Reading Light by M. John Harrison, I ran across a neat reference to quantum computing. So at the begining of the book a main character kills a guy and returns to a lab (of course, doesn’t everyone go to lab after they’ve murdered someone?) where they are working with “q-bits” [sic]. Then this choice line [...]
Vatican Apologizes For Torture, Murder Of Stephen Hawking. I’ve seen his talking wheelchair. It says “beep! beep! beep!” often during the middle of his own scientific talk.
A New York Times article on computers playing poker heads up against humans opens with For anyone stuck on a casino stool, playing hours of video poker, rest assured: humans can still beat a computer. Um, well first of all, video poker is quite different from the heads up Texas Holdem the entire article is [...]
A new paper, “On the Generation of Random Numbers.” Postscript available here. What do you think should I submit it to the arXiv?
I have always been a daydreamer. There isn’t a place or distraction in the world which can keep me from somehow drifting off into a daydreaming state of mind. Which, of course, must be rather amusing for others observing my behavior. One second I’m talking about Barry Bonds and the San Francisco Giants, and the [...]
Best quote from an article in the New York Times about the search for the Higgs boson: Joe Lykken, a Fermilab theorist who said he first learned of the rumored bump the old-fashioned way, over lunch in the laboratory cafeteria, said: “Pre-blog, this sort of rumor would have circulated among perhaps a few dozen physicists. [...]
Juiciest paper on the arxiv yesterday? 0707.3101: “Excision Without Excision: the Relativistic Turducken” by D. Brown, O. Sarbach, E. Schnetter, M. Tiglio, P. Diener, I. Hawke, D. Pollney.
Yesterday my grandmother, Helen Lavender Bacon passed away at the age of 91. Grandma Pete (as we called her, Pete being my grandparent’s dog…doesn’t everyone name their grandparents after their grandparent’s pets?) was the kindest person I have ever met in my life. I have many fond memories of my grandma, including a spectacular trip [...]
It is coming! Maybe, finally, after all these years of waiting, we will learn just exactly what “Quantum Presbyterianism” is: Homer: [opens door to find Kang and Kodos standing there] Hello — oh great. Mormons. Kang: Actually, we’re Quantum Presbyterians… I’m thinking it involves a doctrine which says that you are spiritually doomed to branches [...]
Doctor Wilbur Von Philbert explains the laws of the quantum cheneyverse. Surely a theory of quantum government will appear on the arxiv soon, no? Update: Robin points out this relevant link.
This news article, led me to this website, describing a scheme (arXiv:0706.0062, “Teleportation of massive particles without shared entanglement” A. S. Bradley, M. K. Olsen, S. A. Haine and J. J. Hope) for transporting matter waves between two remote BECs. The basic idea is a setup where mater wave gets converted into information in photons [...]
