….and the winners of the 2004 Turing award are Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn inventors of TCP (transmision-control protocol.) Needless to say the fact that you are reading this message at all says a lot about their impact.
Addiction
There must be a conservation of addictions in the world. Since QIP, I’ve totally given up drinking Diet Coke because John Cortese told me a story about a coworker who went into epipleptic siezures because of the aspertame in the Diet Coke. I’ve gone from around 8 cans of Diet Coke a day to zero. Boy that Turkey sure is feeling cold.
So what have I replaced Diet Coke with? Well tea and coffee, of course. But I’ve also become addicted to the radio station KEXP i.e www.kexp.org.
I’m thinking of performing an expriment where I give up listening to KEXP and see if I start craving Diet Coke.
Word of the Day
Economists are the source of many of my favorite words. Here is another neat one:
Leptokurtic: pertaining to a probability distribution more heavily concentrated around the mean, i.e., having a sharper, narrower peak, than the normal distribution with the same variance.
Arxiv Data
In fairness, here are all of the different categories from ArXiv.org:
One can certainly see the effect of different fields slowly adopting the arxiv, but it seems that even by around 1996, the use of the arxiv was becoming pretty ubiquitous. Here are the percentages from 1997 to 2004:
An interesting trend I was not aware of until plotting this was the rise of the physics category. I’m guessing that this is due to the rise of biophysics. Yes, people, the future is biology! Ack, and the future is bleak for me if I don’t get back to Powerpoint!
The Rise of Quant-Ph
As a break from talk writing, I decided to take a look at the number of papers posted to the quant-ph archive versus the number of papers posted to the hep-th archive on the ArXiv.org Soon we (quant-ph) will take over the world, no?
Pretty astounding that quant-ph is now almost as active as hep-th.
Upcoming Talks
Three talks (maybe four) coming up in the next few weeks have me attached at the hip to Microsoft Powerpoint. First up is the SQuInT conference in Tuscon Arizona where I will be talking Friday, Feb. 18 about my work with Andrew Childs and Wim van Dam on the optimal measurements for the dihedral hidden subgroup problem. Then it’s off to Washington State where I will be giving a Physics colloqium on Tuesday, Feb. 22. The title of this talk is “Quantum Computing in 2020.” Which led me to a very nice quote by Niels Bohr: “Predicition is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” After WSU, I’m off to Seattle where I will be giving a Computer Science and Engineering colloqium at the University of Washington on Thursday Feb. 24. The title of this talk is “How and What to Quantum Compute” and I have (ack!) boldly promised that I
…will draw insights from the vast knowledge base of theoretical and experimental physics, mathematics, engineering, and computer science. The talk will be accessible to practitioners from all of these fields and represents not just an opportunity to see the different fields interact, but also an invitation to participate in the intellectual and practical challenges of quantum information science.
This colloqium will probably be taped and put online in streaming format which I’m really looking forward to. Once I was taped teaching a section of an undergrad physics course at Berkeley. It was very informative to see all the places I was messing up and at least for the next few weeks I think I was a much better teacher. Ak, OK, enough distraction from the blog. Back to my best friend Powerpoint.
Under the Milky Way Tonight
In astro-ph/0501177, Warren Brown, Margaret Geller, Scott Kenyon, and Michael Kurtz announce the discovery of a star which is traveling out of the Milky Way galactic halo at a speed of at least around 700 kilometers per second (.2% of the speed of light.) That’s the fastest ever observed, and the authors speculate that this may be an example of a star which interacted with the black hole at the center of our galaxy. For comparrison, the escape velocity for a star located at its current distance from the galactic center (50 kiloparsecs) is 300 kilometers per second.
So I guess we should all say good bye to SDSS J090745.0+024507. Say “hi” to the intergalactic medium for us, won’t you?
Laughlin Breaks the Law(s)
Via 3 Quarks Daily comes this very interesting essay by Robert Laughlin (he of the strong anti quantum computing sentiment, none the less…) Here Laughlin lays out his main thesis,
I am increasingly persuaded that all physical law we know about has collective origins, not just some of it. In other words, the distinction between fundamental laws and the laws descending from them is a myth — as is therefore the idea of mastery of the universe through mathematics solely. Physical law cannot generally be anticipated by pure thought, but must be discovered experimentally, because control of nature is achieved only when nature allows this through a principle of organization.
from which he concludes that
To defend my assertion I must openly discuss some shocking ideas: the vacuum of space-time as “matter,” the possibility that relativity is not fundamental, the collective nature of computability, epistemological barriers to theoretical knowledge, similar barriers to experimental falsification, and the mythological nature of important parts of modern theoretical physics. The radicalness is, of course, partly a stage prop, for science, as an experimental undertaking, cannot be radical or conservative but only faithful to the facts. But these larger conceptual issues, which are not science at all but philosophy, are often what most interest us because they are what we call upon to weigh merit, write laws, and make choices in our lives.
I can understand all of his shocking ideas, except I have now clue what “the collective nature of computability” means. Anyone have a guess?
Nature's Harshness
Sometimes even the mass emailings can be a bit biting:
From: Naturejobs <nature @scientific-direct.net>
Reply-To: Naturejobs <0a818b044 .560096.e9411888a8e63f8a.16.n.3@scientific-direct.net>
To: D Bacon <dabacon at cs.caltech.edu>
Subject: What is your excuse this year?
The Knuth Is We Fail
If you’ve ever been fascinated by how people approach solving problems, these notes from a “Programming and Problem Solving Seminar” taught by Donald Knuth at Stanford are an extremely interesting read. Knuth selected five (unsolved) problems for the class to work on (with an eye for problems that would lead to interesting subproblems) over the course of the semester. The problems are extremely interesting in their own right, but reading the way in which people attacked the problems is actually much more interesting. One gets the impression, sometimes, that theory is about solved problems, but actually it’s more about a lot of failures. Well, maybe this is my own predjudice due to the number of times I’ve failed, but I suspect I’m not the only one.