Nordita Workshop for Science Writers, Day Two

The second day of the “Quantum Boot Camp” was much lighter on talks. The only speaker was Ray Laflamme from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, who gave a nice introduction to quantum technologies. While he did spend a bit of time at the start going through Shor’s algorithm for factoring numbers (following up […]

Nordita Workshop for Science Writers, aka “Quantum Boot Camp”

Since this part of the trip is actually work-like, I might as well dust off the blog and post some actual physics content. Not coincidentally, this also provides a way to put off fretting about my talk tomorrow… I’m at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers on quantum theory, which a couple of the attending […]

Pubs in London

While I kill time waiting for it to be a reasonable time to call Kate and the kids back in the US, a list of most of the pubs I’ve visited during this trip to London. Because why not? In more or less chronological order: The Victoria in Lancaster Gate. Or maybe Paddington, going from […]

It’s the Little Things…

Small observations of things that have struck me as weird during our UK stay to this point: — There is no alarm clock in our hotel room. — There are no drinking fountains in public spaces. — The travel-on-the-left thing would be easier if it were consistently applied. About one stairway in three asks people […]

Hello from London

I figured I probably ought to post something to let the wider world know we made it safely to London, and have been engaging in tourism. So, please take the above photo of St. Paul’s with a backdrop of the ominous dark clouds that have been chasing us around the city as proof of our […]

See You on the Other Side…

…of the Atlantic. After a few stress-inducing bits the less said about which the better, preparations are basically complete, and we’re heading out for London tonight. In the highly unlikely event that I haven’t done enough plugging of my appearances, here’s a compact list of where you’ll be able to find me if you happen […]

Women of the Arxiv

Over at FiveThirtyEight, they have a number-crunching analysis of the number of papers (co)authored by women in the arxiv preprint server, including a breakdown of first-author and last-author papers by women, which are perhaps better indicators of prestige. The key time series graph is here: This shows a steady increase (save for a brief drop […]