RSS AMSU: temperatures 1979-2014 grouped in many ways

Climate apparently jumped to a warmer basin of attraction in 1998, noise ever since

One month ago, I discussed the ranking of the global mean temperature in 2014 according to the UAH, RSS AMSU satellite datasets. The December 2014 figures weren't out yet but it turns out that my system of predictions always works very well and the ranking of the years may be more or less predicted before the last month is known.



RSS AMSU have published their December 2014 values. The global mean temperature anomaly was +0.284 °C, just 0.04 °C warmer than the value in November which increases the annual average estimate just by +0.0035 °C relatively to my previous expectations – a negligible figure. With this tiny correction, 2014 is pretty much tied with 2007 as the 6th-7th warmest year in the RSS AMSU dataset, after 1998, 2010, 2005, 2003, and 2002.

RSS claims that 2014 was a whopping 0.3 °C cooler than 1998. Please laugh out loud when someone will be telling you that it was the warmest year.

Mysterious positivity of the Amplituhedron

Some comments on papers by Susskind; and Arkani-Hamed et al. (twice)

So far, the latest arXiv preprints emerged on December 31st. The paper arXiv:1501.00001 (with the new redundant zero) should be out on Monday.

On the Sylvester day (for Yankees: 1/2 of Europe plus Israel uses this name for New Year's Eve), three hep-th papers were authored or co-authored by very famous physicists. One was by Nima, another one was by Arkani, and the third one was... by Susskind. ;-)

Leonard Susskind wrote an essay about the ER-EPR (worhhole-entanglement) correspondence and especially about the interpretation of the GHZ states and quantum teleportation within the paradigm started by Maldacena and Susskind. It's fun to read Lenny's papers but I found the issues in this new paper sort of obvious, so I don't think that there's something new for me to learn here.

Scott Aaronson and sheer lunacy of U.S. academic feminism

Larry Summers is a 90% feminist. In fact, he was giving a proof of these "credentials" right before his conflicts with that movement began.

During his January 2005 speech about women in STEM fields, he was just talking about his two twin daughters. He was educating them in a "gender neutral" way so he bought them trucks. (Enough for 99% Czechs to consider him a victim of a craze.) One girl placed a smaller truck on top of a bigger truck and told the other one: "Look, the daddy truck is carrying the baby truck." Even for a feminist of Summers' caliber, that may have been enough to learn a potential message. When he offered that summary, a hardcore MIT feminist named Nancy Hopkins immediately left the seminar room and called her equally obnoxious friends in the New York Times and the Boston Globe. She would later explain that she would vomit if she didn't ignite this nationwide "scandal" which was the main reason why I decided to leave the utterly screwed Academic environment.

Leftists love to destroy their less radical fellow leftists. Stalin has murdered tens of millions of leftists (aside from other people). Even the last Czechoslovak communist president, Dr Gustáv Husák, had escaped from a life-in-prison sentence by his comrades in the 1950s. The feminists boast the very same DNA so they are doing the same thing. Prof Emeritus Walter Lewin has been serving female students for decades. The feminists – of both sexes – decided to destroy him after he used a tweet saying "queefing is yours" in a playful conversation that two fans/students started with him. Not really a big deal. If "queefing" had a good Czech translation, it would become another favorite word of the current Czech president whenever he would be talking to annoying and stupid female journalists. ;-) The Prague Lumpencafé would give Zeman a hard time but unlike MIT, they wouldn't be able to fire him. If the PC folks at MIT could rewrite the memories of everyone in the Universe and make them think that Lewin hasn't spent a life as a successful MIT instructor, they would do it, too. In fact, they apparently think that they have actually done that (and made Lewin "not being an emeritus professor")!

Scott Aaronson, an MIT computer scientist, is a self-described 97% feminist. Note that the figure is higher than Summer's value. He doesn't just bombard his daughter(s) with trucks. In his notorious comment #171 under his first article about Lewin (where he supported feminism but also dared to mention that he at least opposed the removal or Lewin's lectures), Aaronson informed us that a decade ago, he was begging his psychiatrist to chemically castrate him (Aaronson) because he decided that with his penis, balls, and hormones, he is a threat to billions of women in the world!

Syriza-led Greece shouldn't get a penny

A financially collapsing Greece has been damaging the world markets throughout 2011 before the country bankrupted in Spring 2012. Center-right Antonis Samaras (New Democracy) became the prime minister in June 2012. Since that moment, Greece was pretty much going in the right direction. It even managed to achieve a modest budget surplus.

