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Born Where?

Many revelations on my trip from Pasadena, CA to Santa Fe, NM. But first I have to get this out of my system: “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen is NOT the appropriate song to play when the U.S. wins at the Olympics. Why? Why? God damnit listen to the lyrics. We begin with

Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
‘Til you spend half your life just covering up

Hmm, let’s see: ending up like a tortured dog, lying to cover up? What an image to make me proud of being an American.

I got in a little hometown jam
And so they put a rifle in my hands
Sent me off to Vietnam
To go and kill the yellow man

The poor and destitute make great soldiers. Very uplifting, let me tell you.

I had a buddy at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone
He had a little girl in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms

What a beautiful way to raise our hearts at the Olympics: let’s talk about a good friend who died in Vietnam and the picture you carry around of him and the girl he fathered in Saigon.

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years down the road
Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go

And now back to slaving away at that job in a refinery, with no where to go. Ain’t this the kind of stuff that fits the pride and patriotism Olympians want to project.
On the other hand, Bruce’s song does rock and is spot on in its characterization of (rural) America. I guess what tweaks my twissle is that the song is clearly played with the concept of “hey ain’t it great to be an American” when really the song is about the opposite. So, in some ways, this song is very subversive. That’s what I think when I’m thinking optimistically. When I’m not in such bliss, I think about how subversive only works if there is a brain to subvert. And another strip and stripes bedazzled fan singing the song without hearing the words is going to make me go bongo.

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HiHoHiHo

It’s off to New Mexico I go. I decided my original plan, to drive to Yreka in order to retrieve the contents of a storage shed, and then drive to Santa Fe–adding up to 2000 miles driving a big 15 foot truck–was a bad idea.

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Talking About My Generation

Among voters 18-29, Kerry leads Bush by a margin of 53% to 33% (Zogby, July 30th.) Thus if Bush wins I can claim either (a) it’s not my generation’s fault because a landslide of us voted for Kerry or I can claim that (b) it’s my generation’s fault because we supported Kerry by a landslide but if only my generation had higher turnout then Kerry would have won.

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Moved

Well I’ve successfully moved the site to dabacon.org. Or at least I hope so. It may take a while for the DNS servers to catch up. Let me know if you see anything strange on this new setup.

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Moving

Since I’m leaving Caltech (that’s one word people..one word!) I’m going to have to move my blog from transformer.cs.caltech.edu. The blog will be moving to dabacon.org . This change will happen soon: I’m not sure how long I will be able to redirect from dabacon.org to the new domain, so if I go missing, check dabacon.org or www.dabacon.org.

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Things Not Understood

One way people try to get out of the measurement problem in quantum theory is by continuiously bumping the problem up to larger and larger systems until at some point they get rid of the problem by invoking something new. Asher Peres’ book “Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods” has the following to say about this:

This mental prcoess can be repeated indefinitely. Some authors state that the last stage in this chain of measurements involves “consciousness,” or the “intellectual inner life” of the observer, by virtue of the “principle of psychophysical parallelism.”[3,4] Other authors introduce a wave function for the whole Universe[5]. In this book, I shall refrain from using concepts that I do not understand.
[3] J. von Neumann, Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik, Springer, Berlin (1932) p. 223; transl. by E.T. Beyer: Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton Univ. Press (1955) p. 418
[4] E.P. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, Indiana Univ. Press, Bloomington (1967) p. 177
[5] J.B. Hartle and S.W. Hawking, Phys. Rev. D 28 (1983) 2960

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Googlinaire

From Salary.com: about 1000 of Google’s nearly 2,300 employees are paper millionaires. Wowzer.

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Fate

One of the reasons I got interested in physics was because I have always been interested in the “question of free will.” Physicists don’t like to talk about free will much, especially since learning what quantum theory has to say about free will seems to put you smack dab in the middle of the measurement problem in quantum theory. In many ways, what I’m most interested in is not the question of free will, which I find too often to be an overly anthropocentric enterprise, but more the question of the determinism / indeterminism of physics. But the “free will question” has played a major role in shaping why I choose to do physics.
As so the question becomes: why was I interested in free will? Most of it is surely due to my older sister Cathy. You see Cathy is a little person. No one knows exactly what syndrome she has, but it causes her to be lopsided (one arm and leg shorter than the other), she has very poor vision and hearing, and has some mental difficulties. This makes it all sound really bad: which it is definitely not because Cathy is an amazing light in our family. She works at the local library in Yreka, loves to listen to her John Denver tapes, she loves to watch Jeopardy, and is, in general, a very happy person who brightens the lives of her many many friends.
But if you grow up with a sister like Cathy you can not avoid thinking about why you ended up the way you are and why she ended up the way she is? Was it fate and totally out of the hands of human choice? Science, and physics in particular, is the path one is reduced to in order to possibly find any answer to such a question. While we can argue forever whether reductionism to fundamental physics is central to answering this question, there can be no doubt that understanding the role of determinism and indeterminism in physics will have a profound impact on our view of this question.
On the other hand, Richard Feynman said: “Do not ask yourself… ‘how can it be like that?’ because you will lead yourself down a blind alley in which no one has ever escaped.” I don’t think Feynman was talking about science here: scientists spend much of their time answering how it can be like that. I think Feynman was talking about asking for reasons which somehow satisfy us as humans: answers that will give us short sentences explaining why. There are simple important questions which might have simple concise explanations, but finding these explanations seems impossibly difficult. And this is how I find myself coming full circle. Because this point of view, that there are simple questions for which there aren’t answers which can be found in a short time (and once we find them, we’ll know we’ve answered the question) is basically the complexity class NP. Which is computer science. The field, besides physics, which I most deeply admire.
So fate not only made me a physicist, but it also made me a computer scientist.
And the only question left remaining is whether or not it was destiny that I was born at a time when I could participate in the unfolding of the field of quantum computing, which merges physics and computer science like never before?

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Time is Change

Random thoughts at 2 a.m.: I have been playing poker all night and it’s 2 a.m., so this post may make no sense when I wake up in the morning…
If we take a single spin 1/2 particle, and put it in a magnetic field, the spin precesses. We can use this to form a sort of clock by preparing the spin in a particular state and then measuring the spin along a particular direction. Of course this clock only has two value 0 or 1. So a universe with a single spin has a single bit clock. But this clearly doesn’t approximate our univerese. What do we need? More spins! So add more spins. Now we get clocks that count in some binary fashion. So we can more accurately measure a time with more spins. Look: if we add more spins we gain accuracy in keeping track of time.
Now look at relativity. If our clock has a very small mass, and it is all that exists in the universe, we will read a time which is nearly that of clocks which are infinitely distant. But add more clocks and the mass increases. Now we have a clock with a larger mass. And the larger mass will cause the clock to run slow compared to a clock at infinity. But this means that such a clock can be used to measure the time at infinity much more accurately.
Are these two effects really one and the same?
**Update** Yep, it’s morning and this makes no sense. Although the two effects scale similarly in the non-relativistic regime.

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Bow Down Before Giblets

I will tell you once and only once that Fafblog is the best blog currently running. In fact it is so good that I think it may be written by someone with the last name of Wiggin.