The list of talks accepted at QIP 2010 is now online. As a member of the PC I can tell you that there were way more good papers than available speaking slots and made some of the final decisions hard to make. One talk that I think will be a highlight is the invited talk by the optimizer: "Efficient simulation of quantum mechanics collapses the polynomial hierarchy." Quantum computing skeptics of the "BQP=BPP" kind may just found their island significantly smaller and lonelier. The QIP=PSPACE will also be given a talk slot. Quite a year for quantum complexity theory, I think.
Some notes for quantum computing people: IARPA will be hosting a Proposers' Day Conference for the Quantum Computer Science (QCS) Program on December 17, 2009 in anticipation of the release of a new solicitation in support of the program. Details here Submissions for TQC 2010 in Leeds are now open at http://tqc2010.leeds.ac.uk. Digging through my inbox I noticed that I forgot to advertise the following quantum postdoc:The physics of quantum information group at the department of physics of the Universite de Sherbrooke invites applications for up to three postdoctoral positions. The group is…
@EricRWeinstein is at it again in twitterland, this time on the subject of the funding of science. For an intriguing read about the glut of Ph.D.s versus science funding, he links to his (circa 1998?) article titled: "How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers." An interesting read, to say the least. Then @michael_nielsen points to Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion by Daniel Greenberg which I now have to go out and buy. Damn you internet for pointing me to things I should read!…
One must wait until the end of the video, and no, that is not me:
Too often in life I am sending out a check to some charitable organization, or to resubscribe to Bacon magazine, and I think "damn this would be a lot better with Bacon." And now via the honest one, I find out that there is a solution to this vexing problem: Bacon flavored envelopes! From the "learn more" section of the webstie:Technology has given us a lot lately. The car. TV. X-rays. The refrigerator. The Internet. Heck, we even cured polio. But what have our envelopes tasted like for the last 4,000 years? Armpit, that's what. Really, people? If we can't overcome this kind of minor…
Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write--always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a "consumer experience architect" in the Digital Home - User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the "reasonable" range. And then you find out the title of his talks is "Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design" and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a…
Friday the 13th is, apparently, a day of must read articles. This time it's Steven Pinker's review of Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. Readers who have taken linear algebra will be amused:He provides misleading definitions of "homology," "saggital plane" and "power law" and quotes an expert speaking about an "igon value" (that's eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert…
This interview with Cormac McCarthy by the Wall Street Journal is well worth reading (Coincidentally(?) I just started rereading the Border Trilogy.) This amused me[CM:] Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window. simply because I can attest that yes, indeed, this is what he does! And, well, because my time at the Santa Fe Institute followed a similar pattern :) On the other hand here is a more ominous reason why I enjoyed (my too brief) time at SFI:WSJ: What kind of things make you worry? CM: If…
Last month a local restaurant group, Chow foods---among whose restaurants is one of our favorite Sunday breakfast spots, The Five Spot---ran a contest/charity event: "Chow Dow." The game: guess the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close of the market on October 29th, 2009. The closest bet under the closing value which did not go over the value would be the winner. The prize was the value of Dow in gift certificates to the Chow restaurants: i.e. approximately $10K in food (or as we would say in Ruddock House at Caltech: "Eerf Doof!" We said that because it fit nicely with…
It's like, nearly, a genre (via Martin Schwarz): I once saw a talk where Bill Nye said "systematic directed genocide."
I get a lot of press releases forward to me which usually get forwarded directly into my gmail archive. But this one I'm happy to pass along: Third Man Records is releasing A Glorious Dawn. You know the Carl Sagan remix (w/ guest appearance of the Hawkmeister) that I've been looping over and over again while I work:Third Man Records is over the moon to announce the 7-inch release of "A Glorious Dawn" on November 9th. ... The release is timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Sagan's birth. Also happening that day is a reception in United States' Congress with speeches by senators,…
A puppet commenter informs me that El Naschie is suing Nature. El Naschie, you may remember, was the journal editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals who was accused of not reviewing his own papers in the journal. To be expected, I suppose. But the commenter that pointed this out is entertaining:Sarah Limbrick [Pontiff: writer of the above linked article about the suit] would surely be interested to know what the leading libel expert in England had to say about the Nature article complained of. He said he is in a state of disbelief that the worlds most respectable scientific journal Nature…
Not helpful: In Seattle if a road bends ever so slightly you are on a new street, but the above is...confusing.
Over the summer I started running a not so insignificant amount: 6 miles in the morning on the weekdays and 10 to 15 miles on the weekends (insert commenter telling me why this is wrong.) So, one or two or more hours out running around beautiful Seattle (My favorite route is Queen Anne to Fremont to Ballard Locks, around Magnolia and back up Queen Anne.) Which brings us to the subject of time. During my runs it seems that my watch, which runs using mechanical energy, decided that it had a new setting: relativistic mode. In other words I'd go out and run for two hours, and when I got back…
SqUinT will be held in Santa Fe, NM from Feb 18-21, 2010. The submission page is now open and available at http://panda.unm.edu/SQuInT. Note that speakers outside the network should contact the organizers if they wish to inquire about attending. It's an El Nino year, so New Mexico should have some good snow this year :)
The 5th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography has put up its first announcement. It will be held at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, from 13th - 15th April 2010. The first upcoming deadline to be aware of is the submission deadline of Monday January 4, 2010:The 5th Conference on Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication, and Cryptography ---- TQC 2010 ---- University of Leeds, UK 13 - 15 April 2009http://tqc2010.leeds.ac.uk ==================================================================== Quantum computation, quantum communication,…
Update 4/5/09: The wandering Australian does an analysis by institution. Today, because I have way to many deadlines fast approaching, I needed to waste some time (procrastineerering), I decide to take a look at the last years worth of scited papers on the quant-ph section of scirate.com. The question I wanted to investigate is where quantum computing theory is occurring worldwide. So I took the top scited papers scoring over 10 scitations (42 papers in all) and looked at the affiliations of the authors: each co-author contributed a fractional score to their particular region (authors with…
Michael Green's appointment to replace Stephen Hawking as the Lucasian chair, has, quite predictably, brought back into the spotlight the ever simmering STRING WARS!!!OMG!!!STRINGTHEORYRLZ!!. Okay, maybe not the spotlight, per se, but I did find the article about Green in the Guardian interesting (via the so wrong it hurts fellow):But that was one of their arguments, that the academy is so biased towards string theory - hiring mostly string theorists, crowning mostly string theorists - that it has driven out all other ways of seeing (Smolin compared it to deciding that there was only one way…
Spotted on the pick your own religion chart. Also: Bacon Jam!
Via the arXiv api newsgroup comes the rumor that soon, perhaps, the arXiv will be available for full download sometime in the future:or a full copy of (or particular subsets of) PDF for arXiv papers, we are in the process of setting up a service in the Cloud, which will offer the option for bulk download. I'll let you know when that becomes available. Cool! All of physics since recorded arXiv time on my hard drive :)