We'll slice some rind from the pigs behind

After several warnings and one severe beating from the fashion police, I had a haircut My hair was essentially the same length all over due to having had a shaved head recently. Hot tip: It is not cool to have hair growing over your ears the same length as your fringe. Unfortunately, coupled with wearing that damn enormous cape thing, I had no coolness leverage to use at the hairdressers, and felt completely dejected looking at the disaster on my disembodied head that made hurricane Rita look like a tea party that involves floating bloated corpses. So, I just said for her to do whatever she felt like. It's one rung up on the ladder.

Rasterbation is heaps cool. You give it an image, and it blows it up to a massive picture that you print out over like 30 pages, for example. Print it out, stick em up on the wall, be the envy of your friends. Make a statement of your individuality, choose a picture that reflects your desired image, and use it to convince people to sleep with you. I did it to the girl off the front cover of the Bran Van album, but realized I don't have any walls I to stick it to. I am both unemployed and homeless, which is not as romantic and carefree as I'd imagined it. I have not found a single train with one of those carriages at the end that is open and contains straw, in which I may travel the countryside, singing bawdy songs and stealing bread.

My honeys are black, puerto rican, and asian.

I return bearing gifts.

Thankfully I got drunk this week so I have something of dubious worth to share. On Wednesday night, the big guy decided to take the whole group out (around 25 people, no less!) for dinner to an African joint. These physics chaps showed remarkable stamina, and we ended up at one of the other visitors' apartments, and for reasons which were never entirely clear, he had an absolute mountain of grog spread out across the whole bench, including half a bottle of Covoursier. Three of us polished that off, and then a bottle of Brandy. And then I did something that made someone really mad. I can't actually remember anyone ever getting this mad at me in recent memory. And all I did was piss off the balcony. To a large extent I laughed it off, as it was hard to take it seriously when he was falling over periodically, knocking over plastic chairs. Drama queen.

I've been pondering a gentle way to put this, but I'm afraid that the only way to put it is: Brisbane is loaded with hot, hot, bitches. All this summery weather means skirts with floral patterns, strappy little singlety numbers, open-toed shoes, sandy-blonde hair in pony tails... Dear me. However, since it appears that the average age of a first-year is twelve or thirteen, it makes me feel a bit like a lecherous pederast, or perhaps a curmudgeon.

I would now like to pen an open letter to friendly people in bars worldwide. Kind people, thankyou for taking the time to hang out with random drunken people who don't really know anyone, or perhaps have had their associates depart or pass out. Thankyou for telling a range of interesting stories, though they be of dubious authenticity. Thankyou for offering a top-up from your jug of Bundy and Coke, your generosity knows no bounds. When you kick on to the next place, ta for asking if I'd like to come along. You've restored my faith in humanity. Well not really, but I feel marginally less homicidal. I shall attempt to also be nice to strangers in bars in future, at least until I decide once again that most people are idiots.

xo.

AB negative, you represent love.

Whew! Just took off my parachute harness, I've been base jumping off the roof of the Physics building, and, ah, wrestling electric eels. Well, that's a mild exaggeration, I've been working a lot. I had to make some updates on a paper, and since I can't (or wont) do that at UQ, I spent all of last weekend on that, hanging out in my pimp pad.

Mind you, there are some characters here. I'm in a visitor's room, with a bunch of others, two from Oxford, one from Cambridge, and one from Russia. The Russian bloke is a crackup. He's a heavyset, funny looking, balding guy in his early 30's, who strolls around in a tight pair of jeans and a white t-shirt (or if you're lucky, a singlet, considering he has a habit of putting his hands on his head and aerating his pits), and talks at the top of his voice in a heavy accent. Every time he speaks, I keep imagining having the sentence prefixed with "IN MOTHER RUSSIA...". And although I can vaguely understand his mangled, shouting approximation to English, he can't understand a thing I say. Dear lord. There's also a guy who talks in a really, really, high pitched squeaky voice and everyone pretends not to notice. I could go on, as it's like a being at a quirks convention.

I happened to catch an epsisode of Back of the Y on the box last night, once which I've seen before and is a pisser. In particular, a skit called 'Vaseline Warriors IV'. It's a post-apocalyptic scenario, where at some point, in order to stop men from being dickheads by trying to impress women, all the women were shot. The world collapses into chaos, where the remaining men fight over all the remaining reserves of porno mags and vaseline. The protagonist is walking in the desert, and his right arm is HUGE (from whacking off). He spots something fluttering in the mud, it's a porno mag which he excitedly grabs and flicks through. It's a trap though, and he gets surrounded by a motorbike gang who beat him up. Anyway, he is lying in the hot sun in a pool of his blood, and is woken by a stream of water on his face. He wakes up to find someone pissing on his head, a guy wearing flying goggles, a jacket, no pants, and flys flying around his arse. He tells the guy pissing on him to fuck off, and gets up. The guy with no pants just goes, "Oh, sorry mate. (pause) You want to go to the pub?", and the other guy, brushing himself off, just goes "Yeh, alright". (This is hilarious, by the way). At the pub, the barman makes beer by drinking metho, and has a yeast infection. The only porn the guys have at the pub is a picture of Lucy Lawless' head stuck onto a bit of ripped cardboard with a crude body drawn on in texta. Hilarious! Also, there is a skit called 'Bottleshop Galactica', which involves... ah, anyway.

That's all from the newsroom. This is really just a guilt-appeasing post, the belligerent god of the internet must be appeased with regular sacrifices.

Even when the itchy-burn make me wanna let go.

An old photo of a frost.

I missed the last bus home last night, mainly because I stayed back to work and throw sunnick down on the old bog. Having only ridden the bus 3 times, and having not paid an awful lot of attention where it went, I decided to walk it. Considering I have all the sense of direction of your average spin-zero particle (Oh! a physics pun, I am branching out), this was a bad idea. I got mildly lost, and got home about an hour later. If I had have known how long it was going to take me, I wouldn't have done it.

I feel that's an appropriate metaphor for me being here. I don't know what I don't know, and if I did, I probably wouldn't be here. It's gonna be a bloody long walk. Today I agonized over one line of a derivation, and when I asked someone, it turned out to be rather simple, and was just a notational thing. I'm going to have to weigh off annoying people by asking daft questions against sitting there getting angry.

For Ian's benefit and mine, I am going to attempt clear up the whole 'Quantum information can be negative' bruhaha. Allow me to switch to my annoying lecturing tone. A state can be pure, which means we know exactly what it is, and hence has zero entropy. In contrast, a state can be mixed, which means it is in a superposition of states (and it's not possible to find a new basis where the state is pure), and hence has positive entropy. Now, it's possible for a qubits to be entangled, the classic example being the EPR state, (|00>+|11>)/sqrt(2). This entangled state is pure, and has (Von Neumann) entropy S(A,B)=0. However, it can be shown that each qubit is in a mixed state, i.e., the entropies S(A) and S(B) are positive. So the conditional entropy, given by S(A|B) = S(A,B) - S(B), is negative. That is, we know less about A by itself than we do about the joint state AB. This is rather odd from the perspective of classical info theory, where H(X) is always less than or equal to H(X,Y), and so H(X|Y) = H(X,Y)-H(Y) is always non-negative.

I got a one month pass for the UQ gym this evening, and rolled the old heavy artillery down there for some special ops training (I'm being generous, honest, and sarcastic here, but the proportions escape me). It's a bit rough and ready. That's being nice, it's mostly rough with a garnish of ready. However, it is full of hot tanned Brisbanians. This is as opposed to me being snow white and hot, and by hot I mean wearing an inch thick bodysuit composed entirely of sweat. HELLO, LADIES.

Ok, enough drivel. I've got that dizzy feeling that comes over me before I get the KAY-BAB FEVER.

Annihilation and Creation.

My warmest greetings from my warm chair, dear reader! I am in the warm city of Brisbane. Yesterday, the combination of a moderately large lunch, the warm air, and the gentle chitter-chatter of left-wing rhetoric drifting through the window from the cloisters of the great court put me to sleep at my desk.

