Category: Funny Ha Ha

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NPR Tunnels into Future State

nextquant Blog points to one of the most ill phrased NPR story titles of all time:

Quantum Computer Discovery Nets Nobel Prize
by Richard Harris
All Things Considered, October 9, 2007 · Two scientists will share this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries that have revolutionized computer memory.
Albert Fert of France and Peter Grunberg of Germany independently discovered a phenomenon that relies on the spooky world of quantum mechanics to read data from computer disks.
Most computers use it, because it allows manufacturers to pack a lot more data on a single hard drive. It also changed the way scientists and engineers have been thinking about computer memory.

Crap, if I knew that all I had to do was use my hard drive reading head to build a quantum computer I would have done that years ago.

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Dude, a Higs Boson?

Best quote from an article in the New York Times about the search for the Higgs boson:

Joe Lykken, a Fermilab theorist who said he first learned of the rumored bump the old-fashioned way, over lunch in the laboratory cafeteria, said: “Pre-blog, this sort of rumor would have circulated among perhaps a few dozen physicists. Now with blogs even string theorists who can’t spell Higgs became immediately aware of inside information about D Zero data.”

Zing!
I’m also very jealous of Gordon Watts, a fellow University of Washington blogger:

In response, Gordon Watts, a physicist from the University of Washington and longtime member of the D Zero team, scolded Dr. Dorigo for speculating on rumors.
“Dude! If you get called by the press to comment on this rumor — you will be making secondhand comments on rumors!” Dr. Watts wrote on his blog, Life as a Physicist.

Why am I jealous? Because he just got quoted in the New York Times, the paper of record, as saying “Dude!” Dude that rocks.

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They Built….a Brain!

The mystery of what exactly was built up north has been resolved. They built a brain:

Within Holistic Quantum Relativity lies the realm of the human mind and the observable universe running like Quantum Computers: this technological synthesis offers the possibility of solving what computer science calls “NP-complete” problems. Last week D-Wave Systems, a privately-held Canadian firm Headquartered near Vancouver, BC, demonstrated what it calls the world’s first commercially viable Quantum Computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. These are problems which are impossible or nearly impossible to calculate on a classical digital computer. Picking out a single pattern from a collection of patterns, such as one’s mother, father, or child, from a photo of people, is easy for the human mind, but beyond the reach of a conventional desk-top computer!