Another article on/.recently reported single-atom transitors. And a couple of years ago AT&T reported a 1 picometre transistor - ten times smaller than this one. So, while there will undoubtedly be engineering issues to cope with, I don't expect any fundamental physics barriers at this scale.
I wouldn't expect to see any circuitry built directly from these technologies - though I could be wrong. But what it does say is that there is no absolute theoretical limit above the size of a single atom at which transistor operation is no longer possible. We will continue to progress along the lines we are already travelling - finer and finer masks, more sophisticated optical processing, probably electron beam writing, or maybe direct electron masking. But we now know that there is no quantum bogey man going to jump out and say that it is no use shrinking feature sizes any more because transistors just don't work at that size.
This contrasts with hard-disk technology, where there is almost certainly a minimum size to a magnetic domain (though it may be smaller than we now thing - see the latest "pixie dust" enhancements which shrink the stable size of a domain). Somebody who works for a disk-drive manufacturer told me that their R&D people reckoned that they would be hitting brick walls erected by the laws of physics about 2012. Contrast seciconductors, where on one side a senior honcho at TSMC was reported as saying thet he could see the engineering advances continuing to at least 2020, while these results says that the physics carries on even further.
Well before we get to the single atom transistor or the single atom memory, we are going to have problems wiring such chips. I cannot see such high densities being achieved with the wiring for true random access. I think either the wiring density will mean that larger (and hence easier) cells will fit under the wiring, or that some kind of shift-register type scheme will have to be used, slowing random access time.
Which in reflects on computer architectures - we could be adding even more levels to the current hierarchy of register - L1 cache - L2 cache - main memory - disk. Could we usefully used a few Gbyte of (volatile) ram disk on a chip? Say, transfer speeds the same as current disks (100 Mbyte/sec, compared to the 1Gbyte/sec of PCI-X and several Gbyte/sec of main memory) but zero rotational and seek latency?
They only describe a single transistor, not a storage cell. A storage cell requires either several transistors (SRAM) or a capacitor (DRAM). You are probably thinking of DRAM, in which the transistor is sumply used to charge up and discharge the capacitor; so it is the size of the capacitor which matter - the transistor only gets to it.
I could imagine a memory cell which uses such a transistor to swap a single electron between two other atoms, thus making the whole memory cell out of three atoms. However, I don't see how you can shrink the wiring as much as the cell itself.
Like the fighter pilot who called his wife from the cockpit of his fighter and got his phone barred because the software reckoned nothing could travel so fast between cells so one of them had to be fraudulent.
LCD based displays have come an awful long way from the first, truly awful, ones. But when we marvel at how good current displays are, we ignore how bad they are compared to ordinary black-and-white printed (or even written) paper. Even CRTs are inferior to paper for long term reading (hence the slow uptake of e-books), and PDA screens are even worse. If they have a long document to read, most non-geeks will print it out rather than put it on a PDA, even if they have one.
The problem is not so much resolution (though more pixels obviously help) but contrast ratio. Paper can easily give a contrast ration of 100 to 1. CRTs, I believe, give a contrast ration of up to 20:1. I don't know the figure for PDA screens, but it cannot be much more than about 15:1, if that.
You have basoically put your finger on the central point. The benefits of Digital projection fall mainly to the distributor, but the costs fall mainly to the theatre. Given their own, first use, 35mm "celluloid" print, ther will be little difference to th theatre between a digital and a 35mm print. - except that they have to shell out big bucks to pay for the digital projection equipment.
The studio, by contrast, ahs a problem. How may prints, at approximately $6000 each, to they make? If you want to open in 2000 screens in the US (forget international for the moment) thet $12M for prints alone - not trivial even in the budget of a megamoveie. Digilally - $5000 of satellite time for a multicast to every cinema in the US (that has bought the $200,000 worth of kit to do the job).
Expect (or see - it is already happening) an arm-wrestl3e between the distributors and the thatres. Victory for the studiois is inevitable - the onluy question is the timescale. My bet - 3 to 5 years. In 5 years time, 355mm will be standby equipment only, with digital (techie details irelevant) the main distibution medium.
No way is DLP 5000 pixels. Ther is, to my knowledge, no projector capable of more than 1920 wide ort so. I don;t know what the LucasFilms productions are actually projectin gat, but I would be certain it is no more than 2000 - and I could well believe the 1280 quoted.
By contrast, a high res image for the quality print industry (Vogue, say), would reckon 4000 by 3000 a good satrtin pint.
They have tried it. It didn't work - the "watermark" was visible. (Sorry, I can't reveeal the channels I heard this from).
Stands to reason, actually. When the system gets "good enough", people stop trying. So the system is naturally only just barely good enough. People don't waste effort on bandwidth the punter can't see. So any extra signal will intrude into waht the punter *can* see.
This does not accord with the account given from local records by Stephen Jay Gould, in which the tiger was hunted for sport, in much the same way as foxes in England, but much more effectively. Whilst not saying that Tasmanian Tigers did not take stock, I believe that (as was the case with other carnivores such as the Sea Eagle) a carnivore which took a few percent of the stock was scapegoated for any fall in stock numbers and slaughtered indiscriminately.
Yes - because our ancestors were more careless than we are. If you crash your car, it crashed for a reason (somebody drove badly). Does that mean you should not repair it if you can economically do so? Of course not.
Many posters have made the point that extinctions happen, have always happened, and should happen. Sure. But the current rate of extinctions is about 10 to 100 times the "normal" rate. And that kind of differnece matters. Analogy time again (I love analogies). If I am walking down hil at 4mph, I am all undercontrol. But if I trip and start to fall down at 40mph, I am in trouble. Still going the same way, but there is a bigh difference in how I am going to feel at the end.
As to the Tasmanian Wolf - of course one species retrieved, or even a few dozen, won't make much differentce. But the thinking - dion't lose species if you can help it - is important.
Except the Dodo was reported not to taste very noice. Many were killed just for entertainment, and their meat was only taken as emergency food. They probably died out because rats (introduced by man) got their eggs.
Now the Moa, on the other hand.... Drumsticks off a ten foot high bird - you could use them to beat Col Sanders to death.
Why do you think it has exhust in nose? The animation shows a perfectly conventional 2-stage exhaust-in-base system. Obviously the exhausts of the second stage are above the top of the first stage, but they arene't used until the first stage is jestisonned - just like most other rockets. It seems to do some curious antics during re-entry as it uses several stages of parachute - but these are merely uncomfortable.
How many of the people reading this havce really checked out the guys site? He has done a *lot* of planning, and is in touch with a lot of people who know what they are doing - e.g. he has done some Cosmonaut training in Russia. Most of the critics seem to have jumped to the conclusion that this guy is a lone nutter in a back yard. He isn't.
He is trying to do less that than the Gemini missiona in the early '60s. Admittedly, thosw were powered by great lumps of Government money. But 40 years of rocket and control system technology, modelling systems etc. will help enormously. I don't reall see this as more risky than those early NASA launches, as narrated in "The Right Stuff" - and probably quite a bit less. I would give him good odds of succeeding.
"putting yourself in a situation where every single bug may kill you, NEEDLESSLY, is sheer stupidity in my book."
So that Columbus guw was pretty stupid, wasn't he? He could have stayed at home and been quite safe. And those astronauts on the Challenger? If they has not bothered, they would be safe at home now.
Ther is a BIG difference between a carefully calculated risk and straight stupidity. Anyone is entitled to take up dangerous sports if that is what they want - how many people get killed skiing every year? Darwin Awards are for people who take risks because they haven't thought things through, where there are alternatives which will achieve the same end result at far less risk, or the basic idea was stupid anyway.
I find that the use of a folding editor which demands fold comments (i.e. nopt JEDit style) very valuable. If you get used to folding up your code, then you are forced to put enough comments in the body to make it readable.
There should be Javadoc-style header commments on any function more than five lines long (and most shorter).
If you have both of those, you won't get much better for commenting.
Projects should have coding standards, and people ought to conform to them even if they don't personally agree with them. Code written to one standard and modified to another is worse than either. If you can get automated formatters, tune them to your house style then use them.
It is possible to be too verbose, but it is much easier to be too terse. Err on the side of verbosity.
Standardise abbreviations. Is "Length" given in full, abbreviated to "len" or to "ln"? Whichever you do, always do the same thing.
I was told several years ago that the SCSI?IDE diffefence was mainly used by manufacturers rather as a "professional/consumer" flag.
The silicon cost (negligible nowadaya) and raw I/O capability of the two interfaces are effectively the same. If you have the same media rotating at the same speed, you get the same raw throughput. The article described essentially bulk logging application, probably driven buy a single thread (i.e. no room for overlapped IO or seek optimisation). The advantages of Scsi won't show up in this case, so (MTBF) aside, you might as well use IDE.
