The Foo Fighters do the best music videos

One of my flatmates showed me this ripper of a music video last week. I'm not the world's biggest "Foo Fighters" fan, but I think this is a great song and a great clip.

Does anyone else have any good music videos they want to share?

This is totally brilliant

So many memories. *sniff*

Congratulations Dr Cat!

One of my good friends and collaborators, Caterina Mora, is now officially Dr Cat. Yay!

Greatest song ever?

For the boys, you guys know who you are:

It's time to call it

Mark has an excellent post over at LP today. He points out that Howard's approach to this election is going over the top and if he continues in this way he's surely going to lose it. Howard's saturation coverage is having the effect of making him look desperate.

His plan, as has been suggested widely, is to call the election as late as possible while keeping the blowtorch on the ALP in the hope that with every passing week he manages to claw some supporters back. The thing is, people are getting more and more sick of the saturation coverage of this political contest. People are getting bored. If this trend continues Howard is finished.

Howard is looking like a good leader, he's looking desperate and the public can see this. People don't want to vote for an old man who is doing everything to cling to power. What happens if he gets it? Will the public have to endure another three years of this crap? I don't think anyone wants it. It's time for Howard to realize that his approach isn't working. His capital is spent. He has to step aside and give someone else a go or call the election.

Old media rules!

I loved the line:

In your face interested American public! We report! You shut your fu*#ing mouth!

John Howard - now an even older grumpy old man!

Happy birthday John. I really hope that this is your last birthday as PM...

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: