Why Programming a Quantum Computer Is So Damn Hard

Someday, somehow, quantum computing is going to change the world as we know it. Even the lamest quantum computer is orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we could ever make today. But figuring out how to program one is ridiculously hard.

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Watch a Hot Ball of Nickel Scorch Little Gummy Bears to Goop

When you drop a burning ball of nickel onto the world’s largest gummy bear, the synthetic gummy bear surprisingly wins. There’s just too much gummy! But if you put that same burning ball of nickel onto normal sized gummy bears? No contest. Those little tasty fellers get destroyed and smoked and scorched and juiced and pulpified and oozed and gooped to hell. It’s like some sort of alien fire.

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How To Cut a Glass Bottle In Two Using Fire and Water

You might not be able to envision a time when you’re lathe-less and need to cut a glass bottle in two, but when it does happen, you’ll be quite happy you spent three minutes watching ‘CrazyRussianHacker‘ do it with string, alcohol, fire, and water. And even if you don’t ever cut your own glass, this hack is still incredibly fun to watch.

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Traveling Around the World with Skype Actually Looks Kind of Fun

Sure, we would all love to travel around the world and do stuff but then life, work, money and excuses get in the way. So why not try to do what comedian Mark Malkoff did? He Skyped with 162 different countries, traveling the world with technology. And though that sounds horrifying in that you have to talk to that many strangers, it’s actually pretty fantastic to hear everybody’s story and heart warming to see high fives across continents, scary faces made at the same time and the view of other people’s life. Even learning languages looks fun. Oh yeah, Malkoff even Skyped with North Korea! [Mark Malkoff]

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Watch a Prankster ‘Accidentally’ Break His iMac in Front of People

You know that soul dropping feeling you get when you see someone drop their phone? It’s the sound that’s the most horrifying thing. A crisp crack that’s not unlike adding ice to your soda. Painful. There goes hundreds of dollars! Now imagine that same feeling multiplied as you watch in horror as some stranger drops his iMac box and you hear the shrieking shatter. That would be awful. That would also make for a HILARIOUS prank.

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Let’s Get Caught Up on Five Years of Fermi Space Porn

At this very moment, NASA’s Fermi space telescope is up in the sky, zooming around Earth, and doing space stuff like sidestepping Soviet space junk and spotting mysterious galactic soap bubbles. For its (roughly) five year anniversary, NASA put out a little montage of the ‘scopes stellar achievements so far, and the list is impressive.

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Watch People Get Flung at a Mountain by a Giant Human Slingshot

What a great summer tradition this is. Every so often, these wonderful folks plop down a gigantic human slingshot and fire people at stuff. Sometimes it’s down a slip and slide and into a lake, sometimes it’s that, just double. This time it’s at a mountain, while eating pizza. It still looks like a lot of fun. [YouTube]

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Famous TV Show Opening Credits Recreated As Shows About Technology

You can instantly recognize the opening credits of famous TV shows anywhere. Even if you replaced the characters and show title with technology like ElectRoulette did. That means the periodic table in Breaking Bad becomes acronyms in Texting Bad, The Simpsons turn into The Smartphones, How I Met Your Mother becomes about tagging mom and so on. If you enjoy good ol’ TV, you’ll enjoy this 2-minute clip.

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Which Type of Alcohol Gets Destroyed Best By Guns?

It’s never a good idea to mix guns and alcohol unless you’re using guns to shoot at alcohol. And we’re not talking about just popping pellets at empty beer cans, we’re talking about our friends at RatedRR firing AK-47s and AR-15s at full bottles of wine and champagne to create a bubbly (sorry) explosion. Watch as beer bottles, beer cans, champagne, wine and even boxed wine get destroyed by rifles. Which shot is best? I think I’m going with the boxed wine. [Rated RR]

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This F-35B’s Vertical Night Landing Makes It Look Like a Badass UFO

On August 14th, the amazing, hovering F-35B made its first, vertical, at-sea night landing on the USS WASP. We’ve seen it hover before, and even do a vertical take off, but man, nothing quite compares to the sheer night-vision, sci-fi awesomeness of this clip.

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