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Moore Calculation

If only there had been open access, maybe it wouldn’t be called Moore’s law:

I didn’t go to Midland after all, but went instead to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which has roughly the same relationship to Johns Hopkins that JPL has to Caltech, and where I could continue to do basic research in areas related to what I had done before. But I found myself calculating the cost per word in the articles we published and wondering if the taxpayers were really getting their money’s worth at $5 per word. Just as I was starting to worry about the taxpayers, the group I was working in was, for various reasons, breaking apart. So I decided to look for something that had a bit more of a practical bent, and at the same time see if I could get myself back to California.

From Gordon Moore’s The Accidental Entrepreneur.

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Videoabstracts

Martin Plenio writes in with a link to a new site he created with Daniel Burgarth Videoabstracts (Joe got an email too):

I am writing to you to bring to your attention some new tool that we (Daniel Burgarth and myself) have developed that has the aim of making science papers just a little more accessible. Its called Videoabstracts and consists of ‘homemade’ videos in which an author of the paper explains the key point of the paper in front of a whiteboard. The videos should not be longer than 5 minutes to force people to get to the point efficiently. We feel that these 5 minutes clarify the content and relevance of a paper much better than any abstract can do.
We have produced several examples that you may see on http://www.quantiki.org/video_abstracts. We did not strive for perfection as we feel that anybody should just be able to do these with a webcam and then upload them on QUANTIKI. The videos will then be stored on YouTube and at the same time a link will be created on the arXiv.

Cool. We need to do one about our latest paper arXiv/0905.0901.

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Thoughts on Lazowska's Seattle Comments

Over at TechFlash there is an article about some words Ed Lazowska, professor extraordinaire here in the computer science & engineering department at UW, had for the Seattle tech scene (see also xconomy):

“It seems to me that the issue with this state is that we are one big happy family in which everybody is doing extremely well. Everyone’s college program is above average. And everyone’s company is above average. And everyone’s venture fund is above average. And if you go a little bit more above average than the next guy, then they get all Dirty Harry and whack you down. It is a state of Whack-a-Mole…. I worry that those who excel, and excel honestly, aren’t celebrated in this state.”

and

“We think of ourselves as being in the innovation big leagues, where in fact we are in the minors compared to those who are in the really big leagues like Boston and the Bay Area,” said Lazowska, who cited the recent bizjournals report showing that Seattle ranks fifth as a technology hub.

(though that study is whack. Washington D.C. at number 2? L.A. not in the top ten?)
Now I’m just an outsider to the tech scene (and nothing I say here should be construed as ever being endorsed, associated with, or even vaguely connected to my employer, the University of Washington), but I can think of at least one very good reason that Seattle is behind Boston and the Bay Area: its university system. Now, the University of Washington is a great university, our medical school is superb, and there are quite a few rather good departments across campus, but….
Continue reading “Thoughts on Lazowska's Seattle Comments”

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Villa Sophia 2009: Il Monstro Viola

This weekend was bottling weekend. Bottled up nine gallons of cab, Il Monstro Viola (this was the year that the purple monster in our front yard died) yielding 55 bottles of wine. Interestingly the two carboys I used had distinctively different tastes, one had a much stronger oak taste than the other. But both batches, this year, had a lot less of that “juice” taste than my previous years. Off to storage you go, Il Montro Viola:

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Physics Viewpoint: "Too entangled to quantum compute one-way"

Physics is an new APS initiative to highlight select articles for Physical Review journals, very much in the model of the commentaries that appear on articles in journals like Science. Many (all?) of the articles are written by researchers in the field, and are meant to be readable by a wide audience of physicists and serve as a sieve for what a good broad physicist should know about what is currently going on in physics.
Today, a highlight I wrote about two recent PRLs has appeared: Too entangled to quantum compute one-way. This paper highlights two recent papers on entanglement in one-way quantum computing: D. Gross, S. T. Flammia, and J. Eisert, “Most Quantum States Are Too Entangled To Be Useful As Computational Resources” Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 190501 (2009) (arXiv:0810.4331) and M. J. Bremner, C. Mora, and A. Winter, “Are Random Pure States Useful for Quantum Computation?” Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 190502 (2009) (arXiv:0812.3001). (With the bonus appearance of arXiv:0903.5236 by Richard Low.)

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Adiabatic Paper Dance

Yes, it’s a slow dance:

Through the hourglass I saw you, in time you slipped away
When the mirror crashed I called you, and turned to hear you say
If only for today I am adiabatic
Take my pulsed gates away

arXiv:0905.0901, “Adiabatic Gate Teleportation” by Dave Bacon and Steve Flammia(As seen on arXiview)

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Too Few Wrong Papers?

After watching Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk* it occurred to me to go back and look at my own scientific papers and try to assess them for how creative they were. Some things you should just never do, I guess, but it did lead me to an interesting question.
* The first 2/3 of the talk is excellent, ending not as great. I’m heartily in support of his cause, but it felt to me like he was implying that this was the one and only problem with the education system, which I find hard to swallow.
Continue reading “Too Few Wrong Papers?”

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LTCM Video

Via MarketSci blog, Eric Rosenfeld talks about the collapse of LTCM at MIT. Funny I can’t find in any MIT literature an advertisement for the fact that 2/3s of LTCM had MIT roots? (Caltech, snarky snark snark)