pontiff | January 3, 2008From a New York Times article describing the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's production of "No Dice:"
"Poetics," for example, was choreographed using dice. Each face on the die represented one of six possible gestures, and each appendage -- two arms, two legs and the head -- got its own roll of the dice. Dice determined where the actors stand and for how long. There are four actors in "Poetics," but, alas, no such thing as a four-sided die. So, to determine who did what, the directors used a dreidel.
No such thing as a four sided dice? Obviously no one among the choreographers has played…
pontiff | January 3, 2008As we move ever closer to the day where using a computer involves flapping your hands around in the air:
pontiff | January 2, 2008Last quarter I taught discrete math. One component of the class was to cover some basic probability theory. On one of the homeworks we asked the following two questions about random five card poker hands:
Given that the hand contains an ace, what is the probability that the hand contains another ace?
Given that the hand contains the ace of diamonds, what is the probability that the hand contains another ace?
Without doing any explicit calculations, which of the above probabilities do you think will be larger?
I find this problem interesting because while I can do the calculation and…
pontiff | January 2, 2008Books conquered during the holiday resting season: "Learning the World" by Ken MacLeod, "The Crack in Space" by Philip K. Dick, and "Washington Wines and Wineries: The Essential Guide" by Paul Gregutt.
Learning the World by Ken MacLeod. A first contact novel. Or rather, a pre-first contact novel. Enjoyable, but I was left wishing that the characters were more fleshed out. Also [SEMI SPOILER ALERT] notable for its use of the increasingly common "universitas ex machina." You know what I mean: "universitas ex machina" is where parallel universes/the multiverse are used as a nice escape…
pontiff | January 1, 2008Happy New Year! Seattle's fireworks at the space needle had some technical difficulties (and the pyrotechnicians had to light them by hand...yeah I wrote that just to use the word "pyrotechnician"), but were still beautiful as ever:
Welcome 2008! 2008 is the international year of the potato, the international year of planet earth, and the international year of sanitation. Oh, and it is a leap year! And of further note, according to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in "The Mote in God's Eye" 2008 is the year that faster than light travel was invented. Now that should be exciting.
pontiff | December 29, 2007Miguel Pais points to an interesting behavior of Mathematica, where he plots the function which is the square of the square root of x. Now, if the domain of x is taken to be complex numbers, Mathematica's behavior seems to me to be fine. But can anyone explain this behavior
as anything other than a bug?
Update: Oops. That wasn't the one I was trying to paste. See what happens when I disconnect from the intertubes for a few days. How about this one:
pontiff | December 28, 2007You know you're in rural America when...
Reminds me of one of my favorite bumper sticker ideas of a few years ago (less true today): "Buy American: Do Meth!"
pontiff | December 26, 2007What do you call a quantum computer built in the shape of a cubic lattice and containing 450000 qubits?
Noah's ark, of course! Genesis 6:14. Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
pontiff | December 26, 2007Well I finally made it to the ski slopes. Hopefully my late start to this year's ski season will just mean that I push harder to get up to the slopes. Here is a picture taken from the base of the Mt. Shasta Ski area:
The two lifts servicing advanced terrain were shut down in the morning due to the wind, the wind chill factor was brutal, and the snow looked liked it had been shipped out directly from the East Coast: all ice and crud. But hey, it was the first day skiing!
pontiff | December 24, 2007Merry Christmas! I don't think this explanation for Santa delivering presents using quantum theory works. But it does bring up the question of whether Santa could get a quadratric speedup using quantum gift delivery?
pontiff | December 22, 2007Ernesto points me to Bacon Zen, a collection of savory bacon links. But really? Bacon chocolate chip cookies?
pontiff | December 22, 2007Superexchange in optical lattices, factoring 15 in a linear optics quantum computer, quantum plagarism peaceful resolution, silicon and gallium arsinide quantum computers, and quantum mumbo jumbo in support of the ideas popularly known as God.
Superexchange demonstrated in an optical lattice by Immanuel Bloch's group in Germany.
Quantum leaps: Brisbane Times and UQ News Online report on Andrew White factoring 15 with a linear optics quantum computer. The preprint for this paper is arXiv:0705.1398. I didn't check, but I bet they got 15 equals 3 times 5.
A resolution to the quantum…
pontiff | December 19, 2007More from Johnny Chung Lee on hacking the wiimote system to produce a very cool multitouch display:
Update 12/22/07: More Johnny Chung Lee creations:
pontiff | December 19, 2007I grew up in the middle of nowhere. I read all, and I mean all, of the science and math books in my local library (and nearly all of the Scientific American magazines as well.) Because this was before the internet was ubiquitous these were the only resources I had. These days I often wonder how my life would have been different if I would have had access to open courses like the one described in this article.
There is one part of me that thinks this will change the entire landscape of learning for rural kids. On the other hand, by not having total access to the entire world of knowledge…
pontiff | December 19, 2007Here's a list of people who voted for the spending omnibus which totally shafted science and who also voted for the America COMPETEs act. Is your representative on there? Send a letter?
Update: Science article on the budget and science.
pontiff | December 19, 2007You know, QEC07 participant, you're supposed to be watching the talks and not reading this blog! But if you are reading this blog, you might as well not just lurk and instead comment. That's right its a QEC 07 open thread.
To start things off, would anyone care to comment on Robert Alicki's final slide during his talk yesterday? For those not attending QEC 07, Alicki and coworkers have been looking at the properties of two and four dimensional Kitaev phases. For the four dimensional phase, it seems that Alicki could show that they serve as good quantum memories, but he claimed that it was…
pontiff | December 18, 2007So simultaneous with QEC07, the conference I'm attending, is the QIP 2008. Anyone at QIP see any interesting talks that they'd be willing to comment on? Come on, don't be shy (or post anonymously :) )
pontiff | December 18, 2007Today I watched a talk on skepticism about quantum error correction. Now I don't agree with the particular criticism's leveled, but I'm all for people airing their criticisms and, if the majority view is correct, the majority should be able to answer the questions raised. But this isn't what interested me today. What interested me today was thinking about the following question: when has it been true that a curmudgeon, which I use in the most positive since of the word, been on the winning side? When has it been that a single or very small group of radicals who opposes a majority whose…