Reposting for post-Thanksgiving reading in the US.

Zheng Chang, Siqi Zhang, Wenqiang Huang, Tian Tian, Qichun Liu, Tiefu Li, Nan Qi, Yuanjin Zheng, Zhihua Wang, Yanshu Guo, Hanjun Jiang CO-QLink: Cryogenic Optical Link for Scalable Quantum Computing Systems and High-Performance Cryogenic Computing Systems https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22920

CONFIRMED: Oxford University Press has named ‘rage bait’ as the Oxford Word of the Year 2025. #OxfordWOTY

I visited a secondhand Tokyo bookstore just to see what it looks like... And then I stumbled on two bookshelves filled with English-language books! 🤓 They're in like-new condition, and the topics are pretty eclectic. 🙃 Many have been marked down to 220 yen! ($1.42) So anyway, I bought 3. 😅

The article itself: www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/...

A handful of candidates to go to @nerdnitetokyo.bsky.social's end-of-year book exchange next month! Some may get added, some removed.

An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.

And still, there are those who say that Americans can’t do irony.

Our local star, the Sun ☀️ Messing with Starlink (complimentary), the ionosphere (annoying), the magnetic field (aurora!), and now it seems Airbus A320 aircraft (yikes!). I hope someone digs into this (solar cosmic rays?) and any correlations with recent and strong geomagnetic storm activity!

Since the community here is very familiar with VQAs and their pitfalls, Here's my 2 cents on the the topic, would love to hear what everyone thinks too. TLDR: "VQAs are doomed, and that's great news for QC" 1/ however long it's gonna take

no one can escape timeghost

The break up of the Beatles (1970) is closer to the end of World War 1 (1918) than the present day.

We are now further away from the theatrical release of Raiders of the Lost Ark (June 12, 1981) than it was from the year it takes place in (1936). We have reached the Indiana Jones event horizon.

While my American family eats turkey, I am in the combination fish market and tourist trap Kanazawa. Some of the best sushi you can possibly find anywhere in the universe.

"Holy shit, look at me, I'm doing something that just a year or so ago I found really hard and stressful and confusing, but it's second nature now." Generative AI deliberately removes this, entirely, from learning.

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

THIS. I am indebted to all of the people who, sometimes despite evidence to the contrary, decided I was worth their time, effort and care. Thank you all, and I love and miss all of you on other continents.

Happy Thanksgiving to all Americans -- and YOU get to decide if you're American, not this xenophobic administration. Once an American, always an American.

I’m in Barcelona for a few days and this evening I walked past the Gran Teatre del Liceu on La Rambla which, in 1893, was bombed by anarchist Santiago Salvador Franch, killing some 20 people and injuring many others. He was executed for the deadly attack.

Do technical books count? With luck we'll have another out next year. Finishing the manuscript now. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10....

Cover Reveal! “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy" arrives on August 4, 2026. How extremist tech billionaires are dismantling democracy to crown themselves as kings—and what we can do about it. Please pre-order! ➡️ www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Ne...

This means NSF dissertation improvement grants in the social sciences are simply...not happening.

Thats 216 biomedical PhD students for their whole degree, or 140 2 year R21 grants, or 30 5 year R01 grants, or one fired football coach...

Asahi has picked up the WSJ scoop: www.asahi.com/articles/AST...

What is it about people from Cincinnati & their problems with turkeys?

/rant over. But seriously, how are fans supposed to tune into @nba.com games if it requires consulting a calendar, local TV listings, and 3 streaming services? I've watched fewer games this season because I've run out of patience trying to figure out how to watch. It's absurd.

Stahl house is for sale in case you are in need of an architecturally significant property in the Hollywood Hills: www.latimes.com/travel/story...

Somewhere here in the last couple of days, I saw someone (a physicist, I believe) talking about how sycophantic LLMs were telling people they had discovered something that would overturn physics. Now I want that link and can't find it. Anyone got a clue?

Physics Paths xkcd.com/3155/

I am fascinated by the alien/bigfoot split. Republicans are less likely to believe in aliens than Democrats and more likely to believe in Bigfoot and The Yeti. I need to know why.

THOSE ARE NOT CONCESSIONS!!

If you haven't read this, it's a holiday treat.

EXCLUSIVE: US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff advised Russia on how to pitch Ukraine plans to Trump, in audio files reviewed by Bloomberg

This is coherently written and seems, overall, like a good idea. Cynically, though, at the same time this is promoting science, this administration is tearing science down as rapidly and thoughtfully as it did the East Wing. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

From the National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine: “based on our body of work on this topic and the overwhelming scientific consensus, we support the statement that vaccines do not cause autism.” 🧪 www.nationalacademies.org/news/stateme...

Really fantastic mabo tofu for dinner tonight. The depth of flavor is hard to describe. Not over the top hot, just... thoughtful depth.

Ok so. "The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection ... — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs."

Significant earthquake down in Kyushu about 100 minutes ago. Hope there was no major damage or casualties.

I love how outraged everybody is by this list -- me included. Want a meaningless but cathartic rant? Join in! (#77 and #78 are travesties!)

BREAKING: This is huge news, the EU's equivalent of the 🇺🇸Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. 🇪🇺Court of Justice just ruled all 🇪🇺countries must recognise same-sex marriages granted in other member states. This effectively legalises gay marriage across 🇪🇺

In another conversation I mentioned translations of The Three Musketeers, but this website deserves an even bigger plug. This is an *amazing* analysis of the many translations! Love it. fictionforvampires.com/review-dumas...

In the second act of the AI revolution, the humanities fight back.

3 infant #pertussis deaths this year in Kentucky. "Of the three infant deaths reported over the past 12 months, all three were not vaccinated, nor were their mothers." We first tested maternal vaccination for whooping cough over 80 years ago. It's safe & effective & might have saved these babies.

Fantastic work by Ariel Graykowski and our @setiinstitute.bsky.social citizen scientists. Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) is breaking apart — and some of you caught it live. After passing 0.3 AU from the Sun, it erupted, and three days later a third appeared. K1 is now officially in pieces.

Many people don't know this but arXiv is maintained and operated by @cornelltech.bsky.social (that does NOT mean you can send me complaints or feature requests!) Everyone in the community should be excited that arXiv got $7M to upgrade from Schmidt Sciences, NASA news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

Today’s xkcd made me cry. In a good way. xkcd.com/3172/

Reposting for the Americas time zones.

Books We Love is back with a brand new batch of hand-picked titles. Mix and match tags like “Book Club Ideas” and “Eye-Opening Reads.” Find 380+ new 2025 reads, and stick around to browse more than 4,000 books from the last 13 years.