Every morning I go fishing in the arXiv. Or at least that’s the way I’ve been thinking about this daily ritual: I cast my net over the waters and look to see what strange and wonderful creatures I’ve brought up from the deeps. Today it hit me that I have the metaphor backwards. I’m the […]

Still more on reversible and zero-energy computing (see earlier bit-player posts here and here, and the American Scientist column):
M. Maissam Barkeshli of the University of California at Berkeley has a preprint titled “Dissipationless Information Erasure and Landauer’s Principle.” (The paper was first submitted to the arXiv last April, but I missed it then, and noticed […]

When I was a kid, there were no toys I treasured more than magnets. I had dozens of them: horseshoes, bars, a couple of powerful alnico cylinders salvaged from old loudspeakers. The invisible but very palpable forces acting between these objects—pushing like poles apart, drawing unlike together—were signs to me that mystery still exists in […]