Women are neurotic: research

Almost none of the critics of James Damore's memo has actually read it and virtually all negatively sounding statements that have been made about the memo have been malicious, outright lies mindlessly screamed by fanatical lynch mob. But several people who actually wanted to find something wrong about Damore's text found the following statement to be among the most controversial ones:

Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).

This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

Women are more anxious in average, he dared to point out. Well, everyone who is at least slightly interested in related disciplines of biology and psychology – and even most people who aren't interested but they just observe the people around them – must have known it for many years. Let me mention several papers, popular reviews, and facts.

James Damore deserves $100 million as a compensation from Google

His observations about the stifling PC culture may be necessary for reforms that Google needs to survive

Updates: "$1 million in bonuses" was changed to "$100 million as a compensation" after Damore was "fired" by a Mr Kunda Píča whom I have never heard of; Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.

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Donations up to $60,000 to JD. I haven't verified that website.

Recently, James Damore (here's where I learned his name) has studied towards his PhD in systems biology from Harvard but just like some other young men with numerous talents, this 23- or 28-year-old Gentleman immediately went to Google (in 2013, Damore's team won a computational challenge to evacuate a big city; more awards; he's been at Google since 2013) and became a Level 5 Senior Engineer – a position somewhere in the middle of Google's corporate hierarchy – focusing on the infrastructure of the search engine.

(I decided that a photograph of James isn't needed. Imagine a picture of Mark Zuckerberg's twin brother over here.)

Last week, he wrote an e-mail to some internal list of recipients at Google which was both relevant for the future of the company as well as related to the topic of his PhD program that he had previously undergone from a university that isn't quite unknown, ;-) either to me or to the world.

The full text of his 10-page-long essay, Google's Ideological Echo Chamber, may be found at Gizmodo (along with some less valuable appendices) if you click at the link in this sentence. See the original 10-page Damore's PDF file with charts and references; or a special website of the memo. The stifling atmosphere of political correctness has largely conquered Google, Damore argues, and people who just suggest that they would prefer a more serious discussion about the actual causes of the gender gap in STEM fields are immediately demonized, threatened, and silenced.

Damore, a centrist and a sensibly self-described classical liberal, explained some characteristic features (which may become vices in too high concentrations) of the leftwingers and rightwingers, argued that the left-wing bias at Google has become staggeringly obvious, and this bias is increasingly preventing sensible people from saying self-evident facts such as that women's have a greater focus on people and emotions while men's focus on things and hard reasoning, aside from other biological differences he discussed eloquently.

Vanderbilt: mathematics is sexist

In the 1990s, left-winger Alan Sokal wrote a bogus paper mocking his fellow leftists who were also postmodernists, feminists, or otherwise mentally crippled beyond the usual standards of the Left. Just because Sokal was licking their rectums and amplifying some of the most stupid propositions by these pompous fools, the reviewers of a "prestigious" journal have accepted the paper despite its complete absurdity.

Related to this topic: at least one engineer wrote at least one 10-page essay titled Google's Ideological Echo Chamber arguing that the STEM gender gap is natural. Let's hope that Google won't Bing him. One should be afraid – assorted parasitic neurotic vice-presidential bitches for diversity at Google immediately began to threaten the wise gentleman (and prove his thesis in a clear way). Ranting monkey ran a great story about it.

One of the recurrent themes in his funny paper was the idea that mathematics was sexist and the discipline would look very different if we stopped the discrimination against women etc. Serious papers weren't quite saying these things at that time – yet.



Now, two decades later, papers claiming to be serious are saying the same things as Sokal's hoax from the 1990s. Andrzej pointed out the following Tweet

Mathematics is sexist now. Not even joking. We're all doomed...https://t.co/LHmBoj3XVB l

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) August 6, 2017

which promotes a CampusReform.org article about a remarkable paper Unmasking the Male Superiority Myth... The author, Luis Leyva, is a junior professor at the Vanderbilt Peabrain University.

Gary North, Mojmír Hampl on fatal volatility of cryptocurrencies

...and my thermodynamic metaphors...

Mojmír Hampl is one of the 7 members of the Czech National Bank's board – which determines the main interest rates in Czechia etc. He was the key hawk-turn-dove in 2013 whose vote decided about the interventions against the previously strengthening crown and the alleged deflation threat. And he's arguably the most outspoken pundit among the seven. I've had a lunch with him some years ago.



Parallel Polis, a Bitcoin café in Prague

Days ago, he published his opinion about the Bitcoin:

Don't be afraid of bitcoin

It was published on the Czech National Bank's website – and elsewhere. Others in the board probably agree with him. By the "fear", Hampl means that the cryptocurrencies don't really represent any "competitor" to the fiat currencies. In particular, the Czech crown – the currency only used by 0.15% of the people on Earth – is used in a 6 times larger volume of transactions than the Bitcoin – almost 50% of the cryptocurrencies' capitalization over $100 billion and a global mania.

T2K: a two-sigma evidence supporting CP-violation in neutrino sector

Let me write a short blog post by a linker, not a thinker:

T2K presents hint of CP violation by neutrinos

The strange acronym T2K stands for Tokai to Kamioka. So the T2K experiment is located in Japan but the collaboration is heavily multi-national. It works much like the older K2K, KEK to Kamioka. Indeed, it's no coincidence that Kamioka sounds like Kamiokande. Average Japanese people probably tend to know the former, average physicists tend to know the latter. ;-)



Dear physicists, Kamiokande was named after Kamioka, not vice versa! ;-)

Muon neutrinos are created at the source.

Dark Energy Survey rivals the accuracy of Planck

Yesterday, the Fermilab brought us the press release

Dark Energy Survey reveals most accurate measurement of dark matter structure in the universe

celebrating a new result by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a multinational collaboration studying dark matter and dark energy using a telescope in Chile, at an altitude of 2,200 meters.



DES wants to produce similar results as Planck – the modern sibling of WMAP and COBE, a satellite that studies the cosmic microwave background temperature in various directions very finely – but its method is very different. The DES telescope looks at things in the infrared – but it is looking at "regular things" such as the number of galaxy clusters, weak gravitational lensing, type IA supernovae, and baryon acoustic oscillations.

ČNB finally notices that the Czech economy is overheated

Europe's first rate hike in many years

Since the November 7th, 2013 anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Czech National Bank (ČNB) artificially weakened the Czech currency and kept it weaker than 27 crowns per euro. During the 3+ years up to April 6th, 2017 when the cap was finally abandoned, the Czech National Bank quadrupled its Forex reserves so right now, Czechia's $143 billion of foreign reserves make us the 18th "most reserved" country in the world, almost tied with Italy, and safely beating the likes of the United States of America or Europe (ECB). ;-)



Ms Emmy Destinn née Kittlová (almost like Motlová) on our $90 banknote. She and Dinh Gilly uploaded a nice audio to YouTube in 1914 with the Czech anthem, 4 years before it became the anthem. The lyrics were a bit different.

The CZKexit came too late – but it was because the board members had unwisely extended a commitment back in 2016. On April 6th, there was no doubt that it was needed to remove the weird Chinese-style policy. Since that time, the EURCZK rate went down more or less smoothly from the cap level of 27 to 26 or so, confirming all my qualitative predictions and debunking many analysts' delusions about "a huge volatility with rate jumping between 24 and 30" and similar crackpottery.

Italy seizes the first NGO ship of human smugglers

Czech readers were somewhat pleased by the news that at least some sanity is returning to Italy. A Sicilian prosecutor has ordered to confiscate Iuventa, an NGO ship that has been shown to "cooperate" with the human flesh traffickers.



Iuventa belongs to Jugend Rettet (Young Saviors), a German NGO originally founded by some high school students in 2015. The prosecutor announced he has serious evidence of repeated encounters between Jugend Rettet and the recognized traffickers close to the Libyan border. Well, you may see it – a video of June 18th and June 26th incidents.

Two Czech anti-Daesh veterans sentenced to 6.25 years in a Turkish jail

Turkey is a country in between Europe and the Islamic anticivilization which has been increasingly self-confident, increasingly Islamic, and has done lots of questionable things. Last November, Turkey caught a Czech couple that was fighting against the Islamic State along with the Kurds in Rojava, i.e. the Northern Syrian Kurdistan.



Amusingly relaxed and outspoken Ms Všelichová talks since 1:44. "If you wanna help," the Kurds told her, "here you have some clothes, here you have a Kalashnikov, and you can go with us" which is how she got to the battlefront.

Some other folks were released but Ms Markéta Všelichová (codename Zelane Botan) and Mr Miroslav Farkas (codename Sniper Serxwebun Botan 007) weren't too lucky. Their punishment could have been even more severe and lots of people were predicting it. However, we could learn today that they should go to prison for 6 years and 3 months. The most serious formal charge is their membership in YPG, the Kurdish People's Protection Units, which are classified as a "terrorist organization" by Turkey.

