pontiff
Posts by this author
August 26, 2009
I'm off to Zurich tomorrow for 8th Symposium on Topological Quantum Computing which I'm greatly looking forward to (this will be my first trip to Switzerland.) What I'm not looking forward to is the 15.5 hours it will take me to get from the Seattle airport to the Zurich airport! So, any…
August 21, 2009
An interesting paper on the arXiv's today, arXiv:0908.2782, "Adiabatic quantum optimization fails for random instances of NP-complete problems" by Boris Altshuler, Hari Krovi, and Jeremie Roland. Trouble for D-wave?
Adiabatic quantum algorithms are a set of techniques for designing quantum…
August 20, 2009
I Am Poor, the $0.99 iPhone app:The mac & cheese, Ramen noodles, and tuna is my artistic rendition of what poor college students eat with their limited funds.
The icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this.
But,…
August 19, 2009
Want a job hacking away at topological quantum computing (and more) by day and surfing (by morning?) on the beautiful Southern California coast near Santa Barbara? Okay, well maybe surfing isn't part of the job description, but Microsoft's Station Q at UCSB has postdocs available with a deadline…
August 15, 2009
Living in a small rural town is hard. Jobs are often difficult to come by (in the Northwest this is particularly true of towns that have suffered the slow fall of the timber industry.) The county where I grew up, Siskiyou county, currently has an unemployment rate north of 18 percent. And yet,…
August 11, 2009
Buzzing on Scienceblogs right now is PalMDs ongoing attempt to get his BMI in shape. In honor, I shall post my latest attempt at getting in shape:
Kids and adults: don't try this at home!
How did I do it? Eat like a monk and run a lot.
August 11, 2009
How did I miss this one from 2005? And how come no one told me to take off my tinfoil hat? Via @kmerritt, "On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study" by Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter.Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as…
August 10, 2009
March is ages away, but it is time to start planning for the APS March meeting, to be held in the beautiful rose city, Portland, Oregon (Note to skiers that Mt. Hood is just a short distance away :) ) Anyway an important part of the March meeting are invites sessions and the quantum computing/…
August 5, 2009
Booz Allen Hamilton is looking for a science and technology consultant in quantum information sciences. Help be a part of quantum revolution! Description and contact info below the fold.
Key Role/Position Description:
Serve as a strategic consultant to government science and technology clients.…
August 4, 2009
Chris Mooney, former Scienceblogger and provocateur extraordinaire, will be in Seattle this Thursday talking about the book he co-authored with Sheril Kirshenbaum, "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future." Details:Thursday, August 6 7:00 PM
University Bookstore
4326…
August 4, 2009
Well there goes a chunk of my time. A new Pynchon novel is out: Inherent Vice. According to this New York Times review it's much more like Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49 than Gravity's Rainbow. I'm sure there will be much teeth gnashing among the literati, but personally, I'm a huge fan of…
August 2, 2009
"C" sends me a link of fantastic mmmm-ness. CMMG Tactical Bacon, TB-1, 9oz, 10+ Year Shelf Life:The ultimate tactical accessory, the new Tactical Bacon from CMMG ® is simply amazing. Kept in an aluminum can for a shelf life of 10+ years, the CMMG ® Tactical Bacon is more affordable than other…
July 30, 2009
Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is "Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking." Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don't know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is…
July 29, 2009
A widget to watch out for wayward asteroids:JPL's Asteroid Watch Widget tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth. The Widget displays the date of closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter. The…
July 29, 2009
Since it seems that the "arXiv on your hard drive" is dead I've been thinking a bit about if there is a better way to achieve the goal of distributing archives of the arXiv.
One thing I liked about the "arXiv on your hard drive" was that it used BitTorrent. This could alleviate some of the…
July 29, 2009
Rod Van Meter is in search of some summer reading:I'm feeling the need to recharge my store of ideas, and I have the
nagging feeling that my lack of currency in a bunch of fields is
causing me to miss some connections I could use in my own research.
So, I'm looking for a reading list of, say, the…
July 28, 2009
Today on the arXiv an new paper appeared of great significance to quantum computational complexity: arXiv:0907.4737 (vote for it on scirate here)Title: QIP = PSPACE
Authors: Rahul Jain, Zhengfeng Ji, Sarvagya Upadhyay, John Watrous
We prove that the complexity class QIP, which consists of all…
July 27, 2009
A new entry in the best title every contest, arXiv:0907.4152:Born Again
Authors: Don N. Page
Abstract: A simple proof is given that the probabilities of observations in a large universe are not given directly by Born's rule as the expectation values of projection operators in a global quantum state…
July 26, 2009
Writing a blog is for me (1) amusing and (2) amusing. Can anyone take anything that I write on a blog seriously? Well sometimes people do. Many eons ago (okay, I lie, it was 2005), I wrote a post about the then new "h-index." The h-index is an attempt at trying to find a better way of "ranking…
July 22, 2009
Two notes from Caltech of interest:
Michael L. Roukes' group at Caltech has produced a NEMS (nanoelectromechanical system) device which can (almost) measure the mass of a single molecule (as opposed to the many tens of thousands (is this the correct amount?) needed in mass spectrometry.) Build a 2…
July 20, 2009
As someone who was born on a lunar eclipse (explains a lot, no?) the 40th anniversary of man walking on the moon has a special place in my heart. Okay, that sentence makes no sense (I was born on a lunar eclipse however), but anyway everyone is all abuzz about the anniversary of the moon landing…
July 16, 2009
A fellow quantum computing researcher of mine recently joined FriendFeed. Along with another researcher we got involved in a discussion about a paper concerning a certain recent claimed "disproof of Bell's theorem." (arXiv:0904.4259. What it means to "disprove a theorem" like Bell's theorem is,…
July 16, 2009
A friend sent me a link to Detextify2:What is this?
Anyone who works with LaTeX knows how time-consuming it can be to find a symbol in symbols-a4.pdf that you just can't memorize. Detexify is an attempt to simplify this search.
How does it work?
Just draw the symbol you are looking for into the…
July 16, 2009
David Poulin sends me a job announcement for quantum information processing in the solid state at the University of Sherbrooke:Permanent position for a Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) on solid state quantum information processing
University of Sherbrooke is seeking candidates for a Canada…
July 16, 2009
Via @mattleiffer, viXra.org:In part viXra.org is a parody of arXiv.org to highlight Cornell University's unacceptable censorship policy. It is also an experiment to see what kind of scientific work is being excluded by the arXiv. But most of all it is a serious and permanent e-print archive for…
July 15, 2009
Microsoft Research's Project Tuva website is up. Project Tuva is a collection of seven searchable Feynman lectures aimed at a popular audience (with extras coming online in the future.) The rights to these lectures were obtained by Bill Gates after he was entranced by them over twenty years ago…
July 14, 2009
With fast approaching deadlines:
The 2009 Asher Peres International Physics School:Title: "The Edge, twixt quantum and classical phenomena"
30 Nov - 4 Dec, Sydney, Australiahttp://web.mac.com/quests/PeresSchool2009/Welcome.html
The 2009 Asher Peres school provides senior undergraduates and junior…
July 14, 2009
A friend sent me a link to QuantumCamp:Have you ever wondered how the microscopic Universe works? QuantumCamp is a one week journey through this strange but beautiful world - seeing nothing less than how every atom in our universe is working!
We begin with Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of the…
July 13, 2009
Over at the optimizer's blog, quantum computing's younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns)…