Here’s another entry in the list of bizarre uses for the word quantum. I’m eagerly awaiting a UPS delivery and was quite surprised to find that they offer a “Quantum View”:

UPS Quantum View

It even sports a “visibility”, which means it has to be good!

I’m in the process of preparing a talk on our recent quantum walk paper. On the search for inspiration for an introduction to the topic, I was looking for an image to explain (classic) random walks. Google’s image search did a reasonable job, returning these images as the first three results:

Google Image search Result #1

Google Image search result #2

Google Image search result #3

Decent enough, but not exactly what I was looking for. So I turned to Bing, Microsoft’s rebranded Google competitor. This is the number 1 search result:

Microsoft's idea of a random walk

Seriously, Microsoft? Apparently there is a manga called “Random Walk”. The first page of Bing’s results is full of these. Interestingly, Google does actually also bring this up among the results but far less frequent and you can (somewhat bizarrely) filter it out if you turn “safe search” on, something which failed for Bing.

The second Bing hit is actually related to what I was looking for, but let’s see what else Microsoft has to offer:

Well, that’s it for me, back to Google.