Free Thought
revere | March 8, 2008The first computer I used was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-9. It had 48K (that's 48KB, not 48MB or 48GB) of wound ferrite core memory that took up half a very large room. The we booted it with paper tape -- a strip of tape with holes punched in it that got read by a paper tape reader. First we had to set some register switches by hand. No time share. We signed up for use two hours at a time. There was someone in the lab 24/7 using the beast. My first desktop, an Apple II+, had the same amount of memory but it fit on a table top. That was 13 years later. Without a monitor it cost $2200…
jane | March 7, 2008Say you are a woman in computing. Maybe you're struggling to get through school. Maybe you're trying to start up a mentoring program, or have a great project idea, or are facing a career transition. And maybe you need some funds to get your project/schooling/transition off the ground, or at least help it along.
There's a program that might be of assistance....
The Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, and the Systers Online Community, sponsor a program called Pass-It-On Grants. The idea behind the grants is to develop a network of women, who provide financial assistance to their…
thusspakezuska | March 7, 2008According to the Chronicle news blog, computer science enrollment is down by half since 2000.
...undergraduate enrollment in computer-science programs had fallen to half of what it was in 2000 (15,958 to 7,915, to be exact).
But according to Inside Higher Ed, the computer science major has rebounded!
For the first time since 2000, the number of newly declared undergraduate majors at doctoral-granting computer science departments is up.
They have a table that shows enrollment for the last 7 years. 2006 does look like the nadir, though it's a bit soon to tell if the 2007 number is the…
pontiff | March 7, 2008A day in the life of a traveler. For your amusement?
2:15 Shuttle caught after giving lunch time blackboard talk about adiabatic quantum computing and huffing it back to the hotel.
2:30-3:00 Wait in parking lot of a Courtyard Marriott. Twenty person shuttle remains occupied by me and the driver. Other passenger, to fill out the space, a no show.
4:00 Arrive at airport. Check in. Drats looks like the flight is packed so can't change to better seat.
4:05 Is there really only one security line open for all of these people? Newark is the Newark of airports, so to speak.
5:15 We're…
drorzel | March 6, 2008
nanoscale views: Reviewing- why, how, and how often?
"well written, thorough, timely referee reports almost always improve the quality of scientific papers"
(tags: academia science physics articles writing)
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Long-dreaded politics post
"[A]fter seven years of Bush, to ask whether I'd "prefer" Hillary or Obama is like asking a drowning person surrounded by sharks which of two lifeboats he prefers to be rescued by (and adding, in case it's helpful, that one lifeboat is rowed by a
(tags: US politics)
Gravity-test constrains new forces - physicsworld.com
"…
goodmath | March 6, 2008 While doing some reading on rings, I came across some interesting stuff about
Monoids and syntax. That's right up my alley, so I decided to write a post about that.
We start by defining a new property for monoids - a kind of equivalence
relation called a monoid congruence. A Monoid congruence defines
equivalence classes within the set of values in a monoid. The monoid congruence
relation is generally written as "~", and it's a relation between two values in a
monoid: ~⊆M×M. A monoid congruence has all of the usual properties
of an equivalence relation: it's symmetric, reflexive, and…
oracknows | March 6, 2008Yesterday was a rather long day, starting with a long commute in the morning, followed by a long day in the office mainly doing grant paperwork, and capped off by getting home late. Even so, I couldn't ignore this particular story for two reasons. First, it's about so-called "alternative" medicine. Second, it's about Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and the creative, if at times arrogant and abusive, creative genius behind Apple's recovery from the brink of bankruptcy 11 years ago to its current situation, where its computers are cool; its operating system rocks; and it rules over the…
pontiff | February 29, 2008Some of you know (and use) the website I created a year ago, Scirate.com, a place where arXiv papers can be voted for digg style and comments can be left on the papers. After a while of not tinkering much with the website I'm beginning to add more features that I've been thinking about for a while now. The first feature is just a small one: the ability for the website to send trackbacks to the arXiv when someone comments on a paper. After some false starts I think I've got this feature up and running, and indeed the first trackback now appears for arXiv:0802.3351.
Now, of course, the…
gregladen | February 24, 2008That's the sound of a statistician or scientist laughing because s/he has some really cool software and didn't pay a dime for it, because it is open source.
Since we are talking about R, I thought I'd point you to a couple of screen shots. Here it is running on a Mac, and here it is running on a Linux box.
These images are about 200 K or so in size, and they come to us courtesy of The R Project for Statistical Computing
pontiff | February 21, 2008QCMC 2008 in Calgary call for abstracts, Quantum Information and Control in Cairns, Australia call for abstracts, Covaqial, Brassard nominated for Herzberg Medal, and the limits of quantum computers.
QCMC 2008, to be held in Calgary (why do I want to say "yippee ki yay" whenever I hear the word "Calgary?") is asking for abstract submissions:
This is a call for abstract submission to the Ninth International Conference on Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing (QCMC), which will be held at the University of Calgary, Canada, on August 19 to 24, 2008.
