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Wednesday, December 28, 2005

I'm back!
I arrived home last night, but didn't have much of a chance to prepare many posts. I'll post more tomorrow, including some pictures from my trip.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Business Cards
I'm thinking of getting some business cards. Not for work, but for blogging. Of course, by "get," I mean design them with Microsoft Publisher and buy some business card stock and print them out on my color inkjet at home. That's really all that's needed to get business cards these days. In any case, here are a couple of designs I came up with.

First design:


Second design:

What do you think? You notice that they're both based on the new Back of the Envelope logo I now have on my page (if it looks like the old one to you, hit reload to make sure the new image is used rather than the old one you have in your cache). I decided to update it to a better looking envelope with a more quantum computation-specific equation. <0|+>=1/2½ is actually a dot product of two vectors (one-dimensional arrays). If |0> and |1> are the two qubit states zero and one in vector form, then <0| and <1| are their conjugate transposes. (That's just what it sounds like--take the conjugate of the complex numbers and transpose the vector.) Using the usual 0 and 1 basis, we define the vector |0>=[1;0] and |1>=[0;1]. (The semicolons indicate that the elements are in separate rows--it's hard to show here.) Thus, <0|=[1 0] and <1|=[0 1]. <0|0>=1 and <1|1>=1, but <0|1>=0 and <1|0>=0. It's an orthonormal basis set, where each vector has a unit length and is orthogonal to the other vectors in that set, and by multiplying them by scalars you can create any vector in that space. Meanwhile, |+>=1/2½(|0>+|1>) and |->=1/2½(|0>-|1>), forming a separate orthonormal basis set. I've discussed different bases before. The key idea is that while |0> and |1> are orthonormal to one another, as are |+> and |->, |0> and |1> are not orthonormal to |+> amd |->, giving <0|+>=1/2½.

Related Posts (on one page):

  1. Final version
  2. Business Cards

Friday, December 9, 2005

Curtis Schweitzer has moved!
I should have posted a notice of this when it happened earlier this week, but Curtis Schweitzer has moved off of blogspot and onto Word Press. In doing so, he's given his blog a new name, empty rhetoric. Go check out his new blog. I've updated the blogroll.

Wednesday, December 7, 2005

Sorry...
I had my small group last night, and didn't get home until late. So I'm afraid I didn't get any posts ready for today (besides this one). I'll try to do better tomorrow. Maybe I'll even have something substantive. You never know.

Tuesday, December 6, 2005

Webcomic update change
Well, it's getting to be a bad habit. The webcomic update went up on Monday once again. At this point, I've decided to give up and turn my vice into a virtue. I'm moving the Weekly Webcomic Update to Monday so that I don't have to apologize for it being late anymore. It will be scheduled to appear at 9 am, just as you're getting in to work on your first day of the week, and it'll now cover the comics from Monday of the previous week to Sunday, which will only really affect the dailies.

Thursday, December 1, 2005

Carnivals
The Christian Carnival, number ninety-eight, is up at Cadmusings. Check it out.

Also, the God or Not carnival is looking for Theist submissions on Miracles. Please submit them to by Friday to submit-at-godornot.com with the following information:
  • author's name (or handle)
  • the title of the blog on which it appears
  • the title of the post
  • a short description of the post (one or two sentences)
  • a link directly to the post (permalink)
  • the trackback URL (if different)

Please participate!