Did You Know…?

A few topics from CNN.com that I found interesting and how it relates to my life:

First, the one that my students don’t have a comment on.  There’s an article discussing how teleportation is possible, just not in the way that you think.  The basics are that teleportation of information is possible in a quantum sense (quantum meaning “world of atomic particles and smaller” for you non-sciency types) but not Star Trek teleportation.  So, while we may one day soon have incredible super-computers in labs if not our homes, we will not be beamed from one place to another.  Not only does that have physical problems bordering on impossibilities, but it’s not ethically sound either.  Weird, right?  I mean, who ever thought teleporting would be an ethical issue.  To me, it’s the same as cloning.  Let me explain.  In order to teleport, there are two possibilities.  One way is to break you apart into your constituent atoms and then send them to another place, only to be put back together in the same exact way.  Trillions of atoms need to be moved to a remote location and then put back exactly in the same spot.  Good luck with that.  The second way would be to copy the exact location of each atom and send that information to a remote location, where a mass of atoms would be rearranged to be you.  A facsimile of you.  I call it a clone.  Either way, it isn’t you anymore, it’s just a copy of you.  I’m sorry, but the chances that tens of millions of your atoms (less than 1%) show up in the wrong place is just too great for me to entertain this idea.  Try taking a chunk of your lung and putting it in your foot, or in Idaho for that matter.  Either way it’s of no use to you anymore.

Back to the computing part, this teleportation of information takes away the problem of data storage.  It’s strange stuff, but apparently increasingly practical.  Instead of storing info on bits (0 or 1) like current computers, the atoms can store info in multiple states at the same time.  The article puts it this way:  current computers can store 300 pieces of info on 300 bits.  These computers can store 2^300 (that’s two multiplied by two…three hundred times) in the same space.  That gets rid of any computer hard drive problems.

Here’s the next article, and it really hits home.  Here’s what I overhear every once in a while.  “Did you know the world is going to end in 2012?”  Holy crap?!  It is?  Good thing I know now.  I have a good amount of time to live my life before we all go.  The problem is that it’s the same crazy, headline-grabbing, conspiracy-theorist believing crap as Y2K.  Remember how terrible that was?  No?  Didn’t you hear that all the computers on Earth failed because the calendar wouldn’t switch to the year 2000?  All the planes crashed and nuclear missiles were launched by mistake.

Same deal here.  If you haven’t heard of the 2012 situation, here it is quickly.  Hundreds of years ago, the Mayans (masters of astronomy) were obsessed with time.  They had amazingly specific calendars for many different cycles.  One such calendar was called the Long Count calendar, and, just like we went from 2008 to 2009 a month ago, that calendar is set to turn from 12 to 13 in 2012.  Specifically December 21st.  Whenever a nice round number changes on the calendar, people like to think the end of the world is coming.  This calendar cycle is 5126 years long, and that’s pretty impressive.  Here’s where the paranoia sets in: The Maya apparently saw the end of this calendar as a time of transformation.  They do not say what type of transformation.  So, because people are crazy, it’s become apocalyptic death transformation!  Kinda like this article (sorry, had to work it in somehow).

There’s a whole lot of debate as to what this date coincides with (winter solstice, solar flair maximums, aligning the Earth with the center of the solar system, etc.) and a whole lot of books written about it.  I read the book Apocalypse 2012 by Lawrence Joseph that’s mentioned in the article.  If you are interested in the whole ordeal and what it may mean, I think he does a good job explaining.  I also read a book called 2013: The End of Days or a New Beginning.    That book was an embarrassment.  It read like a high school students’ semi-researched/semi-fiction report complete with typos and quotes from Wikipedia.  The premise of that book was that lots of bad things could happen, but what if it happened in 2012?  I almost threw it away but couldn’t because of the stupidity and entertainment factor.  At one point, it was quoting some proclamation of the UN and wrote  that one goal was to decrease child morality, I guess instead of mortality?  That’s a pretty big difference in my mind.

My students don’t bother to look into these ideas (like I decide to do so I can tell them how wrong they are educate them on topics they are interested in) and like to spout off things like “the world’s gonna end in 2012″.  I guess I see it as my duty to know about these things so I can dispel rumors, hype, and generally bad information that they believe.  I guess after 2012, there’ll be a new end of the world scenario to deal with.  Maybe a Kurdish profit?