Tag: images

Plastics

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 80 kg man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 17 kg of oil, 3 kg of gas, and 3 kg of minerals, as well as 56 kg of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. “There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil”.

Just as we are hitting the hubbert peak, we get a technology that may make oil rigs obsolete:

Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world’s agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the US agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4B barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2B barrels of oil. “This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this.”

With their main (only?) source of income in danger, what will the middle east kleptocracies do?
because

The only thing this process can’t handle is nuclear waste. If it contains carbon, we can do it.” and Thermal depolymerization has proved to be 85% energy efficient for complex feedstocks, and even higher for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics

it will be possible to jump start the distributed power infrastructure worldwide.
2007-07-11: Ocean of Garbage

Held together by a slowly rotating system of currents northeast of Hawaii, the Eastern Garbage Patch is more than just a few floating plastic bottles washed out to sea; the Patch is a giant mass of trash-laden water 2x the size of Texas.

2008-01-11: Why not in the US?

Declaring war on the “white pollution” choking its cities, farms and waterways, China is banning free plastic shopping bags and calling for a return to the cloth bags of old

2013-12-05: Depolymerization was hailed as the solution ~10 years ago: turning plastic back into more versatile compounds. I weirdly haven’t heard much about it since. Probably because no one cares about trash?

2015-06-22: Recycling doesn’t work

almost every facility like it in the country is running in the red. More than 2K municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around.

Anything that requires constant vigilance (sorting) combined with subsidies isn’t going to work even medium-term. looks like recycling needs a big reboot.
2017-04-26: Plastic-eating worms. This sounds like one of those “obvious solutions”, like releasing rabbits in Australia to deal with a forgotten problem. Fear our future where the wax worm is up there with rust as a mortal enemy of civilization.

While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they’d eaten 4% of the bag. That may not sound like much, but that’s a vast improvement over fungi, which weren’t able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after 6 months.

2019-02-07: Hydrothermal liquefaction

Hydrothermal liquefaction could change the world’s polyolefin waste, a form of plastic, into useful products, such as clean fuels and other items. Once the plastic is converted into naphtha, it can be used as a feedstock for other chemicals or further separated into specialty solvents or other products. There is 1B tons of polyolefin waste in landfills.

2019-03-13: Plastic recycling never worked, and was a greenwashing effort by the industry, and dum-dums fell for it.

Even before China’s ban, only 9% of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12% was burned. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. The planet’s load of nearly indestructible plastics—more than 8B tons have been produced worldwide over the past 60 years—continues to grow.

2020-01-10: Thai Hacks

As Plastic bag ban hits Thailand, consumers adapt with variety of household carrying items


2020-01-20: Plastic Surge

Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels. Petrochemicals now account for 14% of oil use, and are expected to drive 50% of oil demand growth between now and 2050. The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will double in the next 20 years.

2020-03-03: Microplastics

Every human on Earth is ingesting 2000 particles of plastic a week

2020-04-11: 90% breakdown of PET in under 10 hours. Process is still expensive and needs to scale further.
2020-07-08: Apples are the most contaminated fruit while carrots are the vegetables most affected. This is a much bigger problem than the performative efforts to clean up the great pacific garbage patch.

THROW A POLYESTER sweater in the washing machine and it’ll come out nice and clean, but also not quite its whole self. As it rinses, millions of synthetic fibers will shake loose and wash out with the waste water, which then flows to a treatment plant. Each year, a single facility might pump 21B of these microfibers out to sea, where they swirl in currents, settle in sediments, and end up as fish food, with untold ecological consequences.

2021-10-14: There’s now a startup using PET breakdown technology.

The company plans to use what it learns from the demonstration facility to build its first industrial plant, which will house a reactor 20x larger than the demonstration reactor. That full-scale plant will be built near a plastic manufacturer somewhere in Europe or the US, and should be operational by 2025. Manufacturing PET from enzymatic recycling could reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 17% and 43% compared to making virgin PET.

