Four Fidays ago, I got engaged. Three Fidays ago we bought a house. So what could I possibly do two Fridays ago? How about get a puppy? Everyone please welcome, our new puppy, Tess:
Tess is an eight week old mutt which we got from an animal rescue in Yakima, Washington. It was interesting trying to find a mutt puppy in Seattle. Where I grew up, in the country, there were mutt puppies all over the place. Mostly this was because many of the dogs were not neutered or spayed in the country. Now in the city, however, it seems that things are much different and nearly everyone spays or neuters their dogs. So there are a lot fewer unplanned puppies in the city. Hence, in order to get a mutt puppy, we had to travel all the way to Yakima! But Tess was certainly worth it. She is definitely a mutt, probably lab mixed with rottweiler mixed with who knows what. Here she enjoys the good life at Villa Sophia:
And of course, I haven’t told you about last Friday. Last Friday, I was taken out to dinner and proposed to! And, because she had all eady said yes to my proposal, you can guess that my answer was also yes. At the dinner I received an incredibly cool engagement watch. One cool feature of the watch is that it has no batteries and never has to be wound. It has been about five years since I wore a watch. That’s a long time to go without time!
Ben and Ami Are Famous!
You may have noticed that this blog has become all poker all the time. Well get ready for even more. Here is a link to an ABC World News story about my friends Ben and Ami Foster. Cool! Ben, you remember is the guy who gave up a job at eBay to play poker online professionally. Cool shot of Ben’s setup playing eight poker tables at a time. Even cooler shot of his tracking his success staistically. When I was little I used to take two dice and role them over and over and keep track of the statistics and plot them up all pretty. Yeah, it was a repressed childhood.
Ben and Ami now have got me beat. My closest approach to such stardome on national TV was on CNN where I was a token Caltech student fawning over Feynman. Luckily the video isn’t online to embarrass me.
Spidy
Via Saheli, I find a test to determine which superhero I am.
My results:
You are Spider-Man
|
You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test
Power and responsibility? Huh.
Stay At Home Poker Dad
Tired of your job? Good at poker? Do what my friend Ben Foster did, quit your job and play poker online for a living. From the Wired articled linked above:
Last summer, Ben Foster quit his $110,000-a-year job as a senior product manager at eBay to play online poker full-time. In the months leading up to his decision, the 28-year-old with a degree in statistics had been tracking his winnings on a detailed spreadsheet. After checking and rechecking the numbers, he came to the conclusion that he could earn more money playing poker than working at eBay. Plus, his wife was pregnant with their second child, and he was needed around the house. Foster decided to become a stay-at-home poker dad.
[As a side note, Ben has indeed taken much money from me at poker. But that was before I learned to play poker. That was when I learned that I just shouldn’t play with him. “Strange game Dr. FalconFalken, the only way to win is not to play.”]
UFOs
Something for me to look for next time I’m back in Yreka, Unidentified Fossil Objects:
Geologists have discovered strange disc-shaped features in slate deposits in California. The features, at Yreka, are between 2 and 7 centimetres across and 2 to 4 millimetres thick; some have centres stained with iron oxides. One geologist, Nancy Lindsley-Griffin of the University of Nebraska, has already dubbed the saucer-shaped features, ‘unidentified fossil-like objects.
Geologists discoverd the UFOs in bedding planes of the slate, formed from ocean bottom that was deposited between 400 and 600 million years ago. The objects are puzzling because they lack the symmetry that fossils of living organisms usually display. They are also too large to be the droppings of any creature alive at the time, and do not look like concretions, such as agates, formed by natural chemical processes. Lindsley-Griffin says they resemble very tiny bicycle wheels, with a central core and an outer rim, but with most of the spokes missing.
Yreka, I Have Found It!
