Warning! Politics ahead! I try to avoid it at all costs, but some Fridays, I just can’t take it. Senstive eyes need not continue reading, although graduate students with loans might be tempted to take a look, irrespective of their taste or distaste for politics.
John Preskill points me to Workshop on Classical and Quantum Information Security to be held December 15-18, 2005 at Caltech: This workshop will bring together researchers from a variety of backgrounds who work on different aspects of classical and quantum information security. Participants will strive to identify issues and problems of common interest that can [...]
Hawking interview in the Guardian. Funny: “If you could go back in time, who would you rather meet, Marilyn Monroe or Isaac Newton?” and after 10 minutes he says in that voice that makes the blandest statement sound profound: “Marilyn. Newton seems to have been an unpleasant character.” The interview reminds me of attending a [...]
Information Processing points to a review by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman . What I find interesting in the article is Dyson’s claim that Paul Dirac was a greater genius than Richard Feynman. Of course, judging “greater [...]
A very amusing observation about crackpots. The last line is a classic. I wonder what occupation (besides physicists!) has the highest number of physics crackpots?
Course I’m sitting in on this term (will probably have to miss two lectures, drats!): CSE 533: The PCP Theorem and Hardness of Approximation, Autumn 2005 Instructors: Venkatesan Guruswami and Ryan O’Donnell Meeting times: MW 10:30-11:50 at Loew Hall, Room 222 Course Description The PCP Theorem states that there is a certain format for writing [...]
The Ninth Workshop on Quantum Information Processing, i.e. QIP 2006, has its announcement out. Although, strangely the three emails they sent me all crash pine! QIP will be in Paris this year. They’ve switched to making the process of selecting who will talk competitive (computer scientists, I say!) In addition to longer invited talks, there [...]
Posted, without comment, in order to protect the identity of certain “experimentalists” aiding a “theorist” to take pictures of a theorist’s conception of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer:
I just couldn’t resist free internet access at 5am in the morning in the Sinapore Airport. Update: Nor could I resist internet access at the Tokyo airport.
Just what every physicists has dreamt of: a watch with a Geiger counter in it! Of course, you can tell it is for physicists as well by the lack of style!
Strange stars: Stars race around a black hole at the center of the Andromeda galaxy so fast that they could go the distance from Earth to the Moon in six minutes. The finding, announced today, solves a mystery over the source of strange blue light coming from Andromeda’s center. But it generates a new puzzle: [...]
Wee Kang Chua here in Singapore has pointed me to Quantum Soccer. If you want to decrease your productivity by a good ten, twenty percent, please click on the link.
