> Normally, all stable materials are found in their minimum energy states—that is, of all possible configurations of their atoms and molecules, the material settles into the state that requires the least energy to maintain itself. But for a given chemical structure, there may be other possible configurations the material could potentially have, except that they are suppressed by the dominant, lowest-energy state.

> By knocking out that dominant state with light, maybe those other states can be realized," Gedik says. And because the new states appear and disappear so quickly, "you can turn them on and off," which may prove useful for some information processing applications.

And that's how the universe suddenly ended, via bubble nucleation from a false vacuum state to a true vacuum state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

...I wonder if they teach evolutionary algorithms?

When I was a kid I started with Logo. It was pretty good because you got direct visual graphical feedback from your code. Today, I would go with Flash's ActionScript3 for that same reason. You can import graphical resources with a UI and manipulate location, rotation etc., easily with code.

Alas, it is proprietary though.

... is that we live within a bounded system yet have a financial structure that requires endless growth to sustain itself.
It is worse than broken, it is fundamentally flawed. We must acknowledge this before we can rebuild anew, sustainably.

First we will throw heaps of money at a problem that cannot be solved by throwing heaps of money. I wonder, how long can the fed keep the treadmill of compound interest and fiat currency going? It can't last forever. When they no longer are able, the public questions the value of the dollar (it represents future production, of which we have little remaining), and inflation hits... then perhaps it will be time to start anew.

P.S. I also highly recommend Martenson's crash course, link above... a wonderful series.