (but not the A in DNA!), and a discoverer of the APR primality testing algorithm) has a guest post about the foundations of quantum theory. Len suggests, if I understand him correctly, that one should attempt to understand…
September 22, 2009
Hm, looks like D-wave has a new CEO. Not sure when this occurred (?), but a reader sends along an email with an announcement from a recruiting (?) firm:
Lonergan Partners is pleased to announce that Vern Brownell has been named President and Chief Executive Officer of D-Wave Systems....
Vern…
September 22, 2009
Two conferences. Renato Renner sends along a note about QIP 2010. The paper submission deadline is one month away:
QIP 2010 will be held in Zurich, Switzerland, January 18-22.
The submission deadline for contributed talks is 22 October 2009.
For more information, please see http://www.qip2010.…
September 21, 2009
The Netflix prize for movie rankings has been awarded with the winner being BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos. This is very cool, but since it's Monday I think we need a good dose of reality. So here is the first comment on the New York Times Bit blog:
This sounds like an interesting project, but they…
September 17, 2009
Get your daily dose of physics geekery--an interview with LHC director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer--
I need to learn to use "symmetry breaking" in my everyday speech.
September 16, 2009
Via Asymptotia, an interview with Murray Gell-Mann (who just turned 80. Happy Birthday Murray!) I particularly like the comments at the end of the article:
Battles of new ideas against conventional wisdom are common in science, aren't they?
It's very interesting how these certain negative…
September 15, 2009
Those of you interested in the recent debate over math, beauty, economics, and Paul Krugman, and who are in New York on Oct 5 might be interested in a talk by Eric Weinstein at Columbia:
We will be taking a position opposite to the Claim of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman:
"As I see it, the economics…
September 14, 2009
Yreka Phlox (phlox hirsuta) is a endangered perennial subshrub with small beautiful purple flowers native to my hometown of Yreka, California. And now, it's Yreka's' official flower. The official resolution from the city council:
"WHEREAS the Yreka Phlox is a hardy, enduring plant that grows in…
September 12, 2009
I'm going to be visiting the Perimeter Institute next week, talking on Monday (switched from Wednesday) at 3pm. Visiting Perimeter is always a treat: quantum information, quantum foundations, quantum gravity, cosmology, particle physics, superstring theory...I think I've thought of going into all…
September 11, 2009
Krugman clarifies:
I've been getting some comments from people who think my magazine piece was an attack on the use of mathematics in economics. It wasn't...So by all means let's have math in economics -- but as our servant, not our master.
Word.
(Of course the point I was trying to make was that…
September 10, 2009
As I discussed a few blog posts ago a serious hole in our apocalypse protection network was about to be compromised with the non-renewal of the website http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/. But it seems that Domenic has come to the rescue! See comment in the above blog post and the RSS feed…
September 10, 2009
I have been riveted by yesterday's re-argument of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission before the United States Supreme Court. I mean who hasn't? At stake, as they say in media newspeak, is the entire state of campaign finance law (the astute reader will note the choice of words in this…
September 9, 2009
Any quantum people in the area of Japan in early December might be interested in ICQIT 2009. Submission deadline fast approaching (Sep 30):
The International Conference on Quantum Information and Technology ICQIT2009 will be held at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan from 2nd to…
September 8, 2009
Over at the most uncertain blog, he of uncertain principles (aka Chad) takes up a challenge posed by @EricRWeinstein on twitter concerning Paul Krugman's recent article on why economists got the economic crisis so wrong. Since I know even less economics than anyone around here this seems like a…
September 8, 2009
One RSS feeds I subscribe to is the one at http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/. I mean, if the world is going to end, I certainly want Google reader to be the first to tell me. But today's RSS update is, instead of the traditional "no", different:
Bye bye everyone. This domain is not being…
September 8, 2009
Tomorrow, September 9, 2009 is apparently the date for a worldwide game of monopoly: Monopoly City Streets
Welcome to Monopoly City Streets. You versus the world in the biggest live game of MONOPOLY in history!
On the 9th SEPTEMBER, a world of property empire building on an unimaginable scale will…
September 4, 2009
Scott Aaronson, Leonid Grinberg, and Louis Wasserman's "Worldview Manager" is now live at http://projects.csail.mit.edu/worldview/home. It seems that I am not in much conflict over quantum computing
So, damnit, I may be wrong, but at least I'm consistent (the hobgoblin of a little mind, mind you…
September 4, 2009
Congrats to Andrew Houcke for being selected as one of MIT Technology Reviews 2009 Young Innovators under 35. Houcke has been one the leading experimentalists in superconducting qubits, in particular doing pioneering work in circuit quantum electrodynamics. News article from Princeton:
Andrew…
September 4, 2009
I'm a pretty optimistic guy. Okay, I'm a really optimistic guy. But even my optimism has its limits when bashing up against the cold hard reality of what experiments plus our understanding of the laws of physics tells us about the universe. Here are my top three most depressing facts about the…
September 3, 2009
How do you build a computer out of fire?
(Motivated by the observation that if you take three pieces of string and tie them together at a single point, you can make an OR gate. If we denote the presence of fire on a string as a 1 and the absence of fire as a 0, then this contraption clearly…
September 2, 2009
At least three postdoc positions at the University of New Mexico and the University of Arizona's "Center for Quantum Information and Control." Here is a pdf ad for the positions.
The Center for Quantum Information and Control (CQuIC) is seeking to hire at least three postdoctoral fellows over the…
September 2, 2009
Trip to Zurich for 8th Symposium on Topological Quantum Computing, Zurich 29th-31st August 2009.
Thursday 8/27 - 7:30am SEA to 3:30pm IAD, 6:00pm IAD to 8:00am ZRH. Attempt to upgrade first leg failed which is too bad as it was the international version of the 767-300 which has a pretty nice (by…
August 30, 2009
You've got to love a country where a Caesar salad includes a big helping of Bacon:
All hail Caesar Bacon!