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Comic Relief on Finals

Quotes which I put on the final for my quantum computing class:

“I didnt’ fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.” — Benjamin Franklin
“People will accept your idea much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.”–David H. Commins

Unfortunately I didn’t put a comic on the test. It always seemed that the exams I took in intro level physics and chemistry courses at Caltech, or the ones I saw in similar courses at Berkeley, always had either a Far Side or a Calvin and Hobbes comic on them. In fact, I have a conjecture about this. I’m convinced that you can identify the exam by the comic on the front of the exam. Far Side: physics. Calvin and Hobbes: chemistry. But this just may be a result of my local experience.

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Dean of Evolution

OK, so I know I said no more politics. But opening the paper every morning and seeing a new pro-intelligent design politician blather at the mouth (today was John McCain’s turn), it’s good to see another famous political blatherer actually blathering something sensible. So I present, via Pharyngula, via “Face the Nation” Howard Dean:

Mr. Harris: Were you troubled by President Bush’s endorsement that intelligent design should be taught alongside the evolution to schoolchildren?
Dr. Dean: The president has been anti-science for a long time. This is the most antiscientific regime that I’ve seen in America in my lifetime. I’m a trained physician, as you’re aware. I’m insulted by that. It’s going to harm America. What serious business is going to invest in America if a scientific education is influenced by politics? Science ought to be taught as science. If you want to teach religion, that’s a separate debate. But science should be taught as science.
Schieffer: What is intelligent design? What do you think of that idea?
Dr. Dean: I think it’s a religious idea. And actually, Einstein thought that there was some merit to it. Who am I to question Albert Einstein? But that is not–a religious idea is different than a scientific design. The idea that–and I don’t think science and religion are incompatible. That’s the thing that amazed me about this. You don’t have to disbelieve evolution in order to be a religious person. So I don’t understand why these folks continue to try to have this debate. But the truth of the matter is, intelligent design is a religious perception and a religious precept. That’s fine. That should be taught wherever religion is taught, if that’s the desire of those people who are religious.
Science is science. There’s no factual evidence for intelligent design. There’s an enormous amount of factual evidence for evolution. Those are the facts. If you don’t like the facts, then you can fight against them. The Catholic Church fought against Galileo for a great many, many centuries. But it never pays to ignore the facts. Reason we’re in trouble in Iraq right now, president didn’t care what the facts were. Reason we have a $7 trillion, almost $8 trillion national debt, president didn’t care what the facts were. The facts matter. The truth is, you can’t run a business, a state, a country or a family if you don’t care what the facts are.

Not perfect, but hell I’ll take anything I can get these days.

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Arxiv Trackbacks

Over at Musings, I just learned that the Arxiv now has trackback capabilities. Now we can spend all our time that we normally spend counting citations, instead counting trackbacks!

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Comment Preview

I’ve added comment preview. Let’s see if it works.
Update: doh, not working. Will work on this tomorrow.
Update update: it’s working, thanks the kind help of il filosofo!

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"This is the Way the World Ends" by James Morrow

“This Is the Way the World Ends” by James Morrow is a classic black satire of nuclear proliferation in the cold war. In an interesting way this book did not resonate with me, but I still found it interesting as a window into the ideas and debates of proliferation and deterance during the cold war. So, as a window into so political satire of the cold war, I give it high marks. But as a captivating story which still seems relevant today, I give it low marks. Perhaps I should be scared that I’m not scared of nuclear proliferation. Or at least I’m not scared in the same way people were scared during the cold war.

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Not Even Publishable?

Peter Woit has an interesting post today on his new book “Not Even Wrong.” In the post Peter describes his zigzag path towards publication of the book and the resistance he encountered. My favorite part is where Peter describes how during one round of review, he encountered a referee who

…dealt with the problem of not being able to find anything wrong with what I had written by claiming that arguing against string theory was like arguing against teaching evolution…

Not only are we going to stop teaching evolution in public high schools science classes, but now we aren’t going to teach string theory in these classes as well. On no! The horror! The horror!

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The GHZ Final Problem

Well, my grades are all turned in, and so I’ve pretty much officially finished teaching my first class. On the final, I had an extra credit problem which was basically the GHZ problem. It was very interesting to see the different ways in which the students would come up with a contradiction for the impossibility of winning the GHZ game. My favorite was the student who wrote a spreadsheet for every single possible strategy and showed that none of those would win. This is such a computer science way to solve the problem: I love it! The students all did remarkably well on the final and I was very happy with their final scores (they may be more or less happy.) One of the students didn’t miss a point the entire term!
This week I’m preparing my lectures for a summer school in Italy. Again it will be a course for graduate students in computer science. Pretty soon Dirac notation will be standard in computer science departments 😉 Here is my favorite quote about Dirac notation:

Mathematicians tend to despise Dirac notation, because it can prevent them from making important distinctions, but physicists love it, because they are always forgetting such distinctions exist and the notation liberates them from having to remember.–David Mermin

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My New Toy

Just in time for the end of the semester, my new tablet pc arrived.
My New Toy
It’s a monster Tecra M4 and so far I must say I love it (once I removed all the bloatware and the ugly stickers!) That’s a picture of Mt. Shasta, a volcano near where I grew up, displayed on Google Earth. I’m really looking forward to taking notes with this thing. One thing that is certainly cool is that the size of my screen is such that an entire page of pdf is just about the same size as the real thing:
No Scrolling

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Where's McHawking When You Need Him?

Are doctors scientists? From Chris Mooney, just in time to set my blood pressure up a few notches for the weekend:

“I think today a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith,” Frist said.
Frist, a doctor who graduated from Harvard Medical School, said exposing children to both evolution and intelligent design “doesn’t force any particular theory on anyone. I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future.”

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Patterns? You Want Patterns?

I highly recommend this post over at Three-Toed Sloth about identifying coherent structures in spatiotemporal systems. What a pretty post! Oh, and the science is fascinating as well. It reminds me of a question I’ve always wondered about in cellular automata theory. It’s a bit long winded, so if I get the time I’ll write a post on it.