Funny Ha Ha
pontiff | September 26, 2008There are many things I do not understand in the wide world of finance, but the one which perplexes me the most is why people believe that their money is safe under their mattress.
I mean come on people: mattresses? The odds of a fire in your household serious enough to call the fire department during the year are about one in three hundred. Sure the odds of the whole house burning down are lower, but do you really want to put it under a mattress?
And what about residential robbery? Your odds of a break in are somewhere around one in 250 per year. And if I'm a robber in these dire…
pontiff | September 5, 2008I propose that a good investment would be to short Bill Gates' evil rating:
pontiff | September 4, 2008I really need to create a category for blog posts for things which Google's products do which amuse me. Today in reading an email about the National Science Foundation:
Many a faculty member's got NSF, I guess, and are damn sick or writing grants to continue having NSF.
pontiff | September 3, 2008What a graduate student at UW discovered when searching for Kitaev's paper on anyons:
pontiff | August 6, 2008Hot off the presses!
In an amazing breakthrough, which this press release has no room to describe in any real detail, scientists at research university BigU have made tremendous progress in the field of quantum computing. The results mean that quantum computers are one step closer to replacing your laptop computer
Quantum computers work by some mechanism that we don't have the time to understand. But we are sure our researchers will explain it to you, but you won't understand anyways, so why ask them? It's definitely got something to do with multiple universes and bits that are both zero…
pontiff | August 1, 2008John Baez points to a remarkable mathematician (having being lead there by Alissa Crans):
You may have heard of the Mathematics Genealogy Project. This is a wonderful database that lets you look up the Ph.D. advisor and students of almost any mathematician. This is how I traced back my genealogy to Gauss back in week166.
I was feeling pretty proud of myself, too -- until I found someone who had two Ph.D. students before he was even born!
Yes indeed: our friend and café regular Tom Leinster is listed as having two Ph.D. students: Jose Cruz in 1959, and Steven Sample in 1965. At the time…
pontiff | July 29, 2008Physical Theories as Men, a tit for tat response to Physical Theories as Women. Go ahead, you know you want to click on both of them.
pontiff | July 15, 2008Um, okay, so was this little piece of information really noteworthy enough to be included in a New York Times article on Psystar:
Although Psystar's Web site was available earlier today, by 1 p.m. EDT it was offline and returning the error message: "Database Error: Unable to connect to the database: Could not connect to MySQL" to Computerworld editors and reporters attempting to connect.
I mean, isn't that a bit high up even for an inverted pyramid?
pontiff | July 1, 2008One of the subjects of great debate in physics goes under the moniker of "the arrow of time." The basic debate here is (very) roughly to try to understand why time goes it's merry way seemingly in one direction, especially given that the many of the laws of physics appear to behave the same going backwards as forwards in time. But aren't we forgetting our most basic science when we debate at great philosophical lengths about the arrow of time? Aren't we forgetting about...experiment? Here, for your pleasure, then, are some of my personal observations about the direction of time which I've…
pontiff | May 27, 2008A story, from Jeff Silverman:
Whenever you build an airplane, you have to make sure that each part weighs no more than allocated by the designers, and you have to control where the weight it located to keep the center of gravity with limits. So there is an organization called weights which tracks that.
For the 747-100, one of the configuration items was the software for the navigation computer. In those days (mid-1960s), the concept of software was not widely understood. The weight of the software was 0. The weights people didn't understand this so they sent a guy to the software group to…
pontiff | May 24, 2008From the Uncyclopedia entry on computers:
How Computers Work
Inside a computer case is a midget that intakes power and outputs graphics. On an average computer, this is an average male midget. High end computers contain baby giraffes or sometimes Links (which will periodically shut down, some blame this on power consumption, but this is actually due to the Links leaving the computer in order to save Zeldas from Gilbert Gottfrieds). Cheaper Hewlett-Packard computers generally come standard with a retard midget. Macs and Dells run on magnets which make them better then anything else! Rumors…
pontiff | May 9, 2008From a student today in office hours before today's midterm: "How many times will the word automata appear in the test, including its use in acronyms like DFA, NFA, GNFA, and WTFA?"
pontiff | May 9, 2008From the annals of "is that really the word you wanted?" from a New York Times article on steampunk:
"There seems to be this sort of perfect storm of interest in steampunk right now," Mr. von Slatt said. "If you go to Google Trends and track the number of times it is mentioned, the curve is almost algorithmic from a year and a half ago." (At this writing, Google cites 1.9 million references.)
Certainly I can interpret this as saying that the trend has a curve which can be generated by an algorirthm, but I'm guessing Mr. von Slatt meant something else, considering that the curve which is…
pontiff | April 23, 2008Via Digg, an article on hilarious Google searches. Hmm, reminds me of one I discovered a while back. (Below may or may not be NSFW, depending on your level of puritanism. And it can certainly lead to clicking which is definitely NSFW.)
Why, no Google, you pornography obsessed search engine, that is not what I meant at all.
Update 4/24: Another good physics related google search at Swan's on Tea.
pontiff | April 22, 2008Andrew Landahl (who really should have a blog because he is certainly one of the most interesting people I get to talk to when I attend a conference) sends me a note about recent appearances of quantum computing on prime time TV which he has graciously let me post below.
I thought you'd be amused to know that quantum information has finally made it to prime time. Using TiVo, I just caught up on back-to-back episodes of CBS's "Big Bang Theory" from the past two weeks that make prominent references to quantum teleportation and Shor's algorithm. The week before last, the episode opened with a…
pontiff | April 18, 2008I sure wish I could get my dog to do this so that I wouldn't have to exercise her:
pontiff | April 9, 2008The ads on scienceblogs today lead me to find out that, apparently, I can buy a quantum computer right here from Seattle based REI:
And only $70 bucks! Jeez, those D-wave investors overpaid. I wonder how you use it to factor? But the number in the bag and wait?