The Quantum Pontiff

Mmmvelopes. Tasty Tasty Mmmvelopes.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:35:54 -0500

Too often in life I am sending out a check to some charitable organization, or to resubscribe to Bacon magazine, and I think "damn this would be a lot better with Bacon." And now via the honest one, I find out that there is a solution to this vexing problem: Bacon flavored envelopes! From the "learn more" section of the webstie:

Technology has given us a lot lately. The car. TV. X-rays. The refrigerator. The Internet. Heck, we even cured polio. But what have our envelopes tasted like for the last 4,000 years? Armpit, that's what.

Really, people? If we can't overcome this kind of minor technical challenge, it's only a matter of time until some super-advanced race of aliens with lasers, spaceships and a delicious federal mail system comes down and colonizes the world. And nobody wants that (except for the aliens, of course).

So, after thousands of years and kajillions of horrible tasting envelopes licked, we're happy to report that J&D's Bacon-Flavored Mmmvelopes™ are here to save the day. No longer will envelopes taste like the underside of your car. You can enjoy the taste of delicious bacon instead.

That's right, bacon. It's not real bacon, mind you, so you won't have to start storing your envelopes in the refrigerator. But it really does taste like bacon. Which is what you really wanted in the first place, isn't it? And it only took us 4,000 years to get there. Eat that, alien invaders.

Cool, but I beg to differ. My armpit smells like....Bacon!

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Science Fiction Prototyping

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:04:53 -0500

Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write--always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a "consumer experience architect" in the Digital Home - User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the "reasonable" range. And then you find out the title of his talks is "Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design" and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a group of about forty of us said upon hearing about this seminar, and is exactly why we showed up to hear the talk!

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Igon Value Problems Over Dilettante Matrices

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:22:27 -0500

Friday the 13th is, apparently, a day of must read articles. This time it's Steven Pinker's review of Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. Readers who have taken linear algebra will be amused:

He provides misleading definitions of "homology," "saggital plane" and "power law" and quotes an expert speaking about an "igon value" (that's eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

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Cormac Interview in the WSJ

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:46:46 -0500

This 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 you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

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Guess the Dow, Win Chow!

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:05:01 -0500

Last month a local restaurant group, Chow foods---among whose restaurants is one of our favorite Sunday breakfast spots, The Five Spot---ran a contest/charity event: "Chow Dow." The game: guess the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close of the market on October 29th, 2009. The closest bet under the closing value which did not go over the value would be the winner. The prize was the value of Dow in gift certificates to the Chow restaurants: i.e. approximately $10K in food (or as we would say in Ruddock House at Caltech: "Eerf Doof!" We said that because it fit nicely with another favorite expression, "Eerf Lohocla!", this later phrase originating in certain now obscure rules enforced by administrative teetotalers.) I love games like this, and I especially love games where the rules are set up in an odd way. Indeed what I found amusing about this game was that, as a quick check of the rules on the Chow website showed, you could enter your guesses at anytime up until October 28th. Relevant also: maximum of 21 bets per person with a suggested donation of $1 per guess. So what would your strategy be optimizing your probability of winning, assuming that you are going to enter 21 times?

Below the fold: my strategy, the amazing power of the X-22 computer, and....chaos!

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Geek Synth

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:23:08 -0500

It's like, nearly, a genre (via Martin Schwarz):
I once saw a talk where Bill Nye said "systematic directed genocide."

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Glorious Dawn Record

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:00:07 -0500

I get a lot of press releases forward to me which usually get forwarded directly into my gmail archive. But this one I'm happy to pass along: Third Man Records is releasing A Glorious Dawn. You know the Carl Sagan remix (w/ guest appearance of the Hawkmeister) that I've been looping over and over again while I work:

Third Man Records is over the moon to announce the 7-inch release of "A Glorious Dawn" on November 9th.
...
The release is timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Sagan's birth. Also happening that day is a reception in United States' Congress with speeches by senators, NASA officials and assorted scientists, all hosted by the Planetary Society, which was co-founded by Sagan.

Third Man Records, in conjunction with United Record Pressing, fabricated a special "Cosmos Colored Vinyl" of which 150 copies will be available...50 randomly inserted into mail orders for "A Glorious Dawn" and the remainder to be made available at the Third Man Records Nashville store front at noon on November 9th.

The one-sided single features a very special etching on the flipside. Reproduced from the original artwork, the etching copies the etching included with the Voyager Golden Record, set off into space in 1977 as the most elaborate message-in-a-bottle idea ever imagined. With its inclusion of Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was The Night" it goes without saying that the Voyager Golden Record is one of Third Man's favorite releases of all-time..

I fell asleep last night listening to an episode of Cosmos. Maybe that explains da alienz in my dreamz?

