Many of you know I’m a big fan of funny/creative paper titles. What with journal editors squashing every last ounce of humanity our of scientific papers, it always makes me happy to see someone else fighting the editorial machine. Today a friend sends me “Heavy Ion Collisions at the LHC – Last Call for Predictions,” by S. Abreu et al arXiv:0711.0974 (scirate here.) which cracks me up.
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Your Dog is in Your Head
What’s that you say Dave? Dogs may be able to think about what their owners are thinking? Sounds like interesting research, Dave. If someone could actually find the real research and not just this science by press release, I would really like to read the paper, Dave! And then I’d like to chew it up and hide it in the backyard.
Happenings in the Quantum World: Nov 7, 2007
SQuInT 2008. Quantum postdocs. Christianity as a laser. Toshiba opens lab with a quantum bent.
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The Purpose of This Blog
Oftentimes I’ve been asked what the purpose of this blog is. As if everything in life must have a purpose:pfft, I say! But because an answer is required, what I usually answer is that the purpose of my blog is to slow down my fellow researchers. I mean sheesh, the people in quantum computing are the modern polyglots of science, speaking physics, computer science, and mathematics with ease. And they’re universally a brainy crowd. So what better purpose can this blog serve that to slow these readers down by offering them great opportunities to surf the intertubes and procrastinate.
Along those lines…
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The Library of Laplace
(With apologies to Jorge Luis Borges.)
The universe, which others call the cellular automata, is composed of an indefinite (and perhaps infinite) number of square rooms, each room having four doors (in what we can, for lack of a better choice, assumelie in the cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west.) Each door leads to an adjoining room which is identical to the other rooms except for one salient feature. In the middle of each room stands a monstrous monolith whose color is not fixed, but changes regularly every forty two seconds.
Like most inhabitants of the universe, I have often contemplated the mysterious workings of the monolith…
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This Blog Has Moved
This is not the blog you are looking for. Or, well as of Nov 5, 2007 it is not the blog you are looking for. That’s right, the Quantum Pontiff is moving. Because change is good, life is short, and bad puns are a good reason for doing things, this blog is moving to Scienceblogs.com. The new web address is http://scienceblogs.com/ponitff. RSS will appear here.
Oh, I forgot to tell you what the bad pun is. Shame on me. Scienceblogs.com is under the umbrella of Seed Media Group. Thus I can say that in moving the pontiff, “I’m going to Seed.”
So grab your beer and come on over. For now I’m leaving the archives live for the pontiff here as there is still at least one thread are people are still commenting.
The Quantum Pontiff Has Landed
Look, up in the air, is it a bird? No. Is it a plane? No. Is it the quantum pontiff? Yes! Yes! The Quantum Pontiff! Um, okay….but what exactly is the quantum pontiff? Besides, of course, the juxtaposition of two words which don’t often find themselves seated together at the dinner table…
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States in the Morning, States in the Evening, States in the Afternoon
0711.0047: “Tunable quantum interference: How to make morning, noon, and afternoon states” by Holger F. Hofmann, Takafumi Ono. We can blame Jonathan Dowling?
Teleportation
While we quantum informationistas have not achieved teleportation, apparently the job market now allows for such a transform: TeleportMyJob.com (I wonder where they get their high quality Bell Pairs.)
Arxiv API
The arxiv has added an API. Funny I was just complaining about the lack of an API.