Comments on: Scott in Scotland

By: Tom Leinster

Tom Leinster — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 01:06:29 +0000

Hans: no, it’s pronounced “Edinbruh”: three syllables, not four. The sound at the end is a neutral vowel (a schwa).

By: Hans Wurst

Hans Wurst — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 22:22:10 +0000

Do they pronounce Edinburgh “Edinborough”?

By: Henning Dekant

Henning Dekant — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 02:53:21 +0000

@Scott, thanks for the links to the papers.

I musty admit I am a bit surprised to learn that a country has been named after you So the next logical question: Will you now support Scottish Independence?

By: Henning Dekant

Henning Dekant — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 02:49:11 +0000

Tobias #5: I took some astronomy classes way back when we already had good satellite telemetry but no conclusive evidence for water. That why I wasn’t all that surprised when it was finally confirmed. Still thought it was mega cool – just not terribly surprising. There are many formations on Mars that that are spit images of dried out riverbeds, so the consensus has long been that Mars had a watery past and that chances are good that some of this water was still there.

As to your paper – I quite like it. There is still an awful lot of confusion around the Bell theorem and this is quite a nice take on it that I think could open up some additional perspectives.

By: Silas Barta

Silas Barta — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:50:24 +0000

No remarks on the Higgs boson? How dare you!

By: Thomas Vidick

Thomas Vidick — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 20:57:08 +0000

Gil: I guess that makes me the (non-interactive) oracle…I’d be curious to see a video of the whole proof system

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 21:03:43 +0000

keith #4: Thanks again!! The acai smoothie was acailicious.

By: Gil Kalai

Gil Kalai — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:32:23 +0000

A few weeks ago our quantum seminar featured Michael Ben-Or who explained to us the recent exciting result by Ito and Vidick. This was a very unusual talk. It was based on a videotaped lecture by Vidick, which was often interuppted by questions from the audience that Michael and Dorit tried to explain. It was almost like Michael and Dorit were two provers trying to interactly convinced us about that work. Of course, Michael was part of the first tean that introduced multi-prover interactive proof systems in the late 80s.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 14:13:36 +0000

Scott,

Pretty awesome to have a country named after you

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:09:23 +0000

Matt #1: I agree, from one perspective Tobias is "merely" presenting Bell's theorem in what I always thought was the right way: as a statement that has nothing inherently to do with the free will of the experimenters, but only with the independence of various sources of randomness. What made it more interesting to me was that Tobias managed to leverage that philosophical perspective into a whole bunch of neat technical results and (even more so) open problems. Anyway, while my ardor has since cooled a bit, I got pretty excited reading the paper on the plane to Edinburgh; Dana can testify that I wouldn't shut up about it.