Your Guide to Australian Slang for QIP Sydney

AustralianWhiteIbis gobeirneTo everyone that’s attending QIP, welcome to Sydney!

Since I’ve already had to clarify a number of the finer points of Australian slang to my fellow attendees, I thought I would solve the general problem and simply post a helpful dictionary that translates some uniquely Australian words and usages into standard American English.

Also, this thing on the right is called an ibis. It’s not venomous.

Coffee

Flat white – Try this at least once while you’re here, preferably prepared by a highly skilled barista at one of the better cafes. It’s similar to a latte or to a cappuccino without the foam, but there are important differences.

Long black – Australian version of the Americano, a bit stronger and with crema. It’s the closest you’ll get to a cup of filtered drip coffee, if that’s your thing.

Short black – If you want a standard espresso, order a short black.

The Beach

Thongs – Sandals, or flip-flops. The highest level of dress code in Australia is “no thongs”.

Togs – Swimwear.

Esky – A cooler; the place where you store your beer to keep it cold while you’re getting pissed at the beach.

Pissed – Drunk; the state that a nontrivial fraction of people are in because it’s legal to drink at the beach.

Sunnies – Sunglasses.

Mozzy – Mosquito. Usually not a problem at the beach because there is almost always a breeze.

The Pub

Schooner – (SKOO-ner) A medium-sized glass of beer.

Jug – A pitcher of beer.

Shout – To buy a beer for someone, or a round of beers for your table.

Skol – To chug a beer. Usage: “Hey Robbo, if you skol that schooner I’ll shout you a jug.”

Hotel – In addition to the standard meaning, a hotel is a particular style of pub. It usually has high occupancy and a limited beer selection (though this is starting to improve as craft beer is finally catching on here).

Sports

Football – see “Footy”.

Footy – Rugby. It comes in several varieties, with League and Union being the two most popular varieties.

Gridiron – American football. Not generally watched much down under.

Cricket – An inscrutable game that takes 5 days to play. I think the only way you could like this game is to have the British invade, conquer your land, and occupy your territory under their colonial yoke for at least a few generations. That seems to be how everyone else got into it.

Rooting – Do not make the mistake of saying that you are “rooting for team X”; in Australia, rooting is slang for having sex.

Miscellaneous

Arvo – Afternoon.

Bickie – A cookie or biscuit.

Brekkie – Breakfast.

Fair dinkum – The closest translation is probably “for real”. It’s used to express the sentiment that you’re not deceiving the listener or exaggerating your claims.

Sailing Stones: Mystery No More

My first research project, my first research paper, was on a perplexing phenomenon: the sliding rocks of Death Valley’s Racetrack playa. Racetrack playa is a large desolate dry lake bed that has one distinguishing feature above and beyond its amazing flatness. At the south end of the playa are a large number of large rocks (one man size and smaller), and behind these rocks, if you visit in the summer, are long tracks caked into the dried earth of the playa. Apparently these rocks, during the winter months, move and leave these long tracks. I say apparently, because, for many many years, no one had ever seen these rocks move. Until now! The following video makes me extremely happy

This is a shot of one of the playa stones actually moving! This is the end result of a large study that sought to understand the mechanism behind the sliding stones, published recently in PloS one:

In 1993, fresh out of Yreka High School, I found myself surrounded by 200+ geniuses taking Caltech’s first year physics class, Physics 1 (med schools sometimes ask students at Caltech to verify that they know Calculus because the transcripts have just these low numerical course indicators on them, and of course Physics 1 couldn’t actually be physics with calculus, could it?) It would be a lie to say that this wasn’t intimidating: some of the TAs in the class where full physics professors! I remember a test where the average score was 0.5 out of 10 and perhaps it didn’t help that my roommate studied with a Nobel prize winner as a high school student. Or that another freshman in my class was just finishing a paper with his parents on black holes (or that his dad is one of the founders of the theory of inflation!) At times I considered transferring, because that is what all Caltech students do when they realized how hard Caltech is going to be, and also because it wasn’t clear to me what being a physics major got you.

