Five announcements

1. For the next two weeks, I’m in Berkeley for the Simons program “Challenges in Quantum Computation” (awesome program, by the way).  If you’re in the Bay Area and wanted to meet, feel free to shoot me an email (easiest for me if you come to Berkeley, though I do have a couple planned trips to SF).  If enough people wanted, we could even do a first-ever dedicated Shtetl-Optimized meetup.
2. More broadly: I’m finally finished my yearlong sabbatical in Israel.  At some point I’ll do a post with my reflections on the experience.  I’ll now be traveling around North America all summer, then returning to UT Austin in the fall.
3. Longtime friend-of-the-blog Boaz Barak, from a university in Cambridge, MA known as Harvard, asks me to invite readers to check out his new free draft textbook Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science, and to post comments about “typos, bugs, confusing explanations and such” in the book’s GitHub repository.  It looks great!
4. This is already almost a month old, but if you enjoy the quantum computing content on this blog and wish to see related content from our carefully selected partners, check out John Preskill’s Y Combinator interview.
5. Here’s the text of Senator Kamala Harris’s bill, currently working its way through the Senate, to create a US Quantum Computing Research Consortium.  Apparently there’s now also a second, competing quantum computing bill (!)—has anyone seen the text of that one?

Update (June 16): Even though I said there wouldn’t be a meetup, enough people eventually emailed wanting to have coffee that we did do the first-ever dedicated Shtetl-Optimized meetup after all—appropriately, given the title of the blog, at Saul’s Delicatessen in Berkeley. It was awesome. I met people working on fascinating and important things, from cheap nuclear energy to data analytics for downballot Democrats, and who I felt very proud to count as readers. Thanks so much to everyone who came; we’ll have to do another one sometime!