As part of the Asian University Go competition is an academic workshop! Yup, this is the very first academic workshop that’s not related to physics. So, what do they talk about in such a conference? Well, here’s some topics

• Social advantages for youth who play Go.
• What sort of common characteristics do Go players have?
• Cognitive and emotional skills required to play Go
• How do go players regard go?

So conclusions? Go players have more self discipline, time management, critical thinking, concentration. It teaches players how to deal with defeat, and to better accept other people’s perspectives. But given the limited battery life, so I’ll skip the details. So yup, all parents should get their kids to play go!

Okay, so its not a secret that I’m a gadget lover, one of the few people who prefer reading from the screen than paper (saves trees!). So, I though I should post a photo of just what my desk looks like at home. 

• 24 inch Monitor, check. Great for viewing two pages of whatever paper I’m reading.
• 15.4 inch Monitor on left, for all those internet messaging and status report.
• 13.3 inch Tablet on left, replaces my paper, used to scribble equations and play Go!
• Crazy tube thing is the middle is sub-woofer… small enough to carry back home!
• Wirelesss Logitech Edge as the main keyboard, love the simplicity and elegance of it, great for typing.
• Logitech Edge Mini on the right… hooked with tablet for basic keyboard commands. 
• Microsoft Blue Track mice in there somewhere… only mice that works on forsted glass, unfortunately =\

Its great… except the wires, don’t look underneath the table!

Every now and then, you here some silly event in the US. This one though, is especially worthy. Bill Nye “The Science Guy”, decided to give a talk to the public, and was booed for suggesting that Moonlight was actually reflections from the sun:

Trouble started when the children’s entertainer brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars,” and pointed out that the lesser light was actually a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out, including woman with three small children who shouted, “We believe in God!” and left.

Read the rest here. Its occasions like this that make me really worry about the state of education. Give parents some basic education… please!

I’ve just been alerted to a nifty cartoon on youtube, titled `To Be’, which tackles the philosphy of teleportation…. If we assume the mind to be classical (and most people do), then it can in principle be cloned with perfect accuracy. A possible method for teleportation would then simply involve a measurement of the currnet conciousness, and replicating it at the destination. This idea was also explored in the movie `The Prestige’, but I really do love the treatment in this cartoon:

There’s are plenty of physics papers that are just mathematical details, but every once in a while, we read a paper that offers a new philosophical view of the universe. To me, such paper’s are the true gem’s, they don’t predict the outcomes specific experiments, but rather alludes to entirely new concepts.

One of the paper’s that I had to pleasure of familiarising myself with recently in Landauer’s early work that discovered the remarkable link between information and physics. In particle, it allows us to explain the Schizard Engine, which seemingly allows extract of energy from a system in thermal equilibrium.

Closer inspection would reveal that the fuel of the enginer is information, and storage of that information costs power… its quite an elegant relation.

• Knowledge is Power: The Schizard Engine

The the jounral BMC bioinformatics, a recent paper was published… not about the intricate details of our genetic code, but rather how you shouldn’t use Microsft Excel to do any bioinformatics.

While I am sure the news is extremely useful, physicists can only dream of publishing papers by finding bugs in computer programs. Well, at least its not a randomly generated paper!

While postdocs in most part of the world still live as second class citizens, there’s something remarkably different in East Asian civilizations. Without going into further detail, there’s a sense that academics are simply more valued and respected in such cultures. After all, this was reflected in many opinions polls in China about the most respected proffesion, where Lecturers, Doctors and Teachers ranked consistantly on top. 

One indication of this is in the country of Singapore. Here, postdocs can almost certainly be regarded as middle class citizens, able to afford to rent apartments that, should they choose to work elsewhere, be untenable for quite possibly another decade. Case in point, my current accomodation, Singapore.

If anyone wishes to visit Singapore, and possibly apply for a position, you’re welcome to contact me for some details!

Today, I had the pleasure of giving a talk in regards to the work that I conducted on relating quantum complexity with geometry, based essentially of the paper `Quantum Computation as Geometry‘, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  The talk is primarily designed for a Physics audience, and thus spends a good portion introducing the concepts of computational complexity.

Feel free to download it below

• Quantum Complexity as Geometry Presentation (123)

Both the .ppt and .pptx versions are included. If you have Powerpoint 2007, I would recommend the .ppt version.

One of the brilliant things of a visit back to family is hunting down your past, and one of the most interesting photos I’ve obtained is the one taken above in 1927! The lady and the man in the center would be my great, great, grandmother and great great grandfather, or basically the parents of my mother’s father’s father (who is pictured as the fourth son in line with half of his body cut off on the top right corner). The three guys to his left are his older brothers. Of these, the third is probably most successful, and started the first sauce company in Shanghai, which was by all accounts, properous till the Japanese invasion. I guess that’s why he’s the only one wearing a suit! 

So what about my direct ancestor? Well he basically worked the company tell it collapsed, and then moved to Beijing to become a telegraph operator, allowing communication between Germany and that new Empire of the Rising Sun… the knowledge of which he passed to the underground resistance. Well, that’s enough family history for now! More to come.

The first to get back up, of course, is an explanatory article in regards to the paper `More Really is Different’, that I coauthered. Given that the paper dealt with the idea that not all macroscopic laws can be derived from fundamental physics, you can imagine all the sort of misinterpretations that it may case. 

• More Really is Different explained.

I’ve also attached the powerpoint presentation that I gave at the first quantum biology workshop at Santosa in January, which presents the topic from the altermative perspective of what it can say about deriving biological laws.