Typically, Scsi drives have faster seeks and larger cache rams. The Scsi interface (given a good driver, which is not automatic) allows much more overlapping of transfers. The build standard is usually higher, so SCSI drives have much higer MTBF (1,250,000 hrs vs 250,000 hrs last time I looked). 15,000rpm drives are only available (AFAIK) in Scsi.
For most applications, throughput is overwhelmingly dominated by seek time and rotational latency. Scsi will win by miles here, bith because of non-scsi-related features for which Scsi is a flag (haster seeks) and scsi-related features such as much more ovelapping. (In on application, in which I had already sorted the transfers inot order, I still found a 25% increas in throughput by giving the Scsi drive a whole batch of commands to get on with in parallel).
But the head and oxide technology are the same, so for bulk linear logging, IDE will match the performance of Scsi, and beat the price.
On alt.books.pratchett last night, Terry Pratchett (who can hardly be described as a little know author) said that most Pratchett collections started with "stolen" books - which, in context, he meant borrowed and not returned. Try-before-you-buy, admittedly still in dead tree form, has worked very well for him.
But fiction may be a bit of a special case. Off screen is a rotten way of reading for extended periods, particularly fiction. Reading fiction is a "sat back" activity, like watching TV. Surfing the net, gaming, emailing, programming and most other forms of computer activity are "sat forward" activities. So it is not surprising that downloaded fiction is less satisfying that purchased fiction. But downloaded music can be fully as good as purchased music - so there isn't the same "trial is only half as good" effect.
Yes, there are plenty of geek jobs in TV. But, because there are vast numbers of people trying to "break into TV", you want to paly the geek angle heavier than the TV production angle. And I would suggest you don't start with the big broadcatsters. They may have many, many jobs, but they tend to promote from the bottom up. You need to look at the small production houses. They are the ones buying the latest tech in order to get that little bit of edge, and then need someone with the necessary tech knowhow to drive the bleeding-edge kit they have bought. Anybody who can really drive state of the art IT kit - whether windows or *nix - and also relate easily and constrictively to creative artists should have no trouble getting, and keeping, a good job. If you really can straddle the tech world and the artistic world, you are on to a good thing.
sort of like the thai dancing which includes very precise finger movements, but faster. Which leads to the question of how much you can code into the movements of ten fingers. For example, you double the number of "keys" by allowing up as wll as down. And can we increase the number of "keys" by overlapping them?
Way back when, my company made a product for use in an operating theatre by surgeons in mid operation. So it had to be usable with bloody gloves and capable of tolerating aggressive cleaning. It was hard plastic, with no feel at all. It ws absolutely horrible to use. It could be used as the system keyboard, but everybody needing to do more then about 10 keystrokes would unplug it and use a decent keyboard.
Not true, according to normal definitions. Every point on the earths surface is on an infinite numnber of Great Circles. Th Equator is that great circle whose plane is normal to the line joining the poles.
I'll take issue on that. IMO, for something to be Science Fiction, it must be seriously limited in its postulates, which must all be revealed early on. The rest of the story must then be worked out in the context of the given postulates (which may be counter to known science) and the world otherwise as we know it. The problem with magic in the HP books is that the magic has no "engineering" to it. The auther can invent new magic, or strengthen and weaken the magic of one character against another, as suits the plot. The only exception I can think of is Larry Niven's series of magic relates stories, in which he attempts to make a "science" of magic.
The HP books are good - I read and enjoyed all four. But I don't think thay are SF and are hterefore not, IMO, elegible for a Hugo.
Why do you think that this is approaching the Heisenberg limit? It is working on the same scale as cellular cehmistry works e.g. DNA decoding and protein synthesis. The Heisenberg limit, at normal temperatures, only cuts in another level lower, for individual electrons and suchlike.
Mind you, this is an awful long way from anything useful. Good research, though.
We all multi-task all the time. Think what it would be like if we only allowed switching once a year... Jan-Mar asleep, first week of Apr in the bathroom, communte for the rest of apr, eat through May, June to Sep solid work, then Oct to Dec for R&R, ending with several days of solid sex.
Its just a matter of timescales - too little and too much are both wrong. People vary, tasks vary. If you're being overloaded, multi-tasking or some other way, give your managers feedback. If your managers cant take feedback and act on it, get better managers.
