Archive: January 27, 2016

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anyone can quantum

Wednesday,  01/27/16  08:19 PM

This is ... beyond amazing: 
Keanu Reaves narrates as Paul Rudd challenges Stephen Hawking to a game of quantum chess:

Yep just as good as you thought it might be, right?!

From ... One Entangled Evening, last night at Caltech, a celebration of Richard Feynman and quantum mechanics.
Of course I was in the front row, wondering ... how did I get here?

Other stars included the rather astonishing Michelle Feynman, and ... Schodinger's Cat :)

 

 

filter pass

Wednesday,  01/27/16  08:35 PM

Spent the *entire* day debugging one silly thing, which ended up being ... silly.  Some days are like that, so be it.  And now for a filter pass...

I had been slowly warming to Donald Trump, perhaps mostly since I cannot possibly vote for Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, while secretly rooting for Ted Cruz; but this whole "I don't like Fox News so I'm not going to participate in the debate" episode has reset me back to zero.  He seems to be proof, if any were needed, that the "average voter" doesn't seem qualified to vote. 

In case you were wondering: What went wrong in Flint.  Many things, seemingly.  In the US we have come to take healthy running tap water for granted - despite the huge adoption of bottled water - but this episode shows how technically difficult it can be. 

This I love: Iconic Airstream gets magnificent revamp to celebrate National Park Service Centennial.  There's something so ... "Americana" about both Airstreams and National Parks.  A glimpse through a looking glass into a bygone era - and one we wish would still be with us. 

Of interest (to me): the rise and fall of the singular they.  Long before it was fashionable, I began using "they" in user documentation, as an accompaniment to s/he; it seemed better than him or her.  Or maybe it's just because I'm Dutch :) 

Project Monsoon: transparent river-themed street murals that only appear when it rains.  Love it.  And wish it would rain around here, maybe we would see some! 

You might have thought One Entangled Evening was futuristic fantasy, and it is, but meanwhile quantum entanglement archived in semiconductor wafers.  Wow.  This new understand is just too weird for my feeble brain. 

Related: the 17 equations that changed the course of history.  All of your favorites in there, including E=mc2 and a2+b2=c2, not to mention the Fourier Transform, Maxwell's Equations, and Schrodinger's Equation but what about my personal favorite, W=UH? :) 

Also missing: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  At least, I *think* it is missing... but I can't be sure.

The incredible winners of the "small world" microscopy competition...  the real world is so weird :) 

Tim Bray: Vancouver Real Estate - the game of homes.  "Let’s assume that buckets of overseas money are flowing into Vancouver. The conventional explanation — which I find believable — is that the local real-estate is being used mostly just like a bank account; a safer place to put money than under your mattress."  The notion of stored value is so elusive. 

Perhaps Apropos: How to pull off a bank heist.  It's not easy.  Especially in comparison to investing in Real Estate. 

Good to know: You can explore New York's Guggenheim museum with Google's help.  They've created a "street view" of all the galleries in the museum.  I's cool, but I'm not sure this is actually useful? 

OMG how cool is this?  1905 Woods electric car sells for $95,000.  Probably incompatible with Tesla superchargers, but guaranteed to get a spot in front of any restaurant in LA :) 

Yawn: Oracle announces Java plugin will be deprecated in JDK 9, scheduled for March 2017.  Is *anyone* still writing Java web applications?  (Another question might be, did *anyone* ever write Java web applications?)  I so remember the promise of Java, way back in Netscape 2, with Kim Polese leading the "Green Team" at Sun Microsystems.  But the promise of "write once, run anywhere" was never realized. 

What does it say about me that this has me interested: TAG Heuer's Connected smartwatch looks like an actual watch.  My current favorite watch is a 40-year-old pre-TAG-Heuer, which not only looks like an actual watch, it is one.  Hmmm...

 

 
 

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