Gore's guru, Dr. Roger Revelle, disagreed with alarmism

The Financial Post, a Canadian newspaper, shows much more evidence that Al Gore's mentor, Dr. Roger Revelle, thought that the significance of the greenhouse effect was unproven and existing knowledge didn't justify any "action".



The evidence includes not only his widely discussed paper with Singer and Starr but also earlier letter to lawmakers and others.

Unfortunately, his student was a pretty lousy student. Even more unfortunately, lousy students are those who have much influence in this sometimes lousy world.

Meanwhile, another student who is a staunch AGW believer and became an official member of "Al Gore's cavalry", which is the official name of the greenshirts, is surprised that her classmates think that she's nuts. Most of her generation doesn't find global warming that terrifying, she says. Thanks God.

Similar nutcases as Claire who have made it into the European Parliament want to outlaw burping, so far only for cows. Poor cows. For 50 million years, they thought that they were free to burp. Suddenly, everything can change. ;-) According to the U.N., farm animals create 18% of the greenhouse effect, more than 14% created by transportation. And because the greenhouse effect became politically incorrect, poor cows must change their diet and recycle their manure.

There is only one thing we can say about this lunacy: "Boo!"

The New York Times asks:

• Carbon-neutral is hip but is it green?

and explains that the environmentalist gestures have no positive effect on the environment. They quote the president of an environment grant-making group that the whole indulgence game needs a new Martin Luther.

Well, I am afraid that it probably needs a new Winston Churchill instead - but even Luther would be progress. It is somewhat but not quite unexpected to find relief in the New York Times at the same time when we can't rely on sanity of the White House and many companies in these issues anymore.

In the Financial Times, Lawrence Summers correctly argues that the carbon policies won't lead to any good results if they don't include the developing world where most of the growth will occur. However, the hard-to-swallow conclusion is that the developing world should really be choked, and most of the article is dedicated to technicalities how to choke it. As I see it, the text is written with the assumption that the global warming believers own the world and the only question for them is how to figure out the details of the policies to control everyone on this world and everyone's carbon cycles.

I just can't believe that some of the analogous attitudes were still insufficiently left-wing for many people at Harvard. I consider these particular comments extremely left-wing. The Western politicians or professors don't own the world or the developing countries and don't have any right to dictate someone how much carbon dioxide he should be emitting. They wouldn't have this right even if their theories looked convincing - and they don't.

Well, I happen to think that if someone really plans to do these nasty things to the third world - things based on the assumption that the absurd "fight against climate change" is as important as their future -, they will eventually understand what is the goal and they may try to protect themselves, and guess whether I would be too sad if they assassinated a couple of promoters of the carbon regulation who want to prevent them from developing.

And if I am gonna make any medium-term prediction, I don't believe that China and India will accept any significant mandatory cuts of CO2 emissions. China is already becoming the leading country to oppose this lunacy.

Update, May 1st:

My prediction about China turned out to be precious. The position of the country that will become the #1 CO2 emitter this year has intensified.

Reuters reported that according to the Global Times - daily that, because of idiosyncratic Chinese societal arrangements, represents the opinion of 1.2 billion people - Western politicians are using climate terrorism to put the Chinese growth at risk, and China will oppose it.

Of course that any ban or restriction will just move the corresponding industry to China that will benefit. I wonder whether algores want to do something about it. Do they want to threaten China with nukes, to accept their megalomanic Kyoto-like plans? China has nukes, too. Moreover, China has a fifth column in the West. I dislike communists but if this clash became serious, I would, for example, instantly promote the pro-market Chinese communists to the status of fellow fighters for freedom! ;-)

Algores' insane plans to control the carbon cycle in the whole world will surely lead to some escalation of tension and emotions and these algores may soon find themselves in the same situation as the German chancellor in the late 1930s. Let's hope that fewer human lives will be wasted before they're stopped than what happened 65 years ago.

Resolving the Big Bang

Sean Carroll wrote a bizarre essay arguing against the cosmological principle and against many sane ideas we have about the beginning of the Universe, while trying to oversell many less sane ideas. Because I think that many comments about these issues are based on basic and widespread misunderstandings, let me try to re-analyze these questions.

