Revolt! Scientists Say They’re Sick of Quantum Computing’s Hype
A Twitter account called Quantum Bullshit Detector reflects some researchers’ angst about overhyped claims and other troubling trends.
by SOPHIA CHEN
PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES
This spring, a mysterious figure by the name of Quantum Bullshit Detector strolled onto the Twitter scene. Posting anonymously, they began to comment on purported breakthroughs in quantum computing—claims that the technology will speed up artificial intelligence algorithms, manage financial risk at banks, and break all encryption. The account preferred to express its opinions with a single word: “Bullshit.”
The provocations perplexed experts in the field. Because of the detector’s familiarity with jargon and the accounts it chose to follow, the person or persons behind the account seemed be part of the quantum community. Researchers were unaccustomed to such brazen trolling from someone in their own ranks. “So far it looks pretty well-calibrated, but […] vigilante justice is a high-risk affair,” physicist Scott Aaronson wrote on his blog a month after the detector’s debut. People discussed online whether to take the account’s opinions seriously.
“There is some confusion. Quantum Bullshit Detector cannot debate you. It can only detect quantum bullshit. This is why we are Quantum Bullshit Detector!” the account tweeted in response.
In the subsequent months, the account has called bullshit on statements in academic journals such as Nature and journalism publications such as Scientific American, Quanta, and yes, an article written by me in WIRED. Google’s so-called quantum supremacy demonstration? Bullshit. Andrew Yang’s tweet about Google’s quantum supremacy demonstration? Bullshit. Quantum computing pioneer Seth Lloyd accepting money from Jeffrey Epstein? Bullshit.
Someone ate a really expensive snack at Art Basel Saturday afternoon — to the tune of $120,000.
For one banana.
By now you have probably heard of the now world-famous banana duct-taped to Emmanuel Perrotin’s outer gallery wall at Art Basel Miami Beach. The piece that sold to an art collector for $120,000.
The $120,000 banana — a real, rather ripe and edible one — is the work of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and titled “Comedian.” The work comes with a Certificate of Authenticity, and owners are told that they can replace the banana, as needed.
Instructions on how to replace the banana are not included.
Man walks out of San Francisco art gallery with Salvador Dali painting worth $20K
The suspect can be seen on security footage grabbing the painting, titled “Surrealistic Bullfight: Burning Giraffe,” off the wall and walking out the door.
By Janelle Griffith
“Surrealistic Bullfight: Burning Giraffe” by Salvador Dali.Courtesy of Dennis Rae Fine Art
A suspect who carried a $20,000 Salvador Dali painting out of a San Francisco art gallery while it was open and the director was present is being sought by police.
The painting, titled “Surrealistic Bullfight: Burning Giraffe,” was stolen Sunday from Dennis Rae Fine Art, the gallery’s co-owner David Schach told NBC News on Tuesday. It is worth an estimated $20,000, Schach said.
Security footage showed a man carrying a large frame on Geary Boulevard toward Union Square, Schach said.
To live in Los Angeles means forever catching glimpses of your street or favorite restaurant staged as a stand-in for someplace else. Moving around town becomes an exercise in avoiding those film shoots, a constant reminder that we reside on a giant soundstage, where at any given moment, a beloved block or building is being carefully snipped from the surrounding context.
In the last few years, however, shows have been set in actual LA neighborhoods, with characters referencing real places, sometimes with stunning geographic accuracy. There’s the show Love, which takes place in a well-known apartment complex in the Valley. In Transparent, the neighborhoods where the family members live, from Silver Lake to Marina del Rey, provide cues about their characters. LA’s noir past intersects with present-day addresses in the thriller Bosch. Issa Rae’s Insecure is probably the best example of the genre, offering a look at everyday life in South LA with locations as mundane as a Rite-Aid pharmacy.
But BoJack Horseman—the animated Netflix show bywriter Raphael Bob-Waksberg and artist Lisa Hanawalt, who were high school friends—is the first show to create an entire Los Angeles universe that feels like it was made for people in LA.
For people who don’t live here, BoJack Horseman might appear to be an endless string of cliches: a narcissistic washed-up sitcom star (who is also a horse) voiced by Will Arnett, colonnades of palm trees, candy-colored convertibles, and jabs at celebrity culture. But tucked into the narrative are disarmingly familiar glimpses of actual Los Angeles—well, Los Angeles if it were mostly occupied by animals.
The first Popeyes tweet seemed innocent enough — a photograph of the chain’s new fried-chicken sandwich (chicken breast, brioche bun, pickles, sauce) beneath an artfully garbled caption: “So. Good. Forgot. How. Speak.”
But as a social media battle has captivated the internet this week and generated long lines at Popeyes locations across the country, that tweet from last week now has the feel of an opening salvo. Things grew heated on Tuesday, when Chick-fil-A tweeted what appeared to be a coded response to the Popeyes announcement, extolling the virtues of its “original” chicken sandwich.
Soon, the “passive-aggressive chicken sandwich debate,” as one news article put it, had escalated into a Twitter battle royal, as other fast-food companies started promoting their own sandwiches. Shake Shack tried to rise above the fray, promising a chicken sandwich “without the beef.”
As the Twitter commotion intensified, the Popeyes chicken sandwich reportedly sold out at some locations.
Clown ‘starts violent brawl on cruise ship as passengers use plates for weapons’
Families feared for their lives as chaos erupted on the P&O Britannia cruise following a boozy patriotic party where large amounts of alcohol were consumed
ByLatifa Yedroudj
A passenger dressed in a clown outfit sparked a massive brawl on a P&O cruise which left several staff members injured, according to reports.
The huge fight broke out on board a P&O Britannia cruise with families running to hide as passengers reportedly used plates as weapons.
Emergency services were called to the ship’s 16th floor restaurant at 2am on Friday morning.
Paramedics tended to the injured staff who tried to control the massive fight that erupted between passengers.
The guests allegedly threw plates and furniture at each other and there was “blood everywhere”, a witness said.
The fight broke out following a “patriotic” black-tie event on board the cruise ship on Thursday evening with “large amounts of alcohol consumed”, reporter Richard Gaisford said on Twitter .
According to a witness at the scene, passengers were upset after one guest dressed up as a clown despite the ship’s no fancy dress code.
Stephen Jennings, 40, was found with a rattlesnake, uranium, a gun and an open bottle of whiskey in a stolen car ( Logan County, Oklahoma Sheriff’s Office/AP )
A pair of alleged car thieves were found with radioactive uranium, whiskey and a rattlesnake in their vehicle when they were pulled over in a routine traffic stop, police said.
They were initially stopped after police noticed their vehicle’s licence plate had expired, but officers soon noticed the timber rattlesnake in a box on the backseat.
Mr Jennings, 40, then told police he had a gun in the vehicle and police discovered that the car was stolen.
“So now he’s got a rattlesnake, a stolen vehicle, firearm, and somebody under arrest,” Guthrie Police Sergeant Anthony Gibbs told local broadcaster KFOR-TV.
After a further search of the car, police found an open bottle of Kentucky Deluxe whiskey and a container of “yellowish powder” that was labelled “Uranium”.
Mr Jennings told officers he was trying to create a “super snake” after the uranium was discovered, ABC reported.
The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths within a decade. It was cold, hard math: The human population was growing exponentially; the food supply was not. Ehrlich was an accomplished butterfly specialist. He knew that nature did not regulate animal populations delicately. Populations exploded, blowing past the available resources, and then crashed.
In his book, Ehrlich played out hypothetical scenarios that represented “the kinds of disasters that will occur.” In the worst-case scenario, famine rages across the planet. Russia, China, and the United States are dragged into nuclear war, and the resulting environmental degradation soon extinguishes the human race. In the “cheerful” scenario, population controls begin. Famine spreads, and countries teeter, but the major death wave ends in the mid-1980s. Only half a billion or so people die of starvation. “I challenge you to create one more optimistic,” Ehrlich wrote, adding that he would not count scenarios involving benevolent aliens bearing care packages.