Slashdot Mirror
Another article on /.recently reported single-atom transitors. And a couple of years ago AT&T reported a 1 picometre transistor - ten times smaller than this one. So, while there will undoubtedly be engineering issues to cope with, I don't expect any fundamental physics barriers at this scale.
I wouldn't expect to see any circuitry built directly from these technologies - though I could be wrong. But what it does say is that there is no absolute theoretical limit above the size of a single atom at which transistor operation is no longer possible. We will continue to progress along the lines we are already travelling - finer and finer masks, more sophisticated optical processing, probably electron beam writing, or maybe direct electron masking. But we now know that there is no quantum bogey man going to jump out and say that it is no use shrinking feature sizes any more because transistors just don't work at that size.
This contrasts with hard-disk technology, where there is almost certainly a minimum size to a magnetic domain (though it may be smaller than we now thing - see the latest "pixie dust" enhancements which shrink the stable size of a domain). Somebody who works for a disk-drive manufacturer told me that their R&D people reckoned that they would be hitting brick walls erected by the laws of physics about 2012. Contrast seciconductors, where on one side a senior honcho at TSMC was reported as saying thet he could see the engineering advances continuing to at least 2020, while these results says that the physics carries on even further.
Well before we get to the single atom transistor or the single atom memory, we are going to have problems wiring such chips. I cannot see such high densities being achieved with the wiring for true random access. I think either the wiring density will mean that larger (and hence easier) cells will fit under the wiring, or that some kind of shift-register type scheme will have to be used, slowing random access time.
Which in reflects on computer architectures - we could be adding even more levels to the current hierarchy of register - L1 cache - L2 cache - main memory - disk. Could we usefully used a few Gbyte of (volatile) ram disk on a chip? Say, transfer speeds the same as current disks (100 Mbyte/sec, compared to the 1Gbyte/sec of PCI-X and several Gbyte/sec of main memory) but zero rotational and seek latency?
They only describe a single transistor, not a storage cell. A storage cell requires either several transistors (SRAM) or a capacitor (DRAM). You are probably thinking of DRAM, in which the transistor is sumply used to charge up and discharge the capacitor; so it is the size of the capacitor which matter - the transistor only gets to it.
I could imagine a memory cell which uses such a transistor to swap a single electron between two other atoms, thus making the whole memory cell out of three atoms. However, I don't see how you can shrink the wiring as much as the cell itself.
Like the fighter pilot who called his wife from the cockpit of his fighter and got his phone barred because the software reckoned nothing could travel so fast between cells so one of them had to be fraudulent.
LCD based displays have come an awful long way from the first, truly awful, ones. But when we marvel at how good current displays are, we ignore how bad they are compared to ordinary black-and-white printed (or even written) paper. Even CRTs are inferior to paper for long term reading (hence the slow uptake of e-books), and PDA screens are even worse. If they have a long document to read, most non-geeks will print it out rather than put it on a PDA, even if they have one.
The problem is not so much resolution (though more pixels obviously help) but contrast ratio. Paper can easily give a contrast ration of 100 to 1. CRTs, I believe, give a contrast ration of up to 20:1. I don't know the figure for PDA screens, but it cannot be much more than about 15:1, if that.
You have basoically put your finger on the central point. The benefits of Digital projection fall mainly to the distributor, but the costs fall mainly to the theatre. Given their own, first use, 35mm "celluloid" print, ther will be little difference to th theatre between a digital and a 35mm print. - except that they have to shell out big bucks to pay for the digital projection equipment.
The studio, by contrast, ahs a problem. How may prints, at approximately $6000 each, to they make? If you want to open in 2000 screens in the US (forget international for the moment) thet $12M for prints alone - not trivial even in the budget of a megamoveie. Digilally - $5000 of satellite time for a multicast to every cinema in the US (that has bought the $200,000 worth of kit to do the job).
Expect (or see - it is already happening) an arm-wrestl3e between the distributors and the thatres. Victory for the studiois is inevitable - the onluy question is the timescale. My bet - 3 to 5 years. In 5 years time, 355mm will be standby equipment only, with digital (techie details irelevant) the main distibution medium.
No way is DLP 5000 pixels. Ther is, to my knowledge, no projector capable of more than 1920 wide ort so. I don;t know what the LucasFilms productions are actually projectin gat, but I would be certain it is no more than 2000 - and I could well believe the 1280 quoted.
By contrast, a high res image for the quality print industry (Vogue, say), would reckon 4000 by 3000 a good satrtin pint.
