Booz Allen Hamilton is looking for a science and technology consultant in quantum information sciences. Help be a part of quantum revolution! Description and contact info below the fold.
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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?
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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
I’ve previously mused that a reason that Vineland
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.
Help Rod With His Summer Reading
Rod Van Meter is in search of some summer reading:
I’m feeling the need to recharge my store of ideas, and I have the
nagging feeling that my lack of currency in a bunch of fields is
causing me to miss some connections I could use in my own research.
So, I’m looking for a reading list of, say, the one hundred most
important papers of the decade. It doesn’t have to be an even
hundred, but I’m looking for a good summer’s reading. (Given that
it’s mid-2009, now would be a good time to start composing such a list
anyway, depending on where you want to place the “decade” boundary.)
I want these papers to cover *ALL* fields of computer science and
engineering; I am by nature catholic in my reading.
Head over to his site and help out with your favorite gem of CS/engineering!
OMG QIP=PSPACE!
Today on the arXiv an new paper appeared of great significance to quantum computational complexity: arXiv:0907.4737 (vote for it on scirate here)
Title: QIP = PSPACE
Authors: Rahul Jain, Zhengfeng Ji, Sarvagya Upadhyay, John Watrous
We prove that the complexity class QIP, which consists of all problems having quantum interactive proof systems, is contained in PSPACE. This containment is proved by applying a parallelized form of the matrix multiplicative weights update method to a class of semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proofs. As the containment of PSPACE in QIP follows immediately from the well-known equality IP = PSPACE, the equality QIP = PSPACE follows.
This solves a long standing open problem (we can say long standing in quantum computing when we mean less than nine years because our field is so young.) It has always been known that PSPACE is in QIP, but prior to this result (assuming its correct: I just downloaded the paper and am starting to read it now) the best known inclusion in the other direction was that QIP is in EXP (this result is due to Kitaev and Watrous.) But wait a second, what the hell are all these letters representing?
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