Free Thought
gregladen | September 25, 2008... according to a recent study funded by ... oh, never mind. Funded by Microsoft. OK, skip that, but there is some other interesting tech news.
Here's a piece on how Linux is better than Windows. I don't know where I find these things. Have a look:
Microsoft encourages us to think of Linux... as an also-ran operating systems for nerds. The last thing Microsoft wants us to think about is that there are some spaces where Microsoft is a distant number two and Linux is on top. ... One such is HPC (High Performance Computing).
At HPC's very highest end, supercomputers, Linux rules. The…
clock | September 24, 2008Michael Nielsen wrote another long thought-provoking essay (for his book, I guess):
............Two clarifications are in order. First, when I say that these are examples of scientific facts beyond individual understanding, I'm not saying a single person can't understand the meaning of the facts. Understanding what the Higgs particle is requires several years hard work, but there are many people in the world who've done this work and who have a solid grasp of what the Higgs is. I'm talking about a deeper type of understanding, the understanding that comes from understanding the justification…
pontiff | September 22, 2008I just saw the news that Alexei Kitaev, a pioneer in quantum computing and an incredible physicst/computer scientist, has won a MacArthur "genius" award. Awesome!
Kitaev was my next door neighbor while I was a postdoc at Caltech, and among the many highlights of my short life I count listening to Kitaev's amazing, confounding, brilliant and way over my head ideas. One event in particular I will always remember involved Alexei talking to theoretical computer scientists and, halfway through the talk, pointing out how Majorana fermions were essential to understanding what was going on in that…
drorzel | September 21, 2008
Making kinematics graphs in Excel | Dot Physics
Important tips on making a graph with Excel.
(tags: physics education computing blogs science)
Robert Hughes on Damien Hirst's upcoming Sotheby's auction | Art and design | The Guardian
"Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons's balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat's stoned scribbles, Richard Prince's feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols. Such works of art are bound to hang out together, a uniform message from our fin-de-siècle decadence."
(tags: culture review art)
Vote for…
drorzel | September 19, 2008Speaking of quantum (as we were), I've been meaning to link to the recent Scientific American article by Chris Monroe and Dave Wineland on quantum computing with ions. This is a very good explanation of the science involved, but you'd expect nothing else, given that the authors are two of the very best in the business.
What's especially notable about this article is that either they or the graphic design people at Scientific American came up with a really excellent visual example of quantum indeterminacy and entanglement, using ambiguous cubes. It's a clever way to illustrate the phenomena…
pontiff | September 18, 2008The University of Marland's Joint Quantum Institute has won an NSF Physics Frontier Center. $12.5 million over five years. This is the first frontier center devoted exclusively to quantum information science. Congrats to UM! Press release below the fold.
UM Awarded $12.5 Million for Research Center at Frontier of Quantum Physics
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The National Science Foundation has awarded the Joint Quantum Institute $12.5 million over five years to create and operate a Physics Frontier Center at the University of Maryland. The Joint Quantum Institute is a partnership between the…
drorzel | September 18, 2008There's an article in yesterday's Inside Higher Ed about the supply of scientists and engineers, arguing that there is not, in fact, a shortage:
Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, looked at what he called five "mysteries" of the STEM work force issue. For example, why do employers claim a shortage of qualified STEM graduates while prospects for Ph.D.s remain "poor"? Why do retention and completion rates for STEM fields remain low compared with students' aspirations? Why is there a "serious" funding crisis at the National Institutes of Health after its…
clock | September 16, 2008Under the fold....
What Makes People Vote Republican?:
Not everyone who votes Republican has been 'duped'. Conservative ideals appeal to some because they reflect heartfelt visions of a 'good society.
The Religious Right's Religious Right:
One of the fascinating things about the Palin story to me is how it has demonstrated the split between the mainstream religious right and the far, far religious right. I'm talking about the serious whackos like reconstructionists, the ones even the wingnuts think are wingnuts. While most religious righters have embraced Sarah Palin's candidacy as one of…
terrasig | September 15, 2008I'll be a little light on blogging this week so I'll mostly be sharing a couple of quick reads I've stumbled upon recently.
This one is presented in light of my post last week on National HBCU Week and the accompanying post from my colleague, DrugMonkey (whose referral generated even more discussion).
This tidbit is from the journalism and news production students of James Logan High School in Union City, CA:
"I always, always, always like mathematics." Marjorie Lee Browne.
Marjorie Lee Browne (9 Sept 1914-19 Oct 1979) was a notable mathematics educator, the second African-American woman to…
rallain | September 15, 2008I like computers, really I do. Computational physics is a good thing. However, there is a small problem. The problem is that there seems to be a large number of people out there that treat numerical methods and simulations as something different than theoretical calculations. You can tell who these people are because they refer to simulations as "experiments". But what do these simulations really do in science? What is science really all about?
**Science**
To me, science is all about models. Making models, testing models, upgrading models. Models. Some examples are the model of…
pontiff | September 13, 2008Chris Monroe and David Wineland have an article in Scientific American about ion trap quantum computing.
pontiff | September 11, 2008Robert Clark new chief defence scientist for Australian DSTO, Florida quantum computing conference, standard model quantum computing, and Ray Laflamme is Royal in Canada.
Robert Clark, director of the Australia's largest quantum computing effort, the appointed Chief Defence Scientist for the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (I think "Defence" is the Autralian way of saying "Defense", but I can't really defend the observation, nor can I ever condone the word "Centre.")
Conference SPIE Quantum Information and Computation VII in Orlando, FL. Combine a quantum computing…
clock | September 10, 2008There are 12 new articles 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:
Obesity as a Perceived Social Signal:
Fat accumulation has been classically considered as a means of energy storage. Obese people are theorized as metabolically 'thrifty', saving energy during times of food abundance. However, recent research has highlighted many neuro-behavioral and social aspects of obesity, with a suggestion that obesity, abdominal…
drorzel | September 7, 2008
Confessions of an RNC security guard | Salon
"Even in their lusty, alcohol-fueled swoons, these young politicos still call Palin "governor." In a way, this reverential horniness is sort of endearing. But mostly it's just creepy."
(tags: politics US journalism society culture)
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » The Singularity Is Far
"[I]f the Singularity ever does arrive, I expect it to be plagued by frequent outages and terrible customer service."
(tags: science computing books review blogs)
dgmacarthur | September 4, 2008Nature News has a special feature on "big data" - a broad look at the demands of the brave new world of massively high-throughput data generation, and the solutions adopted by research institutes and corporations to deal with those demands.
The image to the left (from an article in the feature by Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow) is a picture of the office door of Tony Cox, head of sequencing informatics at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. The 320 terabytes refers to the scale of the raw data being produced by the Sanger's next-generation sequencing machines as they chew through kilometres…
drorzel | September 2, 2008
Making Light: Why RMS Titanic Didn't Have Enough Lifeboats
"Sixteen hundred people died in the Titanic disaster because no one had worked out the implications of tuned circuits."
(tags: history science blogs gadgets)
The TNR Q&A: Charles Barkley
"People can always bring up stuff. When I get involved in politics, I am not even going to talk about what the other guys do. The media likes that. I am not going to sit around saying, "The other guy sucks worse than me." I don't need to be governor; I want to be governor."
(tags: politics US sports race basketball)
Why Assistant Professors…
pontiff | September 2, 2008Over hyped press releases are a standard for quantum computing research and a stable of what makes me sound like a grumpy old man. Really I'm not that grumpy (really! reall!), but I always forget to post the stuff which isn't over hyped. For example, today I stumbled upon an article about a recent experimental implementation of a code for overcoming qubit loss done in China. In this article I find a graduate student whose was able to get a reasonable quote into the article:While optimistic critics are acclaiming the newly achieved progress, the team, however, is cautiously calm. "There…
drorzel | August 29, 2008
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Stories / Shade by Steven Gould
Teleporteurs sans frontieres.
(tags: SF stories)
Search Magazine - On God
P.J. O'Rourke does his best Gregg Easterbrook impression.
(tags: science religion stupid)
Built on Facts : Falling from Heaven
" If my opinion is worth anything though, I think classic literature is improved by a little physics."
(tags: physics math science blogs culture literature humanities)
Michael Nielsen û Quantum computing for everyone
"[I]magine for the sake of argument that I could give you a simple, concrete explanation of how…
drorzel | August 28, 2008
Shtetl-Optimized û Blog Archive û Can we?
"IâÂÂd like propose the following question: what non-obvious things can nerds who are so inclined do to help the Democrats win in November? "
(tags: politics US society culture computing internet)
I Watched This On Purpose: Bio-Dome | The A.V. Club
"Bio-Dome doesn't exist to please critics or audiences. It exists to lead easily entertained dumbasses with low standards to Christ."
(tags: movies religion review stupid drugs)
Trying to satisfy too many agendas slows school reform
"Advocates of the liberal perspective can learn from those who…
clock | August 28, 2008There are 11 new articles 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:
Systems Biology of the Clock in Neurospora crassa:
A model-driven discovery process, Computing Life, is used to identify an ensemble of genetic networks that describe the biological clock. A clock mechanism involving the genes white-collar-1 and white-collar-2 (wc-1 and wc-2) that encode a transcriptional activator (as well as a blue-light receptor) and…