One day in Physics 1 it was announced that there was a class that you could gain entrance to that was structured to teach you not physics, but how to do creative research. Creativity: now this was something I truly valued! It was called Physics 11 and it was run by one Professor Tom Tombrello (I’d later see his schedule on the whiteboard with the abbreviation T2). The only catch was that you had to get accepted into the class and to do this you had to do you best at solving a toy research problem, what the class termed a “hurdle”. The students from the previous class then helped select the new Physics 11 students based upon their performance on the hurdles. The first hurdle also caught my eye: it was a problem based upon the old song Mairzy Doats which my father had weekly sung while showering in the morning. So I set about working on the problem. I don’t remember much of my solution, except that it was long and involved lots of differential equations of increasing complexity. Did I mention that it was long? Really long. I handed in the hurdle, then promptly ran out of time to work on the second hurdle.

Because I’d not handed in the second hurdle, I sort of expected that I’d not get selected into the class. Plus I wasn’t even in the advanced section of physics 1 (the one TAed by the professors, now those kids were well prepared and smart!) But one late night I went to my mailbox, opened it, and found…nothing. I closed it, and then, for some strange reason, thought: hey maybe there is something stuck in there. So I returned and opened the box, dug deep, and pulled out an invitation to join physics 11! This story doesn’t mean much to you, but I can still smell, feel, and hear Caltech when I think of this event. Also I’ve always been under the impression that being accepted to this class was a mistake and really the invitation I got was meant for another student in a mailbox next to mine. But that’s a story for another session on the couch.

So I enrolled in Physics 11. It’s not much of a stretch to say that it was the inspiration for me to go to graduate school, to do a postdoc, and to become a pseudo-professor. Creative research is an amazing drug, and also, I believe, one of the great endeavors of humanity. My small contribution to the racetrack playa story was published in the Journal of Geology:

The basic mystery was what caused these rocks to move. Was it the wind? It seemed hard to get enough force to move the rocks. Was it ice? When you placed stakes around the rocks, some of the rocks moved out of the stakes and some did not. In the above paper we pointed out that a moving layer of water would mean that there was more wind down low that one would normally get because the boundary layer was moving. We also looked for the effect of said boundary layer on the rocks motion and found a small effect.

The answer, however, as to why the rocks moved, turned out to be even more wonderful. Ice sheets dislodged and bashing the rocks forward. A sort of combination of the two competing previous hypothesis! This short documentary explains it nicely

So, another mystery solved! We know more about how the world works, not on a level of fundamental physics, but on a level of, “because it is interesting”, and “because it is fun”, and isn’t that enough? Arthur C. Clarke, who famously gave airtime to these rocks, would, I think, have been very please with this turn of events

Portrait of an Academic at a Midlife Crisis

Citations are the currency of academia. But the currency of your heart is another thing altogether. With apologies to my co-authors, here is a plot of my paper citations versus my own subjective rating of the paper. Hover over the circles to see the paper title, citations per year, and score. Click to see the actual paper. (I’ve only included papers that appear on the arxiv.)

If I were an economist I suppose at this point I would fit a sloping line through the data and claim victory. But being a lowly software developer, its more interesting to me to give a more anecdotal treatment of the data.

  • The paper that I love the most has, as of today, exactly zero citations! Why do I love that paper? Not because it’s practical (far from it.) Not because it proves things to an absolute T (just ask the beloved referees of that paper.) But I love it because it says there is the possibility that there exists a material that quantum computes in a most peculiar manner. In particular the paper argues that it is possible to have devices where: quantum information starts on one side of device, you turn on a field over the device, and “bam!” the quantum information is now on the other side of the material with a quantum circuit applied to it. How f’in cool is that! I think its just wonderful, and had I stuck around the hallowed halls, I probably would still be yelling about how cool it is, much to the dismay of my friends and colleagues (especially those for which the use of the word adiabatic causes their brain to go spazo!)
  • Three papers I was lucky enough to be involved in as a graduate student, wherein we showed how exchange interactions alone could quantum compute, have generated lots of citations. But the citations correlate poorly with my score. Why? Because it’s my score! Haha! In particular the paper I love the most out of this series is not the best written, most deep, practical, or highly cited. It’s the paper where we first showed that exchange alone was universal for quantum computing. The construction in the paper has large warts on it, but it was the paper where I think I first participated in a process where I felt like we knew something about the possibilities of building a quantum computer that others had not quite exactly thought of. And that feeling is wonderful and is why that paper has such a high subjective score.
  • It’s hard not to look this decades worth of theory papers and be dismayed about how far they are from real implementation. I think that is why I like Coherence-preserving quantum bit and Adiabatic Quantum Teleportation. Both of these are super simple and always felt like if I could just get an experimentalist drunk enough excited enough they might try implement that damn thing. The first shows a way to make a qubit that should be more robust to errors because its ground state is in an error detecting state. The second shows a way to get quantum information to move between three qubits using a simple adiabatic procedure related to quantum teleportation. I still hope someday to see these executed on a functioning quantum computer, and I wonder how I’d feel about them should that happen.

