Publish or Perish: a program for calculating h-indices and more. (And yes, to preempt the grumpy academics, taking these measures seriously is clearly silly. But then again, from my perspective there ain’t much in the world that ain’t just plain silly )
A few changes at Scirate.com, which I thought I’d mention. The website now supports all of the different arXives. Of course since the only people who read this silly blog are quantum people, I have no idea how much traction these other archives will have in the short term. Navigation to different days should now [...]
Scott factors while Terrance Tao discusses some quantum mechanics based on…Tomb Raider!
The mystery of what exactly was built up north has been resolved. They built a brain: Within Holistic Quantum Relativity lies the realm of the human mind and the observable universe running like Quantum Computers: this technological synthesis offers the possibility of solving what computer science calls “NP-complete” problems. Last week D-Wave Systems, a privately-held [...]
Traveling in a fried-out combie, on a hippie trail, head full of zombie, I found a new quantum blog: we don’t need no “sticking” room 408, it made me nervous, but it linked to me which is sort of like breakfast.
No sooner do I attack biologists as the common mortal enemy of computer scientists and physicists in my last post when along comes quant-ph/0702203. Yet another nomination, in that great cosmic contest: “best paper title ever!” (said with the comic book guy accent, of course.) quant-ph/0702203: Purple bacteria and quantum Fourier transform Author: Samir Lipovaca [...]
Over at Shtetl-Optimized, Scott goes a little ballistic on criticism he’s received over the wording of his and Umesh Vazirani’s letters to the Economist. (As a side note, it is kind of sad to see such a poorly written article in the Economist: I know for a fact that an early Economist article on Shor’s [...]
Wired’s “Danger Room” blog interviews DARPA chief Tony Tether: NS: Does Darpa’s mission change at all when it’s dealing with a low technological surprise as opposed to a high technological surprise? TT: No. A lot of people think that, when we look at an effort that, unless it’s going to take us 20 years to [...]
Frances E. Allen wins the Turing Award. Citation: For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution.
Da Optimizer makes it into Nature (news@nature.com) with comments on D-wave. See, Nature publishes CS researchers! Scott expresses the concern most researchers in quantum computing have with the hype: “If it fizzles out,” he says, “people might say that quantum computing as a whole is just bunk.” [For a picture of real D-wave scattering, see [...]
I’m at SQuint 2007 which is being held on the campus of Caltech this year. Quite a turnout this year: something like 150 people attending! In fine Caltech tradition the night of my arrival I got pretty much no sleep. And I keep getting the feeling that I have a homework due somewhere on campus. [...]
From a Boston Herald article (appears to be an AP news release): “Users don’t care about quantum computing – users care about application acceleration. That’s our thrust,” he said. “A general purpose quantum computer is a waste of time. You could spend hundreds of billions of dollars on it” and not create a working computer. [...]
