1.0.5: hyperbolic spaces and the Internet

One of the most mind-opening talks I've ever been to was Tamara Munzner's talk at SIGGRAPH '95. In hyperbolic space, as you get closer to an object, it gets larger. Not just appears larger, gets larger. This is incredibly useful for visualizing very large networks.

Tamara kind of dropped off my radar for a few years, but if you look at her software page, there is cool, related stuff there, including an SGI tool for managing web content.

Question for Bill and Suz: does anybody in network management use this stuff, or related ideas?

Question for Wook: can we use this somehow to visualize the state of a quantum computer? This would be highly non-representational, I think, but so is the Bloch sphere (see this text description from Mathworld and this GUI and animation).

Qubit News, Qulink and the Quantum Pontiff

That last bit, on the Deloitte report, I cribbed from Qubit News, an excellent source of info on upcoming conferences and whatnot.

For what's up in the Kanto area (around Tokyo), see Kae Nemoto's Qulink.

A chattier resource is Dave Bacon's Quantum Pontiff.

Deloitte on quantum computing

Deloitte has published a report titled, "TMT Trends: Technology Predictions 2005", and it includes quantum computing. PDF is here; they kind of buried the link.)

It's a tad breathless in its assessment, but they conclude in part, "Companies must start giving serious thought to the implications of quantum computing technology...Even during the development phase, the by-products of quantum computing research will have a significant impact on every aspect of computer technology...And when someone, somewhere produces the first commercially viable quantum computer - which is only a matter of time - it will change everything."

new single-photon source?

A Caltech press release from the Harry Atwater group touts a nanocrystal-based approach to creating photons in silicon structures, published in Nature Materials. A nanobead's size regulates the frequency of photon created, and the small size also makes it possible to inject single electrons and single holes to make photons one at a time - VERY useful for quantum computing.

The press release doesn't discuss the critical technical details of how accurately we can control the timing of the recombination of the electron and hole to create a photon - we want this in attoseconds, if possible, femtoseconds for sure. The other big question is how the direction of emission can be controlled.

I haven't read the actual paper yet, am looking forward to it...