Links for2009-07-29

"It hit me like a slap in the face. It sounded familiar, but different. To me, this fictional family was white. But in the time and place they occupied on the page they weren't "white enough."

"Oh my God!" I exclaimed. My husband, who was reading the same book, looked at me.

I looked up from the page, looked at him, and said with a note of wonder in my voice, "There are different shades of white.""

"This solves a long standing open problem (we can say long standing in quantum computing when we mean less than nine years because our field is so young.) It has always been known that PSPACE is in QIP, but prior to this result (assuming its correct: I just downloaded the paper and am starting to read it now) the best known inclusion in the other direction was that QIP is in EXP (this result is due to Kitaev and Watrous.) But wait a second, what the hell are all these letters representing? "

"I'm going to leave aside the question of whether Blender and Vibe somehow deserved their undoing, via editorial missteps or poor business-side decisions, and whether Rolling Stone and Spin deserve their present difficulties. Criticisms attach to every title, and while such factors play a part in the music-mag death march, they're negligible when considered alongside three bigger problems that cut deep and wide across the medium:"

"Nothing can distract her laser focus from the ultimate prize: the Fields Medal."

"Close editing, as distinguished from scanning-for-typos, is an intensely intimate enterprise. [...] Really close editing requires not only seeing what's there, but seeing what isn't there and should be, or what is but is in the wrong place. It requires putting aside "how I would have said it" to be able to come up with something like "how you, at your best, might have said it."

A really good close editor is a rare bird. Candidly, I don't think I've ever had one. "

"Regardless of the validity of the ranking system, the same universities tend to keep showing up on these lists year after year. Though Penn State ousted University of Florida to take the partying crown, the top three party schools this year were the same as last year -- just in a different order. Fourteen of the 20 colleges on the list were also on the list last year. Brigham Young University topped the "Stone Cold Sober" list -- the flip side of the party school rankings -- for the 12th year in a row."

"You spent the whole time thinking and obsessing about your research project, I assume?"

"Wallace is like the Lloyd Dobler of authors: he doesn't woo you with flowers and chocolates, he stands outside your window with a boombox over his head until you relent."

"Harrison Ford, carpenter. When Ford was 30, he starred in "American Graffiti"... which was a huge hit. But he got paid a pittance for acting in it, decided he was never going to make it as an actor, and quit the business to get back into the more financially dependable world of construction."