You know that problem child molar I just had worked on for the nth time? The one that required heroic measures and possibly divine intervention a couple of weeks ago? I went in yesterday to get the permanent crown installed.

It seemed like a pretty standard routine: Sit down, get the topical gel, and then out came the local anesthetic. My dentist went in for the first jab.

And hit the nerve.

For a good many years, I'd been afraid of just such a thing happening. It was only in the past year or so that I'd gotten over it …

Last Thursday morning I went in to have a certain problematic molar taken care of at the dentist's office before it got much worse. To recap briefly, there is a particular molar on the bottom-left side of my mouth that has been through hell: It's broken several times (once particularly memorable time while eating a German soft pretzel, of all things), it's been filled several times, and I've honestly lost track of the number of root canals performed done on it (somewhere between three and six in the last fifteen years). While getting the abscessed #19 tooth taken care of …

The more densely packed computing circuitry becomes, the fast it can run, in part because the connection paths are so short. Until room-temperature superconductors are invented, passing an electrical current through a physical connection, no matter how short, will prevent the current from running at the speed of light due to the phenomenon of electrical resistence. Another problem arises as a result of densely packing circuitry: Heat. Lots of heat.

This is a problem that can't really be eliminated, because heat is a natural manifestation of entropy. When you lose decoherence in anything for any reason waste heat is generated …