Free Thought
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2008The president elect has disappointed many of his supporters by choosing relatively hawkish and right-leaning types to run his foreign and economic policies. But to my mind, his choices for secretary of energy and interior and Environmental Protection Administration chief are more important. And the news Stephen Chu will be energy secretary suggests Barack Obama is going to be progressive where it really counts.
Chu now runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and won a Nobel for physics a while back. He also understands both the threat posed by climate change and the role clean,…
pontiff | December 10, 2008Via Zz, a link to Symmetry Breaking's list of physics based license plates.
Sweet I'll have to submit my old California plates:
If there is one thing I will regret in life it is that I missed one of the most "terrifiq" opportunities of all time. While I was at the Santa Fe Institute, I had my QUBITS plates and sometimes would park beside Murray Gell-Mann's car which had a QUARKS license place. At one point Ben Schumacher, who invented the word "qubit", visited the Santa Fe Institute. Damnit that was my opportunity to get a picture of two people who invented words in the dictionary starting…
bioephemera | December 5, 2008How much do I love this mashed up, remixed version of the standby "Did You Know"? So much that I couldn't help rocking out to it a little during the talk I gave today at work on Web 2.0. I heart fatboy slim.
I'm not getting into the question of how reliable these stats are - while many of them (especially the computing power ones) are obviously speculative, the demographic stats in the original presentation by Karl Fisch were sourced. Of course, it's been through several iterations since then. C'mon, just enjoy the music.
I really do never get tired of watching this.
PS. And it's way…
drorzel | December 1, 2008
Schneier on Security: Lessons from Mumbai
"If there's any lesson in these attacks, it's not to focus too much on the specifics of the attacks. "
(tags: news society security blogs)
Does the broken windows theory hold online?
"Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what's written by the site's commenters?"
(tags: culture internet blogs psychology society)
Good Math, Bad Math : Public Key Cryptography using RSA
How to encrypt and decrypt with RSA, with a worked example.
(tags: math science blogs computing)
Follow the Leader :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for…
goodmath | December 1, 2008Technorati Tags: cryptography, public-key, encryption, RSA, asymmetric encryption
The most successful public key cryptosystem in use today is RSA - named for its inventors Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman. I first learned about RSA in grad school from one of my professors, Errol Lloyd, who was one of Ron Rivest's students. Errol is without a doubt the best teacher I've ever had (and also a thoroughly nice guy). If you want to go to grad school to study algorithms, you frankly couldn't do better than heading to Delaware to work with Errol. I have very fond memories of Errol's class where we talked…
cevans | November 28, 2008
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
In a grand new tradition of using Universe as lodging for really interesting "supplemental material," I present to you the history (and mystery) of g-speak, an incredible new spatial operating environment, as told to me by John Underkoffler, chief scientist at Oblong Industries. Underkoffler designed the fantasy computer systems in Minority Report, then made g-speak, an almost frighteningly futuristic interface that will throw the proverbial brick through the computer screen. Check out the video above to get a sense of it in its…
drorzel | November 24, 2008
FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, News
"For the current [essay] contest, [the topic] is "The Nature of Time," including, but not limited to, the arrow of time; the emergence of time in quantum gravity; time, free will and determinism; time travel; the beginning or ending of time; and timelessness."
(tags: physics time internet quantum astronomy science)
The Quantum Pontiff : Dewy Eyed Pastoralism
"A scientific life lived in short breaths, one publication at a time, until it's too late, and no one can even understand what you are doing. "
(tags: science academia biology history blogs…
jrosenhouse | November 19, 2008This is cool. From Wired:
When the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.
These computers aren't just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn't possible before. As recently described in Wired…
drorzel | November 17, 2008
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones Blog: Conservatives and Unions
"Overturning Roe is certainly a conservative priority, but it's only been on the list for about 30 years. Fighting unions has been on the list for more like 130 years. If it's not central to the conservative identity in America, I don't know what is."
(tags: politics law us blogs society class-war)
Cocktail Party Physics: a spark in the dark
"This also establishes [Francis] Bacon as the earliest to record the phenomenon, known as triboluminescence, a.k.a., "the Wint-O-Green Life Saver Effect." "
(tags: science physics chemistry atoms…
pontiff | November 17, 2008Registration for QIP 2009 is now open:QIP 2009 -- 12th WORKSHOP ON QUANTUM INFORMATION PROCESSING -
Santa Fe, New Mexico USA. January 12-16, 2009.
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN at http://qipworkshop.org/
Deadline for special conference hotel rates: December 1st.
Quantum Information Processing is the recasting of computer
science in a quantum mechanical framework. QIP 2009 is the twelfth
workshop on theoretical aspects of quantum computing, quantum
cryptography and quantum information theory in a series which
started in Aarhus in 1998. QIP 2009, like its previous editions,
will feature invited…
drorzel | November 16, 2008
Information Processing: Central limit theorem and securitization: how to build a CDO
"[T]he mathematical concepts related to the current financial crisis leave over 95 percent of our population completely baffled. If your Ivy League education didn't prepare you to understand the following, please ask for your money back."
