Ground Control to Majorana

I hope you all understand that I realized late on Monday that I had completely forgotten to write this. I dare you to forgive me.

This week, I got a roommate! His name is Francesco. He's one of the new friends I've been hanging out with. I invited him to switch to my room because he had a kind of crazy roommate situation that was starting to take its toll on his well being, plus I figured it would be pretty fun. It does mean I have to get half dressed in the shower stalls and not entirely in my room, but that's about the only downside.

For the fourth year in a row, all of my friends will be leaving on missions. Conveniently, being year 4, I have cycled back to be with some of the originals. I have generational friends. It's very weird.

This week I've been thinking about two things: being nice to people and Microsoft's Majorana quantum chip. I will explain my thoughts on both of them. Which one will come first? You can't know until you read (that was a joke for the physics nerds).

Being nice to people is such a simple thing to do. I don't think that being nice means that you never say anything negative about anyone or anything. I think that you can still tease people and make fun of your friends (and yourself) while being nice, and you can also dislike people without being rude or mean. Being nice includes apologizing for things if you suspect you may have crossed a line. It means not making people feel like you don't value them, even if you hardly know them. With friends, they know that you care (if you did it right), so you have a little bit more leeway in what you can say that will still make them feel cared about. 

I saw 3 things that week that got me thinking about this: 2 examples of what not to do and 1 good example of what to do. The two bad examples occurred today, actually. The first one happened when I was trying to get in contact with someone about ordering lunch for a student trip that my work is hosting. They're leaving early in the morning, so I was asking if they could have the food available for pickup at the time of departure. The guy I talked to was incredibly short with me, making passing comments about my lack of knowledge of his own business. Mind you, he would be getting paid a considerable amount of money if this order went through him. There was just nothing that warranted his tone of voice, especially when I was requesting information that would lead to money in his pocket. Lesson 1: be kind in professional situations. You will be more successful. You don't need to take advantage of people at every chance you get. The second example was in my math class, when I asked a question to the teacher about a brand new concept that none of us had ever heard of: relations. His first definitions were incredibly abstract and it was hard to grasp the meaning behind them, so I asked a clarifying question about the difference between his early and late definitions. He looked at me and said, "Well, they are what they are, so I don't see the point in your question." I asked it again in a different way, and he said, "Yeah, I don't understand what that means." I tried a third and final time to ask the questions, at which point other classmates nodded in agreement. He responded, "I don't think your question means anything. The definitions just are." I then said, "Okay, then you can continue," at which point he said, "no, I just don't see the point in your question." I said "that's fine, just go on and maybe you'll answer it." "I don't see how you can feel confused when there's nothing I've said that could be confusing." At this point, I couldn't see any reason to try to explain again, since he clearly wasn't interested in answering me, so I said, "that is okay, just keep going through the material. It isn't important at this point." My classmates tried to rephrase my question throughout the lesson, since it was about the foundation of the rest of the lecture. I left the lecture with minimal understanding and I suspect many of my classmates did as well. Lesson 2: when teaching someone, patience is incredibly important because you have no idea which question will spark an epiphany. Be nice to them, since they don't have 50+ years of experience in your field like you do, and they're just trying to understand you better. The situation was really uncomfortable and I was more embarrassed for him than for myself.

A good example came at work after a meeting about people stepping over boundaries. Basically, another department was trying to tell us how to do our jobs differently than how we were trained, so we met to discuss how to help them without complying with every request and acting in the appropriate scope. One of my bosses called someone a "puppet", which was totally harmless in the conversation, since it was a fairly accurate way to describe the particular situation we were discussing. Nobody thought anything of the comment, in fact, most of us agreed. However, in an admirable demonstration of humility, my boss called us back a few minutes after the meeting ended and apologized for saying that about the person, and that it was probably inappropriate to say. He said he apologized if he offended anyone, and recognized it as something he probably shouldn't have said. I found this a wonderful example of several things, like humility and empathy. My boss' comment didn't sit right with him, so he put other's needs in front of his own pride and apologized. I think this is a huge part of the difference between being kind and not; being kind includes trying to remedy things and doing what you can when you aren't perfect.

