Mare's Nest: As the Entanglement goes up, so does the Randomness

As the Entanglement goes up, so does the Randomness

A common representation of the uncertainty pri...

Image of a Kitty in the Maybe-Dead Box via Wikipedia
Please do not try this at home.

Too much entanglement can render quantum computers useless:

“Entanglement introduces a certain randomness into the system,” Gross says. “This randomness appears in the measurement outcomes. However, as the entanglement goes up, so does the randomness. When entanglement increases to a certain point, there is so much randomness that the system ends up being about as useful as coins tossed into the air. You don’t get any useful information.”

Why would anyone put a cat, a poison gas canister, and (basically) a Geiger counter in the same box?
Answer: Blame the roommate / boyfriend.

Think this applies to a lot of things besides quantum computing. Sharing living quarters with someone, for instance.

In related news, two independent groups of scientists have recently confirmed that the universe does exist when we are not observing it. They swear they didn't look, only peeked.

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The first form was to find a mare’s nest, to imagine that one has found something wonderful that turns out not to be real. It’s first recorded in a play in 1576. A typical usage is in Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands of 1903: “To accept the suggestion we must declare the whole quest a mare’s nest from beginning to end; the attempt on Davies a delusion of his own fancy, the whole structure we had built on it, baseless.”

It’s one variation on a set of phrases that were around centuries ago. Another version was horse’s nest, which was at one time also a dialect term for an idle tale or an oft-told story, one therefore over-elaborated and unbelievable. Other variations that have been recorded include salmon’s nest, and skate’s nest. For some reason, mare’s nest conquered the opposition and became standard. There’s a lovely enlargement of it in the 1811 edition of Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: “He has found a mare’s nest, and is laughing at the eggs; said of one who laughs without any apparent cause.”

The modern sense wasn’t recorded in the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the entry for which was compiled in 1904, suggesting that it was then uncommon. The untidiness sense began to appear regularly in print only in the 1930s but was common by the 1940s. How the one sense changed into the other isn’t altogether obvious. A progression through illusion to misconception to confusion to muddle to extreme untidiness seems to have occurred. It may be that it was influenced by rat’s nest, a byword for untidiness that’s older than the modern sense of mare’s nest.