Physics and Cake now has a twitter feed:
check out @physicsandcake on Twitter!
I won’t be neglecting the blog, but twitter seems more useful for posting links as you find them. It stops them from clogging up my bookmarks folder!
Archive for August, 2009
P&C on Twitter
Posted in links, web on August 27, 2009 | 1 Comment »
A fridge by any other name…
Posted in experimental insights, expt vs theory showdown on August 25, 2009 | 2 Comments »
So my dilution refrigerator is nicknamed Frosty. In addition to being a neat acronym (FRidge Of Substantially Tempramental Yield) the name is somewhat more grounded in one of his physical attributes, i.e. that of being rather inefficient at keeping the cold where it should be It’s really important to remember not to touch [...]
Coffeebreak Links 200809
Posted in conferences, learnin' stuff, links, transhumanism on August 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Everything’s been so busy this past week, I’ve got a whole load of links and they’re all completely disorganised, but here are a few just so I a get them off the backlog pile:
A really interesting company I learnt about recently:
Evolved Machines
Upcoming Events
World Future Society conference 8-10 July 2010, Massachusetts
World Future 2010
SENS4 Conference in Cambridge, [...]
SU in the FT
Posted in links on August 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Singularity University reported in the Financial Times:
‘South Park meets Harvard Business School’
Singularity University 2009
Posted in conferences, learnin' stuff, transhumanism on August 18, 2009 | 2 Comments »
I’ve been spending the last few days hanging around at Singularity University hosted at NASA Ames in Mountain View, CA (SIlicon Valley).
What an experience. The people here are great, real leaders and entrepreneurs. It’s been inspiring to talk to everyone. The format of the course is several weeks of lectures and presentations by distinguished speakers, [...]
Qudos on the Qudits!
Posted in cool physics, expt vs theory showdown, quantum computing, superconductors on August 12, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Martinis group at UCSB have demonstrated operations on a quantum bit with 5 levels (qudit with d=5) instead of the usual 2 (qubit):
“Emulation of a Quantum Spin with a Superconducting Phase Qudit”
Matthew Neeley,1 Markus Ansmann,1 Radoslaw C. Bialczak,1 Max Hofheinz,1 Erik Lucero,1 Aaron D. O’Connell,1 Daniel Sank,1 Haohua Wang,1 James Wenner,1 Andrew N. Cleland,1 Michael [...]
EDUPUNK!!!
Posted in controversial..., learnin' stuff, links, outreach, web on August 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
As much as I admire some of the traditonal values of Oxbridge/Ivy league style University education, I can’t help but love the idea of this new movement…
Via Academic Earth:
Who needs Harvard? How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education
Who’d have thought education and anarchy would join forces?
I’m going to have to put [...]
Coffeebreak links 070809
Posted in film / tv / music, links, web on August 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Quantum Happenings
Reliable quantum operations performed on an ion trap QC:
Complete Methods Set for Scalable Ion Trap Quantum Information Processing
Here’s a Science Daily writeup of the article
More work towards scaling up macroscopic quantum behaviour:
Observation of strong coupling between a micromechanical resonator and an optical cavity field
Error correcting codes are robust against errors!
Thresholds for Topological Codes in [...]
Virtual Scientific Collaboration
Posted in links, transhumanism, web on August 6, 2009 | 4 Comments »
(Via PhysOrg) This is totally cool. We should set one of these up for QIP/QC Scientists around the world:
Virtual Worlds May Be the Future Setting of Scientific Collaboration
Image © MICA
Could be quite cool if combined with something like Google Wave so you could have avatars inside a virtual meeting room as a front-end for the [...]
Experimental costs
Posted in experimental insights, expt vs theory showdown on August 3, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Low temperature experiments are very expensive to run. That’s why we need such large grants to do research for a 2-3 year project. Just considering Liquid Helium alone:
I run the fridge about 2 times a month, and I use about 150L of LHe4 each time. Liquid Helium costs about £5 a litre. I also run [...]
