The Quantum Pontiff

So suppose you are thinking of building an ion trap quantum computer. Since putting all your ions in one trapping region is just silly when you get to large numbers of ions, you are led to think about using multiple ion traping regions. Then you are led to two possible design choices: whether to move [...]

It’s a late night, and you’re getting tired. You’ve just written down a very complicated and large Hamiltonian. Sure it’s a classical Hamiltonian, but it’s still rather beastly. A big beast which takes as input the configuration of a bunch of subsystems and outputs and energy of the system when it is in that configuration. [...]

Via Uncertain Principles who got it from Cocktail Pary Physics, I find that this blog is rated

Jim points me to the fact that Nature has a new website call Precedings which is supposed to act like an arxiv for those not lucky enough to be physicists. Oh, and look you can vote for papers One interesting feature is you can put posters and presentations on the site as well. I’ve always [...]

A classic: Strindberg + Helium. The problem is everytime I rewatch those flash animations, I can’t get Helium’s voice out of my head for days. Argh!

I dream of computation. Our generous universe comes equiped with the ability to compute. That it didn’t have to be this way is, of course, a truism. An unspeakable truism–for that it is this way, is what allows us to even ask the question of why it is this way. But down this rabbit hole [...]

Sure, arXiv:physics is great for entertaining papers. But so is arXiv:cs. For example, take 0706.1926: Title: Towards understanding and modelling office daily life Authors: Michele Bezzi, Robin Groenevelt Measuring and modeling human behavior is a very complex task. In this paper we present our initial thoughts on modeling and automatic recognition of some human activities [...]

Yesterday at the Perimeter Institute, while I was attending FTQC II, I developed a tremendous headache (conveniently it arose just before the panel discussion I was on started its session) which lasted into the night and is only now disipating. This headache was, I’ve concluded, the result of a perfect trifecta of downers. And because [...]

I’m currently visiting the Perimeter Institute for a workshop on fault-tolerant quantum computing. The workshop is great, but the coolest thing is that I get to wear a badge which calls me fault-tolerant: Am I robust? I certainly don’t feel robust, indeed every day it seems entropy finds yet another way to sneak attack me

A strange place to find a computer science dissertation: Walmart. Update: Commentor Michael points to another interesting book for sale at Walmart. But who is this Iaac third author?

MIT, the Caltech of the east coast, gets optimized.