Off The Deep End
pontiff | June 30, 2009This last weekend we made it out to artopia in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood. One of the cool event at artopia was the power tool races. That's right, power tool's or other appliances propelling themselves down a long track! Here, for instance, is my favorite, the Piña Collider:
Won the race, finishing perfectly at the end of the track, where the owner popped open the blender and poured himself a nice Piña Colida (this shot taken by Mrs. Pontiff, who is much better at aiming her iPhone than I am.)
pontiff | June 29, 2009Is Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Information the first quantum institute to have a twitter feed?
Update: @WaterlooIQC tells me that no they probably aren't the first. That title probably goes to iqoqi.
pontiff | June 26, 2009NSF awards $400K in stimulus funding to study the impact of stimulus funding on science.
Researchers at the University of Virginia get $199,951 to study the impact of stimulus funding on employment in science and engineering fields, while the University of Michigan receives $199,988 to develop a database of the investments in and outcomes of social science projects funded by the ARRA.
But no one is asking the real question. Who will study the impact of funding these two groups on science? Huh?
pontiff | June 24, 2009An old friend from my undergrad days sent me a link to Physics discussion ends in skateboard attack:
A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said today.
Jason Everett Keller, 40, allegedly accosted another homeless man, Stephan Fava, on the 200 block of Grand Avenue in South San Francisco at about 1:45 p.m. March 30.
At the time, Fava was chatting with an acquaintance, who is also homeless, about "quantum physics and the splitting of…
pontiff | June 23, 2009The "slow movement" is a vast beast: there's Slow Food, Slow Travel, Slow Money, and even, I kid you not, Slow Reading. These movements all begin with the premise that modern culture emphasizes ever increasing speed and convenience (cue the Eagle's: "Listen, baby. You can hear the engine ring. We've been up and down this highway; haven't seen a goddam thing.") The prescribed medicine is a moderance in life. More smelling of the roses (but watch out for Ringo), more taking the long road, and most definitely more chewing your food slowly. While the movement suffers from large doses of…
pontiff | June 1, 2009What in the world is a review for Star Trek doing in Nature Physics? (Thank to reader W for pointing this out.) I mean, at least the review of Angels and Demons has references to physics, but the review of Star Trek, is, well, just a review of Star Trek with no reference physics or science or, well, anything that I could see the audience of Nature Physics relating to.
I'm not saying I don't appreciate the review, or the book/art section of Nature Physics, but doesn't this seem a bit out of place. It is too bad, indeed, because the movie does contain time travel, and as Cosmic Sean…
pontiff | May 26, 2009Ah, the games people play:
A 23-year-old Tacoma man and an 18-year-old Lakewood woman are suspected of throwing rocks from a railroad trestle onto at least 14 vehicles traveling southbound on Interstate 5 early Monday.
...
Investigators told KOMO-TV that the couple was playing a stripping game that involved each of them shedding a layer of clothing for every headlight they managed to break.
pontiff | May 21, 2009From Pravda, some pretty serious funny: Quantum transition to transform mankind in 2012.
We begin, as on any other day, with prediction of doomsday:
Russian scientists predict another doomsday. In their opinion, quantum transition will begin in 2012 according to the ancient Maya calendar.
But how, you ask, will this quantum transition occur?
Scientists say that an extremely powerful catalyst will be neccesary to trigger quantum transition. They say that a powerful solar flare will be enough.
Of course, why didn't I think of that: a solar flare to set off a quantum transition. But wait,…
pontiff | May 12, 2009The other day I ran into a good friend from Tlön, who told me the most fascinating story about his discovery of a new theory of games.
I owe my discovery of the nature of equilibrium in card games to an odd conjunction of mirrors and an encyclopedia. The mirror was in our library, and the encyclopedia was called Encyclopedia Equilibria (London, 1942, Enlarged ed. 1983). The mirror was an abomination, for in its reflection, one could see their opponents cards, and thus it led me to a crisis in belief. The encyclopedia, however, was even more of an anomaly, containing a fallaciously named…
pontiff | May 1, 2009In his latest New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks, the conservative liberals can most stomach, attempts to tackle the problem of "what makes a genius". This is, of course, the kind of reasonable length topic that one can explain in a single newspaper column (it's the New York Times, you now.) The article begins, like all great op-ed, with a strawman that would make Dorothy proud:
Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness -- Dante, Mozart,…
pontiff | April 22, 2009Okay, well he didn't exactly say that, but he certainly is a smug son of a gun who asked a grade school question to a Nobel prize winner in physics, apparently expecting a "gotcha" moment (via TPM):
Dudes even so proud of himself that he (or his staff) posted this video on his YouTube page.
