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Video Editing Software?

Both SteelyKid's kindergarten and the snow-day day-care program that the kids go to were closed today, which kind of threw a wrench in things. But it's also kind of fun, as I got to spend some time playing outside with SteelyKid on her play set in the snow. The "featured image" above is a cell-phone snap from this, and I got three short video clips of her going down the slide. Of course, it's kind of stupid for these to be three separate YouTube clips, but when I went to stick them together using Windows Movie Maker (which is what I've used for this sort of thing in the past), it turns out…

Why Isn't Alan Grayson the Speaker of the House?

As a companion to this post, I would like to put forth Alan Grayson, a first-term representative from Florida, as a candidate for Speaker of the House. On Wednesday Grayson said: Now, the Democrats have a different plan. The Democrats say that if you have health insurance, we're going to make it better. If you don't have health insurance, we're going to provide it to you. If you can't afford health insurance, then we'll help you to afford health insurance. So, America gets to decide. Do you want the Democratic plan or do you want the Republican plan? Remember, the Republican plan: Don…

Zingers

Meghan McCain appeared on Bill Maher's show the other night. One of the other guests was Democratic strategist Paul Begala. The following exchange took place: McCAIN: The Obama administration really has to stop completely blaming everything on its predecessor, completely. And I'm really sick of hearing, oh, we were handed this we were handed this. I know. Everyone knows. But we need to move on. MAHER: Do you think that's what Obama is doing? McCAIN: I do, to a degree. BEGALA: Not to enough of a degree, Im sorry. Not nearly to enough of a degree. Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter…

DAMOP Day One

Technically, the meeting started Tuesday, but all that happened was a welcome reception, which I missed due to travel. The real beginning of the meeting was Wednesday morning, with the traditional unscheduled half-hour welcome from local dignitaries. That was followed by the Prize Session, featuring the frighteningly smart Misha Lukin, who was awarded the I.I. Rabi Prize for being really freaking brilliant. The abstract he sent in was kind of vague, but he mostly talked about stuff related to the quantum computing in diamond stuff that I've blogged about before. I'm fighting a bit of a cold,…

Sciences vs. Humanities, Primary vs. Secondary

Thoreau offers without qualification some observations about the different approach to books taken by sciences vs. humanities. Specifically, he notes that despite frequent claims that it is the Most Important Book Ever, nobody actually reads Newton's Principia Mathematica This is totally different from humanities. In humanities, people make a point of reading the original thinkers. They don't just say "Well, philosopher so-and-so influenced lots of other people and got the ideas rolling, so let's read somebody influenced by him and maybe a Cliff's Notes version of the original." They…

Links for 2011-01-18

xkcd: 3D "You should've gone to the screening at CERN." (tags: comics xkcd silly physics particles science theory) Smarter Than the Average Bear? « Easily Distracted "If I have seen a pattern, among my students and my parental peers alike, it's that parents who try to be someone that they're not, pursuing a parenting style that doesn't come from their own life experience, are the ones who will create the most psychic havoc for their children and for themselves. That's the really pernicious thing about figures like Chua, or indeed most folks who try to sell a complete parenting philosophy…

Zebrafish Lab Progress

As I wrote about before, my semester lab project for neurobiology has to do with regeneration. The idea is to damage the spinal cord and observe wonderful regeneration. This proposal was based on some articles I read about regeneration of zebrafish hearts, fins, tails, etc. Unfortunately I haven't had much luck so far. Last week, armed with an exacto knife, I performed my first round of spinal cord butchering on fifteen zebrafish that were only a few days old. The zebrafish are captured with a glass pipet and then immobilized using auger that's just warm enough to be in liquid phase.…

Physics Job Market: Same As It Ever Was

The American Institute of Physics has a statistics division that produces lots of interesting analyses of issues relevant to the discipline. A couple of them were released just recently, including one on the job status of new Ph.D.'s (PDF). The key graph from the report is this one: The text of the report talks up the recent decrease in the number of post-doc jobs and increase in potentially permanent positions, but the long term trend looks pretty flat to me-- averaged over the thirty years of data, it looks like a bit more than half of new Ph.D.'s have always taken post-doc positions, and…

