h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

did i miss something?

tea? eh?

All the tea in China

(estimated to be, anyway.)

Information collected in a U.S. census must remain confidential for 72 years !!!

Information collected in a UK census remains classified for 100 years.

Unless it's sent in the post.

Or lost by HH Revenue and Customs.

I thought losing data in the post was a bit of a UK Custom in itself.

True

To save money, they probably sent the discs second class so they're bound to turn up after christmas

Bryan Singer has a cameo in Star Trek: Nemesis.

Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than through air.

The speed of light also varies depending on what it is passing through. I seem to recall from a recent edition of QI that the speed of light through sodium at umpteen degrees below zero is 38mph. So anybody with a car can travel faster than the speed of light.

Oh, yeah?... How fast can YOU drive your car through frozen sodium?

I'm not saying I'd be driving through frozen sodium, just that my car can travel faster than the speed of light.

so light doesn't travel so fast through solids....

i've heard if 'reinventing the wheel, but reinventing walls?

the scary thing is someone prolly got paid to do those experiments.

ftr, the speed of light is conventionally understood to be its speed thru a vacuum.

It wasn't solid sodium after all. It was an ultra-low pressure/temperature cloud of sodium atoms suspended magnetically.

38 MPH is the old low speed... they actually stopped, and RESTARTED light in 2001.

Fascinating stuff.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/01.24/01-stoplight.html

most of us stop and start light via a sodium medium every time we flick the light switch. *s*

on a serious note, the problem with quantum computing is that altho quantum particles are themselves information systems the inherent problem in using them as such is their unpredictability. by using light as the initiating and retrieval trigger, this unpredictability is (presumably) resolved. hence the concern in the article about ensuring all of the light is 'stored'. atm it is like breaking a 100 dollar note into smaller denominations and getting back 2 twenties and a 10. which would be fine if you knew which part(s) of the original 100 was missing.

This is all getting dangerously close to being useful.

Eight pieces of Extra Fusion bubble gum, when chewed up, can stretch from one side of my bedroom to the other.

I am about to email a link to that article to every single person in my address book.