Wish I'd had a training space like this! Maybe for the kids :-)Mendes bro (155er?) tapping the much bigger UFC fighter Luke Rockhold (185). So smoo...
Monday, 29 July 2013
Saturday, 27 July 2013
From Sam Schweber's In the Shadow of the Bomb:It was part of Oppenheimer's tragedy that, after World War II, he felt that he no longer was a creative scientist and that he therefore had lost part of his "anchor in honesty," and hence integrity. George Kennan, who got to know Oppenheimer after the war and became his colleague at the Institute in 1951, made some of the most insightful observations of Oppenheimer's personality. Kennan described Oppenheimeras in some ways very young, in others very old; part scientist, part poet; sometimes proud, sometimes...
Wednesday, 24 July 2013
IQIM is the home of John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. John was celebrated on the occasion of his 60th birthday here.Dinner meeting with the group.Working in the Pasadena sunshine.Inside the Annenberg Center.On the first floor there are some old plaques, including this one honoring Chris Chang :-)Some random Caltech photos I took. Go Beave...
Monday, 22 July 2013
NYTimes Dealbook interview with the Goldman elevator tweeter (GSElevator).Q. Why did you start this thing?A. Again, I wanted to amuse myself during the summer lull and while market volatility keeps capital markets transactions to a minimum. I also thought that despite the disdain out there that exists for Wall Street professionals, people still really have no idea really how bad it is — and how shallow the industry really is, and frankly, how unimpressive 98 percent of the employees are.Q. Are you really a Goldman employee?A. Yes. However, I cannot...
Sunday, 21 July 2013
Wednesday, 17 July 2013
A new paper from David Lubinski and collaborators looks at spatial ability measured at age 13 to see whether it adds predictive power to (SAT) Math and Verbal ability scores. The blobs in the figure above (click for larger version) represent subgroups of individuals who have published peer reviewed work in STEM, Humanities or Biomedical research, or (separately) have been awarded a patent. Units in the figure are SDs within the SMPY population.Creativity...
Tuesday, 16 July 2013
From Physics to PIMCO to China's SAFE.WSJ: At an official Chinese New Year's party earlier this year, a former bond trader named Zhu Changhong was hailed for the smart choices he made investing the world's largest stash of cash: China's $3.5 trillion in foreign reserves.... A 43-year-old former physicist, Mr. Zhu has made one surprising turn after another in his career. At 20 years old, he moved from impoverished Anhui province to the University of Chicago to study quantum physics, but he then chucked a promising academic career to become a bond...
Measuring the maximal commuting subset of observables uniquely determines the pure state of a quantum system (recently proved Kadison-Singer Conjecture). More here and here. I guess I always assumed this was true, without knowing it was an (until recently) unproved conjecture! Strange that I learned this at a Microsoft Research meeting :-)Other stuff: (conference site, with videos)MSR spends as much as the NSF in support of computer science-related...
Sunday, 14 July 2013
This is a long talk but gets a thumbs up from me. Runciman strikes me as an epistemologically careful thinker, which is absolutely necessary in his field of political science. The abstract doesn't mention it, but one of the points explored in the talk (for the impatient: near the end) is whether technological optimism is the key to American exceptionality -- is restless, individualistic, capitalistic American innovation as central to our uniqueness...
See you in Seattle.Conference site. Agenda. Speakers.This July 15 will mark the start of Microsoft Research’s fourteenth annual Faculty Summit at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, Washington. More than 400 academic researchers from 200 institutions and 29 countries will join Microsoft Research to assess and explore today’s computing opportunities. This year, Bill Gates will join us to set the tone of the summit in a conversation on the topic of “Innovation and Opportunity—the Contribution of Computing to Improving Our World.”Also delivering...
Saturday, 13 July 2013
This is an insightful discussion of MMA for non-experts. See also Mama said knock you out.Slate Afterword podcast: At the age of 21, Matthew Polly dropped out of Princeton to study kung fu at the Shaolin Temple in China. Fifteen years and 100 pounds later, he decided to get back into shape to explore the world of mixed martial arts, now firmly entrenched as America’s most popular fighting sport. Tapped Out chronicles his two-year journey back to fitness, all the way to the night when he got into the cage to square off in a bout against a much-younger...
Thursday, 11 July 2013
Click the link below for the MP3 interview with Haynes and Klehr (New Books in History podcast).Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in AmericaJOHN EARL HAYNES, HARVEY KLEHR, AND ALEXANDER VASSILIEVYALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009by MARSHALL POE on JULY 10, 2013For decades, the American Right and Left argued about the degree to which the KGB infiltrated the U.S. political and scientific establishment. The Right said “A lot”; the Left said “Much less than you think.” Both sides did a lot of finger-pointing and, sadly, slandering. Things got very ugly....
Sunday, 7 July 2013
This is, in my opinion, the best biography yet of Oppenheimer. I think I have read all of the dozen or so major ones. See also The Christy gadget.Oppenheimer's near breakdown while at Cambridge: the story that Oppenheimer attempted to poison his tutor Patrick Blackett (with a cyanide-laced apple) is well known; his erratic behavior in Paris and an attempt on the life of his Harvard friend Francis Fergusson are also described.(p.102) [Oppenheimer's...
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