First week March 2022 - I'm going to Munich

Since I went back to Mexico, and I started typing here again, I promised to myself I'd do it more often, the reason being that it provides a sort of catharsis, even if I don't always write about matters directly affecting me. Where I go wrong, methinks, is in trying to provide much detail or in trying to satisfy an imaginary audience, which in the end derives in it taking a much longer time and effort than it should.

I'll soon be leaving Taipei and gonna be heading to Munich. I've taken a job with IQM as a quantum physics engineer, where I'll work mainly characterizing their superconducting device and thinking about error mitigation/correction.

By the way, we put up a new paper on the arXiv recently on more RB for non-Markovian noise. Despite this one being less sexy than its predecessor when it comes to plots or figures (spoiler alert, there is none at all), I feel like it is hot nevertheless, mathematically and physically, even though as always, there are things that can be improved or addressed further.

Towards a general framework of Randomized Benchmarking for non-Markovian Noise
Pedro Figueroa-Romero, Kavan Modi, Min-Hsiu Hsieh

I will be cutting my 2-year contract in Taipei to a single year, with the main reason being twofold: the first is that the borders are not yet opening, and the second is the lack of diversity, mainly in the workplace. To be fair, people have been great with me, especially the team leader and director of the institute, Min-Hsiu Hsieh.

When it comes to IQM, from the places I sent requests or applications to, it was, I would say, my second priority: to be honest, Zapata was the first one, although mostly for selfish reasons (essentially I don't think I had quite the right profile for any of their vacancies). Regardless, I am super excited about taking up my role; ironically, without my year in Taipei, I don't think I would've been perceived as having the right profile, or it would've been much more difficult getting in. Also, the topic of device characterization in general has revived much of the passion I'd lost for research.

About Munich, so far the only issue I have is the high costs of living coupled with the high taxing rates. Even though I will be earning more than what I currently am, I will be having quite less after taxes and accommodation, which is a tad depressing. I guess it's a reason why the expats that decide to come to Taiwan like it so much, cause you can afford a much higher quality life with much less.

One thing I'll totally be missing is riding a bike, which was, unexpectedly, an amazing experience! This weekend at last I went around the north coast, only with a little climb at the beginning in Fengguizui. I'd been wanting to do this ride for a while, so I decided it was now or never, and didn't disappoint, even reminded me a bit of Beach Rd in Melbourne. I also took the chance to visit the Temple of Eighteen Lords again!

A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

It is foolish to be in thrall to fame and fortune, engaged in painful striving all your life with never a moment of peace and tranquillity. Great wealth will drive you to neglect your own well-being in pursuit of it. It is asking for harm and tempting trouble. Though you leave behind at your death a mountain of gold high enough to prop up the North Star itself, it will only cause problems for those who come after you. Nor is there any point in all those pleasures that delight the eyes of fools. Big carriages, fat horses, glittering gold and jewels – any man of sensibility would view such things as gross stupidity. Toss your gold away in the mountains; hurl your jewels into the deep. Only a complete fool is led astray by avarice. Everyone would like to leave their name unburied for posterity – but the high-born and exalted are not necessarily fine people, surely. A dull, stupid person can be born into a good house, attain high status thanks to opportunity and live in the height of luxury, while many wonderfully wise and saintly men choose to remain in lowly positions, and end their days without ever having met with good fortune. A fierce craving for high status and position is next in folly to the lust for fortune. We long to leave a name for our exceptional wisdom and sensibility – but when you really think about it, desire for a good reputation is merely revelling in the praise of others. Neither those who praise us nor those who denigrate will remain in the world for long, and others who hear their opinions will be gone in short order as well. Just who should we feel ashamed before, then? Whose is the recognition we should crave? Fame in fact attracts abuse and slander. No, there is nothing to be gained from leaving a lasting name. The lust for fame is the third folly. Let me now say a few words, however, to those who dedicate themselves to the search for knowledge and the desire for understanding. Knowledge leads to deception; talent and ability only serve to increase earthly desires. Knowledge acquired by listening to others or through study is not true knowledge. So what then should we call knowledge? Right and wrong are simply part of a single continuum. What should we call good? One who is truly wise has no knowledge or virtue, nor honour nor fame. Who then will know of him, and speak of him to others? This is not because he hides his virtue and pretends foolishness – he is beyond all distinctions such as wise and foolish, gain and loss. I have been speaking of what it is to cling to one’s delusions and seek after fame and fortune. All things of this phenomenal world are mere illusion. They are worth neither discussing nor desiring.

