by Andy Coffey
Sacred Wind – The Appendices
Copyright © Andy Coffey 2014
The right of Andy Coffey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 9781311317193
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Illustrations by Joe Latham [email protected]
Copyright © Joe Latham 2014
Other books by Andy Coffey
Sacred Wind: Book 1
Sacred Wind: Book 2
Sacred Wind: Book 3
Sacred Wind: The Complete Trilogy
Sacred Wind: Songbook
Sacred Wind – The Album
Possibly the finest debut album by a Welsh Viking Flatulence Rock band from an alternative reality… Available at all good download stores!
www.sacredwind.co.uk
Table of Contents
Introduction
Appendix 1 – A Quick Guide to Quantum Computing
Appendix 2 – The Bi-Millennial Deity Conference
Appendix 3 – The Frothy Ale Tsunami of ‘87
Appendix 4 – History of the Cestrian Music Tournament
About the Author – by Oldfart Olafson
Other books by Andy Coffey
Contact Sacred Wind
Introduction
‘Sometimes there are tales that must be told, songs that must be sung, and farts that must be farted. And sometimes the spirit of these great adventures, heroic deeds, songs of glory, and flatulent blessings is powerful enough to touch the hearts, ears and nostrils of the Gods. And so it is with Sacred Wind.
Certainly I know that I, King Beef Vindaloo-Boiled Rice III, puff my rice with pride and thicken my sauce when I recount the adventures of the Companionship of Wind. How a stranger from beyond distance and beyond time (a lad called Aiden Peersey, from your reality) joined Sacred Wind in their quest to win the Cestrian Music Tournament, to save the faerie queen, to win freedom for our land, to be able to fart freely, and to win the right to their cheese. It is the stuff of legend. And sometimes the Gods decree that such legends need to be manifest in the entire Multiverse… although not necessarily the smells.
However, even though this most splendid tale has been told in the marvellous Sacred Wind books 1, 2 & 3, there are other tales that need telling. And so a series of historical appendices has been commissioned by none other than Odin himself. You have here the first four of these enlightening pieces of literature, with more to follow. So read with pride, my friends… and if you feel the need to have a small fart at any time, know that it will cause pleasure to many.
May your rice be forever fluffy, may your poppadoms be crisp, may your curry be hot, and may Odin bless your wind.
King Beef Vindaloo-Boiled Rice III.’
Appendix 1 – A Quick Guide to Quantum Computing
The workings of quantum mechanics are wacky. Let’s not beat around the bush here, Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics, said ‘Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it’. Another Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, said ‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics’. So these guys were baffled by it and they were really clever.
Quantum computing is, perhaps unsurprisingly, computing that harnesses the bizarre workings of quantum mechanics and, depending upon what you read, can be met with the same degree of obfuscation. So, anyone who really isn’t bothered how it works and is quite happy to accept that it’s simply wacky and uses other dimensions to assist in computations, good for you. For those of you who are slightly more curious, or those of you who have a technological masochistic propensity, please read on.
Now your normal, everyday computers, when you really get down to it, all work on the principal that little switches on silicon chips or suchlike are either on or off. And to denote something as either being on or off, binary numbers are used at the lowest level of programming. You see, whereas we can count in base ten, e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. up to 10, computers can’t. They have to translate everything into a mixture of 0s and 1s (if computers had ten fingers and ten toes maybe things would be different). So, thousands or even millions, of tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little, itsy bitsy transistors (basically little switches) on a silicon chip are either ‘on’, which may denote 1, or ‘off’, which may denote 0.
And that’s basically it. In theory, simple; in practice it can get pretty complicated otherwise we’d all be at it. Computer languages effectively tell these little switches which of them should be 1 and which should be 0, based upon the instructions written in the higher language of the program, which is translated by the computer down to low-level languages and eventually into binary instructions; at which point the computer says ‘Aha, now I understand!’ and goes off about its business.
So, if a computer has to do everything in 0s and 1s, how does it count you may ask? Okay, let’s take the number 5 as an example. In binary this is represented as 101. Because in binary the natural steps of multiplication aren’t 10s, 100s, 1000s etc. they are 2, 4, 8, 16 etc. Have a look:
Binary number101
Decimal integers124
So, 101 is one number 1, no number 2 and one number 4 = 1 + 0 + 4 = 5.
Confused? Okay, here’s the number 9:
Binary number1001
Decimal integers1248
So, in decimal this translates thus, 1 + 0 + 0 + 8 = 9.
And the number 52 (just to get really adventurous):
Binary number001011
Decimal integers12481632
No number 1, no number 2, one number 4, no number 8, one number 16 and one number 32 = 0 + 0 + 4 + 0 + 16 + 32 = 52!
Hopefully you’ve now got the picture, although why they didn’t just create computers with ten fingers and toes in the first place is probably the question we should all be asking.
Now, in general computing terms a single switch is called a ‘bit’ and can be either 1 or 0. Eight bits make a ‘byte’ (which could be 10010011, for example), hence the term ‘megabyte’ (a million bytes), ‘gigabyte’ (a thousand million bytes) and ‘terabyte’ (oodles and oodles of bytes).
So, let’s take an imaginary computer that only has two bits and can, therefore, only have the following states: 00, 01, 10 or 11
Okay, so it can have the above four states but only one state at a time, as the switches are either 1 or 0 , and obviously not both as that would be impossible… or very wacky; which leads nicely into an explanation of a qubit and something called ‘superposition’.
A qubit (or quantum bit, to give it its full title) is a single quantum switch that could be, say, an electron. And electrons are entities which exist in atoms, so as you can see we’re really getting to a whole new level of tiny here. Now, electrons have this property called ‘spin’, although it should really be called ‘point’ as they can be either pointing up (spin up) or pointing down (spin down). So you now have a really, really, really, really, really, tiny, itsy bitsy, cute little switch, where up could be 1 and down could be 0. But, and here’s where the wackiness really kicks in with a vengeance, in the quantum world entities like electrons can be in what’s known as a ‘superpositi
on’ of states, which means that in the right conditions they can be both ‘on’ and ‘off’ at the same time. No wonder the scientists are still baffled.
And before any of you start shouting, ‘aha, I’ve got an electricity switch in the house that behaves in the same way’, can I just say that this is not the same thing.
So, in order to have a regular computer display the states 00, 01, 10 and 11 simultaneously you’d need four pairs of bits. But in a quantum computer you’d only need two qubits to do the same task, as they can be in all four states at the same time!
Ok, that’s quite cool, you may think, but it gets cooler the more qubits you have. Eight qubits is called a ‘qubyte’ (no surprise there). A normal byte can be in 256 different states (e.g. 00000000 and all variations up to 11111111), but can only be in one of these states at a time. However, a qubyte can store all 256 states AT THE SAME TIME!
‘How does it do this?’ I hear you ask. Easy, each state is a probability that exists in a different dimension.
Appendix 2 – The Bi-Millennial Deity Conference
The Bi-millennial Deity conference is a grand event where Gods, Demi-Gods and mystical figures from all the major, minor, fledgling and even non-existent religions meet to discuss the current state of the Multiverse, changes and improvements to policies, upcoming mystical events, and who has the most statues.
