All posts by NerdDad

Quantum Computing and Wave-Particle Duality

First, I salute those who got past the headline and are now reading this.

Sara has requested our comments on an article on how a Quantum computer gives results without running at Science News Online. I am not a physicist, but as I understand it, the author is playing semantic tricks on you, the reader.

Wave-Particle Duality is the quantum mechanical term for saying that any given particle (such as the photons mentioned in the article) is also a probability wave, which can travel in multiple directions at once until it is nailed down by an observer (in this case, the computer itself). This means that a single photon is both going through the computer and around it. While it will never appears to do both (the probability wave collapses on observation), it’s not exactly true to say that if the photon is observed to have gone around the computer, it didn’t also go through it as well.

Fun stuff. Later I’ll post why wave-particle duality will always have a special place in my heart.

Why are we homeschooling?

Many reasons. Here’s a few. If most college students

could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school,

then we can stop teaching our kids at about 9 years old!

Cool hosting deal

I just got a year-long domain hosting at DreamHost for 9 bucks!!

  1. Go To DreamHost
  2. Click on the One-Year Pre-Payment button for the Crazy Domain Insane package
  3. On step 5 of the registration enter 777 into the special promotions box

Get ’em while their hot! The best part is that it supports Ruby on Rails, which is a cool new web framework that I’m just now learning.