I should do this more often.

Monday I was at Ashley’s, celebrating the end of classes. I have finished all my coursework, so I will now be spending, well, pretty much the same amount of time in the lab (since I hardly went to class). Now that I don’t have classes, I can spend free time studying what I want. Over several beers, I read/skimmed most of Atomic Physics by Christopher Foot. As well as rambling in my journal about what a quantum state physically means.

I found that I have about 6 pages of random notes ranging from what it is that we actually measure, whether entangled states and mixed states corresponds to some actual reality outside of their mathematical construct, a touch on the Copenhagen interpretation, addition of angular momenta (two spin 1/2 systems), and the EPR paradox.

I need to go through these notes, and write something coherent about them.

Make yourself all honey, and the flies will devour you

Anyone have an idea as to the origin of this phrase? It comes up in the song “Symhonaire Infernus Et Spera Empyrium,” by My Dying Bride. A quick googling of this yields, obviously, My Dying Bride. And people quoting the song. Then I thought, “this might be a proverb.” Another search later, and indeed, it seems to be a proverb (and a variant: Make yourself honey and the flies will eat you). But what are the origins? I had a couple hits on Don Quixote (namely: ‘Only make yourself honey and the flies will suck you). Another site indicates that it is of Italian-Portuguese origin.

So the best I’ve got is that it seems to have originated either on the Iberian peninsula, or that it is a Latin proverb (hence explaining the ‘Italian’ as well as the Spanish/Portuguese). Does anyone have any ideas?

Snow in April!

I’m beginning to think that Michigan’s weather could be described as a phase transition. For about half the year, it is warm, and humid. The other half of the year, it is bitter cold. And there is no in-between nice and cool. So, is there some sort of order parameter that evolved in time that drastically changes the state of the weather? Would this be a second-order transition?

It seems like this parameter has some variance to it, and we are currently sitting right at the transition point. A few days ago, it was warm (not terribly humid), but now it is snowing. A change of temperature of about 40 degrees.

An analogy for EEs: We’re sitting right at the threshold voltage to turn on a MOSFET—say, for an inverter—and are measuring the logic output. Unfortunately, we have some noise in our input voltage, which causes the output to switch randomly between 0 and 1.

The voice of the poet

I was walking home tonight after a drink with Karyna and Cyan at Ashley’s, and I had this thought. R__ Mc______’s voice annoys the fuck out of me. Ok. I’ll freely admit my bias: It is because of him, I broke up with Karyna. But here’s the thing: his introduction for Paisley Rekdal annoyed the shit out of me. It was his “I’m deliberately speaking from below my Adam’s apple voice” coupled with an intonation that indicates that he’s hiding something. Something like: “I really don’t know anything, so I’m bullshitting you all, pretending I sound smart.” Something where, he’s pretending that he’s too smart for his own good. His intonation conveyed that he doesn’t really believe a word he’s saying. It’s that he’s saying this in order to sound as if he knows what he’s talking about. But still, there’s still some disbelief there. It is obvious that he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. Hence, the “pretending he’s too smart for his own good.” And God, did this annoy me. Listening to what he actually said indicates competence and knowledge of what’s going on. But his delivery made it seem like he wasn’t.

Then I got to thinking about other poetical performances. For example, I don’t really care for Karyna’s reading style. Sometimes. it comes across as too consciously “performance.” Perhaps, it is the disconnect between the poetical voice and the poet. The poet is the one who crafts the poem, and thus, the poem sounds like that person. However, when the poet reads it, he reads it in a different voice. A voice that is not that of the poet who wrote the poem. As such, the poem does not come across as authentic. It lacks a certain, humanity to it. The reader brings forth his own personality, his own experiences, his interpretation to the piece when he reads it. But when the poet is performing the piece, as an actor would, there is something lost. The poem and the experience is filtered through this performance, this undefined character.

Indeed, this is what annoys me about some readings. When the poet talks normally, I am enthralled. I associate. I am part of the conversation. But when his voice changes to read a poem, I lose it. It is contrived and in-authentic. It lacks the humanity of that individual poet. It lacks his foibles, his follies. The tragic flaws, the spark of genius, gone.

