Steve Flammia

Registration is now open for QEC26, to be held this June in sunny Santa Barbara, CA! See the registration page at qec-conference.org for a link.

Also, the deadline for submissions is next Friday. Make sure to get those in and spread the word to friends and collaborators!

The Call for Submissions for QEC26 is now up: qec-conference.org/2026/call/
Follow the link to submit your paper or poster by March 6th AOE.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface though. I predict ICE will get tasked with “monitoring election integrity” for the midterms.

The track record with humanitarian institutions and NGOs is much better, admittedly. 8/7

The Peace Prize track record is uniquely terrible. The fundamental flaw is rewarding unstable, real-time geopolitics instead of lifetime achievement. Every time a winner’s legacy curdles, the prize's reputation diminishes, permanently. 7/7

The omissions of deserving people (most famously Gandhi), and the inability to revoke it in bad cases further reinforce the sense that the prize is political and inconsistent. 6/7

Some obvious examples: Obama (for what?), Kissinger/Le Duc Tho (how is this peace?), Rabin/Peres/Arafat (reward people involved in violence), Aung San Suu Kyi (Rohingya), Abiy Ahmed (Tigray). 5/7

This sometimes rewards people involved in violence: many wars end through bargaining with such people. If you reward “peace talks,” you inevitably end up honoring figures many see as undeserving. 4/7

Prizes age badly when a process collapses or the laureate later governs horribly. The committee is sometimes trying to encourage peace in real time, not certify moral sainthood after the fact. 3/7

The Peace Prize is not given as a lifetime achievement award. It often rewards a process (negotiations, ceasefires, diplomacy, advocacy) rather than a settled outcome. That creates a failure mode of premature bets. 2/7

Is there any major, ostensibly legitimate prize with a worse track record than the Nobel Peace Prize? I believe that the “bad picks” aren’t random; they’re structural. 1/7

Ken, you should know that music from 1990 is closer in time to the birth of rock 'n roll than to the present day.

I suspect it’s still open. I would need to read this more carefully to be certain, and I’m at a workshop, so you’ll have to wait on tenterhooks.

This raises new questions about Biden’s dogs.

Parameterableitungseinfachintegralfindungsfreude?

This trick has worked in the past, at least briefly; see False Dimitry. @zachweinersmith.bsky.social
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_D...

Outstanding choices!

Interesting bit of sociology: They are really studiously avoiding any mention of quantum computing. First and only mention came in the last few words of the presentation by Johansson.

Charlie Bennett should win the Nobel prize in Physics this year.

This would be an important breakthrough if it holds, but I'm skeptical on first glance. Large parts of this were clearly written by a generative AI. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but I suspect it's a "vibe theorem", i.e., not a theorem. I'll wait for Vidick, Regev, etc. to weigh in.

Governments have been over-promised, but program managers aren’t naive. Forcing academics + ‘clueless’ industry partners (imperfectly) aligns theory with reality. It’s frustrating (for both sides!), but still positive-sum. IMO funding a mixture is strictly better than funding only fundamentals.

I’m glad you caught that. :)

That's Kurt Anyon, the Austrian–American physicist after which anyons are named. He's walking with Gustav Karl Persson, of GKP fame.

Foreign Student Status Duration Limits Clear White House Review A Department of Homeland Security proposal to restrict the duration of foreign students’ tenure in the US has cleared White House review, the final step before its public release.

Bad Policy: Subjecting PhD students and postdocs to 4-year visa limits, subject to immigration officials' review. This bureaucratic overregulation will reduce US competitiveness and weaken US science. There needs to be more awareness and discussion of this terrible idea
news.bgov.com/daily-labor-...

The QEC25 conference hosted by @yaleqi.bsky.social was really excellent, and videos of all talks are available. So much recent progress on quantum error correction!
qec25.yalepages.org

Screenshot of a post saying, "In German, the word "Schiedsrichtertrotzdank", means the simultaneous feeling of annoyance and gratitude you feel when a referee makes a valid point."

💯! There's even a word for that in German!

Congress wants to cut the smartest investment taxpayers ever made Virtually every smartphone on the planet runs on a chip paid for by American taxpayers — a chip that I helped invent. Now Congress is moving to cut funding for the National Science Foundation that …

"Every American taxpayer is a silent shareholder in that success. If we walk away now, we lose not just future breakthroughs but also what we have already earned." thehill.com/opinion/tech...

thank in the acknowledgments.

Rodney Baxter - Wikipedia

Rodney Baxter, Australia’s celebrated mathematical physicist, the Baxter of Yang-Baxter equations, passed away yesterday 🥲 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_...

Both the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations have now passed funding for science agencies with moderate cuts and flat funding, respectively. Both bills are quite far from the president's budget request, which proposes massive cuts to science funding.