Chris Mooney, former Scienceblogger and provocateur extraordinaire, will be in Seattle this Thursday talking about the book he co-authored with Sheril Kirshenbaum, "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future." Details:Thursday, August 6 7:00 PM University Bookstore 4326 University Way N.E. Seattle, WA 98105http://www.bookstore.washington.edu/trade.taf?dept=attribute&category=events&par=trade&ttl=events&page=1 From all I've heard Chris is an excellent speaker so this should be a fun event.
Well there goes a chunk of my time. A new Pynchon novel is out: Inherent Vice. According to this New York Times review it's much more like Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49 than Gravity's Rainbow. I'm sure there will be much teeth gnashing among the literati, but personally, I'm a huge fan of Vineland I've previously mused that a reason that Vineland gets poor reviews is (a) "Gravity's Rainbow" is pretty epic and has a subject with which current readers can approach without dislodging their own beliefs too much, and (b) literature professors don't like being told the sixties failed. Anyway…
"C" sends me a link of fantastic mmmm-ness. CMMG Tactical Bacon, TB-1, 9oz, 10+ Year Shelf Life:The ultimate tactical accessory, the new Tactical Bacon from CMMG ® is simply amazing. Kept in an aluminum can for a shelf life of 10+ years, the CMMG ® Tactical Bacon is more affordable than other pre-cooked bacon producers, who offer no tactical packaging for their product. Including 9 ounces of pre-cooked bacon goodness, comparable to 3 pounds of raw bacon, the CMMG ® Tactical Bacon is perfect for camping trips, survival situations, a snack at the range, zombie attacks, and many other…
Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is "Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking." Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don't know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is one who is doing cool quantum computing research ("cracking?" and "hacking?" btw.) I open up the article and who is the police woman? It's Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described…
A widget to watch out for wayward asteroids:JPL's Asteroid Watch Widget tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth. The Widget displays the date of closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter. The object's name is displayed by hovering over its encounter date. Clicking on the encounter date will display a Web page with details about that object. The Widget displays the next five Earth approaches to within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers or 19.5 times the distance to the moon); an object…
Since it seems that the "arXiv on your hard drive" is dead I've been thinking a bit about if there is a better way to achieve the goal of distributing archives of the arXiv. One thing I liked about the "arXiv on your hard drive" was that it used BitTorrent. This could alleviate some of the bandwidth pain associated with distributing the arXiv widely. But of course, one of the problems with using Torrents to distribute the arXiv is that, well, the arXiv changes daily! One solution to this is to update the torrent periodically, but in these go-go times this seems wrong. It seems to me that…
Rod Van Meter is in search of some summer reading:I'm feeling the need to recharge my store of ideas, and I have the nagging feeling that my lack of currency in a bunch of fields is causing me to miss some connections I could use in my own research. So, I'm looking for a reading list of, say, the one hundred most important papers of the decade. It doesn't have to be an even hundred, but I'm looking for a good summer's reading. (Given that it's mid-2009, now would be a good time to start composing such a list anyway, depending on where you want to place the "decade" boundary.) I want these…
Today on the arXiv an new paper appeared of great significance to quantum computational complexity: arXiv:0907.4737 (vote for it on scirate here)Title: QIP = PSPACE Authors: Rahul Jain, Zhengfeng Ji, Sarvagya Upadhyay, John Watrous We prove that the complexity class QIP, which consists of all problems having quantum interactive proof systems, is contained in PSPACE. This containment is proved by applying a parallelized form of the matrix multiplicative weights update method to a class of semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proofs. As the…
A new entry in the best title every contest, arXiv:0907.4152:Born Again Authors: Don N. Page Abstract: A simple proof is given that the probabilities of observations in a large universe are not given directly by Born's rule as the expectation values of projection operators in a global quantum state of the entire universe. An alternative procedure is proposed for constructing an averaged density matrix for a random small region of the universe and then calculating observational probabilities indirectly by Born's rule as conditional probabilities, conditioned upon the existence of an…
Writing a blog is for me (1) amusing and (2) amusing. Can anyone take anything that I write on a blog seriously? Well sometimes people do. Many eons ago (okay, I lie, it was 2005), I wrote a post about the then new "h-index." The h-index is an attempt at trying to find a better way of "ranking" citation counts. As such, it is, of course, nothing more than another meter stick in the long line of lazy tenure committee metric sticks. But it's also fun! Why is it fun? Because calculating any "metric" is fun for people like me who spent their childhood involved in such mind expanding tasks…
Two notes from Caltech of interest: Michael L. Roukes' group at Caltech has produced a NEMS (nanoelectromechanical system) device which can (almost) measure the mass of a single molecule (as opposed to the many tens of thousands (is this the correct amount?) needed in mass spectrometry.) Build a 2 micrometer by 100 nanometer NEMS resonator. Drop a molecule on it. The frequency of vibration of the NEMS resonator changes. Detect this frequency change. Of course vibration frequency also depends on where the molecule lands. So run the experiment about 500 times to get good estimate of the…
As someone who was born on a lunar eclipse (explains a lot, no?) the 40th anniversary of man walking on the moon has a special place in my heart. Okay, that sentence makes no sense (I was born on a lunar eclipse however), but anyway everyone is all abuzz about the anniversary of the moon landing so it's as good as any sentence to let me talk about booming sand dunes. Booming whah? Take a big sand dune. Kick some of the sand down the face of the dune. Sometimes, if you are lucky, the sand dune will emit a loud 70 Hz to 100 Hz booming sound. I used to have a sealed container of the booming…
A fellow quantum computing researcher of mine recently joined FriendFeed. Along with another researcher we got involved in a discussion about a paper concerning a certain recent claimed "disproof of Bell's theorem." (arXiv:0904.4259. What it means to "disprove a theorem" like Bell's theorem is, however a subject for another comment section on a different blog.) But, and here is the interesting thing, this colleague then made a trip to China. And FriendFeed, apparently, is blocked by the great firewall of China, so he had to email us his comments to continue the conversation. Which got me…
A friend sent me a link to Detextify2:What is this? Anyone who works with LaTeX knows how time-consuming it can be to find a symbol in symbols-a4.pdf that you just can't memorize. Detexify is an attempt to simplify this search. How does it work? Just draw the symbol you are looking for into the square area above and look what happens! My symbol isn't found! The symbol may not be trained enough or it is not yet in the list of supported symbols. In the first case you can do the training yourself. In the second case just drop me a line (danishkirel[[[at]]]gmail.com)! I like this. How can I help…
David Poulin sends me a job announcement for quantum information processing in the solid state at the University of Sherbrooke:Permanent position for a Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) on solid state quantum information processing University of Sherbrooke is seeking candidates for a Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC). The successful candidate will obtain a permanent full professorship in the Physics Department of University of Sherbrooke in the Faculty of Sciences. The CERC program aims to attract and retain the world's most accomplished and promising minds. This program will…
Via @mattleiffer, viXra.org:In part viXra.org is a parody of arXiv.org to highlight Cornell University's unacceptable censorship policy. It is also an experiment to see what kind of scientific work is being excluded by the arXiv. But most of all it is a serious and permanent e-print archive for scientific work. Unlike arXiv.org tt [sic] is truly open to scientists from all walks of life. Maybe I should submit one of my papers with all of the text reversed (yeah, yeah, it would still be incomprehensible.)
Microsoft Research's Project Tuva website is up. Project Tuva is a collection of seven searchable Feynman lectures aimed at a popular audience (with extras coming online in the future.) The rights to these lectures were obtained by Bill Gates after he was entranced by them over twenty years ago. Well worth watching, especially if you're about to give a popular science talk (I've always been fascinated by how Feynman uses his hands in describing physics.) Even more interesting, in my egocentric universe, are the comments by Mr. Gates himself about Feynman:Someone who can make science…
With fast approaching deadlines: The 2009 Asher Peres International Physics School:Title: "The Edge, twixt quantum and classical phenomena" 30 Nov - 4 Dec, Sydney, Australiahttp://web.mac.com/quests/PeresSchool2009/Welcome.html The 2009 Asher Peres school provides senior undergraduates and junior postgraduates with a pedagogical introduction from internationally leading scientists on topics ranging from the interface between quantum and classical phenomena through to the role of quantum science in biology and nanomechanics. The international lecturers for 2009 are Prof Wojciech Zurek: Los…
A friend sent me a link to QuantumCamp:Have you ever wondered how the microscopic Universe works? QuantumCamp is a one week journey through this strange but beautiful world - seeing nothing less than how every atom in our universe is working! We begin with Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. We move from Albert Einstein's idea of quantization and end up seeing the hydrogen spectrum while contemplating the ideas of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. We witness the explosive beauty and inner order of the elements which begs for deeper investigation. We dive in and immerse…
Over at the optimizer's blog, quantum computing's younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I'd only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave…