Free Thought
drorzel | January 18, 2009
Information Processing: The Age of Computing
"Historians of science have seen fit to ignore the history of the great discoveries in applied physics, engineering and computer science, where real scientific progress is nowadays to be found. Computer science in particular has changed and continues to change the face of the world more thoroughly and more drastically than did any of the great discoveries in theoretical physics."
(tags: science physics computing history)
Mind Hacks: Joseph Weizenbaum has left the building
"Do you believe it is normal to be sad because you just found out that my…
stoat | January 18, 2009I've been re-reading Neuromancer whilst putting my daughter to bed. Fear not, she gets stuff like The Tales of Beedle the Bard instead. Of the two, N is far and away the better book (wiki tells me that the novel appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language novels written since 1923; the authors utter ignorance of computing technology doesn't detract from it as a novel, though oddly wiki doesn't find room to mention how inaccurate his vision of cyberspace has proved). It's the ultimate look-n-feel book; you just let yourself get carried away with the flow, and ignore the…
drorzel | January 17, 2009
Explaining the curse of work - science-in-society - 14 January 2009 - New Scientist
"How many members can a committee have and still be effective? Parkinson's own guess was based on the 700-year history of England's highest council of state- in its modern incarnation, the UK cabinet. Five times in succession between 1257 and 1955, this council grew from small beginnings to a membership of just over 20. Each time it reached that point, it was replaced by a new, smaller body, which began growing again. This was no coincidence, Parkinson argued: beyond about 20 members, groups become…
jlynch | January 17, 2009
A scientist, testing a formula on Univac recently, was amazed to see the computing system stop, then automatically type the reproof: “You’re trying to divide by zero.” A quick check proved that Univac, as always, was right.
Click to image to read more. 1956 good times.
pontiff | January 16, 2009The last day of QIP in Santa Fe. Also note that Joe has posted some nice notes on additivity on his blog: part I and part II. Oh, and QIP next year will be in Zurich, and QIP the year after next will be in Singapore.
computing, conference, quantum
Lluis Masanes, "Towards device-independent security in QKD"
Paper: arXiv:0807.2158. I cam in late, so was a bit lost. But basically Lluis talked about secret key distillation under weaker assumptions than just assuming quantum theory. It seems that one an do secret key distillation from accessing the correlations that violate Bell inequalities…
pontiff | January 15, 2009Stuff learned while at QIP.
A solution to the more cranky P versus NP problem: simply send those who claim P=NP the papers claiming P does not equal NP, and vice versa
I did not know that the cell phone ring tone which is hard for older people to hear was first used by restraunts to keep away kids. That's pretty evil.
When the question says he used to work in the earth sciences as a preface at a quantum computing conference, you should update your prior about the person being homeless
I now understand arXiv:0810.3695 better and particularly am interested in the trick of using an automorphism…
pontiff | January 15, 2009Sorry to those who talked in the afternoon yesterday: I ran off to listen to Michael Nielsen talk at the Santa Fe Institute.
Charles Marcus, "Holding quantum information in electron spins"
Charlie gave a talk about the state of quantum computing in solid state quantum dot systems. Things Charlie talked about:
T1 times of single electron spins of 1 second from Mark Kastner's group:arXiv:0707.1656. Those are long, and it would be awesome to have those for real working devices!
Delft's work on single electron spin manipulations: "Driven coherent oscillations of a single electron spin in a…
pontiff | January 14, 2009A full day today, after a nice break yesterday (went for a run: yeah for altitude making me winded nearly instantly!)
Andrew Childs, "Universal computation by quantum walk
Andrew Childs talked about a subject whose origin can be pretty much tracked back to Feynman in the 1980s. In particular Feynman constructed a model of computing in which you have a time independent Hamiltonian. In today's language this is equivalent to showing that there is a quantum random walk which is universal for quantum computing (though Andrew mentioned that this was a model for classical computing using a quantum…
jrosenhouse | January 13, 2009This particular problem is a bit too applied for my taste, but it's always nice to see mathematicians in the news:
For decades, math and computer science have played a profound role in the drawing of legislative districts. And it's hard to argue that they've improved the process. As the amount of information and computing power available to the gerrymanderers has ballooned, they have gotten much better at surgically crafting districts to their precise desires.
So, with a reapportionment of House seats coming up in just over two years, after the next decennial census, mathematicians are now…
goodmath | January 8, 2009 Ok, away from politics, and back to the good stuff. When I left off talking about
encryption, we were
href="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/12/public_key_cryptography_using.php">looking at
RSA, as an example of an asymmetric encryption system.
Since it's been a while, I'll start off with a quick review of RSA.