When do poet’s learn this? Do all of them develop this? I’m inclined to think no. I went to the J. Edgar Edwards reading on Saturday. All thee—Kristie, Kody, and Sarah—came across as authentic. Even Richard Siken and Paisley Rekdal sounded authentic. Is this something that some poets develop? Perhaps the ones who have spent a reasonable time in theater? I know Karyna spent time at Cornish College of the Arts as a theater major. R__? I don’t know.

Update: I received a rather bitchy e-mail from someone whom I’ll just name as K. I will not take this post down, nor will I ‘lock’ it. It may be tactless, but I don’t feel any need to remove it. I have, however, removed most of R__’s name. I might change it back though.

I must be losing it.

Apparently, it is student government election time here at Michigan. Walking home tonight, I see chalked on the sidewalk: “Klien MAP,” followed by some position I don’t remember. Obviously it is someone whose last name is Klein is running for some position under the “Michigan A____ Party” ( I don’t know what the A stands for. I think it has something to do with Affirmative Action).

Of course, the only thing I think about when I read this is, of course, a map on a Klein bottle. And then: imagine playing some game on a Klein bottle, such as a modified version of chess, or even better, Civilization.

Ok… perhaps I need to lay off the 12+ hour days for a bit.

The end is glorious

Last night I went to see Pelican play at the Blind Pig. It was amazing. They played with another group I hadn’t heard of before, Russian Circles. Both groups were just awesome. Not in the “Electric Six live show” sense of awesome-ness, but in the “Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense” sort of awesome-ness. It was the kind of show that reached into my head and tickled the back of my spine.

I don’t know what it was, but there was something about that show. Something is ending. I can feel it. But what, exactly? I’m not sure. Last night was the final glorious end to whatever it was, as well as the birth of something new. After the show, I was at peace, and felt like I could move on. It was snowing after the show. A fitting—yet clichéd—way of an end and new beginning.

I woke up early this morning, due to lots of scraping & noise. But after that, it was quiet. Dead silent. I walked to work today in the silence. It felt like I woke up this morning to the birth of a new world, screaming loudly, then hushed. It was a sacred, holy walk to work. It’s not everyday that I witness the silence of a newborn world.

Algorithms! I need algorithms!

Often, I am asked something along the lines of: “Why Quantum Computing? What does it offer that is better than regular computers?” To be perfectly honest, I don’t know. For me, I just think that it is really cool to be able to control and engineer the quantum states of individual ions. And working with lasers. But as an engineer, I feel like I need to offer some sort of practical and useful application of Quantum Computing (or Quantum State Engineering).

Are there certain problems that are nearly impossible on a regular computer, but are a snap on a quantum computer? This implies some sort of complexity of the problem. But since I’m no computer scientist, I don’t know anything about P vs. NP & complexity classes. But I do know this: a quantum computer won’t be any faster than a regular computer, unless it is running a quantum algorithm (an algorithm that exploits some aspect of quantum mechanics). Because, otherwise, it could be done on a regular classical computer. And to be honest, with all the infrastructure we need (electronics, lasers, vacuum chambers, etc.), it’d be faster to just use a regular computer.

So, what quantum algorithms are there? Again, I’m no computer scientist, and only know of three: the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm, Grover’s search algorithm, and Shor’s factoring algorithm. Wikipedia gives a good description of the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm:

In the Deutsch-Jozsa problem, we are given a black box quantum computer that implements a single function f(x1, x2, …, xn) that takes n binary bits x1, x2, …, xn and returns the binary value f(x1, x2, …, xn). We know that the function is either constant (0 on all inputs or 1 on all inputs) or balanced (returns 1 for half of the input domain and 0 for the other half); the task then is to determine which it is (constant or balanced) by applying inputs to the black box and observing its output.

