Free Thought
clock | February 4, 2008Shirley of One Big Lab blog is trying to submit a proposal for an Open Science session to be held at the next Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. Although the meeting is a whole year away, the deadline for proposals is only 4 days away. You can read the rules for proposals here and see what Shirley has written so far. With only four days to go, Shirley needs some help in finalizing the proposal and in writing letters to the organizers showing interest in such a session. All the information is here so, if you are interested, please help.
pontiff | February 4, 2008The Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing (but really how can we fault Nobel for not having a computing prize when computers for Nobel would have been people), has been won by Edmund Clarke (CMU), E. Allen Emerson (UT at Austin) and Joseh Sifakis (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/CARNOT Institute) for research on Model Checking. The citation readsFor their role in developing Model-Checking into a highly effective
verification technology, widely adopted in the hardware and software
industries.
The winners will share a $250,000 prize ($150,000 more this year due to the sponser…
pontiff | February 1, 2008Colorado State scores Keck money, D-Wave scores venture money, QICIQ 2008, Reversible computation tutorial, and a review of "Quantum Hoops."
The Keck Foundation has given some dinero to Colorado State for quantum computing research:
The primary goal of the research program is to demonstrate laser cooling and trapping of a single silicon atom. Then, on demand, researchers will ionize the atom and deliver it to the desired qubit location with nanometer accuracy, said Siu Au Lee, a professor of physics at CSU and principal investigator for the program.
D-Wave has closed a $17 million dollar…
drorzel | January 31, 2008
Songs for the Dumped: The Prelude | Popdose
"[A] two-week anthology in which music nerds write about tracks they've attached to a particular crippling breakup, let you splash around in the stories behind them and hopefully, if we've done our jobs, make you feel slightly better about your own mi
(tags: music culture society sex)
Pictures Reveal Mercury's Tumultuous Past - New York Times
""Our little craft has returned a gold mine of exciting data," said Dr. Sean C. Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the mission's lead investigator."
(tags: astronomy science news space)…
clock | January 31, 2008Deepak Singh blogs on business|bytes|genes|molecules and, as the cartoon below testifies, has built for himself quite a reputation as an authority on the questions of Open Access and the future of science communication on the Web. We first met at Scifoo last summer and it was great pleasure to host Deepak here on my home grounds at the Science Blogging Conference last week.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job?
That's a great question. I am a bit of a nomad…
drorzel | January 30, 2008
Jacks of Science â Pimp my Hypothetical Home Laboratory
"Ever since I saw the painting shown above, I've wanted to suffocate birds in my very own home laboratory. As I got older, the desire to destroy life subsided, but the desire for a home laboratory remained."
(tags: science biology chemistry silly gadgets)
The Washington Monthly
"Congratulations then, cold and flu, on prevailing over typhoid and cholera."
(tags: US politics silly)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Administrative Personae
Academic adminstrators as movie characters.
(tags: academia education movies silly)…
drorzel | January 27, 2008
illuminating science » What should we learn?
"should we teach the "standard" methods for doing multiplication and division (the usual multiplication ("carry the 3â³ etc) and the usual long division) or are students would be better off learning more "intuitive" methods?"
(tags: math education academia science society)
Natelson Group: Useful Links
Learn solid-state physics with fun Java applets.
(tags: physics education computing internet academia science materials)
The Oscars Fade to Bleak - washingtonpost.com
"This year's celebrated films make for compelling viewing, but an awful lot of…
drorzel | January 25, 2008
Senators Scrutinize Well-Endowed Colleges :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
There are too few smutty headlines in academia...
(tags: academia economics politics US)
Sorting Out Science » Blog Archive » Carnival of Space, Week 38 -- The Adventures of Shorty Barlow, Private Eye
A hard-boiled blog carnival... in SPAAAACE!
Understanding art for geeks - a photoset on Flickr
The Thinker is probably my favorite
(tags: art pictures silly humanities culture computing internet)
YouTube - Hitler: Bloodthirsty Dictator, Die-hard Cowboys Fan
"Well, at least I…
drorzel | January 24, 2008A little while ago, the Corporate Masters asked us to answer a couple of questions for possible inclusion in the first '08 issue of Seed. I originally posted this back in November, but got asked to take it down because the issue was hush-hush. The street date for the magazine in question was this week, though, and I busted up my wrist playing basketball yesterday, so I'm dragging it back out because typing hurts.
The question is:
What scientific development do you hope to be blogging or reading about in 2008?
The original question was more general, asking us just what we'd like to be…
goodmath | January 22, 2008 A bunch of people have sent me links to an article about MapReduce. I've hesitated to write about it, because the currently hyped MapReduce stuff was developed, and extensively used by Google, my employer. But the article is really annoying, and deserves a response. So I'm going to be absolutely clear. I am not commenting on this in my capacity as a Google employee. (In fact, I've never actually used MapReduce at work!) This is strictly on my own time, and it's purely my own opinion. If it's the dumbest thing you've ever read, that's my fault, not Google's. If it's the most brilliant thing…
pontiff | January 21, 2008Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel has a scathing op-ed in the San Fransisco Chronicle on the recent spending omnibus and its effect on science funding (via Computing Research Policy Blog):What are they thinking? When will they wake up? It may already be too late; but I genuinely think the citizenry of this country wants the United States to compete. If only our elected leaders weren't holding us back.
