Free Thought
pontiff | January 4, 2008What with the U.S. presidential election dominating the news, could you ask for anything more this Friday than more politics blogging? Pain below the fold.
Gordon Watts asks a good question about the zeroing out of funding for the ITER. Treaties? We ain't got no treaties. We don't need no treaties! I don't have to show you any stinkin' treaties!!"
With Huckabee (What is Huck? Huck be a creationist and opponent of the separation of church and state) winning Iowa, I'm sure you'll be hearing for commentary about the "FairTax" (WAR IS PEACE!) If I'm taxed 30 cents on a dollar is that a 30…
drorzel | December 27, 2007
The Least Essential Albums Of 2007 | The A.V. Club
"Every year produces great music and a nearly equal amount of terrible music. Then there's the not-so-creamy middle, the albums that have no real reason to exist, but nonetheless find their way to music-store shelves and online music stores."
(tags: music review culture)
The Best Books We Read In 2007 | The A.V. Club
Genre fiction tops the list!
(tags: books review culture)
AFP: Priests brawl at Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus
"Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over…
clock | December 24, 2007There are 26 days until the Science Blogging Conference. We have 200 registered participants and a few people on the waiting list. The Sigma Xi space accommodates 200 and we have ordered food for 200 and swag bags for 200. Apart from the public list, we also have a list with a couple of anonymous bloggers as well as about a dozen of students who will be coming with their teachers. So, the registration is now officially closed and all future registrants will be placed on a waiting list.
The anthology should be published in time for the event. Between now and the conference, I am…
pharyngula | December 21, 2007
A while back, I summarized a review of the evolution of eyes across the whole of the metazoa — it doesn't matter whether we're looking at flies or jellyfish or salmon or shrimp, when you get right down to the biochemistry and cell biology of photoreception, the common ancestry of the visual system is apparent. Vision evolved in the pre-Cambrian, and we have all inherited the same basic machinery — since then, we've mainly been elaborating, refining, and randomly varying the structures that add functionality to the eye.
Now there's a new and wonderfully comprehensive review of the evolution…
gregladen | December 19, 2007A SiCortex SC648 supercomputer and a Linux cluster of 648 CPU's and a TB of main memory woudl draw about 1,200 watts. That's gotta widen your Carbon Footprint!
Unless, of course, you are a bunch of crazy MIT students withe bicycles, and you've got generators attached to the bikes.
A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC).
...
An SC648 chip, with six processors on it, draws around 8 watts of power, which compares to a typical notebook computer CPU needing 100 watts,…
drorzel | December 18, 2007
Monkeys perform arithmetic as well as college students
I knew that.
(tags: academia education biology math psychology news science)
Merck Manual for Pet Health - Ferret Hit by an Arrow? Here's a Book for You - New York Times
The Merck/Merial Manual for Pet Health: Home Edition: Because hypochondriacs have pets, too.
(tags: animals medicine books silly)
Teenage Risks, and How to Avoid Them - New York Times
"We found that teenagers quite rationally weigh benefits and risks," Dr. Reyna said. "But when they do that, the equation delivers the message to go ahead and do that, because to the…
pontiff | December 17, 2007The grades are all done, and the students are gone, and now I'm conferencing. (That sentence should be sung to the tune of "Busted") After a mere hour and a half delay at the airport I arrived last night at USC for QEC07.
Day one is a half day of tutorial talks and then a half day of talks. I've posted slides of my talk here: "Topological Codes and Subsystem Codes and Why We Should Care About Them..." Hopefully I'll have some interesting things to post about in the next few days as I listen to the latest and greatest from the world of quantum error correction.
So far the highlight of the…
gregladen | December 17, 2007NYT: Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft
The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices -- a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its…
pontiff | December 17, 2007News from Computing Research Policy Blog that the new omnibus appropriations bill will totally hammer the NSF and NIST. Effectively, factoring in some accounting and inflation, both budgets will be shrunk. So much for the America Competes Initiative. I've appropriately updated the probability that I will be employed in the next few years.
gregladen | December 17, 2007Warning: This site opens with a video in play mode, and it is a bit noisy. Normally, I would not link to such as site because I think that is obnoxious. But it is an interesting site.
Welcome to the Computer History Museum on YouTube. We're committed to preserving and presenting the history and stories of the Information Age. Here on YouTube we offer videos of the many events and lectures at the museum.
