Author: dabacon

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Little Miss Bleeeeeeeeeep

Anyone else catch Little Miss Sunshine on USA this weekend? The scene where the brother Dwayne breaks his vow of silence has to be one of the longest silence bleeps of all time. Anyone know of of a longer one (for one word, not for a string of words)?

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Blogroll

Quantum Loonies

Physics and Astronomy Propoganda

Computer Scientists Are Scientists Too

Science, Unclassifiable, (and That’s Good)

Mathematics

There Exists Science, Beyond Physics, Math, CS

Science 2.0

Friends Who Put Up With Me

Finance/Economics and Money Money Money!

Seattle Rocks

Left

Right

Laugh

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Happy New Year!

Like the title says: Happy New Year!
Looking back at the list of top scited papers on scirate.com, shows some good fun indeed:
23 SciTes – 0811.3171
Title: Quantum algorithm for solving linear systems of equations
Authors: Aram W. Harrow, Avinatan Hassidim, Seth Lloyd
23 SciTes – 0809.3972
Title: A Counterexample to Additivity of Minimum Output Entropy
Authors: M. B. Hastings
19 SciTes – 0807.4935
Title: Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels
Authors: Graeme Smith, Jon Yard
18 SciTes – 0804.4050
Title: Matchgates and classical simulation of quantum circuits
Authors: Richard Jozsa, Akimasa Miyake
17 SciTes – 0806.1972
Title: Universal computation by quantum walk
Authors: Andrew M. Childs
17 SciTes – 0805.0007
Title: Superpolynomial speedups based on almost any quantum circuit
Authors: Sean Hallgren, Aram W. Harrow
16 SciTes – 0808.2474
Title: Making Almost Commuting Matrices Commute
Authors: M. B. Hastings
16 SciTes – 0804.3401
Title: Quantum Computational Complexity
Authors: John Watrous
16 SciTes – 0804.1109
Title: Classical and Quantum Algorithms for Exponential Congruences
Authors: Wim van Dam, Igor E. Shparlinski

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A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 1

Moving on to Chapter 1 in my ongoing pedantic plodding through Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. See here for what this is all about. Note that I really am doing this as I read the book (I’m reading it really really slowly), so what I say here may be outdated by the time I get further into the book.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 1”

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A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction

So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book Outliers: The Story of Success the other day, as I’m sure many of you will be doing on your next trip to the airport (where stands of Gladwell’s hardcover book, marked down thirty percent, block your every exit through the already cramped airport bookstores.) Gladwell’s books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. Well “entertaining” in that “holy shit dude you are pedantic” sort of way. Note that I really do like Gladwell’s books, and indeed for me, reading with critical eyes is exactly the reason I like his books. Ah, the life of a curmudgeonly pedant, revealed before your eyes, here on these there intertubes!
To balance things out, I’ve also included some thoughts from the improv part of my brain: the part that takes ideas at more than face value and tries to run with them.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction”

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Deleting arXiv References?

A while back, Aram commented on how he had trouble trying to get arXiv links into a paper he had written (read the further comments for a comment indicating that it was not the policy of the journal to do this.)
Which reminded me: I believe I’ve submitted papers with arXiv references to Physical Review A, but looking back over the papers I don’t see any such references unless the paper was never published. Does anyone know Physical Review’s policy on this? A quick scan of the guidelines didn’t yield anything. Shouldn’t Physical Review be allowing these links? Sure if I want to be careful about a paper I’ll check out the published version, but many times, having the preprint around is extremely useful.
Which reminds me even further: am I the only one who finds it extremely annoying that references in Physical Review don’t include the titles of the papers? (Unless, of course I’m writing a PRL, in which the silly four page limit makes me wish I could use doi’s for references alone.)

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Villa Sophia Skiing

Skiing past our home in Seattle:
Later a group of local kids made a snowboard jump…I would have used it but it didn’t look all that sturdy, and I probably would have ended up with an action shot of “Dave destroying local kids joy.”

