Yep, lucky me I’m off to Santa Fe tomorrow morning for the tenth annual SquInT conference. Holy moly ten years of SqUiNT conferences really makes me feel old. I wonder how many Chiles I’ve eaten over all of those conferences (and I don’t even want to think about how many Margaritas or quantum beers I’ve had.)
For fun, and because I’m procrastinating and because I’m self-centered, I decided to go back and look at how I’d participated in this conference:
SqUiNT I (1999): Poster: “Concatenating decoherence free subspaces with quantum error correcting codes”
SqUinT II (2000): Talk: Quantum Three Card Monte
Squint 2nd Student Retreat (2001) Tutorial: Universality in Quantum Information
SquInt 3rd Student Retreat (2003) Tutorials on quantum error correction
SqUINT V (2003): Talk: The Cost of Quantum Correlations
SquInT 4th Student Retreat (2005): Tutorials on quantum algorithms.
SQUinT VII (2005): Talk: Optimal measurements for the dihedral hidden subgroup problem
sQuint VIII (2006): Talk: New Algorithms for the Nonabelian Hidden Subgroup Problem
SquInT IX (2007)Talk: Is Fault-Tolerant Adiabatic Quantum Computation Possible?
Whew. As you can imagine I think everyone is sick and tired of hearing me talk (not to mention the bad jokes.) This year I’m not speaking so it will be nice to just sit back and listening. Indeed, it will be fun because one of my students is giving a talk. Which he wrote in Python. Thousands of lines of Python. Yeah, I may have made a lot of squinT talks over the years, but I never, ever, wrote thousands of Python lines to present a talk. I’ll have to catch up next year, I guess.
O brave new quantum world!
Pity I missed you at SQuInT 2007 (at our alma mater Caltech).
But, while you’re in gorgeous Santa Fe, do take some time out for:
(1) the Santa Fe Institute, even if Murray Gell-Mann isn’t there when you drop by to say hello;
(2) The New Mexico Cafe (after you’ve ramped-up your chile tolerence);
I see the venue is described as: Southwest Quantum Information and Technology
Tenth Annual Meeting, February 14-17, 2008
University of New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico
“SQuInT brings together researchers in theoretical and experimental quantum information science from around the Southwest and beyond.”
[JVP: is “beyond the Southwest isomorphic to “West of Sunset” by Dirk Bogarde, 1987?]
“The 10th Annual SQuInT Workshop will be hosted by the University of New Mexico, organized by Ivan Deutsch and JM Geremia…”
(3) Try to gather supportive and colorful evidence for the widely disseminated tale that, at one particular evening outdoor performance by the Santa Fe Opera of Madama Butterfly [which takes place shortly after the turn of the century, or roughly halfway between the time Commodore Perry began to force Japan out of isolation and the day when Nagasaki became linked with Hiroshima in the world’s consciousness] there was an uneasy reaction in the uadience when one singer declared (in ACT I. GARDEN OF A HOUSE IN NAGASAKI, wherein Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton of the U.S. Navy, amused by certain Japanese customs and determined to enjoy the pleasures of the country where he finds himself stationed, has arranged through Goro, a marriage broker, to wed a beautiful young Japanese girl named Cio-Cio-San, who has the nickname Madama Butterfly. Pinkerton intends to marry in Japanese fashion for 999 years, but with a monthly escape clause]
as I was saying, the actor was saying: “Yonder lie the lights of Nagasaki” — and pointed directly at the visible lights of Los Alamos, off towards Albuquerque.
Pausing after the politically incorrect punchline, JVP waves his hands towards wikipedia, says “you had to have been there”, and mumbles: “The Santa Fe Opera is an American opera company, located 7 miles north of Santa Fe, headquartered on a former guest ranch of 199 [JVP: a prime] acres. John Crosby, a New York-based conductor, founded SFO in 1956, originally as the Opera Association of New Mexico. His goal was to give American singers the opportunity to learn and perform new roles while having ample time for rehearsal and preparation. Its first season began on 3 July 1957.”
I think you should live-blog the pub discussion and/or the skiing.
Oh, and did I mention I’m as jealous as hell?
So, are you going to live-blog the meeting?