I grew up in a small town in northen California called Yreka. Eureka? No Yreka! Yreka (population around 7000) is located about fifteen minutes north south of the border between Oregon and California on Interstate 5 which runs inland down the west coast. Just to confuse things, Eureka is also located in northern California, but is on the coast about two hours south of the California and Oregon border. From this description you might think that these two towns are close to each other. In fact it takes something like five hours to drive from Yreka to Eureka. (By the way, for those of you who are interested, northern California does NOT include the San Francisco bay area. Look at a map and judge for yourself!) Want to remember how to spell Yreka? “Yreka Bakery” backwards is “Yreka Bakery” (One of Herb Cain’s favorite palandromes palindromes.)
Anyway, back on topic (there is a topic to this post?) Last night I watched the premeire episode of the SciFi channel’s new “Eureka” show. The jist of the show is that Eureka is actually the site of a top secret research laboratory and as such the town is populated by a large number of eccentric scientists/shadow government characters. The show is pretty amusing, as such shows go (a judgement which is purposefully vague), and includes such great lines as “But Dr. [whose name I can’t remember] was our best quantum physicist!” I’ll probably get suckered into watching it again, in large part as an act of solidarity for the part of the world I grew up in.
But watching “Eureka” reminded me of a false impression I had about being a scientist when I was growing up. One of my favorite books growing up was “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle. In this story, the protaganist’s parents are scientists. Who live in an old house in the country. Huh? Scientists making a living in the rural world? Being a rural kid this seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time and made, I think, becoming a scientist seem not so incompatable with living in a rural town. But, alas, I think the real world is much different. Unless of course “Eureka” is more than a T.V. show and there turns out to be a top secret research lab in Eureka. If there is, could the relevant people please send me an application?
Translate to Classical, Then Laugh
If you ever let reviewers get under your skin, your going to waste a lot of your life with way too much grief. So my approach is mostly to first laugh, then send an email to my collaborators expressing outrage (vent), and then laugh again. Sometimes the reviewers comments are just priceless. For example, a recent review of a paper I was involved in had the following line:
However, the mere fact that the…transform can be applied efficiently is not a surprise – usually this is the case with quantum transforms, if one looks into the representation theory close enough.
Why is this funny? Well when I translate this over to classical algorithms I get the following sentence:
However, the mere fact that the circuit can be applied efficiently is not a surprise – usually this is the case with classical circuits, if one looks into the combinatorics close enough.
Ha! Now that’s funny.
Back From Outerspace
Posting has been low because I’ve been (1) camping on a ferry going through the inside passage in Alaska (where I spent my time doing lots of perturbation theory), (2) camping south of Mt. Rainier, and (3) celebrating the 4th of July.
In other personal news, I’m in Nature! Okay, well not quite, but this website was somehow listed on a list of fifty popular science blogs. Like all such listing this certainly is Macbeth (you know, “full of sound and furtyfury, signifying nothing.”)
Oh, and as of July 1, 2006, I am no longer a “Principal Research Scientist” but instead am a “Research Assistant Professor” in the department of computer science and engineering here are UW. I think this means that Scott can no longer officially use me as his physicist punching bag (although I must say I am certainly happy to oblige)? This is, of course, good news. The only drawback that I know of right now is that when I fill out my tax forms next year I will no longer to fill out my occupation as simply “Scientist.”
Next week I’m off to Bell Labs where I’ll be talking at a meeting called “Quantum Information Meets Nanotechnology” so I promise to have real quantum content next week.
Tablet Science
Over at Life as a Physicist, Gordon Watts has a post about using his Tablet PC as a log book for his research (Gordon works in experimental particle physics.) I’ve been doing the same thing for about nine months now: using my tablet to take notes and function as a research lab book (I’ve also been attempting to lead a virtually paperless life: i.e. downloading all of the papers I am reading and reading them on the tablet.) So how do I like the tablet as a replacement for research notebooks?
Well, the first thing I have to say is that it is extremely convenient to have all of your notes in one place. If you convert the handwriting of your notes to text, you can search the notes for text phrases. The handwork recognition works very well (amazingly it seems to work better the faster I write. When I slow down and try to be careful it makes more mistakes!) Of course, the ultimate tool for theorists isn’t yet there: a handwriting to LaTeX convertor!
