This is the second article in my series on quantum computing. Part one is here.
I didn’t start out to write a series.
After my original post on quantum, though, I got to talk to a bunch of folks working in the industry. That made me realized that there are two very different schools of thought on what a quantum computer ought to be.
I wanted to understand the state of the art in quantum computing, but the two different approaches mean the art has two different states. …
Calling someone a “thought leader” is a way of calling them “interesting,” but it has a little more heft. Thought leaders are out there, leading thoughts around! (When someone claims that they themselves are a thought leader, I assume they’re really not, and also that they are a little bit of a dick.)
The phrase has always bugged me. It’s exactly backward.
One of the interesting people I pay attention to is Tim Urban. He blogs over at WaitButWhy. His superpower is to ask a surprising question, and then to start looking for the answer. …
There was a story in the New York Times yesterday about Joe Biden’s fiscal plan as he enters office. The plan calls for $1.9 trillion in spending.
That’s a lot of money. I like it.
Obviously, the fastest way to launch a strong recovery from the pandemic is to end it. The plan invests heavily in vaccine production and distribution, centralizing and coordinating those efforts in a way that the Trump administration never has. The President-elect aims to vaccinate one hundred million Americans in his first hundred days in office. …
Interesting stuff that crossed my feed lately:
We’re six days from the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris. The National Guard has assembled in Washington, DC to protect the legislature and to safeguard the top officials in the nation during the inauguration.
Yesterday, the House voted to impeach President Trump for the second time, awarding him half of all impeachments in US history. That was on the back of a takeover of the US Capitol by his followers, aimed at stopping the Constitutional process to certify the legitimate election results for Biden and Harris. …
Interesting stuff that has crossed my feed lately:
The turmoil of President Trump’s final days in office are sucking up almost all the front page real estate, Twitter chatter capacity and raw attention that Americans have, right now. It is hard to turn away from a train wreck.
But we need to do that, because in our distraction, we are losing critical time in battling the coronavirus pandemic.
In early December, a mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was discovered for the first time in the UK. Mutation is common in viruses, but no mutant strain before this one caused much alarm among epidemiologists. This time, though, they’re worried…
Interesting stuff that has crossed my feed lately:
The avalanch of the final two weeks of the Trump Presidency will cause more damage. Events will no doubt affect my thinking.
But in the immediate aftermath of the President’s call to his supporters, their riot and seizure of the Capitol building, and their interruption of the sacred task of a democracy — counting the vote — I feel compelled to put my thoughts down.
I’m alarmed at the success of conspiracy theories. Those beliefs are the raw fuel on which all of the madness of Trumpism runs. If people are capable of believing in alien overlords, lizard people, satanic…
I’m kind of a map nerd — I love projections and renderings and different wavelengths and physical features and geopolitical boundaries and buildings and roads and oh my goodness! Just for example, after a trans-UK bicycle tour a few years ago, I got obsessed with the total linear measure of dry stone walls in the country, because they were all over the place on the bike ride. Took me a while, but it turns out that the Dry Stone Walling Association thinks that 193,000 kilometers is about right.
Anyway:
The person who tweets at @cartocalypse has posted an amazing set…
Berkeley-based techie with an interest in business. Worried about the world.