Happy 100th birthday special relativity! Let’s all go out and celebrate by running around with poles in our hands and see if they fit in any barns. Or better yet, celebrate by explaining special relativity to someone whose never understood the theory and blow their mind.
From an article in the New York Times about the separation of Church at State (not to be confused with NOFX’s separation of Church and Skate) The United States has always been home to striking religious diversity — diversity that has by fits and starts expanded over the last 230 years. Um. The United States [...]
The list of 2005 FOCS (46th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science ) accepted papers has been posted here. I see four quantum papers (out of 62, one to be announce). They are “The Symmetric Group Defies Strong Fourier Sampling,” Cristopher Moore, Alexander Russell, and Leonard J. Schulman “Cryptography in the Bounded Quantum-Storage [...]
Thermodynamics is one the most important tools we have for understanding the behavior of large physical systems. However, it is very important to realize when thermodynamics is applicable and when it is not applicable. For example, try to apply thermodynamics to the Intel processor inside the laptop I am writing this entry on. Certainly the [...]
From a Science article: Already braced for a tight 2006 budget, the National Science Foundation (NSF) got some disappointing news yesterday from a Senate spending panel that voted less money for the agency than even the president’s stingy request. … The spending panel delivered its most decisive blow to Brookhaven National Lab’s Rare Symmetry Violating [...]
R.R. Tucci comments Hey! Only 2 sentences devoted to a 100 page paper. Proust you are not. What I would like to hear from the audience are opinions on how far and in what sense does this paper advance the programme of topological quantum computing. And how close are Kitaev and Freedman to finding a [...]
Alexei Kitaev has put a massive paper on the arXiv, cond-mat/0506438 describing a very interesting model with interacting spins on a honeycomb lattice. Looks like I’ve found my bus ride reading for the next month!
When I read articles by creation scientists and there ilk I’m often filled with a feeling of “how the heck can you believe that, surely you’ve heard about this, this, and this.” Invariably they have none read of the “this”‘s. Yesterday I gave a talk at the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School on [...]
Two posts over at Quantum Algorithms, one on D-Wave Systems and another one on a supposed algorithm for solving NP-complete problems efficiently on a quantum computer. When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, when a paper came out claiming that quantum computers could solve NP-complete problems, we would all race to see who could [...]
Neal Stephenson has an op-ed article in the New York Times about Star Wars. Someday we can all be so lucky as to write an op-ed piece on a Science Fiction movie and get it published in the Times. A choice paragraph: Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the [...]