Short Story Club: "No Time Like the Present" by Carol Emshwiller

This week's short story club entry is Carol Emshwiller's "No Time Like the Present," a sort of timeless time-travel story. It's narrated by a teenage girl in an unnamed town somewhere in the US whose town sees a sudden influx of tall blond people who behave very oddly. While it's pretty obvious to the reader that something science-fictional is going on, the narrator takes a while to get to that realization, and even when she does, it's mostly buried in typical teen concerns-- friends, parents, potential romantic relationships. This story has a sort of timeless quality, partly because it's a…

Interesting discussions that I don't have time to address right now

How peculiar — I've gotten several requests in email to comment on this plaint from Theodore Dalrymple, a fellow who doesn't like those "New Atheists" like Sam Harris and Dan Dennett. It's peculiar because I'm here at a conference with Sam Harris and Dan Dennett (and others who do not consider themselves "New Atheists")— should I just ask them what they think? Actually, if anyone wants to pass along any brilliant questions that I can use to dazzle the luminaries with my insight, go ahead, toss them into the comments. It's one of those annoying opinion pieces by an unbeliever who wants to make…

Fitness Requires Challenge

Depending on what you read at ScienceBlogs other than this blog, you may have noticed a New Year's fitness theme. Blame Ethan. So, now, everybody's posting workout tips and the like. Which means, of course, that I'm obliged to post my Fitness Secrets here for free, when I could be charging money for them to build a college fund for SteelyKid. Curse you, Ethan! So, what's my secret infallible fitness program? Um, I don't have one. Sorry. I've never had much luck sticking to a workout routine, mostly because I am easily bored. Mike Dunford waxes rhapsodic about swimming, but after a few laps I…

Links for 2009-12-03

The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Holy Concussive Incident, Batman "Batman takes a lot of blows to his head. These come from his fighting activities and from being routinely thrown--or leaping--onto or into hard objects like walls, floors, and moving vehicles. The issue of concussion in Batman's career is something I addressed in Becoming Batman. In examining the scientific possibility of a human training to achieve the pinnacle of physical skill of comic book icon Batman, I reckoned him having a pretty short career. The main thing to shorten Batman's career would…

More Early Reviews of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

The official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is three weeks from tomorrow, but a couple of new reviews have been posted, one linkable, the other not so much. The linkable one is from one of our contest winners, Eric Goebelbecker, at Dog Spelled Forward (an excellent name for a dog-related blog): Quantum physics can be some heavy stuff, and this book teaches you the basics without dumbing it down or putting you to sleep. Professor Orzel has a gift for funny dialogue and straightforward explanation. In addition to the entertaining conversations with Emmy, there are fascinating…

Communicating Science in the 21st Century

My panel on "Communicating Science in the 21st Century" was last night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute. I haven't watched the video yet-- Canadian telecommunications technology hates me, and I'm lucky to get a wireless connection to stay up for more than ten minutes-- but if the video feeds I've seen from other talks are an indication, it should be really good. The panel wound up being primarily about journalism, which is understable given that the other four participants are all very distinguished journalists. I did my best to uphold the honor of the New Media…

Links for 2009-10-14

AdLit.org: Adolescent Literacy - William Farish: The World's Most Famous Lazy Teacher "Thomas Jefferson was arguably one of the most well-educated Americans of his time. He was well-read, thoughtful, knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics from the arts to the sciences, and the founder of the University of Virginia. The same could probably be said of Ben Franklin, or James and Dolly Madison. On the larger world stage, we could credibly make such claims for René Descartes, William Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Plato. But there is one thing unique about the education of all these…

Mysticism and SF

Over at SciFi Wire, the house magazine of the Polish syphilis channel, Wil McCarthy has a piece with the eye-catching headline "Is Mysticism Overtaking Science in Sci-Fi?" What really excites me right now--and not in a good way!--is the recent spate of superficially sci-fi movies that are not merely scientifically illiterate, not merely unscientific or antiscientific in their outlook, but that actually promote mysticism as a superior alternative to science. Leaving aside the irony of this being sponsored by the Dumb-Ass Horror Movie Channel (not that there's anything wrong with dumb-ass…

links for 2009-03-17

The Mid-Majority: The Court and the Conference Room   "Back when I was in college, there wasn't a day I loved more than Selection Sunday. I would sit in front of the television as the details were leaked out, tried to keep up by scratching excited team acronyms and codes on my blank bracket. I felt that euphoria of emotional overload that only comes when incoming information overwhelms the brain's ability to process it. It was a relevation of order from chaos, the bridge between darkness and light, every gift-giving holiday wrapped into one big and glorious package." (tags: blogs sports…

