I’m reviewing previous state-of-the-art in quantum computing in preparation for Google’s supposed upcoming announcement of quantum supremacy. Hadn’t heard anything about D-Wave in a few years, so I thought I’d check where things stand…

…why bother with one of these devices? We posed that question to researchers using D-Wave computers at Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Lab, Volkswagen, and elsewhere. In short, D-Waves are in their early days, but these organizations are hoping to eventually use them to solve problems, like predicting elections, routing taxis in traffic jams, or picking crucial data out of background noise. They want to start approaching these puzzles from a quantum computing mindset as early as possible. No one yet claims to have found the killer app that will bring quantum computing power to the masses. And while D-Wave has demonstrated it can really simulate quantum mechanics, other machines can perform similar tasks, quicker. But if these researchers continue to refine their ideas, they’ll be ready for the day some future D-Wave machine, or any other quantum computer, might provide real benefits.

https://gizmodo.com/why-did-nasa-lockheed-martin-and-others-spend-million-1826241515

Some food for thought on college degrees:

Obstacles to employment are a problem. They impede social mobility, disproportionately harm society’s most vulnerable citizens, and hinder the larger economy. That is why efforts to remove such barriers have become a bipartisan cause. It’s why more than two dozen states now ban public employers (and sometimes even private ones) from inquiring about applicants’ criminal history, due to concerns that capable job candidates will be turned away or otherwise deterred. A number of states and locales are going further: New York City, for example, prohibits public employers from asking about applicants’ prior-earnings history; in 2016, Massachusetts became the first state to prohibit the practice for all employers.

Occupational-licensing reform has similarly seen growing, bipartisan support. Reformers on the left and right have surveyed the staggering costs and barriers to entry for quotidian positions such as masseuse, nail technician, exterminator, and florist, and concluded that these need to be reduced or eliminated. In doing so, they are embracing the understanding Milton Friedman propounded most fluently in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom: “The most obvious social cost,” Friedman wrote of occupational registration, certification, and licensure, “is that any one of these measures…almost inevitably becomes a tool in the hands of a special producer group to obtain a monopoly position at the expense of the rest of the public.”

Yet even as reformers have pushed to remove a variety of barriers to employment, the biggest and most significant barrier to employment in American life — the use of the college degree as a default hiring device — has gone blithely unremarked. Indeed, even as reformers target employment obstacles for felons and florists, the pervasive use of college-degree requirements, despite its dubious legality and profound costs, has bizarrely escaped serious consideration.

https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/busting-the-college-industrial-complex

See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/

…One famous source of such work is Joseph Moxon, who produced a series from 1677 to 1684 called Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises. Different installments dealt with crafts like smithing, sundial manufacture, and carpentry.

Moxon was a printer, and his most significant volume was the installment on The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing. It effectively told a reader—who was assumed to have already learned a variety of crafts, perhaps from previous volumes, or to be able to hire artisans—how to build an entire printing shop from start to finish. Once complete, the reader could ostensibly just start printing, with the help of the specialized staff the book also described hiring and training.

Moxon’s collection on printing is the first comprehensive guide on the topic, but he wrote out of a growing need to spread technical information in an ever more complicated world, in which traditional structures were breaking down and literacy in Europe had picked up enormously. Cities were growing in size, the demand for production in many fields had increased, and technical information—typically kept close and secret—had to be better disseminated.

https://increment.com/documentation/historical-tech-doc-and-how-to-build-a-civilization/

It’s not as naive a question as it initially seems.

13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang occurred. The Universe was filled with matter, antimatter, radiation, and existed in an ultra-hot, ultra-dense, but expanding-and-cooling state. By today, the volume containing our observable Universe has expanded to be 46 billion light years in radius, with the light that’s first arriving at our eyes today corresponding to the limit of what we can measure. But what lies beyond? What about the unobservable Universe? That’s what Gray Bryan wants to know, as he asks:

We know the size of the Observable Universe since we know the age of the Universe (at least since the phase change) and we know that light radiates. […] My question is, I guess, why doesn’t the math involved in making the CMB and other predictions, in effect, tell us the size of the Universe? We know how hot it was and how cool it is now. Does scale not affect these calculations?

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-how-large-is-the-entire-unobservable-universe-73adef0fd480

The Universe began not with a whimper, but with a bang! At least, that’s what you’re commonly told: the Universe and everything in it came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang. Space, time, and all the matter and energy within began from a singular point, and then expanded and cooled, giving rise over billions of years to the atoms, stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies spread out across the billions of light years that make up our observable Universe. It’s a compelling, beautiful picture that explains so much of what we see, from the present large-scale structure of the Universe’s two trillion galaxies to the leftover glow of radiation permeating all of existence. Unfortunately, it’s also wrong, and scientists have known this for almost 40 years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/09/21/the-big-bang-wasnt-the-beginning-after-all/

This is a fun read. What can economists learn about urbanization from Burning Man?

