O brave new quantum world!
In the University of Washington’s “The Daily” in the lost and found section:
FOUND – PANDA head, appears to be a part of a missing suit. Recovered near 45th and Memorial. presumably stolen by ill-advised sorority girls during their week-long, drunken stupor
The iPhone is a great gadget (as a phone, it’s okay. Personally I wish it could be made a bit louder as my ears, they ain’t so good at that hearing thing.) Here are the apps I’ve found that I use the most. (Excluding google maps, the built in email and browser, and the phone functions, of course. Having google maps available so easily really is an amazing piece of functionality to have in a phone, I must say.)
Continue reading “My Most Used iPhone Apps”
What in the world is a review for Star Trek doing in Nature Physics? (Thank to reader W for pointing this out.) I mean, at least the review of Angels and Demons has references to physics, but the review of Star Trek, is, well, just a review of Star Trek with no reference physics or science or, well, anything that I could see the audience of Nature Physics relating to.
I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the review, or the book/art section of Nature Physics, but doesn’t this seem a bit out of place. It is too bad, indeed, because the movie does contain time travel, and as Cosmic Sean demonstrated their is ample fodder for a review of Star Trek that at least pulls in some fun physics.
In a related note, Nature physics now requires a statement of author’s contributions. (“Dave Bacon’s contribution was to sit around and crack jokes all day while we worked hard and tried not to get distracted.”)
So bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, is up and running the tech word is a twitter. I checked it out and…well. On google when you search for “pontiff” my blog comes up as hit number five, after a few silly things like wikipedia entries and dictionary definitions (but no actual links to the *ahem* real pontiff. Sadly the days when I was number one on google are gone. But I will someday tell my grandkids…) But on bing, what happens? I’m down at number nine. Nine, Microsoft, really? I live in Seattle you know: shouldn’t this give me extra rank in your algorithms? And among the related searches, none of these are for “quantum pontiff.”
(I’d like to conclude that this is a good thing for how the search engine works except for the fact that bing gives the number three spot to a real estate agent. And we all know that real estate agents are actually all devils responsible for the collapse of the financial system and probably also for things like Mondays and gum stuck on the bottom of your shoes.)
Catch the wave. Long but worth watching:I suspect that collaboration will never be the same after the wave.
Another observation is about gadgets and iphone apps. One beauty of iphone apps is how easy it is to write one. This has always been true of many gadgets (like gadgets for google’s homepage.) But the later has always suffered, it seems to, in a lack of functionality. I think wave might push this problem in a very positive direction (see for example the yes/no/maybe widget.) Further having things server side is also allows for a sort of gadgetology with a large amount of power, which I really like.
Recently I finally got a chance to read the new preprint arXiv:0905.2292 “A new physical principle: Information Causality” by M. Pawlowski, T. Paterek, D. Kaszlikowski, V. Scarani, A. Winter, and M. Zukowski. It’s been a long time since I spent more than a few spare hours thinking about foundational issues in quantum theory. Personally I am very fond of approaches to foundational questions which have a information theoretic or computational bent (on my desktop I have a pdf of William Wootter’s thesis “The Acquisition of Information From Quantum Measurements” which I consider a classic in this line of interrogation.) This preprint is very much along these lines and presents a very intriguing result which clearly merits some deeper thinking.
(Update: see also Joe for details of the proof.)
Continue reading “Information Causality”
Ditch day 2009 was May 27, 2009. A classic from the past. Our stack involved a multi-storied wooden puzzle and the strong chance we would be taped to a tree upside down.
It seems that astrometry has finally succeeded at detecting a planet. A star and its planets perform a complex dance as they move through space. In astrometry planet hunting one looks for a planet by looking for the “wobble” of a star as it moves across the sky. This is contrast with the two other methods used to detect planets around stars, which use radial velocity or transits to detect the planets. Now it seems that a team from JPL has used a series of measurements over 12 years to detect a Jupiter sized planet tugging on its star, VB 10. The wobble in this case is a movement of about one sixth of an arcsecond per year. Very cool.
Recently I’ve been thinking it might be fun to set up some sort online weekly colloquia in quantum computing. Fun? Well, okay maybe that’s not quite the right word. But it would be an interesting experiment. So I went out looking for good live webinar/videoconferencing software and well…I was a bit disappointed. Sure there are a lot of videoconference companies out there…which almost all have limited version for use for free. But these limited versions almost all seem to restrict to only a few participants. Anyone know of some software which might be appropriate for attempting to setup an online colloquium? Has anyone seen a setup where this has worked before? Oh, and is there any interest in such an online colloquium?
Katamari Damacy is a very cool game, if for no other reason than it is a game in which “scale” changes. The basic idea is that you roll a ball around which picks up objects that aren’t too big for the ball and then the ball grows. Usually you are racing a clock to make your ball big enough. I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s highly addictive.
But this, this is way cool. A controller for the game which is….a big shiny metal ball: