Image of the week: Quantum leap
Leo Varadkar could be right when he says “a lot of people in the media system and the political system” don’t understand numbers. The good news for the share price of parent company Alphabet is that there are loads of people at Google who do.
This week, the tech giant unveiled a new “state-of-the-art” quantum computing chip called Willow that it says needs less than five minutes to perform a mathematical calculation that one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers could not complete in 10 septillion years. Maybe it can even explain why the national children’s hospital is taking so long and costing so much?
Alas, Willow doesn’t have any obvious commercial uses just yet. Google Quantum AI founder and lead, Hartmut Neven, who dubs himself the “chief optimist” for the Willow project, explained in a blog post that the next challenge was to demonstrate a computation using the chips that is “relevant to a real-world application”.
Neven’s post also attracted attention for noting that because 10 septillion years is a “mind-boggling” number that “exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe”, it “lends credence” to the notion that quantum computation “occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse”. Well, that’s just maths.
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In numbers: Thou shalt not be outbid
€1.98 million
Sum that a rare Roman coin featuring the portrait of Brutus, the most famous of Julius Caesar’s assassins, has been sold for at an auction in Geneva. The dealer described the coin, minted in 43-42 BC, as “a piece of history” marking the last chapters of the Roman republic.
€26.5 million
Price fetched at auction for a pair of ruby slippers worn by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Stolen from their home in the Judy Garland Museum in 2005, the slippers remained missing until 2018.
$1 million-€2 million
Stuck for last minute Christmas ideas? The oldest known tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments, dating from AD 300-800, will be auctioned in New York next week and is expected to fetch this much.
Getting to know: Mark Devereux
Mark Devereux, a well-connected British media lawyer, is – for this week, at least – best known as the author of the “Succession memo”.
According to the New York Times, Rupert Murdoch’s children started discussing the public relations strategy for their father’s death in April 2023. What was special about that month? Well, as noted by the Nevada probate commissioner hearing Murdoch’s bid to amend his family trust to consolidate son Lachlan Murdoch’s control, this was when HBO drama Succession aired an episode in which – spoiler alert – “the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos”.
That very fine hour of television prompted Devereux, as Elisabeth Murdoch’s representative to the trust, to write a memo intended to prevent life from imitating art – art that was, of course, inspired by life. Not sure it’s worked. The Nevada commissioner has now ruled against Rupert Murdoch (93) and Lachlan Murdoch in favour of Elisabeth and James Murdoch and their half-sister Prudence MacLeod, setting the scene for a tense Christmas in the mogul’s house.
The list: NYSE bell-ringers
Donald Trump rang the New York Stock Exchange’s opening bell on Thursday, helping himself to what news wire Bloomberg called “a celebratory photo opportunity at an iconic symbol of American capitalism”. But who else, famously, has given the bell a good ring?
1. Ronald Reagan: “We’re going to turn the bull loose,” declared Ronald Reagan before he rang the bell on a 1985 visit to the NYSE trading floor, becoming the first sitting president to do so.
2. Leonard Ross: The tradition dates back to 1956, when a 10-year-old television quizshow winner named Leonard Ross was invited to do it after correctly answering questions about the stock market.
3. Nelson Mandela: The former South African president rang the bell in May 2002 to mark the listing of Gold Fields, a South African gold mining company.
4. Melania Trump: The former and future first lady rang the opening bell in September 2019, this being the natural forum to promote her anti-cyberbullying Be Best initiative, which is aimed at children.
5. Miss Piggy: Trump is not the first cartoonish character to ring the opening bell. In 2016, representing Disney, Miss Piggy rang the opening bell to publicise a new season of the Muppets. Kermit, sadly, got to the podium two years earlier.
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