Free Thought
mspringer | October 30, 2008So Seed magazine has endorsed Obama. Quelle surprise! I suppose I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds me, but of course I'm on record as supporting the "anyone else" ticket. I am under no illusion that it will be anything but a lost cause.
One of the things that leads me to believe this is poll data. Poll data is sort of the sociological version of many-body theory.
In physics, "many" often has a particular meaning. According to a guest lecturer we had today who works with semiconductor lasers, "many" means "more than two". He's working with the difficult problem of theoretically…
drorzel | October 29, 2008
The Frontal Cortex : Dangerous Models
Why investment bankers are like cod fishermen
(tags: economics social-science science environment animals blogs computing theory)
Fear and Humiliation as Legitimate Teaching Methods :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
Teaching lessons from World of Warcraft. Seriously.
(tags: academia education games internet psychology social-science)
Eight Ways To Survive The Next Eight Days Without Losing Your Frigging Mind - 236.com - News
"Force Yourself To Engage In One Non-Election Related Activity Every Day"
(tags:…
drorzel | October 28, 2008
Cognitive Daily: Should you let your toddler watch TV?
No, you dolt.
(tags: science psychology television kid-stuff)
The Bill Clinton President School - World Wide Web Homepage
"Aren't you tired of not being president?"
(tags: us politics onion silly internet)
Microsoft Ad Campaign Crashing Nation's Televisions | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"The Microsoft ads, which began airing earlier this week, are being blamed for generating critical system errors in more than 70 million televisions."
(tags: onion microsoft silly internet computing)
Slate's interactive swing voter…
clock | October 27, 2008There are 13 new articles published Friday night and 10 new articles tonight in PLoS ONE today. 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:
Implication of the F-Box Protein FBXL21 in Circadian Pacemaker Function in Mammals:
In mammals, the circadian clock relies on interlocked feedback loops involving clock genes and their protein products. Post-translational modifications control intracellular trafficking, functionality and degradation of…
pontiff | October 24, 2008Bruce Schneier has a commentary up at Wired about quantum cryptography. There are a lot of good points about the article, but it left me kind of scratching my head. As far as I can tell Bruce Schneier believes that you should not worry about any cryptographic system currently in use ever being broken. I didn't think cryptographers were allowed to have so little paranoia.
Schneier begins by explaining quantum cryptography and quantum computing. The former is a method for taking a small shared private key (needed for authentication) and boosting it up into a shared secret key of greater…
goodmath | October 24, 2008 In my last cryptography post, I wrote about using message authentication codes
(MACs) as a way of guaranteeing message integrity. To review briefly, most ciphers
are designed to provide message confidentiality - which means that no one but the
sender and the intended receiver can see the plain-text of the message. But
ciphers that provide confidentiality don't necessarily make any guarantees that
the message received is exactly the message that was sent. There are a good number
of cryptographic attacks that work by altering the message in transit, and
depending on the cipher, that can result…
pontiff | October 22, 2008The universe doesn't always operate the way we want it to. No, I'm not talking about the stock market (unless you've been short lately), I'm talking about the role of error in logical deterministic systems! When you zoom down far enough into any computing device you'll see that its constituent components don't behave in a completely digital manner and all sorts of crazy random crap (technical term) is going on. Yet, on a larger scale, digital logical can and does emerge.
Today heading to work in the early dawn I was pondering what all of this meant for our notion of reality.
Some of the…
drorzel | October 22, 2008Some time back, I wrote about what you need to make a quantum computer. Given that it's election season, I thought I'd revisit the topic by looking in detail at the candidate technologies for quantum computing.
The first up is Ion Trap Quantum Computing, probably the most well-established of any of the candidates. The field really starts with Dave Wineland's group at NIST, though there is outstanding stuff being done by Chris Monroe at Maryland, and a host of others.
So, how do they stack up? Here are the facts about ion traps as a quantum computing system:
What's the system? Ion traps are,…
j7uy5 | October 21, 2008This is one of those things that take a minute to figure out if it is
serious, or a parody.
href="http://www.injesus.com/index.php?module=message&task=view&MID=CB007FA2&GroupID=2A004N9G&label=&paging=all">Block
African witchcraft curses against McCain and Palin NOW!
Jim BramlettSep 28 2008 04:12PM
Dear friends:THIS IS EXTREMELY SERIOUS.Minutes ago I spoke with friend Dr.
Norman G. Marvin,
M.D. and
he is so concerned at what he has learned about Barack Obama's family
in Kenya that he is calling a special prayer meeting in his home to
pray against the witchcraft…
drorzel | October 16, 2008
Physicists set new entanglement record - physicsworld.com
"Researchers in China and Europe have entangled a record-breaking 10 quantum bits -- an important breakthrough in the quest to develop practical quantum computers."
