Posts

Posted on

Der Took Our Science N Engineering Jerbs!

Whatever you do, Mr. and Mrs. Joe and Mary America, make sure to tell everyone you know not to go into science and engineering! You see those who major in science and engineering are certain to not get jobs, because, as many commenters love to point out, all those jobs are being exported overseas! But wait, what is this:

The overall unemployment rate of scientists and engineers in the United States dropped from 3.2% in 2003 to 2.5% in 2006…according to data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System (SESTAT). This is the lowest unemployment rate measured by SESTAT since the early 1990s. It continues a trend of lower unemployment rates for scientists and engineers compared with unemployment rates in the rest of the U.S. economy.

Who knew? A degree in science and engineering actually appears to help your employment chances 🙂

Posted on

Quake3 on iTouch

One of the reasons I signed up to develop for the iPhone:

Accelerometers are so cool. And I don’t just say that because I’m a physicist.

Posted on

CSE 322 Spring 2008, Week 1

This quarter I am teaching CSE 322: Introduction to Formal Models in Computer Science. Good fun. As part of my teaching I am LaTeXing up lecture notes from the class, which follow closely the book we are using, Sipser’s “Introduction to the Theory of Computation.” Here are the first three lectures for those with nothing better to do during their weekend:

  • Lecture 1: Welcome and Introduction
  • Lecture 2: Formal Definition of Deterministic Finite Automata
  • Lecture 3: Regular Operations on Languages

The notes are certainly full of many typos and such, but maybe there is a young teenager who isn’t in college, but who is bright, and wants to learn something cool about theory, and thus might actually click on those links. Comments and criticisms by others are also greatly appreciated.

Posted on

An ArXiv PDF Mime Fix for Firefox 3.0

Previously, I had found a way to get a Mac running Firefox to not choke on recognizing pdfs correctly when downloaded from the arxiv.org. Commenter Dan has tracked down the reason for this and suggested another way to fix this which should be compatible with the latest versions of Firefox:

Update:
It seems that the source of this bug is the following problem:
Arxiv.org does not like Macs! :-O
Fortunately, there is an easy work around: Using the UserAgent Switcher extension, you fool arxiv.org into thinking your web-browser is running Windows.
Then the PDF download problem goes away! No MIME type hackery is needed.
The technical reasons for this are explained in this thread:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3322008

Thanks, Dan!

Posted on

Best Title Ever Competition: Quantum Flatland Edition

Today, I looked on the arxiv and found arXiv:0804.0272:

arXiv:0804.0272
Quantum computing using shortcuts through higher dimensions
Authors: B. P. Lanyon, M. Barbieri, M. P. Almeida, T. Jennewein, T. C. Ralph, K. J. Resch, G. J. Pryde, J. L. O’Brien, A. Gilchrist, A. G. White

and nearly fell out of my chair. What an awesome title. A least for me, when I first parsed the title of the paper, the first thing that popped into my head was using spatial dimensions to speed up quantum computation (as opposed to using higher dimensional quantum systems.) Gots to get me some string theories to build my quantum computer 🙂 (Oh and the paper is pretty cool as well!)

Posted on

Let's Make Them Fight Each Other

Oh no: do the Christian creationists know that by taking down Darwin they might inadvertently aid Eastern religions? Witness: the Bhaktivedanta Institute Newsletter. Personally I want a grunge match between the Discovery Institute and the Bhaktivedanta Institute to see who can out pseudoscience each other. “No my psychogenetic fallacy definitely trumps your silly fallacy of division!”
Continue reading “Let's Make Them Fight Each Other”