Author: dabacon

Posted on

A Supporter

It’s always good to see the “quantum computing friendly” gain entry to high places:

Tony Hey to join Microsoft as Corporate Vice President
Professor Tony Hey is to join Microsoft Corporation as a corporate vice president to co-ordinate their Technical Computing Initiative. He will work across the company to co-ordinate Microsoft’s efforts to collaborate with the scientific community worldwide.
Currently Director of the UK’s e-Science Programme, Tony Hey has been a member of staff of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) since 1986, and was Head of School from 1994 to 1999.
He played a critical role in building the School into one of the UK’s leading academic departments, and has retained his Chair in the School throughout his period of secondment to UK e-Science.
‘This is wonderful news,’ said Professor Wendy Hall, Head of ECS, ‘and I am delighted to send our warmest congratulations to Tony on behalf of the School. His energy, vision, and sheer ability to make things happen will be of huge benefit to Microsoft and to future collaboration with researchers worldwide. At Southampton we are very glad that Tony will be retaining his Chair in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and his strong links with the School and the University.’
Professor Hey is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In the New Year Honours List (2005) he received the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for his services to science.
‘Today computation plays a critical role in advancing research across almost every field of science, yet far too often scientists must build all their own programming infrastructures and research their own algorithms to help advance their research effort,’ said Professor Hey. ‘By collaborating with the scientific community, I am confident that some of Microsoft’s advanced technologies can be used to accelerate their rate of discover.’
He has worked in the field of parallel and distributed computing since the early 1980s and was instrumental in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and in the Genesis Distributed Memory Parallel Benchmark suite. In 1991, he founded the Southampton Parallel Applications Centre (now the IT Innovation Centre), which has played a leading technology transfer role in Europe and the UK in collaborative industrial projects. His personal research interests are concerned with performance engineering for Grid applications but he also retains an interest in experimental explorations of quantum computing and quantum information theory.

For those who don’t remember, Tony Hey was the editor for “Feynman Lectures on Computation” and the companion volume entitled “Feynman and Computation.”

Posted on

Quantum Documentary?

One question I’ve had for a long time is why there hasn’t been a good documentary produced about the field of quantum information science. There is certainly a feeling that quantum computing has leaked into the mainstream of geeks through various sci-fi stories, articles in Scientific American, and postings on Slashdot, and yet there hasn’t been a NOVA style documentary produced on the field in spite of the (I think) fascinating results which have emerged from the field in the last few decades (we’ve got to count quantum cryptography!)

Posted on

Journal of Well Written Scientific Papers

Via Michael Nielsen I’ve found that Ben Schumacher, inventor of the word “qubit” and quantum information theorist extraordinaire, has a blog. Michael points to the following from quote from Ben:

But you know, so much of academic writing is bad. It is banal, orotund, unmusical, and stuffed with wads of unnecessary jargon. It is the sort of writing that does more to obscure meaning than to convey it. I see this stuff almost every day. I swim in it. OK, maybe I do exaggerate, a little. After all, I teach at a liberal arts college that is moderately well-known for teaching people how to write. Our faculty is full of novelists and poets and whatnot. But let me tell you, it’s here, too. It’s everywhere. It is like a fungus growing over all things, blurring their shapes — the verbal equivalent, maybe, of the ivy on academic buildings. And like the ivy, I guess, its main purpose is to conceal the shabby edifices beneath

Which made me think that it would be fun to create a scientific journal in which good writing was a requirment. No silly page limits either. You either write a killer article, which is comprehensible and well written, or your articled doesn’t get accepted. Even if you result is correct and even if your result is groundbreaking. Sure, not all journals could be this way, but it would if such a journal existed, I would certainly be a regular reader. I certainly know that there are people who are up to the task: every once in a while you stumble upon a piece of scientific writing which is so well written it just makes you cry the next time you look through Physical Review Letters.

Posted on

Homeless Life in a Loop

Yesterday, while waiting for the bus, I was acosted by a homeless man who was missing his front teeth. I asked him how he was doing and he said he was high. I told him I was a theoretical physicist and he said “Amazing! Because I don’t live in reality, so it’s strange that we should meet.” (Indeed!) Then he asked me if the manhole cover in front of us turned into a portal which would take me to an alternate reality whether I would jump into the hole. Of course I said I would. Then somehow our conversation turned to time travel (doesn’t it always) and he said he thought that he was in a situation where things kept repeating themselves. I told him that physicists call this a “closed timelike curve.” He asked me how he could get off the closed timelike curve. Which made me sad.

Posted on

Filibuster Logic

I find it very difficult to agree with the majority of what any one political pundit has to say. It’s a rare case where I read an article that I don’t have at least some problem with the language and logic used in the article. Normally this is just in the back of my head and doesn’t really get to me. But the current “debate” over changing the filibuster rules has sent me over the edge.
Take, for example, this from Ronald D. Rotunda, a law professor at George Mason,

The filibuster has a long history, but its pedigree should not make us proud. It prevented civil rights legislation from being adopted for nearly a century. Now a minority of senators is using it to prevent the Senate from voting on judicial nominees even though a majority of the senators from both parties would vote to confirm if they only could vote.

