pontiff | June 27, 2008This spring/summer has been particularly cloudy in the northwest. But today it is sunny and looks to get to the pleasant high 70s. This, obviously, is due entirely to the fact that Bill Gates controls the weather and today is his last day at Microsoft. Seattle is of course, introspective on the man who certainly changed the region dramatically. Here are some of the more entertaining Gates articles.
Would you have invested? Speaking of which why isn't someone working on face recognition software to predict future business success. I mean, come on, if that picture doesn't say "creators of…
pontiff | June 26, 2008A topic of much discussion I see in the Science 2.0 world (it's like the Renaissance, but with more Javascript!) is the idea of Open Notebook Science. In one version of Open Notebook Science, one simply opens up ones research notebook (or other equivalent) to outside access. For an example see Garrett Lisi's research wiki. This is, of course, the grand ideal of science at its best: the question for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Darwin. But of course, this idea has it's problems. Most notably, of course, there is the political aspect: what is keep…
pontiff | June 25, 2008One of the most interesting talks that many of us in the quantum computing world have seen is the talk by Manny Knill on fault-tolerant quantum computing. Above and beyond the interesting content, what was cool about this talk was that, as far as I could tell Knill used a linked PDF for the talk. That way if he needed to delve into deeper details on a particular subject, he could. While for some talks, like colloquiums, I don't see the need for this, for technical talks before a more informal audience, this, I think is a great tool. Now, having discovered TiddlyWiki, I wonder if it isn't…
pontiff | June 25, 2008No, no, I'm not leaving academia (yet :) Pfffffft! That's the sound of me thumbing my nose at the world.) But recently I was thinking about about people who get a Ph.D. in, say, physics, or are a new postdoc, and then are faced with what to do next. As Peter Rhode, writes in a post today (or whatever day it is in the upside down part of the world) entitled "Farewell physics":
The academic system has some serious problems. Most notably in my opinion, there is very limited scope for promotion. For every permanent position there are countless postdocs competing for that position. It simply…
pontiff | June 24, 2008So you really think the LHC is going to swallow up the Earth by creating a black hole or a quacking duck with X-ray super powers? Why don't you put your money where your mouth is? Not to be confused with other famous black hole bets.
pontiff | June 24, 2008I'm always behind the times. I just discovered Tiddlywiki and I love it!
What is TiddlyWiki? Well, okay, first of all it is a kind of wiki. But, here is the first interesting fact, it is a serverless wiki: TiddlyWiki is exactly one file. This file is written in a combination of html/Javascript/CSS, so you just view this one file in your browser. When you edit your wiki, it just updates this one file. How cool is that. This means, for example, that you can put your tiddlywiki on a thumb drive, and carry it around with you to use where ever you find a computer with a browser. Indeed…
pontiff | June 23, 2008The first edition of the newly revamped Communications of the ACM is out. And I must say, so far I'm greatly impressed. First of all it seems that they've gotten rid of the absolutely horrible front pages for all articles that were (a) ugly (I'm not a font nazi, but sheesh that font choice was horrible!), and (b) a waste of space. This issue includes a blurb about quantum computing, an interview with the Donald Knuth, and a paper by David Shaw (yeah, THAT David Shaw) and coworkers on custom hardware for molecular dynamics simulations. Good stuff, I hope they can keep it up!
pontiff | June 23, 2008Pascal's Wager is a classic for those who want to argue about the existence of God, but now, according to Peter L. Bernstein, of the New York Times, we should be using it for financial risk calculations. Say what?
Bernstien starts out fine:
For example, the average annual inflation rate in the United States was only 1.4 percent from the end of 1954 to the end of 1965. But in 1965, who could have imagined that inflation would average nearly five times that rate over the next 15 years?
In short, our forecasts are wrong from time to time.
I might quibble a bit with the "time to time", BTW...…
pontiff | June 21, 2008Real? I always wanted to design bumps in the road so that vibrations in your car would say something when you went over them...
pontiff | June 21, 2008rpenner passes on some of the latest news on the black hole lawsuit against the LHC:
Update: The trial has been scheduled for June 2009....
