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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!)

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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!”
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Quantum Diet

Eat anything you want and lose weight? How? By using quantum physics of course!:

Freedom From Food looks at food and weight from a unique vantage point. It examines the mind/body connection – how your thoughts and emotions affect your body. The book points out that there is abundant scientific evidence in quantum physics to show that our thoughts and emotions directly affect our physical form. From this perspective, food is not seen as “good” or “bad” for the body.

I’m still looking through the postulates of quantum physics to find how thoughts and emotions are used in quantum theory? Anyone?
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Fafblog Returns?!?!

Is it really true? Is Fafblog back? All that praying to the April Fool’s Day Jackalope has finally paid off!

“Screw this dump!” says Giblets. “This universe is old and fat and smells like smelling and Giblets is busting out!”
“Should we go over the wall or take the tunnel?” says me. I been diggin a tunnel.
“Nuts to the tunnel!” says Giblets. “What we do is we make like we’re sick. Then when God comes in to check on us we punch im in the liver an run out the door!”…

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Hot Quantum Computing!

Normally when I think about quantum computers, I think about systems which are pretty cold, since a thermal equilibrium state at high temperature is a very mixed state. But is it really true that a quantum computer needs to be cold to quantum compute? I’ve often wondered (some would say pontificated) about this, and so I was excited when I found this Physical Review Letter describing quantum computing using plasmas.
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Embarassment Is…

…realizing that the class you are teaching for the first time this quarter ends on the half hour, not the hour, and therefore the fact that you are rushing through the material must seem extremely amusing to the students who know the class ends at 20 minutes after. Doh. Doh. Doh!

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ArXiv PDF Mime Fix for Firefox 2.0

As part of my switching to a Mac, I’ve started using Firefox (one reason being that I’m investigating using Zotero for grabbing bibliographic citations from the web.) However, an annoying problem I encounter was when using Firefox and downloading pdfs from the arXiv. The problem was that Firefox failed to recognize the files as pdf files and thinks the pdf for arxiv XXXX.YYYY was a file of type YYYY. Note that this isn’t just a problem of downloading any old pdf, but specifically pdfs from the arxiv. I’ve now figure out how to fix this.
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Quantum Hoops

Last night I got a chance to go see Quantum Hoops which is playing at the Landmark Metro in Seattle for a limited time. For those who haven’t heard of this movie, “Quantum Hoops” is a documentary about the Caltech basketball team, which currently owns the longest losing streak without a conference win in NCAA basketball (22 years.) The movie is narrated by David Duchovny, and, with the exception of an opening “old time cinema” introduction to Caltech, is actually quite enjoyable. Of course I’m biased. Not only did I go to Caltech as an undergrad (and returned as a postdoc) and thus knew some of the people in the film (“Gillllbeaaar!”), but my grandfather went to Caltech, graduating in 1934, where he played on championship football teams while at Caltech.
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