Self: Meet Center. Center: Meet Self.
pontiff | September 14, 2009Yreka Phlox (phlox hirsuta) is a endangered perennial subshrub with small beautiful purple flowers native to my hometown of Yreka, California. And now, it's Yreka's' official flower. The official resolution from the city council:"WHEREAS the Yreka Phlox is a hardy, enduring plant that grows in poor soils with little water and is known also as Phlox hirsuta; and
WHEREAS, its flower is a lovely and cheerful harbinger of spring; and
WHEREAS, the Yreka phlox is unique to our hometown; and
WHEREAS, the late City Attorney Larry Bacon had a vision for conservation of the Yreka Phlox which resulted…
pontiff | September 12, 2009I'm going to be visiting the Perimeter Institute next week, talking on Monday (switched from Wednesday) at 3pm. Visiting Perimeter is always a treat: quantum information, quantum foundations, quantum gravity, cosmology, particle physics, superstring theory...I think I've thought of going into all of those fields (grad classes in astro at Berkeley not so useful these days in quantum computing. Okay useful in a different sort of way.) Indeed, I think I'm still thinking of going into quantum information.
P.S. anyone recommend a good jogging path starting near the Perimeter Institute?
pontiff | September 4, 2009Scott Aaronson, Leonid Grinberg, and Louis Wasserman's "Worldview Manager" is now live at http://projects.csail.mit.edu/worldview/home. It seems that I am not in much conflict over quantum computing
So, damnit, I may be wrong, but at least I'm consistent (the hobgoblin of a little mind, mind you.) Via @cgranade and @mattleifer.
pontiff | September 2, 2009Trip to Zurich for 8th Symposium on Topological Quantum Computing, Zurich 29th-31st August 2009.
Thursday 8/27 - 7:30am SEA to 3:30pm IAD, 6:00pm IAD to 8:00am ZRH. Attempt to upgrade first leg failed which is too bad as it was the international version of the 767-300 which has a pretty nice (by American carrier standards) business class. Both flights are completely full. Am I the only one who often goes to the self check kiosks by the gates and attempts to move my seat to one beside an empty seat? Sleep approximately 2 hours. Why does the lady behind me think that it is okay to start a…
pontiff | August 26, 2009I'm off to Zurich tomorrow for 8th Symposium on Topological Quantum Computing which I'm greatly looking forward to (this will be my first trip to Switzerland.) What I'm not looking forward to is the 15.5 hours it will take me to get from the Seattle airport to the Zurich airport! So, any recommendations for papers I should read, lectures I should listen to, or videos I should watch in order to keep from going insane on during the flight?
pontiff | August 15, 2009Living in a small rural town is hard. Jobs are often difficult to come by (in the Northwest this is particularly true of towns that have suffered the slow fall of the timber industry.) The county where I grew up, Siskiyou county, currently has an unemployment rate north of 18 percent. And yet, there are small towns where, well you might not have a good job, but you have something else which has tremendous value. Here is the view from near the top of my run this afternoon above Yreka, CA
The volcano to the right is Mt. Shasta and the one to the left is Goosenest (a great place to camp and…
pontiff | August 11, 2009Buzzing on Scienceblogs right now is PalMDs ongoing attempt to get his BMI in shape. In honor, I shall post my latest attempt at getting in shape:
Kids and adults: don't try this at home!
How did I do it? Eat like a monk and run a lot.
pontiff | August 4, 2009Well there goes a chunk of my time. A new Pynchon novel is out: Inherent Vice. According to this New York Times review it's much more like Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49 than Gravity's Rainbow. I'm sure there will be much teeth gnashing among the literati, but personally, I'm a huge fan of Vineland
I've previously mused that a reason that Vineland gets poor reviews is (a) "Gravity's Rainbow" is pretty epic and has a subject with which current readers can approach without dislodging their own beliefs too much, and (b) literature professors don't like being told the sixties failed.
Anyway…
pontiff | July 30, 2009Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is "Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking." Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don't know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is one who is doing cool quantum computing research ("cracking?" and "hacking?" btw.)
I open up the article and who is the police woman? It's Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described…
pontiff | July 20, 2009As someone who was born on a lunar eclipse (explains a lot, no?) the 40th anniversary of man walking on the moon has a special place in my heart. Okay, that sentence makes no sense (I was born on a lunar eclipse however), but anyway everyone is all abuzz about the anniversary of the moon landing so it's as good as any sentence to let me talk about booming sand dunes.
Booming whah?
Take a big sand dune. Kick some of the sand down the face of the dune. Sometimes, if you are lucky, the sand dune will emit a loud 70 Hz to 100 Hz booming sound. I used to have a sealed container of the booming…
pontiff | July 15, 2009Microsoft Research's Project Tuva website is up. Project Tuva is a collection of seven searchable Feynman lectures aimed at a popular audience (with extras coming online in the future.) The rights to these lectures were obtained by Bill Gates after he was entranced by them over twenty years ago. Well worth watching, especially if you're about to give a popular science talk (I've always been fascinated by how Feynman uses his hands in describing physics.)
Even more interesting, in my egocentric universe, are the comments by Mr. Gates himself about Feynman:Someone who can make science…
pontiff | July 14, 2009A friend sent me a link to QuantumCamp:Have you ever wondered how the microscopic Universe works? QuantumCamp is a one week journey through this strange but beautiful world - seeing nothing less than how every atom in our universe is working!
We begin with Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. We move from Albert Einstein's idea of quantization and end up seeing the hydrogen spectrum while contemplating the ideas of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
We witness the explosive beauty and inner order of the elements which begs for deeper investigation. We dive in and immerse…
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 | 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 19, 2009
Ant 1: Protect the queen!
Ant 2: Which one's the queen?
Ant 3: I'm the queen!
Ant 1: No you're not!
Homer: Nooo! [his head smashed the colony, and the ants float free]
Ant 1: Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!
Buzz: You fool! Now we may never know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space.
pontiff | June 16, 2009I've moved my blogroll from the sidebar, to a page accessible from the tab at the top of the page. I've also updated the list a bit, cutting out dead links and such. A few of the new blogs I've put on include One Honest Man (finance, humor), Physics and Cake (physics and, um, cake), TechFlash (Seattle tech), and Xconomy Seattle (Seattle tech) (among others).
pontiff | June 8, 2009Scenes from today's CSE 322 (introduction to formal methods in computer science) final:
pontiff | June 5, 2009A former student sent me what appears to be my doppelganger: Danbert Nobacon. Life with no bacon, well that's just crazy.
In other Bacon related news: Jorge sends me Bacon Vodka...from Seattle. This will surely save me time because frying up bacon to mix in my wodka for my bacon vodka martini was always a real time sink.
pontiff | June 2, 2009The iPhone is a great gadget (as a phone, it's okay. Personally I wish it could be made a bit louder as my ears, they ain't so good at that hearing thing.) Here are the apps I've found that I use the most. (Excluding google maps, the built in email and browser, and the phone functions, of course. Having google maps available so easily really is an amazing piece of functionality to have in a phone, I must say.)
Urbanspoon (free): Restaurant guide with cool select a random place by shaking the iPhone. Links to lots of reviews, which is nice. A friend feature to spy on your friends…