Cosmological principle

The cosmological principle says that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic at large distance scales. Of course, this principle isn't a religious dogma we received from the heavens. It's an assumption about the Cosmos. Do we know it's true? Well, even though it can't be obvious a priori, the answer is Yes. Observations show that the visible Universe is homogeneous and isotropic at distances longer than 300 megaparsecs or so.

Does it mean that the Universe has satisfied the cosmological principle in the past? Once again, the answer is not obvious but it is Yes. Why? Well, it's because the inhomogeneities increase with time. In the past, they were smaller. This statement may be supported by particular calculations as well as observations. For example, the cosmic microwave background that was created 300,000 years after the Big Bang is much more uniform than the distribution of galaxies in the present Universe.

Can we extrapolate this statement to the very beginning? Well, we can extrapolate it to an arbitrary moment in the past in which classical general relativity coupled to other objects was a good zeroth approximation of reality. This certainly includes later stages of the inflationary era. In fact, during inflation, the Universe was as homogeneous as you can get because it was essentially empty. Inflation has the remarkable ability to turn the rules of the game upside down. Inflation makes the Universe more uniform. Do we know this is the case? Well, we know it theoretically and obviously, it is not easy to test it by direct experiments. But as long as we agree about the definition of the word "inflation", we should agree that it tends to make the space empty.

The same conclusion also implies that the Universe could have been very inhomogeneous and complicated before the inflation and it wouldn't destroy its future. But was it? The second law of thermodynamics makes entropy increase with time. At the beginning, the entropy of the Universe had to be much lower than it is today. Although we can't construct a rigorous proof, the extremely small Universe should simply be describable by a small number of degrees of freedom. As long as this Universe has a geometric description, they can be connected with overall uniform features of space or the first few spherical harmonics. There is simply not enough room for more information. The low amount of information is thus either equivalent to a largely uniform Universe, or to a Universe described non-geometrically.

Causality, before, and outside

In the second paragraph, Sean claims that it is pure moonshine to say that there was nothing before the Big Bang and nothing outside the Universe or to say that the distant points are behind each other's horizons. Well, I don't see any moonshine here. Comments about moonshine are pure, uniform fog. Because different questions often have different answers, a rational thinker must avoid general clichés about moonshine and, unlike Sean, he must answer these questions separately.

As long as we accept the picture of the Universe that started from a tiny size (and I will discuss other pictures below), there was nothing before the Big Bang. The spacetime geometry simply doesn't allow us to extrapolate before the first moment. Asking what was before the Big Bang is equivalent to asking what is closer to the center of Earth than the center of Earth. Well, the answer is nothing. There is nothing paradoxical about this answer even though many people, especially laymen, would like to argue that there is a paradox here.

Was there something outside the Universe? Well, it depends on your definition of the Universe. If the Universe means everything there is, which is my preferred definition, there can't be anything outside the Universe, by definition. We often use the description of a curved Universe in which a membrane is embedded in a higher-dimensional space. But when this trick is meant to be just a pedagogical tool to teach conventional 4D general relativity, it is important to realize that the space "outside" the membrane is just a misleading relic of the analogy, not a true property of our spacetime.

If you use the word Universe to define just a brane or similar object embedded in a higher-dimensional space or its generalizations, then there can be things outside your Universe. But whether these things are allowed (compatible with known facts) is a question that can be studied scientifically - by theory and, speculatively, also by experiments. Again, it is certainly not moonshine.

Are different, distant points behind each other's horizons? Well, if you truncate the Universe at age of 1 minute or any other moment that is still described by the Big Bang cosmology, the answer is definitely Yes. Although the answer is a result of a calculation, this part of the Big Bang cosmology has been verified experimentally, too. On the other hand, the uniform cosmic microwave temperature indicates that different points of our Universe had to be in causal contact i.e. their past light cones should overlap, after all. Inflation is the most natural framework that allows such a causal contact and/or thermal exchange. As long as causal spacetime geometry continues to hold, at least approximately, something like inflation is in fact necessary.

Alternatively, the very childhood of the Universe could be described by a set of non-geometric ideas that don't care about causality and locality.

