Rod Van Meter

Hi, #quantum researchers and authors! Some friendly, informal, totally non-binding advice from your Editor in Chief at IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering (TQE). #QuantumComputing #QuantumInternet 1/about a hundred

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

Literally the first shot of this "historically accurate" Odyssey movie shows a boat that A) Has no steering oar. B) Is under full sail *and* full rowers while entering a cave, presumably to dock inside.

Your monthly reminder that if you're using ChatGPT to do your science, you're failing your colleagues, community, and all of us. Here, ChatGPT makes up data and presents it as the real thing — then apologizes when confronted.

Map of World Shipping Traffic Density moverdb.com/shipping-traffi...

“A new map of Africa, even if it’s more true to scale, poses the same central questions as the old one,” Richard Poplak writes: “What does a jumble of countries locked inside a (slightly bigger) continent actually tell us about how Africa, and by extension the world, works?

Have you ever thought about how your computer adds and subtracts? It takes a lot of hardware to handle floating-point numbers like 12.34. I opened up Intel's 8087 math coprocessor chip from 1980 to see how it works...

Wait, we're playing in Yokohama?!? The Hawks are the much higher ranked team, so it's not that. Did Central beat Pacific in the interleague games or something?

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░ 81.10%

rubin observatory just released this STUNNING image of the seagull nebula, located about 3,700 light-years away 🥹🌌

Annual maintenance is complete and Mt Fuji has been re-installed for the season.

Absentee ballot received!

About 7 years ago I went on a campaign to convince people that the CIO role was about to become the most powerful de facto academic officer at the university; should be subsumed to faculty governance. The LMS was their opening gambit, then brand cohesion & centralized syllabus databases. Now AI.

There's neat storytelling gimmick Lovecraft used that you can steal: 'only three fully human souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed the black impious gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three two had come back quite mad.' Guess what he doesn't do next? Tell you who the third was.

The CDC has confirmed a third measles-related death this year as the U.S. faces the largest outbreak of the disease in decades.

The Trump administration’s cuts to weather satellites will set the country back nearly a decade, experts say. https://cnn.it/483oQr5

A paper of ours from earlier this year on how to connect graph state-based quantum links to memory-based, single-entanglement links. ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/doc...

I've been saying for a long time I am worried about Japanese automakers abdicating on EVs and allowing China to win, and for seven years specifically about Thailand and Indonesia. It's here.

Don’t look away from how shocking this is. Yes, unsurprising. Still shocking.

Me, drinking coffee and farting around online, then remembering I have an on-campus meeting in a half hour

THIS is the guy they're getting rid of? these people are monsters.

Who knew they have senior discounts at the bouldering (rock climbing) gym? Woo-hoo, I qualify!

Here's the most famous reference of the quote of John F. Kennedy's to which Abdul El-Sayed is referring (12:49 time mark) "For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic party's candidate for president, who happens also, to be a catholic."

I'm not usually the show binge type, but I'm hooked on The Diplomat. And boy, every detail and every character has no exact analog in our current administration, and the show keeps getting less and less plausible, but somehow it's exactly what the U.S. is doing to other countries.

North Carolina A&T students marched an hour each way to vote on the first day of early voting after their campus polling site was removed by the Guilford County Elections Board.

Quantum Physics for Babies will be 10 years old next year, and I think it would be really great if you guys could cite it more. Thanks.

(most of) my group this fall. Five key people missing, but not bad.

My heart breaks for mathematicians whose lives and careers are being destroyed by AI — and especially this PhD student, who doesn’t even know he is a poet

My friend and collaborator Thaddeus Ladd "elevated" to Fellow of the American Physical Society! Woo hoo!

Moon!

Today I started my postdoc at @virginiatech.bsky.social and my thesis became public: doi.org/10.17863/CAM... It's been a good day.

6,000 employees have been pushed out of the Forest Service since Trump took office. USFS Rangers. Janitors. Researchers. Trail Crews. Biologists. Want to protect our public lands? We need to rebuild the Forest Service.

I've been dieting and exercising for over a week but I haven't hit my target weight yet. What's the deal?!?

Also, I posted it before. But this website is great: bitsofwork.org

Me: makes silly offhand comment about AI and public key cryptanalysis. People freak out. Also me: does a serious analysis of cryptanalytic effort so far set against recent LLM math results, which is (IMHO) wildly more terrifying. Nobody notices.

good lord how can anyone be this whiny; are you not ashamed

From computing history, blaming “rogue” AI’s is B.S. Robert Morris Jr unleashed a worm program that caused more trouble than intended, but far less dangerous than current AI’s. *He* (not worm) was convicted of felony. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_... I used to see him at Bell Labs w/ his father.

youtu.be/KqiDqJMxg6o?...

It's weird, creepy, gross and bizarre. Obviously she is completely unfit for being an ambassador to any country, let alone one that she holds contempt for the people of, and it's clear that the only reason she is here is to spend months partying in Mykonos, as she did.

Guilefoyle is an awful person and it's shameful that our government hasn't demanded that the US sends a different ambassador. She has made numerous outwardly disparaging comments towards Greek people and also threatened that the US can topple the Greek government if they don't like it.