Waiting for Both

How is this meme both ‘why not both’ and ‘aliens’ at the same time? Because both.

IBM's online quantum machine gets faster

Mar 2017, BBC

“IBM has made its quantum computing system commercially available to businesses and beefed up an existing system used by the research community. … The firm is hoping to boost the numbers of people able to use such computers.”

The thing that makes quantum computers special is superpositioning, which is when a bit is both one and zero at the same time (and these bits are called qubits). Kind of like the smell of isovaleric acid, which is considered both good and bad ‘at the same time,’ or in other words, when one hundred people are asked what is smells like, half say really good and half say really bad, and this is more than uncommon in the world of smells that people – or a population rather – would be so split on such extreme responses

Anyway, imagine a day when every person has their very own personal quantum computer in their homes. When superpositioning becomes a household concept, the language of smell will be considered in more depth.

On Space and Place

Confused John Travolta

The hypothalamus is called the seat of social behavior. The hippocampus is the thing that knows where you are, your internal GPS. Together, these brain parts, along with your olfactory system, of course, influence all of your decisions. Everything we do is dependent on where we are (or where we think we are) and who we’re with (or who we think…). Olfactory data informs these things. Places and the smell of those places are centrally located both in the memory and in the motivating, motility actuating parts of us. The emotions that drive us are informed by the smells of the places we are in.

This new report shows that there may be very specific cells that can tell who’s house you’re in. (The experiment is on male mice and other male’s habitats.) They’re looking to use this to help people with social disorders, like autism, schizophrenia, depression, and social anxiety. Anyway, this just points to the use of olfactory studies to help with larger social problems.

Smell tells intruder mice how to behave

phys.org, Jun 2016