Category: General

It’s off to Canada I go, to give some lectures at a Summer School at the Perimeter Institute. In the meantime, at the risk of annoying people with long download times, I’m uploading three photos taken on my recent trip to Leiden, just Southwest of Amsterdam.

An interesting door:

to go with an interesting building:

Overall, the atmosphere was one of geek cool. It made me nostalgic for Caltech, which is the only place I can imagine not being surprised at seeing something like this (of course, it’d be a Saturn rocket or a Shuttle at Caltech).

I’ve had an exciting week personally, with the news that I’m to receive an Australian Government Federation Fellowship. This is a very generous Fellowship scheme (described here), and I’m incredibly pleased and grateful to have received it. I was also extremely pleased to find out that my fellow quantum physicist Howard Wiseman (at Griffith University, also in Brisbane) was a recipient this year. Any scientist who’s ever thought, even remotely, that they might have an interest in moving to Australia, should definitely check out the scheme.

I went to see Shrek II with a group of nine last night, on the day it opened in Australia. Six of us turned around and went to see it again immediately, which is not something I’ve ever done before. If anything, I laughed even harder the second time. Much funnier than the first movie, although not as sweet, and probably not as durable, due to all the references to contemporary pop culture. But my sides still hurt.

Brad DeLong makes a very good point: if Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t put the basic ideas behind the web into the public domain, the evolution of the web very well might have been a lot slower, with concomitant economic costs. Something for University researchers to think about, perhaps: we are supported in the public interest, and putting ideas into the public domain is often the best way of supporting that interest.

A note on a highly visible change: I’ve reversed the order in which comments are displayed, so the oldest comments now display first. This should make it easier to just read through the entire set of comments on a post.

Following up on an earlier entry on a similar topic, I note Qcircuit, a LaTeX package by Steve Flammia and Brian Eastin that makes drawing quantum circuits extremely easy. Should be pretty useful!

Doron Zeilberger gives the best reasons I’ve seen for eschewing Powerpoint in favour of whiteboard talks. His reasons are pretty pertinent for detailed technical seminars where you want to understand ideas in detail. I still think Powerpoint has a place when you’re just trying to communicate the gist of your results, as is often the case in conference talks, and a higher baud rate is appropriate.

Lots of people (including yours truly) love to brag about their Erdos numbers. My colleague Steve Flammia wrote to the people at the
Erdos number project asking them if they had computed the Erdos numbers for infamous people. Steve asked specifically about Ahmed Chalabi, who has a PhD in mathematics.

Turns out Chalabi has an Erdos number of at most six!

Which means my Chalabi number is at most eight…

The Princeton Math Department’s Graduate Students’ Guide to Generals is pretty interesting. They don’t exactly give them an easy time, and the list of examiners is pretty scary (Conway, Wiles and Fefferman in one case!)

Leiden, 50 kilometers soutwhest of Amsterdam, is like a combination of UC Santa Barbara (bikes everywhere), Caltech (the piece of the Ariane 5 rocket engine being exhibited as a sculpture is a particularly nice geek touch), and some of the nicest towns I’ve visited in Europe.

Everything is beautiful and cared for in the nicest possible way – not that sterile way you find in some places, but rather, the way that tells you a place is well-used and much loved; it is neat because people care.

Between talk preparations and sleeping, I haven’t yet explored as much as I’d like, but it sure looks a great place for a workshop.