The Huntington has a cool new history of science exhibit. One of the displays consists of about a hundred historical light bulbs, including three test bulbs labeled by Edison himself. They constructed a case filled with Nitrogen (in case the seals on the bulbs were broken) and put a few watts through some of the [...]

I finished my wordpress plugin, and, after fixing a few bugs, I think it’s at a usable version. Here is the plugin page, including source code and theory. The basic gist is that it creates a sidebar in your blog with links to some of your posts. At first, it experiments by displaying random posts, [...]

I’ve been combing craigslist for a throne to complete my office. Today was the day of anointing.

Finally managed to put the finishing touches on Relaxed uncertainty relations and information processing and get it out.
The result I find most interesting is about “learnability” of states. Although quantum states seem very complicated, requiring 2^n complex coefficients to describe a state of n qubits, Aaronson showed that actually quantum states are easy to [...]

 I finally overcame a tremendous bout of poison oak (not pictured, it was disturbing even to look at) and ventured back into the wild (pictured). I’ve also been working on my research web site (coming soon), a wordpress plugin that uses stat. learning theory (coming soon), and an arxiv paper (coming soonest).

What is this mysterious fruit in our yard? It’s like a miniature green banana. I guess I’ll never know what it really is.

I suspect this is one of those buildings that looks cool right now, but tacky in ten years.

Sometimes the library beats working in the office.