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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
Final version
All right, after a bit more work, here's what the final version of the blogging card I was making looks like:


I needed to do a better job of separating the name and title from the Internet addresses, and I think adding the color bars did that nicely. Overall, I think this looks pretty good. I've printed up a few should the need ever arise. I'm going to have to go to one of those blogging conventions now just so I have a chance to hand them out.

Related Posts (on one page):

  1. Final version
  2. Business Cards