February 23, 2006 - 01:38 PM
A badly written (from an accuracy perspective)
article in New Scientist salutes a Quantum Mechanics research team for creating a "quantum computer program [which] has produced an answer without actually running."
While that sounds ridiculous, it's really only inaccurate. The reality of it, I don't completely understand and would be beyond scope here. But it would be more correct to say that they get the answer out of the computer without it interacting physically with the world around it - but the answer came just because the computer "was there".
(That's really not much more helpful, is it?)
The story hit
Slashdot, and the reader comments, as always, were more fun than the article. Here's my favorite quote (with some sticking-out-of-the-tongue to Tara):
In related news... Microsoft reported earlier today that Windows performs better with your PC shut off.
Heh.
Anyway, here's something to think about - something very weird about quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small (i.e. electrons and particles of light):
Particles are not only in two places at once, they are everywhere at once until you look at them. Then they're in only one place.
In other words, if the bulb in your refrigerator behaved like a sub-atomic particle, then when you shut the door it would be both on
and off. Until you open the door, that is, at which point you force the bulb to be only on or off.
One hundred percent weird, but also completely true. Just don't ask me why.
Okay, enough geek stuff. Tomorrow, if I manage it, we'll go back to our regularly scheduled rambling.
February 21, 2006 - 06:09 AM
Well, that's not exactly new where I'm concerned, is it? Anyway, I haven't posted here for a while - I've been writing over at
Maren's place lately, giving updates on Reilly's eating school. But a lot of this post seemed to want to be here, so here we are.
Weekend recap: headed home Saturday morning. Reilly and I had a good time doing some Valentine's Day shopping at the mall. Sausalito dishes at Pottery Barn are the 'official' dinnerware of Harmony House, and the bright red ones were half off - so I picked up four of 'em for Maren for our Valentine's dinner that night. A bright yellow school bus (with working stop sign!) for Reilly. And I had some extra gift money and decided to supplement that with enough year-end bonus to pick up a 1GB white iPod. What a neat little gizmo. I loaded up a ten-disc
audiobook (review later), some fun 80's music, some Led Zeppelin which I haven't listened to in a while, the KWL Classic Rock mix, and some of U2's Rattle and Hum. I now wish I could have bought one with more space on it. Sigh...
For those who like this kind of thing, here is my current "Fun 80's" playlist (feel free to skip to the next paragraph otherwise): Rapture, Drive, Moving in Stereo, Sunglasses at Night, Modern Love, The Boys of Summer, Life in a Northern Town, Der Kommisar, One Thing Leads to Another, Our House, Who Can It Be Now?, Down Under, Wouldn't It Be Good (very cool song), Love is a Battlefield, Another One Bites The Dust, Silent Lucidity (might be 90's), Stand, Heart and Soul, Everybody Wants To Rule The World.
We had our traditional Valentines Mexican feast (home-made Chimis) and relaxed. It was nice to be all together. I consolidated our music collection (iTunes is a really nice product; I just wish it would convert Apple's M4A format to MP3). I found a utility - db music converter or something like that - which converted all of our WMA stuff to MP3. Also found a nice Linux utility to sync up the iPod and my now-open-standard music collection. Nice.
Sunday - church and then a long nap for me; then at the end of the day a lenghy fit by Reilly who was too tired to come back to Baltimore. So we took our chances of being away two nights and slept on it. (No one at RMH seemed to notice; or if they did they didn't care to act on it.)
Reilly and I had a leisurely drive back down to Baltimore yesterday - via Wal-Mart and a few other stops on the back roads. Skipping I-95 is nice. We hung out at RMH for a while, playing on the slides and basketball court. We then used up the time before Grandma arrived (who is coming to take over for me, essentially) by fixing the house's air hockey table. Which, I think, may have earned us some slack with an extra parking permit and front door pass. Cool.
Grandma Larsen showed up; we got her settled then went out to the Cheesecake Factory for some Tex-Mex Eggrolls and of course dessert. I had a $25 gift card (thanks Kristen!) so the meal ended up costing only about ten bucks. Oh, plus fifteen for parking - which we did far too many blocks away due to my misunderstanding of "East Pratt" vs. "West Pratt" streets. Luckily it was the 200 block I was looking for.
During dinner, we had another full-blown Reilly hissy fit. I don't know what's going on except that we may have some GI discomfort combined with too much activity and not enough sleep. He crashed as soon as we got moving in the car to go back to the house. He didn't even wake up when I got him out and carried him down the street from the garage to the house and up to the bed.
We all crashed. New day this morning; we'll be handing much of the reins over to Grandma today so we'll perhaps get Goon used to the idea. More later, back over at the Garden. Including pictures.
UPDATE: The converter program mentioned is the
dBpowerAMP Music Converter. It's a terrific tool. "Convert between audio formats whilst preserving ID Tags. Practically every audio type is supported: mp3, mp4, m4a, Windows Media Audio (WMA), Ogg Vorbis, AAC, Monkeys Audio, FLAC, Apple Lossless (ALAC) and many others". It has worked great for me.