Catching up with places I’ve been.
Friday Random
Random cell phone photos.
Flaming Bacon
Matt points me to Bacon: the Other White Heat:
I recently committed myself to the goal, before the weekend was out, of creating a device entirely from bacon and using it to cut a steel pan in half. My initial attempts were failures, but I knew success was within reach when I was able to ignite and melt the pan using seven beef sticks and a cucumber.
Dynamical Decoupling Workshop
Michael Biercuk sends me a note about an upcoming workshop on dynamic decoupling. He’s trying to get a gauge of the interest in such a workshop:
Upcoming International Workshop on Dynamical Decoupling (IWODD)
Expected Date: October, 2009
Location: Boulder, CO
By Invitation Only
Interested participants please contact Michael J. Biercuk,
biercuk at boulder.nist.gov
Those interested should shoot Michael an email.
Two Years
Happy Tax Day! Happier anniversary to me and Mrs. Pontiff!
arXiview: A New iPhone App for the arXiv
Over 9 months ago I decided to apply for teaching tenure track jobs. Then the economy took what can best be described as a massive, ill-aimed, swan dive. Thus creating an incredible amount of stress in my life. So what does a CS/physics research professor do when he’s stress? The answer to that question is available on the iTunes app store today: arXiview. What better way to take out stress and at the same time learn objective C and write an iPhone app that at least one person (yourself) will use?
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Where To Move?
I am always greatly amused by the display of frustration in which one threatens to leave a country if things don’t change. During the end of the first term of Bush the Second, it was common in the United States to hear liberals express their anger as: “If he wins a second term, I’m going to move to Canada.” (If you go too far to the left, you end up in Canada?) The expression reached spectacular heights, in my opinion, however, when Tina Fey said of Sarah Palin that if McCain/Palin won the presidential election, Fey would “leave Earth.”
But now that the evil liberals have taken over the Washington, it seems to me that the evil right needs a good guide as to where they can move to overcome their ills. So I’ve put together a simple list to help guide you to your own private utopia.
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Sunday Questions
- Can quantum computers efficiently compute factorials?
- BaconCamp?
- Day Took Er Silicon Valley Jrbs?
- I wonder how I’d do on a RQ test?
Through The Eye of the Beholder
Scott the optimizer asks a question on a wim:
Come up with a catchy name for growth rates of the form 2^(n^&alpha) , 0< &alpha<1.
I thought the answer was obvious: “probably in BQP.”
update: does html superscript not work in a blockquote? I guess the answer is yes.
Climbing Mt. Scalable
The survey of abused words in quantum computing shows the word “exponential” as having an, um, exponential, lead over its competitors. My own personal choice for the most abused word was “scalable,” a word that is, in my opinion, the least debated, but most important, concept in quantum computing today. A word which everyone uses but whose definition is strangely missing from all almost all papers that use the word. Here are some thoughts on this word, what it means to particular groups, and what I, in my own pomposity, think the word really should mean.
Note the title of this post is ripped off from the title of quant-ph/0204157, a classic paper on “scalability” in quantum computing.
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