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"Physicists have been manipulating single photons for several years, but now a team has modulated the time profile of a photon. Using the same optical equipment that fashions ordinary light pulses, the team molded single photons into arbitrary shapes, such as a pair of square pulses, as they describe in the 5 September Physical Review Letters. This precise control could have uses in quantum cryptography and quantum memory storage."
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"I found this mathmatical model of the benefits of having kids as a function of age kinda fascinating. From that link you can download an excel file and instructions on how to fill it out. It has a bunch of curves, representing your professional productivity and social life and "ability to enjoy a child" as a function of age, and takes into the relative importance of family, career, and social life, and the different options -- taking varying amounts of time off or working part time while the child is young."
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For those who care...
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"Heinlein engineered his own nerdy solution to a problem common to famous authors: how to deal with fan mail. "
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Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is taking another whack at photons.
A reader emailed me with a few questions regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, one of which is too good not to turn into a blog post:
Part two of three of an explanation of "quantum teleportation" experiments, from July of 2002. This one goes through the basics how teleportation works.
Here's the only LHC startup site you need:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
Be sure to read the page source.
I had long suspected it was possible to create photons with different sorts of waveforms (certainly, the coherence length could be adjusted by means of the formation interval.) However, unimaginative textbooks often said or implied, that a photons is fully characterized by its polarization state and energy,momentum. I don't know why I didn't hear more about the prospects and theory of photon wave-shaping before.