pontiff | June 19, 2009
Ant 1: Protect the queen!
Ant 2: Which one's the queen?
Ant 3: I'm the queen!
Ant 1: No you're not!
Homer: Nooo! [his head smashed the colony, and the ants float free]
Ant 1: Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!
Buzz: You fool! Now we may never know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space.
pontiff | June 16, 2009I've moved my blogroll from the sidebar, to a page accessible from the tab at the top of the page. I've also updated the list a bit, cutting out dead links and such. A few of the new blogs I've put on include One Honest Man (finance, humor), Physics and Cake (physics and, um, cake), TechFlash (Seattle tech), and Xconomy Seattle (Seattle tech) (among others).
pontiff | June 15, 2009First came the qubits quiz show, and now the qubits construction toy. Okay this later one is cool because...well because it's an awesome toy for kids of all ages (yes, I'm the guy who gives your kids blocks as a present):
pontiff | June 15, 2009Dan Reed has a brief note up about a new group at Microsoft the extreme computing group (XCG) which includes among its subject areas quantum computing:
XCG was formed in June 2009 with the goal of developing radical new approaches to ultrascale and high-performance computing hardware and software. The group's research activities include work in computer security, cryptography, operating system design, parallel programming models, cloud software, data center architectures, specialty hardware accelerators and quantum computing.
Also in the news here. Microsoft, of course, has long had a toe in…
pontiff | June 15, 2009I wasn't at Quantum Information Science Workshop in Vienna, VA, but I heard that the topic of quantum computing "going black" came up at least a few times. One speaker mentioned during his talk that several of his former graduate students were now in "the black hole" of secret U.S. research programs and another expressed, during the open session, that the field is not yet mature enough to be conducting secret research.
Quantum computing is an odd field when it comes to secrecy. Since one (not the only) reason that quantum computers are interesting is that they break the most popular public…
pontiff | June 12, 2009The "International Workshop on Dynamical Decoupling (IWODD)" now has a web site with information on the conference Oct 5-6 in Boulder, CO:
Dynamical decoupling techniques show the potential to dramatically suppress errors in quantum information and quantum control systems. To date, research in this area has been scattered between magnetic resonance experimentalists and quantum information theorists. This workshop aims to foster new relationships between experimental and theoretical researchers in an effort to speed technical developments and to promote the adoption of dynamical decoupling…
pontiff | June 10, 2009The astro/physics blogosphere is all atwitter about papers the Nature embargo policy (See Julianne If a paper is submitted to nature does it still make a sound, the cat herder Hear a paper, see a paper, speak no paper, and he of less than certain principles Unhealthy obsessions of academia. He of uncertain principles loses the catchy title contest :) )
In this discussion, the uncertain principal brings up an interesting effect for arXiv postings:
There's an obsession in science with the order of publication that I don't think is really healthy, and I think it's only gotten worse. At the…
pontiff | June 9, 2009David Wineland runs a world class lab at NIST Boulder which has been at the forefront of ion trap quantum computing. William Phillips is a Nobel prizing winning physicist who also does quantum computing at NIST, this time at NIST Gaithersburg. To say that these are two top researchers in quantum computing, is a massive understatement. Both of the groups have produced their ground breaking work with the support of numerous alphabet soup government agencies throughout the years. Now comes word, via a Nature news article that IARPA, the intelligence community's version of DARPA, has decided…
pontiff | June 8, 2009Scenes from today's CSE 322 (introduction to formal methods in computer science) final:
pontiff | June 5, 2009A former student sent me what appears to be my doppelganger: Danbert Nobacon. Life with no bacon, well that's just crazy.
In other Bacon related news: Jorge sends me Bacon Vodka...from Seattle. This will surely save me time because frying up bacon to mix in my wodka for my bacon vodka martini was always a real time sink.
pontiff | June 3, 2009In the University of Washington's "The Daily" in the lost and found section:
FOUND - PANDA head, appears to be a part of a missing suit. Recovered near 45th and Memorial. presumably stolen by ill-advised sorority girls during their week-long, drunken stupor
pontiff | June 2, 2009The iPhone is a great gadget (as a phone, it's okay. Personally I wish it could be made a bit louder as my ears, they ain't so good at that hearing thing.) Here are the apps I've found that I use the most. (Excluding google maps, the built in email and browser, and the phone functions, of course. Having google maps available so easily really is an amazing piece of functionality to have in a phone, I must say.)
Urbanspoon (free): Restaurant guide with cool select a random place by shaking the iPhone. Links to lots of reviews, which is nice. A friend feature to spy on your friends…
pontiff | June 1, 2009What in the world is a review for Star Trek doing in Nature Physics? (Thank to reader W for pointing this out.) I mean, at least the review of Angels and Demons has references to physics, but the review of Star Trek, is, well, just a review of Star Trek with no reference physics or science or, well, anything that I could see the audience of Nature Physics relating to.
I'm not saying I don't appreciate the review, or the book/art section of Nature Physics, but doesn't this seem a bit out of place. It is too bad, indeed, because the movie does contain time travel, and as Cosmic Sean…
pontiff | June 1, 2009So bing, Microsoft's latest search engine, is up and running the tech word is a twitter. I checked it out and...well. On google when you search for "pontiff" my blog comes up as hit number five, after a few silly things like wikipedia entries and dictionary definitions (but no actual links to the *ahem* real pontiff. Sadly the days when I was number one on google are gone. But I will someday tell my grandkids...) But on bing, what happens? I'm down at number nine. Nine, Microsoft, really? I live in Seattle you know: shouldn't this give me extra rank in your algorithms? And among the…
pontiff | May 29, 2009Catch the wave. Long but worth watching:
I suspect that collaboration will never be the same after the wave.
Another observation is about gadgets and iphone apps. One beauty of iphone apps is how easy it is to write one. This has always been true of many gadgets (like gadgets for google's homepage.) But the later has always suffered, it seems to, in a lack of functionality. I think wave might push this problem in a very positive direction (see for example the yes/no/maybe widget.) Further having things server side is also allows for a sort of gadgetology with a large amount of power,…
pontiff | May 29, 2009Recently I finally got a chance to read the new preprint arXiv:0905.2292 "A new physical principle: Information Causality" by M. Pawlowski, T. Paterek, D. Kaszlikowski, V. Scarani, A. Winter, and M. Zukowski. It's been a long time since I spent more than a few spare hours thinking about foundational issues in quantum theory. Personally I am very fond of approaches to foundational questions which have a information theoretic or computational bent (on my desktop I have a pdf of William Wootter's thesis "The Acquisition of Information From Quantum Measurements" which I consider a classic in…
pontiff | May 28, 2009Ditch day 2009 was May 27, 2009. A classic from the past. Our stack involved a multi-storied wooden puzzle and the strong chance we would be taped to a tree upside down.
pontiff | May 28, 2009It seems that astrometry has finally succeeded at detecting a planet. A star and its planets perform a complex dance as they move through space. In astrometry planet hunting one looks for a planet by looking for the "wobble" of a star as it moves across the sky. This is contrast with the two other methods used to detect planets around stars, which use radial velocity or transits to detect the planets. Now it seems that a team from JPL has used a series of measurements over 12 years to detect a Jupiter sized planet tugging on its star, VB 10. The wobble in this case is a movement of about…