I should have written about those relative successes. We should have praised them because this anomalous era of relative sanity may soon be over. A few days ago, the Parliament gave less than 60% of votes to Stavros Dimas, a former EU commissioner and a presidential candidate (I think that the 60% lower limit is too demanding and creates too much instability in the Greek system, but that's just another bad "detail" in Greece). By the rules of the game, this Parliament's "veto" led to the automatic dissolution of the Parliament within 10 days and new elections on January 25th.

The problem is that according to polls, the elections will be won by Syriza led by Alexis Tsipras. If you need to be reminded, Syriza is a mixture of green left, Maoist, Trotskyist, Leninist, Stalinist, left-wing populist, democratic socialist, and other groups. Think of a random stinky piece of left-wing šit and chances are high that this piece will be an important portion of Syriza.

2015: International Year of Light and Soils

Man's evolving understanding of light

Welcome to the year 2015 = MMXV = 13*5*31 (it took me a minute to write the product in this nicely symmetric way). Hours ago, my hometown of Pilsen (along with Mons, Belgium) became the European Capital of Culture. One of the minor advantages is that whatever I will write on this blog in this year will automatically become the official opinion of the European Union.



I could talk for hours about every place shown in this video. For example, around 2:34-2:36, you see the spot where I enjoyed a collision with a big dog in the summer. ;-) Big celebrations of our capital status should begin on January 17th with a mass communist-style rally of 50,000 not only children whose flow through the streets will emulate the 4 rivers whose confluence modern Pilsen was built around in 1295.

The United Nations General Assembly declared the year as the International Year of Soils and the the International Year of Light.

They seem like two differently profound notions: light is the only stream of massless particles we routinely encounter, soil is just another type of mud. But soil is a "major" kind of a solid so we may say that both light and soil were among the ancient "elements".

Czech army physician returns NATO medals

Translation by L.M., original here; RT story

This is an example of gestures that are either weakly or strongly endorsed by roughly 50% of Czechs. I partly agree with the spirit of the letter – long-time TRF readers probably know where I would disagree, too.

Dr Marek Obrtel: open letter to the defense minister



Dear Mr Minister,

due to the reasons I elaborate upon on the attached 3-page letter which is an attachment to this document, I urge you deprive me of the badges of honor from the military operations of the Army of the Czech Republic performed under the NATO umbrella.

I thank you for your understanding and assertively request your endorsement of my application.

Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Marek Obrtel MD
with his own hand

Top Slovak moderator, Czech Globe classmate, and climate hysteria

This blog has been extremely quiet during the (post-)Christmas week. There have been many things to write about but even at those moments when I wasn't otherwise engaged, I decided not to be saving the world all the time. ;-) Whether you are a Christian or not, I hope that you have enjoyed Christmas.

I won't be writing about tons of personal experiences in the recent days, about Neil deGrasse Tyson's idiotic tweets about Christmas or his equally idiotic populist tirades against string theory, papers and news reports nonsensically claiming to "unify" the uncertainty principle with the wave-particle duality (be sure that everything about these basic concepts and nothing else has been understood for almost 90 years), or about 50 different provoking things in the media.



And I will also postpone some interesting results of my quantum gravity research – as well as some fun about linguistics and many other things I wanted to write about. Instead, let me offer you a slightly relaxing but potentially infuriating story. Alexander Ač, a climate alarmist weirdo who sometimes visits our TRF community as well, just wrote his most popular blog post ever. It is his

Open letter to Ms Adéla Banášová (orig. SK)

It has 50,000 views and 200+ comments right now. The microscopic reason is that someone (...) placed the blog post at the main page www.sme.sk of the leading Slovak newspaper. But we may still ask: Why was this topic so attractive?

Ms Adéla Banášová (*1980) is Slovakia's most popular female TV and radio host and moderator – and one could argue that she is actually the most popular female TV host and moderator in Czechia, too. (Check YouTube.) She became particularly well-known because she has hosted the "Czech and Slovak American Idol" along with Mr Leoš Mareš. She boasts not only a larger nose and a degree in culturology but also higher intelligence than Mr Mareš who is funny but sort of childish and they did a good job. And it was surely her, and not him, who added some maturity to the mix. ;-)

Equally importantly for our purposes, she was a high school student of Alexander Ač, our local special Czecho-Slovak climate hysteria weirdo.