Aaaaaah! The logic in this paragraph is (1) filibuster blocked civil rights legislation, (2) that was bad, (3) the filibuster is being used to block judicial nominations, (4) ergo blocking those judges (“even though”) must be bad. What kind of logic is that?
In the last paragraph of the article we further find

Now, a minority of senators once again claims that the Senate cannot change it rules to prevent this filibuster unless a super-majority agree. That is wrong. To paraphrase Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, to vote without debate is unwise, but to debate without even being able to vote is ridiculous.

Ack. Not being able to vote is ridiculous, but the filibuster IS a vote. It’s a vote by 41 Senators not to proceed. Just because a vote is not a majority vote does not invalidate that it is a vote. By a similar logic, votes to amend the constitution do not constitute a proper vote because they require supermajorities.
OK, sorry, I don’t usually make to many political posts, but this lack of logic in the debate is making me bonkers.

Posted on

Talks and Papers Posted

I’ve put a bunch of my talks and my papers on the web. They can be accessed using the cute little tabs above.
Unfortunately I somehow lost a few of my talks. One talk that is missing, for example, is my talk “What Would John Bell Do?” which included sounded as well as astounding movies and animation. I hope I can find where I put a backup, cus this talk is really rather amusing.

Posted on

Summer Teaching

This summer I’m teaching a course in the professional masters program here at UW:

CSE P 590 TU: Quantum Computing
Dave Bacon – Instructor
Day/Time: Wednesday 6:30-9:20 pm; Place: TBD
(First time offering.) An introduction to and survey of the field of quantum computing. Quantum computation is an emerging field whose goal is to design effectively atomic sized computers which exploit the parallelism of the quantum mechanical laws of the universe. While this sounds futuristic, quantum computers are fast becoming a reality, and have the potential to revolutionize computation over the next twenty years. Topics include quantum algorithms, quantum error correction, and quantum cryptography. This course will cover why quantum computers can break certain public key cryptosystems, the engineering challenges in building a physical quantum computing device, and the level of security assured by quantum crytopgraphic devices. Prior knowledge of quantum theory is not necessary.

I just put up a preliminary version of the course website. The one issue which is bugging me a lot as I try to think about this class is exactly how to deal with the nearly three hour length of these classes. I may be a funny looking guy, but am I really as entertaining as the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings?

Posted on

NYTimes Flubs it Up

From the New York Times this Sunday:

Hearings on how Kansas schoolchildren should be taught about the origins of life – the fourth and final session concluded on Thursday in Topeka – quickly morphed from science lesson to vocabulary quiz.

Repeat after me: the theory of evolution is not a theory of the origin of life. The theory of evolution is not a theory of the origin of life. Bleh. Shame on you New York Times.

Posted on

The Zen of Working on the Bus

When I was a graduate student in Berkeley, I lived in two locations which had a bit of a walk to get to my office on campus (around twenty minutes.) While this may sound like a horribly unproductive waste of time, I found that almost all of my research got done because of this walk. In my walk to work I would often start thinking about a problem I was working on. Sometimes I would make significant progress on the walk. One reason for this may be that I had to do all the thinking in my head (no pad of paper, no whiteboard.) More importantly, though, I think the walk almost always woke my brain up and got it primed to continue to work thoughout the day.
When I moved to Caltech and then to Santa Fe, I lived in locations where I would drive to work or where the walk was for a very short distance. I definitely noticed that it was more difficult to get my brain working in the morning because of this.
So it’s quite fun, now, taking the bus to work. Beside the pain of riding the bus in one of the sideway seats (so that the hurky-jerky motion of the bus makes your back muscles big and strong), the thirty minute trip to campus has been extremely productive. Just this morning I found a polynomial time reduction for a problem I’ve been working on while the bus rounded a corner. In fact, I may just add this to my list of criteria for discovering if you are a theoretical physicist:

  • You might be a theoretical physicist if someone describes prison to you as a very isolating place and you ask “Do they give you a pen and paper?”
  • You might be a theoretical physicist if you find that you can work on a problem so hard that the clock on your desk mysteriously skips two or three hours when you thought only ten minutes had passed.
  • You might be a theoretical physicist if you discover that in locations where most people are listening to their iPods, you are inverting a three by three matrix in your head.
Posted on

Paying Doh

Life feels strange when it begins to feel like an episode of the Simpsons. Today I actually payed a “Monorail tax” of two hundred plus bucks to register my card.

Marge: According to this book, the monorail goes over 150 miles an hour! What if something goes wrong?
Homer: “What if.” What if I stepped in the shower and slipped on a bar of soap? … Oh, my God! I’d get killed!