Yoshida Kenkō was a Buddhist hermit from early 14th-century Japan; this Penguin book is a selection from his Essays in Idleness. The book reminded me strongly of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; it is a sort of stream of consciousness work dealing with many topics about life, nature, virtue and other things, many of which seem really close to Western philosophy from similar times. Some of his remarks, such as the comments on women are utterly outdated and absolutely not PC, and nevertheless, some observations are, methinks, more needed today than they probably ever were, such as the quote I cited above.

Temple of the Eighteen Lords

A temple that is all about praising dogs... yep, you can find such thing in Taiwan. Specifically, I'm referring to the Temple of the Eighteen Lords (in Mandarin, 十八王公廟 or Shíbāwáng Gōngmiào), located at the very north of Taiwan.

The story is quite interesting, from Wikipedia:

According to legend, during the Qing Dynasty, a boat carrying seventeen people and one dog capsized near the coast of northern Taiwan. All of the people died, but the dog survived. When residents on the shore were burying the dead, the dog jumped into the grave to be buried as well.^[a] Locals then immortalized them collectively as the "Eighteen Lords".^[1]

And according to the same Wikipedia article, "In the 1980s, the temple was popular among gamblers playing dajiale (a type of illegal lottery) and sex workers." I find it surprising that none of the Taiwanese that I've spoken to (to be fair, not that many... lol), were not aware about the existence of the temple.

Apparently it's not super easy to get there on public transport from Taipei. While, of course, I wanted to see the temple, my main motivation was to ride there: it took some 85km and 2,000m of climbing but most of it on nice roads and accross the mountains, so a tad hard but super enjoyable.

Preprint on RB and non-Markovianity

We just put up a new preprint on randomised benchmarking for non-Markovian noise at https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.05403 !

Randomised benchmarking for non-Markovian noise

Pedro Figueroa-Romero, Kavan Modi, Thomas M. Stace, Min-Hsiu Hsieh

Estimating the features of noise is the first step in a chain of protocols that will someday lead to fault tolerant quantum computers. The randomised benchmarking (RB) protocol is designed with this exact mindset, estimating the average strength of noise in a quantum processor with relative ease in practice. However, RB, along with most other benchmarking and characterisation methods, is limited in scope because it assumes that the noise is temporally uncorrelated (Markovian), which is increasingly evident not to be the case. Here, we combine the RB protocol with a recent framework describing non-Markovian quantum phenomena to derive a general analytical expression of the average sequence fidelity (ASF) for non-Markovian RB with the Clifford group. We show that one can identify non-Markovian features of the noise directly from the ASF through its deviations from the Markovian case, proposing a set of methods to collectively estimate these deviations, non-Markovian memory time-scales, and diagnose (in)coherence of non-Markovian noise in an RB experiment. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposal by means of several proof-of-principle examples. Our methods are directly implementable and pave the pathway to better understanding correlated noise in quantum processors.

Fourteentine, Taiwanese bureaucracy and loneliness

I started typing this entry in the middle of the mandatory 14-day quarantine* imposed by Taiwan on anyone entering the country, and never really got to complete it, even when I was trapped in that hotel room 24/7. As everything in life, while in quarantine it felt like it would never end (the day after it finished, my feeling was even a bit surreal and I felt kind of afraid of having to face the outside world), but now it feels like it went by in the blink of an eye. I guess all I can complain about was the absurdly high price of the quarantine hotel, but at least I was treated well and really had all I needed to make it through.

For some reason I sometimes feel that writing in here does not make sense at all, and some others I feel that not only is it good for me mentally but it leaves some more permanent information about my thoughts when I'm gone, or when I might need to recall some things. I'm, at least at this second, trying to commit myself to write at least once a week, without caring much about detail, which is, I think, what deters me in the first place from writing or at least keeps me from concluding whatever thought process I want to capture in writing. I guess I just have to forget a bit about style detail and precision when it comes to this thing.

Anyhow, my first status complain is that bureaucracy in Taiwan is an absolute drag. It's funny because I used to think about Taiwan as some very technologically advanced country which would have automated many things and would be very efficient in dealing with many formalities. This is just not so, and some things even seem to make little sense. To be fair, many things do work to a great extent like the strictness they've had with covid-19 and so on. Anyhow, I concluded my quarantine on May the 4th and got sorted almost all bureaucratic chores I needed to. I'm very much looking forward to resuming my life.

While being a postdoc abroad definitely feels different to being a PhD student abroad because of the professional part, there are things in personal life that do feel like going back in time in a negative way. And this is especially true if one is single (i.e. not married) and faces being in a new place with no acquaintances; add to this the unusual circumstance where you're required to initially isolate yourself at least for 22 days and things get a bit worse. And don't get me wrong, it's great to have a life experience like this and being able to live in different places and truly immerse yourself in a totally different environment, but I guess at some point it feels a bit exhausting, even more if you feel that you actually can't call this or that place home.

Today I was particularly reminded of this because I grabbed my camera and went out to check Taipei 101 (台北101) and Elephant Mountain (象山). This kind of reminded me of some shitty times in Melbourne by my own, even when actually trying some photography sort of helped me feel better back then. It also somehow intensified the uneasiness of being in a long-distance relationship (LDR). As I tried to elaborate some entries below, it's just impossible to remain the same person and there is just no way of genuinely sharing feelings all the time when both eventually live through entirely different things. Now, surely some people can empathise better than others, and I guess the first is the type that eventually make it through in LDRs.

* Quarantine literally implies a 40-day isolation period. In Spanish this is easily adapted to imply a 14-day period turning the word 'cuarentena' into 'catorcena'. Or well, okay, maybe not.

I'm going to Taiwan

...I've been telling people for about four months now. Even I started to doubt it was gonna happen and repeatedly blamed myself for not securing other options. Thinking about it though, for moves like these, I think one has to think of time-frames of several months to conclude everything. The whole wait in the end was definitely my bad, cause I only verbally accepted the offer after I had submitted my PhD thesis and was practically, even if not technically, done with my degree.

Perhaps worse than the wait, is the uncertainty: not knowing when things are gonna be finally done with and facing new bureaucratic barriers time and time again. In any case, I'm now quite excited about getting there, even if I have to clear a 14-day mandatory quarantine in an outrageously expensive hotel. I'm looking forward to going full-on with the postdoc and discussing things with people, with some ideas already on randomized benchmarking, unitary designs and some quantum machine learning. I also can't wait to get on a bike again and ride the big hills around Taipei and maybe later in some other exciting spots in Taiwan.

A couple of reads

The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram at Document, by Caroline Busta.

I read this one a while ago but it pop out back in conversation. It's funny how the internet is such a great tool for democratisation, to boost discussion and creativity, but at the same time it can become this omnipresent force that quietly but effectively damps authentic expression, originality and dichotomy. After this then there's the thin line between freedom and transgressing the other, as well as a plethora of other issues arising from such accessibility.

Then,

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think at The Atlantic, by Arthur C. Brooks

This article feels like riding a roller-coaster, but just as it usually happens with roller-coasters, I really enjoyed reading it. Perhaps the most relevant point is an invitation to reflect on how whatever we do professionally identifies us and how success can become an overwhelming and detrimental metric of our worth and well-being. Rather than offering a fatalistic view on the reality of ageing, the article invites to think about adapting and enjoying the different stages of life with the physical and mental capabilities available to us at the time. Similarly, the discussion from the author about Darwin and Bach reminded me of the situation in physics and how my perception about Academic success has changed so much.

Vive L'amour

I used the final day of Tsai Ming-liang's retrospective on Mubi to watch Vive L'Amour (愛情萬歲, Àiqíng wànsuì translated to Long live love).

I confess that before that, I struggled a bit to watch Stray dogs (郊遊, jiāoyóu translated to Excursion), which was a bit too slow for the state I was in; I also find harder to watch films like it in a setting that's not a cinema. I decided to pick a different one and went for Vive L'Amour: while the style was very similar (long shots, silence and not much dialogue) I was much more engaged with it. Given that these two are much more recent than Rebels of the neon God, I reckon this is closer to the defining style of Tsai Ming-liang.