Another feature I really like is the ability to cut and paste sections of a PDF document into my notes. I use this all the time when I am working through a paper. Cut a bit of the paper. Add your own notes. Cut the next section. Add notes, etc. This is actually something which is very nice to have, because previously I would just work through the paper on a separate sheet of paper, so there was no direct connection with the flow of the paper.
Another fine feature of the tablet is using it with Powerpoint. You can write directly on your slides during a presentation (and save those marks on the presentation for latter viewing.) This is very convenient for answering questions and such during a talk. Last term I used the tablet to deliver powerpoint lectures, with mixed success. This can actually work very well if you do it right. The right way, as far as I can tell, is to use the powerpoint for a broad outline of what you are discussing (pictures, charts, etc.) but to use the pen features for most of the lecture. That way you aren’t just giving a powerpoint presentation (which is always too fast and too cursory for teaching), yet on the other hand you can include the nice features that powerpoint allows: clean clear graphs, charts, diagrams, etc. Unfortunately I don’t think I did this properly during most of the class I taught. Doh! (The other strange thing about using the tablet to lecture is that it is very difficult for me to lecture while standing up with the notebook unless the podium is a very high podium. This means that I have to teach sitting down, which is kind of strange!) Here in the CSE department at UW, they have done some very cool research with Tablet software which allows students who all have tablets to interact with the lecturer and give a very cool interactive touch to the lectures (see here for more info.)
Of course, not everything works perfectly with using the Tablet as a research log book. First of all, as Gordon puts it:
The hardware is certainly up to the task. As usual, the software is lagging: the market for lab notebook emulation software is small.
I’ve been particularly frustrated by the poor cut and paste ability of the notebook taking software I’m using, Microsoft’s Onenote software. I’m hopeful that the upcoming Vista version of Onenote will address many of these issues. Another problem is that the Tablet I own (a Toshiba Tecra) is a monster. What is nice about this is that the screen is great for reading papers (no eye strain). What is bad about this is that the thing weighs a bit and has a fan that is, when doing heavy duty computing tasks, rather loud. I think if I did it again I would go one size down (I’m not a fan of the ultralights, really.)
One problem with the tablet I have, which I’ve been trying to remedy lately, is its use in my office. In my office I have a monitor and docking station for the tablet. Right now when I’m in the office I just use the monitor output. What I’d really like to do is set up the multiple displays so that I can use the Tablet in tablet mode and the monitor in normal mode. What is keeping me from doing this? Well the docking station from Toshiba is slanted such that if you use the laptop in Tablet mode (with the screen pivoted down) the tablet isn’t flat. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the way I normally use the tablet is in portrait mode and then the screen is very very awkward. So I’m trying to figure out a way to rig the docking station so that the screen is level (but so far all my attempts have resulted in very awkward and not very robust setups.)
All in all, I’m very pleased with using my tablet as a research notebook. Now if only they could give me more colors and pens for when I’m doodling on my tablet during a talk 🙂
Summer is Here
Well the exams are graded, final grades will be turned in this Friday, so what’s a guy to do to celebrate the beginning of summer? How about duggout seats at a Seattle Mariners game! That’s right seats right behind the dugout, so that you could put your beer on the dugout and if you yelled at the ump he might mistake you for the coach. Luckily I’m only a mild manner theorist, so no such hijinks came to fruition. Here is a shot from the seats:
The game last night was a good one. A bad call late in the game by the ump (hey I live in Seattle, remember) allowed a grand slam by the opposing Minnesota Twins to tie the game and send it to extra innings. The game was, even at that point, a very long game. In the bottom of the 11th the home crowd got really quiet and a lot of people had headed for their beds. So someone shouted out “I want to go home, Carl!” at the current Seattle batter, Carl Everett, and cracked up the crowd. Well it must have worked! Because two pitches latter he hit a home run over the right field wall to win the game. (And then we were attacked by parents with kids on their shoulders, kids under their arms, and kids hanging onto their legs, who immediately ran to the duggout to see if they could get an autographed ball.)
Summer has officially begun!