Of course, I can hear the cries already: typical liberal west coaster spouting more government spending. But, oh. Doh. Okay, well what can basic science research possibly lead to anyway.
drorzel | January 18, 2008
The Quantum Pontiff : The Contextuality of Quantum Theory in Ten Minutes
"Elves, Santa, boxes, and quantum measurements. That's the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem: quantum measurements are contextual."
(tags: physics quantum science computing)
An Upsetting Outcome :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
"When the researchers crunched the data, though, they found that the likelihood of assaults increased by 112 percent when the home team suffered an upset loss,"
(tags: academia social-science football statistics)
Admissions Dysfunction :: Inside Higher Ed ::…
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2008
A recent New Scientist article poses the often-posed question in the title. The answer is mine. Forgive me as I rant and rave on a bugbear topic...
OK, I know that we live in the "information age" and far be it from me to denigrate the work of Shannon, Turing and von Neumann, but it's gotten out of hand. Information has become the new magical substance of the age, the philosopher's stone. And, well, it just isn't.
In the article linked, physicist William Bialek at Princeton University argues that there is a minimum amount of information that organisms need to store in order to be alive."…
drorzel | January 16, 2008The second half of the NOVA special on "Absolute Zero" aired last night. Like the first installment, it was very well done, avoiding most of the traps of modern pop-science television. There were some mysterious shots of amusement park rides when they started talking about quantum mechanics, and I'm not sure why, but they kept the "re-enactments" to a minimum, and didn't overdo the CGI.
They also deserve special mention for not insulting the viewers' intelligence with constant recaps.
As you can guess from the title, this part of the story covered the history of attempts to reach ever-lower…
drorzel | January 11, 2008
YouTube - Svezia, Inferno E Paradiso (1968)
The origin of everybody's favorite Muppet earworm, via the AV Club.
(tags: music video youtube silly movies television)
YouTube - Muppets - Mahna Mahna
The Muppet version. You can thank me later.
(tags: music silly television youtube)
Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Maybe He Shouldn't Have Spoken His Mind
Valdosta State student expelled for protesting a parking garage. Don't mess with parking in academia.
(tags: academia stupid news)
Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed ::…
pontiff | January 11, 2008Sean watches a panel discussion on whether the universe is a computer, looks up the definition of a computer, and decides that instead the universe is a calculation. If thinking about the universe as a computer is designed to make computer scientists feel important, thinking about the universe as a calculation seems designed to make theoretical physicists feel important :) But what I find interesting is that Sean points to a question asked by Tony Leggett: "What kind of process does not count as a computation?"
Now first of all, let me preface this by saying that the word "computation" has…
drorzel | January 9, 2008
Lounge of the Lab Lemming: Geophysicists moderate neutrons
Estimating conference attendance by the attenuation of the cosmogenic neutron flux due to people on the exhibit floor.
(tags: physics silly science)
A Natural Scientist: Before You Sign Up For Indentured Servitude
The three most important decisions in grad school: Advisor, Advisor, Advisor.
(tags: academia science education)
Mars Gets Women: Grad School Letters
"[S]ubmitting the letters has gotten to be such an aggravation that it just sent me into a steaming rage, loudly swearing a blue streak that could be heard up and down the…
thescian | January 7, 2008Before anyone says anything, I'll question the metaphor myself: giant computer? That's just a stupid metaphor, as though we can compare a giant and the Universe. But then, we can't speak from a out-of-this-universe perspective, so, I suppose giant computer would have to do.
So now, if the Universe is a computer, what is it computing? How is it doing it? Are atoms and other structures it's transistors? What are we? (my theory: we are it's buffer overflow) If it is not a computer, what the heck is it?
A long running intellectual debate, the hardest problem so far, and all the blah.…
goodmath | January 7, 2008 I decided to do a little bit of something useful with Erlang, both to have some code to show, and to get some sense of what it's like writing something beyond a completely trivial example. Because the capabilities of Erlang shine when you get into low-level bit oriented things, I thought that writing a bit of data compression code would be make for a good example. I'm going to present it in two parts: first a simple but stupid version of the algorithm; and then the encoding part, which into bit twiddling, and potentially gets more interesting.
I'm going to use a simple version of Lempel-Ziv…
gregladen | January 5, 2008To get his annual predictions, I mean. Actually, now that I think about it, talking to god does not work either...
I don't pay much attention to Bill Gates (and I'm sure it's mutual) but I was just noticing that today is not only his annual prediction speech in Las Vegas, but it is also probably his last one as he will shortly be stepping down from his position at Microsoft to get busy giving money away. At that point, I will start paying a lot more attention to him, I assure you.
So for fun, here are a few of the predictions Bill-o has made in the past:
Bob. Remember Bob? Not the one on…