They have tried it. It didn't work - the "watermark" was visible. (Sorry, I can't reveeal the channels I heard this from).
Stands to reason, actually. When the system gets "good enough", people stop trying. So the system is naturally only just barely good enough. People don't waste effort on bandwidth the punter can't see. So any extra signal will intrude into waht the punter *can* see.
This does not accord with the account given from local records by Stephen Jay Gould, in which the tiger was hunted for sport, in much the same way as foxes in England, but much more effectively. Whilst not saying that Tasmanian Tigers did not take stock, I believe that (as was the case with other carnivores such as the Sea Eagle) a carnivore which took a few percent of the stock was scapegoated for any fall in stock numbers and slaughtered indiscriminately.
Yes - because our ancestors were more careless than we are. If you crash your car, it crashed for a reason (somebody drove badly). Does that mean you should not repair it if you can economically do so? Of course not.
Many posters have made the point that extinctions happen, have always happened, and should happen. Sure. But the current rate of extinctions is about 10 to 100 times the "normal" rate. And that kind of differnece matters. Analogy time again (I love analogies). If I am walking down hil at 4mph, I am all undercontrol. But if I trip and start to fall down at 40mph, I am in trouble. Still going the same way, but there is a bigh difference in how I am going to feel at the end.
As to the Tasmanian Wolf - of course one species retrieved, or even a few dozen, won't make much differentce. But the thinking - dion't lose species if you can help it - is important.
Except the Dodo was reported not to taste very noice. Many were killed just for entertainment, and their meat was only taken as emergency food. They probably died out because rats (introduced by man) got their eggs.
Now the Moa, on the other hand.... Drumsticks off a ten foot high bird - you could use them to beat Col Sanders to death.
Why do you think it has exhust in nose? The animation shows a perfectly conventional 2-stage exhaust-in-base system. Obviously the exhausts of the second stage are above the top of the first stage, but they arene't used until the first stage is jestisonned - just like most other rockets. It seems to do some curious antics during re-entry as it uses several stages of parachute - but these are merely uncomfortable.
How many of the people reading this havce really checked out the guys site? He has done a *lot* of planning, and is in touch with a lot of people who know what they are doing - e.g. he has done some Cosmonaut training in Russia. Most of the critics seem to have jumped to the conclusion that this guy is a lone nutter in a back yard. He isn't.
He is trying to do less that than the Gemini missiona in the early '60s. Admittedly, thosw were powered by great lumps of Government money. But 40 years of rocket and control system technology, modelling systems etc. will help enormously. I don't reall see this as more risky than those early NASA launches, as narrated in "The Right Stuff" - and probably quite a bit less. I would give him good odds of succeeding.
"putting yourself in a situation where every single bug may kill you, NEEDLESSLY, is sheer stupidity in my book."
So that Columbus guw was pretty stupid, wasn't he? He could have stayed at home and been quite safe. And those astronauts on the Challenger? If they has not bothered, they would be safe at home now.
Ther is a BIG difference between a carefully calculated risk and straight stupidity. Anyone is entitled to take up dangerous sports if that is what they want - how many people get killed skiing every year? Darwin Awards are for people who take risks because they haven't thought things through, where there are alternatives which will achieve the same end result at far less risk, or the basic idea was stupid anyway.
"Live long - die bored"
I find that the use of a folding editor which demands fold comments (i.e. nopt JEDit style) very valuable. If you get used to folding up your code, then you are forced to put enough comments in the body to make it readable.
There should be Javadoc-style header commments on any function more than five lines long (and most shorter).
If you have both of those, you won't get much better for commenting.
Projects should have coding standards, and people ought to conform to them even if they don't personally agree with them. Code written to one standard and modified to another is worse than either. If you can get automated formatters, tune them to your house style then use them.
It is possible to be too verbose, but it is much easier to be too terse. Err on the side of verbosity.
Standardise abbreviations. Is "Length" given in full, abbreviated to "len" or to "ln"? Whichever you do, always do the same thing.
I was told several years ago that the SCSI?IDE diffefence was mainly used by manufacturers rather as a "professional/consumer" flag.
The silicon cost (negligible nowadaya) and raw I/O capability of the two interfaces are effectively the same. If you have the same media rotating at the same speed, you get the same raw throughput. The article described essentially bulk logging application, probably driven buy a single thread (i.e. no room for overlapped IO or seek optimisation). The advantages of Scsi won't show up in this case, so (MTBF) aside, you might as well use IDE.
