Shtetl-Optimized

I’ve been told that “the world is awaiting” my report about the QIP’2006 conference. So here it is. I’m in Paris, near the Pantheon. The buildings are beautiful, but the weather is crummy. The food is tasty, expensive, and fattening. Everyone here has been friendly, which is surprising — considering that I’m conspicuously American, and that my French consists almost entirely of the following phrases:

Bonjour!
Merci!
Oui!
Je ne comprends pas!
Monsieur
Madame
École Polytechnique
Croissant
Baguette
Ravioli (no, wait — that’s Italian)

(I’m in a talk right now, using the wireless Internet, and Harry Buhrman is reading this over my shoulder and laughing. Stop that, Harry!)

Oh, right: there have also been talks here. Maybe I’ll blog about them in a later post, but then again, maybe not. I’m not giving a talk, but I am giving the after-dinner speech on Thursday, the quantum computing community having relegated me to the role of jester. Which reminds me that I should write the speech.

I should also apply for jobs for next year. Actually, would anyone like to offer me a tenure-track faculty position right now? Most of the deadlines have passed, and I haven’t even written my research statement — so if that sort of thing doesn’t bother you, your chances of getting me are excellent.

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From CNN:

Television evangelist Pat Robertson suggested Thursday that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine retribution for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which Robertson opposed.

Though many have condemned Robertson’s latest insight, I myself feel only admiration and gratitude. Admiration for one of the creative giants of American comedy, and gratitude to be alive in the 21st century, when the God of Christianity smites the Jews for not being greedy enough.

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“are you referring to yourself in the plural now? It’s getting a little spooky…”
(from a comment on a previous post)

Mark Twain wrote that “only presidents, editors and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we’.” Here at Shtetl-Optimized, we couldn’t agree more. The trouble is that we — sorry, I — have spent too much time in the grammatical dungeon of academic science, where the first-person singular is vaguely taboo.

“But why is it taboo?” you ask. Simple: because if people referred to themselves as “I” in single-author scientific papers, then they’d deprive readers of the fun of reading a sentence like

Hence we see that H is Hermitian

and wondering exactly how to parse it. Personally, I can think of at least seven possibilities:

• Hence I see that H is Hermitian, and so do you, dear reader, unless you have the IQ of a trout.

• Hence Reason, Truth, and Reality themselves, with me as humble scribe, have all testified to the Hermitianness of H since the beginning of time, and will continue to do so after all is naught.

• Hence, though modesty forbids me from saying so, I have shown that H is Hermitian. But one shouldn’t forget all the little people who helped make it possible.

• Hence, after meeting over wine and cheese in our ivory tower, we, the High Priests of the Scientific Orthodoxy, have arrogantly decided that H shall henceforth be Hermitian.

• Hence I — a sniveling wuss who can’t even directly acknowledge his own existence, and probably got beat up a lot in junior high school — have shown that H is Hermitian.

• Hence I — a resident of the collectivist dystopia of Ayn Rand’s novel Anthem, in which the word “I” has been abolished — have shown that H is Hermitian.

And finally:

• Hence H is Hermitian.

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A headline in yesterday’s Toronto Sun:

TWO MORE SHOT DEAD
Grim Rexdale total at three as bloody weekend ends city’s month of gun-death peace

It occurred to me that in the US, the headline would be a bit different:

“A MIRACLE”
In a city of 2.5 million inhabitants, an entire month with no gun homicides

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If you haven’t seen yet, the 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes have been announced. Reading through the list of previous winners, I learned two things:

• For weeks, I’d been wondering why the shower curtains in my new apartment billow inwards. At first I thought it was because the hot water created a pressure difference, but then I found that cold water causes the same effect. Now I know why I couldn’t figure it out: the explanation is sufficiently nontrivial as to have earned an Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for its discoverer.
• Instead of futzing around with Recursive Fourier Sampling, I should’ve been working on more socially-relevant CS problems, like software that detects when a cat is walking across your keyboard.

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