The economist Julian Simon took up Ehrlich’s challenge. Technology—water-control techniques, hybridized seeds, management strategies—had revolutionized agriculture, and global crop yields were increasing. To Simon, more people meant more good ideas about how to achieve a sustainable future. So he proposed a wager. Ehrlich could choose five metals that he expected to become more expensive as resources were depleted and chaos ensued over the next decade. Both men agreed that commodity prices were a fine proxy for the effects of population growth, and they set the stakes at $1,000 worth of Ehrlich’s five metals. If, 10 years hence, prices had gone down, Ehrlich would have to pay the difference in value to Simon. If prices went up, Simon would be on the hook for the difference. The bet was made official in 1980.
Why baseball spent more than $1bn on three players in a month
Three of the richest contracts in sports history would appear to bust the baseball-is-dying narrative, but underlying trends have exposed a rot within the mechanics of the sport’s economics
Mike Trout, the Angels’ newly minted $426.5m man, has finished either first or second in Most Valuable Player voting in every full season he’s played. Photograph: Kelley L Cox/USA Today Sports
he three generational talents on Major League Baseball’s free-agent market this winter were always going to cash in big. But the splashy numbers as they came across the wire were enough to leave even veteran observers slack-jawed.
It kicked off in February when Manny Machado agreed to a 10-year, $300m contract with the San Diego Padres. Bryce Harper followed with a 13-year, $330m deal with the Philadelphia Phillies less than two weeks later, the richest contract by total value in North American sports history.
That record stood for all of three weeks as Mike Trout signed a 10-year, $360m extension – creating a 12-year, $426.5 million total commitment – that all but ensures he’ll finish his career with the Los Angeles Angels.
That’s more than $1bn in guaranteed salary for three players, the sort of money that would appear to dramatically counter the persistent narrative of baseball as an outmoded enterprise.
The perennial hand-wringing over baseball’s waning popularity and relevancy amid the hastening pace of American life, a tradition dating back more than a century, is not entirely without merit. Average attendance at major league ballparks hit a 16-year low in 2018. Little League participation is down. A Gallup poll shows baseball, which ceded the practical if not symbolic mantle of national pastime to the NFL decades ago, is falling behind basketball in popularity among fans in the United States.
She was one of Hollywood’s most celebrated actresses. But Audrey Hepburn had a role that few knew about: spy.
And unlike the characters that she portrayed on screen, playing this part could literally mean life or death.
The maddeningly private actress, who died in 1993, had dropped hints about her work with the Dutch Resistance during World War II, and now a new book puts the whole story together, providing an in-depth look at her life during the conflict.
Robert Matzen, author of “Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II” (GoodKnight Books), combed secret files, talked to Hepburn’s family and tracked down diaries to uncover new information.
The biggest surprise to many will be Hepburn’s work with the Dutch Resistance against Nazi occupation. She certainly seemed an unlikely hero.
Near the end of my chat with Gaspar Noé, I ask him why he’s so comfortable with pushing narrative boundaries in film. He replied he doesn’t believe he’s pushing anything compared to what came before. So I remind him of cinema’s growing sensitivity to controversial representations of sexuality in 2019. The French director—whose latest film Climax (which is co-produced by VICE Studios), is a journey with a dance troupe lured into hallucinogenic states to the point of injury and death—decides to answer in the most Noé way possible.
“The fear of the penis in the United States still shocks me,” he lets out during a phone exchange. “In many ways, the Western world is turning Victorian.”
If you’ve ever seen a film by Gaspar Noé, it would be downright disappointing not to hear the word “penis” leave his mouth. The director is famed with his ability to unsettle viewers with equal parts beauty, sexuality and terror. You’ll see it in works such as Irreversible ,Love, Enter the Void, and now in Climax set for a March 1 limited release—zero penises guaranteed.
It takes a special kind of mind to come up with films that explore the dark depths of the human psyche. And thankfully, I got a chance to listen to the ideas that a mind like that will throw at you when questioned. Whether it was drugs, directing or “the penis,” Noé was a man comfortable speaking about it all.
The Cult of Richard E. Grant’s Withnail and I Is Finally Having Its Moment
After decades of obsessively quoting Bruce Robinson’s 1987 comedy, Gen Xers are using Grant’s Oscar nomination as an excuse to teach a new generation to demand the finest wines available to humanity.