I try to be a kind person. Most people who know me also know that I love to tease and view a lot of things satirically. When it comes to a battle between my ego/pride and the relationships I make, regardless of depth, I would like to think that I choose to prioritize the feelings of another. Lesson 3: be nice to everybody. People like you more, they trust you more, they care about you more, and I dare say that they might even love you for it, just a little bit. 

Also, side story, just before I talked to the mean catering guy, I spoke with someone at BYU's Food-To-Go scheduling. She warned me that the guy might act a bit annoyed and was very kind in helping me work out what I needed to do. I talked to her pretty casually since I had talked to her before, and my boss came over and jokingly told me to stop flirting with the phone lady and get back to work. This lady was like, 45 years old. I could hear it in her voice. I don't flirt with anybody, much less old ladies. After I got off the phone, I told him how old she was and it was a hilarious situation. I turned red so fast, even though I wasn't embarrassed. I can never predict when I blush, but I can feel it on my face. It is a curse that I have.

Now, total subject switch, but it's time to talk about Microsoft Majorana chip. I would like to forward this with the words of Stephen Hawking: "Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations." This depends on the explainer's ability to convey meaning in a way that doesn't require technical knowledge. If I can do that properly, you can understand the most complex of scientific topics. I would like to think that I can do that. Stay with me and you will learn something really interesting about one of the hardest problems in physics without having to solve a single equation. I promise that I will keep things simple and define any crazy words you probably don't know. This should be teachable to a 6th grader.

This new piece of technology promises to change the world of computing forever through quantum architectures that haven't been seen before. If you haven't yet heard about it, it uses a "new state of matter" that will make quantum computing available in a matter of years, not decades.

There is just one teeny-tiny caveat: it probably won't.

Let me explain briefly how quantum computing works, then the chip, then we can talk about Majorana specifically once you are up to speed on things. You have to understand a little bit about quantum particles before you can understand how they are used in computing. 

After another guy named Albert Einstein showed that photons, the particles we know as light, act as both a wave and a particle (a wave and a dot), this even crazier guy named deBroglie (pronounced 'de broy') theorized that it wasn't just photons that were wavy, but all of the elementary particles, like electrons and quarks and other weird things. In his PhD thesis, he showed that quantum (another word for super super small) particles could be represented by a little packet of a wave. Then some guy named Schrödinger came up with this thing called a wave function, and the rest of history.

That probably didn't mean a whole lot to you. The important thing to know is that a particle isn't a little dot moving in a wave, it is the wave itself. The entire wave is the particle, it's just so small we see it as a dot. We have verified this by experiment. If you multiply 2 wave functions together, you get a probability distribution, which describes where you are most likely to find the particle when you take away its ability to move. Until you put the brakes on, the "particle" is the whole wave, so it doesn't have a definite position. We know it occupies the space between the start and end of the wave, but we don't care about that. We want to know where it really is. So, we put up a screen and shoot a bunch of particles (like electrons) at it, and we see a pattern emerge. Electrons hit some places more than others, and this pattern is the probability distribution. Different particles have different distributions, which gives us clues to their properties.

The reason we multiply two functions together is because each one describes the behavior of the particle if it were stuck on a line. When we multiply two together, we pretty much let the wave function do its thing on a flat sheet, aka a 2D surface. Guess what happens when you multiply 3 of these wave functions together? You get some wild 3D shapes. If you've taken chemistry, you've seen them before. These are the electron orbitals, like 1s, 2p, etc, but that isn't super important.

Okay, that was kind of a lot pre-intro. Now, you're probably thinking, why does that matter (bahaha pun)? Why do we care? Well, my friend, let me tell you.

