Month: March 2018

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Giving people a hands-on experience might be one of the best ways to drive acceptance of a new and potentially scary, unfamiliar technology. Talk to anyone trying to sell electric cars and they'll tell you the easiest way to do that is with a 10-minute test drive, after all. That's a large part of the reasoning behind a plan to bring self-driving cars to Washington, DC. What made this particular proposal particularly interesting to me—someone who writes about autonomous cars on an almost daily basis—is that the idea would bring them to my actual neighborhood here in the nation's capital.

It's all down to the Southwest Business Improvement District, which recently issued the request for information in partnership with the mayor's office. (BIDs are nonprofit organizations that work with businesses to improve local communities and are relatively common here in the District.) But this isn't a proposal to turn Southwest DC into an East Coast version of Phoenix, with hundreds of autonomous vehicles testing all over the place. Nor is it asking for applications to launch a robotaxi service—at least not yet.

Rather, the idea is to use a particularly low-traffic stretch of 10th St SW, also known as L'Enfant Plaza—which runs between the National Mall and a new massive development on the waterfront—to present this developing technology to city residents and workers, as well as the vast hordes of tourists that come to visit the monuments and museums.

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When it comes to quantum mechanics, I try to avoid writing about purely theoretical results. This is especially true of quantum computing, where, in the not-too-distant past, every researcher and their dog would put their names to papers describing a new way to make a quantum computer. Then people started playing with the real thing, and suddenly the theory-side held fewer attractions. But every now and again, one of these ideas makes me mash my hands on the keyboard.

Today, it's Rydberg atoms and how to make a quantum computer from them. It's a bit far-fetched but, given the detail of the calculations, probably something that will turn up in a couple of years. And when it turns up, it will not be like previous quantum computers, which started testing with one or two qubits. A Rydberg computer should start out at 10-12 qubits.

Rydberg atoms again?

I recently reported on a story about how atoms could be trapped within a Rydberg atom. In that article, I described what a Rydberg atom is. Let me repeat myself here:

Unlike most politicians, Trump has actually appeared in video games, including 2006's The Apprentice.

Among the critics who will be present are Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who through his Killology Research Group has made a career of suggesting video games and other violent media are desensitizing young people to violence. The title of his book Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing summarizes his position on the issue quite succinctly.

Brent Bozell, the founder of the Parents Television Council interest group, will also attend the meeting along with council member Melissa Henson. The council has pushed for laws restricting the sale of violent and sexual games to minors, and reacted negatively to the 2011 Supreme Court case mooting such laws. "I wonder if Justice Kagan would still argue in public that these games are blameless, and the Adam Lanzas of the world are never influenced by these 'iconic' works [like Mortal Kombat]," Bozell wrote in 2013, referring to the shooter in the Newtown Elementary School shooting.