[dba-Tech] Cubits and Qubits

[Zimmer, Michael]

Arthur

Not to be argumentative, but isn't 11*11*11=1331?  
And 11*11*11*11=14641?  
And 11*11*11*11*11=161051?

I'm probably missing something, number games aren't my forte.

Mike



-----Original Message-----
From: dba-Tech [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2016 11:34 AM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: [dba-Tech] Cubits and Qubits

Without consulting Google, do you remember what a cubit is? Noah's Ark was measured in cubits. A cubit was an ancient measure of length, based on the distance from one's extended middle finger to the elbow -- and thus obviously a rather imprecise measure, but it served for several centuries, and is still employed in the oft-forgot discipline of hedge-laying. Who knew that even in this information-age, that one could make a living in hedge-laying? Most people I know don't even have a lawn, let alone a hedge describing its edges. I guess that's the province of the fancy-pants, whose company I enjoy all too little.

And then we have Qubit, a term from quantum mechanics, which refers toa two-state quantum-mechanical system <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_quantum_system>, such as the polarization <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_polarization> of a single photon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon>: here the two states are vertical polarization and horizontal polarization.  In a classical system, a bit would have to be in one state or the other. However quantum mechanics allows the qubit to be in a superposition <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition> of both states at the same time. Or, in the vernacular, there are simultaneously two square root of 4 -- 2^2 and -2^2. And so on, for all the square roots.

But for my money, the magic numbers are 9 and 11. Any multple of 9 adds horizontally to 9 (9 * 3 = 27, 2 +7 = 9). Any multiple of 11 results in an ascending + descending staircase: 11 * 11 = 121. 11 *11 * 11 - 12321, and so on.

Are there other such magical numbers? (Aside from 1 and 0.)

--
Arthur
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