Lunch With George!

January 24, 2002 - Wildflower Bread Company

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Agenda

• Quantum Liquid Computing
• Digital Picture Frame - Revisited
• Show and Tell (Paul)
• DVD Barn
• Tadpoles
• Sleep Number Bed
• Guggenheim Motorcycles
• Used Car for Sale

While conventional computers would have to run for billions of years to factor the enormous numbers used for current encryption, Shor's algorithm should be able to find the prime factors in a number of days.

Isaac Chuang and his associates at MIT have built a simple quantum computer that actually carries out Shor's algorithm! They created a new molecule with seven atoms which respond to certain electromagnetic waves. Each atomic nucleus acts as a single bit (representing 1 or 0). They synthesized a billion billion copies of the molecule, and then dissolved them in an organic solvent.

Using a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer to direct radio signals at a vial of the liquid, they manipulated the seven-bit molecules to compute the factors of 15: 5 and 3. The answer is carried by radio signals produced by the nuclei as they interact with a magnetic field [Oh... NOW I get it...]. No doubt they're all very excited, even though my 10-year-old daughter can get the same answer. Obviously, if they can do it for the trivial case, they can apply it to something bigger.

Read a report of their findings in the December 20th, 2001 issue if Nature.

Digital Picture Frame - Revisited

George has been working pretty hard to keep his Mom's frame supplied with not only new images, but interesting and surprising ones. Last week he posted shots of Toni and himself washing their car together. This week, though, he outdid himself:

• on Monday, his Mom saw pictures of George baking cookies.
• on Tuesday, she saw pictures of him packing up cookings in a box.
• on Wednesday, the cookies arrived at her door!

Well done, George!

Show & Tell

I brought show and tell today: my new Apple Powerbook G3! I've been trying to buy one of these for some time on ebay, and the right one finally came along. This laptop is lighter than my old one, has a 14-inch screen, and is as powerful as my home desktop system! It will even play DVD movies. I also bought an Apple Airport Base Station and a wireless card for the laptop.

The strangest thing happened when I was setting up the wireless base station... when I first tried to initialize the settings, it asked me to specify which wireless network I wanted to configure! It seems that one of my neighbors also has an Airport. Once I had it configured, it was great! I can open my powerbook and access the internet from anywhere in my house.

I also put an airport card in Teri's G4, so we can now access the internet simultaneously through the Airport base. No more "are you off the internet yet?" from either one of us!

 

DVD Barn

This new type of DVD rental service is pretty cool:

• Pay a flat monthly fee (the more you pay, the larger number of DVDs you can have checked out at one time)
• Browse for DVDs to put in your wish list
• Receive DVD in the mail
• when you send it back, they ship another
• No late fees!!!!

Here's how Netflix and DVD Barn compare on price for their standard service:

	Monthly Fee	# of DVDs at one time
NetFlix	$19.95	3
DVD Barn basic	$ 8.95	1
DVD Barn Average	$19.95	3
DVD Barn SUPER	$49.95	10

DVD Barn actually has several other plans falling between the ones I've shown here. DVD Barn also features somethin NetFlix doesn't-- VIDEO GAMES! they even have nine Dreamcast games listed!

We'll check back with George in a month and see how it's going.

Tadpoles

George told me a very funny story about tadpoles after seeing the cover of Science News (it pictured a LOT of tadpoles). At one time, Georges' sister was the manager of a large, prestigious office building in the Nation's Capital. The building had a large fountain in the main lobby, and George's sister decided to stock it with tadpoles. She was asked by others: "You know what tadpoles turn into, don't you?" But of course, she did. Memos were circulated to all tennant offices announcing a program to adopt the frogs as they appeared, and she armed the lobby security guard with a net.

George doesn't remember the details, but he's pretty sure it ended up a disaster!

 

Sleep Number Bed

Yes, it's wrapped in wonderful padding and foam beams keep the mattress looking exactly like a real mattress, but inside it is still just an air mattress. Of course the rubber bladders as constructed from rubber stock purchased from the Zodiac raft company, so they will definitely be the life-saving flotation device of choice in case of flood!

I was telling George that I find many aspects of the bed (AND the company AND the salesman) to be irritating, including:

• The Design. For what I paid, I would expect the inside of the mattress to be composed of MANY little vertical air cylinders, each separately controlled for pressure (and thuus firmness). Nope! One big hose just pumps air in or lets it out! If you like the bed to be softer, it is not unlike an under-inflated air mattress on a camping trip.
• The Controller is "digital", meaning it display the current sleep number reading on a digital display. Every time I dial up "35" on the controller, I get something between 31 and 39, but it never seems to be the same.
• Lack of Uniformity. With two air bladders (one for each of us) separated by a foam beam, the bed has very well-defined "sweet spots" where you should be sleeping. This differs from a typical mattress which feels basically the same all over the surface of the bed.

Once I finished this rant, George asked me how I was sleeping. YIKES!!! I'm sleeping better! And I'm not waking up with achy muscles anymore. Of course I could have just bought a soft conventional mattress for a quarter of the price... :-)

Guggenheim Motorcycles

Good Used Car for Sale