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Microsoft’s Majorana Move Isn’t About Qubits. It’s Bigger Than That.
Quantum. Nobody said it was supposed to be straightforward.
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How Not To (and Just Possibly How To) Study Japanese
Coming at a language as an outsider isn’t always a disadvantage. What first feels like an insurmountable barrier can become a vantage point.
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Tradecraft : the Stuff They Don’t Teach You at School
Spies, coders, journalists—they all rely on intuition, improvisation, and experience. It’s tradecraft.
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Weaponized Randomness : Monte Carlo from the Manhattan Project to The Three-Body Problem
They call it “weaponized randomness.” I had no idea what it really was until I stumbled across it in three consecutive books.
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The 2024 Reading List
It’s been a good reading year.
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Elementary : From Hadron Bootstrapping to the Implicate Order
If there’s nothing fundamental about ‘elementary’ particles, if nature never bottoms out, then what remains to hold on to?
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Quantum Primitives : An Ontology in 12 ½ Chapters
Mapping out the primitives of a field is a useful way to understand its landscape. In the case of quantum technology, this approach proves especially challenging—but equally rewarding.
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Super-Signalling
Evolution has created a nasty cognitive hack that ethologists call the super-stimulus. I’d like to propose a term for a related behaviour.
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Sweet Nothing : The Gospel According to Frank Bascombe
Richard Ford wraps up the Bascombe saga and leaves the reader with a sense of miracle.
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Nothing is Real : Amanda Gefter is Thinking About Life, the Universe and Everything
Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is a coming of age story—not only for an exceptional science writer, but for the entire cosmos itself.
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A Conversation With Jacek Dukaj
He is Poland’s most popular science fiction author, with his work adapted for both the silver screen and a Netflix original series. He also engages deeply with geopolitics, on Earth and beyond.
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A Conversation With Guido Tonelli
Guido Tonelli is an author and an experimental physicist. His team at CERN was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson.
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Love, Math & Witchcraft: How Roasting Psychoanalysis Came Back to Bite Richard Feynman
The further we zoom in on Mother Nature, the clearer it becomes that, at its most fundamental level, science resembles ‘witch-doctoring’ more than anything else.
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Quantum Bootcamp
Sweden has been lagging badly behind when it comes to quantum tech. Most of the funding has been provided by private players and there’s been no national strategy. That’s starting to change now.
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Quarks, Gluons & Jabberwocks : On Aptonyms and Nonce Words
It’s a very human tendency to conflate representations with reality. We are, after all, symbol-processing machines.