Energize…maaaaan

We’re still a long way from having Star Trek-style transporters, but an Australian research team has taken a small step towards that goal. In a recent experiment, the researchers took a laser beam, “destroyed” it (didn’t they just turn it off?), and built an exact replica of it one metre away in the span of 30 billionths of a second. In theory, they should be able to teleport the laser over a distance of kilometres and team leader Dr. Ping Koy Lam says that while they can only transport light right now, they hope to transport a single atom or even even a small number of atoms in three to five years.

Philosophical issues aside — this kind of teleportation destroys the original and creates an exact duplicate elsewhere, which leads to questions like “will that still be ‘me’ at the end of the transport?” — what worries me is the math skills of the team leader. Here’s a quote from the story in the Australian newspaper, The Age:

“At the moment we don’t know how to teleport a single atom and a typical human being has 10 to the 17th atoms, which is one followed by 27 zeros,” he said.

Uh, Doc, 10 to the 17th is written as one followed by 17 zeroes, not 27. The quote — which I’m hoping is the newspaper’s error’s and not the scientist’s — is off by ten orders of magnitude.

For my non-mathematically-inclined stoner friends who don’t know what “ten orders of magnitude” means, imagine putting a dime bag of weed on Dr. Lam’s transporter pad. You’d the “energize” button, and it would appear at the destination as a trillion tons of the stinky stuff, which is more than half the mass of the moon. Par-tay!

Recommended Reading

IBM did some research into teleportation almost ten years back. I nominate IBM research employee Wes Felter as a test subject. 😉

Charles and Ray Eames weren’t only just designers of cool furniture, they were also pretty good filmmakers! Their best-known film is a nine-minute wonder called Powers of Ten, which starts with people at a picnic and zooms outward to the intergalactic scale and inward to the subatomic. It’s one of the few educational films worth watching again.

Here’s a page with an interactive “Powers of Ten” Java applet inspired by the Eames film.

Photo of the week

Here’s a funny shot of my sister Eileen and brother-in-law Richard trying to feed their son, Aidan.

A better photo of Will

Will McLean, the other member of the Asian gang I started (it’s currently called “Asian Gang”) has been asking me to post a better picture of him. He doesn’t like the one I posted earlier, saying it makes him “look like a Gino”. Here you go, Will:

They’re on to us

Here’s the latest cartoon from Korean cartoonist extraordinaire Derek Kirk, who has a great site called Small Stories:

And who am I to say that 70% of the American public isn’t right? I’m goin’ with the flow and becoming the shiftiest Asian of them all, boyee! I’m been practicing my shifty smile — here’s how it looks so far:

Damn, if that look don’t say “pimp”, I don’t know what does.

(By the way, if you’ve seen that survey, could you let me know where I can find it?)

I’ve been a little busy

…so that’s why there haven’t been updates in a couple of days. I’m alive and well and have a fair backlog of stuff, so watch this space.

In the meantime, may I recommend House of Hot Sauce, a great blog written by my friend and Global Pop Conspirator Sean Monkman?

Funn Venn Diagrams

A friend of an um-friend invented the term Vennophobia: the fear that someone has included you in one of their Venn diagrams. “Look, you’re in the area where ‘ugly’ overlaps with ‘loser’!”

The Brunching Shuttlecocks have some nice Venn diagrams. Here’s my favourite:

Ass Pirates of Silicon Valley

It had to happen: someone’s written Bill Gates/Steve Jobs slash fiction.

(Don’t know what slash fiction is? Here’s a good definition, plus some background.)

In the real world, Jobs needs Bill’s software put in his hardware. In these stories, Bill needs Steve’s hardware put into his software. If you know what I mean. Huh-huh-huh.

Here’s an excerpt:

“(Jobs) nuzzles my neck, bites my earlobe,” Slade writes. “I watch him go to his desk and rummage in one of the top drawers. When he comes back, he’s holding a bottle of hand lotion…. He hooks his hand on the waistband of my chinos and briefs, sliding them both down at once…. He runs his hand up my back and leans down to whisper, ‘Bill, are you a virgin?'”

“Yes.” Sort of.

“I’ll be gentle.”

If you can bear with the mental image of Bill Gates on all fours, grunting with pleasure like a hog at the trough whilst getting jazzed up the gunga, go ahead and read away. Don’t blame me for any nightmares you might have as a result.

(My finding out about this is all Martin “Coderman” Peck’s fault.)