Free Thought
drorzel | August 15, 2009
Making Light: Panels and parlor games
"So all you lucky devils went to Worldcon and I didn't. And now I get to read panel reports, which are always both fun and tantalizingly vague.
So let's have a game of it. What fictional characters would you put on a panel, what would you have them talk about, and how would the panel go, do you think?"
(tags: SF conventions games blogs making-light)
Alternate history | Books | A.V. Club
"British essayist William Hazlitt once observed that only mankind is capable of noticing the difference between how things are and how they might have been. It's both…
drorzel | August 14, 2009
A Burning Dog Needs No Chimney - White House unveils death panel
"After a week of unconvincing denials, the Obama administration reversed course today and released photos of the "death panel" that would, under a proposed new health-care system, make decisions about "when to pull the plug on grandma":"
(tags: politics health-care medicine silly pictures blogs)
Pimp My Novel: Genre-Specific Sales, Part 4 of 8: Science Fiction
"Hard science fiction (think Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven) has been on the decline since the end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, i.e. for about…
drorzel | August 12, 2009
Pimp My Novel: Genre-Specific Sales, Part 1 of 8: Fantasy
"The good news, however is this: fantasy is actually doing all right, and in many instances, sales of fantasy books are up over last year's sales. Without quoting you exact BookScan numbers, I can tell you that fantasy book sales are up at my house by roughly 10%, which is the number currently being quoted for most of the major trade publishers."
(tags: publishing writing business economics books SF)
Dealing With Corporate America | Mother Jones
"Frankly, my dealings with the government, on average, are better than most of my…
pontiff | August 10, 2009March 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/information/foundations topical group GQI is in charge of a few of these sessions. Want to nominate a session or invited speaker? Now's your chance. Here's the email that was sent out Friday:
Dear GQI members,
This is an email to solicit from you proposals for GQI sponsored invited sessions and…
drorzel | August 10, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of James Annan)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I'm a research scientist at a Govt lab, working in the field of climate change research. Currently I'm in Japan, which is probably a bit off-the-wall for most…
cpikas | August 9, 2009Now that I'm not scared to look at my responses... This one doesn't look so bad, so I'm sharing. Please do keep in mind that this was written in 2 hours, by a tired person, with tired fingers!
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Christina K. Pikas
Comps Information Retrieval (Minor)
July 20, 2009
Question F2: Design an information retrieval system for scientists that covers full-text peer-reviewed articles as well as blogs and wikis
0. Introduction
Today, scientists use more than just the peer-reviewed journal literature in their work, but our information retrieval systems such as our library research databases and…
pontiff | August 5, 2009Booz 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. Contribute to advancing the state-of the-art in the quantum sciences by combining strategic planning and technical analysis. Assist clients in researching and formulating ideas for new research programs. Provide expertise in assessing research proposals for technical merit and proposal objectives.…
dsalo | August 2, 2009I cringe. I've accepted an invitation to speak somewhere, and an email comes back asking me politely for a bio. Cringe. Every single time. It's downright Pavlovian.
I loathe, despise, abominate, and abhor writing professional bios.
However. There's a point to the exercise: situating myself in context, so that folk can decide whether I'm worth listening to in the first place, evaluate my expertise and my biases, and make an educated guess about what questions to ask me that I can actually answer. So now that I'm starting to settle down here in my new ScienceBlogs digs, it's time for (dramatic…
pharyngula | July 31, 2009Edge hosted an amazing session that described the looming future of biology — this is for the real futurists. It featured George Church and Craig Venter talking about synthetic genomics — how we're building new organisms right now and with presentiments for radical prospects in the future.
Brace yourself. There are six hours of video there; I've only started wading into it, but what I've seen so far also looks like a lot of material that will be very useful for inspiring students about the future of their field. There is also a downloadable book (which is a dead link right now, but I'm sure…
pontiff | July 30, 2009Okay 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 one who is doing cool quantum computing research ("cracking?" and "hacking?" btw.)