(tags: economics math statistics blogs)
Pictures of Numbers: Fixing Excel's Charts
It's really sad how many steps you need to go through to get halfway decent graphs out of Excel.
(tags: science math computing data-analysis)
slacktivist: How I beat the market
"[I]n 1991…
pontiff | November 15, 2008I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia...eh. For some reason they have a parade at night in November with floats containing Santa and reindeer (obligatory crappy cell phone picture to follow):
Yeah, what the hell?
Interesting conference, I'm attending. I haven't been at a conference in ages where disagreed with so many of the talks!
For example, I learned that many many people have got it all wrong and quantum error isn't possible because we haven't thought about the role of phase errors properly (sadly I didn't get to hear about the twin paradox.) I also learned form an older, well established…
jrosenhouse | November 12, 2008Ever wonder if anyone responds to those spam marketing e-mails? Wonder no more:
The researchers used two of the most popular ploys currently used by spammers - firstly offering a fake pharmacy site and, secondly, offering a herbal Viagra-style remedy to boost libido.
“After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted,” says the research paper.
Yet even with this apparently abysmal response rate of less than 0.00001 per cent, the researchers still estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 (£4,430) a day or $3.…
drorzel | November 10, 2008
Mars Lander Succumbs to Winter - NYTimes.com
Farewell, Phoenix, thou good and faithful servant.
(tags: space planets science astronomy news)
Deep Secrets of 'The Daily Show' - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com
"Mr. Remnick asked the writers and producers what a typical day at "The Daily Show" is like. Based on their responses, here is a summary:"
(tags: television politics news silly)
Spot.us - Home
"Spot.Us is a nonprofit project to pioneer "community funded reporting." Through Spot.Us the public can commission investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories. "
(tags: news…
drorzel | November 9, 2008
Warnock's Dilemma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"[T]he problem of interpreting a lack of response to a posting on a mailing list, Usenet newsgroup, or Web forum. It occurs because a lack of response does not necessarily imply that no one is interested in the topic, and could have any one of several different implications, some of which are contradictory. Commonly used in the context of trying to determine why a post has not been replied to, or to refer to a post that has not been replied to."
(tags: internet computing culture language)
Please Pardon the Interruption While We Sell Out…
jane | November 7, 2008Hello, and welcome to the November edition of Scientiae! The month of October was filled with tricks and treats galore; costumes were donned, and a rollicking good time was had by all. Or at least most. Or some. Anyway, read along to find out who got treated, who got tricked, and who's still figuring out what costume to wear to the ball.
(Note: I've included all of the posts for the October Scientiae as well. Oddly enough, I was able to fit them all into this month's theme, so thanks to you all for writing such malleable posts!)
TREATSBeing a theorist is a treat! So says new blogger…
mspringer | November 6, 2008I promise this is not a politics post. It just uses some vote totals for some fun math!
The Minnesota senate race has so far a total of 2,422,811 votes between the two leading candidates. The margin separating them is 477. It's about as close to a 50:50 split as we've seen this cycle. Probably in the last several cycles.
Now let's say you have a perfectly fair coin that has a probability of 1/2 of landing heads and 1/2 of landing tails. For any given string of coin tosses you won't expect to have an exactly even number of heads and tails. flip the coin 10 times and you wouldn't be…
drorzel | November 3, 2008Continuing the series of descriptions of candidate technologies for making a quantum computer (previous entries covered optical lattices and ion traps), we come to one that's a little controversial. It's the only remaining candidate I can describe off the top of my head without doing some more background reading, though, so I will plunge ahead boldly...
Liquid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) was first suggested as a technology for quantum information processing in 1997, and some demonstration experiments followed very quickly, as there's relatively little infrastructure required. The…
pontiff | October 31, 2008Shor's algorithm is an algorithm for quantum computers which allows for efficiently factoring of numbers. This in turn allows Shor's algorithm to break the RSA public key cryptosystem. Further variations on Shor's algorithm break a plethora of other public key cryptosystems, including those based on elliptic curves. The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the few public key cryptosystems where variations on Shor's algorithm do not break the cryptosystem. Thus it has been suggested that the McEliece cryptosystem might be a suitable cryptosystem in the "post quantum world", i.e. for a world…
drorzel | October 30, 2008
ICA Supreme Cuisine | Wii⢠& DSâ¢
Iron Chef America: The video game
(tags: food games television computing silly)
Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm: Careers: A 73 year-old college basketball player!
There's hope for me yet...
(tags: sports basketball blogs silly)
Mr. Dawkins, please report to the nearest shark tank, water skis in hand § Unqualified Offerings
More or less what I would've written, so thank Thoreau for sparing you my post.
(tags: religion politics books sf stupid)
Still Searching :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"…