BEDEVERE: Exactly. So, logically...
VILLAGER #1: If... she... weighs... the same as a duck,... she's made of wood.
BEDEVERE: And therefore?
VILLAGER #2: A witch!
Then again, what should you expect for someone who produced this:
Wind is God's way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas…
pontiff | April 6, 2009Scott the optimizer asks a question on a wim:
Come up with a catchy name for growth rates of the form 2^(n^&alpha) , 0<&alpha<1.
I thought the answer was obvious: "probably in BQP."
update: does html superscript not work in a blockquote? I guess the answer is yes.
pontiff | March 26, 2009Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to a question that I'm nearly constantly asked: "So...[long pause]...are you a physicist...[long pause]...or are you a computer scientist?" Like many theorists in quantum computing, a field perched between the two proud disciplines of physics and computer science (and spilling its largess across an even broader swath of fields), I struggle with answering this question. Only today, after a long and torturous half year (where by torture, I mean interviewing for jobs, not the eerily contemporaneous fall of the world's finances) in which I have been…
pontiff | March 23, 2009Sundries.
Warren Buffet is often attributed as saying, "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked" referring to how a bad economy exposes problems in a business. After reading too many comment sections on New York Times articles on the financial crisis, I think it should be "only when the tide goes out do you discover who's a real communist." (Note, dear reader beginning to flame me in the comments, that I didn't say whether I thought this was good or bad or neither good or bad.) Hard economic times really bring out the daggers in economic ideology. I love to…
pontiff | March 18, 2009Kamil sends along a pointer to www.playqubit.com. "Qubit," according to the website is a new quiz show on the Discovery channel:
Qubit is a quiz show for the 21st century - fast-paced, cut-throat and fun!
Driven by stunning HD visuals, Qubit showcases science, technology and natural history. Not your ordinary quiz show, Qubit challenges convention by including the odd, unique and truly quirky aspects of the world of science.
Sounds like a fun show.
But "Qubit"? Really? I wonder if the PR firm that sold them on that name knew what the word meant and whether Ben Schumacher is offended or…
pontiff | March 2, 2009Stephen sent me a fun google query, discovered by one of his students:
Those are some pretty impressive four entangled qubits: sticking around for nine days without decohering :)!
pontiff | February 27, 2009On Morning Edition this morning, there was a story about the annual Conservative Political Action Conference which contained a line which made me guffaw:
Representative Paul Ryan: "[rant on spending in stimulus plan]...$400 million dollars to study sexually transmitted diseases!" [rant on about how his daughter is more responsible that President Obama]
Oh my! The horror. Actually spending money studying diseases that infect 65 million U.S. citizens. Yes Rep. Ryan, it would be a real shame if that money improved the lives of those 65 million people (and maybe it might even help, you know,…
pontiff | February 16, 2009A correspondent writes to me about a recent article in the APS News describingThe Top Ten Physics Stories of 2008 and notes a very troubling sentence:
Diamond Detectors
Work on the molecular structure of carbon continues to show great promise for quantum computing. This year scientists were able to construct a nano-scale light source that emits a single photon at a time. The team first removed a solitary atom from the carbon's otherwise regular matrix and then introduced a nitrogen atom nearby. When they excited this crystal with a laser, single polarized photons were emitted from the empty…
pontiff | February 8, 2009In a prior post I asked about the how the structure of fixed points of stochastic maps changes under composition of such maps. Robin provided an interesting comment about the setup, linking this question at least partially with zero error codes:
R has at least one fixed point. If it's unique, there need be no relationship between fixed points of P and R. (Q can project to a single vector, which becomes the unique fixed point of R.) If R has N > 1 fixed points, then things get more interesting. The fixed points are closed under linear combination, so they're a subspace (I'm actually…