Johannes Kepler: an anniversary

Johannes Kepler was born prematurely near Stuttgart on 12/27/1571. His grandfather was a mayor of their town but once Johannes was born, the family's fortunes were already dropping. His father was a mercenary and left the family when Johannes was five. His mother was a healer and a witch which has also led to some legal problems.

Johannes was a brilliant child with early inclinations to astronomy. In Graz (1594-1600), he was defending the Copernican heliocentric system. At that time, there was no clear difference between astronomy and astrology. Therefore, Kepler also invented the ADE classification of planets orbiting the Sun. ;-) This attempt resembled, but was not identical to, Garrett Lisi's hopeless attempt to unify. Kepler also wrote that the Universe had to be stationary.

Only temperatures, not temperature changes, may be dangerous

A Lumo Christmas playlist

Gavin Schmidt wrote a RealClimate.ORG blog post about the difference between the temperatures and temperature anomalies – or temperature changes – and which of them is known, predicted, and important.

Absolute temperatures and relative anomalies

Just to be sure, the temperature anomaly is the difference between the temperature and the "average" temperature recorded for the same place (or region) and the same date or month or season (if applicable). The average is computed (from the data at the same place and the same date[s]) over a period, like 1951-1980 or 1980-1999 or something like that, and this base line is often being changed which makes things confusing.

If the temperature were the changing to the same values every January and every February etc. (at a given location, or globally), the temperature anomalies would be equal to zero.

The global mean temperature is something like 14.5 °C or 15 °C. No one can really determine the value at this amazing, subdegree accuracy. Different methodologies – and indeed, different detailed definitions of the global mean temperature – produce different answers.

Every theory of quantum gravity is a part of string theory: a partial proof

A successful test in \(AdS_3\)

The first hep-th paper today is

String Universality for Permutation Orbifolds

by Alexandre Belin, Christoph A. Keller, and Alexander Maloney who are at McGill and Rutgers University, my graduate Alma Mater (I know A.M. from Harvard). Note that Christopher was terrified by the disagreement between the other two authors when it comes to "-re" or "-er" in their first name, so he erased it from his name altogether. ;-)



Serin Hall, Rutgers University, NJ

We sometimes say that string theory is the only consistent theory of quantum gravity. It's the only game in town. This is an observation mostly based on various types of circumstantial evidence. Whenever you try something that deviates from string/M-theory, you run into inconsistencies. Sometimes you don't run into inconsistencies but something else happens. Many good ideas that were thought to be "competitors" to string theory were shown to be just aspects of some (usually special) solutions to string theory (noncommutative geometry, CFT, matrix models, and even the Hořava-Lifshitz class of theories have been found to be parts of string theory), and so on. And decades of attempts to find a truly inequivalent competing theory have utterly failed. That's not a complete proof of their absence, either, but it is evidence that shouldn't be completely ignored.

But that doesn't mean that the statement that every consistent theory of quantum gravity has to be nothing else than another approach to string/M-theory is just an expression of vague feelings, a guesswork, or a partial wishful thinking. We don't have the "most complete proof" of this assertion yet – this fact may be partly blamed on the absence of the completely universal, most rigorous definition of both "quantum gravity" and "string theory". But there exist partial proofs and this paper is an example.

Did Vladislav Voloshin (UA) shoot down MH17?

A month ago, I mentioned a photograph purportedly showing a Ukrainian SU-27 or Mig-29 that is just shooting down the Malaysian aircraft in Donbas. The picture could have been shown to be fake – too many details were wrong – and some readers helpfully provided us with links to the relevant evidence.

I am hoping that a similar response may emerge now. The new accusations don't come with any high-resolution photograph – it's just an eyewitness – but they are more concrete because they name the boy who is claimed to have shot the airplane by accident.

Komsomolskaya Pravda (in Russian, TV version, an English translation) published the interview with the alleged eyewitness, a former employee of an airbase in Dniepropetrovsk. I am not sure about his or her name – it may be Yuri Shevtsov, the guy who gave this testimony in August, or someone else, like Alexander someone. Most sources say that he is still a "secret witness". Who knows.

2015: arXiv identifiers get a new digit

Paul Ginsparg began to maintain xxx.lanl.gov – the server later renamed as arXiv.org – in Summer 1991. Since that time, the number of papers submitted each month would be growing.



You can see that despite the mild acceleration in recent 5 years, the increase was much closer to a simple linear increse from 0 in Fall 1991 to almost 9,000 in recent months (the latter number may be translated to 400+ papers on an average "live" day). Because 9,000 is rather close to 10,000 which is 10 to the fourth power, you may be worried about the identifiers of the papers.

Since April 2007, the users of the preprint repository were using a system that only allows 10,000 papers a month, a threshold that is likely to be surpassed sometime in 2015 or 2016.

Cutting ties with Klaus: CATO jumps on the totalitarian PC bandwagon

...and the knee-jerk Russophobia...

The Czech media informed us about the article

Vaclav Klaus, Libertarian Hero, Has His Wings Clipped by Cato Institute (The Daily Beast)

by James Kirchick, a Berlin reporter of the Haaretz and a few other left-wing news outlets. The text is dedicated to the divorce between Václav Klaus and the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank. Václav Klaus became a Distinguished Senior Fellow in March 2013 and he was silently "fired" sometime in September 2014, apparently mainly because CATO joined the new wave of the mindless Russophobia that is crippling almost the whole mainstream foreign policy discourse in the U.S. these days – while Klaus knows what he is talking about in this context, too.

In February 2007, after I translated an interview with Klaus about global warming that became the main story of the day at the Drudge Report and was mentioned by Fox News and other sources, our then president invited me to Washington D.C. A group including me, Klaus, and several prominent U.S. climate skeptics had a lunch together. It was actually my first – and (so far?) only – visit to the U.S. capital. I liked it and saw lots of the sightseeings, too.

One of the buildings I visited – because of a talk by Klaus – was the CATO Institute at 1000 Massachusetts Avenue. This is a nice address to remember. You know, in Cambridge and Greater Boston, I would both live and work meters from another Massachusetts Avenue as well so I was distracted by the idea that it's actually the same Mass Ave ;-) – a grand hypothesis that hasn't been "safely" falsified for me yet but feel free to do it LOL.

Discrete spacetimes contradict Unruh effect

Two young Indian men, Golam Mortuza Hossain and Gopal Sardar, wrote a paper about loop quantum gravity and similar "discrete" models of quantum gravity whose mathematical argumentation seems vastly better than that of an average paper about similar subjects:

Absence of Unruh effect in polymer quantization (gr-qc)

Yes, the Unruh effect isn't reproduced by those theories, they say. Backreation sensibly asserted that if the paper is right, it's a way to prove that these theories are dead. Well, it's about the 500th proof that they are wrong, I would say.

These two guys' mathematical and theoretical physical advantage over an average author of "loop quantum gravity" papers seems self-evident. Show me loop quantum gravity papers that actually manipulate with the Mathieu equation, elliptic cosine and sine functions, Riemann zeta function, and even with a simpler mathematical operation in modern physics – the Bogoliubov transformation.

PC revolution, Altair 8800: 40th anniversary

Fourty years and one day ago, the PC revolution started when Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) released its Altair 8800 personal computer.



In 1994, this guy, Bill Gates, said a few words about his and Paul Allen's decision to write BASIC for that machine (which was released in early 1975). Note that BASIC was invented as a popular language at a New Hampshire school in 1964.

I was just one year and two weeks old when the model was introduced. But even for those of you who are older, it must feel like some mysterious pre-history of the PCs because almost no one bought it. It was using the Intel 8080 microprocessor that is, up to relatively minor variations, still around in Windows PCs. That microprocessor was introduced in 1974, two years after Intel's first microprocessor, Intel 8008 (see its restricted instruction set).

Alternative teaching of mathematics: three problems

Mathematics is not just the mechanical elimination of a finite number of answers

Two days ago, I spent hours, literally, by discussions at aktualne.cz about the Hejný alternative method to teach mathematics to the kids.



Off-topic: A group of 100+ engineers is actually building Hyperloop, Elon Musk's mach-one train that gets from San Francisco to L.A. in 30 minutes.

If I try to summarize some key points really concisely (some exchanges helped me to crystallize some of the points): mathematics is not just about the lessons that a human derives from the experience, but about the accumulated knowledge that dozens of generations of mathematicians have extracted from the experience and, even more correctly, from their pure thought. So mathematics can't be left to the rediscovery of each kid.

Now, there are differences between the kids and they will show up. Whether the kids at the top in a given subject – mathematics, in this case – master the subject well is more important than what the others do because those at the top are actually likely to use it. One may reduce the differences by forcing the kids who were not so good to spend much more time. But I actually think it is counterproductive. Kids – and adults – should better focus on things that make them happy and that they are good at. So I think that in a healthy situation, the less talented kids in mathematics will spend less, and not more, time with mathematics than their talented counterparts. Consequently, the gap will be even larger than it would be if everyone spent the same time with everything.