I open up the article and who is the police woman? It's Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described…
pontiff | July 28, 2009Today 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 problems having quantum interactive proof systems, is contained in PSPACE. This containment is proved by applying a parallelized form of the matrix multiplicative weights update method to a class of semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proofs. As the…
drorzel | July 28, 2009
kate_nepveu: Worldcon: online jerkitude
"I'm trying to come up with a list of bedrock principles that apply across all online contexts, and I keep getting bogged down in my lawyer tendencies. So what would you say are the fundamental, applies-anywhere minimum requirements of human decency when it comes to online interactions?"
(tags: internet culture society SF blogs)
Invisible flash takes photos without the glare - tech - 16 July 2009 - New Scientist
"Although the dark flash gives a crisp image without disturbing those in the picture, the results have an odd colour balance that looks…
drorzel | July 27, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Tim Johnson, a software engineer.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
In a nutshell, software engineering. Started off with C/C++, TCL/TK, and a sprinkling of perl. For the last few years, it has been Java…
drorzel | July 26, 2009The del.icio.us automatic blog posting that usually produces the daily links dump posts here has been broken during the recent ScienceBlogs upgrade. The links dump posts from last Thursday on didn't happen, but we've kludged up a way to get that material back. These are the links that should've posted on Saturday the 25th:
Friday Recipe: Chinese Potstickers (aka Jiao Zi) : Good Math, Bad Math
Mmmmmmm.... potstickers.....
(tags: food blogs good-math)
The importance of stupidity in scientific research -- Schwartz 121 (11): 1771 -- Journal of Cell Science
"A Ph.D., in which you have to do a…
jdupuis | July 23, 2009Scott Delman, Group Publisher of the ACM, has responded to my post earlier this month on society publishers and open access. That post generated some very good discussion in the post comments that are well worth checking out.
Delman's article is in the most recent Communications of the ACM (v52i8): Responding to the Blogosphere.
Here are some excerpts, although Delman's article is so interesting that I wish I could quote the whole thing.
The fact that ACM charges both for access to the published information in its Digital Library and also extends the courtesy of "Green OA" to its authors is…
gregladen | July 19, 2009 A gingerbread computer can be complicated.
When you, Joe or Mary user, buy a computer at Best Buy or Computer Village or order a computer from Dell or Gateway, you get a computer with a system already installed. Do you think they had any trouble installing that system on that computer? Do you think that if Dell sells Mary a computer with Windows installed and they sell Joe a computer with Linux installed, that Dell had a differentially hard time installing one of those systems compared to the other?
Think about it.
~ Repost from one year ago this month ~
Linux and Windows each have…
dsalo | July 17, 2009That would be the question, wouldn't it. Unfortunately, such fundamental definitions are never simple to create, and even less simple to agree upon. A little history may help explain how we got into this parlous uncertain state, but it may not get us out of it.
The short version of the history (which all and sundry may feel free to correct in the comments) is that the Anglophone world had a terminology breakdown right from the start: what the English called "e-science" the Americans (with our customary tin ear) dubbed "cyberinfrastructure." Then the humanities reared back on their hind legs…
pontiff | July 16, 2009A 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, however a subject for another comment section on a different blog.) But, and here is the interesting thing, this colleague then made a trip to China. And FriendFeed, apparently, is blocked by the great firewall of China, so he had to email us his comments to continue the conversation. Which got me…
pontiff | July 16, 2009David 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 Excellence Research Chair (CERC). The successful candidate will obtain a permanent full professorship in the Physics Department of University of Sherbrooke in the Faculty of Sciences. The CERC program aims to attract and retain the world's most accomplished and promising minds. This program will…
jdupuis | July 16, 2009This is a great looking afternoon here in Toronto on Wednesday July 29th, organized by Greg Wilson and taking place at the MaRS Centre: Science 2.0: What every scientist needs to know about how the web is changing the way they work.
The event is free, but registration is required. Here's an outline of the presentations:
Titus Brown: Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
Cameron Neylon: A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
Michael Nielsen: Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific…