Category: General

What follows is a long post that’s not the slightest bit academic. It’s personal (possibly to the point of self-absorption) with a few general observations throw in.

I know some people like blogs to have fairly clean cut themes, and so far mine has been mostly academic in flavour. However, I’m still experimenting to figure out what I want this blog to be about.

What I’m saying is, if you’re not interested in non-academic blogging, you may wish to skip this!

I’ve lost a fair bit of weight over the past four months – about 8 kilos. I’d like to lose about the same again, at which point I think I’ll qualify as “fully fit”.

To some extent, I’ve been inspired in my weight loss by the “Fitness blogging” of Jim Henley. In that spirit, I’ll offer a few observations.

(Following Jim Henley, I’ll record that I’m 185 cms, and was 97.6 kg last October. I’m now down to about 89kg. Anything under 85kg will be reasonably fit, and 82kg would be great.)

My amazing super secret to weight loss is to combine increased exercise with an improved diet! Who’d have thought?

Something I hear people discuss quite frequently is the question “What’s the big result of the last year or two in field X?”

My current answer to this question, in the field of quantum information science, is Raussendorf and Briegel’s cluster-state model of quantum computation.

This model tells you that, in order to quantum compute, it suffices to prepare a single quantum state (the “cluster state”), and then do local (i.e., single-qubit) measurements on that state.

Such measurements suffice to write in the initial state of the computation, the dynamical operations performed, and to read out the results of the computation!

In Debbie Leung’s memorable metaphor (memorable if you’re a Unix nut, anyway!), you simply “ping” Nature, and she computes. No “dynamics”, in the usual sense of the word, just ask questions of a suitably correlated state! Those questions don’t even have to be nonlocal; all the nonlocality is carried in a single, universal state.

Whatsmore, if you believe the Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis, you can efficiently simulate an arbitrary physical system this way.

I’ve spent most of the last two months thinking about this model, and the better I understand it, the more interesting and beautiful it seems.

(Disclaimer: I guess I should say that I’ve got a bit of a personal interest in advertising this work, since I’ve done some related work.)

Lance Fortnow, commenting on a post by guest blogger Scott Aaronson, has some sensible advice for aspiring researchers:

Your success in academics, like any professional endeavor, depends in part on how much effort you put into it with the relationship far more than linear. But by no means is social life and a productive research career incompatible. Most academics eventually find a life partner and many of us have children. We have many non-academic hobbies and activities even as graduate students. The trick is to find the right balance between your academic and non-academic activities, a difficult task but far from impossible. I truly admire the massive works of Paul Erdös, but I would never trade my life for the one he led.

I think the usual result of working as hard as Erdos – who was reputed to work up to 18 hour days – is depression. Besides the inherent tragedy, that’s no good for your creative work! I’ve seen formerly successful researchers work incredibly hard, yet make no progress, simply because they were overdoing it.

My opinion is that successful creative thought requires really intense concentration, and that for most people a few hours a day of such concentration is the most that can be sustained. Otherwise, leave plenty of time for the little daily chores of life, rest, relaxation, aned enjoying yourself!

Examples of people that I’ve heard follow this kind of pattern include G. H. Hardy, who apparently worked four hours a day at his research, like clockwork, and Poincare, who did two hours intense work in the morning, two in the afternoon.

I’m currently about two thirds of the way through the audio version of James Gleick’s book “Isaac Newton”.

What I’m enjoying most about the biography is hearing about the goings-on at the Royal Society, newly formed in Newton’s day. What emerges from the book, in my opinion, is that the innovation in forming such a society was at least as important as Newton’s discoveries. You can see in the Society’s activities the beginning of peer review, of the journal system, of the need to do experiments reproducing others’ results, and of the need to cite others’ work appropriately.

It’s very interesting to read about the little intrigues that went on. Someone would publish a new result; Hooke, or Newton, or some other eminence would then claim “Oh, I obtained those results many years ago”. That’s all very well, but if someone obtains a result, and then puts the only record in their filing cabinet, Science does not advance. Only through publication in archived, widely accessible journals does Science advance. Many early members of the Royal Society seemed to understanding this instinctively, and they moved toward an institutional system in which work is not done until it is published.

December turned out unexpectedly busy, so I’ve been away from blogging for the past few weeks.

This blog is still an experiment on my part. I haven’t yet found a voice I’m completely satisfied with, but I’m content to keep playing around with the blog as a hobby, at least for the time being. One thing I do know – I have greatly enjoyed the thoughtful commentary provided by many commenters over the past few months!

No blogging for the next week, as I’m in Melbourne for a conference.

