Sean Carroll, money, and science

Off-topic rumor via @thphysnews at Twitter: In Moriond, both ATLAS and CMS will claim a 3-sigma Higgs signal in a new, 2-photon and 2-jet channel...

Sean Carroll offers his "wisdom" on the "anti-scientific movement". We are told that people always liked the anti-intellectual populism (which I could confirm to a large extent) but something else is going on now: corporations fight against science because capitalism is evil.

Wow.

He has three proofs that corporations are the problem: an interview with an annoyed left-wing female biologist, the $10,000 award that a think tank offered for a good published climate article a few years ago, and a woman fighting against corporations' freedom of speech.

Holy cow, the hypocrisy behind Sean Carroll's choice of arguments and data is just breathtaking. You know, during communism, we would see lots of people with a similar style and low level of morality on a daily basis – let me mention Mr Vasil Mohorita, a top slick Czechoslovak Komsomol apparatchik (he's been washing dishes in a London restaurant for years) - but they have never quite had the degree of chutzpah that Sean Carroll embodies.

EU airline carbon tax: countries rally

EU bureaucrats who are totally detached from the reality have invented an insane carbon trading scheme, the ETS, and they attempted to incorporate the global airline industry into this scheme. Every flight arriving to a EU airport has to pay for CO2 emitted on every mile, whether or not it was above the EU territory.

It is not clear whether someone has already paid this ransom but it has been a law since January 2012.

The BBC reports that Russia wants to become a major player in the anti-EU-loons "coalition of the unwilling", as they cleverly call it. That's why representatives of Russia, America, China, India, and 22 other countries gathered in Moscow to discuss what to do with the European thugs.

CDF at 10/fb sees nothing in diphoton Higgs decays

As I told you on Saturday morning, the CDF Collaboration at the defunct Tevatron collider was going to publish a result on the Higgs physics that is based on 10 inverse femtobarns of their data. Here is the paper:

Search for a Standard Model Higgs Boson Decaying Into Photons at CDF Using 10.0 fb⁻¹ of Data

The Standard Model expectation was a 3-sigma excess near 125 GeV. At least that's what the CDF spokesman Rob Roser has said. Important addition, thanks to commenters: the 3-sigma excess should only occur in a combination of other channels, not in the diphoton channel whose sensitivity is weak at the Tavatron.

Because the LHC indicates an excess of the diphoton events, we could still have been seeing a detectable signal at the Tevatron. Instead...

Peter Gleick: AGW warrior who stole identity

Peter Gleick, a self-described co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California, is a hardcore climate fearmonger.

This blog has emphasized for years that he is an example of the Nazi-driven jerks without a glimpse of morality for whom the ends – the destruction of the human civilization in a foreseeable future – always justify the means – namely the destruction of the human civilization and people today. For years, some people could have doubted the accuracy of this description. It's no longer the case.

He has confessed that he has obtained the internal Heartland documents by a trick known as an identity theft. Huffington Post and Andrew Revkin's blog posted Gleick's confession:

The Origin of the Heartland Documents

...there has been extensive speculation about the origin of the documents and intense discussion about what they reveal...

...At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail...

...In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name...

...Now I confess that I, the chairman of the AGU ethics task force, am a hardcore criminal and a stinky scumbag who should be educated by an electric chair, much like all my fellow warriors against the man-made climate change...

Especially the last paragraph is very accurate which is the reason that it's the only one that Gleick failed to have written. ;-) Well, he's still confessed he's guilty of wire fraud which has been a federal crime in the U.S. since 1872 and carries a sentence of 10 years. Enjoy your stay, Peter.

Unfortunately for Gleick, his identity theft has led to no other results except for an entry in his thickening criminal record. All those documents show that the Heartland Institute only does things that every think tank on the science-policy interface should be doing, with the professionalism we would like to expect.

QC UCSB expert: quantum computing may be 5 years away

Vancouver is hosting the annual meeting of the AAAS, an organization of left-wing scientists whose aim is to promote and politically abuse science. AAAS has also played quite some role in the promotion of the global warming hoax.



Despite the annoying political background of this body, there are some interesting talks. Vancouver Sun writes about a few talks and discussions on quantum computation:

Quantum computing could be five years away, expert suggests

The folks working on quantum computers are still semi-dismissing the D-Wave computer as "something in between" a quantum computer and a classical one. John Preskill of Caltech explained to the journalist that the realization of the full-fledged quantum computers will depend on the taming of the dragon of decoherence.

The guy who offers the bold 5-year timeframe is Dr Martinis of Santa Barbara. Quantum computing may actually be one of the "crisis scenarios" that politicians should think of. Why?

A black hole story of a YouTube millionaire

The silly video above is the first YouTube video posted by your humble correspondent that has surpassed 1 million views. I have no idea why. I don't know where the people come from.

The video was created by NASA. The animation is an artist's creation, based on an actual picture of the black hole taken from a telescope. The sound is based on real information – X-rays coming from the vicinity of the event horizon, transformed to a low-frequency sound.

The black hole is one from GRS 1915+105, an X-ray binary star composed of a star and a black hole. The black hole in the system is the largest stellar black hole we know in the Milky Way.

It is rotating 1,150 times a second, about 10 times faster than the hard disk in your PC. In fact, it is a nearly extremal Kerr black hole (maximally quickly rotating as allowed by the given mass) which is why its entropy may also be calculated by stringy methods, as I mentioned in 2008 etc.

Tevatron: CDF may reveal 3-sigma 125 GeV Higgs bump

Or its absence

See an update: CDF sees nothing in the diphoton channel

Almost half a year after its demise, the Tevatron still seems to be intellectually alive. The CDF Collaboration plans to publish several papers.

