Inratiocination’s posterous

Using a few ultracold ions, intense lasers and some electrodes, researchers have built the first programmable quantum computer. The new system, described in a paper to be published in Nature Physics, flexed its versatility by performing 160 randomly chosen processing routines. -- ScienceNews

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Combining infrared and X-ray images from three orbiting observatories, NASA has unveiled a never-before-seen composite portrait of the Milky Way’s bustling center. -- Science News

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The MITRE Corporation has been named one of the Top Places to Work in Massachusetts in the second annual employee-based survey project from The Boston Globe. The Globe 100's Top Places to Work 2009 magazine was published in the Sunday Globe on November 8.

Full story: http://www.mitre.org/news/releases/09/globe_11_09_2009.html

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The Army says seven people were killed and 20 wounded in a pair of shootings at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas. http://tinyurl.com/ybdqoy8

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Computing seems to be everywhere. But where exactly are all the computers doing that computing? They are hidden away, just out of sight, within films, games, cars, clouds, mobile phones, and much more. Getting computers to be hidden and stay hidden is a major design challenge. It took many years to get to our current point, and will undoubtedly take many more years to perfect and refine. In May 2005, Arun Tripathi reflected on this challenge. His words are as relevant today as they were then. -- ACM Ubiquity

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Kit Eaton writes: "Remember how the Ansari X-Prize resulted in the nascent commercial space trip business, with Virgin Galactic in the lead? Now there's a similar push to innovate space technology, but of a different sort: Space elevators, making the ride into orbit amazingly cheap and easy." -- FastCompany

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GPS satellites send signals to a receiver which calculates your position based on the location of the satellites and your distance from them. The system works well, and millions rely on it every day, but what tells the GPS satellites where they are in the first place?  A three-year effort to update and improve the precision of the celestial map, the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF), was recently completed and officially recognized as the fundamental reference system by the IAU in August, 2009.-- EurekAlert!

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Former MITRE President and CEO Bob Everett was formally inducted into the Computer History Museum’s Hall of Fellows. The induction took place at a formal gala ceremony in Mountain View, Calif., where the museum is located. The master of ceremonies was David Pogue from the New York Times. -- Computer History Museum

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Where does it come from? Scientists in Arizona are reporting a surprising answer to that question, which has puzzled and perplexed generations of men and women confronted with layers of dust on furniture and floors. Most of indoor dust comes from outdoors. -- EurekAlert!

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Last summer Cushing Academy, a venerable boarding school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, began ridding itself of most of its library’s books and replacing them with a digital collection. Headmaster Jim Tracy says he has hired more librarians to help students navigate the electronic stacks and tell “what is valuable information or reliable from what is junk.” -- USA Today

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