Month: July 2006

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Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Syd Barrett, co-founder of Pink Floyd, dead at age 60.

Remember when you were young,
You shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there’s a look in your eyes,
Like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire
Of childhood and stardom,
Blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter,
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon,
You cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night,
And exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome
With random precision,
Rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

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Translate to Classical, Then Laugh

If you ever let reviewers get under your skin, your going to waste a lot of your life with way too much grief. So my approach is mostly to first laugh, then send an email to my collaborators expressing outrage (vent), and then laugh again. Sometimes the reviewers comments are just priceless. For example, a recent review of a paper I was involved in had the following line:

However, the mere fact that the…transform can be applied efficiently is not a surprise – usually this is the case with quantum transforms, if one looks into the representation theory close enough.

Why is this funny? Well when I translate this over to classical algorithms I get the following sentence:

However, the mere fact that the circuit can be applied efficiently is not a surprise – usually this is the case with classical circuits, if one looks into the combinatorics close enough.

Ha! Now that’s funny.

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Back From Outerspace

Posting has been low because I’ve been (1) camping on a ferry going through the inside passage in Alaska (where I spent my time doing lots of perturbation theory), (2) camping south of Mt. Rainier, and (3) celebrating the 4th of July.
In other personal news, I’m in Nature! Okay, well not quite, but this website was somehow listed on a list of fifty popular science blogs. Like all such listing this certainly is Macbeth (you know, “full of sound and furtyfury, signifying nothing.”)
Oh, and as of July 1, 2006, I am no longer a “Principal Research Scientist” but instead am a “Research Assistant Professor” in the department of computer science and engineering here are UW. I think this means that Scott can no longer officially use me as his physicist punching bag (although I must say I am certainly happy to oblige)? This is, of course, good news. The only drawback that I know of right now is that when I fill out my tax forms next year I will no longer to fill out my occupation as simply “Scientist.”
Next week I’m off to Bell Labs where I’ll be talking at a meeting called “Quantum Information Meets Nanotechnology” so I promise to have real quantum content next week.