Google's Quantum Supremacy Paper

[Important update, 10/25 0630. Dave Bacon has corrected me.  The chip is fully programmable. I had thought that the choice of coupler patterns (Fig. S25 in the SOM) would limit what could and could not be done. I thought those were the only patterns the hardware supported, but it's just the set that they chose; in fact, any couplers can be on/off in any cycle, as long as they aren't using the same qubits. I stand corrected! Thanks, Dave!]

[Edit 10/24. 1730 JP time: softened the language a bit in the first couple of paragraphs; it came out harsher than I intended in the original version.]

We interrupt your irregularly scheduled programming on cryptography (What Every Quantum Researcher and Engineer Should Know about Classical Cryptography) for some comments on Google's new supremacy paper...

By now, everyone on the entire planet and some people in space has heard that Google has claimed the achievement of "quantum supremacy". As the resident quantum pundit on Dave Farber's IP list, I suppose I'm obliged to say a few things, but I really don't have much to add beyond what some of the most prominent people have said, so this is largely a collection of links I mostly endorse...

Fundamentally, Google claims that their 53-qubit superconducting processor can solve a problem that would take a classical supercomputer 10,000 years.  But the problem is rather constrained; arguably, they defined the problem as whatever the computer is capable of doing.  That sounds harsh, and I don't mean it to be; it's still a tour de force that will stand as an important milestone, and it is programmable, but it's not yet fully general. Actually, let me soften that a bit; the chip itself was designed in conjunction with an understanding of what they are physically capable of doing, but very much with an eye toward what would most clearly demonstrate supremacy within their physical constraints.  So it's more fair to say it's hardware/software co-design. (And as I always tell my students, you can't design any computer without a plan for its workload!)

If you squint, it's something like a satisfiability problem (SAT, in CS theory terms).  In a SAT problem, you're given a Boolean circuit and challenged to find a set of input values that makes the (single) output TRUE.  In this case, measuring out all 53 qubits, it's not a single value that's the output, but rather a probability distribution. Using quantum entanglement and interference, in fact, it's not a flat "any number out of $2^{53}$" distribution, but instead has complex statistical characteristics.  It's those characteristics that they are looking for.  They started with a small problem size (using a subset of the qubits), calculated the distribution, saw that the machine conforms (but see the next paragraph!), then increased the size up past the level where their code can simulate it, and declared victory.

There are three two big catches to this: one, as already stated it's not fully programmable; two, it's not clear that this is beyond the capability of classical systems (see below); three, I believe them when they say it works, but noise remains the limiting factor, and it takes tremendous statistical skill to pull the signal out of the noise -- indeed, the fidelity (roughly, probability that it did the right thing) for their largest problem is only 0.2%!  That is, only one time in 500 does the circuit run properly, with no errors.  And given that the output is supposed to be a probability distribution, and that the space of answers is about $10^{16}$, that means figuring out whether it differs from pure noise is tough.

The paper itself:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5
53 qubits and 76 authors by my count, which makes 1.43 authors per qubit.  The team is headed by John Martinis (pronounced close to "Martinez"), one of the long-time key people in superconducting qubits.  John was at UC Santa Barbara before Google lured him and his entire team away a few years ago, and put truly outstanding resources at their disposal.

There is also substantial (67 pages) Supplementary Online Material (SOM) at the bottom of the web page, don't miss it if you want details of everything from the fabrication (two chips bonded face-to-face, one with the classical parts and one with the quantum parts!) to the cross-entropy benchmarking (XEB) used to statistically prove their proposition that the device works to the calibration procedure (tremendously difficult) to the algorithm itself.

News & views from William Oliver:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03173-4

The five-minute Google feel-good video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZNEzzDcllU

Blog post by Sundar Pichai, Google CEO:
https://blog.google/perspectives/sundar-pichai/what-our-quantum-computing-milestone-means

They built on techniques developed by Sergio Boixo & co.:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263

Naturally, IBM, one of the other biggest names in quantum computing, is pushing back:
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/on-quantum-supremacy/
(full disclosure: I'm Vice Center Chair of Keio's Quantum Computing Center, and we are working with IBM; my students have recently been using IBM's own 53-qubit processor.)

They're not questioning the experiment itself, but whether it's truly post-classical.  Simulators have been advancing rapidly, and _ideas_ for simulators and what counts as quantum supremacy have been moving even more rapidly.

(n.b.: there is pushback on the term "quantum supremacy"; in particular, the Europeans don't like it, they think it echoes Nazi terminology.)

Anyway...the most straightforward way of simulating a quantum computer takes memory exponential in the number of qubits:

10 qubits: 16KB
20 qubits: 16MB
30 qubits: 16GB
40 qubits: 16TB
50 qubits: 16PB
53 qubits: 128PB (144,115,188,075,855,872 bytes)

and, of course, a separate computation for each entry.  But numerous techniques compress that dramatically; one technique called tensor networks, which (very, very, very roughly) allows a query for the value of a state to reuse previously-calculated results, with the whole thing compressed into a tree of pointers to values, plus modifiers.  IBM's Edwin Pednault and team have simulated up to 56 qubits in special cases:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05867
and this team's new work forms the core of the IBM pushback against Google:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09534

Indeed, Alibaba simulated some special cases related to supremacy last year, up to *144* qubits:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.01450

There has been some recent discussion of what it is that truly determines the difficulty of a quantum computation; it's not just the number of qubits or the number of entangling two-qubit gates, it's a more complex function. I should dig up some references on that.

Scott Aaronson's quantum supremacy FAQ:
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4317
and a new post on the topic:
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372

Simon Devitt's podcast, Meet the meQuanics, just did an episode with some of the inventors of some of the theoretical techniques Google used:
https://soundcloud.com/mequanics/meet-the-mequanics-e53-quantum-supremacy-a-montenaro-m-bremner-r-mann

More useful discussion:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/how-googles-quantum-supremacy-plays-into-quantum-computings-long-game

And from John Preskill himself, inventor of the term:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-preskill-explains-quantum-supremacy-20191002/

Finally, let me point out that Chris Monroe is quoted in Financial Review, talking about his ion trap experiment from a couple of years ago -- featuring, you guessed it, 53 qubits (they were trying for 52 and wound up with 53):
https://www.afr.com/technology/why-google-wasn-t-really-the-first-to-achieve-quantum-supremacy-20190927-p52vg6
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24654
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.01044
52 was chosen to get ahead of Misha Lukin's group, which had 51:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24622
https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.04344

More than enough for now.  Hope this helps!

1.3.1 DES (the Data Encryption Standard)

DES, the Data Encryption Standard, was designed by IBM in the 1970s, consulting with the NSA.  DES is a type of cipher known as an iterative block cipher, which breaks data into to blocks and repeats a set of operations on them.  The operations in DES are called a Feistel network, after the inventor.

DES uses a 56-bit key, though products exported from the U.S. were limited to using 40 meaningful key bits [wikipedia/40-bit-encryption]. It was later upgraded to triple-DES, using three 56-bit key pieces and repeating DES three times, giving up to 168 bits of protection.  But it's not just the key size that matters in a block cipher.  The block size itself matters a great deal, as we'll see below.  For DES, that block size is only 64 bits.

DES operates in sixteen rounds, each of which uses a 48-bit subkey generated from the original 56-bit key using a key scheduling algorithm.  In each round, half of the block is tweaked and half initially left alone, then XORed with the tweaked half.  The two halves are swapped before the next round.

The "tweaking" of the right half of the block is done by first expanding the 32 bits into 48 by replicating half of the bits, XORing with the 48-bit subkey, then dividing it into 6-bit chunks and pushing each chunk through one of eight substitution boxes, or S boxes.  Each S box turns 6 bits into 4, using a lookup table defined as part of the algorithm (that is, this operation is not key-dependent).  The S boxes are nonlinear (but not affine), which is the source of the true security of DES; if the S boxes were linear, breaking DES would be easy (or so I am told).

Decrypting DES is exactly the same operation as encrypting, except that the subkeys are used in reverse order.

Slightly more formally, the sequence of operations in a DES encryption is:

1. Apply initial permutation (IP) (a fixed operation)
2. For i = 1 to 16 do
1. divide the block into two 32-bit halves
2. expand the left half to 48 bits (a fixed operation)
3. calculate subkey i
1. split key into two 28-bit halves
2.  rotate each half 1 or 2 bits (a fixed operation according to the key schedule)
3. select a subset of 48 bits (a fixed operation according to  the schedule)
4. XOR subkey i with the left half of the block
5. split into 8 six-bit pieces
6. push each 6-bit piece through a $6\rightarrow 4$ S-box
7. permute and recombine the pieces (a fixed operation)
8. XOR the left half with the right half of the block
9.  swap halves of the block
3. Apply the final permutation (FP) (a fixed operation)

The $6 \rightarrow 4$ S boxes are obviously inherently non-reversible, but the earlier
expansion guarantees that ultimately no information is lost as the block passes through the entire network.

The success of cryptanalysis is often measured in terms of the number of rounds it can break in a multi-round cipher like DES.  e.g., if DES were six rounds instead of sixteen, we could do yea much.  Various attacks have been able to penetrate DES to different depths.  Of course, the more straightforward approach is sheer brute force; as early as 1977, Diffie and Hellman published a critique in which they argued that brute force stood at the edge of feasible, and indeed in 1999, a special-purpose machine named Deep Crack, built by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, cracked a DES key.  Further advances have made it possible even for dedicated hobbyists to crack.

Triple-DES (also called 3DES) has several modes of operation, but is usually used with three independent 56-bit keys, $K1$, $K2$, and $K3$, with encryption performed as $C = E_{K3}(D_{K2}(E_{K1}(P)))$ where $P$ is the plaintext, $E$ and $D$ are the encryption and decryption operations, and $C$ is the ciphertext.

DES was withdrawn as a standard in 2005, after having been replaced by AES in 2001, although the U.S. government still allows 3DES until 2030 for sensitive information.

1.3 Bulk Data Encryption

D-H and RSA are pretty easy to understand, and known to be vulnerable to quantum computers, hence attract a lot of attention. The workhorse symmetric block ciphers for bulk encryption are actually much more complex mathematically, and hence harder to understand, but ultimately can be executed efficiently on modern microprocessors and dedicated chips.

A block cipher takes the data to be encrypted, and breaks it into fixed-size chunks called blocks.  If the last block isn't full, it is filled out with meaningless data.  We also take a key, and using the key perform mathematical operations on the data block.  In a symmetric system, by definition, the decryption key is the same as the encryption key.  Generally, the output block is the same size as the input block.  There is no requirement that the block and key are the same size.

Ideally, the output block (the ciphertext) will look completely random: about 50% zeroes and 50% ones, regardless of input, and with no detectable pattern.  That is, its entropy will be very high.  Of course, it cannot be completely random, as it must be possible for the data to be decrypted by someone holding the appropriate key.  A good cipher, however, will provide few clues to an attacker.  A single bit's difference in either the key or the original plaintext should result in about half of the ciphertext bits being flipped, so that being "close" offers no guidance on a next step.

Thus, a symmetric key system's security is often linked to its key size; with $k$ key bits, it should require, on average, $2^{k-1}$ trial decryptions to find the key and to be able to decrypt the message.  We will discuss this further when we get to cryptanalysis.

Many encryption algorithms have been designed over the years, but two in particular are too important to ignore, so we will examine them: DES, the Data Encryption Standard, which is still in use in modified form but is primarily of historical interest now, and AES, the Advanced Encryption Standard, which is used for most communications today.

1.2 Key Generation

See the previous section here.

The other algorithm we talk about a lot as being both important and vulnerable to Shor's factoring algorithm is Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which is used for creating the session key we will use for bulk data encryption.  It's important that every session have its own separate encryption key; we don't want multiple conversations sharing the same key, for a lot of obvious reasons.

D-H works as follows:

1. Alice and Bob publicly agree on a modulus $p$ and a base $g$ (in cleartext is okay)
2. Alice and Bob each pick a secret random number $a$ and $b$
3. Alice calculates $A = g^a \bmod p$, Bob calculates $B = g^b \bmod p$
4. Alice sends Bob $A$, Bob sends Alice $B$ (in cleartext is okay)
5. Alice calculates $s = B^a \bmod p$, Bob calculates $s = A^b \bmod p$

Both Alice and Bob now have the same secret $s$, which they can use as an encryption key.

Note that, as-is, D-H is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, and so must be coupled with some form of authentication so that Alice and Bob each know that the other is who they say they are.

1.1 Authentication

Previous post in this series is here.

Okay, time to dive into this in more technical depth. Let's go phase by phase:

1.1 Authentication

Authentication, or proving you are who you say you are, is often described as something you have (a physical key), something.you know (a secret password), or something you are (biometrics, or physically unclonable functions, or PUFs).

The authentication phase can be accomplished using a pre-shared secret key and symmetric encryption of some message and response, or it can be done via asymmetric, public-key cryptography.

The best-known and most-used form of public key crypto is RSA, developed by Rivest, Shamir and Adelman (but also previously discovered by Cocks, of a British intelligence agency):

1. Pick two large primes, $p$ and $q$, let $n = pq$.
2. Calculate $\phi(p,q) = (p-1)(q-1)$.
3. Pick $e$, prime relative to $\phi(p,q)$.
4. Calculate $d$, s.t. $de = 1 \bmod \phi(p,q)$, which we can call the inverse of $e$ modulo $\phi(p,q)$.

The tuple $\langle n,e\rangle$ is now your public key, and $d$ is your private key. You can publish $\langle n,e\rangle$ any way you like, including in the New York Times. To send you a message $m$, I calculate the ciphertext $c$,

$c = m^e \bmod n$

and send $c$ to you.  You can recover the message $m$ by

    $m = c^d \bmod n$

That's all there is to it!  Except that it's expensive, so we don't use it for every message.  If I send you "Hi, Bob, it's Tuesday, let's use 42 as our key," using your public key and you reply, "Tuesday is beautiful, Alice, and 42 is fine," using my public key, we confirm that we are definitely Bob and Alice, known as authentication -- assuming, of course, that you trust that the key that you are holding really and truly belongs to me, and I haven't leaked it out somehow!

As you might guess from the publication of $n$, RSA is the one that's vulnerable to factoring larger integers, and hence of interest to spooks once Shor's algorithm came about.

Current EU recommendations are for 3072-bit RSA keys, recently (2018) upgraded from 2048, for "near-term protection" (up to ten years). They recommend an extraordinary 15360 bits for "long-term protection" (thirty to fifty years). [Cloudflare, Keylength.com, Ecrypt, Lenstra]

(Note: there are many more references to come; they will be delivered in a batch at the end.  It's not practical to list them all here in every article as we go, but I'll try to give you some of the key(ha!) ones.)

1.0 Encrypted Communications

See the previous posting if you haven't.

An encrypted conversation involves, at the macro level, three phases:

1. Authentication: proving that you are who you say you are
2. Key generation: creating the keys used for bulk data encryption
3. Encryption/sending/decryption of the user's valuable bulk data

That's a bit of an oversimplification, as we'll see below when we talk about IPsec, but good enough for now.

You probably all know that there are two major kinds of cryptography -- symmetric key and asymmetric key, also known as public key.  Due to the high costs of computation for public key, bulk data encryption is done using symmetric key.  Symmetric encryption comes in two kinds, block ciphers and stream ciphers.  These days pretty much everything seems to be block, but I'm not sure why.

Some additional terminology:

• cleartext: data that isn't encrypted and isn't really intended to be (sometimes confused with the below, even by me)
• plaintext: the original, unencrypted message
• ciphertext: the encrypted message
• integrity: the data hasn't been tampered with
• confidentiality or privacy: the data hasn't been disclosed to anyone unauthorized
• session keys: the keys used for one communication session
• forward secrecy: keeping your data secret in the future, esp. by building a crypytosystem that doesn't reuse keys
• rekeying: changing the keys used in the middle of a session
• subkeys: keys used for a portion of an encryption process, derived from a subset of the bits of the session key
• cryptoperiod: the time that a specific key is authorized for use

Attacks on encrypted communications generally fall into one of three
categories:

• unknown plaintext: the hardest problem; how do you recognize when you've found the message?  With many but not all systems, failure will leave only unintelligible, random data, while success will produce words from the dictionary or other recognizable text.
• known plaintext: when an attacker knows what the plaintext corresponding to a particular ciphertext is, and attempts to find the key; not uncommon given the regularity of communications such as web browsing or email.
• chosen plaintext: when the attacker can control the text to be encrypted, but obviously not the key; rarer than known plaintext, but can happen with small devices that a person may "own" but not always completely control, or if the attacker partially controls some subset of resources, such as a related web server, or has compromised one or more hosts behind an encryption gateway.

We also need this definition:

• brute force/exhaustive search: checking every possible key, which of course is $2^n$ for an $n$-bit key, resulting in an expected hit time of half that number of trials; if you have a method that will find a key in substantially less than $2^{n-1}$ trials, you have "broken" the cipher, even if your attack isn't necessarily practical in the short run.

And three mathematical definitions I know for algebra on the real numbers, but I'm a little fuzzy on in the bitwise, cryptographic context:

• linear function: I think in this context, $f(x,y)$ is a linear function of some bits if it involves only a linear addition of the inputs, and $f(0,0) = 0$ (origin is preserved).  Multiplication (AND) is disallowed?  Importantly, $f(x1 + x2) = f(x1) + f(x2)$.
• affine function: same as a linear function, but an offset is allowed, such that $f(0,0) = 1$ (origin isn't necessarily preserved) (equivalent to a translation in a real space $R^n$).
• nonlinear function: A nonlinear function is one in which $f(x+y) \ne f(x) + f(y)$ for some values $x$ and $y$. Some affine functions are nonlinear. I'm definitely fuzzy here...multiplication and arbitrary mappings are allowed?

Next posting in this series is here.

0.0 Introduction

I just posted this introduction to the project here.  I hope you'll follow along as I fill in the postings.

There are two fundamental reasons for periodic rekeying:

1. Having a long string of data encrypted with the same key increases the ability of an attacker to find the key.
2. As a practical matter, reducing the amount of data that is exposed in the event that a key is broken is good stewardship of your data.

So changing the key "often" makes it both harder and less valuable for an attacker to find a key.  That's the tl;dr.  Turning it into concrete, numeric recommendations is hard, but it looks like rekeying every half hour is pretty good, if your key bandwidth isn't high enough to do full one-time pad.

The above I knew off the top of my head, but I'm not a cryptographer and had more or less taken the need for changing the keys (known as rekeying) on faith.  So, let's dig a little deeper...there won't be any new knowledge in this, but I hope it helps bring together some information and organizes it to both save you the googling and calculating I've done and to provide a clear picture.

