Don't end up like me; take online nanotech courses

Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is offering two new nanoscience courses on its OpenCourseWare site: Advanced Solid State Physics and Quantum Information Processing.

While I am certain my readers can take advantage of these free online courses, it all sounds too difficult for an undereducated writer like me.

Just this morning, I learned that I left my kids' lunchboxes at their preschool and I had failed to properly read a bottle of baby soap, mistaking it for baby lotion -- thus drying out my two young sons' skin even more during this cold winter.

Quantum information processing? I'd be happy with any information processing in my 43-year-old, ancient senile brain.

Backgrounder
Nanotech for undergrads
High School Nails Nano
Penn State's Little Recruiting Video

Quantum self-loathing

Now, here's one way to annoy yourself in lots of little (quantum) ways: Let's say you're an atom. Are you with me here? You are an atom, just doing your atom thing. And one way that you are just being you is that, under certain situations, you can actually be in two places at once. This often comes in handy when your kid needs his nose wiped upstairs, but the second-to-last episode of "The Sopranos" is on TV downstairs.

Well, scientists have now not only placed atoms in two places at once, but they managed to stick them close enough together that they interfere with one another.

In other words: Here you are, face-to-face with yourself, and you find that you really don't like what you see, so you start really f---king with one another. And who else but you would know how to insult you so it really hurts?

Oh, and there's some application here to quantum computing. Read about the breakthrough here, and quantum computing here.

Backgrounder
Jim Carrey and Conan talk quantum physics II
A sneak peak at next week's quantum leap
Einstein's dice and the nano Sopranos
Zeno, nano and quantum cwaziness

A sneak peak at next week's quantum leap

Thanks to nanotech venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, we get a sneak peak at the core of a new quantum computer, which will be lovingly unveiled a day before Valentine's Day -- Feb. 13. Yes, you read that correctly. There is real work going on in the mind-boggling multiverse of quantum computing, where a shave and a haircut can cost anywhere from one to 65,536 bits (or qubits) at the same time.

I remember when Jurvetson's firm first invested in D-Wave Systems Inc. back in 2003. I was news editor at Small Times back then, and we just ran a brief on it because even we -- who had chugged the nano Kool-Aid -- found it difficult to believe that a quantum computer would be anywhere close to commercialization.

I also remember my surprise at Jurvetson's investment, since he has long maintained that while he's a believer in the long-term promise of molecular nanotechnology, come to him for money only if there's a short-term commercialization plan.

I should know better than to doubt Steve Jurvetson, who consistently proves the truth of a phrase credited to Alan Kay, whose work at the Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s can be traced directly to the computer revolution of a decade later. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Or, in Jurvetson's case, to fund it.

Backgrounder:
Einstein's dice and the nano Sopranos