pontiff | October 24, 2008Bruce Schneier has a commentary up at Wired about quantum cryptography. There are a lot of good points about the article, but it left me kind of scratching my head. As far as I can tell Bruce Schneier believes that you should not worry about any cryptographic system currently in use ever being broken. I didn't think cryptographers were allowed to have so little paranoia.
Schneier begins by explaining quantum cryptography and quantum computing. The former is a method for taking a small shared private key (needed for authentication) and boosting it up into a shared secret key of greater…
pontiff | October 23, 2008Stephen Jordan, now a postdoc at Caltech, has produced a useful little guide to quantum algorithms: a zoo of quantum algorithms. Help squash the myth that all there is to quantum algorithms are the algorithms of Shor and Grover!
pontiff | October 22, 2008The universe doesn't always operate the way we want it to. No, I'm not talking about the stock market (unless you've been short lately), I'm talking about the role of error in logical deterministic systems! When you zoom down far enough into any computing device you'll see that its constituent components don't behave in a completely digital manner and all sorts of crazy random crap (technical term) is going on. Yet, on a larger scale, digital logical can and does emerge.
Today heading to work in the early dawn I was pondering what all of this meant for our notion of reality.
Some of the…
pontiff | October 17, 2008A very good essay Paul Krugman wrote on his method of doing research. Some good gems in there for researchers of all fields.
The injunction to dare to be silly is not a license to be undisciplined. In fact, doing really innovative theory requires much more intellectual discipline than working in a well-established literature. What is really hard is to stay on course: since the terrain is unfamilar, it is all too easy to find yourself going around in circles.
pontiff | October 16, 2008It's official: Loveland and Arapahoe Basin are open for the 2008-2009 ski season. Eighteen inches of man made snow may or may not, however, be considered good news.
pontiff | October 16, 2008Okay, I think it is time I give in and create a category on the blog called "Bacon." Two new entries for the category:
Bacon Robots. Think, people, before you start sizzling up the Bacon that falls from the sky.
Bacon and Donuts: Taste We Can Believe In.
pontiff | October 14, 2008Self promotion for those around the University of Washington campus: I'm giving a talk in the physics department at UW. Mondays, October 20 at 4:00 P.M. Ronald Geballe Auditorium, Rm. A102 (cookies at 3:45):
Title: "Who Will Build a Quantum Computer: the Physicists or the Computer
Engineers?"
Abstract: Building a quantum computer large enough to perform a task beyond the capability of today's classical computers (breaking a cryptographic code or simulating a complex quantum system) is a daunting task. On the fundamental side, this difficulty arises from the fact that quantum systems like to…
pontiff | October 14, 2008Garrett Lisi, surfer and creator of possible theories of everything, has given a TED talk:
I had never thought to put Schrodinger into the box.
"I try to balance my life between physics, love, and surfing. That way even if the physics I work on comes to nothing, I've lived a good life." Word.
pontiff | October 14, 2008I wonder how many people this week realized that "ten percent down" followed by "ten percent up" does not equal "no change." Probably a few. And how many realized that "ten percent down" followed by "ten percent up" is the same as "ten percent up" followed by "ten percent down"? Or that up 5 percent, down 3 percent, up 2 percent, down 8 percent, and down 8 percent in that order is the same as down 8 percent, up 2 percent, down 3 percent, up 5 percent, down 8 percent in that order? Commutativity is cool. Yes, I am easily amused.
pontiff | October 12, 2008A new entry in the best title every competition:
arXiv:0810.0827: Sine function with a cosine attitude
Authors: A. D. Alhaidari
Someday I promise that I will use the phrase "an exponential function with a logarithmic attitude."
pontiff | October 10, 2008From the annals of strangely mixed news stories. Canada: $25 billion government bailout and....$50 million for the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing:
BRANTFORD, Ont. -- The $25-billion government deal to buy mortgages from Canada's banks isn't a lifeline for lenders stuck with bum loans, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Friday...
He said the government will likely make money on the deal, because its borrowing costs are lower than those available to banks.
Harper also produced an election goodie, promising a $50-million grant to a high-tech research lab at the…
pontiff | October 10, 2008You know it's a heavy volume day when even Google can't handle it:
Your message could not be posted to the DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE INDEX group because there have been too many messages posted to the group recently.
pontiff | October 9, 2008Fear
Google's view of capitulation
Irrationality?
Anyone seen any old men with canes yet?
Crisis per capita winner? Iceland. Will the last one leaving Reykjavík please tear up that recipe for Súrsaðir hrútspungar?
Panics 1812, 1837, 1869, 1873, 1882, 1884, 1896, 1901, 1907,1937, 1973, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1997, 2001. Add 2008.
Just over a hundred years ago
Another hundred year reference: the Cub's ticket market.
Let's blame Van Buren:
pontiff | October 9, 2008Not just grades but:
Grade distribution for the class. At a minimum: class average, standard deviation, median. Even better: a breakdown by grade.
Scores of students in the class on standardized exit exams. For example I'd like to see how students who took the class scored on physics GREs.
Surveys of the students perception of the difficulty of the class. Comparison of this ranking for same students across other classes.
Today, when information storage is cheap, why is it that we have a grading standard consisting of a few lousy letters (less for some schools..you know who I'm talking…
pontiff | October 7, 2008A priceless new email feature for gmail: Mail Goggles:
Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.
When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve…
pontiff | October 7, 2008And the Nobel prize in Physics 2008 goes to...Yoichiro Nambu (1/2), Makoto Kobayashi (1/4), and Toshihide Maskawa (1/4) "for discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" and "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature." I'm buried under work but if I can claw myself out of it I'll write a post about their work. In the meantime, here is the Nobel's scientific background.
pontiff | October 2, 2008Take a look at Google circa 2001. Yes that's right you can search like it's 2001! Oh my: apparently I was everything and nothing: 2001 Google search for "Dave Bacon".
pontiff | October 1, 2008DonorChoose, an organization which matches teachers requests for funds with donors, is running their annual blogger challenge. Already Cosmic Variance is trying to harness their vast resources of physicists, The Optimizer is appealing to the base nerd in everyone, He of Uncertain Principles is offering up his dog's services for donations (does the dog know?), and the moral Mathematician is offering solutions to math homework problems (err I mean blog posts on a chosen topic.) But I think you shouldn't fall in this trap and support those blogs....
Because, of course instead you should…
pontiff | September 30, 2008A quantum physics spotting in....rugby? An article about rugby player Jonny Wilkinson:
The experiment was conceived by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödin-ger to demonstrate a conundrum at the heart of quantum physics: that a sub-atomic particle exists in two states. However, the act of measuring it effectively forces it into one particular state, rather as England's discounted second-half try in the 2007 World Cup Final appeared to many fans to be both a try and not a try, until the referee called for a video replay.
Oye vey:
He realised that his entire world-view was bound up with a…