One of the strangest things about the hexagon is that other gas giants don't see to have anything like it. And it rotates with the same period as Saturn's natural radio emissions, which is not the period of rotation of Saturn itself. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/247/4947/1206. Also, relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1930.

When Nelson Mandela turned 70 there was quite a bit of coverage in the news here. He was still in jail, so I called Cape Town information, got the number, phoned the jail and left a message ("Happy Birthday!") for him.

The man who answered the phone sounded like he'd been on the phone a lot that day. He was also very careful to take down my name and where I was calling from. I suspect that until the government changed there would have been little point in trying to get a visa to visit South Africa...

...laura

The technology to autonomously deliver payloads with high accuracy has been around for a long time. I remember years ago people staring wide-eyed when I pointed out that the same technology that delivers bombs could be adapted to deliver more useful things like food and medical supplies. And now goodies from Amazon & Co.

As a pilot I wonder about the aeronautical issues. The authorities are clearly up in the air on the subject (pun intended... :-) as well. I hope they can find some good answers.

...laura

A question that comes up a lot is if Delicas do so well in Canada, why didn't Mitsubishi sell them here at the time?

My answer: all Mitsubishi products in Canada at the time were captive imports, sold as Dodge products (e.g. Dodge Colt). Would you still want one if it said "Dodge" on it?

Mitsubishi sold a 2 wheel drive gas-engine L300 in the U.S.A. as the Mitsubishi Vanwagon. They were largely ignored at the time, and are pretty well extinct now.

...laura

Here in B.C. we had a stink a few years ago over privately imported vehicles from Japan. Under Canadian law you can privately import anything you like if it's over 15 years old, and in the mid-noughties a lot of interesting vehicles started to turn 15. Since they are essentially worthless in Japan, but well looked-after, they're a bargain for anybody who wants a used car. Japan has made a major industry of exporting their used cars. Unlike many other jurisdictions, cars with the steering wheel on the "wrong" side are road-legal here.

The car dealers threw a fit. They claimed that right-hand drive vehicles were the enemy of all that is free and right and holy, but were never to adequately explain why. I wondered why they were concerned about their ability to compete with 15 year old used cars. Again, they were never able to adequately explain why.

It's died down. For now. But you never know what they're going to try next.

I bought a 1992 Mitsubishi L300 Delica in 2007. I love it. A touch expensive to run, but ridiculously practical and it will go anywhere with shift-on-the-fly 4WD. It also has a delightfully quirky style.

...laura

So, aside from the issues already pointed out (you weren't running a 600 hp car), it is worth noting that actually a lot of older cars really were terribly unsafe to the point where we'd likely find them unacceptable for large-scale modern use. The technology has been steadily improving. The likelyhood that you will die car in accident in the US has been going down since the late 1960s, and that's even as the amount of driving per a person has gone up. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year for example.

My bank card PIN is four digits. It's not the year I was born, nor is it any other year (or other four-digit number, for that matter) that you will find in my personal information.

For computer passwords I like the "first letter of a phrase" algorithm, producing passwords like TbontbTitQ and MRwiTDtESSahtuwws. Or pick a phrase, l33t it up a bit, and come up with something like W1nd0ze1sTehSux0r3. Long passwords are good.

The worst public web site I've encountered for silly password requirements is U.S. Customs eAPIS, which you use to send your information if you're going to fly privately to the U.S.A. Not only does it enforce silly password requirements, it doesn't tell you about them until after you have typed in your new password and it tells you why your password sucks. Yes, I end up writing them down.

...laura

Without decent battery life a portable gadget is useless. My cellphone (Samsung) is starting to show its age in this department.

Some years ago I bought a Palm Tungsten to play with. I thought I might be able to come up with some interesting programs for it with the open-source development toolchain, and I did. Except that its battery life was pathetic. I tossed it when I cleaned house last year...

...laura

Well, let's see, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have both been heavily involved in massive charity to the developing world, especially in regards to malaria. Apparently some billionaires are more than willing to do so without having guns pointed at them. And then there's the Giving Pledge http://givingpledge.org/ where a group of wealthy philanthropists have committed to giving most of their wealth to charity. That motivation is clearly partially out of peer pressure. So apparently peer pessure and empathy both work to get billionaires to listen, which is just like how normal people work. Imagine that. Of course, none of this is at all relevant to the issue at an, since neither assisted suicide laws nor the vast majority of our other laws are decided on by billionaires.

It's as simple as that.

I live in an apartment building. I've discussed the matter with the building management but we haven't come up with an answer. While new buildings must have electrical hookups for electric cars, there is no incentive to retrofit old buildings.

...laura

At this point, we have a pretty good understanding of using genetics to estimate roughly when two populations diverged. If we find such life, we can first test if it at all resembles Earth life. If it does (in the sense that it uses most of the same amino acids, and uses similar machinery for DNA and replicating DNA), then we should be able to get a rough estimate of when it separated from Earth life based on how genetically different it is. There will be some difficulty with this sort of technique, since the life on alien worlds may be subject to extreme selection pressures, but that should be something we can roughly account for.

On the contrary, if you talk to the people who are doing this, many of them acknowledge that something might not work, and they are eager for that because it would be a glimpse of new physics. At this point, we know that the Standard Model isn't all there is, but we don't know exactly where it breaks down. If we can set up what should be fully functioning quantum computers and then they don't do what we want, that will be Nobel Prize level discoveries by itself. As to your last bit, I don't know what you mean by "failing to take into account the effects of the outside world"- if anything quantum mechanical demonstrations generally require very careful consideration of external effects, because superposition breaks down very easily when contact with outside objects occurs. As to the claim that there's any sort of "cloak" or "thick armor of complexity"-most of the math involved doesn't require anything beyond linear algebra, but it is worth considering that somethings in life have complicated math because they are genuinely complicated.

Actually, this does not follow either. Right now it is open if BQP (the set of decision problems solveable by a quantum computer in polynomial time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP) lives in the polynomial hierarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PH_(complexity). Most complexity classes we care about live between P and NP, but it turns out that PH (a class believed to be much larger than even NP) will also collapse to P if P=NP, so there are larger complexity classes that also collapse if P=NP. However, it is open as to whether BQP lives in PH. So it is consistent with what we know now for it to be true that P=NP but BQP != P. That would be a weird situation, but possible.

But we have gotten quantum mechanics to work well on single particles. There have been many experiments involving individual electrons or individual photons (fewer with photons since it is very difficult to send out a single photon). Moreover, this actually misses what quantum computers rely on: they aren't relying on the behavior of the individual particle as much as on the entangled state, exactly where you seem to think that the statistics works well. You may also want to look into Boson Sampling http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/optics.pdf a very neat process which lets us verify in a very controlled setting that quantum systems can be used to compute classically difficult stuff. For small numbers of photons, Boson Sampling has been verified to do exactly this in experimental contexts: http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v7/n7/full/nphoton.2013.102.html

No one is saying that we should "depend" on it. And there are serious physicists and mathematicians who do doubt that these systems will ever work, but most of that concern is practical: that the fundamental difficulties involved are just too big to ever scale to practical sizes.

That you can "get away" with something isn't a reason to do it. And if your career isn't in theoretical physics, computer science, math, or particle physics, then that's all the more reason you shouldn't throw out controversial statements as gospel when they likely are wrong. There's a massive difference between "We should consider if maybe X is true" and "X is true."

So, the result for encryption may not be that large, but that's by far not the only thing that people want to use quantum computers for. They can be used to optimize a number of problems that show up in real world conditions, and do quantum simulations for chemistry where actually observing the reactions in detail would be too difficult.