Typically, Scsi drives have faster seeks and larger cache rams. The Scsi interface (given a good driver, which is not automatic) allows much more overlapping of transfers. The build standard is usually higher, so SCSI drives have much higer MTBF (1,250,000 hrs vs 250,000 hrs last time I looked). 15,000rpm drives are only available (AFAIK) in Scsi.
For most applications, throughput is overwhelmingly dominated by seek time and rotational latency. Scsi will win by miles here, bith because of non-scsi-related features for which Scsi is a flag (haster seeks) and scsi-related features such as much more ovelapping.
(In on application, in which I had already sorted the transfers inot order, I still found a 25% increas in throughput by giving the Scsi drive a whole batch of commands to get on with in parallel).
But the head and oxide technology are the same, so for bulk linear logging, IDE will match the performance of Scsi, and beat the price.
Horses for courses.
On alt.books.pratchett last night, Terry Pratchett (who can hardly be described as a little know author) said that most Pratchett collections started with "stolen" books - which, in context, he meant borrowed and not returned. Try-before-you-buy, admittedly still in dead tree form, has worked very well for him. But fiction may be a bit of a special case. Off screen is a rotten way of reading for extended periods, particularly fiction. Reading fiction is a "sat back" activity, like watching TV. Surfing the net, gaming, emailing, programming and most other forms of computer activity are "sat forward" activities. So it is not surprising that downloaded fiction is less satisfying that purchased fiction. But downloaded music can be fully as good as purchased music - so there isn't the same "trial is only half as good" effect.
Yes, there are plenty of geek jobs in TV. But, because there are vast numbers of people trying to "break into TV", you want to paly the geek angle heavier than the TV production angle. And I would suggest you don't start with the big broadcatsters. They may have many, many jobs, but they tend to promote from the bottom up. You need to look at the small production houses. They are the ones buying the latest tech in order to get that little bit of edge, and then need someone with the necessary tech knowhow to drive the bleeding-edge kit they have bought. Anybody who can really drive state of the art IT kit - whether windows or *nix - and also relate easily and constrictively to creative artists should have no trouble getting, and keeping, a good job. If you really can straddle the tech world and the artistic world, you are on to a good thing.
sort of like the thai dancing which includes very precise finger movements, but faster. Which leads to the question of how much you can code into the movements of ten fingers. For example, you double the number of "keys" by allowing up as wll as down. And can we increase the number of "keys" by overlapping them?
Way back when, my company made a product for use in an operating theatre by surgeons in mid operation. So it had to be usable with bloody gloves and capable of tolerating aggressive cleaning. It was hard plastic, with no feel at all. It ws absolutely horrible to use. It could be used as the system keyboard, but everybody needing to do more then about 10 keystrokes would unplug it and use a decent keyboard.
As far a I can see, the changes are all incremental. Nothing learned so far is changed, just new (and valuable) bells and whistles.
Not true, according to normal definitions. Every point on the earths surface is on an infinite numnber of Great Circles. Th Equator is that great circle whose plane is normal to the line joining the poles.
I'll take issue on that. IMO, for something to be Science Fiction, it must be seriously limited in its postulates, which must all be revealed early on. The rest of the story must then be worked out in the context of the given postulates (which may be counter to known science) and the world otherwise as we know it. The problem with magic in the HP books is that the magic has no "engineering" to it. The auther can invent new magic, or strengthen and weaken the magic of one character against another, as suits the plot. The only exception I can think of is Larry Niven's series of magic relates stories, in which he attempts to make a "science" of magic.
The HP books are good - I read and enjoyed all four. But I don't think thay are SF and are hterefore not, IMO, elegible for a Hugo.
Why do you think that this is approaching the Heisenberg limit? It is working on the same scale as cellular cehmistry works e.g. DNA decoding and protein synthesis. The Heisenberg limit, at normal temperatures, only cuts in another level lower, for individual electrons and suchlike.
Mind you, this is an awful long way from anything useful. Good research, though.
We all multi-task all the time. Think what it would be like if we only allowed switching once a year... Jan-Mar asleep, first week of Apr in the bathroom, communte for the rest of apr, eat through May, June to Sep solid work, then Oct to Dec for R&R, ending with several days of solid sex. Its just a matter of timescales - too little and too much are both wrong. People vary, tasks vary. If you're being overloaded, multi-tasking or some other way, give your managers feedback. If your managers cant take feedback and act on it, get better managers.