{"id":1703,"date":"2007-11-05T20:23:28","date_gmt":"2007-11-06T03:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=1703"},"modified":"2007-11-05T20:23:28","modified_gmt":"2007-11-06T03:23:28","slug":"the-purpose-of-this-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2007\/11\/05\/the-purpose-of-this-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"The Purpose of This Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oftentimes I&#8217;ve been asked what the purpose of this blog is.  As if everything in life must have a purpose:pfft, I say!  But because an answer is required, what I usually answer is that the purpose of my blog is to slow down my fellow researchers.  I mean sheesh, the people in quantum computing are the modern polyglots of science, speaking physics, computer science, and mathematics with ease.  And they&#8217;re universally a brainy crowd.  So what better purpose can this blog serve that to slow these readers down by offering them great opportunities to surf the intertubes and procrastinate.<br \/>\nAlong those lines&#8230;<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\ngo ahead waste your day:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Via <a href=\"https:\/\/fliptomato.wordpress.com\/2007\/11\/05\/negative-numbers-foil-lottery-players\/\">An American Physics Student in England<\/a> I&#8217;m led to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk\/news\/greater-manchester-news\/cool-cash-card-confusion-1009701\">Negative numbers foil lottery players.<\/a>  Apparently there was confusion over whether -8 was colder than -6 or not.  Now for something more controversial: the lottery is a tax on those who are bad at math.  I always found it ironic that lottery proceeds often go to education.  Shouldn&#8217;t this arbitrage itself away?<\/li>\n<li>Here is an article on what worries the security officials at federal agencies.  Turns out Patricia Titus, the Transportation Security Administration&#8217;s CISO, is worried about quantum computers.  Now if only the TSA would spread some of those airline baggage screening dollars on quantum computing.  I know, I know.  A quantum computer which can find a terrorist in quadratically faster time!<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mit.edu\/~humanistic\/faculty\/lightman.html\">Alan Lightman<\/a> has a new <a href=\"https:\/\/myaccount.nytimes.com\/auth\/login?URI=www-nc.nytimes.com\/2007\/11\/04\/books\/review\/Park-t.html&amp;REFUSE_COOKIE_ERROR=SHOW_ERROR\">book out<\/a>.  Lightman is one of my favorite writers.  And that&#8217;s not just because he is a professor of Physics with and adjunct position in the Humanities at MIT and was a Caltech graduate student (For those of you who do not know, I was an undergrad and postdoc at Caltech, and hold a B.S. in physics and a B.S. in literature from that crazy institution.  Yes, those are what we call the &#8220;no job majors,&#8221; although the B.S. in literature somehow seems&#8230;.apt.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/myaccount.nytimes.com\/auth\/login?URI=www-nc.nytimes.com\/2007\/11\/06\/business\/06electric.html&amp;REFUSE_COOKIE_ERROR=SHOW_ERROR\">Deregulation<\/a> of the energy industry has led to higher energy prices than in states where the energy was not deregulated.  The best part is where they discuss the in-favor-of-deregulation version of the report where they say that prices &#8220;rose only slightly higher&#8221; and then bury the actual data in a footnote.  I teach my students that if they are going to fudge something in their homework, they should make the fudge at a page break in hopes that the grader, in turning the page will lose their train of thought.  Surprisingly when I tell them this I always catch someone doing this and get to have a heyday in red ink saying &#8220;I taught you this trick!  It doesn&#8217;t work on me!&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oftentimes I&#8217;ve been asked what the purpose of this blog is. As if everything in life must have a purpose:pfft, I say! But because an answer is required, what I usually answer is that the purpose of my blog is to slow down my fellow researchers. I mean sheesh, the people in quantum computing are &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2007\/11\/05\/the-purpose-of-this-blog\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Purpose of This Blog&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,34,65,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2","category-go-ahead-waste-your-time","category-quantum-computing","category-read-you-tweed"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}