The site is here.
pontiff | December 5, 2007Since I got into trouble for posting about the need for more, not less, funding for science and engineering, (and, I might add, a reengineering of our approach to what it means to produce a successful Ph.D.), I thought I'd continue the trouble by linking to a post over at the Computing Research Policy Blog, "Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations Expected to Grow Quickest Over the Next Decade."
pontiff | December 5, 2007Chad of Uncertain Principles asks what's on our office doors. Here in the Paul Allen Center, our doors are too pretty to put things on, but the little square beside our door is perfect for attaching odds and ends. Here is my door in all its glory:
A. Quantum computing warning sign. The cat is in a superposition of sleeping and scratching.
B. Me jumping off a cornice. Weeee! Mmm, cornices.
C. Spherical cow warning sign. This one causes great confusion in a computer science department.
D. Villa Sophia in the snow. Our Christmas card.
E. M.I.A
F. The Clifford group
G. Occam warning sign…
drorzel | December 1, 2007
Amazon.com: Uranium Ore: Electronics
"When mixed with Tuscan whole milk I gained the power to control deceased woodland creatures. I am now in the process of raising an army of undead wombats to overthrow the government from deep within my volcanic lair. "
(tags: silly internet)
FilmChat: Philip Pullman -- the extended e-mail interview
Phillip Pullman on the upcoming movie of The Golden Compass, and His Dark MAterials generally. Less crazy than some of his other interviews.
(tags: books literature movies religion culture society)
Second Sight
Rob Knop's new digs.
(tags: blogs computing…
gregladen | November 28, 2007Are there really open source colleges?
Not really, but there are regular colleges that offer some degree of OpenSource learning.
For instance, you can take a LOT of science courses from MIT, or Physics from Tufts, or Molecular Computing from Tokyo. Here is a list of OpenSource college opportunities.
And if you want to brush up on your math, go here.
pontiff | November 27, 2007My grandfather liked to write letters to the editor. I think I inherited this disease from him. Here are the contents of a recent letter I wrote to the editor of Physics Today which I hope some of you may find amusing.
I greatly enjoyed reading N. David Mermin's last two Reference Frame columns on factoring and quantum computing ("What has quantum mechanics to do with factoring?", Physics Today, April 2007, page 8 and "Some curious facts about quantum factoring", Physics Today, October 2007, page 10.) However as the proud one-time owner of the California license plate "QUBIT" (which I had…
goodmath | November 25, 2007Several commenters pointed out that I made several mistakes in my description of Erlang. It turns out that the main reference source I used for this post, an excerpt from a textbook on Erlang available on the Erlang website, is quite out of date. I didn't realize this; I assumed that if they pointed towards that as a tutorial, that it would represent the current state of the language. My bad. As a result, several things that I said about Erlang - including some negative comments, were inaccurate. I've updated the article, and the changes are marked with comments.
As long-time readers will…
drorzel | November 25, 2007There are two things creating some buzz at the moment on ScienceBlogs that I don't intend to write about because I've already commented on them. They're oddly similar, too, though they're being approached in different ways.
One is this op-ed by Paul Davies, which is basically a shorter and more contentiously worded version of one of the arguments in Cosmic Jackpot. I reviewed the book back in January, and I really don't have anything to say about this Cliff's Notes version that I didn't say then.
The other is this silliness from the Telegraph about shortening the life of the Universe by…
drorzel | November 22, 2007
[0711.0745] Imaging the Internal Structure of the Earth with Atmospheric Neutrinos
"The absorption of neutrinos with energies in excess of 10 TeV when traversing the Earth is capable of revealing its density distribution."
(tags: physics theory articles science)
mmcirvin: Retract your ad homonyms
Matt McIrvin explains a classic of Usenet debate.
(tags: politics blogs computing)
Berry's phase seen in solid-state qubit - physicsworld.com
I've never understood Berry's Phase, and now I can not understand it as applied to quantum computing.
(tags: physics experiment computing quantum science…
pontiff | November 21, 2007Postdocs, APS GQI quantum newsletter, Quantum computing in Waikiki, quantum chicanery, quantum foods.
Postdocs at NIST: National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associateships at Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division of the NIST Information Technology Laboratory
The fall newsletter for the APS Topical Group of Quantum Information, Concepts and Computation is available. Included is a report on a recent quantum computing conference in Iran, as well as statements from the people crazy enough to run the topical group officer positions. Wait, I'm one of those crazies? Doh.…
pontiff | November 19, 2007Commenter Michael J. Biercuk asks about D-wave's machine:
What is the fundamental experimental test which would demonstrate the system is not simply undergoing a classical, incoherent process?
Of course there are answers to this question which involve some technically fairly challenging experiments (proving that a quantum computer is quantum computing is something which many experimentalists have struggled over, for far smaller systems than D-wave's system.) But there is a much simpler experiment which I haven't seen answered in any of the press on D-wave, and which, for the life of me, I…