Category: Current Events

I’ve been following the blog of Scott Aaronson, Shtetl-Optimized, for a while now — he’s a professor at MIT with research focusing on quantum computers and complexity theory. When he writes about his work, his descriptions are usually far too complex and technical for me to even begin to comprehend. For example, a week or so ago, one of his posts started off like this: “If the world ends today, at least it won’t do so without three identical photons having been used to sample from a probability distribution defined in terms of the permanents of 3×3 matrices, thereby demonstrating the Aaronson-Arkhipov BosonSampling protocol.” I think that was an apocalypse joke, but I can’t be positive. Anyway, I found Scott’s blog long

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Via Ezra Klein, “If Congress fails to renew the farm bill by Jan. 1, the country’s farm policy will revert back to laws dating from 1949. Government price supports for milk would rise significantly — and the cost of milk could rise by as much as $3 per gallon. Dairy doom!” “While we’re on the topic, though, it’s worth noting that milk has been growing steadily less popular in the United States for three decades now”: The post then goes on to discuss how milk has been losing out to other beverages, with one of it’s biggest competitors being bottled water. Given my uses of milk, which are mainly for coffee and cereal, I don’t see water being a reasonable substitute. But that’s just me.

My brother Ben just graduated from the Sound Design for Digital Media program at the Vancouver Film School. That means he’s really good at managing and executing the end to end sound design process for films and video games – everything from creating and recording sounds to mixing and post production work. If you’re still not sure what that really means, take a look at his final project. It’s awesome. He took a video game trailer, stripped away all of the sound, and recreated all new tracks from scratch. A couple highlights: those creature screams are pigs and sea otters, and the sizzling sound when the soldier steps on the smoking body is meat hitting a frying pan. Congrats Ben. Well done.

This is hysterical: