I attended a lecture at UTD with my father this afternoon. The speaker was addressing the topic of quantum computing. I'd done some reading on the topic, so I wasn't completely clueless about the subject. The guy was really knowledgeable, but not a very good orator. He seemed to jump back & forth between incomprehensibly complex and absurdly easy topics, though, so I only understood half of what was going on. The most intriguing thing he mentioned, in my opinion, was the idea of using constructive interference of light waves as a means of like solving for unknown stuff in data... hard to explain. I don't know how much practical knowledge I took away with me from that lecture, but at least it got me thinking.