The Binary Circumstance

I’ve been busy redesigning The Rational Foundation site.

Check it out.

Google has agreed to remove over 100,000 Viacom video clips from its YouTube site after negotiations with Viacom broke down.

MSNBC has an interesting take on the move, seeing Google as the ultimate victor.

The stock market doesn’t see it the same way, however. Google’s stock price has dropped about 7.7% over the past three days.

While I’m on the subject of alternative energy sources, I’d like to point to OtherPower.com, a site with lots of information on DIY alternative energy sources, including specific instructions on how to build your own wind turbine.

These guys even build homemade alternators that turn the rotation produced by blades into useful electrical energy. (Most people just try to make an old car alternator work.)

It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention and necessity is clearly how this group got into the business of off-the-grid energy production. From their home page:

We are a group of alternative energy enthusiasts who want to spread the message that It’s EASY to make your own power FROM SCRATCH! Otherpower.com’s headquarters is located in a remote part of the Northern Colorado mountains, 15 miles past the nearest power pole or phone line. All of our houses and shops run on only solar, wind, water and generator power…not because we are trying to make some sort of political or environmental statement, but because these are the only options available. And we refuse to move to town.

They also have an extensive links section which connects to dozens of other sites devoted to off-the-grid living and alternative power generation.

Jacob West describes the basic principles behind a quantum computer.

Physicist Christoph Boehme, assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah, has shown it is feasible to read data stored in the form of the magnetic “spins” of phosphorus atoms.

“Our work represents a breakthrough in the search for a nanoscopic [atomic scale] mechanism that could be used for a data readout device,” says Christoph Boehme, assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah. “We have demonstrated experimentally that the nuclear spin orientation of phosphorus atoms embedded in silicon can be measured by very subtle electric currents passing through the phosphorus atoms.”

The study by Boehme and colleagues in Germany will be published in the December issue of the journal Nature Physics and released online Sunday, Nov. 19.

“We have resolved a major obstacle for building a particular kind of quantum computer, the phosphorus-and-silicon quantum computer,” says Boehme. “For this concept, data readout is the biggest issue, and we have shown a new way to read data.”