[Over at Shtetl-Optimized, Scott Aaronson has decided to take a shot at physicists with his cute little fable The Physicists and the Wagon. Scott specifically called me out, so I feel obliged to respond. Of course I would have liked to respond with a fable directly related to Scott's main point, but that is damn [...]
From quant-ph/0606131: How many copies are needed for state discrimination? Authors: Aram W. Harrow, Andreas Winter Comments: 1 page, submitted to QCMC’06, answer is O(log # of states)
And now for something a little different. A little economics and finance humor: here. (Via Rain City Guide)
For quite a while now I’ve been looking for a good way to deal with the fact that I almost daily look at the arXiv for new papers, but have the bad habit of forgeting about what I want to read from a day’s listings. I’ve tried setting up a blog where the RSS feed [...]
Over at Information Processing, Steve Hsu has a post about a recent paper (with coauthors R. Buniy and A. Zee), hep-th/0606062: “Discreteness and the origin of probability in quantum mechanics” which is probably of interest to quant-ph exclusive readers (it was cross posted to quant-ph today.) The basic idea of the paper is as follows. [...]
Watching PBS tonight: “Dr. Wayne Dyer: The Power of Intention.” Holy moly bad stuff. Religion dressed up in authority soaked in pseudoscience. Use the word “energy” enough and people will believe anything you say. “Spirititual energy is the energy of abundance.” What does this even mean? So here is the real question. Why doesn’t the [...]
If there is a clock in the woods and there is no one there to hear it tick, does time pass? (Corollary question: if there is a clock in the woods and no one is there to hear it tick, do the trees age? Are naturalists killing trees by going camping?)
When I’m feeling particularly stupid, I always, like any good citizen, look around to see what or who I can blame for my stupidity. Lately the leading candidate of my excusing has been my age. I mean, according to Nintendo’s Brain Age game, the optimal age is 20. And we are all trained as graduate [...]
Over at Life as a Physicist, Gordon Watts has a post about using his Tablet PC as a log book for his research (Gordon works in experimental particle physics.) I’ve been doing the same thing for about nine months now: using my tablet to take notes and function as a research lab book (I’ve also [...]
Well the exams are graded, final grades will be turned in this Friday, so what’s a guy to do to celebrate the beginning of summer? How about duggout seats at a Seattle Mariners game! That’s right seats right behind the dugout, so that you could put your beer on the dugout and if you yelled [...]
I’ve just upgraded my blogging software to the latest version. If you seen anything broken, please let me know. Update: I’m having major trackback problems. Trackbacks have been disabled.
This weekend I entered my entire library into librarything. Why would I do this? I don’t really know, but I’ve always been curious how many books I own. The number, as of today, appears to be 858 (including seven duplicates.) For those wishing to see what trash I read, you can find the catelog at [...]
