blake johnson

Gay marriage is back in the news. Voters in 10 States Likely to Ban Gay Marriages on NYTimes and Spain Church Blasts Gay Marriage on BBC News shows just how different the US is from Europe on this issue. Anti-gay marriage people continue to use language that amazes me:

Their spokesman likened gay marriages to a counterfeit currency. “It would impose on society a virus, something false, which will have negative consequences for social life,” Juan Antonio Martinez Camino said.

This is one that I find especially hard to understand, since allowing gay marriage won’t increase the number of gays living together. It will just give them the same rights as heterosexual partners. What is the big deal?

I heard an interesting talk from a Bell Labs scientist on Friday regarding the use of techniques borrowed from physics in modern wireless communication schemes. Specifically, these schemes have multiple antennas at both the sending and receiving end. Taking advantage of the multiple antennas requires modeling the effect of the environment on the progating waves. To do this, the Bells Labs scientists have borrowed some techniques from mesoscopic physics, particularly the random matrix methods developed by Dyson et al. Apparently, they published an article regarding this work in Science in 2001. I should try to find it.

Holy shit!!! Half-Life 2 will be released next week!!! I noticed on the website that you can already download some of the game content in encrypted form with Valve’s Steam service. Now, if only I had a machine fast enough to play it.

I guess it’s time to upgrade =).

Apparently stem cell research is proceeding with some sucess in this country (despite Pres. Bush’s ridiculous restrictions). See Wired News: Stem Cells May Open Some Eyes for some information on an experiment which converted stem cells into eye cells. If we could actually “grow” new eyes, that would certainly beat the current efforts with implanted CCD chips.

So, I’ve been in grad school for almost a month now, which seems incredible. I guess I should be used to time whizzing by now, but I still find it surprising. Classes are going okay. The problem sets are really rolling in now, but so far they have been manageable. I worry about when the problem sets really start getting difficult.

I haven’t been able to devote much time to research questions. Rob asked me to calculate the landscape of phase changes to the measuring pulse for the 2-qubit cQED system. It took me a while to figure out how to do this for the 1-qubit case, and by the time I thought I knew how to do 2-qubits, I was already deep in problem sets. So, I’ve been reduced to working on physics during time which I would normally set aside for relaxation. Oh well.

I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog, but I suppose it is time to start posting again. The web address will probably change soon. I’m thinking about taking down needcollegestuff.com indefinitely. So, this will likely move to an address I bought 6 months ago: blakerobertjohnson.com. We’ll see if I can get the hosting company to do the changeover gracefully.

Alright, I’m out. Gotta get to group meeting.