Bruce Robinson’s script for his 1987 cult classic, Withnail and I,wanders effortlessly between the high (a Hamlet soliloquy) and the low (“You can stuff it up your arse for nothing and fuck off while you’re doing it!”). But it’s the incandescent performance of Richard E. Grantthat sends the dark British comedy—about a couple of out-of-work actors—into the stratosphere of greatness.
So it’s less weird than it might at first seem that the movie which screened at New York’s Film Forum on Thursday night wasn’t the one that has earned Grant a best-supporting-actor Oscar nomination—Marielle Heller’sCan You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy—but the one that forged his legend more than three decades ago.
Over coffee in Brooklyn, I asked Grant if he could tell when he read the script for Withnail and I that it was a role for the ages? “I knew it bone-deep,” he said. “It made me laugh out loud, it was so brilliantly written. Even the stage directions were hilarious. I had also been unemployed for nine months, too, so it was the best preparation I could have had for playing an embittered unemployed actor.”
Within a few weeks of each other, two friends of mine in the Bay Area independently received a text with the same unsolicited photo of a woman’s bra-clad, but otherwise exposed, cleavage sent from an area code in central Pennsylvania last month.
Both of them, curious as to the provenance of the boobs, replied and asked who was texting them. It was clear some scam was afoot. But what was it? They wanted to know the endgame.
Local Redditors, too, have reported similar missives.
“Anyone else in SF getting texts from a random number who sends you a nude and then tries to flirt with you over text?” wrote Redditor NaturalPerspective earlier this month. “I have had three people tell me it has also happened to them in the past 3 weeks. Wondering what is going on.”
If you yourself have gotten a similar text out of nowhere and wondered where the trail of breadcrumbs lead — Phishing? Blackmail? Viral marketing? — we followed them, so you don’t have to.
In the latest example that internet dominance is as fragile as an eggshell, an egg Instagram overtook Kylie Jenner by posting the most liked Instagram photo ever.
The egg racked up more than 18.2 million likes as of Sunday evening — a big win for a little egg.
The Instagram account set out on its journey Sunday morning with its first post declaring its ambitions.
“Let’s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this,” the bio read.
The slickly produced film—full of sweeping underwater shots and a swelling soundtrack—was financed by the artist himself, a spokesperson from Hirst’s company, Science Ltd, tells artnet News. “The film is something Damien wanted people to be able to come across in years to come, which explores the backstory of the project,” she says.
Instead, the film suggests the show was the debut presentation of long-lost treasure discovered by a team of archaeologists and divers off the coast of east Africa. The trove—so the story goes—had been assembled during the 1st or 2nd centuries by a former slave turned voracious collector, Cif Amotan II (an anagram, it turns out, for “I am fiction”).
The film follows a team of researchers as they identify Amotan’s shipwreck beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. But in order to retrieve the sunken booty, they need a benefactor. Enter: Damien Hirst.
Bay Area jogger is attacked by a dog, then bitten by the dog’s owner
by Alejandra Reyes-Velarde
A woman jogging in a Bay Area park was bitten by the owner of a dog who also attacked the jogger, police said.
The jogger was in Anthony Chabot Regional Park in Castro Valley when a dog attacked her about 10:30 a.m. Thursday, and she had to defend herself with pepper spray, the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department said.
The woman later came across the dog’s owner — another woman — who tackled and punched her multiple times, authorities said.
“As the victim attempted to push her assailant off of her,” police said, “she was bitten on her forearm by the female, causing significant wounds.”
The group released a “follow-up report” this month that concludes the woman saw something that wasn’t human. Sandy Hook is about 100 miles east of Lexington, Kentucky.
“She described it as a walking tree,“ investigator Jack Smarr said after interviewing the woman.
His report stops short of declaring it was Bigfoot, a legendary “ape-like creature” that remains more a popular myth than a scientific fact, according to Live Science.com.
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Mike Trout, the Angels’ newly minted $426.5m man, has finished either first or second in Most Valuable Player voting in every full season he’s played. Photograph: Kelley L Cox/USA Today Sports
One of Damien Hirst’s “found treasures.” Screenshot via Netflix & Science Ltd. “Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable” (2017).
