Go Ahead, Waste Your Time
pontiff | March 5, 2010It's like Jackass for people who can wire stuff together (via @JoeAndrieu):
Happy Friday!
pontiff | March 4, 2010Thomson Reuter's website Sciencewatch.com has a special section out on citation and paper data for the last ten years of quantum computing. More below the fold.
The first interesting thing that everyone wants to know about such list is, of course, "who's number 1?!?" Well the most cited paper over the last 10 years according to this survey was "A scheme for efficient quantum computation with linear optics" by Knill, Laflamme, and Milburn (Nature, 409, 46-52 (2001)). Not too surprising given that this paper established a completely new method for building a quantum computer and, equally…
pontiff | March 4, 2010Today Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke at the University of Washington in the Microsoft Atrium of the Computer Science & Engineering department's Paul Allen Center. As you can tell from that first sentence UW and Microsoft have long had very tight connections. Indeed, perhaps the smartest thing the UW has ever done was, when they caught two kids using their computers they didn't call the police, but instead ended up giving them access to those computers. I like to think that all the benefit$ that UW has gotten from Microsoft are a great big karmic kickback for the enlightened sense of…
pontiff | December 3, 2009I'm in D.C, attending the sorters meeting for the APS March meeting. Traveling in early December is always nice as the planes seem to be empty (*stretch*) and sheesh, it's downright balmy here in D.C. Now I've absconded to a second rate hotel in the middle of what I can only guess is somewhere near the mythical land of suburbia, since the place is surrounded by office complexes, watching the civil war (no, not that civil war, that one.)
Things I've been thinking about when I'm not obsession about my latest research:
Has anyone ever tried sending a prop to a conference?
Because I hate…
pontiff | November 9, 2009It's like, nearly, a genre (via Martin Schwarz):
I once saw a talk where Bill Nye said "systematic directed genocide."
pontiff | October 14, 2009Blackjack, or 21, is a game that many enjoy wasting their money playing at casinos. For those who don't like to waste their money, or at least want to waste it more slowly than others, card counting is a time honored tradition for moving the odds away from the casino and in the players direction (blessed be Ed Thorp.) In other words it makes the game at least slightly enjoyable for those who like to win. But now a graduate of the University of Dundee, Kris Zutis, is going to ruin this small smidgen of fun:
A University of Dundee graduate has created a computer system with the potential to…
pontiff | September 8, 2009Over at the most uncertain blog, he of uncertain principles (aka Chad) takes up a challenge posed by @EricRWeinstein on twitter concerning Paul Krugman's recent article on why economists got the economic crisis so wrong. Since I know even less economics than anyone around here this seems like a great opportunity for me to weigh in (this is, after all, the blogosphere!)
Krugman's article is deceptively enticing, yet I find it disturbingly inadequate. In particular the critique is very much written as a just-so story, and there is very little in terms of concrete claims made nor of actual…
pontiff | September 8, 2009Tomorrow, September 9, 2009 is apparently the date for a worldwide game of monopoly: Monopoly City Streets
Welcome to Monopoly City Streets. You versus the world in the biggest live game of MONOPOLY in history!
On the 9th SEPTEMBER, a world of property empire building on an unimaginable scale will be launched! A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.
Own any street in the world. Build humble houses, crazy castles and stupendous skyscrapers to collect…
pontiff | September 3, 2009How do you build a computer out of fire?
(Motivated by the observation that if you take three pieces of string and tie them together at a single point, you can make an OR gate. If we denote the presence of fire on a string as a 1 and the absence of fire as a 0, then this contraption clearly computes the OR function. But OR by itself is not universal.)
pontiff | August 11, 2009How did I miss this one from 2005? And how come no one told me to take off my tinfoil hat? Via @kmerritt, "On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study" by Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter.
Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either…
pontiff | July 13, 2009Over 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…
pontiff | July 2, 2009Okay, I'm calling it. We have officially reached the top of the Bacon loving bubble. Why? The dress made of Bacon indicator has been tripped. This indicator has a 50 percent probability of beating the magic 8 ball in predicting the top of past Bacon bubbles. I predict a hard landing for Bacon lovers everywhere. Until they shed their few extra pounds (a lagging indicator) we are entering a dark period for Bacon.
Hat tip: Jorge.
pontiff | June 30, 2009Summer doesn't officially start here in Seattle until the fourth of July, but the summer vibe is definitely here. Which means no teaching, so it's all research all the time. But a man cannot live by his own research alone, which leads me to the vast brain dump that is the internet.
Things found...
The Innsbruck group has a new paper out on a very cool way to shuffle ions in a trap: arXiv:0906.5335
The info processor points to a review of power laws in finance/economics
Via the one honest man a strangely mesmerizing history of yield curve spreads:
It looks like a group has finally gotten…
pontiff | June 24, 2009When I was a postdoc, I made it a habit to try to spend at least one week a year visiting Isaac Chuang's lab at MIT. There were many reason for this, including that Ike has been a collaborator of mine, and Ken Brown, another collaborator was working as a postdoc in the lab. But another reason was...it's damn nice for a theorist to sit in a real experimental lab. Oh sure, you need to keep the theorists away from all the cords and knobs for fear that they might actually touch something. And don't ever let a theorist chose the music being played in the lab or you'll end up hearing some real…