Random Paper

A new paper, “On the Generation of Random Numbers.” Postscript available here. What do you think should I submit it to the arXiv?

Turducken?

Juiciest paper on the arxiv yesterday? 0707.3101: “Excision Without Excision: the Relativistic Turducken” by D. Brown, O. Sarbach, E. Schnetter, M. Tiglio, P. Diener, I. Hawke, D. Pollney.

Many Universes, But Not All Lead to Salvation or the Simpson's Movie

It
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=OL50ddCSJmo[/youtube]
is
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=q-O7Nteshv4[/youtube]
coming!
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=3r-YJOrY28w[/youtube]
Maybe, finally, after all these years of waiting, we will learn just exactly what “Quantum Presbyterianism” is:

Homer: [opens door to find Kang and Kodos standing there] Hello — oh great. Mormons.
Kang: Actually, we’re Quantum Presbyterians…

I’m thinking it involves a doctrine which says that you are spiritually doomed to branches of the wavefunction which are condemned by God, but the divine intervention of God can lead you to those branches which are not condemned. Or something like that.
“Spider pig, spider pig…”

Reviewing Ratio?

Since that last poll got more than three total responses, and I’m here refereeing a paper, here is another poll for your amusement:
[poll=3]

Unique Models

Sure, arXiv:physics is great for entertaining papers. But so is arXiv:cs. For example,
take 0706.1926:

Title: Towards understanding and modelling office daily life
Authors: Michele Bezzi, Robin Groenevelt
Measuring and modeling human behavior is a very complex task. In this paper we present our initial thoughts on modeling and automatic recognition of some human activities in an office. We argue that to successfully model human activities, we need to consider both individual behavior and group dynamics. To demonstrate these theoretical approaches, we introduce an experimental system for analyzing everyday activity in our office.

Sorry, I looked: there are no histograms of TPS reports per day in the paper.

Robust Bacon

I’m currently visiting the Perimeter Institute for a workshop on fault-tolerant quantum computing. The workshop is great, but the coolest thing is that I get to wear a badge which calls me fault-tolerant:
ftbacon.jpg
Am I robust? I certainly don’t feel robust, indeed every day it seems entropy finds yet another way to sneak attack me 🙂