2022: A Year in Review
Let us look back on 2022 and look forward to 2023! It has been a fun year for the blog, and for me personally and professionally. I am confident that 2023 will be, as the youths say, totally lit.
The Blog
I started this year with a whole 7 subscribers. I am about 85% sure that none of them were my mom. I hit 50 subscribers on April 30, 2022, 100 subs on July 04, 20221, and 200 on August 16, 2022. It’s not particularly surprising to note that the most recent subscription plateau, from mid-August to early November coincided with a break in my posting rate, and subscriptions picked up again after I starting writing. Currently, the blog is at 294 subscribers2, which is a decent-sized Intro Physics lecture class at a mid-sized state university.
Let me say that I’m very thankful for your continued readership. If you weren’t here, well, I’d probably still be writing mostly the same stuff, but the vibe would be much more ‘old man yells at cloud’. I’m glad to have found a small collection of people who, for their own strange reasons, want to read this stuff. So once again, thank you!
Most Popular:
Simulating a PhD- in which I attempt to give some advice. Apparently this is what The People want (and it didn’t hurt that some folks with much larger audiences shared the link!). I still stand by what I wrote here, and I think it’s worth a once-over if you’re looking to get a quantum job, if only for the links to other bloggers’ opinions.
The Scorpion and the Qubit- Popular likely because of its broad(er) appeal. I’ll probably have to do a retrospective of the QC SPACs next year (spoiler: it’s bad), but this was an interesting exercise in reading what passed for research in financial circles. Some points were legit, some were less so, but all of them were written in kind of a deranged quasi-conspiratorial style that I found both entertaining and bizarre.
Least Popular Post:
Killer Quasiparticles from Space- The opposite of broad appeal, I guess. Where most posts got ~hundreds of views, this one got a staggering… 72. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.
My Pick:
Open Source Superconducting Qubit Design- Yeah the financial stuff can be fun, and trawling through financial filings can be diverting for some time, but my favorite posts are the technical ones. I especially enjoyed messing around with the available open source superconducting circuit simulation software, learning more about how they worked, and seeing where I could take them. I’d like to return to this in 2023 if I can force myself to figure out a workaround for getting some physical EM simulation software running on macOS.
Blog Improvements
In a last minute move, the Powers That Be at Substack have bestowed upon us a magnificent gift: LaTeX formatted text blocks. Hallelujah!
I wish I could offer you other improvements. Something like a real editor, or just better copy-editing when it comes to grammar and spelling. Or maybe better writing or tighter prose. Maybe when the blog has 25,000 subscribers and I’m the most famous Superconducting Qubits blogger in the world, I’ll get an editor. Until then, I will give you my best3.
Quantum Observer 2023
What should 2023 (and beyond) look like for the Blog? I’m trying to add a little more intentionality to the things I do. My guess is that it will be easier to recognize and seize great opportunities if I have some idea of what I’m trying to accomplish here4. The general idea is that this blog should be a source of value and insight for the readers. It should also be a reasonably good indicator of my general skillset and capability (just in case anyone out there needs a CTO/CSO5). It should be fun (for me).
So what will 2023 look like? Two words: moar poasts. I’m going to do better in terms of posting consistency (and maybe quality, but we’ll see).
More follow-through on series posts. I have at least two series that can be continued, and following up on these would be both interesting and useful. For me, it would be useful to practice following through in non-professional environments where the motivation is largely Love of the Game, rather than money.
More posts about the basics. I think it is highly instructive even for seasoned professionals to revisit the basics of the field. In academic settings this usually happens in the classroom, as we prepare to teach classes and find many small details which we didn’t really appreciate beforehand. In superconducting QC specifically, there’s still a great deal of implicit knowledge that separates useful work from incompetent bumbling. This is starting to get corrected as more textbooks are written, but perhaps the blog could be a good stopgap.
More posts grappling with interesting papers. This one will be challenging, since it takes a long time to truly digest a paper. In this particular case, I’m interested in working through published equations and trying my own hand at fitting published data. This would be easier if people routinely included their data and fitting code on the arXiv, but data digitizers exist and it’s always possible to email authors directly.
More posts! I want to commit to a more reliable posting cadence, which will be challenging. I think I can definitely post once a month, but once a week seems extremely difficult. I expect to land on something like 1 post per 3 weeks, since much of what I want to do will be technically involved and could require Actual Learning on my part. If, by some miracle, I write many good posts in a short span of time, I will practice restraint and create a backlog, just in case I ever go on vacation.
Personal Stuff
Ignore this if you don’t care about books I’ve read or whatever.
