A Bowl of Stupid

Last week, I posted a video lecture about ‘Sixth-Sense Technology’ on TED, the brainchild of a remarkable Indian inventor, Pranav Mistry. I caught shit from a bunch of people back in the States about my comments regarding the general decline in American education and innovation.

I really don’t mean to sound like I’m America-bashing. I really don’t. And I really can’t help it if people don’t like hearing the truth. Nor can I help it if I wind up sounding like a broken record (assuming anyone still knows what a ‘record’ is). But the facts are the facts. And it seems like every week, there’s another story about how some other country or part of the world is just kicking the shit out of America in the fields of economics, the sciences, and technology.

Admittedly, this time, it’s not India or China leading the charge. Rather, it’s the Swiss and French (which George Bush declared as irrelevant “Old Europe”). The NY Times/International Herald Tribune reported today, in an article entitled “Collider Sets Record, and Europe Takes U.S.’s Lead”:

Scientists said that the new Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile loop underneath the Swiss-French border, had accelerated protons to energies of 1.2 trillion electron volts apiece and then crashed them together, eclipsing a record for collisions held by an American machine, the Tevatron, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

This moment has been inevitable since fall 1993, when Congress canceled a behemoth project in Texas known as the Superconducting Supercollider, after estimated costs rose to $11 billion. … In the future, as the collider ramps up to seven trillion electron volts, the dateline for physics discoveries will be Geneva, not Batavia, Ill., the home of Fermilab.

Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. In fact, I’m sure you paranoid idiots nice folks don’t want to waste good ammunition on lil’ ol’ me. Wouldn’t you much rather maintain your ever-increasing stocks of ammunition for President Obama’s impending socialist revolution?

P.S. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Just last week, I was lamenting the general decline in American education with respect to the most recent embracement of Sarah Palin-esque ideals by many Americans. In all honesty, however, that kind of stuff is made in jest (for the most part).

Where the rubber really meets the road is the fact that, while Americans have been busy invading other countries, arguing over which is the true nonexistent God, and debating whether or not Lady Gaga is a man or not, other peoples around the globe have been making some truly INCREDIBLE technological advances.

The following is one of the most inspired, and inspiring, demonstrations of technological prowess that I’ve seen in a long time. Watch Pranav Mistry talk about the thrilling potential of SixthSense technology. It’s absolute genius.

All of you goddamn parasites — just keep yer damn hands off!!! (Cough, cough, gollum, gollum … Gollum, gollum, cough).

Based upon a variety of factors, my old laptop — a Dell Inspirion — is quite utterly, a disaster.

It’s about 4 years old (the same age as my emotional state), it was abused as my secondary “work” computer during the last 3 years I practiced law (uggh, the mere thought of doing legal work at this point just gives me the freaking “willies”), it has been with me across several continents now, and it has been subjected to conditions that one could euphemistically describe as “harsh.”

In short, it has seen better days.

Additionally, I have learned the hard way that it’s not the best “traveling” computer either. It’s heavy as all get-out (in the range of 8-9 pounds with battery), the screen is broken and won’t even stand up without the use of books or other items propping it up (much like myself, come to think of it), the outer casing is cracked in various locations allowing me to see more of it’s computer guts, and sometimes it simply refuses to cooperate at all.

Action needed to be taken. And I’m back in Singapore, which is the alleged “cheapo electronics” capital of the world. So, when in Rome … uhh, I guess you buy something, right? Riiight.

Oh, I bought something. I realllllly bought something. In fact, I am the proud new owner of this miracle of modern technology — the Sony Vaio TZ.

Holy shit, this thing is the fuckin’ mac-daddy, mutha fuckas!!

The thing only weighs 1.2 pounds. It’s got an 11.1 inch screen. It’s got over 12 hours of battery life. It’s got a fingerprint reader so I don’t have to deal with any more goddamn passwords. And it’s got a shock protection G-Sensor Hard Drive – which is better for traveling (I would have to do a system restore on my old one every time it would take a big bump on an Indo public bus).

Yeah, you women can have yer shoes, and yer handbags, and yer makeup, … or yer whatever — I’ve got my VAIO; I said I got my VAIO to keep me warm.

Well now, if y’all will excuse me, I’m gonna hole up in my room and whisper sweet nothings into its built-in microphone allllll night. Just you and me, love … just you and me.

I’ll apologize up front for completely link-napping this article, but I really wanted to pass on this post from “Inkblot Earth” concerning Quantum-computer technology. I’ve found the concept fascinating for many years, but I don’t have a firm enough grasp of the subject to add any coherent commentary of my own. So I’ll leave much of it to Raven over at Inkblot, who aptly notes that D-Wave, a privately held Canadian company, just unveiled and demonstrated the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer. Wooha for science.

In their press release, D-Wave states the following:

Quantum-computer technology can solve what is known as “NP-complete” problems. These are the problems where the sheer volume of complex data and variables prevent digital computers from achieving results in a reasonable amount of time. Such problems are associated with life sciences, biometrics, logistics, parametric database search and quantitative finance, among many other commercial and scientific areas.

Quantum technology delivers precise answers to problems that can only be answered today in general terms. This creates a new and much broader dimension of computer applications,” [Executive Officer] Herb Martin said.

The image above is what’s called a Bloch sphere: a representation of a qubit, the building block of quantum computers. For background, this is what Wikipedia has to say:

A classical computer has a memory made up of bits, where each bit holds either a one or a zero. The device computes by manipulating those bits, i.e. by transporting these bits from memory to (possibly a suite of) logic gates and back. A quantum computer maintains a vector of qubits. A qubit can hold a one, or a zero, or a superposition of these. A quantum computer operates by manipulating those qubits, i.e. by transporting these bits from memory to (possibly a suite of) quantum logic gates and back.

In laymans terms — quantum computers can compute REALLY hard problems — and potentially problems which today’s supercomputers can’t touch. Check out more on D-Wave‘s website. And again, as aptly noted by Raven — Raymond Kurzweil’s evolutionary chart of computing power comes to mind (click the picture for a larger version).

Raven concludes his post by stating that he can’t wait to see how A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) evolves during his lifetime.

As for me, err … not so much – I’m hoping for at least a few more years before Skynet takes over. If we can just make it to 2025 (the estimated date for Human Brain Neural Stimulation), we can simply upload ourselves into a T-1000 and everything will be status quo.