Group Page Wikified

Nice page indeed.
Though it does destroy the illusion hitherto promulgated that you are an emergent state of the vacuum. Or was that false vacuum? One of 10^500 vacua in The Landscape?
Funny, my wife is an experimental condensed matter physicist, but once in a long while she gets nostalgic for Clebsch-Gordan coefficients.
Warning: dense data dump ahead, here be magicdragons.
Did you know that there are ~ 10^9 neurons (espcially Interstitial Cells of Cajal) in the plexus distributed between the two muscle layers in your stomach, small intestine, and large intestine, that being 1% as many neurons as in your brain, and many more than your spinal cord? Some people are intellectuals but only at the gut level. “Our understanding of virtue and vice, success and failure, has long been expressed in the language of appetite, consumption, and digestion” [‘A Short History of the American Stomach’ by Frederick Kaufman, Harcourt, 2008, 206 pp.]
And, as to the question “what do academics do while watching the Super Bowl?” let me point out that I had 2 friends over watching, on our digital projector surround-sound top-grade big movie screen, the insanely oscillating (in last quarter) SuperBowl who qualify as intellectuals (not counting my Physics professor wife and our smarter-than-us-both son, who wandered in to see once in a while when we screamed louder than usual, William Drury concentrated on making sarcastic comments about ads, and plotting his next start-up within IdeaLab and playing with his iPhone; while Dr. George Hockney (ex-Fermilab, UCLA postdoc doing lattice QCD simulations, then JPL Quantum Computing and GR corrections to The Ephemeris and software guru) kept reverting to his NSF Grant Referee mode and asking me vexingly hard questions about my latest and greatest paper, in which he’s already acknowledged more than anyone but me, my coauthor, and the SBML team at Caltech).
Said paper being (for the record) a Grand Unified Theory of the Gut = G.U.T. of GUT; at least that part which deals with biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, kinetics, neurophysics, myoelectrophysiology, rheology, immunology, fluid dynamics, control theory; in the context of diagnosis, pathogenesis, risk assessment, treatment; of post-operative paralysis of the human small intestine (ileus) contrasted with normal peristaltic and regulatory function, related post-operative pathologies, in vivo and in vitro measurements, in silico computer simulations, experimental data on horse, dog, pig, guinea pig, and mouse gastrointestinal tracts. Clinical Computational Biology, paper now at draft 1.5, coauthored with Thomas L. Vander Laan, M.D., FACS, etc., (who saved my life while I was at Huntington hospital 9-18 Jan 2008, in return for which he gets the burden of being my coauthor, which answers the questions “what do intellectuals do in hospital when asked “on a scale from 0 to 10, how much does it hurt?”) he being technically on staff at USC Medical School as well as Huntington Memorial Hospital. The package of models is being developed in SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language) technically in beta-test Level 3 (for 2-D and 3-D spacial modeling going beyond the purely topological “compartments” hierarchy and flows, and with a spacial structure of a 1-D array of 6096 elements, each slice being a 2-D concentric annulus system of neural, biochemical, and myoelectrical entities defined by hybrid event-delay-Partial Differential Equations with algebraic constraints). Clinical testing shall be at USC Medical School (as Caltech has no Medical School) but is expected/hoped to be anchored at Caltech’s Beckman Institute’s Biological Networks Modeling Center.
And, apologizing in advance for the MANY very distinguished people whose names I am compelled to list below, to emphasize that I did not spring from a vacuum spontaneously when I appeared at Caltech aged 16 on full scholarship in 1968 to study with Feynman, I do openly admit my stupidity and ignorance and listen (or have listened) carefully to advice at Caltech several times each from Barry Simon, Gary Lorden, David Wales, Michael Aschbacher, Tom Apostol, W.A.J. Luxemburg, Dinakar Ramakrishnan, Rick Wilson, Kip Thorne, Ed Stone, Bruce Murray, Harry B. Gray, Fred and Bozena Thompson, Trustee (supercomputer designer) Phil Neches, former VP/Provost Steve Koonin, Kelly Beatty, the late Fritz Zwicky, the late Jesse Greenstein, the late Olga Taussky Todd, and the late Herbert John Ryser.
I’ll never again have such senior pioneering august Computer Science advice and teaching as I got from my former teacher John “Jack” Todd (although Claude Elwood Shannon, Edward Fredkin, former PhD Thesis advisor Oliver Selfridge comes close, as does Stan Ulam, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, John Holland, Solomon Golomb, John Horton Conway, Stephen Wolfram, Gregory Chaitin, Bill Gross, Yaneer Bar-Yam, Stuart Kauffman, Danny Hillis, Calvin Mooers, Richard S. Varga, Doyne Farmer, Chris Langton, Tom Ray, Doug Hofstadter, Kathleen M. Carley, partner Ted “Hypertext” Nelson, and the late Derek H. Fender). Also Penrose’s student prof. Tim Poston. Also John Forbes Nash, Jr., who (with wife Alice and son John were extremely kind personally and generous with time and company).

6 Replies to “Group Page Wikified”

Suresh says:

February 4, 2008 at 12:59 am

neato. Where do you get the calendar template from ?

Dave Bacon says:

February 4, 2008 at 10:28 am

The Google Calendar is a mediawiki extension http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GoogleCalendar
What Pieter wants me to post actual scientific content? 🙂 Well I’m try to finish a paper related to self correction and so maybe when I get that done I’ll actually describe my research instead of just gossip.