Last year, I finished 23 books. This year I finished 17 books and abandoned 4-6. I thought it would have been fewer, but you can do a lot of ‘reading’ if you have a commute.
The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby
The Innovation Stack by Jim McElvey
2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Eliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis
Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
The Man from the Future (audio) by Ananyo Bhattacharya
The Arsenal of Democracy (audio) by A. J. Baime
Freedom’s Forge (audio) by Arthur Herman
The Revelations by Erik Hoel
Pursuing Power and Light by Bruce J. Hunt
Empire of the Summer Moon (audio) by S. C. Gwynne
Chip War (audio) by Chris Miller
The Alchemy of Air (audio) by Thomas Hager
The Founders (audio) by Jimmy Soni
Causes of Separation by Travis J. I. Corcoran
The Golden Age by John C. Wright
The Phoenix Exultant by John C. Wright
The Golden Transcendence by John C. Wright
Best of 2022:
Pursuing Power and Light
Bruce J Hunt
This is a must read. There’s so much about the state of knowledge in the early 1800s that I didn’t really appreciate. I also didn’t really internalize what amazing leaps forward humanity made in the hundred years between 1820 and 1920. It’s just mind-boggling to think that the formal concept of energy conservation wasn’t really widely accepted until the late 1840s! The first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was layed in 1866! I was also surprised by how much the business imperative of getting better signals through submarine cables drove the rapid advancement of the theory of electromagnetism. Part of the reason the field interpretation of things was even discovered/required was entirely due to the unexpected signal retardation telegraph operators would observe through those submarine telegraph cables. It could only be explained by the influence of the surrounding sea water! I’ve only just started Bruce Hunt’s longer book, Imperial Science, which appears to go into much more depth regarding the relationship between science and technology in Victorian Britain.
Freedom’s Forge
Arthur Herman
One of the very interesting things about WWII is how soon after the most destructive war in human history, all of the major powers were ready to partake in… the most destructive war in human history. This book focuses entirely on the miracles of American industrial production from roughly 1936 - 1945. The author is almost comically anti-union, which might be grating if you’re very passionate about these things. If you’re able to mentally give him an ‘Ok, bud’ and move on, the book is full of interesting anecdotes about pretty much all facets of American industry during that time. At minimum, it’s a great jumping off point for more detailed reading on the personalities and feats of the time.
Empire of the Summer Moon
S. C. Gwynne
If you’re the kind of person who really, really doesn’t want to hear depictions of incredible violence (all violence is represented) then you should just scroll on past. If this is less of an issue for you, then Empire of the Summer Moon is a fascinating look at the decades long war between the Commanche and the United States, culminating in the eventual destruction of the Commanche as a military power. Prior to acquiring horses, the Commanche are described as an obscure hill tribe that mostly survived off foraging. After acquiring horses, they swiftly became the greatest military power on the Great Plains of North America, displacing or annihilating all rivals. They held on to this status for something like 2 centuries, despite the fact that the tribe was estimated to number something like 20,000 individuals at their zenith. The book basically focuses on the social, political, and military landscape of what was essentially a de facto war between Texan settlers and Commanche tribes. It’s wild to think that this was happening simultaneously to the events described in Pursuing Power and Light.
The Alchemy of Air
Thomas Hager
This is likely my other ‘must read’ recommendation. This is the story of the Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixation process. Its discovery, its motivation, the state of the world before6, during, and after. The discovery of the Haber-Bosch process is probably one of the most important human achievements ever, right up there with the Germ Theory of Disease, antibiotics, and the transistor.
Fiction
Last year I said:
I plan on making it a point to find some higher quality SF&F in 2022.
I… did not do this. Of the fiction I read in 2022, The Revelations was probably the best from a quality of writing perspective, and if you like literary fiction in a sciency setting, you might enjoy it. It was too much for me, but I did finish, which is becoming more rare these days. Otherwise, I mostly didn’t seek out new fiction. I am re-reading The Golden Age trilogy, and I finished the sequel to Powers of Earth. Although I’m not fully aligned with the politics of either, I enjoyed reading these because they are, at heart, extremely optimistic. The Golden Age especially so. Most of the other SF&F I’ve attempted to read over the past few years has been just so depressing and I’m tired of it. If you’ve got recs along these lines, I’m ready to hear them.
thank u america
The blog has grown 42x since the beginning of the year. People are saying this is the fastest growing (superconducting quantum computing) blog on the internet.
Up to the point where I get bored of looking at words instead of writing them.
I think this is true of life in general and more people should spend a little time thinking about where they are and where they want to be.
You can reach me at quantumobserverblog(at)gmail(dot)com.
Guano. Islands. Look ‘em up.