Chris Monroe and David Wineland have an article in Scientific American about ion trap quantum computing.
Happy Birthday Integrated Circuit!
Fifty years ago today, this device
set the course for a pretty big revolution. That’s a picture of Jack Kilby’s first integrated circuit which first functioned on September 12, 1958.
A Simple Winning Strategy for the Card Game War
War is a classic kids card game. I spent many an hour wiling away the time playing war growing up. Enough so that I actually developed a strategy for the game. A strategy for the game of war? That’s crazy talk.
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LHC Ad: Beware Bears
You may have noticed an ad running on scienceblogs which says “Has the LHC destoyed the Earth?” If you click on it you find a webpage that says in big letters simply “NO”. What’s up with that? Check out the webpage source for the page (http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/).
Update 9/12/08: Check out the comments for more fun and also read the cat projectile analyzers take on how you can click to save the world.
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The Suantum of Quolace
Proposed theme song for “The Quantum of Solace”:
Happenings in the Quantum World, September 11, 2008
Robert Clark new chief defence scientist for Australian DSTO, Florida quantum computing conference, standard model quantum computing, and Ray Laflamme is Royal in Canada.
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Google Polarizes America?
The techno wonder pundits say that the internet revolutionizes democracy by leveling the playing field (everyone can be an ass online, oh yeah!) But what I find more fascinating about the internet and politics is the role that search plays in polarizing politics. I mean, sure there are dissenting voices all over the internet, but google “John McCain” or “Obama” or “Sarah Palin” or “Joe Biden” and you won’t discover a single dissenting opinion about any of these candidates on the front page of the search results (the exceptions to this rule are probably the small news items that Google includes: but these tend to be main stream media fluff pieces.) If the world is full of dissent but the main lens by which people view the world never reveals this, does this really make a positive impact on democracy? Indeed if I were totally crazy, I might even argue that Google was aiding tyranny when it decided to combat google bombing.
In other words what I’m saying is that I’m tired of blaming the white male voter for going against my political leanings and today I’ve decided it would be fun to pick on Google instead 🙂 (And yes I picked Google arbitrarily. If by “picked arbitrarily” you mean decided because it was most dominate search webite.)
Update: In a related note, has anyone tried Spinoculers?
The Looming Danger
The physics blogosphere is abuzz about the start up of the large hadron collider. There is a hole in Texas which is very jealous. And of course, everyone is happy that the Earth was not destroyed or a bubble universe wasn’t created.
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Weather Politics
The lore I heard when I lived in New Mexico was that the reason Gore won the state in 2000 was that there was a snowstorm in the southern part of the state (which is more conservative.) In 2004 there was no snowstorm in the state, and the state went to Bush. If you could control the weather by fixing particular weather in different locations (weather that was not too far beyond the typical weather for the area), I wonder how many electoral votes could you swing?
An Ad About Nothing
I propose that a good investment would be to short Bill Gates’ evil rating: