Amusings.
Continue reading “Florida”
A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 2
Part three in my continuing pedantic slow-as-molasses walk through Outliers: The Story of Success
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1, ch 2.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 2”
Ecto and LaTeXiT
Method for using Ecto and LaTeXiT.
Scienceblogs Upgrade
Scienceblogs is upgrading. This site won’t allow comments from 10pm Pacific Standard Time on Friday, January 9 until…well until the upgrade is complete (possibly Saturday sometime.)
So instead of being frustrated at not being able to comment why don’t you instead go waste your time by:
- By reading some provocative statements about teaching over at the information processors blog.
- If you need to procrastinate about preparing a referee report, you might check out Michael Nielsen’s Three myths of scientific peer review
- The Statistical Mechanic is back, and discussing thermodynamics, probability, and the measurement problem. If you actually want to expand your brain instead of waste your time, this would be a good place to do so.
- Copco and Iron Gate, will they be demolished in 2020? The county hopes to be involved.
- Read articles from the perspective of a view not often heard at Secular Right
- Read a book from the list of free books about the market put together by the Master of the Universe.
QIP Santa Fe
For those of us quantum computing folk heading to QIP 2009 in Santa Fe, NM, a few recommendations from someone who once called Santa Fe home.
Continue reading “QIP Santa Fe”
Dad – 5 Years On
It is nearly impossible for me to believe that five years have passed since you passed away.
And hey, we’re still waiting for Mt. Shasta to explode, could you get working on that?
One day, when I was an undergraduate at Caltech, I received a package in the mail from my father. In it was a small yellow squash with red dots painted onto it along with a strip of paper which read “what is this?” Well, Caltech is full of some pretty smart people, so we spent a few days trying to reason what this strange package that my father sent was. Small. Yellow. Squash. With red dots. Huh? After a few days I gave up and gave him a call. Okay, dad, what is that damn thing? “Oh, that’s simple,” he said, “It’s an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot zucchini!”
We miss you. Even your bad jokes.
Villa Sophia Skiing
Skiing past our home in Seattle:
Later a group of local kids made a snowboard jump…I would have used it but it didn’t look all that sturdy, and I probably would have ended up with an action shot of “Dave destroying local kids joy.”
Bouncing Back From Droping Off The Edge
Whew. That was quite a quarter! Talk about drinking straight from a firehose. Okay, okay, I still have a long list of missed deadlines that I need to get to ASAP, but at last it feels like maybe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (don’t tell me its the next quarter, I want to be delusional for at least a few days.)
The winter break is always a great time, most importantly because “OMG snow!” (Seattle got another four plus inches of snow last night. Dude, that’s like a two feet equivalent in most of the rest of the northern U.S.!) and because of all the great Christmas cheer (like the war on Christmas taking place right here in Washington. In order to add to this war, my front yard currently includes a Santa Flamingo and his nine flamingo Reindeer:
) And most importantly because I like to spend my winter break thinking really crazy ideas. In other words, it’s more likely that there will actually be something worth reading on this blog in the coming weeks (promised to be crazy however, always ruin being crazy, so I won’t promise to be crazy, because, well, that would be crazy.)
Physics Based License Plates
Via Zz, a link to Symmetry Breaking’s list of physics based license plates.
Sweet I’ll have to submit my old California plates:
If there is one thing I will regret in life it is that I missed one of the most “terrifiq” opportunities of all time. While I was at the Santa Fe Institute, I had my QUBITS plates and sometimes would park beside Murray Gell-Mann’s car which had a QUARKS license place. At one point Ben Schumacher, who invented the word “qubit”, visited the Santa Fe Institute. Damnit that was my opportunity to get a picture of two people who invented words in the dictionary starting with a “q” beside two cars with those words as license plates! Drats, that would have been priceless.
(For quantum computing people make sure you ask Andrew Landahl what his license plate is next time you see him.)
Damn You Thomas Jefferson!
A while back I added my library to librarything.com. In adding this books I tagged my books with various keywords. As you can imagine there were a lot tagged as “physics.” Indeed when I entered the books there were only a few people who had a comparable number of physics tags, among them a user called lasermazer. Recently I checked in, and damnit, there is now a library that has a lot more physics tags books:
Yes that is the Thomas Jefferson! A cool feature of library thing are “legacy libraries” where you can compare your overlap with other historic libraries. But wait. Thomas Jefferson is cheating. I mean I don’t have a copy of “Advice to shepherds and owners of flocks on the care and management of sheep”, which is tagged “Physics” but it seems to me that this book is most probably not about physicists (managing physicists is not like managing sheep, it’s like managing cats.)
The books I share with Thomas Jefferson are:
L’eloge de la folie by Desiderius Erasmus
The meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius
The plays of William Shakspeare : in ten volumes : with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators by William Shakespeare
Titi Lucretii Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex by Titus Lucretius Carus