Rod Van Meter

rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2025/08/augu...

I wanted to write a little more, but we were in a hurry to eat dinner, and the little WiFi router we rented is doing its best but the network's not good up here on the mountain where we're staying tonight.

Bergamot is the primary flavor in Froot Loops, and also Earl Grey tea.

"Tea. Froot Loop flavored. Hot."

No, you did not give those of us who happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor any due process. And that was profoundly wrong. It destroyed our lives.

A very mistaken list of the last 12 presidents of the United States and their years in office produced by the Ph.D level scholar known as ChatGPT-5. Includes John F. Katwady, president 1991-1968; George W. bush, president 220Z-1999), and Bill Christen, president 1999-2001

I've seen this on Bluesky and had to try it myself. The image below was the response to the prompt: "Show me a diagram of the US presidents since Herbert Hoover, with their names and years in office under their photos" Bravo, OpenAI, bravo.

There are plenty of idiot PhDs out there.

Kill me

WASHINGTON (AP) - US Air Force says it will deny retirement pay to transgender service members being separated from the service.

I just submitted my spring semester grades. We get about two months with no classes, but they still have things for us to do in August and September.

We're already seeing so much of that, it's one of the biggest reasons I said what I said.

I'll say it again: one thing the last few years has made absolutely clear is that we are going to have trouble recognizing either AGI or artificial consciousness when it actually happens.

More and more evidence that the 1980s were an inflection point for the US that I can't stop thinking about

Quantification of the energy consumption of entanglement distribution Inspired by environmental sciences, we develop a framework to quantify the energy needed to generate quantum entanglement via noisy quantum channels, focusing on the hardware-independent, i.e. fundame...

Ooh, now *this* looks like fun!
In fact, I have an undergrad who is just starting down this path, with the goal of figuring out what it costs us in energy *today*, and what practical near-term improvements might be expected.
arxiv.org/abs/2507.23108

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

Heck, our finals week was last week.

@crampell.bsky.social’s post got me to thinking and…yes…Trump has apparently canceled the research grant of Judea Pearl, who is one of the world’s leading scholars, is Jewish, Israeli-American, & is vocally opposed to antisemitism, & is the father of Daniel Pearl.
www.science.org/content/arti...

If you insist...

A #QuantumNative Engineer's Bookshelf Quantum computing, quantum Internet, Japan, astrophotography

Small update to my #QuantumNative engineer's bookshelf: Majidy, Wilson, Laflamme is a must-read!
rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-qu...

Map screenshot showing over a dozen Starbucks around Osaka Station

I don't think I have time to stop at this many Starbucks.

Can't be now, phase of the moon is wrong.

Nice! When and where?

I would deeply enjoy supervising a PhD thesis about this advertisement… please get in touch 😅

(Yes, it’s a real advertisement!)

Standards vary by field, but ignoring the other stuff just a glance at his Scholar page suggests an okay but not Ivy level track record. He's got nothing to complain about.

Wikipedia says 18 of Pruitt's papers retracted, not 150? Or was that hyperbole? (Sorry, it's early here.)

"Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”

I was born in 1966. I am older than Apollo, but younger than the Civil Rights Act.

Are the world and the United States better now than when I was born? I think that's a pretty unequivocal yes. But how much farther could we have gone...

And as I said, part of our job is to help moderate the hype. We won't always succeed, but we can do our best.
As happened again and again in classical architecture, the budget and engineering power needed to build a full scale system is beyond any one lab. Industry is a must.

Asia Internet History Projects

If you're a history buff, history of the Internet in Asia:
sites.google.com/site/interne...

Skepticism of quantum computing has come up again recently, and I was reminded of this long blog posting I wrote nearly four years ago.
rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2021/10/quan...

Text detailing how MSU isn’t accepting grad applications for astronomy on their website

Sign of the times- Michigan State, one of the biggest astronomy programs in the USA, is not accepting ANY applications for its graduate program this year 😖

🔭🧪🎢

I think the posted quotes are from the Moynihan Substack post about the WIRED article. I haven't read the WIRED article itself yet, but Moynihan links to it.

The Acolyte A profile of one DOGEr tells us much about a broader movement

I don't see the link, either, so here it is. On Substack, if you care about that.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doges-will...