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A Tactic Named Sue

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:14:44 -0500

A ~~puppet~~ commenter informs me that El Naschie is suing Nature. El Naschie, you may remember, was the journal editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals who was accused of not reviewing his own papers in the journal. To be expected, I suppose. But the commenter that pointed this out is entertaining:

Sarah Limbrick [Pontiff: writer of the above linked article about the suit] would surely be interested to know what the leading libel expert in England had to say about the Nature article complained of. He said he is in a state of disbelief that the worlds most respectable scientific journal Nature should publish an article which bears all the hallmarks of the tabloid press. Another interesting point is the conspiracy theory linking the plagiarism of El Naschies work published in Scientific American with the Nature article as well as a far worse article published in Die Zeit. Interestingly all of these three publications are owned by Macmillan. I understand from confidential sources that a mega surprise will be released at the trial engulfing highly reputed names some of whom are Nobel laureates.

OOooh, Nobel laureates in a libel case and conspiracy theories to boot! That's bigger than the Scopes monkey trial!

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Seattle Signs

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:14:49 -0500

Not helpful:
In Seattle if a road bends ever so slightly you are on a new street, but the above is...confusing.

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Living the Relativistic Life

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:01:54 -0500

Over 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 my watch would be ten minutes behind the clock at my home. At first I thought, cool! I get to experience time dilation in person! And then I thought: boy I'm fast. And then finally: I'm always late.

Damn you relativity!

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12th Annual SqUiNT, Feb 18-21 2010

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:26:54 -0500

SqUinT will be held in Santa Fe, NM from Feb 18-21, 2010. The submission page is now open and available at http://panda.unm.edu/SQuInT. Note that speakers outside the network should contact the organizers if they wish to inquire about attending. It's an El Nino year, so New Mexico should have some good snow this year :)

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TQC 2010 First Announcement

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:18:28 -0500

The 5th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography has put up its first announcement. It will be held at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, from 13th - 15th April 2010. The first upcoming deadline to be aware of is the submission deadline of Monday January 4, 2010:

The 5th Conference on Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication, and Cryptography
---- TQC 2010 ----
University of Leeds, UK
13 - 15 April 2009
http://tqc2010.leeds.ac.uk
====================================================================
Quantum computation, quantum communication, and quantum cryptography are subfields of quantum information processing, an interdisciplinary field of information science and quantum mechanics. TQC 2010 focuses on theoretical aspects of these subfields. The objective of the conference is to bring together researchers so that they can interact with each other and share problems and recent discoveries. The conference will be held from April 13-15, 2010, at the University of Leeds. It will consist of invited talks,
contributed talks, and a poster session.

The scope of the conference includes, but is not limited to:
* quantum algorithms
* models of quantum computation
* quantum complexity theory
* simulation of quantum systems
* quantum cryptography
* quantum communication
* quantum estimation and measurement
* quantum noise
* quantum coding theory
* fault-tolerant quantum computing
* entanglement theory

Invited Speakers:

* Julia Kempe (Tel-Aviv University)
* Kae Nemoto (NII, Tokyo)
* Frank Verstraete (University of Vienna)
* Ronald de Wolf (CWI, Amsterdam)
* Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna)

Post Proceedings:

As has happened for previous TQCs, a post-conference proceedings volume
will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science, to
which selected speakers will be invited to contribute.

Program Committee:

Andrew Childs (University of Waterloo)
Matthias Christandl (Ludwig-Maximilians-University)
Wim van Dam (University of California, Santa Barbara; Chair)
Nilanjana Datta (University of Cambridge)
Aram Harrow (University of Bristol)
Peter Hoyer (University of Calgary)
Rahul Jain (National University of Singapore)
Elham Kashefi (University of Edinburgh)
Debbie Leung (University of Waterloo)
Hoi-Kwong Lo (University of Toronto)
Juan Pablo Paz (University of Buenos Aires)
Francesco Petruccione (University of KwaZulu-Natal)
Martin Rotteler (NEC, Princeton)
Miklos Santha (Universit? Paris Sud)
Simone Severini (University College London; Co-chair)
Seiichiro Tani (NTT, Tokyo)
Jean-Pierre Tillich (INRIA, Rocquencourt)
Pawel Wocjan (University of Central Florida)
Takashi Yamamoto (Osaka University)

Local (University of Leeds) organising committee:

Katie Barr (Physics and Astronomy)
Katherine Brown (Physics and Astronomy)
Barry Cooper (Maths)
Peter Crompton (Maths)
Vladimir V. Kisil (Maths)
Viv Kendon (Physics and Astronomy; Chair)
Neil Lovett (Physics and Astronomy)
Rob Wagner (Physics and Astronomy)

Conference series steering committee:

Yasuhito Kawano (NTT, Tokyo, Japan)
Michele Mosca (IQC, University of Waterloo, and Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada)
Vlakto Vedral (CQC, University of Oxford, UK, and CQT, National University of Singapore)

Important Dates:

* Submission deadline: Monday 4th January 2010 (23:59 local time)
* Notification of acceptance/rejection: Thursday 11th February 2010
* Conference: April 13-15, 2010
* Post-proceedings submission deadline: End of May 2010
* Final copy deadline: End of August 2010
* Published: November 2010

To receive announcements, calls for papers, and reminders of deadlines, subscribe to the mailing list by following this link:

http://lists.leeds.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/tqc2010

(You may also use this link to unsubscribe at any time.)