I used to work on a box known as an IPsec gateway, but I was the OS guy, not the cryptographer; Darrell Piper, Dan Harkins and Dave Kashtan did most of the crypto work.  I am also a board member of the WIDE Project, which through its KAME Project created the Racoon software that was an important early implementation of the key exchange protocol for IPsec, with much of that work done by Shoichi Sakane.  Much of what I know about IPsec and other security was just incidental radiation from them, or gained from the security-oriented papers we had to read when I did my master's at USC back before the Enlightenment.

I'm afraid this has gotten longer than I originally intended, so I hope it's all useful.  It's so long, a table of contents is in order:

1. Brief, mostly non-mathematical intro to cryptography and its terminology, in the context of encrypted communications.
2. General ideas behind cryptanalysis and the importance of limiting data volume, since that's the topic that started this conversation.
3. How these ideas play out in IPsec, one of the Internet's key security protocols.
4. How these ideas play out in TLS/SSL.
5. Quantum and crypto.
6. Post-quantum crypto.
7. ACT NOW and order the above package, and as a FREE bonus, Ronco (well, Rodco) will send you a few thoughts on Bitcoin and its vulnerability to the development of quantum computers!
8. References

Next posting is here.

What Every Quantum Researcher and Engineer Should Know about Classical Cryptography

At a conference in Berlin in June, I was asked, paraphrasing, about why we change the cryptographic keys used during long communication sessions, and how often they ought to be changed.  I waved my hands a little bit, but I wasn't completely satisfied with my own answer. It turned out to be a good opportunity for me to dig into a little background I'd been meaning to go through.  It also proved to be a remarkably hard question to answer from googling up pages, including cryptography research papers and the extensive mailing list archives from development of key Internet protocols.  I fell down a pretty serious rabbit hole here, and haven't found my way out yet.

What I have wound up with is about 25 pages of notes on classical cryptography, and I have decided to turn them into something that will benefit the quantum community at large.  I'm tentatively titling it, "What Every Quantum Researcher and Engineer Should Know about Classical Cryptography", in homage to Goldberg's classic paper on floating point arithmetic.

The target audience for this is primarily quantum computing researchers who are familiar with Shor's algorithm, Grover's algorithm and QKD, since those are among the first things you learn, but who have only a very rough idea of what it means to actually encrypt data and to use encryption in a real-world setting.

I'll be posting the notes gradually over the next few weeks here on this blog, and I hope you will comment and help me improve them.

Table of Contents:

0. Introduction
1. Encrypted Communications
1. Authentication
2. Key Generation
3. Bulk Data Encryption
1. DES
2. AES
3. Limitations of Block Ciphers
4. Notes & References
2. Cryptanalysis
1. Defense
1. Entropy
2. Diffusion and Confusion
2. The Birthday Paradox, or, When Should I Change my Encryption Keys?
3. Differential Cryptanalysis
4. Linear Cryptanalysis
5. Known and Chosen Plaintexts in Real Systems
6. Notes & References
3. IPsec and the IETF
1. Internet Standards
2. (Classical) IPsec
3. Digging into the Cryptanalysis of IPsec
4. IPsec with QKD
5. Notes & References
4. TLS/SSL and cryptography
1. TLS Records and Basic Limits
2. Keying and Rekeying
3. Other Attacks on TLS
4. TLS and QKD
5. Notes & References
5. Quantum Attacks on Classical Crypto
1. Shor 'Nuff
2. Grover's Amplifier
6. Post-Quantum Cryptography
7. Bitcoin/Blockchain and Quantum Computers
8. Conclusion
9. Additional References

See the first installment here.

testing, testing, is this thing on?

My interest in running a blog was tailing off when I lost access to this account, so I let it go for a long time. Now, I have some things to say, and I may have recovered access here.

Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

I've been thinking about restarting this blog, which has been kind of dormant for a while.  One of the topics I've been thinking about covering is research integrity, both in Japan and throughout the world.  Here is one tidbit along those lines.  Perhaps I'll comment a little more later, perhaps not.
Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

I heard yesterday that Mr. Phillips died on March 13, at the age of 84.  When I heard the news, I cried steadily for half an hour, and am crying again now as I write this.  Mr. Phillips was, outside of my mother and father, perhaps the single person I most respected; he influenced the direction of my life disproportionately.  He was more than simply a high school science teacher, he was a role model in life, a mentor, and a very good friend.  I will miss his quiet voice, warm smile and the light in his eyes, almost conspiratorial with some shared humor but never smug or excluding, until the end of my days.

Jack Phillips was the Williamson High School biology, advanced biology, and physiology teacher during my days as a student.  But that is like saying Magic Johnson was a basketball player -- it is a simple fact, but gives you no insight into his accomplishments, let alone deeper into the person.  This essay won't be able to do him justice, either, but I hope it will give some measure of the man.

Mr. Phillips believed in the intelligence, curiosity and maturity of the students (sometimes in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary).  He treated us all like we wanted to be treated -- like adults.  He found ways to make difficult concepts accessible and lively, even taking us to his farm to study the plants there.

I developed a deep bond with him.  Even as a young student, I would go to his classroom during lunch breaks, before or after school, and knock on his door.  He would always open it with a welcoming smile. We would sit and talk, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for an hour.  He would show me experiments he was setting up for class, and even ask me to help.  Sometimes my best friend, Michael Hensley, would go with me, sometimes I went alone.

Mr. Phillips had been in the Navy for a number of years before coming back to Williamson and becoming a teacher, so he knew much about the world, had been many places and seen many things.  We shared books and magazines -- usually serious, sometimes humorous, sometimes banal -- and video tapes of Nova and Cosmos episodes.  These conversations almost always began with some relationship to science, but no topic was off limits, and we covered much of life.

These visits continued even after I graduated from high school, though they gradually tailed off over the years.  Mr. Phillips moved from educating the students to educating the educators, and I would visit his office at the Board of Education.  Michael and I would also drive up to his farm, twenty minutes up the river, and drop in unexpectedly, on a weekend afternoon or even a weekday evening.  If he was home, I can't remember ever being turned away.  Mrs. Phillips would ply us with lemonade and we would sit and talk, on the back porch on warm days, inside the house evenings or if the weather was either too hot or too cold.  Sometimes we repaid the intrusion by helping in minor ways with farmwork, but most often we just chatted.

His stories of growing up on the farm were wry, often hilarious. Perhaps our favorite was the story of tearing down the barn.  His grandmother (if I recall correctly) had an old barn that was falling down, and she wanted it removed.  Jack and his cousins offered to do it.  Of course, they didn't tell her that they had found a box of dynamite, abandoned by miners or the railroad.  They knew enough about dynamite to know how to set it off, and enough to stay well clear, but not enough to know how much to use, so they used it all.  The explosion not only succeeded in demolishing the barn (to the point where there were few pieces even worth picking up), it blew windows out at the main house, and the chickens that had been quietly going about their business in the yard made themselves very scarce.  After their own ears stopped ringing, the kids had to round the chickens back up, who refused to lay for some time afterward.

More than a talker, though, he was an extraordinary listener.  He weighed everything you said, correcting gently when necessary, but always making you feel that your opinions and ideas were valued.  I strive (but often fail) to emulate his approach.

I can only remember him getting something like angry once.  We were at his house, playing Trivial Pursuit (whether the Phillipses owned it, or Michael and I brought it with us, I don't recall).  Mr. Phillips kept trying for the Science questions, and kept getting questions like, "If you were born on March 18, what is your astrological sign?" His annoyance with such un-scientific claptrap in the science category was palpable.

It was Mr. Phillips's sincere interest in me and his sterling role model that gave me the confidence to pursue a career in science and engineering.  My parents, especially my father, were always supportive of my interest in the sciences, taking me to Saturday morning science classes when I was young, subscribing to magazines, talking about it, taking us to see solar eclipses and space launches.  But without Mr. Phillips's steady presence at just the time I was figuring out who I was, and applying to colleges, I might have drifted off into some other field.  He helped me make the right choices in life, first with his advice and incisive questions, later as a presence in my mind.

I don't mean to slight the contributions of my other mentors.  I have had half a dozen older mentors, at least as many peers, and many wonderful teachers who changed the direction of my life.  I owe them all a debt I can never repay.  But Mr. Phillips was there at the right time to guide me.  He was perhaps the first outside of my parents to take me seriously and treat me like an intellectual peer and colleague, if a young and naive one, rather than just a student to be trained.

I think the last time I saw him, my older daughter was a toddler, so it must have been a dozen years ago.  We were visiting my parents, and on a whim I picked up the phone and called.  He was actually living down by the Tennessee border by then, but by coincidence happened to be up at the farm doing some maintenance.  My wife, daughter and I drove up, and had a wonderful chat with him.  I remember we talked about Japan quite a bit (although we were still living in California at the time), though I don't recall any of the details.  I'm not sure I ever even told him that I am now a professor at a university, which I think would have made him proud.

He was loved by all of the students of my generation.  Teachers of his caliber are rare.  So are human beings.  His passing saddens me, but if the measure of value of a life is its impact on others, he made the world a far better place.  I can only hope that I pass on to my own students some of the same intellectual and personal traits.

I'm sorry I'm not there today with you.  My love to Mrs. Phillips and
Ann.

