The final has been administered:
A Hunting We Will Go
Buried under way too much work right now. So for your viewing pleasure (ha) an epic story of Christmas tree hunting in the great pacific northwest.
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Rivalry Week
This is rivalry week
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Hours
Observations on time.
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Halifax Off A Bit
I’m in Halifax, Nova Scotia…eh. For some reason they have a parade at night in November with floats containing Santa and reindeer (obligatory crappy cell phone picture to follow):
Yeah, what the hell?
Interesting conference, I’m attending. I haven’t been at a conference in ages where disagreed with so many of the talks!
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So Much For Research Faculty
New NSF policies on faculty salaries:
A major revision of NSF’s faculty salary reimbursement policy, to limit compensation for senior personnel to no more than two months of their regular salary in any one year from all NSF-funded grants
This pretty much eliminates any NSF funded research professors, as far as I can tell. Well it was a good run, peoples, but that rule change virtually assures that pseudo-professors like myself don’t exist.
And I, For One, Welcome Our New Insect Overlords
“Local” politics.
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Villa Sophia Cab 2008: The Beginnings
This weekend the grapes for my second “real” batch of wine were delivered to Mountain Homebrew and Wine Supply. Last years vintage, Villa Sophia “La Gruccia” was a success in that it didn’t turn to vinegar and that over time it is definitely mellowing out, but I wouldn’t say it was a fantastic wine. This year I’m a bit more hopeful and have some ideas for how to modify my process to produce a better wine.
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Visiting Stanford and Cal
I’ve spent the last two days in the San Francisco bay area visiting first Stanford and then Berkeley.
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War I Tell You
Self promotion for those around the University of Washington campus: I’m giving a talk in the physics department at UW. Mondays, October 20 at 4:00 P.M. Ronald Geballe Auditorium, Rm. A102 (cookies at 3:45):
Title: “Who Will Build a Quantum Computer: the Physicists or the Computer
Engineers?”
Abstract: Building a quantum computer large enough to perform a task beyond the capability of today’s classical computers (breaking a cryptographic code or simulating a complex quantum system) is a daunting task. On the fundamental side, this difficulty arises from the fact that quantum systems like to decohere, and that we cannot control a quantum system with perfect accuracy. On the technical side, the obstacles toward build a quantum computer arise from the severe engineering constraints imposed by manipulating individual quantum systems. The theoretical solution to the problems of decoherence and lack of control was worked out in the nineties and is known as the threshold theorem for fault-tolerant quantum computing. The great debate in quantum computing today is how the technical difficulties of building a quantum computer will be overcome. In this talk I will outline two very distinct camps on how this will be achieved: one centered very squarely on engineering and the other with roots in condensed matter physics. This is a battle for the soul of future quantum computers and will determine whether quantum computers are years, decades, or centuries away from being built.