Why is it that people who say “update my priors” are never the people who actually do any damn calculations of probabilities let alone Bayesian updates?

Love love love this article. In my (far less deep) delve into algebraic geometry, I have been motivated to apply it to quantum computing. Or as Wim van Dam asked, can we connect the Weil conjectures to the power of quantum computers? arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph...

An abelian variety is a variety that's an abelian group. Varieties are sets of solutions of polynomial equations, and they're the main focus of algebraic geometry. I was scared of algebraic geometry until my 50s - and I wrote about getting over my fear. nautil.us/the-math-tha...

Con-cat-enated

The Tandem Non Stop youtu.be/SSSB7ZTSXH4?...

Wowah turns out the father of the modern surf board was the brother of “tutu man” at Caltech. legendary-surfers.blogspot.com/2017/03/bob-...

New president at Caltech announced, astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana www.caltech.edu/about/news/r...

Much later Einstein postulated that the universe was a 3-sphere. But Dante got the idea first: • Mark A. Peterson, Dante and the 3-sphere, American Journal of Physics 47 (1979), 1031-1035. physicsgg.me/wp-content/u... (2/2) mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosb...

"It’s just embarrassing that we don’t have a story we can tell people about what reality is" - Carl Caves www.quantamagazine.org/its-a-mess-a...

Although 2025 was absolutely shocking in terms of the cruelty of powerful people, science can still be a refuge from it. A highlight for me was retreating to the mountains to teach at the Les Houches Summer School. Here are my lecture notes: arxiv.org/abs/2512.24390

Last year I wrote about a paper on the idea of black holes made purely from light, and why it doesn't seem possible. Now one of the proponents of the idea, Don Page, has argued that there are still circumstances in which they could happen. journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

My year in reading dabacon.org/pontiff/2025...

Do you want to help develop new theories for systems that adapt, evolve, and interact? Applications are open for SFI’s 2026 UCR program, a fully funded, 10-week experience for undergraduates, offering mentorship, seminars, and project development. Apply by Jan 14, 2026 www.santafe.edu/ucr

A pretty good haul.

Will recite this one before my next fencing bout.

This is a cool result, but to me represents why the Turing model is actually the wrong physics model of computing. This is because it is serial, and so cannot deal with errors. I’ve written about this here dabacon.org/pontiff/2010...

My colleague Sanjay Ghemawat & I have done a fair bit of performance tuning of various pieces of code. We wrote an internal Performance Hints document ~2 years ago as a way of identifying some general principles & we've recently published a version of it externally. Doc: abseil.io/fast/hints.h...

Scientists should read this. artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/context-wi...

And it’s actually even crazier than that (the epidemic stuff is the beginning). Wheelers four no’s include: self reference instead of hierarchy of laws, no laws, no continuum, no spacetime!

Applications open for SFI’s 2026 UCR program. Are you fascinated by transdisciplinary questions that transcend or combine disciplines? UCR is a fully funded, 10-week summer research experience for undergraduates curious about complexity science. Apply by Jan 14, 2026 santafe.edu/ucr

OpenAI leadership are promoting a paper in Physics Letters B where GPT-5 proposed the main idea — possibly the first peer-reviewed paper where an LLM generated the core contribution. One small problem: GPT-5's idea tests the wrong thing. My technical comment: scirate.com/arxiv/2512.0... 1/

Great visit to Tufts a few weeks ago. They have an open-rank job in Quantum Information / Computing theory. Open Positions | Department of Physics and Astronomy share.google/NosuSUs77OZU...

A claim of indirect detection of dark matter via gamma rays from the galactic center. I would not get too excited until independent confirmation comes along; many people have looked for exactly this signal. It’s too easy to make gamma rays from more conventional sources.

Don’t tempt me langjamgamejam.com

Preprocessing direct in QEC microcode

Bullshit is sort of the opposite of a problem in coNP. Instead of hard to find but efficient to verify it is false, it is easy to find and hard to verify it is false.

Thoth is short for The Toric Code in Ancient Egyptian.

Ancient Egyptian resource theory with Clifford operations

A few quick notes: 1) Magic - not my favorite word choice - comes from magic angle directions and into quantum computing by arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph... . It is not about entanglement.

If I believed in the simulation hypothesis (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulat... for my opinion that somehow made it to Wikipedia) I’d say this is obviously how magic works arxiv.org/abs/2511.15304

The riverlane report is excellent, thanks to the authors for correcting a minor minor minor bug :).

Chris Umans, Siki Wang A number-theoretic conjecture implying faster algorithms for polynomial factorization and integer factorization https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10851

Ancient Egyptian Causality

Apply now for SFI’s 2026 CSSS Journalism Fellowship (June 9–July 8). Each year, two accomplished journalists join our summer school program for a deep dive into complexity science. Stipend, housing, and travel covered. Applications open until Feb. 4, 2026. Apply: www.santafe.edu/news-center/...

We taught a quantum computer to learn from its own mistakes-- without stopping. Our RL framework repurposes QEC detection events as learning signals to stabilize the system. Result: Improved Logical Error Rates for both Surface and Color codes on Willow! see arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2511.08493

The list of accepted papers for #QIP2026 is now online at qip2026.lu.lv/programme/ac...

“but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition” - Borges

Hopefullly they also include test of space awards.

Down with the Pauli group stabilizer hegemony scirate.com/arxiv/2511.0...

Department of Physics at UIUC is looking for an Assistant Professor in Theoretical Quantum Information Science, including, but not limited to, quantum error correction, quantum optics, quantum algorithms, and AMO physics. Application deadline: Dec 1 illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

To celebrate 2025 John Bell Day, which marks the work of the great Northern Irish quantum physicist, do check out this legendary feature he wrote for Physics World just before he died in 1990. ⚛️🧪🔭 physicsworld.com/a/against-me...

Congratulations to Venkat Guruswami, new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (@simonsinstitute.bsky.social)! And congrats to us, the Theoretical CS community, for having someone as good, dedicated, and wonderful as him at the helm of a place so important to us! #TCSSky

The Frontiers of Programmable Quantum Dynamics: Advances and Applications conference has concluded today, and recorded talks are now available to watch at buff.ly/2lD7WTC and buff.ly/AXJjS4e Watch more talks from the associated program online at buff.ly/QHE8YtH 🧪

It’s really too bad that my sub-field of quantum foundations research doesn’t have any Halloween-related or spooky aspects, no way that anyone could ever use the season to drum up any... any fake-quoted, overdramatic… Oh. Oh dear. molotovsunsets.substack.com/p/the-univer...

Another day, another arxiv paper claiming that classical gravity can produce entanglement. Last week's Nature paper continues to cause confusion. But classical fields can't create entanglement *even if* they directly couple two masses. Comment added at superposer.substack.com/p/no-classic...

Academia giving up self governance makes me so sad. I remember when Caltech used to have faculty actually interview undergrad applicants, which I think led to more outliers and quirkiness. Efficiency breeds homogeneity.

43 years ago today, readers the world over opened their newspapers and gazed upon cow tools for the first time. happy birthday cow tools. you look great.