{"id":371,"date":"2008-12-15T10:10:02","date_gmt":"2008-12-15T14:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=371"},"modified":"2008-12-15T10:10:02","modified_gmt":"2008-12-15T14:10:02","slug":"four-announcements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=371","title":{"rendered":"Four announcements"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I arrived in Tempe, Arizona yesterday for a workshop on &#8220;The Nature of the Laws of Physics,&#8221; kindly hosted by Paul Davies&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/beyond.asu.edu\/index.php\">Beyond Center<\/a>.\u00a0 I&#8217;m treating this as a much-needed end-of-semester vacation&#8212;with warm desert air, eccentric personalities, talks without theorems, and the sort of meandering philosophical debate I get inexplicably cranky if I haven&#8217;t had for a month.\u00a0 Just one problem: I was hoping <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/\">Cosmic Variance<\/a>&#8216;s Sean Carroll would arrive to provide much-needed positivist reinforcement against the gangs of metaphysical ruffians, but the California Clarifier backed out&#8212;leaving the remaining skeptics to dodge relentless volleys of ill-posed questions only three hours&#8217; drive from the O.K. Corral.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>My graduate course <a href=\"http:\/\/stellar.mit.edu\/S\/course\/6\/fa08\/6.896\/index.html\">6.896 Quantum Complexity Theory<\/a> ended last week, with ten amazing student project presentations.\u00a0 Thanks so much to the students, and to my TA Yinmeng Zhang, for making this a great course (at least for me).\u00a0 Almost all of the scribe notes are <a href=\"http:\/\/stellar.mit.edu\/S\/course\/6\/fa08\/6.896\/materials.html\">now available<\/a> on the course website.\u00a0 But be warned: not only did I not write these notes, not only did I not edit them, for the most part I haven&#8217;t <em>read<\/em> them yet.\u00a0 Use entirely at your own risk.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Want to do graduate study in quantum information at MIT?\u00a0 Yes?\u00a0 Then my colleague Jeff Shapiro asks me to point you to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rle.mit.edu\/iquise\/\">new website<\/a> of iQUiSE, our Interdisciplinary Quantum Information Science &amp; Engineering program (motto: &#8220;Further Depleting the Supply of Quantum Funding-Related Acronyms Containing the Letters Q and I&#8221;).\u00a0 If you&#8217;re interested, you apply to a traditional department (such as physics, math, EECS, or mechanical engineering), but specify in your application that you&#8217;re interested in iQUiSE.\u00a0 The application deadline is <strong><font color=\"red\">today<\/font><\/strong>&#8212;but if for some strange reason 17 hours isn&#8217;t enough to write your application, there&#8217;s always another year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Dmitry Gavinsky asks me to throw the following piece of meat to the comment-wolves: <em>What exactly should count as a &#8220;new&#8221; quantum algorithm?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><input id=\"gwProxy\" type=\"hidden\" \/><!--Session data--><input onclick=\"jsCall();\" id=\"jsProxy\" type=\"hidden\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I arrived in Tempe, Arizona yesterday for a workshop on &#8220;The Nature of the Laws of Physics,&#8221; kindly hosted by Paul Davies&#8217; Beyond Center.\u00a0 I&#8217;m treating this as a much-needed end-of-semester vacation&#8212;with warm desert air, eccentric personalities, talks without theorems, and the sort of meandering philosophical debate I get inexplicably cranky if I haven&#8217;t had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[5,30,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complexity","category-mirrored-on-csail-blog","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}