Chihuahua in a Cup. Not!Who needs Sea Monkeys anyway?by Ian Shoales One of the greatest disappointments of my life was discovering that Sea Monkeys were not monkeys at all, but little tiny shrimp. They don't wear crowns, or smoke pipes, or smile, or do tricks. They just swim around aimlessly in murky water until they disintegrate. You can't even use them for bait. This disappointment definitely colored my worldview. Thereafter, whenever I came across an amazing offer on television or the back pages of a comic book, I would snort derisively and clutch my allowance. Chihuahua in a teacup? Fat chance. X-ray specs? In your dreams. A Ginsu Knife that cuts through tomatoes and concrete with equal ease? Right. Internet revolution? I say it's retail, and I say the hell with it. Feats of AnnihilationI greet every so-called marvel with a grain of salt so large a herd of cattle could lick it for a year, turning my meager needs for amazement to gloom and doom scenarios. Lucky for me, the recent proliferation of tidy acronyms such as WMD (weapons of mass destruction), NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical), and GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics), have given birth to an entire host of new, amazing possibilities — the kind that could obliterate us totally. GNR, for example, could give us gray goo. Here's the definition (taken from The Jargon Dictionary, www.info.astrian.net/jargon): "A hypothetical substance composed of sagans of submicron-sized self-replicating robots, programmed to make copies of themselves out of whatever is available ... the entire biosphere of Earth being eventually converted to robot goo." Gray goo is as close a description as any of what Sea Monkey water turns into when left in a jar for six months or so, although I never considered it life-threatening. Then last spring I read a review ("A Shortcut Through Time, Quantum Weirdness," The New York Times, April 6, 2003) of a new book by George Johnson that attempts to explain quantum computing. Here's how it works: Quanta defy traditional physics (being able to spin in opposite directions simultaneously). As such, an atom can act as a switch in a quantum computer, with clockwise spin meaning off and counterclockwise spin meaning on. Thus, a single spinning atom can represent 0 and 1 at the same time. A row of 10 such quantum bits, or 'qubits,' could store not just one number between zero and 1,023, but all of these numbers simultaneously. Things Get StickyYou can, by zapping our row of 10 spinning atoms with a laser gun, do a computation on all 1,024 numbers at a single stroke. Think of how awesome it would be: A single molecule of 13 atoms strung together, too tiny to see with a microscope, could outpace Blue Mountain, the supercomputer covering a quarter of an acre and used at Los Alamos National Laboratory to simulate nuclear explosions. Again, this is probably amazing. And super teeny! One of the descriptions of a quantum computer in Johnson's book is a "computer in a cup of coffee.'' Say, wait a minute ... a computer in a cup? Is that like a chihuahua in a cup? I suppose you need X-ray specs to see these so-called qubits as well? That'll cost you another two bucks right there, in addition to the $40 trillion it will take to develop the quantum computer in the first place. And isn't a laser just a Ginsu Knife made out of light? Darn, I was almost suckered again. These quanta, they're very, very small aren't they? Right. I say they're Sea Monkeys, and I say the hell with them. Ian Shoales lives in San Francisco with a mass of gray goo that has been trained to do simple tricks.
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