Driven by joy

staghunts:

“This one is very serious, guys:

I came upon these two on the sidewalk. They were having a conversation. “Excuse me,” I said, addressing the girl: “I’m sorry to interrupt, but is there anyway I can take your photo?”

“Why would you want my photo?” she asked.

“Because you look beautiful,” I said. And she did. She was Sudanese. There is a very distinct beauty among people from the Sudan, and she was filled up with it. Suddenly the man cut in: 

“I was just telling her she was beautiful,” he said. 

Naively, I assumed I had just walked up on one stranger giving a compliment to another. I wanted to capture the moment. “Let me take your photograph together,” I said. The man seemed reluctant, he started smiling nervously and inching away. But the girl called him back. 

“Come take a picture with me,” she said. Encouraged by her attention, he returned. She put her arm around him, and I took the photo.

As I examined the photos on my camera, the man started whispering to the girl. She answered him in a loud voice: “I told you! I’m not that kind of girl.” She seemed agitated now. Finally sensing that I had misread the situation, I stepped between them. The man began hurrying down the sidewalk.

When the man left, the girl’s demeanor changed completely. She seemed shaken. Her eyes were tearing up. “He just offered me five hundred dollars to go out with him,” she said. “And then when I said ‘no,’ he offered me one thousand. Why does this always happen to me?”

“It happens a lot?” I asked.

“All the time,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m getting emotional. I just can’t go out of my house without this kind of thing happening. I have a son. I’m a mother. I would never degrade myself like that. I just don’t understand why this keeps happening.”

“Do you mind if I tell this story?” I asked.

“Please,” she said. “Tell it.”

Let’s hope this man, and all men, realize the emotional damage they are inflicting on the women they try to buy. In the meantime, feel free to SHARE.*

Dear Tumblr, fuck you for trying to erase this. 

quantumaniac:

New Space Company May Solve World’s Economic Problems

This Tuesday, a group of billionaires and former NASA scientists will announce Planetary Resources Inc., the first asteroid mining company in history. They claim they will “add trillions of dollars to the global GDP” and “help ensure humanity’s prosperity.”

The group of investors and scientists on board this enterprise is impressive:

…including Google’s Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ph.D.; film maker & explorer James Cameron; Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect Charles Simonyi, Ph.D.; Founder of Sherpalo and Google Board of Directors founding member K. Ram Shriram; and Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group Ross Perot, Jr.

Harnessing the resources of asteroids is not a crazy proposition and the return of investment could be amazing. So much that they are convinced they can “add trillions of dollars to the global GDP.” More importantly, this may solve many of our material needs as resources on Earth keep dwindling fast.

But is it doable? There are no details yet, but if they are going to invest millions of dollars on it, you can be sure it is doable and it will be profitable. They don’t have to travel to the asteroid belt to grab them. There are many passing near Earth that may be accessible. In fact, there are already plenty of plans on scientists and engineers’ drafting boards.

Needless to say, and despite the fact that it will probably take some years to achieve their goals, this is all extremely exciting. If they are successful, it will truly be a new dawn for humanity.

We will be covering the press conference live, which will feature Charles Simonyi, Planetary Resources, Investor; Eric Anderson, Co-Founder & Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources; Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Co-Founder & Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources; Chris Lewicki, President & Chief Engineer, Planetary Resources; Tom Jones, Ph.D., Planetary Scientist, Veteran NASA Astronaut & Planetary Resources, Inc. Advisor.

It will be held in the Museum of Flight in Seattle on Tuesday, April 24 at 10:30am PDT.

(Source: Gizmodo)

quantumaniac:

The Quantum Internet is Born

“Years from now it may be said that the quantum Internet was born today.” Of course, the quantum internet is just in the baby stages now - but when it matures, it will be able to process ridiculous amounts of data at blaring speed, and never be hacked. The system, developed by physicists Stephan Ritter and Gerhard Rempe at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, has two nodes. Although this is small, the internet you’re on right now started in the 1960s in a similar process. 

This first quantum network was built by utilizing two atoms of rubidium which exchange photons. Each atom is placed inside an individual ‘room’ with highly reflective mirrors surrounding it, and at a short distance from its sister atom. These rooms, called optical cavities, are connected by an optical fiber. 

First, scientists aim a laser at the first rubidium atom, which induces an emission of a single photon. That photon travels  along the optical fiber to the other optical cavity, containing the other atom. Thanks to the mirrors, the photon bounces off the mirrors thousands of times, and is absorbed by the atom upon collision. This absorption transmits information about the first atom’s quantum state - and voila, a transfer of information. 

The two rubidium atoms were entangled beforehand, which effectively means that they were linked together. During entanglement (read more about entanglement here), certain properties of the atoms are linked, and measuring one instantaneously produces the same result in the other atom. During this experiment, the atoms were entangled for 100 microseconds - a long time in quantum physicists. Entanglement what renders any form of hacking impossible - as soon as a would-be hacker tapped into the quantum network, the quantum states of the atoms would no longer match up. 

This is the first step towards something great. 

Read the press release.