pontiff | November 17, 2008
Engadget picks up on the bacon theme, a bacon iphone case:
You can buy one for your favorite vegetarian for only 25 euro.
In other bacon news, five pounds?!?!
pontiff | November 15, 2008I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia...eh. For some reason they have a parade at night in November with floats containing Santa and reindeer (obligatory crappy cell phone picture to follow):
Yeah, what the hell?
Interesting conference, I'm attending. I haven't been at a conference in ages where disagreed with so many of the talks!
For example, I learned that many many people have got it all wrong and quantum error isn't possible because we haven't thought about the role of phase errors properly (sadly I didn't get to hear about the twin paradox.) I also learned form an older, well established…
pontiff | November 13, 2008Direct imaging of extra solar planets. The cat dynamicist has the details. (because, linking, I've heard, is good.) Fomalhaut b, a nice name.
When I was on the road to becoming an astrophysicist, as a young grad student, I remember thinking how cool it would be to join the planet hunters. I mean being able to say that in your research you "discovered a planet" well how cool would that be. Alas I caught the quantum bug and so all those days spent studying the interstellar tedium are now lost, like tears in the rain.
pontiff | November 13, 2008Melody points me to this gem of an advisory from the NSF:
In the event of a natural or anthropogenic disaster that interferes with an organization's ability to meet a proposal submission deadline, NSF has developed the following guidelines for use by impacted organizations. These guidelines will take the place of the previous NSF practice of posting notices to the NSF website regarding each specific event.
Flexibility in meeting announced deadline dates because of a natural or anthropogenic disasters may be granted with the prior approval of the cognizant NSF Program Officer. Proposers…
pontiff | November 13, 2008New NSF policies on faculty salaries:
A major revision of NSF's faculty salary reimbursement policy, to limit compensation for senior personnel to no more than two months of their regular salary in any one year from all NSF-funded grants
This pretty much eliminates any NSF funded research professors, as far as I can tell. Well it was a good run, peoples, but that rule change virtually assures that pseudo-professors like myself don't exist.
pontiff | November 11, 2008John Baez (via Zoran Škoda) points to the case of M.S. El Naschie. El Naschie is apparently the answer to the question "how do you publish over three hundred papers of craziness in an Elsevier journal?" Simple: just become the editor and chief of the journal!
Tell me again the argument about scientific publishers rendering a valuable service with their stellar editing?
pontiff | November 10, 2008The 11th Annual SQuInT Conference (dude that makes me feel old) will be held in Seattle this year. Seattle is in the southwest because Southwest airline flies here (quick book the direct flights from Albuquerque!) In conjunction with this there will also be a satellite meeting, the Workshop on Integrated Atomic Systems II.
Invited speakers for this years SqUiNt conference include
Andrew Childs (Waterloo)
Luming Duan (Michigan)
Jack Harris (Yale)
Chris Monroe (Maryland)
Barbara Terhal (IBM)
David Weiss (Penn. State)
Yes, for those of you unawares of the SqUinT tradition, that is a list…
pontiff | November 9, 2008If you want to have a productive day I suggest avoiding Assembler.
Via: "Phd"ed Man
pontiff | November 9, 2008When sky's fall, apparently they do not fall equally everywhere (contrary to popular theory.) A partial is of those who've held up the sky (and even pushed higher) in this New York Times article:
Bernard V. Drury is a rarity on Wall Street: a hedge fund manager who is making money rather than losing it.
While most hedge funds are sinking into red this year and unsettling the markets in the process, a handful of them are posting spectacular gains. Mr. Drury's fund, for instance, is up 60 percent since Jan. 1.
How did he do it? Mr. Drury, a former grain trader, is not giving away his secrets.…
pontiff | November 9, 2008Zotero is a Firefox browser plugin for keeping track of citations and is very useful in an academic environment. I've played with it from time to time and with each progressive version it is getting better and better. Apparently now its even good enought that, Thomson Reuters, makers of Endnote software, a commercial competitor of Zotero, has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia (George Mason University is where the core team developing Zotero is based) over Zotero being able to read Endnote files into the Zotero system. Yeah, if I were Endnote I'd be scared pantless that a startup which…
pontiff | November 7, 2008Science on blogs? We don't need no science on blogs! We need more Bacon on blogs:
Bacon Versus Fries. Not what you think.
Bacon Maple Donut. Or how about Diet Coke with Bacon. If you've ever seen me you are all ready likely to have seen a Bacon with a Diet Coke.
pontiff | November 6, 2008I wrote a paper with David DiVincenzo once. Now he is in the title of a YouTube video. Some things you can never predict.
Part of me wants to say very loudly OMG. The other part of me watched the full six episodes.
Parts 2-6 below the fold. Hat tip Aggie.
Part II:
Part III:
Part IV:
Part V:
Part VI:
pontiff | November 5, 2008"Local" politics.
Siskiyou County, CA (on the CA/OR border), where I grew up (population 44301, population density 8 per square mile, median household income $29530), voted 53.6 percent for McCain and 43.7 percent for Obama. That's extremely close for a very red county (2004 it was 60 percent Bush, 37.7 Kerry.) In other local Siskiyou County news a giant Salmon was found just to the south of Siskiyou County in the Sacramento River.
One can tell that Seattle is once again lagging the nationwide economy (yep), since the voters were in a mood to spend money. (Okay well Western Washington…
pontiff | November 3, 2008A common refrain among members of the left in the United States in the last two presidential elections has been that if the right wins then they would "move to Canada." This was, of course, recently one-upped by Tina Fey who quipped that if McCain-Palin won this year, she would "leave the Earth." Today I spent way to much time trying to figure out where the right would say they are going if the left wins. Anyone?
pontiff | October 31, 2008Shor's algorithm is an algorithm for quantum computers which allows for efficiently factoring of numbers. This in turn allows Shor's algorithm to break the RSA public key cryptosystem. Further variations on Shor's algorithm break a plethora of other public key cryptosystems, including those based on elliptic curves. The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the few public key cryptosystems where variations on Shor's algorithm do not break the cryptosystem. Thus it has been suggested that the McEliece cryptosystem might be a suitable cryptosystem in the "post quantum world", i.e. for a world…
pontiff | October 29, 2008This weekend the grapes for my second "real" batch of wine were delivered to Mountain Homebrew and Wine Supply. Last years vintage, Villa Sophia "La Gruccia" was a success in that it didn't turn to vinegar and that over time it is definitely mellowing out, but I wouldn't say it was a fantastic wine. This year I'm a bit more hopeful and have some ideas for how to modify my process to produce a better wine.
Saturday, October 25:
Picked up grapes from Mountain Homebrew. I order 150 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon, a full 50 pounds more than last year which should give me a yield of around 70 to…
pontiff | October 28, 2008
I've spent the last two days in the San Francisco bay area visiting first Stanford and then Berkeley.
Highlights of the trip included:
Talking to Jelena Vuckovic about the work she and her group have been performing on strongly coupling photonic crystals to quantum dots.
Talking to Thaddeus Ladd and Yoshihisa Yamamoto about their work on ultrafast pulses for controlling electron spin which appears in Nature Physics. Picosecond single qubit gates, mmmm.
Talking with Vaughan Pratt. I did not tell him that I am teaching his (and Knuth and Morris') algorithm this Friday! Oh, and I shook…
pontiff | October 26, 2008Turn your face into a name (via torque). The "quantum pontiff" apparently has long hair: