The greatest procrastinator of all time?

I think Brian May (the guitarist from Queen) has got to be a contender for the title.

This about sums up the whole Harry Potter thing

Banner change

I really should get around to changing my banner photo sometime soon seeing as there aren't really any mountains in these parts.

Apartment hunting is driving me nuts

Well, I know I've been crap at updating my blog recently but the real world has been getting in the way far too much. As many of you know I'm now living in Bristol. I start working in the CS department at the University of Bristol next week.

This week, I'm trying to get my life somewhat organized before I start work. Unfortunately, job number one - finding a place to live - is proving to be tricky. I'm trying to land a room in a sharehouse for around 350 pounds a month but I'm struggling to find anything. I'm looking at a few places tonight, so, with luck, one of them will come through. Fortunately, I'm not stuck staying in a hotel or something because a friend of mine has been kind enough to let me stay at his apartment. Still, I'm a bit over living out of my backpack.

On top of that, I'm not actually 100 % sure what my salary will be once I start working. I know, some of you out there in business land will be mocking me. But the thing is that I'm getting paid an award wage. The award and how it is decided actually changes this month so it is far from clear what my take home salary will be. 

Other jobs that I still have to nail down include getting a national insurance number, a national health number, and my university ID card. I suspect that the Uni will take care of some of this, however, the person who normally does this is away on holiday.

So, this post isn't so much making a point as having a whinge. For all the kiddies out there, this is the sort of crap that you have to deal with when you work in a field where you have to keep switching jobs.

Family Guy - Stewie is SO all about Ultimate Frisbee

The tri-nations begins

How long has it been since I've written about Rugby? I was in the UK on the weekend and for the first time since forever I was able to watch Australia play live. You know what, I was impressed by what I saw.

Australian Rugby has been in trouble this year. The Super 14 season was pretty much a dud for every team except the Brumbies,  the ARU has been completely mismanaged (as have some of the state Unions), and the Wallabies in the warm-up tests have been somewhat shaky. This was all blown away last week. To begin with John O'Neal was reappointed as the CEO of the ARU, then the Wallabies lost in a a nail biter to South Africa.

Normally, I wouldn't be crowing about a loss to South Africa. But, this year South Africa have had all the form. By all accounts, South African teams played superbly during the Super 14 and the form has flowed on to the Springboks. For Australia to be considered contenders at the World Cup this year they had to be more than in the game against South Africa. They had to show that they have the potential to take away the big games. Even though they lost the game, it could have gone either way. In the end, I think Australia ultimately lost because of three bad lineout throws from the replacement hooker. If one these throws hadn't happened the game could have easily gone the other way.

The Australian backs, with the exception of Julien Huxley, all looked dominant in their positions. Huxley had a mediocre game with the boot which, in a game dominated by territorial kicking, hurt Australia somewhat. However, defence was superb.

The performance of the forward pack made me smile more than anything else throughout the game. The Wallaby scrum easily matched the Springbok scrum and the lineouts (until Adam Frier came on) were a great spectacle. A little less obvious than this was the improvement of the Australians at the breakdown. For the first time in years the Australian forward pack looked fast and aggressive. When in possession the forward pack (with Lote Tequiri) continually made it over the advantage line and maintained possession. When George Smith was on the field the South Africans had to fight like nothing else to retain the ball at more rucks than they would have liked to count. More importantly, Australia were able to not only shut-down the Springbok rolling maul, but they were able to use their own as an attacking weapon.

I'm no-longer completely depressed about Australia's chances at this year's world cup!

I'm moving to Bristol

Regular readers would remember that I visited the University of Bristol a month or so ago for a job interview. Well, my interview and talk went pretty well and I got offered a job there a few weeks back. I've been keeping it somewhat under my hat (ie I haven't posted this until today) because I was waiting for the paperwork to come through.

If all goes to plan (which it seems to be at the moment) I will be starting a two-year postdoc position in the quantum information theory group at Bristol in August. The appointment is the Computer Science department, which is a little weird for me as I've always worked in physics departments. I'm kinda looking forward to the change though, I think it will be a great opportunity to learn some interesting new stuff.

As many of you would know, moving to the UK is going to make my personal life pretty tricky. My girlfriend and I have been living together now for about 18 months and now with this new job we are going to have to go back to being in a long-distance relationship again as Sarah will be stuck studying in Innsbruck until February next year. This isn't something that I'm really happy about. Those of you that know me personally know that I've been trying to find other work and living options for some time in order to avoid this outcome. Unfortunately it hasn't worked out the way we want. I guess in many ways it could be worse, there isn't a huge amount of distance between Bristol and Innsbruck.

Professionally, I'm very happy to be moving to Bristol. I've been a big fan of the work that has come out of there for years. I also have a bunch of friends who already work there so I don't think I'll be too lonely there. Oh, and Bristol is only an hour and a half away from London where I know roughly a zillion people both professionally and personally.

Scirate.com keeps getting better and better

Dave had been busy improving SciRate.com in the last week or two. Now you can comment and there's a funky little "recent comments" and "recent Scitations" box on the side.

It's really great to see that people are already getting on board and writing comments about papers!

I'm blogging politics at Larvatus Prodeo from now on

I just thought I'd let people know that from now on I will be posting most of my political posts over at Larvatus Prodeo as one of the regulars there. My first article as a regular can be found here.

Sometimes I might cross-post my articles between the two blogs when it makes sense to do so.

So true

PhD comics rips out another classic.

Coffee tastes better in Italy

One of the best things about living in Europe is that it's easy to travel between countries.

On the weekend I dipped down to Italy for the day to check out Bolzano, a town in Süd Tirol. Bolzano is just over the border with Austria and culturally it is quite similar to Innsbruck. Fortunately, the Italian influence is just strong enough to demand a high standard in coffee!

Here are some pics from Bolzano:

Where's mick?

Following the example of Dave I thought I'd start posting my travel plans for all the world to see.

For the next week or so I'll be heading to the UK. I will be traveling to Bristol for an interview and will be there till the weekend. After that I'll be in London where I will catch up with a whole bunch of people and maybe sneak in a little research on the side.

On Thursday I'm giving a talk to the quantum information theory group at the University of Bristol. If any of you are interested the title and the abstract can be found below:

Title: To what extent can one quantum system simulate another?

Abstract:

Quantum computers are an example of a large class of quantum-control systems that are capable of simulating the Hamiltonian dynamics of any finite-dimensional system. It turns out that many such systems have the same computational power as a quantum computer, at least when one assumes perfect control operations. For some simulation problems this is a blessing, as in when you want to simulate the dynamics of a k-local Hamiltonian, and for others this is a curse, for instance when you want to find spectral information of a k-local Hamiltonian. In this talk I will discuss some of the key challenges ahead in the field of quantum simulation, in particular I will focus on the problem of identifying systems that are universal for quantum computation (and simulation) and on the effects of noise on certain quantum simulation protocols.

Super Mario awesomeness

This is so fantastic:

What got me into politics

Yes minister:

Season 1, Episode 1, first half:

 

 Season 1, Episode 1, second half:

 

Err, Season 1, Episode 1, third half...

Well, I tried

I don't know how many regular readers noticed me mucking around with the template of this blog yesterday. I was attempting to switch over to one of the New Blogger templates. Unfortunately, I seem to be encountering real conflict issues between the Haloscan commenting system which I am using and the style editors in the new template. I have no idea why, but it seems when I install Haloscan comments the new Haloscan code puts itself all through the layout widgets. In particular, it screws up the header a lot.

I wish I could ditch Haloscan and keep my old comments somehow...

Update: Bloody hell, I actually managed to fix it. Basically I just hacked the New Blogger template directly and ignored anything that Haloscan said. It all seems to work now...

Oh, and this website kinda helped though it wasn't completely what I wanted it was enough to give me an idea about what to hack.

Who is the greatest on-screen physicist?

Weird question no? This is the sort of stuff that I worry about as I fall asleep at night. Well no, not really but it's something that I thought about late last night after watching Spiderman 2.

I'm gonna go all out there and say that Spiderman, or rather Peter Parker, is the best fictional character that is both a physicist and has appeared on the big screen.

Can anyone out there come up with a better big-screen physicist? Here are some that I thought up, each of which is way less cool than Spiderman:

• Dr Otto Octavius (the bad guy in Spiderman 2)
• Bruce Banner (The Hulk)
• Dr Emmett Brown ("Doc" from Back to the Future)
• Eddie (A physicist played by Keanu Reeves in the crappy movie "Chain Reaction")
• Angela Merkel (whoops, unfortunately she's not a movie character)

Anyway, I'm totally hanging (ha, I totally meant that pun) to see Spiderman 3 in the coming week or so...

Where have I been the last few weeks?

I've been on a bit of an unannounced hiatus for the last three weeks. This wasn't because I was intentionally avoiding blogging, but rather because since Easter I've either been snowed under or on holiday.

One of the major blogging killers of the last three weeks was the IQING conference that I was running here in Innsbruck. Unfortunately, as an organizer I felt a bit left-out of the scientific side of the conference. I only had time to make it to a few sessions, and in those I was either the chairperson or I was busy trying to work out very interesting things like how much coffee needed to be bought for the next coffee break.

Luckily though, I did get to go to a few really high quality talks. The ones that really stood out for me were:

• Joe Renes' introductory tutorial on quantum communication and cryptography.
• Marcus Cramer's tutorial on quantum dynamics.
• David Gross's talk on using the matrix product state formalism to find new families of quantum states that are universal for one-way quantum computing.
• Konrad Kieling's talk about the relationship percolation and cluster-state generation (a special mention should go to Konrad for carrying on superbly after we had a little IT meltdown which was in no way his fault).
• Daniel Burgath on quantum state transfer through spin chains.
• Christian Burrell on Lieb-Robinson bounds in certain disordered Hamiltonian systems.
• Richard Low on quantum algorithms for Fourier Transforms on SU(2).
• Ashley Montanaro's talk on establishing lower bounds on the entanglement-assisted quantum communication complexity.

There are probably a few other talks that I've forgotten, so apologies if I have forgotten anything.

Happy Easter!

Oh, and Happy Easter everyone!

IQING 5 countdown

Sorry for my lack of blogging this week, my co-organizers and I have spent the week finalizing everything for IQING 5, which is starting next Wednesday. If you are interested in the scientific content of the meeting, you can download a book of abstracts here.

If you are attending the workshop you might be interested in all the new information we've put up on the website in the last few days.

MC Rove - lame, so very very lame

Jon Stewart sums up the abysmal shenanigans at the White House correspondents dinner last night:

 

 I couldn't bring myself to actually post the video of the performance, it's just way too crap for this blog. Sorry but it has to be said, KARL ROVE YOU ARE CRAP AND IN NO WAY ARE YOU FUNNY.

Instead, here's a link to Stephen Colbert's speech at last year's correspondents dinner - which is probably the reason why they had such a lame performance last night.