Asymmetric encryption systems like RSA are based on computations that are easy to perform if you know the keys, and incredibly hard to perform if you don't. In the specific case
of RSA, everything is based on a pair of very large prime numbers. If you know those two
primes…
drorzel | January 8, 2009Over at the theoretical physics beach party, Moshe is talking about teaching quantum mechanics, specifically an elective course for upper-level undergraduates. He's looking for some suggestions of special topics:
The course it titled "Applications of quantum mechanics", and is covering the second half of the text by David Griffiths, whose textbooks I find to be uniformly excellent. A more accurate description of the material would be approximation methods for solving the Schrodinger equation. Not uncommonly in the physics curriculum, when the math becomes more demanding the physics tends to…
drorzel | January 7, 2009
The Quantum Pontiff : Relatively Right in Front of Your Nose
"In other words, there is a reference frame in which what is "right under your nose" is far far away, and just seconds after the big bang (let's ignore cosmology for now.) "
(tags: science physics blogs relativity)
The Best Jobs in the World | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
Why are actuaries so popular, anyway?
(tags: math economics silly jobs)
ALFALFA: The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey
Love those recursive acronyms.
(tags: science astronomy blogs internet)
Moral arbitrage -- Crooked Timber
"So, if you want to raise…
pontiff | January 6, 2009For those of us quantum computing folk heading to QIP 2009 in Santa Fe, NM, a few recommendations from someone who once called Santa Fe home.
Food
The first thing you must realize is that New Mexican food is not Mexican food, nor is it Tex-Mex (bleh: worst food ever), but is really it's own form. In addition, Santa Fe has a ton of good food (for a town so small) which is not New Mexican. The second thing you must understand is that New Mexico has a state question! You will be asked this question at dinner. The question is "Red or Green?" an refers to what type of chile you would like.…
cortex | January 6, 2009Here's an interesting finding, which is summarized by Kevin Lewis in the Boston Globe Ideas section:
If you've ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this study: The more people you're competing against, it turns out, the less motivated and competitive you are. Psychologists observed this pattern across several different situations. Students taking standardized tests in more crowded venues got lower scores. Students asked to complete a short general-knowledge test as fast as possible to win a prize if they were in the fastest 20 percent completed…
jwilbanks | January 5, 2009I've been working on some text for a series of papers lately. I'm writing the core of a book proposal and working through the ideas around the knowledge web and the knowledge economy, and thought I'd post some interim thoughts here.
Knowledge is a funny thing. Philosophers have spent eons debating it. I'm not going to figure it out here - in fact, the conclusion that I wasn't going to figure it out played a big role in my choosing not to go to graduate school. But on the web, we have these things that are kind-of-knowledge. Databases. Journal articles. Web pages. Ontologies.
Taken together…
drorzel | January 4, 2009
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind: Donald Westlake, R.I.P.
With links galore.
(tags: books writing mystery)
A question of mass? « Physics and cake
"The Penrose interpretation of quantum mechanics...
...states that the mass of a system affects the system's ability to maintain quantum coherence. This is the basis for some theories of quantum gravity. Above the Planck mass, which is ~1E-8kg, a system can no longer maintain coherence for any measureable time, due to the onset of gravitational interactions."
(tags: science physics quantum mass philosophy)
A little rant about that 2012…
goodmath | December 31, 2008I'm away on vacation this week, taking my kids to Disney World. Since I'm not likely to
have time to write while I'm away, I'm taking the opportunity to re-run an old classic series
of posts on numbers, which were first posted in the summer of 2006. These posts are mildly
revised.
Ω is my own personal favorite transcendental number. Ω isn't really a specific number, but rather a family of related numbers with bizarre properties. It's the one real transcendental number that I know of that comes from the theory of computation, that is important, and that expresses meaningful fundamental…
drorzel | December 20, 2008
Sciencewomen : Thoughts on my AGU experience
Don't tell my university administrators, but sharing my latest science results is only a tiny fraction of the reason to go to a conference like AGU. Even hearing the latest and greatest science is not the entire reason. This is a lesson that is taking me a long time to learn.
(tags: science academia jobs meetings)
Respectful Insolence: Your Friday Dose of Woo: When a mad mathematician meets quantum homeopathy
Oh, Lionel Milgrom, no!
(tags: science blogs stupid medicine)
Minimal Advice to Undergrads on Programming
"You should treat "Thou shalt…
goodmath | December 19, 2008 Since my post a couple of weeks ago about NASA and the antenna evolution experiment,
I've been meaning to write a followup. In both comments and private emails, I've gotten
a number of interesting questions about the idea of fitness landscapes, and some of the things
I mentioned in brief throwaway comments. I'm finally finding the time to write about
it now.
Fitness Landscapes
First, let me review what a fitness landscape is.
Suppose you're searching for something. There are N parameters that define the thing you're searching for. Then we can say that you're doing a search for a target…
clock | December 18, 2008So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Developmental Constraints on Vertebrate Genome Evolution:
Because embryonic development must proceed correctly for an animal to survive, changes in evolution are constrained according to their effects on development. Changes that disrupt development too dramatically are thus rare in evolution…