Update (5/7): Enough! Thanks, everyone, for asking so many imaginative questions, and please accept my apologies if yours remains unaddressed. (It’s nothing personal: they simply came fast and furious, way faster than I could handle in an online fashion—so I gave up on chronological order and simply wrote answers in whatever order they popped into my head.) At this point, I’m no longer accepting any new questions. I’ll try to answer all the remaining questions by tomorrow night.

By popular request, for the next 36 hours—so, from now until ~11PM on Tuesday—I’ll have a long-overdue edition of “Ask Me Anything.” (For the previous editions, see here, here, here, and here.) Today’s edition is partly to celebrate my new, tenured “freedom to do whatever the hell I want” (as well as the publication after 7 years of Quantum Computing Since Democritus), but is mostly just to have an excuse to get out of changing diapers (“I’d love to, honey, but the world is demanding answers!”). Here are the ground rules:

One question per person, total. Please check to see whether your question was already asked in one of the previous editions—if it was, then I’ll probably just refer you there. No questions with complicated backstories, or that require me to watch a video, read a paper, etc. and comment on it. No questions about D-Wave. (As it happens, Matthias Troyer will be giving a talk at MIT this Wednesday about his group’s experiments on the D-Wave machine, and I’m planning a blog post about it—so just hold your horses for a few more days!) If your question is offensive, patronizing, nosy, or annoying, I reserve the right to give a flippant non-answer or even delete the question. Keep in mind that, in past editions, the best questions have almost always been the most goofball ones (“What’s up with those painting elephants?”).

That’s it: ask away!

Update (5/12): I’ve finally answered all ~90 questions, a mere 4 days after the official end of the “Ask Me Anything” session! Thanks so much to everyone for all the great questions. For your reading convenience, here’s a guide to my answers (personal favorites are in bold):