pontiff | May 12, 2009The other day I ran into a good friend from Tlön, who told me the most fascinating story about his discovery of a new theory of games.
I owe my discovery of the nature of equilibrium in card games to an odd conjunction of mirrors and an encyclopedia. The mirror was in our library, and the encyclopedia was called Encyclopedia Equilibria (London, 1942, Enlarged ed. 1983). The mirror was an abomination, for in its reflection, one could see their opponents cards, and thus it led me to a crisis in belief. The encyclopedia, however, was even more of an anomaly, containing a fallaciously named…
pontiff | May 11, 2009This weekend was bottling weekend. Bottled up nine gallons of cab, Il Monstro Viola (this was the year that the purple monster in our front yard died) yielding 55 bottles of wine. Interestingly the two carboys I used had distinctively different tastes, one had a much stronger oak taste than the other. But both batches, this year, had a lot less of that "juice" taste than my previous years. Off to storage you go, Il Montro Viola:
pontiff | May 11, 2009Physics is an new APS initiative to highlight select articles for Physical Review journals, very much in the model of the commentaries that appear on articles in journals like Science. Many (all?) of the articles are written by researchers in the field, and are meant to be readable by a wide audience of physicists and serve as a sieve for what a good broad physicist should know about what is currently going on in physics.
Today, a highlight I wrote about two recent PRLs has appeared: Too entangled to quantum compute one-way. This paper highlights two recent papers on entanglement in one-…
pontiff | May 9, 2009A nice read for the weekend: Michael Nielsen on Doing science in the open in Physics World.
pontiff | May 8, 2009Yes, it's a slow dance:
Through the hourglass I saw you, in time you slipped away
When the mirror crashed I called you, and turned to hear you say
If only for today I am adiabatic
Take my pulsed gates away
arXiv:0905.0901, "Adiabatic Gate Teleportation" by Dave Bacon and Steve Flammia
(As seen on arXiview)
pontiff | May 7, 2009After watching Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk* it occurred to me to go back and look at my own scientific papers and try to assess them for how creative they were. Some things you should just never do, I guess, but it did lead me to an interesting question.
* The first 2/3 of the talk is excellent, ending not as great. I'm heartily in support of his cause, but it felt to me like he was implying that this was the one and only problem with the education system, which I find hard to swallow.
Looking at the list of my papers, I'm struck by many things. First of all I'm amazed by how tightly I've…
pontiff | May 6, 2009Via MarketSci blog, Eric Rosenfeld talks about the collapse of LTCM at MIT. Funny I can't find in any MIT literature an advertisement for the fact that 2/3s of LTCM had MIT roots? (Caltech, snarky snark snark)
pontiff | May 6, 2009For the bus ride home, I'm going to check out "One world versus many: the inadequacy of Everettian accounts of evolution, probability, and scientific confirmation" by Adrian Kent (arXiv/0905.0624) Nothing like ending the day with some against many-worlds reading. That and a fun TED talk should make the ride go by fast
pontiff | May 6, 2009I've not had a chance to play with a Kindle, but seen a lot of them in the coffee shops of Seattle (Amazon will soon be moving to a neighborhood very close to mine, in South Lake Union.) My first impression was: cool, but a bit small. Now here comes the Kindle DX with a 9.7" display and better integrated PDF. Now if Amazon will just offer an easy method for connecting to the arXiv, and I can scrounge up $500 bucks (can I put a Kindle on one of my grants?), I might think of getting one. One question I couldn't find an answer to was whether one could use the "basic web browser" in the Kindle DX…
pontiff | May 4, 2009Some quotes, with some substitutions, denoted by [], for the actual words:
"The famous physicist Max Planck was talking about the resistance of the human mind, even the bright human mind, to new ideas.... And he said science advances one funeral at a time, and I think there's a lot of truth to that and it's certainly been true in [FIELD X]."
and
"If you stand up in front of a [FIELD Y] class and say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, you won't get tenure.... Higher mathematics my be dangerous and lead you down pathways that are better left untrod."
and
"The more symbols they could…
pontiff | May 4, 2009Personally I'm very skeptical of technical analysis, but that's just because I am skeptical of easy answers. But try to parse this article over at bloomberg titled "Stock Charts Fail Forecast Test in Complete S&P Miss."
We begin with
Ever since the Standard & Poor's 500 Index peaked in October 2007, six of eight strategies -- which are supposed to make money whether stocks rise or fall -- failed, according to back-testing data compiled by Bloomberg. As the bear market erased $11 trillion from the value of U.S. equities, buy and sell signals from those six technical indicators…
pontiff | May 3, 2009Is the Super Mario Bros. theme song the most covered song ever? Via hacklab.to:
lazzor music! from hypatia on Vimeo.
pontiff | May 2, 2009Quantum ghosts, dynamical decoupling, why a diamond is forever in quantum computing, transversal press, quantum phrases I can't grok, and quantum jumping.
Quantum ghosts: here and here. These articles describe the work reported in Laing, Rudolph, and O'Brien. "Experimental Quantum Process Discrimination." Phys. Rev. Lett., 102, 160502 (2009) arXiv:0801.3831. The idea is to discriminate "non-orthogonal" quantum processes via the use of entanglement, which is cool. (I'm a bit surprised that this classic paper is not referenced.)
Optimized dynamical decoupling performed in ions at NIST.…
pontiff | May 1, 2009In his latest New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks, the conservative liberals can most stomach, attempts to tackle the problem of "what makes a genius". This is, of course, the kind of reasonable length topic that one can explain in a single newspaper column (it's the New York Times, you now.) The article begins, like all great op-ed, with a strawman that would make Dorothy proud:
Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness -- Dante, Mozart,…
pontiff | April 24, 2009A few small tips for what to do when starting up programming for the iPhone.
Just a few tips from my experience in learning to program apps for the iPhone.
Don't begin by using Interface Builder. Interface Builder may be a great tool once you understand what is going on, but it obscures a lot of the basics when you are starting up. As a corollary, tutorials which use Interface Builder aren't as useful as those that don't.
Right click is your friend for looking up documentation in Xcode. Want to remember more about UIViewController? Simply right click on "UIViewController" and pull up a…
pontiff | April 23, 2009
Click Here for PollOnline Survey | Website Polls | Email Marketing | CrowdsourcingView MicroPoll
pontiff | April 22, 2009ArXiview, my iPhone app for surfing the arXiv, spotted in the wild:
One of my graduate students is using the app which feels....odd.
James Dacey says incredibly nice things over at Physics World.
MyOpenArchive tweets
just download #arXiview to my iphone. http://dabacon.org/arxiview/ I â¡ #arXive, I â¡ #arXiview. :)
Three diggs, heh, not much.
pontiff | April 22, 2009Okay, well he didn't exactly say that, but he certainly is a smug son of a gun who asked a grade school question to a Nobel prize winner in physics, apparently expecting a "gotcha" moment (via TPM):
Dudes even so proud of himself that he (or his staff) posted this video on his YouTube page.
BEDEVERE: Exactly. So, logically...
VILLAGER #1: If... she... weighs... the same as a duck,... she's made of wood.
BEDEVERE: And therefore?
VILLAGER #2: A witch!
Then again, what should you expect for someone who produced this:
Wind is God's way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas…
pontiff | April 22, 2009Wednesday, April 29, 6:30 p.m I'll be participating in a panel discussion of science blogging sponsored by the Northwest Science Writers Association:
Join local science bloggers, including Alan Boyle from MSNBC.com's Cosmic Log, David Bacon the Quantum Pontiff, Sandra Porter of Biology in a Digital World, Julianne Dalcanton of Cosmic Variance, Eric Steig of Real Climate, and Keith Seinfeld from KPLU, for a lively discussion about the state of the art (or is it science?) of science blogs. If you are a sciblogger or like the idea, join NSWA at the UW Paul G. Allen Center in the Gates Commons (…
pontiff | April 21, 2009In Vienna, Virginia on April 23-25th a workshop is being held in response to a report, "A Federal Vision for Quantum Information Science" issued by the United States National Science and Technology Council. While this workshop looks, from the outside, like any other typical quantum computing workshop, this is a bit deceiving, as from what I understand this workshop is supposed to provide the impetus for a report arguing for a major spending for quantum information science in the United States, especially from the National Science Foundation. The Quantum Pontiff, unfortunately, is stuck…