Computers currently work by using electricity to put an electron in a box. You know binary? The 1's and 0's state if there is an electron in the box or not, respectively. This is memory. When you send very specific electricity through these boxes, you can change whether or not there are electrons in the boxes, which is how computers perform calculations.

Remember how the wave function basically describes probabilities for where the particle can be? Well, that turns out to be incredibly useful in computers. What if, instead of putting an electron in a box, we use something that has a 60% chance of being in the box and a 40% chance of being outside? Then we can use electricity to change those percentages as we need to. By stopping the "thing" we call a qubit, we either see a 1 or a 0. This type of computing is called quantum computing. It is incredibly powerful because instead of only doing one calculation at a time, qubits can calculate what happens if we did a whole lot of different calculations at the same time. They aren't defined until we tell them to be, so we don't have to spend energy taking electrons in and out.

Here's the other crazy thing about qubits: they're kind of stuck together. Like the couple making out every time you walk by, their "moods" are highly influenced by each other through a process called quantum entanglement. This means that if I do something to one qubit, the next one will change without me doing anything directly. This enables insanely complex computations using very little energy. Even crazier, since the qubits don't have a defined state, these chains of calculations can be done at the same time, which makes them way, way, way faster than regular computers. They can solve problems in minutes that take real computers septillions of years (a really long time, like, older than the universe's 16.5 billion).

However, there is one downside: these qubits are pretty unstable. They tend to destroy themselves at the slightest perturbation, just like a cranky toddler. If you get them really cold, they do quite a bit better, since they pretty much have no energy to complain with. They also are more likely to be wrong, since there is the slight non-zero chance that they don't exist inside or outside the box you want, they exist somewhere else entirely. Thus, they must be corrected for, which is getting so much better in recent years.

All particles have alter-egos, which really mess up their ability to act normally and tend to cause those things that upset quantum toddlers. The reason the new chip is called the Majorana chip is because it utilizes particles called Majorana (named for the scientist who theorized their existence) particles whose alter-egos are the same as their normal ones. Thus, you don't get the schizophrenic self destructive behaviors that you do with the other particles, so they are much more stable. Yes, I just used children with an incurable mental disorder to explain quantum particles. I bet you understood it, so I think it works. These Majorana particles are the "new state of matter" Microsoft has claimed to invent, although we already knew about these. They just got them really cold and got them to stay where they want, which I guess kind of counts as new matter.

Google just put out the Willow chip (named after yours truly) and gave benchmarks for its performance. Microsoft's statistics were notably absent. They have claimed that their design is scalable to the long-standing final figure for supercomputing: 1 million qubits. This would be more powerful than every computer ever invented combined, by far. However, this is entirely theoretical. The more qubits you have, the more they interfere with each other. 1 million qubits in the palm of your hand (the current size of the chip that Microsoft claims can be scaled down) might not be physically possible, we have absolutely no idea. It would be incredibly difficult, that's for sure. Their 8 qubit computer is still pretty error prone, albeit more stable.

The Google chip, Willow, has 105 qubits, making it significantly better than Microsoft's eight qubits at a similar size. The reason that Majorana has received any attention is because this is the first time that a qubit has been created that uses particles and antiparticles as described, called a topographical chip. It isn't currently better, but maybe it will turn out to be better in the future for its stability. Willow beats the current fastest standard computer, Frontier, such that it can solve a problem that would take Frontier 10 septillion years in under 5. Oh sorry, not years. 5 minutes. Crazy stuff.

Thus, Majorana has hype because it's new. It isn't groundbreaking by performance, but by concept, and time will tell if that concept is worth improvement.

I guess that's all from me. Have a good week.

Will Ott

St. Geezy ft. Big RhinO

It is Wednesday, my dudes. I haven't been this late in a minute. Usually I do okay, but this week was busy. Also, I have blog readers! If you're reading this on the blog, congratulations.

Let me think, what have I been up to... oh, that's right, getting absolutely curbstomped by my French writing assignments. 8/10 is not good. I'm yet to beat my high score of 8.5 which is so infuriating because I try to push myself sooo hard on those writing assignments so that my vocabulary actually grows, and then the feedback comes back and it's like "hey by the way you suck." All this to say that I have to turn in a much larger paragraph tomorrow, so wish me luck or something.

This weekend was lit, though. I stayed up till 3 hot tubbing then woke up at 7 to go to St. George with some friends and it was so much fun. If you get my Instagram stories, you probably saw that I stayed up late beating a dice game on that trip. If you don't, then you have no clue what I am talking about. Look up "gong-gi from Squid Game" and you'll see what I'm referring to. Basically, a player takes 5 little stones and they have to do a series of moves that involves way too much hand eye coordination. The final move is the hardest: one must throw them up and land them all on the back of their hand, then toss them up from the back of the hand and catch them all in a downward motion. It is so difficult, but we promised that we weren't going to bed until it was done. Beginning at around 10, we played the game straight through to 2:30 am when I finally completed the cycle. It was murder, but the relief was unbeatable. Besides that, I got a little bit sunburned, ate at Red Robin, took pictures on my film camera, ran a 5k in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, and did absolutely no homework. It was the best.

Speaking of homework, it's been crazy these last few days. I basically live at the library just grinding out the work, but my brain is gaining so much mass. I just did a presentation on the standard model, and my physics teacher said that he got a lot out of it that he didn't know before, so that's good. Did you know that neutrinos don't interact with photons? Definitely saw this 79 bro sleeping a little bit during the presentation, but whatever. That class has descended beyond confusing anyways. We're talking about particle wells and their widths, which I find like a totally pointless tool for understanding, but what do I know? I'm just a kid.

I've made some new friends in the last week, and they have officially ruined my sleep schedule. I was doing so good, but it's okay. They're really cool so I guess I can sacrifice. I made new friends on the St. George trip too, and they're also awesome.

I had a super epic idea to get our office on social media, so I'm gonna start filming a noice video this week to post for the premier. I'm actually pretty excited for that. 

I did watch this really thought provoking French film called All Your Faces, which I highly recommend. It was about a program that pairs victims of crimes with prisoners who were sentenced for the same crimes. They meet in a group to talk to one another about what they did, why they did it, how it has affected them, etc. It has some really good themes, and I thought it did a great job at humanizing the prisoners. After the first few minutes, it was hard not to see them as people. This film made me think about prejudices I didn't know I had. Such an awareness makes it easier to limit those subconscious thoughts and condemn their appearance in our behavior. The film also raised important arguments about the penal (don't laugh, you 12 year old boy) situation in developed countries and how we claim to be this highly progressive, nuanced, sophisticated, and scrupulous society, yet dehumanize people who commit crimes; at times, they may "deserve" what they get, but most of the time they are the result of broken situations. Others are also in the result category, but the crimes are committed against them. Such is the difference between criminals and victims: both are the output of disadvantaged circumstances, but one decided they were going to do something about it. Unfortunately, the choice was a bad one, but to what level should they be punished when their history is considered? How do we draw a line? What efforts can we apply to make the best of the past? All good questions, all found in the movie. 

What else? I don't think things have been super exciting lately, mostly just busy. 

I guess that's it, then. See you next week.

Will Ott

Yes, we really slept like this (please don't tell the honor code office)

I've Got Royalty Inside My DNA

Guess what? I am beginning to write this at 11:18 PM, so don't expect it to be super deep or anything like that. I just have to do it today because I won't have time tomorrow.

This week wasn't particularly exciting. I let my friend cut my hair, which was an adventure. I have also been going to the gym with this friend regularly, and he is good. He has been correcting my form for me, which actually makes a huge difference. I used to not get very sore. Turns out it was because I wasn't actually working the muscles I was supposed to. Shoutout to Dylan. One day I'll have a six-pack. It is one of my life goals, but every year that slips means it is less likely to occur the following year. I should probably start running too, but I can't freaking run anymore. My lungs don't breathe the winter air.