Martin Rees Against Fundamentalism

There's a really good article from Martin Rees in the latest issue of Seed, on the scientific challenges that won't be affected by the LHC: The LHC hasn't yet provided its first results, the much-anticipated answers to questions we've been asking for so long. But they should surely come in 2009, bringing us closer to understanding the bedrock nature of particles, space, and timeâ--âtoward a unified theory of the basic forces. This would push forward a program that started with Newton (who showed that the force that made the apple fall was same one holding the planets in orbit), and continued…

Point Spreads, Again

I'm listening to "Mike and Mike" on ESPN radio, as I usually do in the morning, and they just spent the better part of five minutes talking about the point spread for the upcoming Super Bowl. The opening betting line has Pittsburgh favored by seven points, but some Las Vegas organization or another told them that the Cardinals would be underdogs to ten different NFL teams, had they made it to the game, including the Patriots and Cowboys, who didn't even make the playoffs. I have no idea who provided this information, or why they would even have betting lines for Super Bowls in alternate…

DAMOP Day 3

I'll get to the much-delayed Friday summary shortly. But first, the Nerds of the Purple Cow: That picture (courtesy of Justin Brown) shows twelve of the thirteen Williams graduates attending this year's DAMOP, in order of class year, from Paul Hess '08 on the left (who technically only graduated yesterday) to Tom Gallagher of UVA on the far right. Dan Kleppner of MIT had left before Tiku Majumder got the picture set up, but if you include him, we spanned 55 years of graduating classes. Given that the school only graduates 10-ish physics majors a year, that's a pretty impressive showing, and…

Does tropical tree diversity explain the diversity of soil arthropods?

Strumigenys rogeri in the leaf litter In 1982, a small journal called The Coleopterists Bulletin carried a two page note by beetle expert Terry Erwin that increased- by an order of magnitude- the estimated number of species on the planet. Erwin crunched some back-of-the-napkin numbers based on the tree specificity of arthropods he'd collected in Panamanian tree canopies and the richness of tropical tree species worldwide to surmise that the earth should hold 30 million species. An impressive bump from the 1 to 2 million that was the going estimate. Later research on canopy arthropods (For…

Taxonomy Fail

Today's breaking news in Ant Science is this: Newly discovered pieces of amber have given scientists a peek into the Africa of 95 million years ago, when flowering plants blossomed across Earth and the animal world scrambled to adapt. Suspended in the stream of time were ancestors of modern spiders, wasps and ferns, but the prize is a wingless ant that challenges current notions about the origins of that globe-spanning insect family...Inside the Ethiopian amber is an ant that looks nothing like ants found in Cretaceous amber from France and Burma. Wow- that's big news! I wonder what this…

Fighting back against creationism

Creationism is not quite as pervasive a problem in the UK as it is in the US, but it's still rising…so it's good to see that British scientists are being aggressive in confronting bad educational policies. A number of prominent scientists, including Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough, have stepped forward to demand that evolution, not creationism, be taught in the classroom. Here is their position statement, with the signatories and organizations backing it: Creationism and 'intelligent design' Creationism and 'intelligent design' are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as…

I am not worthy

[Sort of a repost from the last three years, updated appropriately - APB] Seven years ago at 11:24 am EDT (1524 GMT), your humble blogger was handed the keys to a whole new vocabulary of love. The gift came in the form of a 7 lb 13 oz (3,544 gm), 20.5 inch (52 cm) bundle of drooling, peeing, meconium-pooping bundle of baby girl, yanked from an incision in PharmGirl's abdomen. The lessons of compassion and unconditional love I have been taught by these two women have comprised the most formative experiences of my life. In return, PharmGirl has suffered tremendous indignities on my behalf:…

I am not worthy

[Sort of a repost from the last two years, updated appropriately - APB] Six years ago at 11:24 am EDT (1624 GMT), your humble blogger was handed the keys to a whole new vocabulary of love. The gift came in the form of a 7 lb. 13 oz. (3,544 gm), 20.5 inch (52 cm) bundle of drooling, peeing, meconium-pooping bundle of baby girl, yanked from an incision in PharmGirl's abdomen. The lessons of compassion and unconditional love I have been taught by these two women have comprised the most formative experiences of my life. In return, PharmGirl has suffered tremendous indignancies on my behalf: the…

