pontiff | April 18, 2009Over at Healthy Algorithms, the healthy theoretical computer scientist, puts up a very interesting graph about spatial variation in Medicare expenditures in the last six months of life. Paper here. Interesting stuff, but am I the only one who gaffs when reading: "Previous studies have shown that regions with greater overall EOL spending do not have better outcomes" (EOL = end of life)?
pontiff | April 17, 2009Catching up with places I've been.
Caltech.
Steve Chu to be Caltech's commencement speaker. Caltech has found an upgraded mascot. I once wore the old mascot uniform when we were playing Life Bible college. Nothing like signs saying "Darwin was right!" to inflame some sporting events. Who was the person who decided to send out an email to alumni for a survey where the link led to an MIT web address? That's a good way to get a Techer's suspicions up (even the Boston version of the Techer might catch that.)
Berkeley
Berkeley physics now webcasts their physics colloquium. They also scored a big…
pontiff | April 17, 2009Random cell phone photos.
Blossoms so thick that when they fall it looks like it has snowed on the cars parked underneath. (Location: up the street from Villa Sophia, Seattle)
Patience, attention, and territory:
The end of monkey the second:
Letting nature draw a silhouette
pontiff | April 17, 2009Matt points me to Bacon: the Other White Heat:I recently committed myself to the goal, before the weekend was out, of creating a device entirely from bacon and using it to cut a steel pan in half. My initial attempts were failures, but I knew success was within reach when I was able to ignite and melt the pan using seven beef sticks and a cucumber.
pontiff | April 16, 2009Michael Biercuk sends me a note about an upcoming workshop on dynamic decoupling. He's trying to get a gauge of the interest in such a workshop:Upcoming International Workshop on Dynamical Decoupling (IWODD)
Expected Date: October, 2009
Location: Boulder, CO
By Invitation Only
Interested participants please contact Michael J. Biercuk,
biercuk at boulder.nist.gov
Those interested should shoot Michael an email.
pontiff | April 15, 2009Over 9 months ago I decided to apply for teaching tenure track jobs. Then the economy took what can best be described as a massive, ill-aimed, swan dive. Thus creating an incredible amount of stress in my life. So what does a CS/physics research professor do when he's stress? The answer to that question is available on the iTunes app store today: arXiview. What better way to take out stress and at the same time learn objective C and write an iPhone app that at least one person (yourself) will use?
What is arXiview? It is yet another arXiv viewer (there are two others available, last I…
pontiff | April 12, 2009I am always greatly amused by the display of frustration in which one threatens to leave a country if things don't change. During the end of the first term of Bush the Second, it was common in the United States to hear liberals express their anger as: "If he wins a second term, I'm going to move to Canada." (If you go too far to the left, you end up in Canada?) The expression reached spectacular heights, in my opinion, however, when Tina Fey said of Sarah Palin that if McCain/Palin won the presidential election, Fey would "leave Earth."
But now that the evil liberals have taken over the…
pontiff | April 12, 2009Can quantum computers efficiently compute factorials?
BaconCamp?
Day Took Er Silicon Valley Jrbs?
I wonder how I'd do on a RQ test?
pontiff | April 6, 2009Scott the optimizer asks a question on a wim:Come up with a catchy name for growth rates of the form 2^(n^&alpha) , 0
I thought the answer was obvious: "probably in BQP."
update: does html superscript not work in a blockquote? I guess the answer is yes.
pontiff | April 6, 2009The survey of abused words in quantum computing shows the word "exponential" as having an, um, exponential, lead over its competitors. My own personal choice for the most abused word was "scalable," a word that is, in my opinion, the least debated, but most important, concept in quantum computing today. A word which everyone uses but whose definition is strangely missing from all almost all papers that use the word. Here are some thoughts on this word, what it means to particular groups, and what I, in my own pomposity, think the word really should mean.
Note the title of this post is…
pontiff | April 6, 2009John Preskill writes to me about workshop being quickly organized in response to the release of a report by US National Science and Technology Council calling for a national initiative in quantum information science. I saw this report a while back and have some half written blog posts about it that I need to finish off. Anyway the workshop website is http://www.eas.caltech.edu/qis2009/index.html. Everyone in the quantum information science is invited to attend and the registration and deadlines are, like, almost now!
Here is the blurb from the website:In January 2009, the United States…
pontiff | April 6, 2009Over at Xconomy Ed Lazowska writes about the proposed cuts in higher education here in the state of Washington. There I find that the Washington higher eduction is number one! Number one in terms of the percentage being cut by the (proposed) state budget: 23 to 31 percent among global challenge peer states. But are we really number one or are there other non-global challenge peer states that are getting cut worse? Inquiring minds want to know: which university system is going to win the prestigious "the Tax Man axeth" contest?
pontiff | April 3, 2009A note from Ivan Deutsch, Secretary-Treasurer of the APS GQI topical group about the winners of the best student paper awards:We are pleased to announce the Best Student Paper awards for the 2009 APS March Meeting. For the best experimental paper, the winner is
Eric Lucero, UCSB
for his paper J17.1, "High fidelity gates in Josephson phase qubits".
For the best theoretical paper, the winner is
Lev Bishop, Yale University
for his paper V17.9, "Towards proving non-classicality with a 3-qubit GHZ state in circuit QED".
Congratulations to the future Doctors Lucero and Bishop!
pontiff | April 3, 2009..asks a facebook application.
Apparently I am the kind of physicist who likes proper spelling and proper capitalization, and who thus, will not take a quiz with bad spelling. Which physicist is that? Gell-Mann?
pontiff | April 1, 2009Wow, this is a very cool result:Researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorkstown, NY have announced a breakthrough which they feel could revolutionize power consumption in computers. Today's computers are power hungry: a typical computer consumes hundreds of watts of power. Not only does this power consumption add up to a lot of wasted power, but increasingly the amount of heat generated by the machines is a significant barrier to building faster more powerful computers. The researchers at IBM say they've made a breakthrough in how computers consume power which will…
pontiff | March 31, 2009
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pontiff | March 26, 2009Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to a question that I'm nearly constantly asked: "So...[long pause]...are you a physicist...[long pause]...or are you a computer scientist?" Like many theorists in quantum computing, a field perched between the two proud disciplines of physics and computer science (and spilling its largess across an even broader swath of fields), I struggle with answering this question. Only today, after a long and torturous half year (where by torture, I mean interviewing for jobs, not the eerily contemporaneous fall of the world's finances) in which I have been…
pontiff | March 25, 2009A press release from Caltech about Steve Koonin, who was the boss of my bosses during a SURF project and was a student of my undergraduate advisor at Caltech (and also responsible for severe drops in GPAs for many of the physicist students I knew at Caltech :)):Steven Koonin, visiting associate in physics and former provost of Caltech, has been nominated by President Obama to serve as Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. The position requires Senate confirmation. Koonin is currently chief scientist for BP, where he is responsible for guiding the company's long-range…