Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is “Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking.” Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don’t know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is one who is doing cool quantum computing research (“cracking?” and “hacking?” btw.)
I open up the article and who is the police woman? It’s Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described her job as “a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at the School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University” not as “policewoman working on quantum hacking and cracking.” And here I was hoping that we’d have someone to arrest anyone making false claims about quantum mechanics!
Humor as a Guide to Research
Over at the optimizer’s blog, quantum computing’s younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I’d only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave talks about their work. I was last to go. In my talk, I drew (transparencies, you know) a cartoon of “photon man” (wavy line stick figure) who explained the difference between two photon absorption and absorbing two photons. No one reacted to these cartoons during the talk. But at the end of the talk, one of the other interns, trying to be cute asked me “So, what does photon man think about all of this?” I paused. Thought for a second. And replied “He was very enlightened by the whole thing!” The simultaneous groan emitted by the audience (who had sat through 8 straight talks) was, I must say, awesome. I have a vivid memory of my adviser in the back of the room giving a hearty actual laugh! And I have been hooked on trying to insert at least one bad joke in every talk I have given ever since.
Since I enjoy humor in talks, lately I’ve been wondering if there isn’t an easier way to make funnier talks. The optimizers list is a good start, but I’m lazy. Which led me to the idea: maybe I can make funnier talks by simply basing my research on things that are inherently funny? I mean, you try taking How a Clebsch-Gordan Transform Helps to Solve the Heisenberg Hidden Subgroup Problem and making a funny talk! On the other hand it is, without a question, nearly impossible to give a talk about Time Travel without (purposefully or not) uttering really awesome (and well timed) jokes.
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Theorist In a Box
When I was a postdoc, I made it a habit to try to spend at least one week a year visiting Isaac Chuang’s lab at MIT. There were many reason for this, including that Ike has been a collaborator of mine, and Ken Brown, another collaborator was working as a postdoc in the lab. But another reason was…it’s damn nice for a theorist to sit in a real experimental lab. Oh sure, you need to keep the theorists away from all the cords and knobs for fear that they might actually touch something. And don’t ever let a theorist chose the music being played in the lab or you’ll end up hearing some real wacky “music.” But as a theorist I got a lot out of simply being around the actual enactment of the ideas that otherwise exist for me only in a paper or in my head. Being in a lab is very inspiring for an aspiring theorist.
So now I could go and bother one of the physics people and ask them if I could work in their lab. But this is 2009, damnit, and that 2 in 2009 certainly stands for web 2.0 or science 2.0 or iTechnology 2.0. In other words I want the same effect of visiting an experimental lab without getting of my lazy bum and walking across campus. So…
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Campus Ad
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
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.
Continue reading “Where To Move?”
Which Physicist Are You?
..asks a facebook application.
Apparently I am the kind of physicist who likes proper spelling and proper capitalization, and who thus, will not take a quiz with bad spelling. Which physicist is that? Gell-Mann?
Construction, Real Estate, and …
For those scientists out on the job market this year, the following from TheLadders.com might be a little scary:
Two annihilated industries and…science.
Book Reviews
State of the ?
Amusing line from a New York Times article this morning:
“Are you aware under what conditions I worked in 1996?” he said by telephone from Mexico. “It’s only because of my lawsuit that you or anybody else can pick up a tape. In those days, I could not leave the archives with that material. I used state-of-the-lost-art equipment. I brought in a team of court reporters to help me with the first drafts.
State-of-the-lost-art? He used a telephonoscope?
Scienceblogs Upgrade
Scienceblogs is upgrading. This site won’t allow comments from 10pm Pacific Standard Time on Friday, January 9 until…well until the upgrade is complete (possibly Saturday sometime.)
So instead of being frustrated at not being able to comment why don’t you instead go waste your time by:
- By reading some provocative statements about teaching over at the information processors blog.
- If you need to procrastinate about preparing a referee report, you might check out Michael Nielsen’s Three myths of scientific peer review
- The Statistical Mechanic is back, and discussing thermodynamics, probability, and the measurement problem. If you actually want to expand your brain instead of waste your time, this would be a good place to do so.
- Copco and Iron Gate, will they be demolished in 2020? The county hopes to be involved.
- Read articles from the perspective of a view not often heard at Secular Right
- Read a book from the list of free books about the market put together by the Master of the Universe.