Why I Left Academia

TLDR: scroll here for the pretty interactive picture.
Over two years ago I abandoned my post at the University of Washington as a assistant research professor studying quantum computing and started a new career as a software developer for Google. Back when I was a denizen of the ivory tower I used to daydream that when I left academia I would write a long “Jerry Maguire”-esque piece about the sordid state of the academic world, of my lot in that world, and how unfair and f**ked up it all is. But maybe with less Tom Cruise. You know the text, the standard rebellious view of all young rebels stuck in the machine (without any mirror.) The song “Mad World” has a lyric that I always thought summed up what I thought it would feel like to leave and write such a blog post: “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.”
But I never wrote that post. Partially this was because every time I thought about it, the content of that post seemed so run-of-the-mill boring that I feared my friends who read it would never ever come visit me again after they read it. The story of why I left really is not that exciting. Partially because writing a post about why “you left” is about as “you”-centric as you can get, and yes I realize I have a problem with ego-centric ramblings. Partially because I have been busy learning a new career and writing a lot (omg a lot) of code. Partially also because the notion of “why” is one I—as a card carrying ex-Physicist—cherish and I knew that I could not possibly do justice to giving a decent “why” explanation.
Indeed: what would a “why” explanation for a life decision such as the one I faced look like? For many years when I would think about this I would simply think “well it’s complicated and how can I ever?” There are, of course, the many different components that you think about when considering such decisions. But then what do you do with them? Does it make sense to think about them as probabilities? “I chose to go to Caltech, 50 percent because I liked physics, and 50 percent because it produced a lot Nobel prize winners.” That does not seem very satisfying.
Maybe the way to do it is to phrase the decisions in terms of probabilities that I was assigning before making the decision. “The probability that I’ll be able to contribute something to physics will be 20 percent if I go to Caltech versus 10 percent if I go to MIT.” But despite what some economists would like to believe there ain’t no way I ever made most decisions via explicit calculation of my subjective odds. Thinking about decisions in terms of what an actor feels each decision would do to increase his/her chances of success feels better than just blindly associating probabilities to components in a decision, but it also seems like a lie, attributing math where something else is at play.
So what would a good description of the model be? After pondering this for a while I realized I was an idiot (for about the eighth time that day. It was a good day.) The best way to describe how my brain was working is, of course, nothing short than my brain itself. So here, for your amusement, is my brain (sorry, only tested using Chrome). Yes, it is interactive.