Two years of gratitude to Katherine Sharpe

I had only been blogging for four-and-a-half months when I got an e-mail two years ago today from someone named Katherine Sharpe at Seed Media Group in New York City. Seems they had started this ScienceBlogs.com thing a couple months earlier with 14 blogs, many of which I had already read regularly. I figured that Ms. Sharpe just wanted me for some reader focus group but after I read the e-mail again, it appeared that she was inviting me to join ScienceBlogs. We hung out the Sb Terra Sig shingle two months later, 9 June 2006, with a diatribe containing all you ever wanted to know (or didn'…

The Secular Coalition for America wants you!

Here's a great opportunity for a paid summer internship with the SCA. Apply! SCA Summer 2011 Internship Program The Secular Coalition for America (SCA) is pleased to offer one paid internship position for summer 2011. SCA is seeking a highly motivated undergraduate junior- or senior-level student with a demonstrated interest in being active in the nontheistic movement. The student must live and attend school more than 50 miles outside of the District of Columbia. SCA is a 501(c)4 advocacy organization whose purpose is to amplify the diverse and growing voice of the nontheistic community in…

Chronic illness discussion continues with Dave Munger on living with AIDS

I'm always pleasantly surprised when a topic generates enthusiastic reader feedback, particularly when comments come from long-time readers who share experiences I never knew they had or, in some cases, comment for the first time. The topic this time was a simple reflection on my current bout of pneumonia and my being taken aback by how debilitating it has been mentally. It's taken me two days just put put together these few sentences of what will essentially be a referral post. A very thoughtful commenter posed a question to me about what does it mean to be "really sick." What is long-term…

SCONC tomorrow at Duke: Influenza - What's more contagious, the virus or the hype?

When writing the other day about how blogging has been of benefit to my career, I neglected to mention my recent invitation to the board of Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC). Founded in June 2007 by Karl Leif Bates and Chris Brodie, and now headed by President Ernie Hood (Radio In Vivo), SCONC is a group of "science writers, journalists, public information officers, teachers and institutional communicators from academia, government labs, industry, museums and schools -- just about anyone interested in communicating science," who aim to improve public understanding of science…

Exploring the climate whiplash

Andy Revkin demonstrates once again why he's among the best science journalists around in his latest exploration of the challenges facing climatologists frustrated with the way their science is portrayed in the popular media. No real answer emerges from his analysis, but if every researcher and reporter involved in the subject read this piece, maybe we'd be closer to one. The problem, in short: Discordant findings have come in quick succession. How fast is Greenland shedding ice? Did human-caused warming wipe out frogs in the American tropics? Has warming strengthened hurricanes? Have the…

Sex on a skateboard!

There is a virtue to Christian prudes. They make me aware of ideas I might otherwise have missed. Conservative evangelical groups in the UK are whining about sex ed books that are too 'explicit' for their taste. Children as young as five are being shown "explicit" images to teach them about sex, an evangelical Christian pressure group has claimed. The Christian Institute has complained that at least 10 books or teaching packs used in English primary schools for lessons on sex and relationships, contain images or descriptions that are "obviously unsuitable". Its report, Too Much, Too Young…

The Streamline Future

This is of course from the 1939 World's Fair. It represents the era of perhaps the most optimistic vision of science held by the public, from back when Progress was spelled with a P. The war put things on hold for a few years, and then we had a decade or so of glorious Streamline Moderne before the public image of science fell apart and science became just another occupation; thought about fairly rarely and with a volatile combination of appreciation and suspicion. But it was nice while it lasted. I assume it was. The era was over two decades before I existed. I've always had a taste for…

SCIENCE SPRING SHOWDOWN: Acids vs. d-orbitals: Destruction, mayhem and beauty.

PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET Welcome folks, to this here what we'll call the beautiful game (at least we'll say that for the molecular level). This game really had it all, it was dynamic, it had equilibrium, it had fluid transition, and it was catalytic. It involved freakishly large chemical sounding words, and also a wierd scoreboard that looked something like this: But hey, whatever, right? The game started off slowly enough, with Team Acid moving the ball well. Their game plan was fairly straight forward, and with a play by play that looked a little bit like this: But then the d-…

Announcing The Morning News's 2007 Tournament of Books

The Morning News is a fantastic literary and cultural site, chock full of writer-type work, interviews, artwork, commentary, and the like. (We link to them on the lower left of this page. G' head, take a look. I'll wait.) They also run an excellent daily set of news links, almsot always with something unusual and intriguing. (Today, e.g., they give a link to a story on the size of New York condoms.) Anyway, they've just announced one of their notably fascinating projects, the third annual Tournament of Books. A bevy of high-profile judges, side commentary on the challenges from astute…

Army ants plug potholes with their own bodies

Imagine that you're driving along a country lane. As often happens, the road suddenly transforms from a well-paved street to a pothole-ridden nightmare. As your suspension and your stomachs start to tire, your friends in the back suddenly force you to stop the car. To your amazement, they jump out and lie across the potholes, beckoning you to drive your car over them. It may seem like a far-fetched scenario, but if you were an army ant, such selfless behaviour would be a matter of course. Army ants are some of the deadliest hunters of South America. Amassing in legions of over 200,000 ants…

The Shuttle on a Diet

Space Shuttle mission STS-132 is currently orbiting over our heads. It's scheduled to land a week from now. After that, there's two more launches and that will be that for the program. At that point the US will officially be out of the business of launching people into orbit, and there's not a lot of prospect of getting back into that business in the near future. I don't really regret the end of the shuttle program as such - it was never a really good human spaceflight strategy - but it's a real shame we have nothing to replace it. Oh well. To commemorate STS-132, how about a quick physics…

The Time Traveller's Surrogate

This weekend I was at the movies with my lovely significant other watching The Proposal (verdict: about what you'd expect). Unusually for a by-the-numbers romcom, the pre-film previews showed no fewer than two promising science fiction films. Science fiction is difficult to cleanly describe - it's almost more of a flavor than a formula. The best I can do at the moment is to say that science fiction speculates on the consequences of some fundamental but scientifically plausible difference(s) between now and some other time. That time doesn't necessarily have to be the future, by the way.…

Sunday Function

I've been away from campus visiting family during the first part of the summer, in one of those rare confluences of events where research, classes, and teaching all find themselves on temporary hiatus. While it's pretty rare, I'm glad to take it. It is giving me Mathematica withdrawals though, especially with being able to easily make nice graphical plots and do some of the number-crunching I sometimes need for the more technical posts around here. Fortunately this is the last Sunday I'll have that problem, as I'll be back in Texas soon (and all those responsibilities will come roaring…

Sunday Function

Saw "Up" yesterday. How Pixar manages to be so consistent in their astonishing quality is entirely beyond me. In a bit of a tribute, this Sunday Function is not about any dramatically important special function, but instead it's about filling a balloon. Air or water, as your preference. You'll have noticed that when you start to fill a balloon, its radius expands very rapidly at first before slowing dramatically. A water balloon will go from 1 to 2 inches much faster than it will go from 6 to 7 inches. Why? Because if you fill the balloon at a constant rate, you're increasing the…

Sunday Function

Let's do two functions today. As sometimes happens, in this case we're not so interested in the functions themselves as the fact that these functions happen to be part of a general class of functions. Just as we can classify the real numbers as even, odd, or neither (numbers like pi, 1/2, and the rest of the non-integers are neither), we can classify functions as odd, even, or neither. This is a random even function and its graph: What makes this function even? A function is even if it's symmetric about the y-axis. In other words an even function will have the same value at at x = 1 as…

Singing in the Rain

So not only did I miss the Saturday and Sunday posts, but also the Monday and Tuesday ones as well. Gah! It's honestly quite a bit more difficult to keep to the one-per-day regimen this semester than I though. Nonetheless I'll try to stick to that schedule to the greatest extent possible. KBO. Today I'd like to talk about singing in the shower. You will notice, if you're brave enough to try it, that certain notes resonate with a particular volume. It's probably why so many people like to sing in the shower - it turns the most humble voice into booming thunder. Or at least an…