A one-page abstract of your…
bioephemera | February 17, 2008Golden Age of Scientific Computing
Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
In a Friday session at the AAAS conference here in Boston, Dr. Chris Johnson of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute showed this short video encapsulating some of his team's striking 3D imaging innovations. He also made what I think is a very important point: that one of the biggest challenges in his field lies not in finding new technologies to capture details, but finding new ways to generate abstractions of data - images that don't just depict results for presentation, but help to clarify significant…
pontiff | February 16, 2008Yes we work on Saturdays. Okay work may be the wrong word. Updated as the day goes along and my brain doesn't fill up (plus I'm chairing a session, so is it ethical to chair and blog at the same time?)
The first talk of the morning was by Edward Farhi. Farhi talked about the NAND tree algorithm (see the Optimizer along with quant-ph/0702144 and its plethora of follow up works.) This was only the second computer talk Farhi has given. That's right, hell has frozen over, and MIT physic professors have given up transparencies and are now using computers. I feel like an era has come to pass…
pontiff | February 15, 2008Sloan awards have been announced for this year. On the list I noticed at least two three quantum computing/information related names: Alexandre Blais (University of Sherbrooke), Andris Ambainis (University of Waterloo), and Jason Petta (Princeton.) Congrats!
pontiff | February 15, 2008Live blogging from day one of the talks at SquInT 2008. Updated as the day goes along. So hit that refresh button :)
In a sign that history may be warping itself into a cirlce, the first speaker of the day was Serge Haroche, who was the first speaker at the first SqUinT conference ten years ago. Close time like curves anyone?
Haroche talked about quantum nondemolition measurements of a photon number in a cavity (see 0707.3880.) A quantum nondemolition measurement is a measurement of eigenstates which commutes with the free evolution of the quantum system (thus only external interactions…
drorzel | February 14, 2008
The Neon Season - Things I Have Learned From Reading Children's and YA Books of Yesteryear (and sometimes of Year Now)
"1. The dog always dies."
(tags: books literature culture silly)
Talk Like A Physicist
Because we're cooler than pirates.
(tags: physics science silly)
Cocktail Party Physics: a little light housekeeping
I really like the KITP "Journal Club" idea...
(tags: physics science writing society)
The Quantum Pontiff : SquInT Live Blogging - Thursday Tutorials
His Holiness reports on the latest in quantum information.
(tags: quantum physics computing science)
Scientists Find…
pontiff | February 14, 2008I've never live blogged before (well I've been alive while I've blogged, but that is different, I guess), but maybe it will make me pay more attention to the talks, so here goes nothing. Oh, and happy Hallmark(TM) Valentines day! I'll be updating these posts as the conference goes along.
John Martinis led a tutorial on measuring coherence in one qubit (Rabi flopping, Ramnsey interference, lifetimes, spin echo), measuring fidelities of one qubit gates, and process tomography for one and two qubit systems. All illustrated with beautiful experimental data from his group at UCSB.
Most…
goodmath | February 12, 2008 I've been getting a ton of questions about an article from the Independent about a guy named Bertie Smalls. Bertie was a british thief who died quite recently, who was famous for
testifying against his organized crime employers back in the 1970s. The question concerns one
claim in the article. Bertie was paid £10,000 for his part in a robbery in 1972. The article alleges that £10,000 in 1972 is equivalent to £200,000 today.
Lots of people think that that looks fishy, and have been sending me mail asking
if that makes any sense.
Full disclosure. I'm not an economist - I've never studied…
goodmath | February 10, 2008 In the last couple of posts, I showed how we can start looking at group
theory from a categorical perspective. The categorical approach gives us a
different view of symmetry that we get from the traditional algebraic
approach: in category theory, we see symmetry from the viewpoint of
groupoids - where a group, the exemplar of symmetry, is seen as an
expression of the symmetries of a simpler structure.
We can see similar things as we climb up the stack of abstract algebraic
constructions. If we start looking for the next step up in algebraic
constructions, the rings, we can see a very…
drorzel | February 8, 2008
Pure Pedantry : Friday Rants: People
Bill Hicks: "We're a virus with shoes."
(tags: blogs society stupid silly)
YouTube - Gnarls Barkley Crazy Theremin Jam
A cover of "Crazy" with the vocals replaced by a theremin.
(tags: music video youtube)
A Call for Professional Attire :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
I hope this is satirical.
(tags: academia stupid)
Stanford researchers hear the sound of quantum drums
"Using a tunneling scanning microscope and two roomfuls of equipment to move around individual carbon monoxide molecules on a copper surface,…
pontiff | February 5, 2008"Jumper" is a new movie about a man (okay, Hayden Christensen, aka Anakin Skywalker) who can teleport himself anywhere just by thinking about it. Quantum teleportation is a procedure where quantum information can be transported using entanglement and a few bits of classical communication. The distance between these two is, *ahem*, rather large. The New York Times today has an article about an event at MIT (that other institute of technology) which brought together the director of Jumper, star Hayden Christensen, and MIT professors Ed Farhi and Max Tegmark.
The article is fun, with the…