Renowned particle physicist Steven Weinberg has an interesting article about doing research in this week’s issue of Nature. Link here.

Kevin Drum recently posted a list of Bill Clinton’s purported “Twenty-One Favourite Books”. (Yes, Hillary makes it.) Reading the comments reminded me how much fun such lists can be.

Here’s a few of my favourites, by category. Suggestions appreciated in all categories.

History

Norman Davies’ Europe is a heck of a fun book: big, bold, and opinionated. Jen and I have been reading it aloud together, on and off for a couple of years. Endless food for thought.

Biographies

Walter Isaacson’s Ben Franklin inspires emulation and admiration of a great man, without ever making one feel smaller.

James Gleick’s Genius, a biography of Richard Feynman, gives you a sense of contact with an unusual mind.

Science fiction

Most scientists seem to read a lot of science fiction, especially in their teens. Except for a little Asimov, I missed out, and discovered it in my twenties. I’ve made up a fair amount of ground since. On my admittedly scant evidence I’m inclined to agree with Marvin Minsky’s assessment that science fiction will contribute a disproportionate share of the twentieth (and 21st?) century fiction that anybody remembers in 200 years.

Among current writers, Vernor Vinge is, in my opinion, the best. His last three books (A Deepnees in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep, and Across Realtime) are extraordinary “sense-of-wonder” stories.

Carolyn Cherryh’s Cyteen is a superb story about individual identity, politics, and paranoia. Cherryh is, apparently, a trained archaelogist, and her professional insight shows.

It’s an odd fact that Lois Bujold is one of the best-selling science fiction authors today. It’s odd because, while large parts of her books are genre fiction (usually mystery, military, or romance) there’s little science fiction in them, except as window-dressing.

It doesn’t matter. The genre parts of her fiction are usually fun, fast, and well-done. Even when they’re not particularly memorable, they’re rarely less than enjoyable and easy-to-read.

And when Bujold is writing about things that matter to her – motherhood, hardship, integrity, love – she can sometimes write very well indeed, in ways that transcend genre.

In rough order, her best work is, in my opinion, A Civil Campaign, Memory, Mirror Dance, The Mountains of Mourning (a short story), and both Cordelia books (I forget the titles). Opinions vary as to the best order to read things in, and I won’t even try to offer an opinion.

On the covers: just hold your nose. I don’t know what her publisher is thinking.

Mainstream literature

I have a poor batting average with contemporary mainstream literature.

I’ve dipped into quite a few well-known contemporary or near-contemporary authors. To pick a few names at random, Nabakov, DeLillo, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Kafka, Eco, Hemingway, not to mention dozens of others. Some of the work is excellent – from that list, Lolita and The Old Man and the Sea bring back fond memories.

But a lot of extremely well-regarded works just seem plain dull to me. To pick two other works from that list, the only reason I finished The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby is because they were short, and even then it was a close thing. If that’s great literature, I’ll take the trash.

I will mention two classics that I love.

Hugo’s Les Miserables combines an enormous scope and sense-of-wonder with up-close individual stories better than anything else I’ve read. Wonderful.

Parts of Hamlet infuriate me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get goosebumps at the best parts of a good production.

Funnily enough, much of the contemporary mainstream literature I’ve enjoyed most is genre fiction in disguise. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Borges’ are good examples of science fiction attaining a measure of respectability by masquerading as mainstream fiction. I don’t enjoy these quite as much as Les Mis or a good production of Hamlet, but I’m certainly glad they’re reaching the wider audience that seems denied to works stuck in the science fiction ghetto.

In a related vein to the previous post, there’s an interesting fact I read in The Economist recently: the average person in the US has 2.11 children, while in Western Europe – I’m not sure which countries, exactly – the average is 1.45.

Aside from the sheer “wow” factor, that might create some interesting political differences in the decades ahead. I know the pressure on health care issues in the US is becoming enormous. Goodness knows what it must be like in Europe, and what it will become.

I’m sure this has been discussed to death in some circles, but my fiancé Jennifer and I had an interesting idea in conversation recently: a taxation system progressive with age, so that young people pay substantially less of their income as tax.

Politically, it’s difficult to imagine this happening, with the aging population. But adopting such a system might provide substantial help to people just getting on their feet. And it might fly as a way of helping people’s kids get ahead.

Another, possibly better and more politically viable variant, would have the tax rate rise gradually until a few years before retirement, and then plummet.

Of course, arguably the effect of the existing progressive system is not that different from these proposals. But my naive first take finds a combined system (progressive with both age and income) rather attractive. It would give a leg up both to people who are younger, and to people who are having trouble make ends meet. Both goals seem worthwhile to me.