Posts

Posted on

A Bit Unclear on History

Guffaw!

Mr. Blagojevich seemed not to mind earlier news reports that his conversations had been recorded. “I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it,” he said, though he added that those who carried out such recordings sneakily, “I would remind them that it kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate.”

Posted on

Damn You Thomas Jefferson!

A while back I added my library to librarything.com. In adding this books I tagged my books with various keywords. As you can imagine there were a lot tagged as “physics.” Indeed when I entered the books there were only a few people who had a comparable number of physics tags, among them a user called lasermazer. Recently I checked in, and damnit, there is now a library that has a lot more physics tags books:
Yes that is the Thomas Jefferson! A cool feature of library thing are “legacy libraries” where you can compare your overlap with other historic libraries. But wait. Thomas Jefferson is cheating. I mean I don’t have a copy of “Advice to shepherds and owners of flocks on the care and management of sheep”, which is tagged “Physics” but it seems to me that this book is most probably not about physicists (managing physicists is not like managing sheep, it’s like managing cats.)
The books I share with Thomas Jefferson are:

L’eloge de la folie by Desiderius Erasmus
The meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius
The plays of William Shakspeare : in ten volumes : with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators by William Shakespeare
Titi Lucretii Cari De Rerum Natura Libri Sex by Titus Lucretius Carus

Posted on

Math Gains, But World Still Scheduled to End

In this era of the impending apocalypse, what the hell is a report about United States students actually showing gains in mathematics doing in the New York Times? Dude, media, get on message and send us some more doom and gloom! I especially need more gloom here in Seattle where the sun rises at 7:47 a.m. and sets at 4:18 p.m.
Update: Ah, science results are flat, so it’s the end of the world as we know it, according to The Washington Post. Thank’s WaPo for restoring pessimism into my world.

Posted on

MIT Scores New Quantum Information Science Graduate Training Program

News from the other coast: MIT has won an IGERT to start an interdisciplinary graduate program in quantum information science. From the press release:

MIT has been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a pioneering doctoral-study program in the growing field of quantum information science (QIS), which has evolved rapidly recently with a new influx of ideas from quantum physics and poses great potential in supercomputing.

Website up an running here.
Continue reading “MIT Scores New Quantum Information Science Graduate Training Program”

Posted on

ACM Classic Books

Via Michael Nielsen’s friendfeed, I am led to ACM Classic Books Series. If you’ve got ACM subscription access, some of the book are even in electronic form. Cool. I love the introduction to “The Computer and the Brain” by John von Neumann:

Since I am neither a neurologist nor a psychiatrist, but a mathematician, the work that follows requires some explanation and justification. It is an approach toward the understanding of the nervous system from the mathematician’s point of view. However, this statement must immediately be qualified in both of its essential parts.

I feel like I need to use an intro like this everytime I submit a paper to a computer science conference.