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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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Weaponised 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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Teach, Don’t Tell : Lessons in Mastery, From Tennis to Welding
What’s true on the court is true in the workshop: effective teaching relies on clarity, precision, and the ability to transcend words.
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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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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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Saying is Believing : Authenticity, ‘Hypnosen,’ and the Startup Myth
Hypnosen is great fun, but it paints a picture of the startup circus I don’t fully agree with. Not all entrepreneurs are full of shit, and pitching isn’t just a spectator sport.
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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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Seeing the Light : Fei-fei Li and the Dawn of AI
Fei-fei Li has had a front-row seat to the cutting-edge development of AI over the past couple of decades. Her biography is captivating.
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Commonplacing : Nurturing Slow Hunches from Notebook to Knowledge
Carmen Berzatto does it. Sherlock Holmes did it too. How about you, do you commonplace?