4 Pages

Walk up to a physicist at a party (we could add a conditional about the amount of beer consumed by the physicist at this point, but that would be redundant, it is a party after all), and say to him or her “4 pages.”  I’ll bet you that 99 percent of the time the physicist’s immediate response will be the three words “Physical Review Letters.”  PRL, a journal of the American Physical Society, is one of the top journals to publish in as a physicist, signaling to the mating masses whether you are OK and qualified to be hired as faculty at (insert your college name here).  I jest!  (As an aside, am I the only one who reads what APS stands for and wonders why I have to see the doctor to try out for high school tennis?)  In my past life, before I passed away as Pontiff, I was quite proud of the PRLs I’d been lucky enough to have helped with, including one that has some cool integrals, and another that welcomes my niece into the world.
Wait, wht?!?  Yes, in “Coherence-Preserving Quantum Bits” the acknowledgement include a reference to my brother’s newborn daughter.  Certainly I know of no other paper where such acknowledgements to a beloved family member is given.  The other interesting bit about that paper is that we (okay probably you can mostly blame me) originally entitled it “Supercoherent Quantum Bits.”  PRL, however, has a policy about new words coined by authors, and, while we almost made it to the end without the referee or editor noticing, they made us change the title because “Supercoherent Quantum Bits” would be a new word.  Who would have thought that being a PRL editor meant you had to be a defender of the lexicon?  (Good thing Ben didn’t include qubits in his title.)
Which brings me to the subject of this post.  This is a cool paper.  It shows that a very nice quantum error correcting code due to Bravyi and Haah admits a transversal (all at once now, comrades!) controlled-controlled-phase gate, and that this, combined with another transversal gate (everyone’s fav the Hadamard) and fault-tolerant quantum error correction is universal for quantum computation.  This shows a way to not have to use state distillation for quantum error correction to perform fault-tolerant quantum computing, which is exciting for those of us who hope to push the quantum computing threshold through the roof with resources available to even a third world quantum computing company.
What does this have to do with PRL?  Well this paper has four pages.  I don’t know if it is going to be submitted or has already been accepted at PRL, but it has that marker that sets off my PRL radar, bing bing bing!  And now here is an interesting thing I found in this paper.  The awesome amazing very cool code in this paper  is defined via its stabilizer

I I I I I I IXXXXXXXX; I I I I I I I ZZZZZZZZ,
I I IXXXXI I I IXXXX; I I I ZZZZ I I I I ZZZZ,
IXXI IXXI IXXI IXX; I ZZ I I ZZ I I ZZ I I ZZ,
XIXIXIXIXIXIXIX; Z I Z I Z I Z I Z I Z I Z I Z,

This takes up a whopping 4 lines of the article.  Whereas the disclaimer, in the acknowledgements reads

The U.S. Government is authorized to
reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental pur-
poses notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon.
Disclaimer: The views and conclusions contained herein
are those of the authors and should not be interpreted
as necessarily representing the official policies or endorse-
ments, either expressed or implied, of IARPA, DoI/NBC,
or the U.S. Government.

Now I’m not some come-of-age tea party enthusiast who yells at the government like a coyote howls at the moon (I went to Berkeley damnit, as did my parents before me.)  But really, have we come to a point where the god-damn disclaimer on an important paper is longer than the actual definition of the code that makes the paper so amazing?
Before I became a ghost pontiff, I had to raise money from many different three, four, and five letter agencies.  I’ve got nothing but respect for the people who worked the jobs that help supply funding for large research areas like quantum computing.  In fact I personally think we probably need even more people to execute on the civic duty of getting funding to the most interesting and most trans-form-ative long and short term research projects. But really?  A disclaimer longer than the code which the paper is about?  Disclaiming, what exactly?  Erghhh.

Ig Nobels 2011

Yes, it’s that time of year again. The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held this evening at Harvard. My favorite is the winner of the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, which went to

Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armoured tank.

This could have plausibly gotten him an Ig Nobel in economics instead, since it’s all about incentives. The video is priceless:

As of right now, the list of winners is still not up at the home page for the Annals of Improbable Research. That link should start working shortly, but until then I found this article from the BBC which gives complete coverage of the event. Enjoy!
Of course, this means that we will know the winners of the “real” Nobels soon enough. Put your best guess for the Physics prize in the comments.

Consequence of the Concept of the Universe as a Computer

The ACM’s Ubiquity has been running a symposium on the question What is Computation?. Amusingly they let a slacker like me take a shot at the question and my essay has now been posted: Computation and Fundamental Physics. As a reviewer of the article said, this reads like an article someone would have written after attending a science fiction convention. Which I think was supposed to be an insult, but which I take as a blessing. For the experts in the audience, the fun part starts at the “Fundamental Physics” heading.

Seth Lloyd at IQC

Some fun short clips of Seth Lloyd at the IQC. Love the first one. Disagree with the second one. The third is a great hope. Disagree strong with the fourth one (since I think the definition of a computer must include fault-tolerance.) The fifth one is a great ad!
And the music. Well the intro and final music is…awesome.