Self: Meet Center. Center: Meet Self.
pontiff | July 7, 2010This blog has moved. The new location is http://dabacon.org/pontiff.
So long and thanks for all the fish!
Over the past three years I've had a good time blogging here at Scienceblogs. Though I rarely agree with much they say (haha, classic curmudgeon that I am) I can honestly say my fellow Sciencebloggers are a great bunch of people, and I'm sure I'll continue to get irritated at what they write for many years to come (just kidding, I always agree with the physicists! ;) )
"Great Dave, thanks for taking a stand against the PepsiCo blog!" Well actually, I've been thinking about leaving…
pontiff | June 14, 2010I grew up in the small town of Yreka, CA ("Yreka Bakery" backwards is...) that sits just minutes south of the Oregon-California border on Interstate 5. Yreka, population a little over 7000 brave souls, is the county seat of Siskiyou county. Siskiyou county is "god's country" meaning, yes, (a) it votes strongly Republican :) and (b) its scenery is awesome:
Siskiyou county is, however, not a wealthy part of the United States (yes, if you measure wealth in dollars :)) Unemployment in the county is currently 19 percent (not seasonally adjusted), the median income is $29,530, and about 18…
pontiff | May 7, 2010Here's an interview with Daniel Lidar whose was the postdoc who first taught me quantum error correction (and more.) No, not that LIDAR!
Note to all you job seekers, even in your darkest hours know that you have friends out there who are working to change the abysmal state of quantum computing hiring:
I would also hope to see a wave of new faculty positions at US institutions for quantum computation theoreticians and experimentalists. We now have the first generation of students and postdocs trained in this field, many of whom are finding it very difficult to land faculty positions in the US…
pontiff | March 5, 2010Congrats to OneBusAway, winners of the 2010 WTIA Industry Achievement Award for "best use of technology in the government, nonprofit or education sector". OneBusAway was started by University of Washington students and provides real time access to transit information here in the Seattle area. I know it best through it's iPhone app, which is by far my most regularly used app (sure I probably use email more, but the iPhone app I use every weekday nearly without exception.) Yeah, yeah I know you fancy European cities will scoff at our backward nature, but I will tell you that the iPhone app is…
pontiff | March 5, 2010Scienceblogs and Serious Eats are teaming up this year for the 2010 Pi Day Bake-Off. I wonder if Mrs. Pontiff is up to defending her crown?
pontiff | February 1, 2010Shameless self-promotion: an article I wrote with Wim van Dam, "Recent Progress on Quantum Algorithms" has appeared in the Communications of the ACM. Indeed if you have a copy of the magazine you can check out an artists rendition of a quantum computer/quantum algorithm on the cover. Clearly quantum computing is the new string theory: so abstract that it must be represented by beautiful, yet incomprehensible, figures. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing. (The article was actually written quite a bit back, so "recent" is a bit off. If we had to write it today I'm guessing we would…
pontiff | January 26, 2010If your work productivity is shaped by the type of pen you are currently using:
pontiff | January 19, 2010The Shorty Awards have a category called "bacon." Your vote for @dabacon will, I promise, result in a great increase in your pork-based karma. And voting doesn't even clog your arteries!
pontiff | January 5, 2010About that talk at UBC which I posted about on Sunday...
Q: How'd the talk in Vancouver go Monday, Dave?
D: The slides were awesome and the animations dazzling.
Q: So the talk went well?
D: Don't know. I didn't give the talk.
Q: Didn't give the talk? Why not?
D: Well at the time I was supposed to be giving the talk I was on the US / Canada border.
Q: Oh so you were late for your talk ...due to being stuck at the border crossing?
D: Actually I was heading back into the US at the time.
Q: Huh? Why were you heading the wrong direction?
D: Well because the fireman called.
Q: The fireman? Why…
pontiff | January 3, 2010Late notice, but I'm giving the theory seminar at UBC tomorrow, January 4, 2010 at noon:
Title: Adiabatic Cluster State Quantum Computing
Location: Hennings 318
Abstract:
Models of quantum computation are important because they change the physical requirements for achieving universal quantum computation. For example, one-way quantum computing requires the preparation of an entangled state followed by adaptive measurement on this state, a set of requirements which is different from the standard quantum circuit model. Here we introduce a model based on one-way quantum computing but without…
pontiff | December 16, 2009Lately I feel like my reading material has gotten stuck in a rut. The feel is that everything I'm reading is a rehash of something I've read before. Okay, maybe it is just that the rain has returned to Seattle :) Since I'm a subscriber to the belief that books that show you something outside of your current view of the world are the most important, a challenge to all two of remaining readers of this blog: what should I be reading that is most likely to be of such high information content? Recommendations? (For comparison, I think my library is available on librarything. Fiction, non-…
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 23, 2009@EricRWeinstein is at it again in twitterland, this time on the subject of the funding of science. For an intriguing read about the glut of Ph.D.s versus science funding, he links to his (circa 1998?) article titled: "How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers." An interesting read, to say the least. Then @michael_nielsen points to Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion by Daniel Greenberg which I now have to go out and buy. Damn you internet for pointing me to things I should read!…
pontiff | November 13, 2009This interview with Cormac McCarthy by the Wall Street Journal is well worth reading (Coincidentally(?) I just started rereading the Border Trilogy.)
This amused me
[CM:] Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.
simply because I can attest that yes, indeed, this is what he does! And, well, because my time at the Santa Fe Institute followed a similar pattern :)
On the other hand here is a more ominous reason why I enjoyed (my too brief) time at SFI:
WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?
CM: If…
pontiff | November 3, 2009Over the summer I started running a not so insignificant amount: 6 miles in the morning on the weekdays and 10 to 15 miles on the weekends (insert commenter telling me why this is wrong.) So, one or two or more hours out running around beautiful Seattle (My favorite route is Queen Anne to Fremont to Ballard Locks, around Magnolia and back up Queen Anne.) Which brings us to the subject of time. During my runs it seems that my watch, which runs using mechanical energy, decided that it had a new setting: relativistic mode. In other words I'd go out and run for two hours, and when I got back…
pontiff | October 19, 2009The grapes have been picked up
and the fermenting has (hopefully!) begun. This year I'm trying two types of grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese.
pontiff | October 12, 2009Update 10/13/09: corrected for ice cream flavor and location, thus merging two related universes.
There is a story about Richard Feynman that while he was at Princeton MIT he had a hard time with dessert. Apparently they always served either chocolate or vanilla ice cream and Feynman would agonize over which he wanted that night. Then one day he decided that he was wasting his time making this decision and so he would solve this by only choosing vanilla chocolate and from that point on in life that is what he did. He no longer wasted time choosing, and, apparently, ate a lot of vanilla…
