Gordon Watts over at Life as a Physicist describes a cool response to (crank) manuscripts purporting to factor large numbers (via The Old New Thing). This reminds me of a scam I once dreamed up. The scam would consist of an email like the one here: Dear sir or madam! In today’s modern world, an [...]
One of the cool talks at the northwest APS meeting I attend a little over a week ago was a talk by Mark Beck from Whitman college on implementing Hardy’s test of local realism in an undergraduate lab. I sure wish I’d had this lab when I was an undergraduate (as it is I most [...]
What do you call a blog entry whose only content is a link to another blog post? I suggest calling such posts throughposts.
I was an undergraduate at Caltech, which is located in southern California in the city of Pasadena. This meant that when I went home for the holidays, I would have to drive ten hours north to my home in Yreka, California (by the way, the San Francisco bay area is NOT Northern California!) Along the [...]
Today is my birthday and I am the third Mersenne prime years old. I am skeptical that I will make the fourth Mersenne prime. And I am certain that I will not make the 43rd (?): !
For those of you local to Seattle, Scott Aaronson, keeper of the complexity zoo, will be giving a talk this Thursday: Event: Colloquium, 05/25/2006 11:30 am, Gates Commons, CSE 691 Speaker: Scott Aaronson (University of Waterloo) Talk: The Learnability of Quantum States Abstract: Using ideas from computational learning theory, I’ll show that “for most practical [...]
From article entitled “Bright Outlook for Queenland Nanotechnology Alliance”: …their efforts are focused on making a significant impact into solving many of the holy grails, such as clean energy, personalised medicine and quantum computing. Well I’m not sure if quantum computing is a hoy grail, but I’m pretty sure quantum computing researchers all know and [...]
Right now I’m in the middle of an incredibly strange transition. Friday and Saturday the Northwest Section of the American Physical Society had its annual conference in Tacoma (at the University of Puget Sound: what an acronym, eh?) This conference was full of all sorts of cool physics, astronomy, and even the history of physics [...]
Okay, we will officially call this week “D-wave week.” According to an article here (update: for a link that may work for all browsers, see here), D-wave just secured another round of financing, to the tune of $14,000,000.
An article today in the New York Times describes a cool experiment with “backwards propogating light.” It’s a cool experiment, but what I love best from the article is the following line: However, the pulses were in a shape known as Gaussian, which is, in principle, infinite in width, though in practice not quite that [...]
The KITP is hosting a conference on Topological Phases and Quantum Computation which starts today. The talks should be appearing online this week here. Wish I could be there, but hopefully most of the talks will appear online, thus allowing the teaching bound like me to follow the conference from afar.
It’s Bacon! (Warning: the linked site may lead to abnormally clogged arteries.) Update: From the comments, Bacon, Bacon, Bacon www.baconrobots.com – Because the only thing better then Bacon is a hot animatronic lady cooking it for you. www.ratethebacon.com – A site for bacon lovers who love to talk about bacon. www.baconspectator.com – Home of the [...]
