So bing, Microsoft’s latest search engine, is up and running the tech word is a twitter. I checked it out and…well. On google when you search for “pontiff” my blog comes up as hit number five, after a few silly things like wikipedia entries and dictionary definitions (but no actual links to the *ahem* real pontiff. Sadly the days when I was number one on google are gone. But I will someday tell my grandkids…) But on bing, what happens? I’m down at number nine. Nine, Microsoft, really? I live in Seattle you know: shouldn’t this give me extra rank in your algorithms? And among the related searches, none of these are for “quantum pontiff.”
(I’d like to conclude that this is a good thing for how the search engine works except for the fact that bing gives the number three spot to a real estate agent. And we all know that real estate agents are actually all devils responsible for the collapse of the financial system and probably also for things like Mondays and gum stuck on the bottom of your shoes.)
Google Wave
Catch the wave. Long but worth watching:I suspect that collaboration will never be the same after the wave.
Another observation is about gadgets and iphone apps. One beauty of iphone apps is how easy it is to write one. This has always been true of many gadgets (like gadgets for google’s homepage.) But the later has always suffered, it seems to, in a lack of functionality. I think wave might push this problem in a very positive direction (see for example the yes/no/maybe widget.) Further having things server side is also allows for a sort of gadgetology with a large amount of power, which I really like.
Information Causality
Recently I finally got a chance to read the new preprint arXiv:0905.2292 “A new physical principle: Information Causality” by M. Pawlowski, T. Paterek, D. Kaszlikowski, V. Scarani, A. Winter, and M. Zukowski. It’s been a long time since I spent more than a few spare hours thinking about foundational issues in quantum theory. Personally I am very fond of approaches to foundational questions which have a information theoretic or computational bent (on my desktop I have a pdf of William Wootter’s thesis “The Acquisition of Information From Quantum Measurements” which I consider a classic in this line of interrogation.) This preprint is very much along these lines and presents a very intriguing result which clearly merits some deeper thinking.
(Update: see also Joe for details of the proof.)
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When Tomorrow Was Yesterday
Ditch day 2009 was May 27, 2009. A classic from the past. Our stack involved a multi-storied wooden puzzle and the strong chance we would be taped to a tree upside down.
Astrometry Finds Planet
It seems that astrometry has finally succeeded at detecting a planet. A star and its planets perform a complex dance as they move through space. In astrometry planet hunting one looks for a planet by looking for the “wobble” of a star as it moves across the sky. This is contrast with the two other methods used to detect planets around stars, which use radial velocity or transits to detect the planets. Now it seems that a team from JPL has used a series of measurements over 12 years to detect a Jupiter sized planet tugging on its star, VB 10. The wobble in this case is a movement of about one sixth of an arcsecond per year. Very cool.
Online Weekly Colloquia?
Recently I’ve been thinking it might be fun to set up some sort online weekly colloquia in quantum computing. Fun? Well, okay maybe that’s not quite the right word. But it would be an interesting experiment. So I went out looking for good live webinar/videoconferencing software and well…I was a bit disappointed. Sure there are a lot of videoconference companies out there…which almost all have limited version for use for free. But these limited versions almost all seem to restrict to only a few participants. Anyone know of some software which might be appropriate for attempting to setup an online colloquium? Has anyone seen a setup where this has worked before? Oh, and is there any interest in such an online colloquium?
Life Sized Katamari Controller
Katamari Damacy is a very cool game, if for no other reason than it is a game in which “scale” changes. The basic idea is that you roll a ball around which picks up objects that aren’t too big for the ball and then the ball grows. Usually you are racing a clock to make your ball big enough. I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s highly addictive.
But this, this is way cool. A controller for the game which is….a big shiny metal ball:
The Weird Pope
Via his squidiness, a test on which pope you are. Me?
Seek help now!
You are a giddy combo of the weirder Popes, Stephen VI, Benedict XVI and St Peter
But we knew that already, no?
Comments?…I Don't Have to Show You Any Stinkin' Comments!
One of the more interesting “problems” in Science 2.0 is the lack of commenting on online articles. In particular some journals now allow one to post comments about papers published in the journal. As this friendfeed conversation asks:
Why people do not comment online articles? What is wrong with the online commenting system[s]? I think this is one of the central issues in Science 2.0.
Or as Carl Zimmer commented on comments appearing at PLOS One a few years back:
What I find striking, however, is how quiet it is over at PLOS One. Check out a few for yourself. My search turned up a lot of papers with no discussion attached. Many others had a few comments such as, “This is a neat paper.” There’s nothing like the tough criticism coming out about the new flagellum paper to be found at PLOS One.
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Alumni Magazines in Economic Bad Times
As an alumnus of the California Institute of Technology (thats “Caltech” not “CalTech” peoples!) and a member of the Caltech alumni association, I get a quarterly copy of Engineering and Science (E&S). In this month’s issue there is a letter from the editor concerning the future of the print version of Engineering and Science. It seems that, like much print media today, this esteemed publication’s print edition may go the way of the dodo.
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