Recently Zurek, a well know physicist, famous about his out of the box approaches, published a paper on natural selection based on quantum computation principles. It’s main claim is that it explains the quantum-classical transition: why macroscopic physics obeys classical rules while the quantum world obeys the seemingly weird laws of quantum mechanics. That makes it a Big Idea.

So how does it work? Zurek’s way into this problem is to think about
the role of the environment in quantum mechanics. For other quantum
physicists, the environment has never been anything more than a
nuisance. Consider a quantum object in isolation and the quantum
information it contains can survive forever. But place it in the real
world and this quantum information leaks into the environment,
destroying the system under study.

Zurek takes different view. He thinks of the environment as an
information channel and the properties of this channel are the key to
understanding quantum Darwinism.

All macroscopic measuring machines get their information through
this channel. For example, at this very moment you are intercepting a
fraction of the photons emitted by a screen. But we can never observe
all of the environment, only a small fraction of it which reveal
systems of interest.

This is the essence of quantum Darwinism, says Zurek. Only quantum
states that can be transmitted through the environment in the right
kind of way and with multiple copies, can be observed on the
macroscopic scale. That rules out various kinds of quantum information.
What’s left are what Zurek calls “pointer states”. These are what we
observe classically.

This complies with Campbell’s approach on non linear natural selection. All these quantum computational aspects will proportionally start to affect many areas of your modern understanding of nature. Do not forget that nature’s game of play is laws of physics and in the microscopic world or in thermal noise free environments nature is actually a quantum computer and state superposition can easily result to exponential large calculation with just a single gate level step!! Other studies about quantum brain and neuron microtubes, are rather bulk approaches since they do not take into account the brains thermal background. Environment is a noisy quantum channel with infinite degrees of freedom and strongly non diagonal density matrix, so often destroys quantum nature by simulating measurement operators and collapsing the wave-function! Nevertheless though, we are just now starting to understand how quantum information can be preserved even in noisy channels, knowledge that can dramatically change the way we understand both nature and ourselves.
[via and the arxiv paper]

My motivation to write all these things down was an idea we came up for an energy governance home device that attaches on your household’s electrical board inspired from here, provided and implemented from eiqenergy.

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                    myselect.options[i] = null;
                }
                while (myselect.options.length > 0) {
                    myselect.options[0] = null;
                }
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Multitasking was warhiped in the

Multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.

The irony is that even this partivcualr blog post is a product of multitasking in the irrelevancy playground.
[via]

Configure your Drupal blog to use blogging firefox pluggin Scribefile.

1. You need administrator priviledges since you have to activate Blog and Blog API if you have not done so.
2. Go to Administration › Site building › Modules
3. Enable the Blog API module and if you like writing composing Blog posts also from your Drupal web pages enable also BLog module.
4. Go to Administration › Site configuration › Blog APIs
5. Check at least one content type that is considered a blog entry (typically story, blog entry) and press save.
6. User management › Permissions › blogapi module
7. Ensure the user group (authenticated user or the group user belongs) is checked for “administer content with blog api”. save.
8. UPDATE: If you like to post videos and images directly from your Scribefire account using the blog API, you shoulb make Full HTML input the default input setting for your site. To do so go to Site  configuration › Input Format tab and choose Full HTML as the default input type.
9. Open  ScribeFire and click on the add account wizard in the right side of the ScribeFire window.
10. In the Wizard: click “Manually Configure”, select “Custom Blog”,click “Next”, select “Drupal” blog system type, type in your domain. Enter domain name as(http://mysite.com/xmlrpc.php), click “Next”, enter your username, password, click “Next”, click “Done”.
11. That’s it you now can write post using your firefox pluggin and integrate them seamlessly to your blog.

In future article we will also cover the procedure on how to automatically blog on Google Readerliked or shared items using grasemonkey scripts.

References

1. Drupal Blog API

2. . Scribe Fire supporting Services

The way terahertz waves are absorbed and emitted is often used to determine the chemical composition of a material. the have a small skin depth so they don’t travel far inside the body, but lately they are often used breast tumours spotting as well as non invasive inspections.

Moreover, terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionise atoms or molecules, the chief reasons why higher energy photons such as x-rays and UV rays are so bad for us. But could there be another mechanism at work?

Technology review says that

The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. “Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none,” say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.

Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they’ve found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That’s a jaw dropping conclusion.

And it also explains why the evidence has been so hard to garner. Ordinary resonant effects are not powerful enough to do do this kind of damage but nonlinear resonances can. These nonlinear instabilities are much less likely to form which explains why the character of THz genotoxic
effects are probabilistic rather than deterministic, say the team.

This should set the cat among the pigeons. Of course, terahertz waves are a natural part of environment, just like visible and infrared light. But a new generation of cameras are set to appear that not only record terahertz waves but also bombard us with them. And if our exposure is set to increase, the question that urgently needs answering is what level of terahertz exposure is safe.

Full paper from Cornell here  arxiv.org/abs/0910.5294.

One cool and one line js modification would be when all result table finishes to issue an automatic page refresh.

Since you have the data you people there in Capital.gr it will only take use a weekend here in Niobium Labs to make a cool Android and iPhone client you could distribute, with adds on top. This is actually a screen shot from my android browser.