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 learn, that is only it takes on the order of n measurements to figure out approximately what state you have. We show that if you allow more general states with the strongest nonlocal correlations allowed that don’t violate no-signaling, then it’s hard to learn states. That is, it will take exponentially many measurements to learn the approximate identity of a state. Another way in which quantum mechanics is powerful, but not too powerful.

 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.

I’ve been meaning to do a shout-out for Kristin’s List: Guide to events in LA. She picks quirky things, and could use some extra pagerank, so there you are. She has a weekly mailing list that is filled with fun things that I’m too lazy to drive to.

Sadly, I didn’t make it to the star trek experience before their impending shutdown, but M&M did and they picked up this cuddly assimilator for me. “Resistance is cute-ile”? Cheesy, but I’d like to see you do better.

That’s what greeted me in my garage one morning. Our garage gate broke down that night and someone came in and smashed a few car windows looking for valuables. Although my car doesn’t scream high living, my white ipod charging cord may have. When I showed up in the morning the police were there and they even dusted my car for fingerprints. What fun. Now I have a dilemma: get a new window? Or weld the door shut and go in and out of my car “Dukes of Hazard”-style?