strange happenings in BlackBerry country

Jacob Koshy — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:40:00 GMT

The University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada is a great campus to stroll in. Pretty and pleasantly wintery, what struck me though was the spate of BlackBerrys around. Everybody, from the university managing director to the students are twiddling on these phones and in my relatively-brief 6-hour time on campus, i didn't see anybody use a non-BlackBerry handset. Turns out that Mike Lazaridis, founder and CEO of Research in Motion, that makes these virulently-popular devices, pretty much tested, tweaked and tossed out the first Berrys from the university campus. It's said on campus that anybody wants Blackberrys for experiments, surveys has only to walk over to the Blackberry office, a few blocks away and simply ask for them!!

Lazaridis, like all world-famous geeks, dropped out of his graduate programme at Waterloo university, and has now donated millions to set up a clutch of institutes that will work in quantum computing and nano-technology. His most interesting venture, though, is funding the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), located a few miles away from the University of Waterloo campus, that's attracted international physicists such as Stephen Hawkings, to India's very own string theory whiz, Ashoke Sen. PI's meant to draw the world's best theoreticians, who are going to be pondering completely abstract stuff such as whether it's atoms--or strings- that really make up the world. In short, Lazaridis will drain millions in an intellectual quicksand that may not make him a single dollar, and perhaps may never really improve the commoner's grasp of what constitutes matter. (Sadly, that's how slowly and boringly the world of theoretical physics progresses!)

I'd kill to know what went on in Lazaridis' boiling-point-of-water-on-the-Farenheit-scale IQ brain, when he decided to set up PI. Surely he doesn't expect to understand how the dodo-est atoms and photons intuitively Blackbery each other (" I'm not in the mood to be wave tonight, can i be a particle next Sunday?") in this lifetime atleast. Then why? Why blow up over $150 million of personal wealth over such stuff?

Maybe has aims to make hometown Ontario another MIT or Oxford, and run for prime minister? Maybe he doesn't know what to do with all that money (Read this interview) or maybe PI's going to do something practical, like make the next quantum computer (But there's already a separate project for that). Quantum cryptography (using the quantum nature of matter for the said purpose) would be extremely useful to Lazaridis, who will continue to need ever more secure methods for his wireless encryption. And q cryptography IS one of the focus areas at PI. But then why the cosmology and the superstring theory?????

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Lab Rats : BlackBerry

strange happenings in BlackBerry country