To contact the organisers, please send emailto: tqc2010 [at] leeds.ac.uk.

Looks good but what is the Maths department ;) ?

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Where Quantum Computing Theory Is Done

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:37:53 -0500

Update 4/5/09: The wandering Australian does an analysis by institution.

Today, because I have way to many deadlines fast approaching, I needed to waste some time (procrastineerering), I decide to take a look at the last years worth of scited papers on the quant-ph section of scirate.com. The question I wanted to investigate is where quantum computing theory is occurring worldwide. So I took the top scited papers scoring over 10 scitations (42 papers in all) and looked at the affiliations of the authors: each co-author contributed a fractional score to their particular region (authors with multiple affiliations had their votes split.) And yes, I decided to lump all of Europe together and combined Japan and China (sorry). The results are as follows:

US: 40.07%
Europe: 30.68%
Canada: 18.75%
Singapore: 5.54%
China/Japan: 3.77%
Australia: 1.19%

Of course these results are subject to a plethora of problems: I mean the idea that one can extrapolate from a half rate voting website is silly! But that's what blogs are for, no? So let's plunge in :)

To me it was interesting to see that the U.S. is doing as well as it is, considering that fact that there have been considerably less hires of junior faculty in the U.S. in quantum computing that elsewhere. In looking at this it seems pretty clear to me at lot of this has to do with two institutions: Caltech (the IQI) and MIT. Another interesting fact for me was that Canada did not score as high as I would have expected, considering the vast resources that exist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute. Finally it was quite impressive to look at the number of European contributions from the U.K.: far higher than I had appreciated.

So what conclusion should you draw from this? Probably none at all, considering the suspect methodology, but if you want something to write home about it's probably: the U.S. is behind the combined juggernaut of Canada and Europe :)

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Is College Tuition a Bubble?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:46:07 -0500

Over at Life as a Physicist, the Physicist for Life gets on a well deserved soap box and laments certain comments concerning articles about a recent College Board study: Trends in College Pricing 2009. The gist of the Physicist for Life's comments concern the fact that one should not be surprised at rising tuition costs at public universities, given that state budgets have been shot to all hell in the present downturn.

But what I find interesting, and what I've never been able to figure out, is the larger trend (ignore the last two years, please). Why are tuition prices increasing at such a fast rate for four year colleges? For example, see slide 5 of this presentation where one sees that over the last three decades, the inflation adjusted price of college has more than tripled at public four year universities and gone up nearly as much a private four year universities. So that is question number one for me. Question number two is really related, and is where is this money going? (And of course the real question, as a pseudo-professor, how do I get some of it?)

Speculation below the fold.

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What To Do When There Is Nothing Else?

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:27:58 -0500

Michael Green's appointment to replace Stephen Hawking as the Lucasian chair, has, quite predictably, brought back into the spotlight the ever simmering STRING WARS!!!OMG!!!STRINGTHEORYRLZ!!. Okay, maybe not the spotlight, per se, but I did find the article about Green in the Guardian interesting (via the so wrong it hurts fellow):

But that was one of their arguments, that the academy is so biased towards string theory - hiring mostly string theorists, crowning mostly string theorists - that it has driven out all other ways of seeing (Smolin compared it to deciding that there was only one way to fight cancer, and pouring all available resources into that one way). "People do what they feel is going to be productive," says Green. "It's all very well to say they should be doing something else. But there is nothing else."

Now, of course, this is all part of a long series of arguments about the validity of string theory as an approach to a physical theory merging gravity and the standard model. Yawn, that is *so* 00s.

What it did make me think, however, was what the equivalent argument would be in a different field. And because, while I posses my fair share of extralusionary intelligence, I thought, oh I'd better stick to my own field when I think about this. So what would the equivalent be in quantum computing?

I hereby declare that there are only two valid approaches to building a quantum computer: ion trap quantum computers and superconducting based quantum computers. It's all very well to say that we should be spending our time working on other "ideas" for quantum computers. But there is nothing else.

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The Quantum Pontiff

Mmmvelopes. Tasty Tasty Mmmvelopes.

Science Fiction Prototyping

Igon Value Problems Over Dilettante Matrices

Cormac Interview in the WSJ

Guess the Dow, Win Chow!

Geek Synth

Glorious Dawn Record

A Tactic Named Sue

Seattle Signs

Living the Relativistic Life

12th Annual SqUiNT, Feb 18-21 2010

TQC 2010 First Announcement

Where Quantum Computing Theory Is Done

Is College Tuition a Bubble?

What To Do When There *Is* Nothing Else?

What To Do When There Is Nothing Else?