Hopefully Interesting

I recently realized something about solar power and  smart electrical grids  and I feel sort of stupid for not realizing it earlier.  But rather than stew in shame I should probably share it with all of you since I expect most of my readers, not having had the benefit of working at Ember, have no idea what a smart grid is. But first, solar power.  For a while now the prices of solar cells has been plummeting .  Not with the outstanding reliability of Moore's law but at a fearsome rate nonetheless.  Which is really awesome in terms of reducing carbon use!  But there's a problem.  Solar energy only works when the sun is shining.  At night, there's no solar energy at all so you need to run some other sort of electrical generation to keep things running.  You still have to build enough non-solar infrastructure that you can keep things going even at night. But there's an even worse problem.  It can take up to an hour to spin up a con...

I recentlyish finished Scott Aaronson's  Quantum Computing Since Democritus .  I enjoyed it quite a bit and it managed to explain some things very well.  One of those things was Quantum teleportation - something I've seen mentioned in the popular science press time and again but which always seems to be conveyed very badly. Before I get to that explanation, though, I'm going to have to explain two things first: qubits and the no-cloning theorem.  Qubits or Quantum bits are the quantum version of classical bits.  Imagine that if a regular bit is an arrow that can point to the left or to the right to represent 1 or 0 a qubit is an arrow that can point in any direction.  That's totally misleading in all sorts of ways but it will work well enough for the rest of this post.  I'm here to explain quantum teleportation after all. If you have a regular bit you can do a lot of things with it.  For instance you can copy it.  This very blog post, com...