Thank You, Endeavour

You friends posting fabulous pictures of Space Shuttle Endeavour's last flyby over California are making me weep.  First, I'm crying because I'm not there to celebrate this valedictory moment with you.  I love you all and miss you terribly, and this reminds me of that because of the space program events we have shared, both triumph and tragedy.  Some of those have been defining moments in our lives and our friendships: watching landings at Edwards Air Force Base; sitting in the shed in the Lloyd House courtyard, mute, staring at the images of Challenger on the big-screen TV, with one friend that evening passing out black strips to be attached to basketball uniforms.

I weep for the machine itself.  A fabulous piece of hardware, one of mankind's greatest technical accomplishments.  I still use a technical paper about the shuttle's software when I teach about real-time operating systems, and it never fails to impress.

Fabulous, but flawed: I weep for Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judy Resnick, Greg Jarvis, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, and Christa McAuliffe.  I weep for Rick Husband, Willie McCool (perhaps the greatest name for an astronaut, ever), Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon.

I weep for the program; from my junior high school days until now the space shuttle has dominated our conception of what it means to fly into space.

I weep for the end of an era.  The step into commercial space travel is fraught with uncertainty.  Perhaps we should have done it twenty years ago, perhaps never; we won't know for another decade.  I stand in awe of the accomplishments that the commercial space companies have already made.  I am hopeful, but apprehensive.

I weep for Apollo, the boldest among many bold things Americans have done.  I weep because we left the job unfinished, and because the day may come again when no American, and perhaps no human, alive has been to the Moon.  As we saw last month, somewhat to our surprise our
heroes are mortal, and the youngest of them are nearing eighty.  To me, the greatest generational dividing line is July 20, 1969: were you born before, or after, a human being set foot on another celestial body for the first time?

I weep for our dreams.  Make no mistake about it -- I am a huge supporter of our unmanned space program, and Curiosity shows once again what we can accomplish when we try, and that it has the power to capture the imagination of people around the world.  But as long as we inhabit these bodies of flesh and blood, part of what it means to be human is to challenge ourselves physically as well as intellectually.  "To boldly go where no man has gone before," captured it perfectly.

Finally, I weep for the little boy who thrilled to every launch, with memories of Apollo 15 and STS-1 in person, to every event and landing, every discovery.  In what seems simultaneously an instant and forever, the boy grew from a dreamer in a hard worker, from a skinny kid with unruly hair to a middle-aged, gray-bearded, balding, slightly overweight man.  The first, the greatest dream was always to become an astronaut.  Indeed, I was worried I had been born too late, that by
the time I was an adult all of the interesting exploration would be done!  But still, just going would be wonderful.  Somewhere along the way, the dream got set aside in favor of easier-to-achieve goals.  I
am proud to be a professor, proud of my research and students, and deeply in love with my family.  But my wife still tells the story that I once said, "If aliens stop by, and ask if I want to go with them,
I'm saying 'Yes!'  Sorry if it means leaving you behind.  Maybe you can come, too?"

The tears are tears of deep emotion, both joy and sadness, tears for ourselves, for all of humanity, for our breathtaking accomplishments, our failures, and for our ability to go on.

Thank you, Endeavour.

Reach for the stars.

New Paper Dance: Recursive Quantum Repeater Networks

I've been neglectful of this blog lately, but this paper has what I think are some ideas that are a good fit for quantum networking.  We're just beginning the discussion about QRNA (Quantum Recursive Network Architecture), though, and comments are very welcome!

Our paper Recursive quantum repeater networks is part of a special issue of Progress in Informatics on quantum information technology.


Thanks to Joe Touch (and his Recursive Network Architecture (RNA) project), and Clare Horsman for their work on the paper.  Wouldn't have happened without them.

#Quakebook

"2:46" is now available on Amazon.  100% of the proceeds go to the Japanese Red Cross.  Buy your copy today!
http://www.quakebook.org/

Abstracts for Systems Papers

Generic advice on abstract writing for systems papers:

6 sentences in an abstract:

1. Define the problem you're solving
2. Give the key idea for how you solved it
3. Describe how you demonstrate the success of your solution
4. Give key results, preferably numerically
5. Describe how this impacts the world/industry/whatever (big picture)

Next, go back and reread it, and figure out which of those topics
needs a second sentence, and fill that in. Most often, it's the data
or experiment. Viola! Six sentence abstract!

...now go back and think about whether you really need that first
sentence. Often the first two can be combined, if what you are
working on is a well-understood "hot topic". But be *very* careful
about eliminating it, lest you appear to be doing empty-headed "cool
prototype" building. This is also one of the key places your paper
needs to be timeless; people will hopefully read your abstract for
years to come, but they won't read the paper if they don't like the
abstract!

The abstract *must* be clear about whether your results are analytic,
simulated, or measurements of a real-world system or lab prototype.

Not a perfect formula, and formulas shouldn't be over-used anyway, but
it's a pretty good way to do it. The abstracts of 90% of the papers I
read could be improved by following this approach.

Diary From the Last Couple of Days in Japan

Dave, others:

This is a collection of notes, lightly edited, compiled over the last
two days, so the voice and time line move around a bit.  Apologies.

OK, first impressions:

1. The earthquake was by far the biggest I've ever been in (or hope to
be in), but the building we are in is brand new and very well built,
so it swayed a lot but never felt dangerous.
2. Being a refugee is both stressful and boring at the same time, even
when you're with friends in a place you know is safe.  The biggest
thing, of course, is the lack of reliable information; several
people around me have 1seg keitai which give a *very* poor TV image,
enough to be scary but not provide a lot of detail.

Observations:

1. It's a rule of mine not to leave the house without clothing warm
enough for the possiblity of being stuck outside for hours; I think
I'll keep that rule.
2. I carry millions of transistors in my pocket, billions in my
backpack.  One would be enough for an AM radio, but no one around me
seemed to have one.

Rolling back to 14:45 Friday...

"Earthquake," I said quietly.  Nobody noticed, Kei-san kept on
talking.  Even I wasn't completely sure at first, and I'm pretty quick
to pick up on them.

"Earthquake, we're having an earthquake," I said, a little louder.

Kei-san said, "Earthquake?...You're right..."

Osamu-san said, "Earthquake?  Really?"

By this time, it had already been swaying for several seconds.

"It's getting bigger," someone said.

Kusumoto-san got up and walked across the room and peeked through the
blinds.  "Electric poles are swaying," he said.  I got up and walked
across the room to join him.

"It's getting even worse," someone said.  "Better get away from the
windows."

"Wow, it's big...this is far away and big..."

Comments like that continued for what seemed like two minutes, before
it calmed down.  The electricity went out.

Shortly, the announcement came to evacuate the building, so we grabbed
our jackets and went out.  Several of us helped a man in an electric
wheelchair, lifting him down the stairs.

This building includes a gym and pool; dozens of kids in speedos and
googles were forced out into the cold.  I handed out a shirt and
fleece I was carrying (which haven't come back, but if that's my
biggest loss, I'm fine).

While we were outside, I got email on my cell phone (DoCoMo mail)
from my wife, letting me know that she was okay, had one of our
daughters, and was getting the other.  It would be fifteen hours
before we would be able to connect via voice or SMS, but DoCoMo mail
and their 3G packet service operated sporadically from the beginning.
I was able to access Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, enough to get a
message to friends who relayed it to my parents.

Eventually, they announced that they would inspect the building top to
bottom, starting on the 7th floor, before we were allowed back in the
building.  A few minutes later, it started to rain, and a stream of
people went back into the building -- with permission or without, I
don't know.

With power out, we had some emergency lights; our local blackout
continued until 11pm, eight hours after the first shock (but when it
got dark, we could tell that surrounding areas still had power).  We
grabbed our stuff, and were herded into a few rooms on the lower
floors, where sat on classroom chairs or stretched out on the floor.
Decks of cards and various drinks, including Dad's Root Beer (which
some student literally mistook for a type of beer -- to her disgust
and my delight) and some sort of avowedly foul Korean liquor, and
snacks materialized, and the students and younger folks quickly
settled into a social mood.  I'm fighting either allergies or a bit of
a cold, so I stretched out on the floor to rest.

About a half a dozen faculty were in the early part of an overnight
retreat, here on Keio's Hiyoshi Campus rather than at SFC, so I had
extra shirts and some bread and cheese on hand.

Most of the other faculty that I came with have gone home to check on
their own families, moving via car, but none were going in my
direction, so I elected to stay here.  Some of the faculty and staff
and a fair number of students from this campus remain; some live close
enough to walk, but have no power or simply prefer to be with friends
here.

Fighting a cold and stress, and with nothing but emergency lights,
didn't feel like reading.  Little information coming in; we were safe,
with nothing particular to do.  No one around needed immediate help,
and simply adding people to the streets and stations was clearly a bad
idea.  I now understand the empty look on the faces you see in refugee
camps.

Eventually, the campus security and general affairs folks came around
and handed out canned water, crackers, and rather musty blankets.

Some people had keitai (cell phones) with one-seg (1seg) receivers,
very low-bandwidth digital TV.  The images we could see were
appalling, with fires burning across broad areas, in the dark.

About 10pm, the Toyoko Line reopened to Shibuya, and people began
filtering out.  I stuck with my resolution to stay put until morning,
or JR began running again.  (I later heard that some faculty took more
than ten hours to get home; those of us who stayed warm, fed and
comfortable certainly didn't regret that decision the next morning.)

Overnight there were a number of aftershocks, and the second major
quake in Nagano, which they asserted was not related.

