Marco Piani

PRX Quantum social media post, saying “A new Monte Carlo method computes stabilizer Rényi entropy and reveals nontrivial magic behavior at quantum criticality.”

Physicists: we should counter the impression that quantum mechanics is weird and inaccessible to ordinary people; anybody with sufficient interest and ready to put in the effort can learn quantum mechanics

Also physicists:

We are organizing a short course on Quantum Foundations at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona funded by Catalonia Quantum Academy (CQA). Few spaces left! Apply before 20 August, 2025.

😅

Little ray of sunshine A common saying goes, you should never meet your heroes, because they’ll disappoint you. But you shouldn’t trust every common saying; some heroes impress you more, the better you know them. Ray Laf…

"I can hear his French-Canadian accent in my memory, but not without hearing him smile at the ends of most sentences." A blog post for Ray Laflamme. @quantumiqc.bsky.social @perimeterinstitute.ca @majidy.bsky.social quantumfrontiers.com/2025/07/27/l...

Postdoc opening in my group:
careers.nus.edu.sg/job/Research...

It turns out that the solution to the Fermi paradox is stupid.

Pardon, it’s “stupid”.

Meaning, the so-called Great Filter is the plain stupidity that even relatively advanced civilizations, say, humanity as a whole, can still display.

The solution was in front of us all this time.

Breakdown of the resident population of the Vatican City from Wiipedia

Chuckling at this breakdown of the Vatican City resident population

BREAKING

An immigrant becomes the head of state of the Vatican.

Again.

But this time he is American.

Yes! That one!

The way Trump declares that there are National Security threats to invoke emergency powers for tariffs reminds me of one of the early South Park episodes, where hunters shout they are being attacked by protected animals, to shoot them unpunished.

If you are saying that the Canadian election was rigged at whatever local level, be aware you sound like a child having a tantrum after dropping on the ground your fresh ice cream cone

OTOH you would be entitled to complain against the old man in a blue suit that bumped into you

Recent Trump post: Boeing should default China for not taking the beautifully finished planes that China committed to purchase. This is just a small example of what China has done to the USA, for years... And, by the way, Fentanyl continues to pour into our Country from China, through Mexico and Canada, killing hundreds of thousands of our people, and it better stop, NOW!

Correlation does not imply causation but I am afraid of my own power

Donald J. Trump Posts Fr... & @TrumpDailyPosts Follow I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Lets get the Peace Deal DONE! From Donald Trump Truth Social 04/24/25 08:24 AM 8:26 AM • Apr 24, 2025 • 3.4M Views

Trump’s appeal to Putin sounds very similar to me turning off a ringing Alexa alarm.

There might or might not be a typo

Nate Silver’s charts about the approval / disapproval ratings for Donald Trump

Nate Silver’s chart about the net approval rating for Donald Trump

There is a lesson here: if you Putin the effort, you can achieve a lot - like almost flipping the approval ratings - in a short time.

When was the last time Trump mentioned Fentanyl as rationale for tariffs against Canada, China, and Mexico?

They mean A One 👀

Higher-Order Quantum Operations An operational description of quantum phenomena concerns developing models that describe experimentally observed behaviour. $\textit{Higher-order quantum operations}\unicode{x2014}$quantum operations ...

Wrote up a little tutorial + review on higher-order quantum operations. If you love quantum channels, you can think of these as linear maps that act on channels themselves in manner fully consistent with quantum theory! I hope it helps future students / researchers! 🤗
arxiv.org/abs/2503.09693

Fox News headline: BREAKING 1936-2025 Vatican says Pope Francis has passed away the day after meeting VP Vance on Easter

Correlation is not causation but…

There are many aspects of the COVID pandemic the US needs to learn from, not least given the >1 million deaths it suffered and the current threat of viruses like H5N1. But the misleading, politically-charged content at covid.gov is not a route to the constructive or evidence-based debate we need.

Happy World Quantum Day in the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology!

It does not get more quantum than this - unless you are Ant-Man. Then you can celebrate while in the Quantum Realm.

Agreed. It is an effect, but certainty it is not THE effect fully responsible for the trend with age.

The article states that that is a factor alongside getting more conservative with age.

Stare at it a bit!

Isle in a Canadian grocery store, with many Canadian flag tags

What some people do not seem to understand is that the U.S. under Trump has lost the trust of other countries and (further) damaged the status of leader of the Western World. It does not matter whether tariffs go / stay down.

This is particularly true for Canada.

Perhaps the funniest bit was when the S&P popped by +1.2% for a couple of minutes, all the traders earned their "Fell for it again" awards... and then the country-by-country tariff slide came out.

Barre chords many

Fibonacci covering of the plane with grey colormap

Fibonacci covering of the plane with grey colormap

I have recently looked into Fibonacci coverings, and it is hard not to play with them to create cool images.

Plotted with @matplotlib.org

Definitive Proof of the Classical Multiverse! Recent astonishing experiments with quantum computers have demonstrated unambiguously the existence of a quantum multiverse, where calculations of mind-boggling complexity are effortlessly computed in...

It is not clear that it’s multiverses that provide a quantum advantage

Back to sCuare 1

arxiv.org/abs/2503.22768

In 2004, it took the world a year to add one gigawatt of solar power — now it takes a day.