Funny man in Rome, fat man in France, strangely unrelated. I am writing an essay on one. The other is this weird childhood memory a book in the living room brings back. There's some sort of a British connection between both, but some connections are worthless. Besides I am pretty sure Roman virtues from the Early Republic had fairly limited appeal for the Gaulic tribes inhabiting France back then. That said, the Gauls seem to have been less Asterix like, and more Spartan like every day. Here lay a group of people who were so fierce that the Romans were afraid of them, fierce not weirdly clever mind you.

I was walking around New York a couple of days ago, one of those short visits where one gets to enjoy expensive hotels and rain. I went to an Afghani restaurant, supposedly owned by someone who was a judge in Kabul in the late 70s. Funny considering his leaving the country would neatly coincide with the rise of the communists, and such things usually have interesting stories. The restaurant itself didn't have a story, it wasn't even exceptionally good. At least I didn't really pay for the food. The rain did actually suck.

I am not sure why I wrote this, I didn't have that much to say. Observations for the night: scheme's cool, coding is fun, writing papers is less fun than it used to be.

Panda

It is all over the web, there are about 50 mentions of this on Reddit, there might be another bubble out there, except it doesn’t feel like one. See back when there was that other bubble, I lived in another country, was there for more than a month a year, and things looked very different. It is easier to pick up somethings when you live in a country when everyone wants to be a part of the bubble, as fast as possible, without care. I was talking to Itay (who has finally posted another blog post) about this earlier today (also about lots of other things, but those are unimportant), and he was pointing out all these subtle clues in the CS department that I am missing. Clues about all the people who want to start startups, clue about all the startups, clues about how the holly grail of achieving anything currently is being bought out. Maybe there is a bubble going on, maybe it is a nicer bubble, what with people paying for things in cash and not stocks, but it certainly does not look the same on the other side. There are no crazy NIIT posters about bullshit that doesn’t help anything, there are no crazy people getting crazy certificates. There are the standard crazy sums of money all the people are being paid to work, but those numbers sound pretty much at par with what I heard last year. Bubbles look different from different places.

I am TAing 167/9 next semester, along with being a lot of work, this should be fairly fun. Woohoo.

Ze Panda

Hi people of the internet (or the subset of those who read this) and more importantly the Gods, owners and legislators of this unlegislated land
While I am aware more important debates, such as ones concerning the ‘tubular nature of the internets’, the ongoing shift to IPV6, the failure of certain registrar’s and such is taking up your valuable time, is there anyway you could make it simpler to just kill the sound on webpages, you know, make a mutable thing for browsers, which affects plugins and such. I know this lowers some people’s advertising revenue, but it makes me less scared.

Also while we are at this, could those of you residing in MSR get the folks at Mono to implement a F# compiler for Mono, I like OCaml, and want to see this new child which emerges from it, but do not really want to go through the trouble of acquiring a Windows license from the folks who administer MSDN-AA licensing for Brown.

Thanks, that’s about it.

Ze Panda

Turns out some people over in the cold land which lies to the north of my current location, and which certain friends of mine call home, have decided that they have a commercially viable quantum computer that they plan on selling soon. No specs seem to be easily visible on the website, so questions about whether this merely reflects their ability to multiply two numbers with some high probability of success, or an actually viable computer, currently abound. A quick search through Google Scholar yields nothing (no research papers, I am disappointed, no specs, and no papers make me unhappy), however the company did file for a bunch of Quantum Computing related patents in 2000 and 2004, though none seem to have been filed post January 2005, which leads to obvious questions about what in the world happened in the last month, and observations about the awesomeness of Google Patents.

Scientific American seems to have a story about this, painting a less rosy, more realistic picture, and much like everything else that can be seen, Flickr has an image.

Scientific American also claims that it won’t be breaking any encryption schemes, making this entirely worthless. Also the guy in the Scientific American article seems to accept the fact that it probably won’t be viable at larger scales, and might not scale up, and might not be the commercial success everyone wants it to be. Wait, a company announces a commercially viable quantum computer that might not work, and does so by solving a Sudoku (simple enough thanks to all the constraints and the magic of constraint programming)... Bah, this has been a disappointing discovery, I think I will go back to approximating my NP-complete problems.

Ze Panda

I have a del.icio.us account that I should really be using and combining with the blog so I can post all the cool (non comic related URLs) I seem to come across, like the one on NTP time synchronization and RAID 6 (though I got that from someone else’s blog). But anyways, this phdcomic seemed appropriate

Ze Panda