Sunday Function

A tricky one: At x = 2, f(x) = 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + ... Which, uh, is clearly not going to end anywhere finite. The series fails the single most basic necessary (but not sufficient) condition for convergence of infinite sums - that the terms of the series approach zero as you go farther and farther up the chain of addition. On the other hand, f(x) is equally clearly not divergent for all x. For instance, at x = 0, f(x) = 1 + 0 + 0 + ... = 1 So that's a start. Maybe there's other numbers x can equal where the series has a finite value. What are they? This is one of those problems where it's…

On George W. Bush

I think personally he is a good man who loves his family and loves his country. And I think he made the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances. - Barack Obama on George W. Bush, 1/16/09 There's no shortage of shortcomings in the administration of the forty-third president. If your ideology is liberal, you can think of scores of disagreements with Mr. Bush ranging from mild disapproval to sputtering apoplexy. If your ideology is conservative (as mine is), well, you can think of scores of disagreements with Mr. Bush ranging from mild disapproval to…

Science is not a religion

Before criticizing our newest ScienceBlogger, David Sloan Wilson, who has moved here from the Huffington Post, let me add my voice to those who are welcoming the move. It is a good thing to have such an esteemed and accomplished scientist among our ranks. But like fellow blogger Eric Michael Johnson, I found David's first post in these parts is more than a little unsettling. Under the headline of "Goodbye HuffPost, Hello ScienceBlogs: Science as a Religion that Worships Truth as its God," he provocatively writes: Science can even be regarded as a religion that worships truth as its god. It…

Going from Starvation to Obesity

A study by researcher David Holben in the latest Preventing Chronic Disease (never heard of it) shows that so-called "food insecure" Appalachians are more likely to be obese and have obesity-related disease. This puzzling statement can be clarified somewhat by changing the phrase "food insecure" to "poor," in which case these results are not particularly surprising. A total of 2,580 people participated in the Ohio University project, with 72.8 percent from food secure households and 27.2 percent from food insecure households that may or may not be experiencing hunger. That's higher than the…

ID rap (seriously!)

I have a dislike of hip-hop and rap. But when it is mixed with ID, well, I'm speechless. Witness Atom tha Immortal's silken rhymes: Apocalyptic G-d presence/ Feeling the fire of G-d's essence/ You need Rosetta Stones to unlock my poem's message/ Born in a body of sand since early dawn/ Adam spawned genetic code of early on/ Written on the rocks of Hebron, The Earth Is Gone/ Reverted from an Information Age to Early Bronze/ Punishment of Civilization/ The only reason why this wicked nation ain't burning is G-d's patient/ Chorus: -----…

On “exotic vacations” and politicians

Cokie Roberts in full concern troll mode: I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be at Myrtle Beach and if he's going to take a vacation at this time. I just think this is not the time to do that. People, let's get this straight, Hawaii is one of the 50 states and Obama has family there. It's a farking vacation ... one that remains within the United States. Not to mention that McCain took nearly every weekend off at residences in Arlington and Phoenix or vacation homes near…

The Science that Will Not Be Denied

If you haven’t already, you must check out Charles Darwin’s blog, if only for this: However in the dramatic presentations it is clear what science is for: it is to help the police elucidate which American has killed which other American. It is also clear who becomes a scientist: people of eccentric appearance and manner with peculiarly arranged hair. They inhabit extremely modern, uncluttered and strangely lit laboratories, there is usually only one of them and he or she possesses an extraordinary range of scientific specialities and skills. They are sessile, but propel themselves on chairs…

Every Thursday I Go Jeffersonian On You

Yesterday the New York Times, ran an article Absaroka, a proposed state between Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota which never was. Which reminded me of the state that I grew up in, the great state of Jefferson. What, you've never head of the great State of Jefferson? The state of Jefferson was proposed in October of 1941 as a new state along the Oregon/California border, encompassing Curry, Josephine, Jackson, Klamath, Del Norte, Siskiyou, and Modoc counties. In short, the residents of this area where not to happy with the neglect they felt they were receiving from their respective state…

Hot Quantum Computing!

Normally when I think about quantum computers, I think about systems which are pretty cold, since a thermal equilibrium state at high temperature is a very mixed state. But is it really true that a quantum computer needs to be cold to quantum compute? I've often wondered (some would say pontificated) about this, and so I was excited when I found this Physical Review Letter describing quantum computing using plasmas. The idea of this new approach, according to the paper, is to use modes in the Debye sheath as qubits. Because of the Child-Langmuir law, the current in this sheath is quantized…