Category: Self: Meet Center. Center: Meet Self.

Because, of course, you’ve all been wondering about goings on in my life. Of couse you have, that’s why you’re wasting your time reading blogs on the intertubes, no?

• Look, I’m a small part physicist! Which part has yet to be determined.
• Please, please, do not let bacn catch on. (Thanks to Brian for pointing me to this link.)
• Anyone else going to AQIS 2007 on United Flight 0885, SFO to KIX, 12:30pm Sep 1? Over eleven hours in an airplane sounds like fun doesn’t it?
• The two trips I took this summer, to Panama and to Orcas Island, have both coincided with resignations from the Bush white house (Gonzales and Rove.) If anyone wants to get rid of Dick Cheney, they might consider sending me on a trip 🙂
• The tomatos have grown tall, a mole is attacking our yard, the puppy ate a pillow and dug many holes, the wine needs to be bottle before I leave for Japan, and I broke the toilet trying to fix the thing I broke when I was trying to fix that other thing which broke. Yes, life at Villa Sophia is good.

Paper dance. Delayed posting here about the paper dance because I did the paper dance in Bocas de Toro in Panama. “Panama! Panama ah ah ah! … Model citizen, zero discipline.” New paper, arXiv:0708.1221 (scirate here):

Title: Caching in matrix product algorithms
Authors: Gregory M. Crosswhite and Dave Bacon
Abstract: A new type of diagram is introduced for visualizing matrix product states which makes transparent a connection between matrix product states and complex weighted finite state automata. It is then shown how one can proceed in the opposite direction: writing an automata that “generates” an operator gives one an immediate matrix factorization of it. Matrix product factorizations are shown to have the advantage of reducing the cost of computing expectation values by facilitating caching of intermediate calculations. Finally, these techniques are generalized to the case of multiple dimensions

Yesterday my grandmother, Helen Lavender Bacon passed away at the age of 91. Grandma Pete (as we called her, Pete being my grandparent’s dog…doesn’t everyone name their grandparents after their grandparent’s pets?) was the kindest person I have ever met in my life. I have many fond memories of my grandma, including a spectacular trip I took with my father to visit her and my grandpa in Sacramento where I got to see my dad argue a case before the California Supreme Court and woke up during the return trip on a small airplane staring directly at Mt. Shasta, but mostly I will remember standing in line with my grandma. Standing in line, you say? Pft, what a silly memory! But what you have to understand is that if you would go out to a grocery store with my grandma, and were waiting in the checkout line with her, random strangers would, unprovoked, start up conversations with you. There was something in her smile, in her body language, which just invited people into conversation. As if you could just tell that she was going to be fun to talk to and always smile at your jokes and your ideas. Whenever I see kindness, a part of my thoughts will always remember my grandmother, and standing in line.
Here is my Grandma Pete, only a few years ago, riding on the wild side:


From the Sacramento Bee:

BACON, Helen Lavender
Passed away peacefully on July 18, 2007 at age 91 in Carmichael, CA. She was preceded in death by her loving husband of 60 years, Glenn Claire Bacon and beloved son, Larry George Bacon. She is survived by son, Glenn Charles Bacon; nieces, Doris Adams and Helen Jensen; six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. She will be deeply missed by her family and friends. Helen was born on September 11, 1915 in Hyattville, WY. She was raised in Washington state and Arizona where she was married to Glenn and gave birth to her sons. She moved to the Sacramento area in 1947 and has been a resident here since. Over this time, she has been blessed to have a huge community of caring friends who have been most kind and giving in her aging process. A celebration of Helen’s life will be held at Celtic Cross Presbyterian Church, 5839 Dewey Dr., Citrus Heights, Saturday July 21 at 1:00pm. Private interment will be at Sierra Hills East Lawn Memorial Park. Helen (Mom, Grandma) was a source of loving kindness for everyone she touched. In lieu of flowers, an appropriate remembrance would be an intentional act of kindness on her behalf.
Published in the Sacramento Bee on 7/19/2007.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdF9liwZfuI[/youtube]

Tappidy, tap, tap, a new paper tap dance:

0706.4478
A Note on the Optimal Single Copy Measurement for the Hidden Subgroup Problem
Authors: Dave Bacon, Thomas Decker
Abstract: The optimization of measurements for the state distinction problem has recently been applied to the theory of quantum algorithms with considerable successes, including efficient new quantum algorithms for the non-abelian hidden subgroup problem. Previous work has identified the optimal single copy measurement for the hidden subgroup problem over abelian groups as well as for the non-abelian problem in the setting where the subgroups are restricted to be all conjugate to each other. Here we describe the optimal single copy measurement for the hidden subgroup problem when all of the subgroups of the group are given with equal a priori probability. The optimal measurement is seen to be a hybrid of the two previously discovered single copy optimal measurements for the hidden subgroup problem.