Pieter Kok says:

February 4, 2008 at 6:23 am

Nice page! I also would like to know (1) where you got the calendar template from, and (2) could you tell us more about the quantum memory (there does not seem to be a link to a paper from the image)? Is it a kind of graph state?

Jonathan Vos Post says:

February 4, 2008 at 8:13 am

Nice page indeed.
Though it does destroy the illusion hitherto promulgated that you are an emergent state of the vacuum. Or was that false vacuum? One of 10^500 vacua in The Landscape?
Funny, my wife is an experimental condensed matter physicist, but once in a long while she gets nostalgic for Clebsch-Gordan coefficients.
Warning: dense data dump ahead, here be magicdragons.
Did you know that there are ~ 10^9 neurons (espcially Interstitial Cells of Cajal) in the plexus distributed between the two muscle layers in your stomach, small intestine, and large intestine, that being 1% as many neurons as in your brain, and many more than your spinal cord? Some people are intellectuals but only at the gut level. “Our understanding of virtue and vice, success and failure, has long been expressed in the language of appetite, consumption, and digestion” [‘A Short History of the American Stomach’ by Frederick Kaufman, Harcourt, 2008, 206 pp.]
And, as to the question “what do academics do while watching the Super Bowl?” let me point out that I had 2 friends over watching, on our digital projector surround-sound top-grade big movie screen, the insanely oscillating (in last quarter) SuperBowl who qualify as intellectuals (not counting my Physics professor wife and our smarter-than-us-both son, who wandered in to see once in a while when we screamed louder than usual, William Drury concentrated on making sarcastic comments about ads, and plotting his next start-up within IdeaLab and playing with his iPhone; while Dr. George Hockney (ex-Fermilab, UCLA postdoc doing lattice QCD simulations, then JPL Quantum Computing and GR corrections to The Ephemeris and software guru) kept reverting to his NSF Grant Referee mode and asking me vexingly hard questions about my latest and greatest paper, in which he’s already acknowledged more than anyone but me, my coauthor, and the SBML team at Caltech).
Said paper being (for the record) a Grand Unified Theory of the Gut = G.U.T. of GUT; at least that part which deals with biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, kinetics, neurophysics, myoelectrophysiology, rheology, immunology, fluid dynamics, control theory; in the context of diagnosis, pathogenesis, risk assessment, treatment; of post-operative paralysis of the human small intestine (ileus) contrasted with normal peristaltic and regulatory function, related post-operative pathologies, in vivo and in vitro measurements, in silico computer simulations, experimental data on horse, dog, pig, guinea pig, and mouse gastrointestinal tracts. Clinical Computational Biology, paper now at draft 1.5, coauthored with Thomas L. Vander Laan, M.D., FACS, etc., (who saved my life while I was at Huntington hospital 9-18 Jan 2008, in return for which he gets the burden of being my coauthor, which answers the questions “what do intellectuals do in hospital when asked “on a scale from 0 to 10, how much does it hurt?”) he being technically on staff at USC Medical School as well as Huntington Memorial Hospital. The package of models is being developed in SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language) technically in beta-test Level 3 (for 2-D and 3-D spacial modeling going beyond the purely topological “compartments” hierarchy and flows, and with a spacial structure of a 1-D array of 6096 elements, each slice being a 2-D concentric annulus system of neural, biochemical, and myoelectrical entities defined by hybrid event-delay-Partial Differential Equations with algebraic constraints). Clinical testing shall be at USC Medical School (as Caltech has no Medical School) but is expected/hoped to be anchored at Caltech’s Beckman Institute’s Biological Networks Modeling Center.
And, apologizing in advance for the MANY very distinguished people whose names I am compelled to list below, to emphasize that I did not spring from a vacuum spontaneously when I appeared at Caltech aged 16 on full scholarship in 1968 to study with Feynman, I do openly admit my stupidity and ignorance and listen (or have listened) carefully to advice at Caltech several times each from Barry Simon, Gary Lorden, David Wales, Michael Aschbacher, Tom Apostol, W.A.J. Luxemburg, Dinakar Ramakrishnan, Rick Wilson, Kip Thorne, Ed Stone, Bruce Murray, Harry B. Gray, Fred and Bozena Thompson, Trustee (supercomputer designer) Phil Neches, former VP/Provost Steve Koonin, Kelly Beatty, the late Fritz Zwicky, the late Jesse Greenstein, the late Olga Taussky Todd, and the late Herbert John Ryser.
I’ll never again have such senior pioneering august Computer Science advice and teaching as I got from my former teacher John “Jack” Todd (although Claude Elwood Shannon, Edward Fredkin, former PhD Thesis advisor Oliver Selfridge comes close, as does Stan Ulam, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, John Holland, Solomon Golomb, John Horton Conway, Stephen Wolfram, Gregory Chaitin, Bill Gross, Yaneer Bar-Yam, Stuart Kauffman, Danny Hillis, Calvin Mooers, Richard S. Varga, Doyne Farmer, Chris Langton, Tom Ray, Doug Hofstadter, Kathleen M. Carley, partner Ted “Hypertext” Nelson, and the late Derek H. Fender). Also Penrose’s student prof. Tim Poston. Also John Forbes Nash, Jr., who (with wife Alice and son John were extremely kind personally and generous with time and company).

matt says:

February 4, 2008 at 10:59 am

Nice page, Dave. Is the QW group part of one of the departments (EE/CS?), or are you a separate organization?

Pieter Kok says:

February 4, 2008 at 2:14 pm

LOL! Cheers Dave. Good luck with the paper!

6 Replies to “Group Page Wikified”

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