Met with the big guy today. Not God, someone far more important, but we'll call him God for the purposes of the vague argument I'm about to formulate on the fly. God is really bloody clever. God can do all sorts of things. Ok, no more cheap shots. This group is bloody amazing. They do all sorts of things together, a concept both foreign and welcome to me. For instance, once a week, the group (which is rather large) get together for an afternoon tea where there is a Question, which is posed by either God or someone in the group. If you answer the Question, you get a bottle of wine. Neat, eh? The question today was about Entanglement Monotones, and God came up with the answer after about 10 minutes. Naturally. The discussion is lively, animated, and though not free from egos, still highly productive. Makes me wish my group was like that. I don't know if it was because they are physics people, or it is because they were mostly Aussie and Pommy white guys. I'm going to put it down to God...

Welcome to the next paragraph, created largely out of guilt. Anyway, God and I had a chat, and it looks like we might be able to do some stuff on Quantum process tomography. Also, he suggested that I look at a big open question: the capacity of the single-use quantum channel. Also, I had a chat for several hours with one of his students on what the quantum analog of the recently discovered mutual information - conditional mean estimate relationship is. More links to follow up, more fun to be had.

Pop77-38 is out. Get it up ya. Currently I am rating it at 7 stars in my arbitrary rating system based on an unordered set of variable-length characters.

Anyway, I'm gonna lock up shop here, and get the bus back to my Pimp palace, which I still think is the dog's bollocks. There's a good chance my drinking partner and token black friend, Chris, will be coming up here for work in a few weeks, and Wendy has mentioned much the same. Anyway, I dither! To the pimp palace!

And lo, on the third day...

The Barossa valley. One of numerous fascinating places outside Adelaide.

Pardon me for not being in the internet lately, I have a note. After submitting, I was whisked away in the sky by a wing-ed bird which nay flap but contains muffins to the mysterious destination people insist on calling Melbourne. I attended a two day workshop there, which was fantastic. Significant celebrations were reserved until Friday night, whereupon I and the usual suspects got spectacularly drunk. Highlights:

• One of my brother's lecturers from Melb Uni made some fast moves on a really, really drunk young lady. One of her friends tried to drag her away, a biffo on the street ensued. We watched through the blinds at the front of the bar. It was so beautifully tragic as they had a tug of war over the girl, and then had a face-to-face yelling match. You couldn't script, cast, and stage such a tragic scene. Bitterness truly is the pallbearer of death.
  
• My backpack became a wandering bar, replete with coke, red bull, and three bottles of bourbon. We made friends with the chick who owns the bar, and she gave us 9 drink vouchers. Those shots tasted sweeter than the milk from the nipples of Lady Sweetness herself.
  
• Woke up Steve's floor, not feeling so flash. He had gone to work, but left me a muffin in a bag, and some copies of 'Too Much Coffee Man'. Sweeter still.
  

Drove to Adelaide, attended conference. Around other people for too long. The only time I've had to myself is taking a shower, or taking a dump. You need a break when you're looking forward to the next time you're gonna back one out.

On a lighter note, my presentation went smashingly, and several top people were in attendence, although not as many as I'd hoped. Nevertheless, I was given a solid invitation to go visit a chap to do some research in the south of France at a top research institute, and also the possibility of a post-doc in Trondheim in Norway next year. Bonza! Into my stew of options ye go. Also, I've thought rather seriously about getting a job on an oil rig in WA through my brother's connections. Pros: 40 bucks an hour, 38% tax rate, involves helicopters, company owns resort island that you live on while not on the rig, and of course the opportunity to hang out with swarthy men wearing singlets capping spurting oil pipes. Cons: None really, except losing momentum on an academic career distinctly lacking in helicopters.

And today I flew to Bris-vegas, to start my Quantum info theory jaunt. The chap I'm visiting has had his personal assistant organise me a spiffy furnished apartment which has pay tv and a pool. The next month is going to be way rad. I'm relishing my privacy, and took the liberty of spending a large portion of the evening in the nud sprawled out on the couch watching telly. It's hot, you see.

Anyway, I'm fine. Hit me up with all the good oil.