One of them is a new high precision measurement of the W-boson and top-quark masses. Another one might be a 3-sigma evidence supporting a Higgs boson near 125 GeV, as seen by the LHC:

AAAS press release, Cosmic Log at MSNBC, SciAm blogs, Discovery News, Macleans, Vancouver Sun blogs

3 sigma is the predicted strength of the signal of the Standard Model Higgs whose mass is 125 GeV, as applied to the recorded CDF collisions.

America's 19 most charitable corporations

As a part of the "DenierGate", green activists at Think Progress have created a list of 19 most charitable corporations in America (using the Heartland Institute documents). These great companies have donated several pennies and – in some cases even several dollars – to the Heartland Institute.

A fraction of a penny if not whole pennies out of these amounts could have been used to support research and presentations by the folks who actually understand the climate. And that's the huge "DenierGate" scandal, the recipient of $60 billion in climate alarmist grants rightfully tell us.

TRF readers may choose to "fall in love" with some of the companies. The list is the following.

Google Earth: could not write myplaces.kml

Tons of computer users have experienced the same problem as I did. They installed Google Earth, created lots of bookmarks for places before they exited Google Earth and got the messages that the myplaces.kml file could not be written down; writing to myplaces.kml.tmp instead.

I haven't found a functional fix anywhere on the Internet but it's so simple.

When the captain (pilot) passes away

Commercial aircrafts are usually piloted by two men and it is so for a good reason.

On Wednesday, captain Mr Jaroslav Váňa (58), a great and beloved pilot and a lover of his old Škoda 120 car, almost completed his routine flight from Warsaw to Prague flawlessly. However, when he began to land, he made a mistake that a pilot shouldn't do more than once in his life (except if he is Hindu): he died.



What I find impressive – and it is not the first time – is the discipline and cold attitude that the other pilot obeys.

Heartland Institute and skepticism: is that a scandal?

Some people have obtained several documents from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian/conservative U.S. think tank. These documents show that the folks in the Heartland Institute are climate skeptics who are working to help other climate skeptics, especially among the scientists.

Many alarmist websites claim that it is a scandal. See hundreds of articles available via Google News.

I find it amusing. The Heartland Institute has organized several conferences of climate skeptics and everyone who observes the debate at least at a superficial level must know that the folks in the think tank are skeptics and they have some – modest – amount of money to be used.

The only detailed information that went beyond my – and public – knowledge was the insight that a single generous and wealthy anonymous donor contributed $8.6 million to the Heartland's climate causes (well, at least I guess that the person had to be a bit wealth to give a gift of this magnitude). If she or he happens to be reading these lines, she or he may notice that a piglet to donate via PayPal is at the bottom, so if she or he didn't care that pure science will be strengthened by those $100 or so, wherever it leads, it could turn out to be a more focused investment than those $8.6 million to the Heartland!

Several skeptical weblogs discuss the amusing "skeptics' climategate" here:

Dr Roy Spencer, Australian Climate Madness, Climate Resistance

Some of them discuss the amusing transformation of Andy Revkin who used to deplore the evil criminals who have hacked the University of East Anglia e-mails – but now celebrates those who have obtained some internal Heartland documents. Do you think that you're being ethical or consistent, Andy?

Of course, the Heartland folks may be "homo politicus" who are more likely to reach certain conclusions about this politically polarizing issue. But the number of such politically motivated people is much higher on the alarmism side of the aisle. It's kind of amusing to ask the question: Who is the "true counterpart" of the Heartland Institute on the alarmist side? Is it Gore's Coalition or the World Wildlife Fund? Well, I think that a much more accurate counterpart of the Heartland Institute on the "other side of the political spectrum" is the IPCC.

CMS hangout

The CMS Collaboration organized its first hangout via Google+:



The selection of beverages and babes wasn't too wide. Instead, the event was a video conferencing session with a physicist in the CMS cavern, 110 meters beneath the ground, and laymen on the other side of the cable.

I find such exchanges frustrating.

Some alarmists are waiting for skeptics to die off

Apologies for the severely lowered frequency of blogging. I've been busy with many things including my new notebook (it's amazingly fast) I bought after a decade as well as a new stage of the translation of Brian Greene's latest book.

Willie Soon has pointed out a new conflict in between two groups of climate change alarmists. What do they disagree about?

One group led by David Roberts of Grist argues that the alarmists should wait for all the climate skeptics to die off; another group, represented by Crikey, claims that the alarmists are not waiting for skeptics to die off even though they would be happy if this dream came true:

‘Cohort replacement’: Climate deniers won’t change, but they will die (Grist)

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Death isn’t an option: climate change activists aren’t waiting for deniers to die (Crikey)

You may react to these texts in various ways. You may be shocked or scared. Or you don't have to be surprised at all: we may have already heard everything. Most reasonably, you should realize that the folks such as David Roberts are just unhinged impotent ideologues whose words mean absolutely nothing – and you should be as amused as your humble correspondent.

Cold fusion colloquium at CERN

On Thursday, March 22nd, the CERN Colloquium between 4:30 pm and 5:30 pm will be dedicated to a very, very unusual topic: cold fusion. The title is

Overview of Theoretical and Experimental Progress in Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR): click for description

and the talk will be presented by two folks I've never heard about but they're probably focusing on cold fusion, Francesco Celani and Yogendra Srivastava. This will surely be an event that may elevate the blood pressure of the people in the audience and may be very attractive. And I think it's good that organizers – Antoniadis and Benedetti – have the right to occasionally choose speakers who stand beyond the boundaries of proper science, as understood by most of the active physicists in conventional particle physics.



Still, I think it is unfortunate that invalid claims are allowed to penetrate into official CERN's documents. What do I mean?