I watched Kendrick ruin Drake again in his Super Bowl halftime show. This guy got SZA and Serena Williams to perform on the Drake disses with him, which is insane because Drake dated both of them. People sang "a minor" louder than they cheered for the Eagles all game long. My coworkers said that Kendrick mostly looked like his pants were too tight and thus couldn't move properly. I concur. The part where they stood in the shape of the American flag and danced in sync was pretty sick.

I liked Kendrick's rhetorical message portrayed through his show. I find messages in performance to be increasingly rare these days, so I appreciated his attempt. It was reminiscent of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew," when Petruchio tells Kate that they need to play the game in order to get by and beat the system, while recognizing that the rules themselves are stupid. By dressing up Samuel L Jackson as Uncle Sam, Kendrick implied that some parts of America are kind of stuck in the past, and want to go back to an older, calmer way of life that is more proper and less... modern. His show demonstrated that the only way to move forward in a positive way is to acknowledge history, learn from it, and make something new. One must play by the rules that were created before to create something valuable to society. If they don't, they end up getting clowned on like Drake has been for violating common morals and ideals. I thoroughly enjoyed the brief part where Kendrick is having a conversation with his famous detuned female vox, responding to its recurring question: "Are you sure you want to do this?", after which he proceeded to roast Drake and ask America what it really valued.

Don't think I thought that the show was the best thing ever. I also felt that it was lacking in several areas, especially in K Dot's own choreography. The staging was kind of boring at times, and had several technical issues, including whatever deaf person was mixing his vocals. You couldn't understand most of his show, which was incredibly disappointing. He didn't have much diversity in his presentation, and he didn't elaborate on some fairly large parts of the set. Although the "game" was mentioned, it wasn't well explained, and left the viewer to fill in a lot of gaps. If they are used to doing that, then it works. When you're trying to get a message out to as many people as possible... such an approach is fairly ineffective.

There's my rhetorical analysis of the Super Bowl Halftime Show. In other news, I went on a really weird date with some slightly crazy girl who I kind of hope that I don't see again because she freaked me out. She wanted to drop out of school and study meditation in India. I got along with the 30 year old dentist guy who was there though. 

My entire skin organ has been really itchy for some reason and I have broken blood vessels in several places, can't figure out what that's about. Not that you need to know that at all.

I'm gonna be so late for class tomorrow. I've been working on my French homework in between paragraphs, so I've gotta finish that up then go to sleep.

*Alarm Bells

2/3/25

Oh, hi!

I didn't see you there. Well, I didn't see you, and I don't see you. You know what else I didn't see? Any sort of emergency evacuation plan. There is a route on the inside of my door, but it didn't say where to go once you left the building. Usually they count everybody up and make sure that people aren't dead, which seems kind of silly in the middle of the day.

Our fire alarm went off on Saturday while I was listening to some Metro Boomin song I hadn't heard in a while. It fit so well with the song that I thought it was part of it. I was like, "dang, never heard somebody use an alarm as a hi-hat before, but it's kinda dope." Then the song ended, and I was like, "wait a minute," and some dude came running by all the doors, pounding on them and yelling "Everybody out!" I grabbed my backpack with the most expensive things I owned and walked outside. The door to my room had not been closed for more than 3 seconds before I realized that I'd left my keys inside.

Since I had never been told where to go, I went to the Cannon Center and waited there. I asked a girl at the front desk if I could get a key to my room. She asked for my number (not like that) and a kid standing next to me said, "Hold up, that's my room?" I told him that maybe he was my missing roommate. He said "Whoa, I don't have a roommate either!" He lives in Budge. Haven't seen him since.

