blake johnson

The nytimes has a very nice article on Justice Kennedy today. Reading this reminded me that I never found time to take "the Warren Court" at Harvard. Oh well. I have a feeling that the Supreme Court will be in the news a lot in the coming weeks.

In other news, the new team name seems to be working-- we actually won a game last week!

My softball team now has a new name. Instead of the uninspiring name "Physics" we are now "Schroedinger's Bat". Appropriately punny, I feel.

I love how the New York Times always tries to inject some literary analysis into their movie reviews. For instance, in the review of Batman Begins (which I plan to see this weekend) the Times reviewer Manohla Dargis says that:

What Mr. Keaton couldn't bring to the role, and what Mr. Bale conveys effortlessly, is Bruce Wayne's air of casual entitlement, the aristocratic hauteur that is the necessary complement of Batman's obsessive megalomania. What Mr. Nolan gets, and gets better than any other previous director, is that without Bruce Wayne, Batman is just a rich wacko with illusions of grandeur and a terrific pair of support hose. Without his suave alter ego, this weird bat man is a superhero without humanity, an avenger without a conscience, an id without a superego. Which is why... with narrative economy and tangible feeling, [Christopher Nolan] stages that terrible, defining moment when young Master Wayne watched a criminal shoot his parents to death in a Gotham City alley, thereby setting into motion his long, strange journey into the self.

It just reads more like an english paper than a movie review, doesn't it? I guess that's why I like it. The review actually starts with this amusing section:

Near the big-bang finish of "Batman Begins," the title avenger, played by the charismatic young British actor Christian Bale, scoops up a damsel in distress, played by Katie Holmes, and spirits her away to his lair. Watching this scene, it was hard not to think how nice it would have been if Batman had instead dispatched the infernally perky actress, whose recent off-screen antics have threatened to eclipse this unexpectedly good movie.

which reminds me that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes got engaged yesterday. How gross-- she's my age for crying out loud!

Harvard's propaganda magazine, the Harvard Gazettte, actually has a rather amusing article this month about Harvard chemistry professor David Liu. Apparently, professor Liu has been banned from MGM Casinos in Las Vegas after winning too much money at blackjack. It's quite an entertaining read.

I recently got another request from someone for an easy-to-read reference on quantum computing. So, I did some searching; unfortunately, I wasn't too happy with anything that I found. The references which are easy to read also contain many mistakes, and the ones which have good info are too in-depth or use too much unexplained jargon. The reference in Wikipedia is ok, but it is still too detailed for what I'm looking for. Consequently, writing my own "brief" explanation of quantum computing (and what I am doing) has just been added to my to-do list for the summer.