Didn't investing in Goldman Sachs toxic assets contribute to their problems?

The problem in Greece seems to be an artificial scarcity of money imposed by the EU central bank and the IMF. The solution is to get out of the EU and stimulate individuals to innovate with a basic income, and challenges.

In Coursera's recent "Exploring Quantum Physics" class, Ian Applebaum talked about spin. If electrons spin like tops spin, you can calculate the minimum speed it must be spinning from the electron's charge, size, and magnetic field. The problem is that the minimum speed exceeds the speed of light.

More at http://www.askamathematician.com/2011/10/q-what-is-spin-in-particle-physics-why-is-it-different-from-just-ordinary-rotation/

The forums for the class are an excellent resource. Often other students can explain things better than the instructors, because the instructors are so familiar with the material they forget what is confusing about it to someone learning it.

The edx quantum computation class will be offered again, not sure when. The Coursera "Exploring Quantum Physics" class is finishing this week, but will likely be offered again.

There may be others, you can check coursera's and edx's sites...

Schroedinger was a mystic. Read some of his quotations about Nirvana and Hinduism at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger

Here's a sample:

The observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical system. And it might be better to reserve the term "subject" for the observing mind. ... For the subject, if anything, is the thing that senses and thinks. Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the "world of energy."

Another sample:

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

Another:

Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge... It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two "I"'s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents -- their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further... when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.

Andrew Cleland and Aaron O'Connell have recently done experiments putting a macroscopic object in a superpositional state.

O'Connell's PhD dissertation: http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/theses/OConnell2010.pdf

In O'Connell's words, from http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/v464/n7287/nature-2010-03-18.html:

the swing both swings back and forth and stays perfectly still at the same time.

In conclusion: 1) Schroedinger had mystical beliefs, which is relevant when you bring up his ulterior motives for the "cat" analogy; 2) modern experiments demonstrate superposition on a macroscopic scale.

I took the Berkeley Quantum Computation MOOC through Coursera, taught by Umesh Vazirani, twice. First time I maybe got half of what was in it (though I passed, barely); second time maybe 70% (again barely passing; homeworks and tests had mostly different problems). I learned to manipulate Hamiltonians in Octave to find their eigenvectors and eigenvalues, for example. So now I have a better sense of the math used to describe a superposition state, and I feel better informed about current models and ways of thinking about quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement.

The current Coursera MOOC "Exploring Quantum Physics" involves a lot more math. Most of it goes over my head, but still there are some basic concepts that I can grasp; and just seeing the math laid out is somewhat helpful to know what it looks like and have some sense of how it's being used.

In conclusion, the MOOCs on quantum computation/physics have helped me develop a better understanding of the mathematics behind the models. So I feel more informed than I was before, approaching the subject simply from a philosophical viewpoint. Yes, I'm a "N00B", but so was the poster I was replying to; now I'm a little less ignorant.

You can take a MOOC on quantum physics. No need to remain ignorant...

Let's change the politics of funding. Challenge the economic principles that require artificial scarcity of money. Dick Cheney was right when he said that Reagan proved deficits don't matter. Let's talk about that, not fall to fighting about who gets the scraps thrown to us, when there's plenty of food to go around and more where that came from.

My guess? Free will, since particles are not completely random but can be in states such as i/2|0> + sqrt(3)*i/2|1>.

Aaronson's language is so political. He seems to have rabbit ears, more concerned with what people are saying than what he's doing. The real question is why can't we explore both D-Wave's approach and "academic QC programs" in parallel? Economics is not a good reason; economics should serve the advance of knowledge, not throttle it.

"This particle collides with that one, causing the two to spin in opposite directions."

Hidden variable theory states the above; Bell's experiment was designed specifically to test it. Conclusion: Einstein was wrong; hidden variables don't exist.

Aaronson's selling cynicism. Wrapped in emotional language that uses caps for emphasis!

Why aren't you asking why those dogs and cats come to PETA in the first place?

There's a world market for about 6 computers.

You can describe magic with math too, and it starts to make a lot more sense.