Free Thought
pontiff | April 29, 2008Okay, quick, who can be the first to tell me what is drastically wrong with arXiv:0804.3076? (via rdv.) Winner gets a beer next time I see them. This is almost as fun as the game of trying to spot the error in papers claiming thethe discovery of a quantum algorithm for efficiently solving NP-complete problems.
drorzel | April 28, 2008
The Art of the Possible » Blog Archive » Wussy Like a Fox?
"Summing up: Obama risks looking marginally "weak" by "not hitting back" against Clinton's attacks. But hitting back risks making him look like a) an asshole; b) a sexist; c) a scary negro man! "
(tags: politics US race gender)
Solar System Live
See the arrangement of planets on any date you choose.
(tags: astronomy planets space computing internet gadgets)
blarg? » A Clear And Present Danger
"[T]he American national security establishment has stolen my socks."
(tags: war US stupid travel)
What's up in the solar system for…
pontiff | April 25, 2008Bill Gates, in his transition from Mr. Big at Microsoft, to Mr. Big at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, has been going around to various college campuses and given a talk "Bill Unplugged." You can watch the video here if you are so inclined.
Notes from the talk.
First of all no one asked the question I wanted him to answer: how is he going to commute to work. You see Gates' house is on the "east side" which is separated from Seattle by floating bridges (I kid you not.) The commute across these bridges, is, well, lets just say, not the most pleasant experience. The new offices for…
pontiff | April 22, 2008Andrew Landahl (who really should have a blog because he is certainly one of the most interesting people I get to talk to when I attend a conference) sends me a note about recent appearances of quantum computing on prime time TV which he has graciously let me post below.
I thought you'd be amused to know that quantum information has finally made it to prime time. Using TiVo, I just caught up on back-to-back episodes of CBS's "Big Bang Theory" from the past two weeks that make prominent references to quantum teleportation and Shor's algorithm. The week before last, the episode opened with a…
drorzel | April 22, 2008Two weeks ago, now, I promised some peer=reviewed physics blogging, to compensate for the "screechy monkey" nonsense. Of course, I got distracted by other things, but I've been sitting on this paper for a while now, and I really need to get it off my desk.
The paper in question is "Quantum Register Based on Individual Electronic and Nuclear Spin Qubits in Diamond," by the group of Misha Lukin at Harvard, published in Science last June. It's a clever idea for a way to do quantum computing using individual nuclear spins in a diamond matrix. I really like this idea, not least because it has the…
pontiff | April 19, 2008We've seen these demos before, but Johnny Lee's TED talk still wows:
Not only does it seem that interfaces are undergoing some radical redesigning right now, but also methods to take existing "cheap" products and leverage them into something which would normally cost a lot more, seems to be catching on.
Just yesterday I saw a talk by Shwetak Patel from Georgia Tech which leverages things like existing power lines, plumbing, or HVAC systems to detect activities occurring in a house. What was nice about the work, in my mind, was the fact that it leveraged current infrastructure and thus…
drorzel | April 18, 2008
Preliminary thermal modeling accounts for some (but not all) of the Pioneer Anomaly - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
Some of the mysterious extra acceleration may just be uneven heating.
(tags: science space physics astronomy thermo theory computing)
Car Talk
"Coming April 22, PBS's NOVA presents a very special program. The topic? 'Car of the Future ...' Now, here's the downside: '...with hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi.'"
(tags: television science silly)
Atoms in a Radio-Frequency-Dressed Optical Lattice
Using lasers and RF fields to make a lattice of ring-shaped…
pontiff | April 17, 2008A word I accidentally mumbled in class: "crudimentary." I think it means both rudimentary and crude. Anyway, I like it, and am going to try to start weaseling it into as many talks as I possibly can. Speaking of which, here are slides for a guest lecture I gave to the local alternative models of computing class at UW.
catdynamics | April 16, 2008Weather forecasting is a tricky business.
It is a lot better than it used to be, but most of the time, for most places, you can't put much faith in forecasts much beyond 3-5 days.
Which is a big improvement on how it used to be, but one could still hope for better.
So... I was chatting to a met grad student, as one does, and he told me that the current forecasts are running into fine grain limits of initial condition data - the weather stations are too sparse and not always well located for the initial data needed to do medium term forecasts, the 5-10 day forecasts. Locations tend to be…
pontiff | April 11, 2008Last week, in the class I'm teaching, we talked about the basics of deterministic finite automata. In week two we moved on to more interesting and slightly less basic material. In particular we introduced the notion of a nondeterministic finite automata and, by the end of the week, had showed that the class of languages accepted by deterministic finite automata is exactly the same class of languages accepted by nondeterministic finite automata.
