Links + coming soon

Real life is a bit busy right now, but I wanted to point out a couple of links and talk about what's coming up.

• I've been looking for ways to think about and discuss topological materials that might be more broadly accessible to non-experts, and I found this paper and videos like this one and this one.  Very cool, and I'm sorry I'd missed it back in '15 when it came out.
• In the experimental literature talking about realizations of Majorana fermions in the solid state, a key signature is a peak in the conductance at zero voltage - that's an indicator that there is a "zero-energy mode" in the system.  There are other ways to get zero-bias peaks, though, and nailing down whether this has the expected properties (magnitude, response to magnetic fields) has been a lingering issue.  This seems to nail down the situation more firmly.
• Discussions about "quantum supremacy" strictly in terms of how many qubits can be simulated on a classical computer right now seem a bit silly to me.  Ok, so IBM managed to simulate a handful of additional qubits (56 rather than 49).  It wouldn't shock me if they could get up to 58 - supercomputers are powerful and programmers can be very clever.  Are we going to get a flurry of news stories every time about how this somehow moves the goalposts for quantum computers?    
• I'm hoping to put out a review of Max the Demon and the Entropy of Doom, since I received my beautifully printed copies this past weekend.