I was beside myself with worry about the possibility of tsunami coming
to Kamakura.  Our house sits 800 meters from the beach.  A couple of
years ago, they handed out a community disaster handbook that included
a tsunami map, which suggested that 7m is a high enough altitude.
Friday's events clearly show that to be false.  Our house sits right
on the isoline at 7m, but clearly would have been swept away.

The lights came back on at 11pm.  About 1am, I laid down to sleep for
a while; when I woke up at 2:30, many of the students had gone.

More earthquakes, more worries, watching NHK on a big projector screen
until 430am, then slept until 6.

When they announced the reopening of some of the JR lines at 700, I
left.  Getting to Yokohama was easy, from there was slow as they kept
trains running at 35km/hr and stopping at every intersection.  The
platforms and trains were crowded, but not intolerably so.

From Kamakura Station, it's a ten-minute walk home.  I detoured
through the area I think my family should use as an escape route in
the event of a tsunami.  The official map recommends that we make our
way to one of the nearby junior high schools, on higher ground, but
their recommended route passes through a stretch of very low ground
several hundred meters long, and crosses the river.  I'm revising ours
to what I think is a less-exposed route, though we have to cross a
branch of the river somewhere and there's still one low stretch in
it.

That takes us up to the start of the nuclear reactor concerns, which
will have to be a separate post.  I'm struggling with the technical
explanations in Japanese, anyway, so those reading the
English-language press may be better informed.

Over time, as the information flow peaks, my posts will probably lack
originality and insight, but I hope this gives you some idea of what
it's like here on the ground, for a typical family in the Kanto area,
well away from the most seriously hit areas.

Will mine my FB posts and tweets for further material at some point.

Comments and reassurances always welcome; if I seem abrupt via email,
it's just trying to handle the flood of check-in emails from both
people here locally and those from outside asking about us.

We *definitely* appreciate the concerns!  Keep us in mind not just
today but over the coming months; recovery here is going to take time.

New Paper Dance

Austin G. Fowler, David S. Wang, Thaddeus D. Ladd, Rodney Van Meter, and Lloyd C. Hollenberg,
Surface code quantum communication, arXiv:0910.4074 [quant-ph], accepted to Phys. Rev. Letters!  Congrats to Austin and the rest of the team.  We are gradually illuminating some of the possible corners in the space of quantum repeater system design.

The New GIGA Program at SFC

The web site for Keio's new undergraduate program, Global Information and Communication Technology and Governance Academic Program (GIGA), is now up and running.

Starting in fall 2011, we'll be accepting freshmen into GIGA to study networking, novel computing systems, international relations, and all of the other fun things we do (including computer architecture and quantum computing, two of the things I teach), with the language of instruction to be English.

Associate Professor

First day of work as Associate Professor Rodney Van Meter.  No foolin'!

New Factoring Record

New factoring record: 768 bits, about 1500 CPU-years on 2.2GHz AMD CPUs, 10^20 operations, 2^67 instructions (for some definition of "operation" and "instruction". Claims a 1024-bit number would only be about 1,000 times as hard.

Brought to you by Kleinjung, Aoki, Franke, Lenstra, Thome', Bos, Gaudry, Kruppa, Montgomery, Osvik, te Riele, Timofeev, and Zimmerman.
http://bit.ly/8xXSgy

Just FYI.

Lecture on Systems for Distributed Quantum Computing

Systems for Distributed Quantum Computing on Keio's YouTube Channel, where you will find other videos from the Spintronics group at Keio, as well.

Introduction of my research, targeted at physicists, primarily at a qualitative level, no equations but no stopping to explain vocabulary.

IJQI Acceptance

Our paper Distributed Quantum Computation Architecture Using Semiconductor Nanophotonics has been accepted for the International Journal of Quantum Information special issue on Distributed Quantum Computation. Huzzah!

This paper was very collaboratively written, thanks to Skype. Thaddeus and Austin both deserve full measures of credit for this one. Thanks, guys!

Help Me With My Summer Reading

I'm feeling the need to recharge my store of ideas, and I have the
nagging feeling that my lack of currency in a bunch of fields is
causing me to miss some connections I could use in my own research.

So, I'm looking for a reading list of, say, the one hundred most
important papers of the decade. It doesn't have to be an even
hundred, but I'm looking for a good summer's reading. (Given that
it's mid-2009, now would be a good time to start composing such a list
anyway, depending on where you want to place the "decade" boundary.)

I want these papers to cover *ALL* fields of computer science and
engineering; I am by nature catholic in my reading.

You probably know that my current field is quantum computing, but prior to
that I did network-attached storage. The 1990s were a very creative,
ambitious decade in that area; I admit I read much less there now than
I used to, but I haven't seen anything really earthshaking in storage
in the last few years. (Friends still in the area will no doubt
correct me.)

If such a list already exists, I'm happy to use it as-is, otherwise
I'm willing to manage a conversation and create such a list.

Since this list will be very broad, I want only a few "MUST READ"
papers in each field. What are the new ideas in your field? If you
had a short meeting with, say, an NSF god descended from Olympus, what
ideas would you cite to convince him/her that your *field* (not your
pet idea) is a vibrant field with real-world impact, worthy of
large-scale support? What papers or ideas have changed the way you
think?

So, if your field is:

Theory:
* complexity theory
* algorithms
* data structures
* automata/Turing machines/FSMs, etc.
Systems:
* hardware technology (Moore's Law, etc.)
* processor architecture
* systems architecture
* operating systems
* storage systems
Programming languages
Software engineering
Networking
Artificial Intelligence
Search
Databases
Security
Human-computer interaction
Network or systems operations
Ubiquitous systems/sensor networks
Computer Science education (please help me learn to teach!)
etc.

please send me your suggestions.

I'm even willing to go as far afield as robotics and bioinformatics,
if you can convince me it's worth my time to go read. I'm also
willing to accept old ideas that are finding new urgency;
transactional memory would be a good example, virtualization another.

I will leave it to you to balance newness of idea with real-world
impact, and to decide whether to recommend the key original paper(s)
or a survey paper, if one exists already.

(I'm doing this a tad ad hoc; I really should reconcile against, say,
the ACM computing curricula or a journal keyword list, but I probably
won't bother. Some may also object to the categorizations above;
don't worry about it, just send me the papers/ideas you think are
critical, and we will work on the categorization and balance of the
list later.)

(Yes, the choice to limit this to the last decade is arbitrary; there
are plenty of old ideas I'm not familiar with, too -- I recently ran
across R-trees for the first time, for example -- but, generally
speaking, I'm after ideas too new to have made it into textbooks,
otherwise I'd just pick up a recent text.)

(And on these grounds let me say that I'm enjoying the revitalized
CACM, which seems to be helpful in focusing on new, important ideas,
with more timely and accessible review articles than Computing
Surveys.)

A few thoughts to get started:

* The hierarchy of limits in computing technology:
An outstanding synthesis of Moore's Law, Landauer's principle, etc.
Dense, but well-written and worth the effort to understand. I don't
care if the ideas are old, this one is critical.

@Article{meindl01:_terascale-si,
author = {James D. Meindl and Qiang Chen and Jeffrey A. Davis},
title = {Limits on Silicon Nanoelectronics for Terascale
Integration},
journal = {Science},
year = 2001,
volume = 293,
pages = {2044--2049}
}

* proper network topology analysis:
A clear-eyed look at mathematical analysis of and understanding of the
Internet.

@article{JohnCDoyle10112005,
author = {Doyle, John C. and Alderson, David L. and Li, Lun and Low, Steven and Roughan, Matthew and Shalunov, Stanislav and Tanaka, Reiko and Willinger, Walter},
title = {{The "robust yet fragile" nature of the Internet}},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},
volume = {102},
number = {41},
pages = {14497-14502},
doi = {10.1073/pnas.0501426102},
year = {2005}
}

* distributed hash tables (DHTs):
Just barely makes my "decade" cutoff, but one of the most influential
ideas of recent years; fault-tolerant, truly distributed,
loosely-coherent key-value pairs, useful for managing e.g. a lookup
system for P2P networks. (You can argue for another choice of
paper.)

@inproceedings{stoica2001chord,
title={{Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for internet applications}},
author={Stoica, I. and Morris, R. and Karger, D. and Kaashoek, M.F. and Balakrishnan, H.},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications},
pages={149--160},
year={2001},
organization={ACM New York, NY, USA}
}

* Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks:
No recommended paper here yet. I've read a few, but none really stand
out in my mind. Suggestions?

* Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs):
No recommended paper here yet. Might not make the decade cutoff.

* Network coding:
Just barely makes the decade cutoff. This is the seminal paper,
AFAIK, but the writing in it is poor; recommendations for an easier
read gladly accepted. A highly theoretical idea that seems to be
gaining surprising traction in real-world systems.

@article{ahlswede2000nif,
title={Network information flow},
author={Ahlswede, R. and Cai, N. and Li, S.Y.R. and Yeung, R.W.},
journal={Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on},
volume={46},
number={4},
pages={1204--1216},
year={2000}
}

* Ajax:
I haven't seen any good papers on it, and it's a philosophy rather
than a technology, but surely it's important enough to rate
here...suggestions?

* Transactional memory:
One possible route to effective parallel programming. The right one?
Good question!

