O brave new quantum world!
Hot off the presses!
In an amazing breakthrough, which this press release has no room to describe in any real detail, scientists at research university BigU have made tremendous progress in the field of quantum computing. The results mean that quantum computers are one step closer to replacing your laptop computer
Continue reading “Revolutionary Breakthough in Quantum Computing”
John Baez points to a remarkable mathematician (having being lead there by Alissa Crans):
You may have heard of the Mathematics Genealogy Project. This is a wonderful database that lets you look up the Ph.D. advisor and students of almost any mathematician. This is how I traced back my genealogy to Gauss back in week166.
I was feeling pretty proud of myself, too — until I found someone who had two Ph.D. students before he was even born!
Yes indeed: our friend and café regular Tom Leinster is listed as having two Ph.D. students: Jose Cruz in 1959, and Steven Sample in 1965. At the time he was teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Later he took an extended sabbatical, got born in England, and transferred to kindergarten. After a lively second career as a youth, he returned to academia and got his Ph.D. at Cambridge under Martin Hyland in 2000. He now has a permanent position at the University of Glasgow. But who can say what he’ll do next?
Check it out soon, since it may go away.
And yes I posted this just so I could used the words “closed timelike mathematicians.”
Physical Theories as Men, a tit for tat response to Physical Theories as Women. Go ahead, you know you want to click on both of them.
Um, okay, so was this little piece of information really noteworthy enough to be included in a New York Times article on Psystar:
Although Psystar’s Web site was available earlier today, by 1 p.m. EDT it was offline and returning the error message: “Database Error: Unable to connect to the database: Could not connect to MySQL” to Computerworld editors and reporters attempting to connect.
I mean, isn’t that a bit high up even for an inverted pyramid?
One of the subjects of great debate in physics goes under the moniker of “the arrow of time.” The basic debate here is (very) roughly to try to understand why time goes it’s merry way seemingly in one direction, especially given that the many of the laws of physics appear to behave the same going backwards as forwards in time. But aren’t we forgetting our most basic science when we debate at great philosophical lengths about the arrow of time? Aren’t we forgetting about…experiment? Here, for your pleasure, then, are some of my personal observations about the direction of time which I’ve observed over my short life. Real observation about the direction of time should lead us to the real direction of time, no?
(With apologies to Alan Lightman
Continue reading “Occupational Arrows of Time”
A story, from Jeff Silverman:
Whenever you build an airplane, you have to make sure that each part weighs no more than allocated by the designers, and you have to control where the weight it located to keep the center of gravity with limits. So there is an organization called weights which tracks that.
For the 747-100, one of the configuration items was the software for the navigation computer. In those days (mid-1960s), the concept of software was not widely understood. The weight of the software was 0. The weights people didn’t understand this so they sent a guy to the software group to understand this. The software people tried mightily to explain that the software was weightless, and the weights guy eventually went away, dubious.
The weights guy comes back a few days later with a box of punch cards (if you don’t know what a punch card is, e-mail me and I will explain). The box weighed about 15 pounds. The weights guy said “This box contains software”. The software guys inspected the cards and it was, in fact, a computer program. “See?”, the wights guy said, “This box weighs about 15 pounds”. “You don’t understand”, the software guys responded, “The software is in the holes”.
From the Uncyclopedia entry on computers:
How Computers Work
Inside a computer case is a midget that intakes power and outputs graphics. On an average computer, this is an average male midget. High end computers contain baby giraffes or sometimes Links (which will periodically shut down, some blame this on power consumption, but this is actually due to the Links leaving the computer in order to save Zeldas from Gilbert Gottfrieds). Cheaper Hewlett-Packard computers generally come standard with a retard midget. Macs and Dells run on magnets which make them better then anything else! Rumors have surfaced recently that DARPA is working on a computer that runs on zombie midgets, the name for this project is quantum computing. But this does not include Mall Zombies.
Be sure to watch out for the Pacific Northwest tree octopus!
From a student today in office hours before today’s midterm: “How many times will the word automata appear in the test, including its use in acronyms like DFA, NFA, GNFA, and WTFA?”
From the annals of “is that really the word you wanted?” from a New York Times article on steampunk:
“There seems to be this sort of perfect storm of interest in steampunk right now,” Mr. von Slatt said. “If you go to Google Trends and track the number of times it is mentioned, the curve is almost algorithmic from a year and a half ago.” (At this writing, Google cites 1.9 million references.)
Certainly I can interpret this as saying that the trend has a curve which can be generated by an algorirthm, but I’m guessing Mr. von Slatt meant something else, considering that the curve which is always zero is also algorithmic.
