pontiff | September 18, 2008This blog post is for me, not for you. Brought to you by a trip down memory lane visiting my adviser at Caltech.
Do something new. Do something exciting. Excel. Whether the path follows your momentum is not relevant.
Don't dwell. Don't get stuck. Don't put blinders on.
Consider how the problem will be solved, not how you are going to solve it.
Remember Feynman: solve problems.
Nothing is not interesting, but some things are boring.
Dyson's driving lesson: forced intense conversation to learn what the other has to say.
Avoid confirmatory sources of news, except as a reminder of the base…
pontiff | September 16, 2008Scienceblogs has now passed its millionth comment! In celebration many of us are having our own local Scienceblogs million comment parties. See here for your local party.
What does all that boring writing mean in the last paragraph? No need to read it. Just read this one if you're going to be in Seattle at the end of September:
Join Sandra Porter, Maria Brumm, (hopefully) GrrlScientist, and myself for our millionth comment shin dig at Ozzie's in lower Queen Anne (105 W Mercer St.) That's right: beer, beer beer! At 4pm on September 27th. Considering the themes of three of four of the…
pontiff | September 16, 2008Anyone who is a U.S. citizen working in the quantum information sciences might be interested in this job announcement from the Aerospace Corporation.
pontiff | September 16, 2008This morning, John McCain's top economic adviser made a bit of a mistake:
Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.
"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."
Al Gore, call…
pontiff | September 15, 2008For many years, and in particular during my college years, I was a huge Pink Floyd fan. Indeed, I suspect the first trace of me on the internet probably involves a post on a Pink Floyd newsgroup of which I am now quite embarrassed (but my ideas was sound, damnit!). Thus it is with great sadness that I learned today via Quantum Moxie that Richard Wright, keyboardist for the Pink Floyd, has passed away due to cancer.
In honor, why don't you check out "The Great Gig in the Sky":
I can see the tornado now...
And I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do; I don't mind.
Why should I be…
pontiff | September 15, 2008Dum, dum, dum, DUM DUM
No, it's not the monolith from 2001, but instead Millikan library at Caltech which I'm visiting. If you're ever around Caltech on Halloween, be sure to check out the pumpkin drop where frozen pumpkins are dropped off this gigantic monolith. I thought I saw a blue spark...
Always a bit strange going back to the place where you spent seven plus years of your life. Especially when it's a place like Caltech, I suppose.
pontiff | September 13, 2008The new father, he of uncertain principles, has analyzed whether his science posts gain viewership over time. My biggest problem with writing scientific content into posts is that when I do that it totally messes up my google searching. I mean when I do that then I end up finding my own blog post when I search for something I'm trying ton understand. On the other hand, it saves a click because I can be pretty certain that the link to my blog doesn't lead to the answer I'm looking for (or if it does it's time to get my memory checked out.)
pontiff | September 13, 2008Chris Monroe and David Wineland have an article in Scientific American about ion trap quantum computing.
pontiff | September 12, 2008Fifty years ago today, this device
set the course for a pretty big revolution. That's a picture of Jack Kilby's first integrated circuit which first functioned on September 12, 1958.
pontiff | September 12, 2008War is a classic kids card game. I spent many an hour wiling away the time playing war growing up. Enough so that I actually developed a strategy for the game. A strategy for the game of war? That's crazy talk.
For those who've never encounter the game of war here are the rules. A standard deck of 52 cards is shuffled and split between two equal stacks which are then given to the two players. The players then turn over the top card of their stacks and the player with the higher rank card "wins" and gets to take the two cards and place them at the bottom of their stack. If the cards…
pontiff | September 11, 2008You may have noticed an ad running on scienceblogs which says "Has the LHC destoyed the Earth?" If you click on it you find a webpage that says in big letters simply "NO". What's up with that? Check out the webpage source for the page (http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/).
Update 9/12/08: Check out the comments for more fun and also read the cat projectile analyzers take on how you can click to save the world.
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?
NO
href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/…
pontiff | September 11, 2008Robert Clark new chief defence scientist for Australian DSTO, Florida quantum computing conference, standard model quantum computing, and Ray Laflamme is Royal in Canada.
Robert Clark, director of the Australia's largest quantum computing effort, the appointed Chief Defence Scientist for the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (I think "Defence" is the Autralian way of saying "Defense", but I can't really defend the observation, nor can I ever condone the word "Centre.")
Conference SPIE Quantum Information and Computation VII in Orlando, FL. Combine a quantum computing…
pontiff | September 11, 2008The techno wonder pundits say that the internet revolutionizes democracy by leveling the playing field (everyone can be an ass online, oh yeah!) But what I find more fascinating about the internet and politics is the role that search plays in polarizing politics. I mean, sure there are dissenting voices all over the internet, but google "John McCain" or "Obama" or "Sarah Palin" or "Joe Biden" and you won't discover a single dissenting opinion about any of these candidates on the front page of the search results (the exceptions to this rule are probably the small news items that Google…
pontiff | September 11, 2008The physics blogosphere is abuzz about the start up of the large hadron collider. There is a hole in Texas which is very jealous. And of course, everyone is happy that the Earth was not destroyed or a bubble universe wasn't created.
But if I remember my science fiction correctly, I don't believe that one can conclude from our continued existence that the LHC isn't making black holes. Indeed if the plot is followed, which is the prophecy equivalent of the derivation being sound, then we will discover that the LHC has produced a trillion mini black holes at the center of the Earth. And of…
pontiff | September 7, 2008The lore I heard when I lived in New Mexico was that the reason Gore won the state in 2000 was that there was a snowstorm in the southern part of the state (which is more conservative.) In 2004 there was no snowstorm in the state, and the state went to Bush. If you could control the weather by fixing particular weather in different locations (weather that was not too far beyond the typical weather for the area), I wonder how many electoral votes could you swing?
pontiff | September 5, 2008I propose that a good investment would be to short Bill Gates' evil rating:
pontiff | September 4, 2008Is fame and fortune what you seek (or at least fame)? Be a first mover, according to a new paper, arXiv:0809.0522
The first-mover advantage in scientific publication
Authors: M. E. J. Newman
Mathematical models of the scientific citation process predict a strong "first-mover" effect under which the first papers in a field will, essentially regardless of content, receive citations at a rate enormously higher than papers published later. Moreover papers are expected to retain this advantage in perpetuity -- they should receive more citations indefinitely, no matter how many other papers are…
pontiff | September 4, 2008I really need to create a category for blog posts for things which Google's products do which amuse me. Today in reading an email about the National Science Foundation:
Many a faculty member's got NSF, I guess, and are damn sick or writing grants to continue having NSF.
pontiff | September 3, 2008When I was a little kid I used to take a pair of dice and throw these dice repeatedly. At each throw I'd fill in a box for the corresponding number on some graph paper and I would essentially "race" the numbers against each other. I suppose for that reason I've always been fascinated not just by probabilities, but in the convergence of repeated trials to the limiting "probabilities." Which explains not just why I'm an uber geekazoid, but also why I was quite shocked today when I Googled "gambler's ruin" and found that the intertubes only returned about 16000 hits ("card counting," by the…