Adding pre-history

In the scientific, minimalist picture, the Universe started as a small seed that was itself expanded by inflation. Before the inflation, the only thing we can find is the creation from "nothing". Such a creation, if it follows some laws, almost certainly follows laws based on the ideas of Hartle and Hawking or their generalizations. It is likely that the full laws of quantum gravity, i.e. string theory with all of its strings, branes, extra dimensions, dynamical dimensions, topology change, microscopic black holes, non-commutative geometry, and other concepts, must be taken into account to derive something solid about the pre-inflationary Universe.

I think that completely different, additional eras of the life of the Universe in which it was large are extremely unlikely fantasies. They are not needed to explain anything in the observed data, most of them are in a subtle tension with the second law of thermodynamics, and all of them fail to solve the question of the initial conditions because they just move the enigma further into the past. This black list includes entries such as

• big bounce: a contraction preceded our expansion in a symmetric fashion
• pre-Big-Bang cosmology: there was a large, cold, flat Universe that shrank in order to start to expand again
• cyclic or ekypyrotic Universe: the number of contraction-expansion cycles was in fact extremely large
• and, to a large extent, eternal inflation: our Universe was created as a bubble in a much larger multiverse and we should track its ancestry for many generations and study the existence of completely different Universes who were grandfathers of ours

Unlike ordinary inflation, these theories don't solve any problems of the well-established framework of the Big Bang cosmology. They're not theories that are meant to explain data or problems with previous theories: they're just meant to add something new that is not needed and something that is not mathematically robust. I don't like this kind of theories.

Also, neither of them can be shown to be inevitable by solid calculations. There are so many of them exactly because neither of them is well motivated. It is virtually guaranteed that we won't have any experimental evidence for any of these scenarios in the next few millenia. Will we ever have any theoretical evidence for them? I don't think so.

But even if we will, the derivation of one of these scenarios from a solid underlying theory - probably string theory - will be much more important than the random guess that has predicted its validity. If someone proved the validity of one of these theories kind of rigorously tomorrow, I would still think that it would have been a complete coincidence that someone else has guessed the answer in advance.

Note that I listed four examples. The average probability of one of them to be right is at most 25%. Be sure that the actual probability is way smaller, with the exception of the eternal inflation. I assign this theory a probability of 10%, somewhat less than 20% I gave to the statement that the anthropic explanation will remain the only explanation of the smallness of the cosmological constant.

Imagine that you want to describe your origin. You will end up with the egg. Would you think that the egg was created by shrinking an elephant, or infinitely many times oscillating donkey? Maybe you would but you would be wrong. The egg was never large. The only other interesting events in the past are connected with your parents - your ancestors are analogous to eternal inflation. But operationally speaking, starting with the fertilized egg and continuing with the conventional evolution explains everything about physics of yourself. ;-)

To summarize: Occam's razor was exactly designed to remove speculations of these kinds. We shouldn't be inventing new structures that are not needed for an explanation of any data and that are not needed to explain any theoretical discrepancy.

Dirty games with the arrow of time

Sean also discusses some theories where the arrow of time is spontaneously reverted. I think that these speculations are mad, stupid, and I won't honor them with too a long response except for saying that a fixed arrow of time is an inevitable component of any picture of reality based on special relativity that is compatible with any semi-realistic macroscopic physics. The arrow can't be reverted, and the idea that it can be suddenly reverted is not useful to explain anything about the Universe. The likelihood that the arrow of time gets flipped is much lower than the probability that Jesus Christ is born from a virgin, and if Sean thinks otherwise, he only reveals his deep exo-religious bias.

Sean argues that the "right" expectation would be that the entropy should be increasing into the past. Obviously, it doesn't. In the whole Universe, the macroscopic entropy was always increasing in the same direction as it is today, namely from the past to the future. Isn't it enough to show that Sean's speculations that it should have been the other way around are just wrong? They are circularly based on the wrong conclusion he wants to derive, namely that the entropy of the Big Bang should be "naturally" high.

Of course that we know that it is bogus. There exists no rational method based on science and verified theories and/or principles that would imply that the entropy should be higher in the past. The entropy of the young Universe is low and there is nothing wrong whatsoever with this picture.

Any argument meant to show that something is wrong here is an artifact of sloppy and dogmatic thinking, thinking denying the known basic fact that the initial conditions are defined in the past and what evolves out of them is the future - never the other way around.

Loop quantum cosmology

In Sean's mishmash or random ideas, he seems to put loop quantum cosmology on equal footing with the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction. I don't know whether it was meant as a joke but if it was not, I think that it is an insane approach to these questions.

The work of Hartle and Hawking is an essential and robust proposal explaining the only known natural way how the initial conditions of the Universe may be derived dynamically, from the known path integral or an equivalent definition of dynamics. The existing calculations of the wavefunction of the Universe are arguably primitive but in a more complete theory, it is conceivable that someone just takes their ideas and repeats the calculation in a more rigorous and controllable way that will lead to much more familiar and encouraging results.

The Hartle-Hawking proposal also trivially explains why the entropy of a young Universe is tiny: it's because the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction is really a pure state whose entropy is zero and this value can be trusted as long as the Universe is microscopic.

Loop quantum cosmology is, on the other hand, a silly oversimplification of loop quantum gravity whose purpose is to present childish kindergarten games as a work on quantum gravity although these games have clearly nothing to do with physics of gravity. Loop quantum cosmology doesn't even follow from loop quantum gravity. Loop quantum cosmology is obtained by similar dumb "quantization" procedures directly from the special FRW classical cosmological Ansatz as the procedures that lead from classical 4D general relativity to loop quantum gravity.

Given the fact that even the full loop quantum gravity is demonstrably inconsistent and silly and the procedures themselves are clearly flawed, making further oversimplifications makes the situation really disastrous. Loop quantum cosmology doesn't satisfy any elementary consistency criteria we expect from a theory of quantum cosmology - such as unitarity or the existence of space and particles with spins and familiar interactions - and it will clearly never say anything interesting about physics.

This whole enterprise is just a tool for some people to convince themselves that a game shallower than LEGO can be marketed as quantum gravity. All details are wrong and all questions it offers are completely disconnected from real questions needed in physics. And because there are many stupid people around, be sure that it can be marketed in this way.

Sean's collection of random, mostly flawed ideas is an example how physics would look like if the lowest possible standards were accepted. It would become a conglomerate of myths, religious and anti-religious dogmas, confusion about things that are not confusing at all, and contrived, arbitrary, and mathematically shallow constructions that don't explain anything.

And that's the memo.

IPCC AR4 WG1: full text

The climate panel's working group I has just published the full report:

• IPCC WG1 full text

A preliminary version of the same document has been available via JunkScience and the structure of the final document seems almost identical. You may read the first reactions of Steve McIntyre.

Officially, we have had the summary for policymakers (SPM) only - until now. You may see that the long document contains a lot of serious albeit boring science and data. Concerned members of the IPCC have however (mis)interpreted the results in catchy ways in their summary. Journalists are even more concerned and their presentation is much closer to nutcases like Al Gore than the boring content of the IPCC report. This multi-level hysterization and cherry-picking is a primary mechanism fuelling this whole global idiocy.

Comments about the IPCC working group II summary for policymakers, originally posted on April 6th

Recall that the U.N. climate panel (IPCC) has three parts:

• WG1: physical processes
• WG2: impact on life and societies
• WG3: how to cool down Earth :-) ... next week, they will recommend nuclear power and GM crops

Buy your personal CO2 box today!
(Thanks to the creator written in the corner of the ad.)

WG1 is composed of scientists led by government bureaucrats and political activists: these three subgroups are far from disjoint. Their list includes every scientist who has been in contact with them but hasn't yet threatened them with a lawsuit - which is what e.g. Prof Paul Reiter had to do before he was removed from the list of the corrupt scientists. Their pre-determined task is to "prove" that most of the recent climate change is man-made, despite any scientific evidence that shows the opposite. Their fourth report, IPCC AR4, will be released on April 29th (officially May).



It is necessary for WG1 to prove what they're asked to prove, otherwise it would become clear that the very existence of the groups WG2, WG3 is a gigantic fraud - much like the existence of a large WG1, after all.

In the same way, it is necessary for WG2 to prove that the exaggerated yet modest warming "predicted" by WG1 will have extremely bad consequences. If they failed to prove it, it would become clear that the very existence of WG3 - and to a large extent WG2 - is a huge fraud. The political framework is given and scientists are only expected to make it look convincing by inserting scientific jargon and cherry-picked data into the big gaps in the whole orthodoxy. That's a classic example of intellectual prostitution.