Yesterday at the Perimeter Institute, while I was attending FTQC II, I developed a tremendous headache (conveniently it arose just before the panel discussion I was on started its session) which lasted into the night and is only now disipating. This headache was, I’ve concluded, the result of a perfect trifecta of downers. And because I have nothing better to do while waiting for my ride to the Toronto airport to fly back to Seattle, I thought I’d catelog these downers, for posterity, and for my own egotistical record. No one likes to hear anyone complain, heck I myself particularly hate to hear whining complaints come from someone as lucky as I’ve been, so if you’re not interested in such purging, please stop reading now. I meant it! Proceed at your own caution.
(Downer Numero 1) Being surrounded by people who are absolutely a trillion times smarter than I am. Can I ever hope to keep up with Aram Harrow, Barbara Terhal, and Daniel Gotesman? Nope, I most certainly can’t! Most of the time my wonded ego simply keeps its head down and silently wanders through the backrooms of its own extremely minor accomplishments, but yeseterday it seemed my own shortcomings decided to take refuge directly in between my temples. Ouch! Why does this matter, that I’m that much slower than everyone around me? Well certainly in a big picture it doesn’t, but it reminds me of how little I’ve actually done, and the small probabilities that I actually have of doing anything of major merit. Headache pain meter increase “plus one.”
(Downer Numero 2) Hearing about fault-tolerant quantum computing reminded me how far we are from building a quantum computer and how little we realize that we have no clue how far we are from building a quantum computer. The threshold theorem for fault-tolerant quantum computing seems, to me, a soothing balm which we can spread over our proof of principle exposed skin, but it certainly, to me at least, doesn’t seem like anything we’d remotely like to really do. And being at a conference where the whole point of the conference was to explore the realm, and only the realm, of fault-tolerance, began by the time my headache started, to drive me crazy. I think this was exacerbated by the fact that, while there were a few experimental talks (and they were excellent, of course) I have a hard time thinking about fault-tolerance without thinking about experiments. And then I start thinking about experiments and I start wishing I myself could work in a lab, because what I so desire is lots and lots of qubits, which I can tinker with and come up with new ideas for fault-tolerance in these systems. Because I’m an arrogant theorist locked up in an ivory tower, I find myself frustrated at not being able to participate in experimental progress. I want a quantum computer and I want it now, without another decade of fault-tolerant workshop to beat my head up against. Headache pain meter “plus one more.”
(Downer Numero 3) I’ve been reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is the kind of book which is both infuriating and which I highly recommend. Infuriating because of the numerous points were I contend that it has gone too far to a philosophical extreme, yet at the same time highly recommended for spouting interesting takes on the world about which I wholeheartedly agree. So how can reading such a book be a downer? Because the “Black Swan”‘s of the title, the highly improbably events you didn’t see coming, remind me so much of the reason I got into this whole quantum business in the first place (or more properly remind me of the story I tell myself about why I am were I am.) In particular I got excited by quantum computing because it was a totally new and rebelious direction. Because it was new, something we hadn’t conceived of before. A new hole in the phase space of ideas, so to speak. Quantum computing was a Black Swan: who ordered Peter Shor and his factoring algorithm? And certainly there have been other quantum Black Swans, not the least of which I would say was the threshold theorem for fault-tolerant quantum computing. But at the workshop, the only swans I saw were white and swimming in the pond just outside the hulking monolithic Perimeter Institute building. Without totally new and novel approaches to fault-tolerance, or new and novel advances in quantum computing or new and novel advances from outside of the phase space of quantum computing, the whole workshop began to remind me of a fear a friend of mine described to me: “of being the scientist who works on water hexamers and goes to conferences to be patted on my back by my water
hexamer friends where we would stand in a six sided circle arms outstretched.” Headache pain meter “plus one.”
Really most days trifectas like the ones above don’t spend their time haunting my heads. But yesterday they ate up my brain, kept me up at night, and, as you can certainly tell from reading this post, made me very very grumpy. Well, I guess there is, as the saying goes, always tomorrow. When I’m hoping only a few of the trifecta pose haunts my throbing head.

Some kids never grow up. Here for example is my nephew Marcus. Watching his uncle Dave, a very overgrown kid, balance a pipe on his nose:

Note the volcano in the background.