2022-03-04: Meanwhile, stop it with the performative cleaning:

Last month, a group of marine biologists noticed something fishy in a video by a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup. “This is likely a staged video. I call bullshit.” In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 4000 kg of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100m on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “It’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on. We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution.”

2023-09-29: Big if true

78% of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber

Space Elevator

As I’m re-reading the red / green / blue mars series, I’m amazed by the discovery of Liftport. 2018 is also the launch date for a manned mars mission.

Liftport Inc. is a different kind of high-tech startup. Our mission is to build a vital and highly profitable infrastructure for off-world industry. Our first project is the Space Elevator, which will revolutionize space exploration and utilization – first, in the neighborhood of the Earth, and then throughout the solar system. The Space Elevator is a key enabling technology for any work done off the planet, whether in near-earth orbit, at geosynchronous distances, or far beyond the moon. The era of violently blasting things (and people) into space on top of wasteful, dangerous rockets is almost over. In 15 years, we will get there quietly, reliably, safely, and at a fraction of the cost. the lift date is July 1st, 2018.

2006-10-03: CNT strength is, of course, on the critical path.

2006-10-26: Java applet (with annoying IE only check) to play with SE parameters: CNT strength, climber payload, etc.
2019-08-25: A lunar space elevator should be possible in a few years as it doesn’t require exotic new materials. It would save lots because braking to the surface is a significant factor.

Quantum Computing

It is becoming increasingly clear that, if a useful device for quantum computation will ever be built, it will be embodied by a classical computing machine with control over a truly quantum subsystem, this apparatus performing a mixture of classical and quantum computation. This paper investigates a possible approach to the problem of programming such machines: a template high level quantum language is presented which complements a generic general purpose classical language with a set of quantum primitives.

A very interesting paper, basically stating that any quantum computer will need a classical front end to deal with data pre- and post processing. even the very pragmatic distinction between call-by-value and call-by-reference needs to be rethought:

It is well known that the no-cloning theorem excludes the possibility of replicating the state of a generic quantum system. Since the call-by-value paradigm is based on the copy primitive, this means that quantum programming can not use call-by-value; therefore a mechanism for addressing parts of already allocated quantum data must be supplied by the language.

2007-02-12: D-Wave 16 qubit prototype, with hopes for a 1024 qubit system in late 2008. funny: they are not sure if it is a quantum computer at all, it might be an analog computer.
2007-04-22: the quantum computation version of the stacked turtle

But it was still pretty exciting stuff. Holy Zarquon, they said to one another, an infinitely powerful computer? It was like a 1000 Christmases rolled into 1. Program going to loop forever? You knew for a fact: this thing could execute an infinite loop in less than 10 seconds. Brute force primality testing of every single integer in existence? Easy. Pi to the last digit? Piece of cake. Halting Problem? Sa-holved.

They hadn’t announced it yet. They’d been programming. Obviously they hadn’t built it just to see if they could. They had had plans. In some cases they had even had code ready and waiting to be executed. One such program was Diane’s. It was a universe simulator. She had started out with a simulated Big Bang and run the thing forwards in time by 13.6b years, to just before the present day, watching the universe develop at every stage – taking brief notes, but knowing full well there would be plenty of time to run it again later, and mostly just admiring the miracle of creation.

2007-08-30: What Google Won’t Find

For “generic” problems of finding a needle in a haystack, most of us believe that quantum computers will give at most a polynomial advantage over classical ones.

2011-01-20: 10b qubits is very significant. i am sure there are all sorts of caveats, but still: wow
2011-10-04: Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science class by Scott Aaronson.

