Canada's Prime Minister has provided a great boost to the popularity of the quest for a "quantum computer." He was talking at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada (where I was once a Visiting Professor for two years). The Prime Minister not only impressed both the journalists and the scientists at the institute, but also pledged $50 million of ongoing state support for research on quantum computing. You can watch him impress here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZBLSjF56S8.
This reminds me of a funny story I read in an arXiv paper a few years ago about how to get a grant to teach a donkey how to read:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.3562.
Let me quote from this paper:
The [Quantum Computer] story says a lot about human nature, the scientific community, and the society as a whole, so it deserves profound psycho-sociological studies, which should begin right now, while the main actors are still alive and can be questioned.
A somewhat similar story can be traced back to the 13th century when Nasreddin Hodja made a proposal to teach his donkey to read and obtained a 10-year grant from the local Sultan. For his first report he put breadcrumbs between the pages of a big book, and demonstrated the donkey turning the pages with his hoofs. This was a promising first step in the right direction.
Nasreddin was a wise but simple man, so when asked by friends how he hopes to accomplish his goal, he answered: “My dear fellows, before ten years are up, either I will die or the Sultan will die. Or else, the donkey will die.”
Had he the modern degree of sophistication, he could say, first, that there is no theorem forbidding donkeys to read. And, since this does not contradict any known fundamental principles, the failure to achieve this goal would reveal new laws of Nature. So, it is a win-win strategy: either the donkey learns to read, or new laws will be discovered.
Second, he could say that his research may, with some modifications, be generalized to other animals, like goats and sheep, as well as to insects, like ants, gnats, and flies, and this will have a tremendous potential for improving national security: these beasts could easily cross the enemy lines, read the secret plans, and report them back to us.