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Scienceblogs Upgrade

Scienceblogs is upgrading. This site won’t allow comments from 10pm Pacific Standard Time on Friday, January 9 until…well until the upgrade is complete (possibly Saturday sometime.)
So instead of being frustrated at not being able to comment why don’t you instead go waste your time by:

  • By reading some provocative statements about teaching over at the information processors blog.
  • If you need to procrastinate about preparing a referee report, you might check out Michael Nielsen’s Three myths of scientific peer review
  • The Statistical Mechanic is back, and discussing thermodynamics, probability, and the measurement problem. If you actually want to expand your brain instead of waste your time, this would be a good place to do so.
  • Copco and Iron Gate, will they be demolished in 2020? The county hopes to be involved.
  • Read articles from the perspective of a view not often heard at Secular Right
  • Read a book from the list of free books about the market put together by the Master of the Universe.
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Feynman on the Measurement Problem

I’d never seen this quote from Richard Feynman on the measurement problem:

When you start out to measure the property of one (or more) atom, say, you get for example, a spot on a photographic plate which you then interpret. But such a spot is really only more atoms & so in looking at the spot you are again measuring the properties of atoms, only now it is more atoms. What can we expect to end with if we say we can’t see many things about one atom precisely, what in fact can we see? Proposal,
Only those properties of a single atom can be measured which can be correlated (with finite probability) (by various experimental arrangements) with an unlimited no. o f atoms.
(I.e. the photographic spot is “real” because it can be enlarged & projected on screens, or affect large vats of chemicals, or big brains, etc., etc. – it can be made to affect ever increasing sizes of things – it can determine whether a train goes from N.Y. to Chic. – or an atom bomb explodes – etc.)

This is from a set of notes dating to 1946 as detailed in Silvan S. Schweber, “Feynman and the visualization of space-time processes” Rev. Mod. Phys. 58, 449 – 508 (1986).

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Relatively Right in Front of Your Nose

Special relativity holds a special (*ahem*) place in most physicist’s physicists’ hearts. I myself fondly remember learning special relativity from the first edition of Taylor and Wheeler’s Spacetime Physics obtained from my local county library (this edition seemed a lot less annoying than the later edition I used at Caltech.) One of the fun things I remember calculating when I learned this stuff was what “right in front of your nose” meant in different frames of reference.
Continue reading “Relatively Right in Front of Your Nose”

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Dad – 5 Years On

It is nearly impossible for me to believe that five years have passed since you passed away.
And hey, we’re still waiting for Mt. Shasta to explode, could you get working on that?
One day, when I was an undergraduate at Caltech, I received a package in the mail from my father. In it was a small yellow squash with red dots painted onto it along with a strip of paper which read “what is this?” Well, Caltech is full of some pretty smart people, so we spent a few days trying to reason what this strange package that my father sent was. Small. Yellow. Squash. With red dots. Huh? After a few days I gave up and gave him a call. Okay, dad, what is that damn thing? “Oh, that’s simple,” he said, “It’s an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot zucchini!”
We miss you. Even your bad jokes.

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Little Miss Bleeeeeeeeeep

Anyone else catch Little Miss Sunshine on USA this weekend? The scene where the brother Dwayne breaks his vow of silence has to be one of the longest silence bleeps of all time. Anyone know of of a longer one (for one word, not for a string of words)?

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Happy New Year!

Like the title says: Happy New Year!
Looking back at the list of top scited papers on scirate.com, shows some good fun indeed:
23 SciTes – 0811.3171
Title: Quantum algorithm for solving linear systems of equations
Authors: Aram W. Harrow, Avinatan Hassidim, Seth Lloyd
23 SciTes – 0809.3972
Title: A Counterexample to Additivity of Minimum Output Entropy
Authors: M. B. Hastings
19 SciTes – 0807.4935
Title: Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels
Authors: Graeme Smith, Jon Yard
18 SciTes – 0804.4050
Title: Matchgates and classical simulation of quantum circuits
Authors: Richard Jozsa, Akimasa Miyake
17 SciTes – 0806.1972
Title: Universal computation by quantum walk
Authors: Andrew M. Childs
17 SciTes – 0805.0007
Title: Superpolynomial speedups based on almost any quantum circuit
Authors: Sean Hallgren, Aram W. Harrow
16 SciTes – 0808.2474
Title: Making Almost Commuting Matrices Commute
Authors: M. B. Hastings
16 SciTes – 0804.3401
Title: Quantum Computational Complexity
Authors: John Watrous
16 SciTes – 0804.1109
Title: Classical and Quantum Algorithms for Exponential Congruences
Authors: Wim van Dam, Igor E. Shparlinski

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A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 1

Moving on to Chapter 1 in my ongoing pedantic plodding through Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. See here for what this is all about. Note that I really am doing this as I read the book (I’m reading it really really slowly), so what I say here may be outdated by the time I get further into the book.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 1”

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A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction

So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book Outliers: The Story of Success the other day, as I’m sure many of you will be doing on your next trip to the airport (where stands of Gladwell’s hardcover book, marked down thirty percent, block your every exit through the already cramped airport bookstores.) Gladwell’s books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. Well “entertaining” in that “holy shit dude you are pedantic” sort of way. Note that I really do like Gladwell’s books, and indeed for me, reading with critical eyes is exactly the reason I like his books. Ah, the life of a curmudgeonly pedant, revealed before your eyes, here on these there intertubes!
To balance things out, I’ve also included some thoughts from the improv part of my brain: the part that takes ideas at more than face value and tries to run with them.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!
Continue reading “A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction”