parallel universe stuff there.

low hanging fruit.

also points out how often the Right uses the "naw - uh - uh - you are" defense. the Democrats need to start trademarking phrases. "The Big Lie" would have made them millions.

Earlier episodes that have been sifted:

https://videosift.com/video/Meanwhile-in-a-parallel-universe
https://videosift.com/video/Meanwhile-2
https://videosift.com/video/Meanwhile-3

If you liked this short video, I recommend you watch the TV show Counterpart, which explores similar ideas, but with only 1 parallel universe, and some people can travel between them. J.K. Simmons really shines, probably his best role(s).

first I thought I was in a parallel universe ala Rick and Morty style, then I started thinking about walking dead.

mesmerizingly nope, no way, disgusting.

I was hoping for more meat to his presentation, and was disappointed. I feel that he said absolutely nothing to help anyone in the audience understand what quantum computers actually DO or what sort of problems they'll help to solve. They'll absolutely not increase your FPS, as that's not what they're well-suited to do. What they are quite excellent at is taking a problem with many possible solutions and finding the correct (or best) one at an extremely high speed.

One example would be the Traveling Salesman problem. In brief, find the optimum route for traversing a number of points on a map. This is useful for things like scheduling package delivery routes, airline flights, etc. With a classic / current computer we write software that cleverly chugs through the possible solutions, throws out any that prove to be poor, and eventually gets to what appears to be the best or is at least a "good enough" solution. As the number of necessary points to be visited increases this problem scales in complexity quickly, so eventually a current computer would just choke on the problem and at best return an ok-ish solution in a reasonable period of time.

A quantum computer is a totally different beast. If it's "big" enough (IE, is comprised of a sufficient number of qubits), it takes the entire set of all possible solutions to the problem, and rather than iterate through them to find the best one, it checks them all simultaneously and immediately returns the optimum solution. It does this by using properties of quantum mechanics, and I think this is where the speaker was drawing his talk of parallel universes. If there are 3 qubits, they would exist as 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111 simultaneously. The software would then define what the best answer would look like, and the computer returns the answer.

You can hopefully see how this totally breaks encryption. With a current computer and a long enough encryption key, an encoded message would take the fastest machines a huge number of years to decipher. With a quantum computer you hand it a gibberish encrypted message, it loads all possible transformations of that message simultaneously, and it then returns the transformation which looks most like a coherent message.

I'm excited to see what these machines can do for us, but they're going to necessitate some significant structural changes in how we handle sensitive data.

When someone says something like "we're exploiting parallel universes", what they mean is that one of the many theories that can be used to describe quantum behaviour such as entanglement is to do with parallel universes.

That doesn't mean there aren't other theories, it doesn't mean there are parallel universes, it's just one of the few ways we can make it make sense is if it exists and carries information in a dimension that is not tangible to us.

When Archimedes invented his screw, using gravity to drive water uphill, he could have said that he's using an invisible multi-dimensional goblin to move the water; well that's one theory and its irrefutable until Newton makes an appearance. And even then you can still say "yeah but what we know of gravity is still a multidimensional goblin."

Having said that, it has as much likelihood of being correct as any other theory in its infancy.

The more I listen to quantum mechanics the more it sounds like religious nuts. "Oh, we don't know what the qubit is, so that means it's everything, and like 4 or 5 parallel universes too!" it's perpetual motion machines all over again.

Let's ignore for the moment what led to this current mess within the Eurozone. You point out, correctly, that Greece is too poor to service its debt. And yes, for the German government to do whatever is required to get back their loans is to be expected. However, Greece was incapable of servicing its debt five years ago. Yet the subsequent programs, all supported or even demanded by the German government, reduced Greece's ability to pay back at least portions of its debt. At the end of the day, goods and services are what it's all about. And by dismantling the Greek economy, nevermind the Greek society, they actively undermined what they publicly claimed to be working for: a self-reliant Greek economy, capable of financing the needs of Greece. And capable of paying back what is owed.

The question inescapably poses itself: was it done intentionally or are they blinded by ideology?

One doesn't have to be as far left as I am to see that it didn't work, doesn't work, and never could have worked. Even the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz are perfectly clear about it.

Varoufakis, as you note, has been just as clear about this at least since late 2010, when he published the first draft of his Modest Proposal with Stuart Holland. There was a very good discussion about it in Austin in 10/2013 under the topic "Can the Eurozone be saved?" Participants included Varoufakis, Tsipras, Flassbeck, Holland and Galbraith, amongst others. I submitted a short clip back then.

His argument that Germany won't see a dime when Greece is shoved off a cliff, as correct as it is, never had any bite to begin with. The German government, and large parts of parliament, are operating in a parallel universe, economically. Over here, mercantilism is the road to success. Monetarism works. Surplus good, deficit bad. Saving good, spending bad. Everyone should have a current account surplus.

It's horseshit by the gallons, and it's the official economic policy of the largest economy in the EU.

And we're not even getting into the political aspects of it. Throwing a member of the EU into debt bondage, suspending its democracy to please the gods of the market... that's a travesty and a half. Yet it's also inevitable if they insist on going down the road of neoliberalism.

Worst of all, Greece is just the canary in the coal mine, as Varoufakis likes to point out. Greece had plenty of issues before they joined the EZ, but when they chose to adapt the same currency as a much larger economy hell bent on competitiveness, which is the favorite euphemism for Germany's beggar-thy-neighbour policies, they were doomed to be crushed. The rest of the PIIGS are next in line, unless this whole mess explodes beforehand. Maybe Rajoy's Franco-esque repression techniques fail, maybe le Pen wins in 2017, who knows. Maybe Schäuble finds the 100k of bribes that he conveniently forgot about back in the '90s and chokes on them.

Last but not least, 208 billion Euros – that's the projected current account surplus of Germany this year. That's 208 billion Euros of debt foreign economies have to accumulate, so that the German public and private sector can run a combined surplus of €208b. That's the elephant in the room. Systematic undercutting of the inflation target through suppression of unit labour costs and a dysfunctional focus on exports.

Definitions are flexible. The universe is currently defined as the totality of existence, in much the same way as the "world" was defined centuries ago.

In theory there could be many parallel universes (where we change the definition to mean " a space time volume with a given set of fundamental physical constants")

There's also the theory that our entire universe is a 2d hologram.

Personally, I don't know why you'd want to limit yourself to anything as prosaic as one existence. The idea that there are infinite universes is fascinating....

In case you missed the earlier two sketches (already sifted):

http://videosift.com/video/Meanwhile-in-a-parallel-universe
http://videosift.com/video/Meanwhile-2

Comic books have been dealing with these issues for years. (There are entire teams of Avengers comprised of varied times and parallel universes.) Aside from a sentient time-dimensional traveler demigod that interferes -- it happens because there's some interconnectivity between all dimensions, time included.

Pshaw.

That's a valid explanation for how your changing the past can skew the future timeline after the manipulation took place.

There's no such valid excuse for the simple act of going backwards in time landing you in a different parallel universe that is totally unrelated to the universe from which the time traveler left.

Alternate universe.
Infinite parallel universes (multiverse). Try to shoot your grandfather, well you just shot him in a different universe. Paradox avoided.

Uh, *related=http://videosift.com/video/Meanwhile-in-a-parallel-universe

Meanwhile.. in a parallel universe! has been added as a related post - related requested by ant.