This new offering will examine the relevance of modern theoretical computer science to traditional questions in philosophy, and conversely, what philosophy can contribute to theoretical computer science. Topics include: the status of the Church-Turing Thesis and its modern polynomial-time variants; quantum computing and the interpretation of quantum mechanics; complexity aspects of the strong-AI and free-will debates; complexity aspects of Darwinian evolution; the claim that “computation is physical”; the analog/digital distinction in computer science and physics; Kolmogorov complexity and the foundations of probability; computational learning theory and the problem of induction; bounded rationality and common knowledge; new notions of proof (probabilistic, interactive, zero-knowledge, quantum) and the nature of mathematical knowledge. Intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in computer science, philosophy, mathematics, and physics. Participation and discussion are an essential part of the course.

2013-04-13: Quantum computing since Democritus. Written in the spirit of the likes of Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, and Douglas Hofstadter, and touching on some of the most fundamental issues in science, the unification of computation and physics. kind of like a new kind of science was, without the bs. Plus Scott is a funny guy, so even if you only understand 5% (likely, given the deep topics), seems worth it. If you want to get a taste, try this paper: NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality
2017-07-09: Multi-colored photons

the technology developed is readily extendable to create 2-quDit systems with more than 9000 dimensions (corresponding to 12 qubits and beyond, comparable to the state of the art in significantly more expensive/complex platforms).

2018-10-09: Quantum Verification. How do you know whether a quantum computer has done anything quantum at all?

After 8 years of graduate school, Mahadev has succeeded. She has come up with an interactive protocol by which users with no quantum powers of their own can nevertheless employ cryptography to put a harness on a quantum computer and drive it wherever they want, with the certainty that the quantum computer is following their orders. Mahadev’s approach gives the user “leverage that the computer just can’t shake off.” For a graduate student to achieve such a result as a solo effort is “pretty astounding”. Quantum computation researchers are excited not just about what Mahadev’s protocol achieves, but also about the radically new approach she has brought to bear on the problem. Using classical cryptography in the quantum realm is a “truly novel idea. I expect many more results to continue building on these ideas.”

2019-01-19: Spacetime QEC

space-time achieves its “intrinsic robustness,” despite being woven out of fragile quantum stuff. “We’re not walking on eggshells to make sure we don’t make the geometry fall apart. I think this connection with quantum error correction is the deepest explanation we have for why that’s the case.”

2019-04-19: Quantum Diff Privacy. On connections between differential privacy and quantum computing
2019-06-18: Neven’s Law

That rapid improvement has led to what’s being called “Neven’s law,” a new kind of rule to describe how quickly quantum computers are gaining on classical ones. Quantum computers are gaining computational power relative to classical ones at a “doubly exponential” rate — a staggeringly fast clip. With double exponential growth, “it looks like nothing is happening, nothing is happening, and then whoops, suddenly you’re in a different world.”

This is certainly the most extreme of the nerd rapture curves i have seen:

the very near future should be the watershed moment, where quantum computers surpass conventional computers and never look back. Moore’s Law cannot catch up. A year later, it outperforms all computers on Earth combined. Double qubits again the following year, and it outperforms the universe.

2019-06-23: Diamonds and Ion Qubits

In the mid-2000s there was a small diamond mined from the Ural Mountains. Is was called the ‘magic Russian sample. The diamond was extremely pure—almost all carbon, which isn’t common but with a few impurities that gave it strange quantum mechanical properties. Now anyone can go online and buy a $500 quantum-grade diamond for an experiment. The diamonds have nitrogen impurities—but what Schloss’s group needs is a hole right next to it, called a nitrogen vacancy. Russian “magic diamonds” can hold qubits in place and thus act the same way that a trapped-ion rig does. They replace a single carbon atom in a diamond’s atomic lattice with a nitrogen atom and leaving a neighboring lattice node empty, engineers can create what’s called a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center. This is generally inexpensive since it’s derived from nature.

2019-07-04: John Wright joins UT Austin

With no evaluative judgment attached, this is an unprecedented time for quantum computing as a field. Where once faculty applicants struggled to make a case for quantum computing (physics departments: “but isn’t this really CS?” / CS departments: “isn’t it really physics?” / everyone: “couldn’t this whole QC thing, like, all blow over in a year?”), today departments are vying with each other and with industry players and startups to recruit talented people. In such an environment, we’re fortunate to be doing as well as we are. We hope to continue to expand.

