The Quantum Pontiff

Posting will be light.

Via Leiter Reports, we find Mark Fiore’s Superintelligent Design. Which might make you happy. This story, found via Chris Mooney, however, will quickly destroy any good mood the previous cartoon may have induced. So I recommend reading the cartoon again and leaving it at that.

Quotes which I put on the final for my quantum computing class: “I didnt’ fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.” — Benjamin Franklin “People will accept your idea much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.”–David H. Commins Unfortunately I didn’t put a comic on [...]

OK, so I know I said no more politics. But opening the paper every morning and seeing a new pro-intelligent design politician blather at the mouth (today was John McCain’s turn), it’s good to see another famous political blatherer actually blathering something sensible. So I present, via Pharyngula, via “Face the Nation” Howard Dean: Mr. [...]

Over at Musings, I just learned that the Arxiv now has trackback capabilities. Now we can spend all our time that we normally spend counting citations, instead counting trackbacks!

I’ve added comment preview. Let’s see if it works. Update: doh, not working. Will work on this tomorrow. Update update: it’s working, thanks the kind help of il filosofo!

“This Is the Way the World Ends” by James Morrow is a classic black satire of nuclear proliferation in the cold war. In an interesting way this book did not resonate with me, but I still found it interesting as a window into the ideas and debates of proliferation and deterance during the cold war. [...]

Peter Woit has an interesting post today on his new book “Not Even Wrong.” In the post Peter describes his zigzag path towards publication of the book and the resistance he encountered. My favorite part is where Peter describes how during one round of review, he encountered a referee who …dealt with the problem of [...]

Well, my grades are all turned in, and so I’ve pretty much officially finished teaching my first class. On the final, I had an extra credit problem which was basically the GHZ problem. It was very interesting to see the different ways in which the students would come up with a contradiction for the impossibility [...]

Just in time for the end of the semester, my new tablet pc arrived. It’s a monster Tecra M4 and so far I must say I love it (once I removed all the bloatware and the ugly stickers!) That’s a picture of Mt. Shasta, a volcano near where I grew up, displayed on Google Earth. [...]

Are doctors scientists? From Chris Mooney, just in time to set my blood pressure up a few notches for the weekend: “I think today a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith,” Frist said. Frist, a doctor who graduated from Harvard Medical School, said exposing children to [...]

I highly recommend this post over at Three-Toed Sloth about identifying coherent structures in spatiotemporal systems. What a pretty post! Oh, and the science is fascinating as well. It reminds me of a question I’ve always wondered about in cellular automata theory. It’s a bit long winded, so if I get the time I’ll write [...]