This weekend I entered my entire library into librarything. Why would I do this? I don’t really know, but I’ve always been curious how many books I own. The number, as of today, appears to be 858 (including seven duplicates.) For those wishing to see what trash I read, you can find the catelog at this page.
Summer? We Don't Need No Sticking Summer!
The end of the term is almost here! Summer, also known as, RESEARCH FULLTIME, is almost here. My teaching of “Introduction to Digital Design” is almost complete (okay, grading nearly sixty exams might eat up a bit of my time next week 🙂 ) Histograms of scores are being plotted campus wide. Everywhere students stumble to the final review sessions, their heads swollen from all of the informatinos stuffed inside their head. Rejoince! Rejoice! Summer is almost here!
And what is it doing in Seattle to remind me of this coming event?
Raining.
Okay, enough moping, back to work!
Neologistas
What do you call a blog entry whose only content is a link to another blog post? I suggest calling such posts throughposts.
Third Mersenne Prime
Today is my birthday and I am the third Mersenne prime years old. I am skeptical that I will make the fourth Mersenne prime. And I am certain that I will not make the 43rd (?): [tex]$2^{30402457}-1$[/tex]!
Tale of Two Conferences
Right now I’m in the middle of an incredibly strange transition. Friday and Saturday the Northwest Section of the American Physical Society had its annual conference in Tacoma (at the University of Puget Sound: what an acronym, eh?) This conference was full of all sorts of cool physics, astronomy, and even the history of physics (did you know that graphs were not really used until the mid to late nineteenth century. How strange?!) Starting this evening, I’ll be attending the 38th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing which is being held here in Seattle. I’m sure the next few days will be filled with all sorts of cool theoretical computer science. Now I’m faced with getting my brain to move from an experiment involving electromagnetically induced transparency to understanding capacity achieving list decoding codes. So if my bloggings seem a little random, well, you’ll know that this transition has fried my brain.
My Last Name
It’s Bacon! (Warning: the linked site may lead to abnormally clogged arteries.)
Update: From the comments,
Bacon, Bacon, Bacon
www.baconrobots.com – Because the only thing better then Bacon is a hot animatronic lady cooking it for you.
www.ratethebacon.com – A site for bacon lovers who love to talk about bacon.
www.baconspectator.com – Home of the Bacon of the Month Club.
www.craftyplanet.com/bacobuddies.htm – Bacobuddies – how cool is that.
www.blacktable.com/bacon030515.htm – Bacon soap.
www.makinbacon.com/welcome.htm – I’m sorry, but microwaving bacon is just wrong.
www.cookingforengineers.com/article.php?id=3 – Or is it? Scientific Bacon.
www.cockeyed.com/inside/bacon/bacon.html – The economy of bacon.
www.bayoudog.com/04kitchen/bacon.htm – Bacon as heroin.
www.iheartbacon.com – for the Bacon obsessed
One Heck of a Lorentz Transform
When I was little I used to wonder if a long time ago a distant alien race had noticed our little planet and set up a gigantic mirror pointing towards the earth such that we could use superpowerful telescopes to look into our planet’s past. Mostly I remember thinking that it would be cool if this were true and we could see dinosaurs (that was, I believe, the complete and total extent of my own version of the dinosaur fetish that seems to infect so many children.) Of course I was delighted when I discovered many years later the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, who had quite a fetish for mirrors. A memorial quote of Borges on mirrors is from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
Then Bioy-Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.
While this is not a quote I can exactly sympathize with, the logic of mirrors holds, I think, some strange consequences. For example, suppose you want to freeze a moment of your life for future generations to look back upon. Well, simply launch a mirror away from you at as close to the speed of light as you can possibly manage. Then some future generation will be able to use this mirror to look back at this moment. (Of course the closeness to which you can launch this mirror to the speed of light will effect how much you have “frozen” this instant.) Of course, you could just as easily take a picture of the moment. But the mirror trick affords a certain sense of security: as long as no one can launch a mirror faster than yours, your mirror is safe. And this only gets better as time goes on (they need a faster mirror than yours to catch up to yours.) Of course the size of the mirror needed might be a little extravegant, and certainly gets worse as a function of time. Why Kodak hasn’t marketed this to cult leaders who wish to preserve their teachings, however, I do not know. 🙂
The reason for this post is completely a function of associative memories: yesterday I was bored, and so I calculated for myself that if you move approximately 1-10^(-39) percent of the speed of light as compared to everyone else, then the event in your frame which has coordinates x=1cm and t=0, would correspond to an event which happened about 14 billion years ago, i.e. at the begining of the big bang. In other words there are reference frames where what is next to you happened at the big bang.
So what physicists/(whatever job title describes what I am) do when they get bored? Well it appears to me to be the same things we thought about when we were little. But now they just involve numbers.
Brain Signals Random
Note to self: Going to see David Sedaris will give you really funky dreams.
Note to self: Dreams which involve explaining how to pull Pauli gates through Clifford gates using holes in the ground and coconuts are disturbing.
Blabbering Bacon
For those local to Seattle: Next week, on Tuesday, I’m giving a talk here at UW:
Towards Robust and Powerful Quantum Computers
Colloquium
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
3:30 pm, EE-105
Abstract
Today, a massive effort, spanning many hundreds of research groups coming from multiple disparate disciplines, is underway to build a robust large scale quantum computer. These groups are undertaking this task because the payoffs for building a quantum computer are large and because of a remarkable set of theoretical insights, collectively known as the theory of fault-tolerant quantum computation, which assures them that building a robust quantum computer is possible. In this talk I will discuss my research into the theory of fault-tolerant quantum computation as well as into the study of the algorithmic power of quantum computers. On this first topic, I will highlight methods for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computation which are remarkably similar to how fault-tolerance is achieved in classical computers. Such “self-correcting” quantum systems are best thought of as being the equivalent of the classical transistor which jump started the classical computer revolution. On the second topic of quantum algorithms, I will highlight the similarities and differences between quantum and classical computers and describe how these differences have lead to new quantum algorithms for classically hard problems.
Dance Ions! Dance!
A reliable source (heh, that’s funny isn’t it) tells me that the ion trap dance I discussed here was the “Open Box Salsa.” Because, you know, I’m sure you all really wanted to know that.
(Which of course reminds of a story. So an old teaching technique for those who have trouble spelling (like me) is to learn to visualize the world you are trying to spell while looking, say, to the up and right. You know, that introspective thing you do when you are searching for some bit of knowledge. The idea is to leverage that to help your spelling. Well a few years back I decided that what was more important than remembering things was to forget things. Indeed, like the above information, I’ll bet you were better off without it. So I started training myself to look down when I am trying to forget something. Not sure if it ever really worked. Or at least I don’t remember if it’s worked.)