March Meeting GQI Invited Speakers

March is ages away, but it is time to start planning for the APS March meeting, to be held in the beautiful rose city, Portland, Oregon (Note to skiers that Mt. Hood is just a short distance away 🙂 ) Anyway an important part of the March meeting are invites sessions and the quantum computing/information/foundations topical group GQI is in charge of a few of these sessions. Want to nominate a session or invited speaker? Now’s your chance. Here’s the email that was sent out Friday:

Dear GQI members,
This is an email to solicit from you proposals for GQI sponsored invited sessions and invited speakers at the 2010 APS March Meeting (Portland, Oregon March 15-19, 2010.) Invited sessions and speakers are a great opportunity to highlight the most exciting results emerging from quantum information science and quantum foundations to the broader physics community.
The website for submitting proposals is now open at
http://meetings.aps.org/aps_invited/Invited/LoginForm.cfm?MT=MAR10&UNIT=GQI
and will remain open until September 15, 2009.
The GQI Program Committee has the opportunity to organize three invited sessions at the March Meeting. Proposals for these can only be submitted through the above web site. The deadline for submitting nominations is September 15, 2009.
In making proposals, please keep in mind the following APS rules: (i) no individual may receive an invitation two years in a row (unless he or she is a winner of a Prize in the second year); (ii) a single invited session is not permitted to have two speakers from the same institution (i.e., the same university or laboratory). A chair and a speaker from the same institution is acceptable.
Proposals for single invited presentations will also be considered for inclusion in the March Meeting Focus Sessions. This year, the planned focus sessions are
1. Superconducting qubits, 2. Semiconducting/solid state qubits, 3. Foundations of quantum theory, 4. Recent progress in quantum algorithms and quantum computational complexity, 5. Topological quantum computing,
and, jointly with DAMOP,
6. Hybrid AMO-condensed matter systems for quantum information science
To make a nomination, you will need to create an account at the web site and fill in the nomination form. You will need to provide reasonably detailed information about the proposed invited speakers. The more information you provide, the better the chance your proposal will be selected. If you proposal a single individual, you should give a justification for inclusion in one of the above Focus Sessions. If you propose a complete symposium, you should provide detailed information about the proposed topic of the session. Also, please indicate your preference for inclusion in the invited program of either the March Meeting or the DAMOP Meeting. Note that a full invited session at the March Meeting includes 5 speakers.
The GQI program committee will select March meeting sessions in the fall, while Focus session organizers will determine the single invited talks to be included in their sessions.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions (dabacon [nospam @] cs.washington.edu)

Can We Predict the Past?

God has no power over the past except to cover it with oblivion. – Pliny the Elder

Predicting the future is hard to do. Just ask any economist, stock trader, or weatherman, and you’ll hear of the horrors of predictions gone wrong. But what about on a more fundamental level? What can we say about prediction? In the past, I (and many others before me!) have argued that entities in universes with finite information per volume and local laws are fundamentally limited in their ability to predict the future (for a fable, see The Library of Laplace, for more clear thoughts see this post.) But what about the opposite direction? What if we ask, instead of whether we can predict the future, whether we can predict the past?
Continue reading “Can We Predict the Past?”

Unscientific in Seattle

Chris Mooney, former Scienceblogger and provocateur extraordinaire, will be in Seattle this Thursday talking about the book he co-authored with Sheril Kirshenbaum, “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.” Details:

Thursday, August 6 7:00 PM
University Bookstore
4326 University Way N.E.
Seattle, WA 98105
http://www.bookstore.washington.edu/trade.taf?dept=attribute&category=events&par=trade&ttl=events&page=1

From all I’ve heard Chris is an excellent speaker so this should be a fun event.

New Pynchon Novel Out

Well there goes a chunk of my time. A new Pynchon novel is out: Inherent Vice. According to this New York Times review it’s much more like Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49 than Gravity’s Rainbow. I’m sure there will be much teeth gnashing among the literati, but personally, I’m a huge fan of Vineland
I’ve previously mused that a reason that Vineland gets poor reviews is (a) “Gravity’s Rainbow” is pretty epic and has a subject with which current readers can approach without dislodging their own beliefs too much, and (b) literature professors don’t like being told the sixties failed.
Anyway time to see if it’s in the bookstore! I’m particularly excited to hear that there is a character named “Shasta” and that Lemurians make an appearance. Pynchon’s definitely spent some time in my old neck of the woods!

Tactical Bacon

“C” sends me a link of fantastic mmmm-ness. CMMG Tactical Bacon, TB-1, 9oz, 10+ Year Shelf Life:

The ultimate tactical accessory, the new Tactical Bacon from CMMG ® is simply amazing. Kept in an aluminum can for a shelf life of 10+ years, the CMMG ® Tactical Bacon is more affordable than other pre-cooked bacon producers, who offer no tactical packaging for their product. Including 9 ounces of pre-cooked bacon goodness, comparable to 3 pounds of raw bacon, the CMMG ® Tactical Bacon is perfect for camping trips, survival situations, a snack at the range, zombie attacks, and many other apocalyptic scenarios. Able to be eaten cold, or heated up, CMMG ® Tactical Bacon is sure to please bacon lovers of all ages.

Note the combined bonus price: if you buy the Tactical Bacon with a “Glock Factory Part, Disassembly Tool” you’ll save some dinero!

Quantum Police, Arrest This Woman

Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is “Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking.” Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don’t know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is one who is doing cool quantum computing research (“cracking?” and “hacking?” btw.)
I open up the article and who is the police woman? It’s Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described her job as “a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at the School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University” not as “policewoman working on quantum hacking and cracking.” And here I was hoping that we’d have someone to arrest anyone making false claims about quantum mechanics!

Asteroids!

A widget to watch out for wayward asteroids:

JPL’s Asteroid Watch Widget tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth. The Widget displays the date of closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter. The object’s name is displayed by hovering over its encounter date. Clicking on the encounter date will display a Web page with details about that object.
The Widget displays the next five Earth approaches to within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers or 19.5 times the distance to the moon); an object larger than about 150 meters that can approach the Earth to within this distance is termed a potentially hazardous object.
Available for Mac OS X Dashboard and Yahoo! Widgets.

Also you can follow along in the near eath encounters via twitter by following @AsteroidWatch.

Novel Torrent Technology For arXiv Archives?

Since it seems that the “arXiv on your hard drive” is dead I’ve been thinking a bit about if there is a better way to achieve the goal of distributing archives of the arXiv.
One thing I liked about the “arXiv on your hard drive” was that it used BitTorrent. This could alleviate some of the bandwidth pain associated with distributing the arXiv widely. But of course, one of the problems with using Torrents to distribute the arXiv is that, well, the arXiv changes daily! One solution to this is to update the torrent periodically, but in these go-go times this seems wrong. It seems to me that what we need is a BitTorrent-like protocol for collections that periodically get updated. A seeder could then update its collection and propagate only these new results to other hosts. Does anyone know if such a technology exists? A quick scan didn’t locate anything.
Of course then one would have to convince the arXiv folks to go along with this, but it would seem to me that the bandwidth costs for them could be made really fairly minimal.