SQuInT program and deadline, Rush Limbaugh on quantum cosmology, and the parallel worlds of Hugh Everett’s son
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Off the Queue and Into the Cranium
Books off the queue and lodge securely somewhere behind my eyes: “A Mathematician’s Apology” by G.H. Hardy and “A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation” by Richard Bookstaber
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Nitpicker's Paradiso: We Don't Need no Stinking Scientists and Engineers Edition
Researchers Dispute Notion That America Lacks Scientists and Engineers in the Chronicle of Higher Education is a fine example of how thinking that scientific or engineering degree’s are like technical training degrees will lead you to say all sorts of funny things. Yep, it’s another edition of Nitpicker’s Paradiso.
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Teaching Happiness…
…is finding a homework stuck to my door, with duck tape, along with the note “Gone to Mt. Baker” (Mt. Baker is a local ski area.) Actually this reminds me of a policy I’ve always wanted to try: require every student to NOT attend class at least a few times a term. The idea being that it is actually beneficial to at least try to teach yourself the material without guidance from the teacher. Many students probably can learn on their own, but never try, because they equate doing well with attendance. Nudging these students towards that realization, I think, might actually be a good thing.
Seattle Contradiction: Geek City USA and Bachelors Production
From the magazine Seattle Metropolitan, comes the article “Smartest city ever: 50 ways Seattle will change the world.” I hope the claim is true, but like all magazine articles from rags denoted entirely to a city, the lens is more than a little biased.
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God Is a Weak Coin Flipper
One of the funniest abstracts to a paper on the arxiv in many moons appeared yesterday, authored by Carlos Mochon:
arXiv:0711.4114
Title: Quantum weak coin flipping with arbitrarily small bias
Authors: Carlos Mochon
“God does not play dice. He flips coins instead.” And though for some reason He has denied us quantum bit commitment. And though for some reason he has even denied us strong coin flipping. He has, in His infinite mercy, granted us quantum weak coin flipping so that we too may flip coins. Instructions for the flipping of coins are contained herein. But be warned! Only those who have mastered Kitaev’s formalism relating coin flipping and operator monotone functions may succeed. For those foolhardy enough to even try, a complete tutorial is included.
Physics in the New York Times?
One good reason to subscribe to the New York Times is that they have what I consider far above average science reporting for a newspaper. Their Tuesday Science Times section is a must read for me pretty much every week. Over the last three weeks I’ve been keeping track of the stories that were run in Tuesday’s science section. By my count, three weeks ago there were two stories which might be considered as articles about physics, one of which the categorization is a stretch (swarm models have been studied by physicists, but I doubt many physicists would consider this physics), and since two weeks ago, not a single article on physics has appeared. So the question is whether the reason for this is (1) not much is happening in physics that is newsworthy, (2) physics is, after many years of being hailed as achieving great public relations, losing its public relations touch, (3) biology and medicine are much more important, interesting, and newsworthy, (4) the New York Times hates physics, physicists, and even physicist’s children, or (5) none of the above?
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Qubit, qbit, q-bit, or Q*Bert?
My grandfather liked to write letters to the editor. I think I inherited this disease from him. Here are the contents of a recent letter I wrote to the editor of Physics Today which I hope some of you may find amusing.
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Nitpicker's Paradiso: Paul Davies Anthropic Edition
Paul Davies essay in the New York Times on “Taking Science on Faith” is sure to raise some hackles from the science community. Me, I’d just like to point out how silly some of Davies arguments specifics are. Yes, its another edition of “Nitpickers Paradiso.”
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"Space-Time" to Call Mystics on Their Misuse of Quantum Theory
Well it is certainly true that Mystics and quantum physicists speak the same language, that language most probably being Mandarin, English, or Hindi, but I’m guessing that’s probably not what they meant by that title. I should have stopped reading at the title, but instead I actually scanned down the page.
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