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4830&view=findpost&p=349304
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4830&view=findpost&p=349685
and
Update: LHC Saftey Assessment Group releases two papers.
http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf
http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/CERN-PH-TH_2008-025.pdf
Update 6/23: Oh noes! The Optimizer wants to kill us all!
pontiff | June 20, 2008One of the most amusing things about writing a blog is that people you've never met form an impression about you from your blabberings, and then, often, when they actually meet you they are astounded that you aren't "an old grumpy guy" or whatever image they had in their mind. So, in order to confuse you even more, here are some things which I've been reading and thinking about and doing while not working on efficient quantum algorithms for the hidden subgroup problem.
Spanish Treasury to Exclude Italian Government Bonds. Could this be an indication of problems ahead for the Euro?…
pontiff | June 19, 2008Running a process to fix the utf-8 support on scirate.com using the unix "screen" command I got the following crash:
Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die...
Doh!
pontiff | June 18, 2008David Brooks, has an op-ed in the New York Times about Tiger Woods and his astonishing string of triumphs in the golfing world (including last weekends U.S. Open which I watched the end of on both Saturday and Sunday: my wife was right he did make that last put.) Brooks piece waxes on and on about the Tiger's ability to concentrate
And for that, in this day and age, he stands out. As I've been trying to write this column, I've toggled over to check my e-mail a few times. I've looked out the window. I've jotted down random thoughts for the paragraphs ahead. But Woods seems able to mute the…
pontiff | June 16, 2008I do believe this is the first time I've performed the paper dance on the scienceblogs incarnation of this blog. Yep, it's that time again: it's the paper dance!
"A far away light in the futuristic place we might be; It's a tiny world just big enough to support the kingdom of one knowledgeable; I feel a wave of loneliness and head back down I'm going too fast (I'm going too fast)"
arXiv:0806.2160
The Stability of Quantum Concatenated Code Hamiltonians
Authors: D. Bacon
Abstract: Protecting quantum information from the detrimental effects of decoherence and lack of precise quantum control is…
pontiff | June 13, 2008Writing grants and teaching, not to mention trying to get some actual research done, has taken up a considerable amount of my time this quarter. I mean, sheesh, I've barely had any time to read! This has, of course, made me grumpy. So when the publisher of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow offered me a review copy of the book, I was very happy. I mean, I love probability and I love, um, well....you know :)
First of all, let me say that Mlodinow's book is preaching to the converted! A large portion of his book is devoted to showing how randomness…
pontiff | June 11, 2008The New York Times has a policy on anonymous sources. Great! But do they have a policy on statistics? They certainly need it. I mean, take a look at the graphic from an article on women and smart phones:
I mean, sure the numbers on the right hand side could be used to support the caption "women are more concerned with price, size and design" (and keyboards by their same reasoning) but the hell if I'm going to believe that without knowing what a reasonable estimate of the margin of error is in the survey being reported on. I mean, without such data, the graphic displayed has absolutely…
pontiff | June 9, 2008Today is the final exam for the course I've been teaching this summer. So I need some reading material for when I'm not watching the students take their exam. Here are two fun ones I just downloaded (one via Alea):
arXiv:0803.3913:
The Reverse of The Law of Large Numbers
Authors: Kieran Kelly, Przemyslaw Repetowicz, Seosamh macReamoinn
Abstract:The Law of Large Numbers tells us that as the sample size (N) is increased, the sample mean converges on the population mean, provided that the latter exists. In this paper, we investigate the opposite effect: keeping the sample size fixed while…
pontiff | June 6, 2008I'll admit it: I like reading George Soros' books. I mean, here's a guy whose made a godzillion dollars in the financial markets, has been behind political destabilizations/stabilizations worldwide, taken on a U.S. president (can you guess which one?), and yet, in spite of this, can write a book in which he talks his own brand of....philosophy and how it relates to life, the universe, and the current financial crisis. Whah?
As you might have guessed I just finished reading one such book: the rushed to market The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means…