@Article{larus07:_trans_mem,
author = {James Larus and Christos Kozyrakis},
title = {Transactional Memory},
journal = cacm,
year = 2008,
volume = 51,
number = 7,
pages = {80--89},
doi = {10.1145/1364782.1364800}
}

* MapReduce:
One of a set of very good ideas to come out of Google in the last few
years. The right way to get to real parallel programming on very
large datasets? Good question! The database community seems to think
not. But having done a little MPI programming, I can assure you that
MPI is not for the masses, at least not in its current form.

@article{dean:mapreduce-cacm,
author = {Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat},
title = {{MapReduce}: simplified data processing on large clusters},
journal = {Commun. ACM},
volume = {51},
number = {1},
year = {2008},
issn = {0001-0782},
pages = {107--113},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1327452.1327492},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

* Rethink the Sync:
Recommended by a friend, who called it his favorite paper of the
decade.

@inproceedings{nightingale2006rethink,
title={Rethink the sync},
author={Nightingale, E.B. and Veeraraghavan, K. and Chen, P.M. and Flinn, J.},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation},
pages={1--14},
year={2006},
comment ={Best paper; Honey's favorite paper of the last decade.}
}

* Disk MTTF:
An analysis rather than idea paper, but important for anyone who does
large-scale systems or cares when their laptop disk is likely to
fail.

@article{schroeder2007dfr,
title={{Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you}},
author={Schroeder, B. and Gibson, G.A.},
journal={Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST)},
year={2007}
}

That's eight papers on eleven ideas that have changed the way I think
about computing systems in the last few years, mostly in the
networking area (a couple may have to get deleted to hold the final
list to 100 papers). There are many other topics, of course (chip
multiprocessors and radical new architectures such as TRIPS;
hypervisors and virtualization of systems and networks is another
old/new idea), but I'll leave them to others to promote. I've read
hundreds of papers in the last decade, but I'm interested in what
*you* consider important, not my own biases here. And while IP is a
heavily network-oriented list and will no doubt expand on that set of
ideas above, please look as far abroad as you comfortably can -- or
forward on to colleagues in other areas who might be interested in
such a list.

Please help educate me!

Mountain Music

I do like mountain music, though I wouldn't qualify myself as a "big" fan.

Today's discovery:
WMMT, broadcasting from Whitesburg, KY (about an hour from my parents' place), using 15,000 watts, a decent Internet service, and an all-volunteer staff.

The mountain version of "All My Loving" was nice, though I'm actually partial to instrumentals. I like the traditional mountain music, with dulcimer, fiddle, banjo, including the gospels. Bluegrass is okay, but I'm not a big fan of modern country. I'm not wild about steel guitar and, despite (because of?) being a drummer, I don't like the heavy drums and simple 4/4 beat of a lot of commercial country.

Just to blow my mind, after three hours of "Bluegrass Express", they wedged some Latin jazz in between "I Need You Like a Train Needs a Track" and "He Got You, I Got the Dog" (how can you go wrong with a song that starts, "He's sleeping in my double-wide, hunting on my land" and proceeds to conclude that getting the dog was the better end of the deal?).

I commented recently that the problem with a lot of Internet music services is that they are predictable, and hence have no personality. This one - and my favorite, KCSM - definitely have personality.

And every WMMT announcer I've heard so far sounds like someone I went to high school with. Ah, the sounds of home...

Kabuki Driving

After more than five years of living here in Japan, and with the expiration of my California driver's license looming (now only days away), I finally decided to get a Japanese driver's license.

Six weeks, six trips to the testing center (more than an hour away), innumerable, insufferable hours spent in plastic chairs crammed too close together to be comfortable, three actual chances sitting in the driver's seat with an inspector, and more than three hundred bucks later...

I still don't have a license.

In fact, given that the effort and expense have already exceeded the license's value to me, I'm thinking about just giving up. For Japan, this is more of an inconvenience to Mayumi than to me; once a year or so, we rent a car and go somewhere, and since I don't have a license, she does all the driving, while I look out the window, fiddle with the radio, read or nap. For most business trips, I'm actually *forbidden* from renting a car (regardless of how realistic a restriction that is for the city I'm travelling to), so it's not a big deal there, either. The only time I *really* need a license is when we're in West Virginia, visiting family, or the far-too-rare occasions when we get to California for pleasure.

(I am told by friends that I *can* renew my California driver's license, even though I no longer live there, but you have to appear in person and get a retinal scan -- and the CA DMV has cut hours and closed offices as a result of the financial crisis.)

There would be a certain satisfaction in taking the moral stand that we actively oppose the use of private cars. But I'm really not in that camp. I think the world would be a better place -- and Americans healthier -- if Americans drove less, used less oil, and ate less beef, and Japanese actually attempted to manage ocean fish stocks rather than simply exterminate them, but I'm not advocating the complete banishment of cars, beef, and sushi. We choose not to have a car here, since we think it's healthier and better for the environment, but don't press that choice on others. (I admit, we still eat sushi, though I'm talking about the fish more, and slowly working toward lowering the catch limit on our take at a sushi restaurant.) And I'd be lying if I said that economics didn't figure into it -- we couldn't afford to buy a car right now if we tried (we have a house and annual trips to the U.S. instead).

Anyway, I've been driving for more than a quarter of a century now. How could I possibly flunk a driving test, you ask? Ah, naive one, let me instruct you in the ways of this country...

First off, flunking is not unusual, it's the norm. The pass rate, I am told, is less than 30%, even among Japanese, and most of those who pass are clearly on their second or third (or fourth or fifth) attempt. In three attempts, in which I sat with groups of foreigners and Japanese returning from living overseas attempting to transfer their license to Japan, I have not yet seen a SINGLE person actually pass the driving test. One Japanese woman drove for years in California, and had driven more than 5,000 kilometers back in Japan using an international license that was about to expire, flunked it three times.

So, if each test were a random, independent variable (they're not) with a failure rate of 70%, about 35% of the people would flunk at least three tests.

The thing you have to understand is that it's not actual driving, it's Kabuki Driving: it involves exaggerated motions, long pauses for dramatic effect, an obscure vocabulary, and improbable sub-plots, and has only the most oblique relationship to everyday life. There's even an audience (they stick another testee in the back seat while you drive). The only thing it doesn't have is exotic costumes. (In fact, if I read the sign right, along with flip-flops, wooden "geta" sandals, and excessively high heels, you are not allowed to take the test while wearing a kimono. Go figure.)

The rules for getting a license differ depending on how you're going about it. Most Europeans can simply take a written test and be issued a license on the spot. Americans and most other Asians have to take the written test *and* a driving one. America is not a signatory to some international treaty (the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war, I believe), and even if it were, there is no central authority in the U.S. Japan would have to decide whether or not to accept licenses from at least fifty-one different jurisdictions.

But still, for Americans with a license, the process is much easier than starting without any license at all. The written test is ridiculously easy -- ten true/false questions (in both English and Japanese) with 70% being a pass. Close your eyes and guess, and you've got a 17% percent chance of passing -- almost as good as passing the driving part with your eyes open. And the driving test is difficult, but easier than the one Japanese people go through.

For Japanese people with no license, the first thing they do is sort you based on whether or not you have a certificate from a driving school. Without one, they give you a harder driving test, which apparently no one ever passes, so in effect, you have to attend driving school first.

Driving schools here are a HUGE business. (I'm convinced that the schools themselves are run by ex-inspectors, making out like bandits after decades of civil servant penury.) There is no learner's permit here, so the only way you get enough experience to pass the test is by going to a driving school. At a cost of three thousand dollars, and sixty (yes, sixty!) hours of instruction.

And they wonder why the number of young Japanese people getting driver's licenses is declining.

The Japanese taking the regular route are herded through the system like cattle, and given a registration number, made to wait, made to drive, made to wait (okay, that part is the same for foreigners). After finishing the test, they are NOT TOLD whether or not they passed. After another round of waiting, the registration numbers of the people who passed are posted on a giant LED signboard. A cheer goes up from the hundred or so people who passed, and groans from the other hundreds who didn't.

Once you get to the actual driving part (which is run on a closed course about the size of two American football fields), the kabuki starts. They tell you that you start with 100 points, and as long as the penalties are less than 30 points, you'll pass. But at the end they won't tell you how many points you have, just whether or not you passed; modulo a few major fauxes pas, ultimately I'm sure it's up to the judgment of the inspector. Most of the tests I have seen actually ended before the course was completed, with an "Okay, you're done, you flunked, please return to the start." But getting all the way through the course doesn't mean you passed; I didn't this last time. For the foreigners, at least, they do have some pity, and the inspector will usually give you an oral summary of what you did wrong.

There are minus points for failing to adjust the position of the driver's seat and mirror. There are minus points for holding the steering wheel wrong, including turning your hand palm up and sticking it through the wheel, turning it from the inside. The easiest one for the inspector to use is, "You didn't do enough safety checking," by which he means that your head stopped swiveling on its neck for several seconds at some point.

The one that got me twice is turning too wide. It's a fair cop, as Monty Python would say: I'm not accustomed to driving on the wrong side of the road, so I pull too far out into the road as I turn, in order to avoid hitting the curb. That was the first and third tries. On the second, I was careful about that -- and wound up hitting a curb, which is an automatic fail. There is a tight spot called the "Crank", with two right-angle turns and tight walls, that the car just barely fits through. I cleared that easily -- then clipped the curb on the corner as I turned out of it into the wider street. Dang. That experience pushed me too far back the other way for the third try, apparently.