Bitcoin split shows the stupidity of the concept of cryptocurrencies

...and why the central, transparent control over a currency is a key advantage, not a vice...

Today, the Bitcoin (BTC) was split into two new cryptocurrencies. From now on, you may convert your cash to Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash (click and try to distinguish their symbols LOL). For quite some time, people were using the acronym BCC for Bitcoin cash before most began to appreciate that BCC was already taken by BitConnect, the 15th largest cryptocurrency by capitalization (which lost 20% today), so BCH began to spontaneously propagate instead – the new acronym originated after the currency was created! The very naming of the old and new currency is a complete mess: a minor example of a situation in which some "adults in the room" would be helpful.

If you held 1 BTC at a given moment, you were eligible to get one new BTC and one new BCH. In principle, the rule "when" you should hold the old BTC should be absolutely and universally specified – because you surely want to know whether you're buying or selling an "asset" that is eligible for this BCH "bonus" – which is worth some 10-20 percent of the old BTC. It's exactly analogous to the splitting of a stock to two, or the payment of the dividend. The price of the "main" stock is expected to decrease exactly by the value of the smaller stock or by the dividend at the very last moment when you still have the right to get the "bonus" – the new stock or the dividend.

But the people trading this stuff don't care about details such as 10% of their wealth.

Mapy.cz, best online/offline map app+server

LIGO-VIRGO: The European 3/4-size, LIGO-like detector, VIRGO, has finally joined its two larger American siblings and they collect the data together.

Seznam.cz was and probably still is Czechia's most visited web page – and the company behind it, a formidable, locally stronger competitor of Google's.

I am proud to have spent an hour chatting to Ivo Lukačovič, its founder and owner, in the early 1990s. We participated at the Liane BBS Session – a real-world gathering of folks who would otherwise only chat through the telnet-based Bulletin Board Service. We were talking shortly before he founded the company, during our walk to the summit of Ještěd, a Northern Bohemian hill (Sudetenland) with a famous hyperboloid structure at the top.

"Seznam" means a "list" or a "directory" and the company began as a Yahoo-style "list of all Czech websites". You can imagine that this approach to the Internet has been somewhat obsolete for quite some time. So Seznam.cz gradually embraced a full search engine and – usually with some delay – most of the other services that non-Czechs mostly associate with Google. The map server and application, Mapy.cz ("mapy" is "maps", the plural from "mapa" i.e. "a map"), is one of the most successful projects of this big Czech company.

I recommend you to

try Mapy.cz website, download Android app, iOS app, WM app.

This blog post is being written right now because the Android map was just upgraded to version 5.0 which contains offline maps of the whole world. That new version will come to iOS soon, too.

For example, after you tap the three-dots (other commands) and "offline mapy" (the web exists in Czech and English, the apps only in Czech so far, as far as I know), you may download the whole U.S. to your Android phone – it is some 22 gigabytes – or you may download each of the 142 U.S. maps separately (states but also various districts, groups islands etc.). In all these applications, you will face the language barrier. The first thing the American readers should know is that "Spojené státy americké" is the phrase for "The United States of America". The U.K. starts with "Spojené", too. But you will see flags and it's not hard to use the functions even if you don't understand the Czech.

Aspects of 755 Americans expelled from Russia

Putin responded to the new U.S. sanctions by a move that is the mirror image of the previous, December 2016 act by the U.S. – which was still done under the Obama administration – to expel 35 Russians from the U.S. What is the mirror of expelling 35 Russians from the U.S.? Yes, it is the expulsion of 755 Americans from Russia.

The reason why it's the mirror image is that after that move, the number of citizens employed by the State Department or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to work in the other country will be 455 in both cases which is "fair". What does statistical physics say about the fairness? Assuming the same "chemical potential", the number of Russians who drift to the U.S. should be approximately equal to the number of Americans who drift to Russia, regardless of the size of the two countries.

Nice. The large number has shocked many. It's the largest number of diplomatic employees that have been ejected from another country – since a similar expulsion of the U.S. diplomats from the newly Bolshevik Russia exactly 100 years ago, in 1917.

If you read the American reactions, you will see that many of them are confused about the following point: Oops, what I find most shocking isn't that 755 State Department employees are expelled but the fact that there were 755 employees in Russia to start with!

Uro, the ultimate virtual cryptocurrency

Paris Agreement: first, off-topic. Look at the map of countries that have ratified. Czechia and Switzerland are the only two advanced European countries that have still avoided ratification – and Czechia is expected to surrender in September because most of our lawmakers are either corrupt or idiots, too. Only two small post-Yugoslav countries, Turkey, and Russia may also be counted as additional cautious European countries here.