(tags: physics quantum computing science news experiment optics)
Ananova - Rabbit wins half marathon
Don't tell Emmy.
(tags: animals silly dog sports)
drorzel | October 15, 2008
slacktivist: Racism and litigation
"[N]o, it's not an overstatement or an uncharitable characterization to say that anyone swallowing this ACORN-scapegoating is insane and a racist bastard. This is a baseless assertion that begins with the argument that poor people and black people are the powers that be in America -- that they run the show. That's insane. It's laughable on its face to anyone not infected by the voluntary mental illness of old-fashioned American racism."
(tags: US politics race society diversity stupid evil)
Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » What a Beautiful World
"What…
razib | October 15, 2008Photo Credit: Wired
Wired has a story about pod cars! Awesome. Pod cars are one of those things ubiquitous in science fiction (like humanoid robots) that just never come to be. In contrast, computer technology has advanced so far in the past generation that older science fiction resembles some sort of alternative history where Apple didn't transform home computing more than extrapolation from the present.
Granted, I don't have much of an opinion on the feasibility of pod cars. Nor do I really care. It just would be fun to have a little bit of Logan's Run around (mind you, just a little…
tlambert | October 15, 2008The latest salvo from the Australian in their war on science is a column from Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg tells us:
Have you noticed how environmental campaigners almost inevitably say that not only is global warming happening and bad, but also that what we are seeing is even worse than expected?
This is odd, because any reasonable understanding of how science proceeds would expect that, as we refine our knowledge, we find that things are sometimes worse and sometimes better than we expected, and that the most likely distribution would be about 50-50. Environmental campaigners, however, almost…
goodmath | October 14, 2008
This is just a short gripe at the NYT, and a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/14/opinion/20081014_OPCHART.html">feature
that they included in today's Op-Ed section.
It purports to compare how the economy does under democratic versus
republican administrations. They claim that they're computing the returns
on a 10,000 dollar stock investment under 40 years of republican
administrations and 40 years of democratic administrations, in the 80 years
since 1929.
The whole comparison is pretty idiotic to begin with. Comparing stock
prices over different time spans is already…
pontiff | October 14, 2008Self promotion for those around the University of Washington campus: I'm giving a talk in the physics department at UW. Mondays, October 20 at 4:00 P.M. Ronald Geballe Auditorium, Rm. A102 (cookies at 3:45):Title: "Who Will Build a Quantum Computer: the Physicists or the Computer
Engineers?"
Abstract: Building a quantum computer large enough to perform a task beyond the capability of today's classical computers (breaking a cryptographic code or simulating a complex quantum system) is a daunting task. On the fundamental side, this difficulty arises from the fact that quantum systems like to…
pontiff | October 10, 2008From the annals of strangely mixed news stories. Canada: $25 billion government bailout and....$50 million for the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing:BRANTFORD, Ont. -- The $25-billion government deal to buy mortgages from Canada's banks isn't a lifeline for lenders stuck with bum loans, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Friday...
He said the government will likely make money on the deal, because its borrowing costs are lower than those available to banks.
Harper also produced an election goodie, promising a $50-million grant to a high-tech research lab at the…
thusspakezuska | October 9, 2008I found out about these two books from the Chronicle Review; haven't read either one, but they looked interesting and some of you may want to check them out.
Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing by Jane Margolis
The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low, according to recent surveys. And relatively few African American and Latino/a high school students receive the kind of institutional encouragement, educational opportunities, and preparation needed for them to choose computer…
drorzel | October 4, 2008
...My heart's in Accra » Cultural appropriation of the kick-ass kind
The haka comes to Texas.
(tags: rugby football culture society sports)
VOTD: I Love Sarah Jane (Zombie Short Film) | /Film
"Jimbo is 13. All he can think about is one girl, Sarah Jane. And no matter what stands in his way - bullies, violence, chaos, zombies - nothing is going to stop him from finding a way into her world."
(tags: video movies SF)
The Shakespeare Programming Language
"The design goal was to make a language with beautiful source code that resembled Shakespeare plays. There are no fancy data or control…
edyong | September 30, 2008
I am walking strangely. About a week ago, I pulled something to my left ankle, which now hurts during the part of each step just before the foot leaves the ground. As a result, my other muscles are compensating for this to minimise the pain and my gait has shifted to something subtly different from the norm. In similar ways, all animal brains can compensate for injuries by computing new ways of moving that are often very different. This isn't a conscious process and as such, we often take it for granted.
But we can get a sense of how hard it actually is by trying to program a robot to do…
drorzel | September 28, 2008
Cocktail Party Physics: prime time science
Why you should stop worrying and learn to love science-themed tv shows.
(tags: television science culture society)
blarg? » I'm Sorry, Are You From The Past?
Standards-compliant Web design, Microsoft style.
(tags: computing internet stupid)