October 2, 2007

"Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell printers"

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Scott Aaronson, the blogger who moonlights as an MIT quantum computation researcher, just discovered that an Australian commercial (on YouTube) has cribbed most of its script from one of his lectures on quantum mechanics posted online. Link

Model 1: But if quantum mechanics isn't physics in the usual sense--if it's not about matter, or energy, or waves--then what is it about?

Model 2: Well, from my perspective, it's about information, probabilities, and observables, and how they relate to each other.

Model 1: That's interesting!

The commercial then flashes the tagline "A more intelligent model," followed by a picture of a Ricoh printer.

Scott finds himself in a quantum superposition of |speechless>, |flattered> and |thinking about cashing in>. (If only it was a quantum printer.) The spot is apparently the work of one "Love Communications":

The Intelligent Model campaign was developed at Love by creative director Scot Waterhouse, art director Andrew Leftley, copywriter Guy Lemberg and agency producer Paul Johnston. Filming was shot by director Mark Furmie via Filmgraphics with producer Simon Ritch.

Note to CBS: Hire the Love guys to punch up the dialogue of The Big Bang Theory. No uber-nerd would be telling another uber-nerd about the double slit experiment as if he had just read about it on CNN.com.

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