February 1996, “Goo-Losh”

Mmm, goulash…is that how you spell it? Thanks for the tip. I haven't heard the reaction of Bennett and company on this business yet, but when I do, I'll send a report your way.

I've been thinking about Kochen–Specker theorems lately; they're very nice you know…especially the ones with small numbers of vectors. Implications for “quantum information”? There must be! In particular, why can't one go much further in this effort to prove the theorem with smaller and smaller numbers of vectors? Why is there no proof of this property (i.e., no noncontextual hidden variables for the outcomes of standard von Neumann measurements), the very second you admit a measurement that is nonorthogonal to the others? Just food for late night thoughts.

March 1996, “The Commitments”

It's a good movie; did you ever see it?

Suppose you need some cash and so you go to your Automated Teller Machine (ATM). You insert your bank card and the machine asks you for your Personal Identification Number (PIN). It does this for the obvious reason that it wants to know that you are indeed who you say you are before it hands over the money. That's a good safeguard. However suppose, as really did happen a year or two ago, someone had set up a fake ATM in place of the real one.