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Pastimes : Let's Build a School to Start the New Year! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FJB who wrote (148)	1/18/2001 9:25:43 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 198

Bob, I just received this book today. Fantastic pictures! amazon.com $50 retail price, $40 at Amazon.....$13.95 at allbooks4less.com as incredible as it may seem. Brian

To: FJB who wrote (148)	1/20/2001 9:45:11 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 198

Thought this may be of interest to you: Stopping light could lead to quantum advance in computing By Sandeep Junnarkar Staff Writer, CNET News.com January 19, 2001, 3:35 p.m. PT Two teams of scientists have accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of trapping and stopping light--an achievement that could lead to major advances in quantum computing. The experiments were conducted by two teams working independently of each other in Cambridge, Mass. One team was led by Lene Hau of Harvard University and the Rowland Institute of Science, the other by Ronald Walsworth and Mikhail Lukin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Just a few years ago, Hau brought the speed of light down to a manageable 30 meters per second, much slower than its normal 300 million meters per second, according to Seth Lloyd, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose focus is on building quantum computers. More recently, the two teams brought light to a halt by shining a pulse of light into a chamber of gas in which the beam got slower and slower and dimmer and dimmer before coming to a stop with the help of a technique dubbed electromagnetically induced transparency. Hua's group used chilled sodium gas to act as a parachute, while Walsworth's team used gaseous rubidium, an alkaline metal element. The light, composed of particles called photons, essentially lost its zing as the information from the photons was transferred into the spin inherent in the gas atoms. Once paused, it could then be revived to its usual speed of 186,000 miles per second. The achievement has sparked renewed enthusiasm among advocates of quantum computing. "It is easy to send a photon from one place to another, but catching it at the other end is what is really hard," Lloyd said. "This is a beautiful way of catching bits stored on light and storing them in a medium. I think it puts us considerably forward in our schedule in building more powerful quantum computers and the quantum Internet." Traditional drives in today's computers store data in terms of zeros and ones, with different combinations and strings of zeros and ones representing information. "The problem with classical computers is that they can be zero or one only at a given moment," said Ben Stein, a senior science writer at the American Institute of Physics. "Quantum computers would use particles that act as a zero or one at the same time, giving them the ability to perform many, many calculations in parallel, while classic computers could only look at one possibility." Physicists envision a quantum computer could perform calculations that are exponentially faster than any computer now available, cracking the toughest encryption code in a matter of seconds and searching massive databases in a fraction of the time it takes today. A top-notch quantum computer can process data in 7- or 8-bit chunks and perform a few thousand operations. "That sounds pretty pathetic, but just five years ago we had a 2-bit computer on which we could do just one operation, and seven years ago, it had no bits at all," Lloyd said. "It would be irresponsible to speculate when we could have even more powerful quantum computers based on these developments, but this is really going to help." Lloyd said that one of the hardest things in quantum computing is the transfer of information from light to atoms. Making light stand still so it can be looked at and manipulated will "be quite useful in building quantum computers." Both MIT and Caltech are trying to build communication applications based on quantum physics, such as a quantum Internet that would have little quantum computers attached to each other with fiber optics sending and receiving information using photons. Hau's experiment will be published in the journal Nature, and Walsworth's work will appear in the Physical Review Letters.

To: FJB who wrote (148)	1/25/2001 1:39:36 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 198

OT From the Kathmandu Post: It’s only five years and Nepalis have turned web crazy By Binaj Gurubacharya KATHMANDU, Jan 24 - Nepal has gone web crazy. There are hundreds if not thousands of sites on Nepal and many of them are all home made. There used to be time when the site - www.south-asia.com - was the only site managed and hosted by a Nepali company. Mercantile Communications first began the site in 1995. It contained news from The Kathmandu Post and other important information about the country. This was a revolutionary move that gave Nepali students and those working abroad a means to keep in touch with their homeland. For potential visitors to Nepal, it was a way to browse through this interactive electronic catalogue, where information was practically just a click away and right at the users’ fingertips. Five years later, a search for the word "Nepal" on popular search engines like Yahoo or Google would show thousands and thousands of web addresses. The over one dozen Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country and many web page designers have flooded the world wide web with sites on Nepal. From sites like www.kantipuronline.com or www.nepalnews.com that offer serious reading like news, current events and features, to fun sites like www.thisiskathmandu.com or www.boyfriend.com.np, there are choices to fit any mood and occasion. Domestic portals like www.nepalonline.org or www.nepalonline.net, offer seas of information on Nepal for people both at home and abroad. Be it about movies being screened at theatres in the capital city or the latest happenings in town, these portal have updates for the home users. The news sites have been a boon to all home Internet users, giving them the luxury of accessing news and reading them in their own free time. With other types of electronic media like radio and television, one does not have to wait for the broadcast but can just tap the computer and get the latest news. Travel sites like www.travel-nepal.com or www.nepal.com offer wide range of information to travelers, be it trekking, mountaineering or just a vacation in the foothills of the Himalayas. Travel web sites in fact are the most popular ones, giving potential visitors easy access to information and even photographs of the mountains and other places of interest in Nepal that for years have made this Himalayan nation a popular vacation destination. Hotels and travel/trekking agents now have the chance to show off what they have to offer in an much cheaper and convenient way as the cost of both accessing and hosting web sites plunged over the past few years. Web sites are no longer a luxury but rather a necessity these businesses now can not do without. On the fun side of these sites, www.she.com.np or www.glamour.com.np offer information on the latest fashion, makeup tips, magazines, skincare tips and even perfumes available. www.boyfriend.com.np and soon www.girlfriend.com.np give Romeos and Juliets a platform to meet, chat and exchange their love stories or just send plain electronic greeting cards. www.cards.com.np is our own local site that offer electronic greeting cards that can be sent via the Internet. From birthday cards, to new year’s cards or Valentine’s day cards or card to just say "I am sorry" for hurting someone’s feeling or just to say "I love you" - these electronic cards work wonders. To order pizza right at your doorstep or movie tickets for a film with your favourite star, there is www.nepalshop.com, where users can book tickets or place an order for pizza and other commodities. Other new ventures include www.yokeho.com or www.kegarne.com or www.cyberlearningnepal.com offering education on the Internet. And now, International Technology and Telecom International (ITNTI) is coming up with free e-mail boxes for Nepalese users that the company will be launching during the Computer Association of Nepal (CAN) Info Tech show that begins on Thursday. "We will be offering over 100 domain names enabling users to get free e-mails," said Pradipna Gautam, web designer for ITNTI. Email addresses like yourname@nepali.com.np or yourname@hacker.com.np or yourname@father.com.np there are over a 100 choices of free e-mail addresses available. Already there are estimated 50,000 Internet and e-mail users in the country and more and more people are getting hooked to cyber world.