Visiting Shtetl-Optimized always brings out the neologista in me. Reading tonight led me to the following idea for a useful phrase: Front of the envelope calculation A calculation so simple that you don’t even need to use the back of the envelope to carry it out.
JohnQPublic points me to a new use of quantum theory. World peace: At about 4:30 you’ll find my favorite line: “…the radiated influence of peace in the environment grows roughly as the square of the number of people doing it together…” Can we expect Grover speedups in achieving world peace if we use quantum theory?
Because, of course, you’ve all been wondering about goings on in my life. Of couse you have, that’s why you’re wasting your time reading blogs on the intertubes, no? Look, I’m a small part physicist! Which part has yet to be determined. Please, please, do not let bacn catch on. (Thanks to Brian for pointing [...]
From a New York Times article: Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science. Link to links to articles here. Doesn’t this make you want to [...]
Is gr-qc/0504083 the world record holder for number of versions on the arXiv? Seventy four is a lot of versions.
Um…arXiv:0708.2410: Title: How to become a superhero Authors: P. M. Gleiser We analyze a collaboration network based on the Marvel Universe comic books. First, we consider the system as a binary network, where two characters are connected if they appear in the same publication. The analysis of degree correlations reveals that, in contrast to most [...]
From an article in the New York Times today: More recently, executives have blamed very unusual events — known to experts as 25-standard deviation moves, things expected only every 100,000 years — for the disruptions that computers could not predict. Um, according to my calculation, a 25 standard deviation move on a normal distribution has [...]
Paper dance. Delayed posting here about the paper dance because I did the paper dance in Bocas de Toro in Panama. “Panama! Panama ah ah ah! … Model citizen, zero discipline.” New paper, arXiv:0708.1221 (scirate here): Title: Caching in matrix product algorithms Authors: Gregory M. Crosswhite and Dave Bacon Abstract: A new type of diagram [...]
It looks like the America COMPETEs act is making its way out of Congress (See here). One interesting part of the science and technology legislature being considered is the creation of ARPA-E, an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (initial budget of $300M.) Similarly, a while back (former) Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte discussed [...]
Over at Life as a Physicist Gordon Watts notes the email we received here at the University of Washington from our university president yesterday which told us that last year, for the first time, UW received over a billion dollars in research grants. Only John Hopkins receives more money. Of course the main reason for [...]