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Bouncing Back From Droping Off The Edge

Whew. That was quite a quarter! Talk about drinking straight from a firehose. Okay, okay, I still have a long list of missed deadlines that I need to get to ASAP, but at last it feels like maybe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (don’t tell me its the next quarter, I want to be delusional for at least a few days.)
The winter break is always a great time, most importantly because “OMG snow!” (Seattle got another four plus inches of snow last night. Dude, that’s like a two feet equivalent in most of the rest of the northern U.S.!) and because of all the great Christmas cheer (like the war on Christmas taking place right here in Washington. In order to add to this war, my front yard currently includes a Santa Flamingo and his nine flamingo Reindeer:
) And most importantly because I like to spend my winter break thinking really crazy ideas. In other words, it’s more likely that there will actually be something worth reading on this blog in the coming weeks (promised to be crazy however, always ruin being crazy, so I won’t promise to be crazy, because, well, that would be crazy.)

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Conference Spam

Amusing, in a twisted an irritating sort of way.
Who’s on first:

Dear scholars:
Here is an invitation letter from 6th International Conference on Service Systems and Service Management(ICSSSM’09) which will be held in Xiamen in June next year. We hope you can submit your new papers and exchange new ideas with us. There is a call for letter in attachment. And if you’re interested in,please login our conference website: http://sm2.xmu.edu.cn/icsssm09/index.htm.
Looking forward to your participation!
ICSSSM09 COMMITTEE
—
Thank you again for your contribution.
Sincerely,
icsssm09 Organizing Committee
Email:

What’s on second:

Please remove me from your email list.
dabacon (at) cs.washington.edu
– Hide quoted text –
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 1:12 AM, icsssm09 wrote:
> Dear scholars:
>
> Here is an invitation letter from 6th International Conference on
> Service Systems and Service Management(ICSSSM’09) which will be held in
> Xiamen in June next year. We hope you can submit your new papers and
> exchange new ideas with us. There is a call for letter in attachment. And if
> you’re interested in,please login our conference website:
> http://sm2.xmu.edu.cn/icsssm09/index.htm.
>
> Looking forward to your participation!
>
>
> ICSSSM09 COMMITTEE
>
> —
> Thank you again for your contribution.
> Sincerely,
> icsssm09 Organizing Committee
> Email:
>

I don’t know’s on third:

ICSSSM09
Dear Author(s):
Thank you for submitting your paper to ICSSSM2009!
We are sorry to notify you that the submitting method has changed
from sending e-mail to this mailbox to login of the conference website
http://one-stop1.baocard.com/icsssm09/en_index.php .And this mailbox
is invalid now. So if you have already submitted your paper, please
make sure that you will re-submit on the website. Otherwise, the paper
which sent into this mailbox will not be collected for the meeting.
And icsssm09 Organizing Committee would not be responsible for it.
Sorry for bringing these troubles to you.
And thank you again for supporting us!
ICSSSM09 Organizating Committee
—
Thank you again for your contribution.
Sincerely,
icsssm09 Organizing Committee
Email:

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Large Earth Collider

Oh noes: Scientists Warn Large Earth Collider May Destroy Earth:

BATAVIA, IL–In October, Fermilab scientists joined a growing number of physicists around the world in warning that the Very Large Earth Collider–a $117 billion electromagnetic particle accelerator built to study astronomical phenomena by colliding Earth into various heavenly bodies–could potentially destroy Earth when it sends the planet careening headlong into Mars, Jupiter, or even the sun.
…
Physicists at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who underwrote the VLEC’s construction with donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agree that there are “some troubling variables” whenever attempting to launch Earth through the vacuum of space into a massive body of solid matter. Yet, they insist, the academic benefits of a planetary collision outweigh any risk of annihilating the Earth

Damn, and I’d just drawn up plans for the Incredibly Large Sun Collider (we can get ahold of the sun, so the joke goes, by traveling there at night.)