What I love about this basic material is that you take a seemingly crazy idea: machines that can follow multiple computational paths at the same…
developingintelligence | April 10, 2008Peter Hankins has written an excellent commentary criticizing the "positive comparisons" I make after contrasting brains with computers.
Peter says:
"... the concept of processing speed has no useful application in the brain rather than that it isn't fixed."
While this statement may intuitively appeal to some philosophers, temporal limitations in neural processing are both critical for neuronal function and well accepted in both neuroscience and psychometrics. At the biological level, the membrane capacitance of neurons is important for regulating the firing rate of neurons, which itself has…
gregladen | April 9, 2008The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing edited by Richard Dawkins is now in pre-release state ... so you can order it with a discount from Amazon. Publisher's description:
Boasting almost one hundred pieces, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is a breathtaking celebration of the finest writing by scientists--the best such collection in print--packed with scintillating essays on everything from "the discovery of Lucy" to "the terror and vastness of the universe."
Edited by best-selling author and renowned scientist Richard Dawkins, this sterling collection brings together…
drorzel | April 8, 2008
Most powerful laser in the world fires up
"The Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power on Monday morning, March 31," Good thing, or they'd feel pretty dumb about the name.
(tags: physics optics science news)
Cats Laughing
Everybody's favorite band of SF authors, on the Intenet.
(tags: SF music internet)
Affirmative Action Challenged Anew :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs
(tags: academia diversity race education politics US law)
Researchers take step toward creating quantum computers using entangled photons in…
drorzel | April 8, 2008(This is the second of two background posts for a peer-reviewed research blogging post that has now slipped to tomorrow. I started writing it, but realized that it needed some more background information, which became this post. And now I don't have time to write the originally intended post...)
Making a quantum computer is a tricky business. The process of quantum computing requires the creation of both superposition states of individual quantum bits (in which the "qubit" is in some mixture of "0" and "1" at the same time) and also entangled states of different qubits (states where the state…
drorzel | April 6, 2008
In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop - New York Times
"To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. "
(tags: blogs writing journalism society culture computing internet)
Calorimeters for High Energy Physics experiments - part 1 « A Quantum Diaries Survivor
A detailed exploration of high energy physics hardware.
(tags: physics experiment science)
Meteorites delivered the 'seeds' of Earth's left-hand life
This seems to be a narrow argument about chirality, rather than…
stoat | April 6, 2008Suppose you read a press release that started... Bleak first results from the world's largest climate change experiment and continued Greenhouse gases could cause global temperatures to rise by more than double the maximum warming so far considered likely by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to results from the world's largest climate prediction experiment, published in the journal Nature this week. and went on The first results from climateprediction.net, a global experiment using computing time donated by the general public, show that average temperatures…
drorzel | April 3, 2008
VQR » The Christian with Four Aces
A biography of the deeply creepy and corrupt Pat Robertson.
(tags: culture religion television journalism politics US society)
Coming to New York, a Science Event for the Masses - New York Times
"Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, who described himself as being from Muppet Labs, extolled the family-oriented programs. The most important thing they could show, he said, was "that science can be as explosive and violent as any TV program.""
(tags: science education news meetings academia society culture)
World Science Festival -- World Science Festival 2008 - Five Day…
pontiff | April 3, 2008Today, I looked on the arxiv and found arXiv:0804.0272:
arXiv:0804.0272
Quantum computing using shortcuts through higher dimensions
Authors: B. P. Lanyon, M. Barbieri, M. P. Almeida, T. Jennewein, T. C. Ralph, K. J. Resch, G. J. Pryde, J. L. O'Brien, A. Gilchrist, A. G. White
and nearly fell out of my chair. What an awesome title. A least for me, when I first parsed the title of the paper, the first thing that popped into my head was using spatial dimensions to speed up quantum computation (as opposed to using higher dimensional quantum systems.) Gots to get me some string theories to…
catdynamics | April 1, 2008it is a busy news day, with a number of breakthroughs reported in different fields, and a lot of changes here at ScienceBlogs
I'll try to update as more reports come in
The Quantum Pontiff reports a potential breakthrough in quantum computing using bleeding edge fusion technology.
Virgle, a new joint venture between Virgin Galactic and Google, has bought Mars. Markets rose on the announcement.
There are rumours that the SEC was to investigate Google for insider trading, and that they had abused their privileged position at Ames to find out about the NASA breakthrough propulsion technology,…
pontiff | March 31, 2008Normally when I think about quantum computers, I think about systems which are pretty cold, since a thermal equilibrium state at high temperature is a very mixed state. But is it really true that a quantum computer needs to be cold to quantum compute? I've often wondered (some would say pontificated) about this, and so I was excited when I found this Physical Review Letter describing quantum computing using plasmas.
The idea of this new approach, according to the paper, is to use modes in the Debye sheath as qubits. Because of the Child-Langmuir law, the current in this sheath is quantized…