yet another DSA, this one an acquaintance from the army, re-appeared in my life this week (incidentally reaffirming my belief that stanford is, indeed, camazotz). his undergraduate thesis, which is being published in a peer-reviewed journal, involved exciting electron spins uwith laser beams, flipping them to a high-energy state, and measuring their subsequent relaxation time. this is apparently of vital interest to the computer industry -- controlling the spin/anti-spin configurations of electrons is the basis of building quantum computers (because there are only two possible energy states, these can function as the binary operators upon which all computer systems run. well, almost binary because the bits in a quantum computer can hold a superposition of the two states, which is the nifty part, but also another story for another day). IBM has already created a prototype of this -- a soup of 7 carbon-based atoms which has successfully factorised the number 15. a computer significantly larger than this (perhaps created using semi-conductor technology) would essentially be able to zip through online security systems decrypting previously-unhackable passwords in a matter of minutes and completely changing the landscape of information security as we know it. lovely. unfortunately, DSA the second will play no part in this revolution, because, like most capable singaporeans, he is BONDED, and will be shuffling papers in a small cubicle overlooking marina bay for the foreseeable future. this story is becoming all too familiar.