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Any engineering project can generate dozens of projects, components, objectives, processor interconnect topologies, architectures, mask generations, types of experiment, algorithms, etc. and sometimes it becomes difficult just to keep up with naming everything.

Here is a cool site that can help.

I have already used a few of their suggestions, and just today initiated Operation Moist Weasel.

There used to be a time when one person could know pretty much everything that was known. Those days are long gone. Nowadays in order to become an expert in anything you need to focus pretty much all of your faculties on that one thing.

This leads to a couple interesting effects. One is that this focus tends to color everything about how you view the world. People tend to approach problems and form opinions through the lens of their expertise. This happens all the time when disciplines are close-for example solid state physicists tend to have a way of thinking about chemistry problems that is predictable and different from the way chemists think of these things-but it also happens in wierder situations, where the area of expertise is entirely disjoint from the situation being analyzed-like when theoretical computer scientists have opinions about real computers for example.

I think this is inevitable. But understanding this phenomenon is very important in dealing with any highly multidisciplinary technology effort. One thing you can actively try to do is make sure that basic results known to one class of expert are understood by the others. It’s easy to assume that just because something is well-known in one sector of science that leading experts in something else will be aware of these results, but this is almost always not the case.

So why am I going on about this? Well it turns out that something I thought was foundational knowledge in quantum computation is not common knowledge for a lot of QC theorists (although I’ve yet to meet an experimental QC-er who didn’t know about these. You guys should talk more).

An entry point into these sets of experiments is here, which in my opinion is a QC classic and one of the most important experimental QC papers written to date. A good theoretical analysis of this type of system is here.

Now that I get that a lot of people aren’t aware of these I’m going to spread the good word.

Last night Diego Corrales was killed in a motorcycle accident in Vegas.

There are two fights in the modern era of boxing that showcase in their starkest forms what it means to perservere in the face of pain and long odds, for no clear reason except that to give up is simply not an option. The first was the first Gatti-Ward fight. The second was the first Diego Corrales-Jose Luis Castillo fight.

Fights like these capture some essence of the human condition in its purest form. Like the rare times when some piece of art, literature or science makes you feel like you’ve seen through the multiple layers of crud that cover up who we really are or can be, these fights will endure and will serve to enthrall many future generations with a vision of how much we can (or must) endure to survive when things get tough.

My sympathies go out to his family and friends. I hope you can take some solace in knowing that Diego’s courage in the ring has been an inspiration for me personally, and likely for thousands of others who understand that the lessons learned from the Castillo-Corrales fight transcend boxing.

According to a recent press release from NEC, the company has just demonstrated what they proudly call the “world’s first controllably coupled qubits”.

As a counter-argument to that claim, I reference this. Also I would mention that the 16-qubit processor we ran the demo on has 42 such couplers, all of which were operated simultaneously in the course of doing an actual computation.

I’m particularly interested in seeing what response–if any–this press release will get from my fellow quantum bloggers.