Official petition to the 🇦🇺 govt: make part-time PhD students' stipends tax-exempt!
www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...

Stipends are low but at least tax-exempt. Unless they go part time, then it becomes taxable. This disproportionately affects PhD students w/ care duties, health issues, young children..

Peter Shor receives a small gift on the 30th anniversary of his QEC paper at #QEC2025.

It's been an amazing week at QEC25 seeing the incredible work people have done in the field over the past couple of years!
Abe Jacob did a fantastic job presenting our new work on trivariate tricycle codes, quantum LDPC codes that combine several nice fault-tolerant properties.

That's a wrap on the #Coogee25 Sydney Quantum Information Workshop! Thanks to all the brilliant speakers who came to talk about their research!

Now with a cool logo! #Coogee2025

@mattmcewen.bsky.social kicking of #Coogee25.

A useless but awesome fact from reddit: the range of a trebuchet does not depend on the planet on which you fire it. E.g. on the moon, the initial launch speed is smaller but the gravity pulling the stone to the ground is weaker, and the effects cancel out. (from this blog post: shorturl.at/8AqV8)

With this year's big successes in quantum error-correction, is a Nobel prize somewhere down the track? (Or maybe one for quantum computing more broadly?) If so, who would be on the list of possible recipients?

This is an incredibly well-researched account of how the Soviet Union fell apart. The main argument is that the collapse was not inevitable and it was helped along tremendously by Gorbachev's reforms.
Some interesting tidbits:
- The August 91 coup plotters were a nervous shambles from the start.

Okay obligatory paper meme: Recently Setiawan, at Riverlane, and I released a preprint on how to tailor Floquet codes to noise that is biased towards, say, Z errors. This "X3Z3 Floquet code" could improve performance on architectures using, e.g. the heavy-hex lattice.
www.arxiv.org/abs/2411.04974

I'm loving Kant here: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another... Have courage to use your own understanding! That is the motto of enlightenment." From What is Enlightenment?

I wrote a blog post on the Shor code for the non-expert back in the day! Not sure how successful I was at making it understandable, but it was fun to write. More QEC education in unis and elsewhere is a great thing!
universealacarte.blogspot.com/2020/08/code...