The girl then asked me what my room number was and my building, then laughed when I repeated the information I had just said to the other kid. She went to go look for a key, came back, and said "We don't have a key for you. They're all checked out." I said that was weird since I am the only person in my room and I only have one key. She said "2117, right?" I said "no, 1217." She went back to look again and came back and said yeah, we don't have anything for 2117. I reminded her that it was 1217. She said "omg" and then went back to look for the key for the 3rd time. She came back with a key in hand, and said "this one was on the hook but it doesn't match the numbers it's supposed to have. You can try it," so I took it and left.

Surprise! It didn't work.

I didn't know who our RA was, but I was with another kid who let me in the building, so I asked him, and he pointed him out 'cause he happened to be walking by. He then opened my room with his key, I got mine, then returned the dumb key to the office. I also learned that someone had pulled the fire alarm earlier in the week at like 2 in the morning. I definitely didn't hear it, so I would be very dead if it were real. They're quiet in the rooms. Somehow I slept through it.

Okay, with that entire event in mind, rewind your mental picture to earlier that morning. I had just walked back from the bank and was about to cross Canyon Road when I noticed a police car in the southbound right lane stopping traffic. I thought, "how sad, someone must have been hit," but then I thought "why don't they just go around?" Then I realized: they were waiting in line for Swig. It was wrapped around the corner so I couldn't see how long the line was.

While I'm waiting for Office Girl to give me a dysfunctional key, my mom called. She was gonna pick me up and take me to Lindon so I could do my laundry (yes, I do my laundry at home because all but one here are broken). She called and said "Do you know why I can't turn onto Canyon Road? I've been stuck here for like 15 minutes. Is there a basketball game or something?" 

Can you see where this is going? I forgot for a second but then I remembered, so I told her. She just screamed into the phone. Office Girl nearly died laughing. She thought I was funny trying to soothe my mother's hatred for Utah caffeine penny-pinching. When we drove by on the way, the line was around the corner on Canyon Road and all the way down past Riviera, backing up right turn traffic on University. Why the police didn't say, "yeah no Swig for you bums keep driving" is beyond me. Turns out Swig was having a sale for soda starting at a dollar. It wasn't even free. You could earn more money in the time it would take to get to the front than you'd save waiting in that line. It was wild.

I watched the Grammy's. #ByeDrakeAubrey Also, bye-bye COIN.

I had a French test, which wasn't that bad. I'm doing alright at this whole French thing so far. Finally got some details on the study abroad I'm considering.

I left my Airpods at home, so I guess I'm music-free this week. I am also caffeine-free this week, because I think I might've inherited my mother's caffeine sensitivity, so I'm testing myself to see if my slight headaches disappear. I'm a little bit sickened, so the test may be postponed until later.

I just updated my blog with all these emails. I haven't decided if I want to write more there or not. I think I'm just gonna stick with email for now.

This week, I also learned that I am very lazy at work. More specifically, if I can find a way to prevent myself and others from doing future work, then I'm going to take the time to figure that out. I've been trying to automate a significant portion of my work using a Microsoft service called Power Automate, and I am fiiiinallly getting the hang of it. I'm learning so much about that thing because you have to know lots of different things, which I love doing.

"Jack of all trades, master of none" seems to be a pretty fitting theme for my personality. I could only remember the 'master of none' part, so I looked it up, and apparently the full quote paints me in a much more colorful light: "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." Boom. Get roasted, YoYo Ma. You may be so good at cello it can make a grown man cry, but can you explain what Compton Scattering is (not the gun kind) while doing tricks with DVD cases taped together and watching "The Dead Poets' Society"? Didn't freaking think so.

I guess I don't have much else this week. I've been thinking about our role as citizens of the United States. Some crazy things happened in Utah this week, of which I'm not a fan. I feel that it would be inappropriate to invoke any politics on these emails, but grrr am I tempted. Consider it a demonstration of how much I care for you, dear reader.

That's all from me.

-w cubed