In a nutshell, I'd say the film is about love, sex, loneliness and depression in a contemporary setting (1990's in Taipei). I found it funny, moving, sad, sombre and joyful all at once. It's hard to describe masterpieces like these and make them justice, one can discuss at length and seemingly never conclude; one just has to experience them.

My week's films

I watched First Reformed (2017) by Paul Schrader (starring Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried) on Saturday and it left me thinking about it for the rest of the weekend.

The film slowly burns just to finally explode in the final scene. Ethan Hawke masterfully plays Reverend Ernst Toller, a protestant pastor struggling with several personal issues like the death of his son and alcoholism, his thoughts being captured in a handwritten journal which he plans on keeping for a year and to destroy it after a year. He then meets Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a pregnant attendant to church, who asks for his help in counselling her husband, a troubled man who is not wanting to keep their child. Then many issues start coming into play and we slowly see Toller free-falling, with Mary being perhaps his only source of comfort with whom he develops a strong non-sexual emotional connection.

I found the whole film enjoyable, and despite it being a bit sombre, it has some beautiful scenes (namely the floating one), although there are some cliched depictions and so on (probs would not make happy a fair chunk of religious people). Then I found the final scene absolutely marvellous, I think it is somewhat up to interpretation, but if you understand how troubled the mind of Toller is, you might have a different perspective on it; in brief, I think he does go ahead with the drano, with the last seconds unfolding only in his head, until...

Then, just yesterday, I found out about a streaming of some of Tsai Ming-liang's films on Mubi. Naturally I'm currently interested in finding out more about Taiwanese cinema; I now recognise, for example the names Edward Yang or Hou Hsiao-hsien, also the film A Sun (陽光普照) Chung Mong-hong, streaming on Netflix, is highly recommendable. I first heard about Tsai Ming-liang from this beautiful video on Fandor:

The streaming of the films is part of UNAM's 11th international film festival (FICUNAM) based here in Mexico. Unfortunately, the streaming of Ming-liang's films, specifically, only lasted from the 18th to the 24th of March.

Anyhow, I had the chance to watch Rebels of the neon God, in Chinese "青少年哪吒" (Qīngshàonián Nézhā) literally meaning Teenage Nezha; from Wikipedia:

The Taiwanese title refers to Nezha, a powerful child god in Chinese classical mythology who was born into a human family. Nezha is impulsive and disobedient. He tries to kill his father, but is brought under control when a Taoist immortal (Nezha's spiritual mentor) gives the father a miniature pagoda that enables him to control his rebellious son.

Many things can be said about the film. The only bad thing about it really is that it doesn't seem to be readily available online: films like these are nowadays at least available for rent, but apparently not this one or other Tsai Ming-liang's films. Hopefully during my time in Taiwan I'll be able to find these and other cornerstone Taiwanese films more easily in stores or otherwise.

Canto XXX de El Infierno en La Divina Comedia

Estando otra vez en casa, tengo a mi alcance bastante libros que muchos considerarían básicos pero que yo jamás leí. Entre éstos está La Divina Comedia, de Dante Alighieri.

En particular, me encuentro en el Canto XXX de El Infierno, del cual me ha encantado el final:

Yo estaba escuchándoles atentamente, cuando me dijo mi Maestro: — Sigue, sigue contemplándolos aún, que poco me falta para reírme de ti.

Cuando le oí hablarme con ira, me volví hacia él tan abochornado, que aún conservo vivo el recuerdo en mi memoria: y como quien sueña en su desgracia, que aun soñando desea soñar, y anhela ardientemente que sea sueño lo que ya lo es, así estaba yo, sin poder proferir una palabra, por más que quisiera excusarme; y a pesar de que con el silencio me excusaba, no creía hacerlo así.

— Con menos vergüenza habría bastante para borrar una falta mayor que la tuya —me dijo el Maestro—: consuélate; y si acaso vuelve a suceder que te reúnas con gente entregada a semejantes debates piensa en que estoy siempre a tu lado, porque querer oír eso es querer una bajeza.

Por supuesto se requiere un poco de contexto para entender a qué va esta cita. Como sea, La Divina Comedia es una obra que uno puede gastarse la vida pensando en ella.