“To be a little grandiose about it, this is a really unique moment in human history,” Mr. Romer told me last year. “We’re likely to decide in this time frame what people are going to live with forever.”

Urbanization in the developed world has largely come to an end; nearly everyone who would move from farmland toward cities already has. This century, the same mass migration will run its course across the rest of the world. And if no one prepares for it — if we leave it to developers to claim one field at a time, or to migrants to make their way with no structure — it will be nearly impossible to superimpose some order later.

It will take vast expense, and sweeping acts of eminent domain, to create arterial roads, bus service, trash routes, public parks, basic connectivity.

That prospect agitates Mr. Romer, because the power of cities to lift people out of poverty dissipates when cities don’t work. To economists, cities are labor markets. And labor markets can’t function when there are no roads leading workers out of their favelas, or when would-be inventors never meet because they live in gridlock.

Mr. Romer’s answer is to do with this moment what Burning Man does every summer: Stake out the street grid; separate public from private space; and leave room for what’s to come. Then let the free market take over. No market mechanism can ever create the road network that connects everyone. The government must do that first.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/upshot/paul-romer-burning-man-nobel-economist.html

From Warren Ellis’ Normal:

“Money,” Clough declaimed, “is the dark unknown god driving us all towards certain bloody doom. A giant formless thing from beyond space with a million genitals. It’s the thing in the horror films that you should not directly look at lest you go mad and all that bollocks. It’s crushed the world into new shapes and all we want to do is drink its dark milk because that is the nature of its horrible fucking magic.

All that prelude is to say, coming in to the Hong Kong protests from a
less developed country like the United States is disorienting. If you
have never visited one of the Zeroth World cities of Asia, like Taipei
or Singapore, it can be hard to convey their mix of high density,
mazelike design, utterly reliable public services, and high social
cohesion, any more than it was possible for me or my parents to imagine a
real American city, no matter how many movies we saw. And then to have
to write about protests on top of it!

It’s hard to write articulately about the Five Demands when one
keeps getting brought up short by basic things, like the existence of
clean public bathrooms.

The time and location of protests are set via social media
alchemy; once you get notified about one, you descend through a spotless
mall onto a bright and clean train platform, get whisked away by a
train that arrives almost immediately, step out into another mall, then
finally walk outside into overwhelming heat and a gathering group of
demonstrators.

When it’s over, whether the demonstrators have dispersed of their
own will, or are running from rubber bullets and tear gas, you duck
into another mall, and another train, and within minutes are back in a
land of infinite hypercommerce, tiny alleys and posh hotels with their
lobby on the 40th floor of a skyscraper.

https://idlewords.com/2019/08/a_walk_in_hong_kong.htm

A pair of excellent articles by artist and writer Molly crabapple post-disaster Puerto Rico and the networks of solidarity and change that people are building there:

I arrived in San Juan on July 26, four days after Rosselló had
announced his resignation, and everyone seemed convinced that a new
Puerto Rico was being born. “I had nearly given up,” said José, a
restaurant manager whose design studio went bankrupt after Hurricane
Maria. “The citizens of a colony are now teaching the citizens of the
empire what people power can do,” wrote my friend Christine Nieves, an
organizer on the island’s eastern end. Sugeily Rodríguez Lebrón, a
performer with the radical artistic collective AgitArte, told me she had waited for this moment her entire life.

The protesters had done more than boot Rosselló from office. They
wanted the head of every politician that had cheated and mocked the
island, whether or not they had taken part in the recently leaked texts
and chat messages between the governor and senior officials. “Clean the
house,” the slogan went, and by the day, protesters improvised new
chants savaging each potential Rosselló heir apparent. Protesters
repudiated Puerto Rico’s two-party system as a corrupt Punch-and-Judy
show in which each side took turns to build their patronage networks and
made empty promises of either statehood or greater autonomy; and they
rejected, too, the neocolonial Fiscal Control Board imposed by Congress
in Washington, D.C., that has been wrecking the island’s economy with
austerity measures in order to service unpayable, possibly illegal
debts.

The protests had revealed, in the words of Puerto Rican writer Ana Teresa Toro, “the true social animal that we are: a beast that is joyous, wild, indocile and untamed, that has slept… until now.”

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/09/a-peoples-cry-of-indignation-a-dispatch-from-puerto-rico/

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/11/17/puerto-ricos-diy-disaster-relief/