Every cryptocurrency fan will tell you that the blockchain is a technology that is priceless – it is worth quadrillions or infinitely many dollars. Unless you want to be a dinosaur, you should convert all your assets to the Bitcoins, Ethereums, and similar coins.



But some of these fans still realize that there have been problems with the existing cryptocurrencies. The Bitcoin's ledger, tens of gigabytes, is too long and some people disagreed with each other so it's likely that the currency will split into two, Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash, on August 1st. You may keep your Bitcoins happily and wait to see whether they become the more valuable among the two or the worthless one. Good luck! A similar, "real" test will arrive on November.

Also, some cryptocurrency fans are confused by the graphics cards and electricity that are being spent to mine the new currency. Isn't it useless waste of GPUs and electricity, some of the most heretical users of the Bitcoin ask? The growth of the producer of chips AMD already depends on the sales of graphics cards to the miners.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am just introducing the new truly virtual cryptocurrency, one Uro, which fixes all the problems of the old cryptocurrencies. The Reference Frame is also the first blog that accepts payments for unlimited reading in the new virtual cryptocurrency.

Assuming the present trend, Russia will remove the GPS, U.S. satellites by 2020

John McCain was a top hateful scumbag who led the U.S. lawmakers to approve a new wave of broad and idiotic sanctions against Russia. They have absolutely no justification, they will damage the relationships in the world, and they will damage the European companies as well. That's why the Austrian chancellor and the German minister and SPD boss angrily responded and started to consider European countries' sanctions against the U.S. Great. The American politicians are absolutely inconsiderate. They don't give a damn when they hurt third parties equally if they decided that the primary goal is to hurt someone, in this case Russia.

Russia was placed on equal footing with Iran and North Korea – the latter country just fired an intercontinental (!) ballistic missile to the sea off Japan. Days ago, the U.S. stole some real estate that Russians bought for $1.2 million 40 years ago. Lots of self-evident crime is taking place overtly, a daylight robbery. Also, a lawmaker paid millions of dollars believes that Putin keeps on invading Korea. You get in trouble in the U.S. when you just point out that she is a stupid ape because she's the true representative of the American nations right now.

One reason why the brain-dead far left jerk Mr John McCain (the brain cancer has utterly failed to kill him so far) keeps on being reelected in the U.S. is the Americans' frantic religious and utterly irrational cult worshiping their "troops" – which is not really one of the most commendable jobs. This old and counterproductive man still paints himself as a soldier and the stupid Americans are buying it. It's apparently enough for many of them. But it's not just John McCain. Only 2+3 U.S. lawmakers voted against the sanctions. The degree of the lawmakers' group think is stunning. Even if Donald Trump vetoed the bill, the lawmakers will have the much higher majority that is enough to overrule Trump's veto. And don't forget that Trump was promising to veto the sanctions in order to propose even tougher ones. He probably thinks it's a good idea to join the contest looking for the most fanatical lunatic.

Interventions against the U.S. elections were quoted as a reason for the sanctions. There is zero evidence supporting any of these claims. But even if Russia did influence the U.S. elections – what staggeringly double standards the U.S. would display. After the war, the U.S. intervened in 81 elections held in 47 countries of the world. Those efforts included several brutal interventions into the Ukrainian politics which consumed billions of American taxpayers' dollars and all of them were directed against Russia. So either it's nonsense that such interventions are utterly criminal, or the U.S. is the leading criminal regime in the world, isn't it?

Cryptocurrencies, a speculative mania

Those who have invested a lot of money into the Bitcoin or the Ethereum, a new competitor, at least half a year ago have become wealthy. The Bitcoin's price doubled in less than a year. It added an order of magnitude in some 5 years and several orders of magnitude in just slighter longer intervals. The Ethereum's price added some two orders of magnitude in a year.



The Bitcoin price juxtaposed with the usual graph of stages of a bubble.

The current prices of the Bitcoin and the Ethereum are some $2,700 and $200, respectively. There will be a 5% decrease of ETH to $190 today and another 5% decrease to $180 on Saturday: The Ethereum dropped by more than 50% from a peak in June (when Peter F. was encouraging me to buy LOL), the Bitcoin is close to its peak around $3,000. Should you buy these things?

Given the fact that their value may drop 50% in weeks – and I think that it can also easily fall by 99% in weeks – you should only reserve the money for similar cryptocurrencies that you don't need at all, that you may afford to completely sacrifice.