Before trying the first time, I read up on the process on the web. That taught me that you need to stop at stop signs for three full seconds, which is an eternity. In California, you could watch a stop sign all day, and the *total* amount of time cars spent stopped at the sign might not be three seconds.

But just reading someone's advice on the web will give you a false confidence that you can pass the test. The course is really not that difficult in terms of where you're asked to drive, but there are many small points the inspector is looking for and they grade quite harshly. After flunking the first time, I did a one-hour practice session with one of the inspectors, one Saturday morning.

It was a revelation. Before doing that, I had NO IDEA that they want you to take turns at 10km/hour -- about six miles an hour! That's the speed at which you pull into a parking spot, fer cryin' out loud! Likewise, there is one place on the course with a "caution" sign, and caution means 10km/h. The one "high speed" part of the course is 40km/hour, about 25mph. After learning this, I laughingly told my lead-footed sister that she could never pass the test, since you have to drive slow. It's probably true.

So, I am contemplating whether or not to give this one last shot. They gave me a test slot for the afternoon of my birthday, which is when my CA license expires. I may simply not go.

I no longer have any ego bound up in my driving abilities, though I certainly used to take pleasure in a sunset cruise on an open road. Now I feel that if I was told that I could never drive again, my reaction would probably be to simply shrug. My father's midlife crisis was a red Toyota Supra. My mom joked that the car was fine, as long as he didn't get the blonde to go with it. My midlife crisis arrived earlier, and has resulted so far in a Ph.D. and a faculty position.

Flunking is something of an embarrassment for me in the lab, though. Murai Lab hosts the "iCar" project, which has been working since the early 1990s on connecting cars to the Internet. We have a lot of car enthusiasts, including one student who reportedly used to race professionally, and several others who own sports cars (Beemers, Alfas, a Lotus, an RX-8) and take them out to Mount Fuji Speedway on weekends.

Speaking of which, one of our faculty members (late forties, has an Alfa and two Beemers, one of which was brand new...) lost his license last year. 55km/h OVER the speed limit. License yanked (not suspended, canceled outright), forbidden to reapply for a year. His year is almost up, so he is now back in driving school, spending sixty hours and three thousand bucks to enjoy the company of eighteen-year-olds hearing for the first time that a car usually has four tires and a steering wheel, so he can get back in the brand new Beemer two-seater. He and the others spend a fair amount of energy discussing "license tourism", taking the three grand and going to Europe and getting a license instead (European ones translate more easily than American ones). Sounds like a win to me.

No one I know will defend the system. It's clearly ridiculous. But in a larger social engineering context, maybe it makes sense. If it's not in Japan's interest to have too many people on the roads, maybe it *should* be hard to get a license, and it doesn't really matter whether it's difficult for a good reason or if it's the equivalent of reading Shakespeare while standing on your head. As a liberal with a belief that government should actively work toward creating the society we would like to have, this could be exhibit A. Hmm. Let me think about that.

Happy Birthday!

A day late, but yesterday was Edgar Allan Poe's two hundredth birthday! Happy birthday to one of my favorite writers.

Tonight's midnight (well, two a.m., Tokyo time) promises to be anything but dreary, as I ponder (perhaps weak and weary due to a cold I've contracted) the inauguration. Obama's TODO list is infinitely long, but hope dawns across the land. Hmm, there are lots of comparisons to Lincoln, King, and Kennedy; I wonder if there's an appropriate Poe quote?

Single Best Geek Comic Ever?

I don't often read xkcd, but this one might be the single best geek comic ever...

Anniversary of Two Eras

This past week was the anniversary of two important eras in Japanese history, one symbolic and high profile, the other of enormous practical impact but much lower profile.

January 7th was the twentieth anniversary of the death of Emperor Hirohito, the end of the Showa Era, and the start of the Heisei Era with the ascension of the current occupant to the throne.

That same day, Jun Murai was at Narita Airport, on his way to Washington, D.C., for some rather obscure technical work. On about January 11th, he got it running: Japan was connected to the Internet, via IP over X.25, for the first time.

Several years later, when I left Japan for the first time, I gave my email address to many Japanese (and foreign) friends. Most said, "What's this?" I replied, "Hang onto it, in a few years you'll know." And indeed, I occasionally am contacted by friends from that time, though I suspect they come upon my address now via Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or another, mutual friend.

ToN Quantum Paper Online

Our Transactions on Networking paper, "System Design for a Long-Line Quantum Repeater," is now available in final form in the IEEE's Digital Library. Print edition is not due until August 2009. Thanks as always to Thaddeus, Bill and Kae for their hard work on it.

MARA in Infocom!

Congratulations to Yasu Ohara and Shinji Imahori! Yasu's paper (on which Imahori-san and I are coauthors), "MARA: Maximum Alternative Routing Algorithm", was accepted to INFOCOM 2009, one of 282 acceptances out of 1,435 submissions. This work is follow-through on Yasu's Ph.D. thesis, completed and defended in our lab last academic year. It's good work on how to do route calculations to support multipath forwarding in a network.

A trip to Rio for Yasu next April!

New Campus Web Site

For those who aren't allergic to Flash, our campus has a new website for faculty & research profiles. Check it out, let me know what you think.

Tell Me a Story

What he said. Robert Krulwich, you da man.

Now, if only I could write like that...I can't, but sign me up, I'm willing to give it a shot.

Sustainable Sushi

...is largely a hopeless prospect in this country (let alone the rising appetite for it world-wide, especially in China) for the foreseeable future, but: the Monterey Bay Aquarium's sustainable sushi guide is a win.

A translation to both Japanese language and Japanese market availability would be a plus...

FWIW, a sushi bar here is actually a reasonable place to take a non-squeamish vegan. At a good place, there are a number of pure vegetable rolls. Not clear how much goodwill you earn with the sushi chef that way, but it's a much better menu bet than a tonkatsu (deep-fried pork) restaurant.

I can't promise perfection, but I can promise to do my best to follow the guide.

Now, how to popularize the ideas here?

Give Us This Day Our Daily Banana

In English, "bread" can be a synonym for "meal" or "food" (and for "money", though that's a later innovation), as evidenced by the line from the Lord's Prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread."

In Japanese, "gohan" is both (cooked) "rice" and "meal": "Gohan wo tabeta?" "[Have you] eaten a meal?" (Transliterated; a more natural rendering would be "Have you eaten?")

An article in a recent issue of Science, talking about bananas, informs me that in Uganda the word for "banana" is the same as the word for "food". Sadly, the article didn't give the word for it, or even name the language (presumably Swahili).

I read the article on the train on the way home yesterday, and when I got home I was dying for a banana. Fortunately, Mayumi had bought bananas. Unfortunately, my girls managed eat all of them before I got home :-).

That's perhaps an allegory for what's happening worldwide: the Cavendish banana, the most common around the world, is under attack by a fungus all over the planet. The plant can be grown only by cloning (it's sterile) and since all the plants are genetically identical, they are all equally susceptible.

Other strains of bananas might be less vulnerable, but are suffering from neglect. (The most fragrant bananas I've ever had were in Nepal, some small variety that smelled of cinnamon.) Let's not let the world's fourth-most-important staple crop (behind rice, wheat and corn) get away from us, people!

guGUttara?

"To google" is now a verb in English (at least, the American (correct) form of the language, not sure about other parts of the diaspora). "He googled it," "I'm googling it now...," "Why don't you google it?" and more.

The same thing is true in Japanese. "Google" in Japanese is "GUUguru" (or "GU-guru"), written in katakana, the syllabary used for "loan" (imported) words, with a long "uu" and the unfortunate but necessary mangling of the pronunciation. (Not that Americans can come close to pronouncing Chinese or even French correctly, but that's not the point here.)

By fortunate coincidence, "-ru" is the common ending for verbs in Japanese, so conjugating it is natural and trivial, but the emphasized syllable changes: "guGUrimasu", "guGUrimashita". You almost never hear the formal form of it, though, you usually hear the informal form "guGUtta" ("googled") or "guGUtte iru" ("am googling/is googling"). Japanese has a verb form (not sure of the technical name in either Japanese or English) for "why don't you..." or "if you...", which usually ends in "-ttara".

And if you don't believe me, guguttara?

ORF: QKD with IPsec

Our campus (Keio's Shonan Fujisawa Campus) just finished our Open Research Forum, the annual two-day big exhibit of students' work. It was a blast, a lot of interesting people show up (including, if I understood him right, the director of "Godzilla versus Hedora", and it's great to see the work being done by students in other "kenkyuukai" (research groups), as well.

At our campus, undergrads, usually, starting in their second year, join the "lab" or kenkyuukai of a professor, and by the end of their four years, I would say that many students have done a third to a half of their total learning in the context of the kenykyuukai. Classes provide breadth and theory, the kenkyuukai provides depth.

My students in the AQUA group integrated IKE, the Internet Key Exchange protocol, with QKD (quantum key distribution), so that traffic between two networks can be encrypted using a key created via QKD. I'll post more about the technical work on it a little later, but thanks to Satoh and especially Nagayama for the hard work on both the implementation and the display.

Thanks to NEC for the loan of the QKD devices! We look forward to continuing to work with you.

Keio: Astronauts, Princes, Emperors, and Postage Stamps!

So, Saturday was the Keio University 150th anniversary ceremony. I didn't get to attend (there were only a few thousand tickets), and I found out about the live webcast after it was over. Oh, well.

I'm told that the Emperor made very nice remarks about the history of Keio.