Grover’s search Algorithm searches an unsorted database. Suppose you find just a phone number in your pocket, and you can’t remember if it is the number of the hot girl you met last night, or the the ugly one. To save face, you decide not to call to find out. Rather, you want to look them up in the phone book. Unfortunately, the phone book is ordered by name, not number. So how would you search? If you had a quantum computer, Grover’s algorithm could help you.

Shor’s factoring algorithm is just that. It factors a number into its primes. Why is this interesting? The difficulty of factoring has it’s uses in encryption. An example of the use of this is in RSA Encryption. Of course, this has spy stuff written all over it—breaking codes, secret messages. It also offers the best speed-up, and uses the Quantum Fourier Transform. And I’m quite partial to any sort of Fourier Transform.

So, obviously, I’ll mention Shor’s algorithm.

Perhaps it is time that I learn some Computer Science & some other quantum algorithms. If you’re interested in how Shor’s factoring algorithms works, I highly recommend this post by Scott Aaronson. Incedentally, he’s got another post about the recent breakthrough in quantum algorithms: the NAND tree.

Under the radar

D-Wave supposedly has unveiled it’s 16-qubit Quantum Computer today, according to their blog. What does this all mean? Well, if it truly is a Quantum Computer, then good for them. I’m quite skeptical, mainly because this thing would have gone completely under our radar. Their method is using superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (aka “SQUIDs”), which are large solid-state devices. One reason ions hold so much promis in this field is that their qubits can have long coherence times (i.e. it keeps a |0> or |1> longer), because we choose atomic states that do not interact strongly with the environment. Solid-state implementations of Quantum Computing generally have short coherence times. So, given that I’ve not seen many papers demonstrating rapid progress in solid-state quantum computation, I think I’m right in being rather skeptical about this announcement. My advisor Chris is skeptical too.

I don’t know anything about adiabatic quantum computing, which is what this system supposedly is. From what I can gather, it looks like they’re just simulating (solving?) a 2-D ising model in a magnetic field. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there an analytic solution?

I have this sneaky suspicion that what we have is a 2-D array of qubits—a qubit consisting of a large domain of a single state—interacting via tunneling from one domain to another. I don’t think that we have actual entanglement, nor coherence. This tunneling interaction can be written as a 2-D Ising model. Hence, all I can see this ‘quantum computer’ doing is simulating the 2-D ising model.

Note: The Quantum Pontiff, Dave Bacon, had a roundup of this. We’ll see what goes on with this. If this is bunk, hopefully it won’t be like Cold Fusion, which discredits the whole field.

Judge Ito Strikes!

Well, not really. I’ve been trying to learn some Ito calculus, and damn, it is hard. I’ve never been good at probability—especially given my terrible, terrible education in it at Cornell. I’ve gotten a decent handle on some of it via quantum theory, as well as the stochastic processes course I took. But nothing like this.

Suppose we had this function W(t) that took on a random value at each time t. How the hell do you integrate it? Does this make any sense to anyone? Supposing we understood this in a ‘classical’ sense. What does it mean if we consider quantum stochastic processes? ahhh!!!! my brain’s about to explode!

Mr. Wolfram’s crazy Ising model

A few years back, I went to see Steve Wolfram talk at Cornell about his crazy theory of Cellular Autonoma being “A new kind of Science.” The basic gist of his theory is something like this.

Suppose we had an array of cells, being either black or white. Given a certain set of rules, a cell will change it’s color from black to white (or vice versa). The rules are simple; a cell will flip based on the current colors of itself and it’s nearest neighbors. Mr. Wolfram noticed that surprisingly simple rules with a simple initial condition can generate chaotic patterns:

To me, this seems like he’s simply been performing a one-dimensional simulation of the Ising Model. This models magnetic domains in solids. Particles have a property called spin that is related to its magnetic moment. The one-dimensional version of this model is as such:

Suppose we had an array of particles whose spin can either be up or down. The ground state of this array is the configuration that minimizes the energy. The energy is determined by the spins of the nearest neighbors in the array. In a sense, the spin of a particle will flip depending on its nearest neighbors.

This is an interesting thought, but I have no mathematical ‘proof’ of this idea. Thoughts?