Category: Read You Tweed

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The Purpose of This Blog

Oftentimes I’ve been asked what the purpose of this blog is. As if everything in life must have a purpose:pfft, I say! But because an answer is required, what I usually answer is that the purpose of my blog is to slow down my fellow researchers. I mean sheesh, the people in quantum computing are the modern polyglots of science, speaking physics, computer science, and mathematics with ease. And they’re universally a brainy crowd. So what better purpose can this blog serve that to slow these readers down by offering them great opportunities to surf the intertubes and procrastinate.
Along those lines…
Continue reading “The Purpose of This Blog”

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Kielpinski Spaces

Reading Light by M. John Harrison, I ran across a neat reference to quantum computing.
So at the begining of the book a main character kills a guy and returns to a lab (of course, doesn’t everyone go to lab after they’ve murdered someone?) where they are working with “q-bits” [sic]. Then this choice line (p.6):

“We can slow down the rate at which the q-bits pick up phase. We’re actually doing better than Kielpinski there – I’ve had factors of four and up this week.”

Despite the Cornell spelling (it’s so cold in Cornell that David Mermin loses the “u”?), cool! Hopefully, many of you will recognize the reference to Dave Kielpinski who did some amazing ion trap quantum computing experiments at NIST and is now at Griffith in Australia. Okay cool, a reference to a real quantum computing researcher.
But it gets better! A few lines later:

Somewhere off in its parallel mazes, the Beowulf system begam modelling the decoherence-free subspaces – the Kielpinski space – of an ion pair…

Not only q-bits [sic] but also decoherence-free subspaces (no subsystems, alas)! And indeed this is a direct reference to papers Kielpinski was involved in: “A decoherence-free quantum memory using trapped ions,” D. Kielpinski, V. Meyer, M.A. Rowe, C.A. Sackett, W.M. Itano, C. Monroe, and D.J. Wineland, Science 291, 1013 (2001) and “Architecture for a large-scale ion-trap quantum computer,” D. Kielpinski, C.R. Monroe, and D.J. Wineland, Nature 417, 709 (2002). That former paper saved my butt during my thesis defense. An AMO physicist, about half way through my defense, said something like “Well this theory is all good, but what about in the real world.” My next slide was a plot yoinked from that first paper showing the first experiment which demonstrated slower decoherence in a decoherence-free subspace under ambient conditions.
And, dude, from now on I am totally calling the DFSs in ion traps “Kielpinski spaces.”

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Cormac McCarthy on Oprah, End of World at 8

Interviewed on Oprah (subscription required). And yes, his latest book is about the end of the world. Inteviewed in the Santa Fe Institute library. I don’t remember it looking like that at all 🙂
Comments by SFI researchers are here.
Best part of the interview is where Cormac lectures on probability: “The laws of probability operate everywhere. That being the case, somewhere in the world there is the luckiest person.” Yes, isn’t the luckiest man’s name Rosencrantz?

[Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are riding horses down a path – they pause]
Rosencrantz: [to Guildenstern] Umm, uh…
[Guildenstern rides away, and Rosencrantz follows. Rosencrantz spots a gold coin on the ground]
Rosencrantz: [to horse] Whoa – whoa, whoa.
[Gets off horse and starts flipping the coin]
Rosencrantz: Hmmm. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads.
[Guildenstern grabs the coin, checks both sides, then tosses it back to Rosencrantz]
Rosencrantz: Heads.
[Guildenstern pulls a coin out of his own pocket and flips it]
Rosencrantz: Bet? Heads I win?
[Guildenstern looks at coin and tosses it to Rosencrantz]
Rosencrantz: Again? Heads.

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Ketchup-ing

Things that happened while I was off the edge of the Interwebs:

  • Cormac McCarthy (my office neighbor while I was at the Santa Fe Institute) won the Pulitzer for fiction for his novel The Road. Cormac is also (amazingly!) giving an interview on Oprah, which is almost as amazing as Pynchon appearing on the Simpsons.
  • A new branch campus for the University of Washington is moving forward. This is a compromise over a previous attempt by the city of Everett to establish an independent polytechnic, which they hypothetically called the “Washington Institute of Technology” (WIT…you have to have a sense of humor to teach there?) This will bring to four the number of posts I have under the category of WIT.
  • Quantum inteference in photosynthesis
  • Earth-like planet discovered only twenty light years away. (Probably) five times the size of as massive as the Earth. If we send off an expedition today, by the time we arrive we should have been able to evolve to survive in the five times higher gravity?
  • Papers scirate wants me to read while I was away: 0704.3432, 0704.2529, 0704.2575, 0704.2575, 0704.2241, and 0704.3142.
  • A horrible title for a Nature blurb, “Quantum cryptography is hacked,” about an experiment performed at MIT (Phys. Rev. A, 75, 042327.) Notice how an inacurate title leads to all sorts of bad follow ups. That’s almost egregious enough to induce a Rage Against Doofosity!
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"Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg

Many of you have probably read the classic The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder which chronicles the building of a minicomputer at Data General in the late seventies. Earlier this week the torrent finally let up (no it didn’t stop raining) and spring break descended so I made a trip to the bookstore. There I found a book proclaiming on the back jacket to be the first true successor to The Soul of a New Machine, Dreaming In Code by the cofounder of Salon.com, Scott Rosenberg. Dreaming in Code chronicles the trials and tribulations of the creation of Chandler, an “interpersonal information manager that adapts to your changing needs”, which, if you visit the website linked above, you will discover is still at version 0.7. The book is an interesting, quick, if somewhat depressing read, I must say. Having myself never been involved in software development beyond my own hacking around with little personal programs, I found the picture painted of how code is developed to be interesting. Indeed, I can see in my own methods for programming many of the traits which are described as impeding good software development in a team setting: the desire to do it all yourself, the desire to reinvent instead of reuse, the desire to overdesign, etc etc. If nothing else, this book is probably a great read for anyone on the path towards becoming a software delevoper: not really a warning so much as a case study of the trials of tribulations of dreaming in code.

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Action

I’ve been tagged by Gordon Watts:

So the game is, take the closest book to you right now, go to the fifth sentence on page 123, write the following three sentences in the blog, and tag three people.

I’m home at my mom’s house in Yreka, and the closest book is “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl. On page 123, I find, a fifth sentence of

Sometimes the situation in which man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action.

Pretty optimistic, no? But what does it mean for you to take action and shape your own fate? Yep, I must get my philosophical genes from my mom 🙂 So I need to tag three people:

Quantumbiodiscs
Scrofulous
Life Without Translation