Prince Charles also dropped by the Mita Campus on his visit to Japan a couple of weeks ago. There is a good photo of him examining a bamboo sword during a kendo demonstration. I heard that his talk was nice, as well.

Just as exciting, to me, was the talk that Akihiko Hoshide gave a few weeks ago. He was on the team that delivered the Kibo Laboratory module to the International Space Station this summer. He also took an aluminum soroban with him, made for him by our engineering department. Oh, Hoshide is a Keio grad -- at least the second to fly in space, after Chiaki Mukai. Hoshide-san gave a great, inspirational talk targeted at kids, and accessible to all ages. It was broadcast over the Internet, and translated into several languages in real time.

More to my surprise, the Japan Post Office has issued a commemorative stamp set. Now I know what I'm getting my great-aunt, the stamp collector, for Christmas.

New Papers

It occurs to me that I'm behind in doing the obligatory paper dance, as our pontiff would say. All from collaborators, one already published and two new submissions:

1. Byung-Soo Choi and Rodney Van Meter,
   Effects of Interaction Distance on Quantum Addition Circuits,
   submitted;
   available from the arXiv as quant-ph:0809.4317.
   


2. Liang Jiang, Jacob M. Taylor, Kae Nemoto, William J. Munro, Rodney Van Meter, and Mikhail D. Lukin,
   Quantum Repeater with Encoding,
   submitted;
   available from the arXiv as quant-ph:0809.3629.
   


3. W. J. Munro, R. Van Meter, Sebastien G. R. Louis, and Kae Nemoto,
   High-Bandwidth Hybrid Quantum Repeater,
   Phys. Rev. Letters 101, 040502, July 2008;
   available from the arXiv as quant-ph:0808.0307.
   Selected for Virtual J. Quantum Inf. 8(8), Aug. 2008.
   
   

More to come in the next couple of months, I hope, on both repeaters and arithmetic circuits; there is also a pile of systems work from last year's QEC conference and other places that needs to be polished up and submitted, as well as a stack of half-completed things...

...ah, for a trio of clones! Then one of us could teach, one could spend time with the family, one could do research, and one would have to do the drudge work. I suppose we'd have to rotate; I love all three of those first topics, but no one would want to be stuck with the paperwork forever :-).

Biden's Travels

I'm not going to get into politics on this blog, but one note: Joe Biden's team released a list of heads of state he has met with.

Now, the team claims the list is incomplete, but as an expat living where I do, there is a conspicuous hole: um, Japan? I realize that prime ministers here change often enough that it's difficult to keep up, but Japan is still the second biggest economy on the planet, and one of the U.S.'s top trading and defense partners.

Has Biden really not met with any Japanese leaders, or is the absence an oversight? It's not that he's shunning East, South, or Southeast Asia; he's met with leaders from almost every Asian country you can name, except Bangladesh and Thailand. Okay, he's allowed to not hit every single one; but still, Japan?

Likewise, another near the top of any U.S. list should be that Neighbor to the North, Canada. Hmm.

No Koike

Well, looks like no woman prime minister this time.

No comment?

I'm a little disappointed that my glamorous new profile photo here hasn't drawn the attention of Paris, Milan and New York runway talent scouts.

I'm also a little surprised by the lack of comments from the peanut gallery.

The Candidate of Change

No, for you myopic Americans, I'm not talking about Obama, McCain, or anyone else on that continent. I'm talking about Yuriko Koike, a candidate for president of the Liberal Democratic Party here in Japan. She has held several cabinet positions, and is fluent in both Arabic and English, having received her degree from Cairo University. She's a bit of a long shot, but is supported by Koizumi, the former prime minister, who is still very popular. And, she has been dubbed the candidate of change, which many people would agree is desirable in Japanese politics.

The LDP's internal presidential election is tomorrow (Monday), Japan time. The rules for that election are apparently variable from election to election, but involve mostly members of parliament, and some local leaders, I believe. Taro Aso is expected to win.

Because the LDP is still the largest and strongest political party here, the person elected president normally becomes prime minister. Could Japan wind up with a woman chief executive before America does? Stay tuned.

Quantum Arithmetic

I get occasional mail from people asking me about quantum arithmetic. I usually point them to the Qwiki page on arithmetic I created a couple of years ago, which is a list of useful papers, rather than an actual technical description.

Most of the papers there are about specific arithmetic circuits, building from binary integer addition to modular exponentiation, and include some examples of actual experimental implementations.

This morning, I ran across some lecture notes by Ekert, Hayden, and Inamori on "Basic concepts in quantum computation," at Quantiki. The notes contain a nice intro to the theory behind reversible, binary, modular arithmetic.

Competitiveness

BusinessWeek asks, "Is the U.S. Losing Its Edge in Tech?"

But their online article doesn't include an obvious link to the actual report from the Economic Intelligence Unit, sponsored by the Business Software Alliance. It's titled, How technology sectors grow: benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2008", which tells you a little about their mindset.

Both the detailed data and their chosen methodology are interesting, though I haven't had time to digest them yet. The top 21 in their total index:

1. U.S.
2. Taiwan
3. U.K.
4. Sweden
5. Denmark
6. Canada
7. Australia
8. South Korea
9. Singapore
10. Netherlands
11. Switzerland
12. Japan
13. Finland
14. Norway
15. Ireland
16. Israel
17. New Zealand
18. Austria
19. Germany
20. France
21. Hong Kong

India, Russia, and China are 48, 49, and 50.

The disparities in "human capital" and "R&D environment" are interesting.

Even more telling are the drops from last year's index -- Japan fell from 2nd to 12th, South Korea from 3rd to 8th, due at least partly to shifts in their methodology. As always in some ranking system, you can engineer the results to fit your intuition :-).

Happy Anniversary

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Morris Worm. At the time, I had recently moved from ISI's computing center into the MOSIS Project, giving up my position as a sysadmin and becoming a regular programmer on the research staff.

I did get called back in to help a little, but since we were using VMS, the fix for MOSIS was pretty easy: unplug the network, and go back to work. Other folks I worked with, including Dale Chase, Jim Koda, Tom Wisniewski, had a much rougher day, dealing with several BSD VAXen and a large number of Suns.

No Colbert on Linux, No Olympics on Windows

So, I'm trying to watch "The Colbert Report", which features Flash video, on my Fedora 9 laptop.

No joy. npviewer.bin, the Firefox plugin for Flash video, crashes reliably. A little googling turns up that I'm not the only one with this problem -- it has been The Daily Show's Developers' Blog. (Whine: why is it always me?)

A few weeks ago, I wanted to watch the Olympics in some fashion besides Japanese broadcast. Went to MSNBC.com...dang, Silverlight. I only run Linux on my laptop. Grumble. Dig out the Windows XP laptop I have at work for doing the obligatory Word documents. Download Silverlight. Install. Crashes. Reliably. (Whine: why is it always me?)

Have I mentioned that I hate computers?

Ten Million Bucks to Learn to Program...

...molecules.

Erik Winfree's DNA and Natural Algorithms Group at my alma mater is arguably already the best in the world at programming DNA; they publish in Nature and Science like clockwork. I don't know the U-Dub guys, but I assume they're good, too.

So, over the next few years, I expect marvelous advances. Good luck to them! We'll be watching and waiting.

Internet-connected Windshield Wipers

A couple of days ago, Vint Cerf appeared on The Guardian, talking about the future of the Internet (what else?). He mentioned that "Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives."

That's the iCar project, headed by Kei Uehara, here in the Internet Research Lab at Keio's Shonan Fujisawa Campus. The project has been running for more than a decade, and has strong ties to industry groups. Current work includes industry standardization of the privacy aspects of information uploaded by probes attached to vehicles, and the like.

The particular tidbit about the windshield wiper info goes back to about the year 2000, I'm told. It has even been featured in short TV segments about the project.

The WIDE folks are visionaries, I tell ya :-).

Tom Sawyer in Tokyo, via Karachi

Hiya bibliophiles,

I bought an old, red, hardback copy of Tom Sawyer in Jimbocho, the famous used book district of Tokyo, and have been reading it to my nine-year-old daughter. (To my intense delight, she begs me not to stop reading.)



It's undated, and unillustrated, and includes a few typographic mistakes or omissions (such as saying, "See the next page" for some illustration which doesn't exist).

Mine appears to use the same chapter headings as the Random edition, according to Mark West. It does not, btw, say "complete and unabridged" anywhere, but it certainly feels complete.

My guess, based on the age and condition, is that it was printed in the 1920s or 30s. Here's the title page:



It also includes an embossed seal, which I'm guessing is a bookseller's:



Pan-American Commercial, Inc.
Elphinstone Street
Karachi

According to Wikipedia, the name of Elphinstone Street was changed to Zaibunnisa Street in 1970, so presumably my copy passed through Pakistan in the 1960s or earlier, before coming to Japan. Quite a trek for a book.

Thought you would enjoy the tale.

(Yes, I tinkered with the lighting on the second image using Gimp. Apologies for the generally poor image quality; those were taken hand-held in low light. The camera and lens are fine, but I didn't have a tripod available last night, and didn't mess with the in-camera choice of lighting adjustment.)

25th MSST

Don't forget to register for the 25th IEEE Symposium on Massive Storage Systems and Technologies!

This conference series has a long history, and has produced some fascinating discussions, especially about very large datasets (particle physics and the like). This year, the symposium is moving to a different format. See the web site for details.