Singapore. Nothing like a thunder storm at 2 am.
I’m here to visit the Quantum Information Technology Group at the National University of Singapore, a.k.a. quantumlah. Their motto is “We do IT with qubits.” Which reminds me that I need to get my personalized Washington state license plates. In California, I had the plates “QUBITS” (because one qubit isn’t that interest). What should I get this time? I was thinking of “NTANGLD” or maybe just “QUANTUM.”
Planets, Lies, and Astronomy Logs
New York Times: One Find, Two Astronomers: An Ethical Brawl After reading this you might want to double check the security of your local research wiki or blog.
Pop, Coke, …
SODA papers are out. One quantum paper: “Quantum Verification of Matrix Products” by Harry Buhrman and Robert Spalek. Also known as quant-ph/0409035.
Jet Lag, Shmet Lag
Tokyo, in route to Singapore.
Ticking Away the Moments That Make Up a Dull Day
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s new book coming out this September: A Briefer History of Time
Twirling, Twirling To Infinity
Nature gets the best title of the day award for “Cosmic ‘cigar’ spins at astonishing pace”. Seems that Santa is a very strange object, indeed.
Going to MIT and Negative Information
Patrick Hayden (awesome ski picture) sends me an email that negative quantum information was discussed…..on the public radio show “Car Talk!” (The August 27th edition, available for purchase from audible.com.) You know your work has hit it big time when it makes it onto a show which discusses how to repair your car. The next step after “Car Talk” is if your work appears on “The Daily Show.”
Of course, we shouldn’t be too surprised. The hosts of “Car Talk”, Tom Magliozzi and Ray Magliozzi (click and clack), both graduated from MIT. In the show where they discuss negative quantum information, one of the two hosts says something like “Of course you know who Claude Shannon is.” Of course!
FTQC 2005 Talks
A workshop I very much regret missing because I was in Italy, “IBM Workshop on Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation” now has all of their presentations online.
Beyond the Frinkahedron
An easy, well written discussion of the casual causal dynamical triangulations approach to quantum gravity: hep-th/0509010: “The Universe from Scratch” by J. Ambjørn, J. Jurkiewicz. and R. Loll. If I were young (wait a second), interested in quantum gravity, and this article didn’t get me interested in this technique, I think I would check my pulse (ducks shoe thrown by Lubos.)
physics.QP
The arxiv has announced a restructuring of its categories. Quant-ph will be known as physics.QP and its moderators are Daniel Gottesman and Lev Vaidman:
physics.QP Quantum Physics (Daniel Gottesman, Lev Vaidman)
quantum information and associated physical effects, quantum computation, experimental quantum devices, non-determinism experiments and interpretations
I have no idea what “non-determinism experiments” refers to. Apparently there are some really good experimentalists out there who run experiments with no noise.