2019-07-26: Quantum hardware should make monte carlo methods more powerful & accurate.
2019-08-20: 1 Million Qubits

Fujitsu has a Digital Annealer with 8192 Qubits and a 1M qubit system in the lab. Digital Annealer is a new technology that is used to solve large-scale combinatorial optimization problems instantly. Digital Annealer uses a digital circuit design inspired by quantum phenomena and can solve problems which are difficult and time consuming for classical computers.

2019-11-12: Topological Quantum Computer

Microsoft is developing Majorana-based topological quantum computer qubits which will be higher-quality and lower error rate qubits. A high-quality hybrid system made of InSb nanowires with epitaxial-grown Al shells has revealed ballistic superconductivity and quantized zero-bias conductance peak. This holds great promise for making the long-sought topological quantum qubits.

2019-12-13: 10000x Faster Quantum Simulations

they have made the simulation of the quantum electrons so fast that it could run extremely long without restrictions and the effect of their motion on the movement of the slow ions would be visible

2020-01-14: MIP*=RE

easily one of the biggest complexity-theoretic surprises so far in this century

2020-05-07: Room Temperature QC

Transparent crystals with optical nonlinearities could enable quantum computing at room temperature by 2030

2020-12-03: BosonSampling. A second method achieves quantum supremacy.

Do you have any amusing stories? When I refereed the Science paper, I asked why the authors directly verified the results of their experiment only for up to 26-30 photons, relying on plausible extrapolations beyond that. While directly verifying the results of n-photon BosonSampling takes ~2n time for any known classical algorithm, I said, surely it should be possible with existing computers to go up to n=40 or n=50? A couple weeks later, the authors responded, saying that they’d now verified their results up to n=40, but it burned $400000 worth of supercomputer time so they decided to stop there. This was by far the most expensive referee report I ever wrote!

2021-12-06: Quantum Computing Overview. A really good overview of the field of quantum computing with a clear explanation of how they work, why people are excited about quantum algorithms and their value, the potential applications of quantum computers including quantum simulation, artificial intelligence and more, and the different models and physical implementations people are using to build quantum computers like superconducting devices, quantum dots, trapped ions, photons or neutral atoms, and the challenges they face.


2023-02-23: Quantum Error Correction breakthrough

Here we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling across several code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from increasing qubit number. We find that our distance-5 surface code logical qubit modestly outperforms an ensemble of distance-3 logical qubits on average, in terms of both logical error probability over 25 cycles and logical error per cycle ((2.914 ± 0.016)% compared to (3.028 ± 0.023)%). To investigate damaging, low-probability error sources, we run a distance-25 repetition code and observe a 1.7 × 10−6 logical error per cycle floor set by a single high-energy event (1.6 × 10−7 excluding this event). We accurately model our experiment, extracting error budgets that highlight the biggest challenges for future systems. These results mark an experimental demonstration in which quantum error correction begins to improve performance with increasing qubit number, illuminating the path to reaching the logical error rates required for computation.

2023-06-19: It might be possible to work around noise, making quantum computing practical.

IBM physicist Abhinav Kandala conducted precise measurements of the noise in each of their qubits, which can follow relatively predictable patterns determined by their position inside the device, microscopic imperfections in their fabrication and other factors. Using this knowledge, the researchers extrapolated back to what their measurements — in this case, of the full state of magnetization of a 2D solid — would look like in the absence of noise. They were then able to run calculations involving all of Eagle’s 127 qubits and up to 60 processing steps — more than any other reported quantum-computing experiment. The results validate IBM’s short-term strategy, which aims to provide useful computing by mitigating, as opposed to correcting, errors. Over the longer term, IBM and most other companies hope to shift towards quantum error correction, a technique that will require large numbers of additional qubits for each data qubit.