WG2 doesn't even pretend to be based on natural science. Just like WG1 that provided us with a demo (summary for policymakers) although many people apparently think that WG1 has already released a report, WG2 only offers us the table of contents, press conferences, and their

• IPCC WG2 summary for policymakers.

You can also see a webcast of this conference: a black window together with a screenshot that allows you to safely remove zero types of hardware.

Some of their statements

Even though the full document is rumored to have 1572 pages (what else it can be than just a worthless conglomerate of myths that hundreds of random people add to it?), we must rely on the summary and press conferences as reported by the media e.g. Bloomberg. The working group is informing us that species will go extinct even though it is pretty much known that higher temperatures have been historically increasing the diversity of species, especially mammals.

They feel certain that all infectious diseases will become extremely widespread although the correlations between the temperature and diseases are questionable, to say the least, while millions of people are dying today as opposed to a result of a hypothetical change in the future.

They are telling us that there will be many more storms even though rudimentary atmospheric physics implies that storminess should decrease because it is driven by the temperature difference between the equator and the poles and this difference is predicted to shrink because the polar warming should be faster.

They are also convinced that the droughts will spread although some of the newest scientific results indicate that rainfall in Saharan Africa could increase substantially within a few decades in the case that the warming trend continues and undo the natural devastation of that region.

They are telling us that the poor people may be the hardest hit ones. That's almost certainly the case but what they're not saying is that 99+ percent of their ability to cope not only with a hypothetical climate change but also with the status quo depends on their future wealth and on their access to technology - something that these comrades want to prevent.

To summarize, what WG2 is saying is mostly a shameful piece of crap but it is a politically correct piece of crap, and that's what really matters these days. The Whacko Gang #3 will release their "findings" how to cool down Earth later. A leading contaminator of science, Stephen Schneider who is known for his Schneider doctrine about the necessary compromise between the scientific integrity and fraud that every scientist must adopt in order to be effective, claims that the Bush administration was helping this bureaucratic tumor of professional parasites and liars to grow in 85% of cases. President Bush should be ashamed.

And that was the memo on April 6th.

Map: we know your location

The Reference Frame knows where you are. Please feel free to bookmark this page or link to it if you find it useful. Feel free to drag the map, zoom it in, zoom it out, and so on.

(C) 2007 Luboš Motl, KGB, StB, CIA, FBI, MI5, Google Maps, Microsoft

An MIT dean with high school education (or less)

Dr Marilee Jones, PhD joined the MIT Admission Office in 1979 to lead the recruitment efforts for women. That was exactly what was expected from certain powerful cliques so she became the Dean of Admissions in 1998.

Last year, she co-authored a booklet called "Less Stress, More Success". She emphasized that "you must always be completely honest who you are."

Dr. Marilee Jones, PhD is the recipient of MIT’s highest award for administrators, the "MIT Excellence Award for Leading Change", as well as the "Gordon Y. Billard Award" and the "Dean for Undergraduate Education Infinite Mile Award for Leadership". I could continue. She has simply been a star.

Except that last week it turned out that among her three degrees from schools in upstate New York, she hasn't received a single one. See

• The Crimson
• The New York Times
• News.Google.COM.

She is not a Dr. She is not a PhD. She hasn't finished a college. She hasn't seen the two colleges out of three at all and she has only attended the third one as a part-time student for a year. Indeed, with much less stress, she achieved much more success: she earned about 3 million USD more than if she didn't cheat. And she has been teaching students how to achieve the same thing with minimal effort. It's not surprising they liked her.

An obvious question is whether anyone has noticed during these 28 years. Is it really that difficult for those thousands of people who have interacted with her to distinguish a PhD from a former torch singer at upstate New York clubs with high school education? Maybe it's not difficult but it is certainly hard to point out that the woman has been a complete fraud because of an outrageous totalitarian ideology called feminism.

Its power is so overwhelming that even if you're the most obvious scholarly zero as you can get, you can not only live with these lies for 28 years but also collect the highest awards on the market, as long as you help to spread certain fashionable lies.

If she were a Harvard dean and not an MIT dean, she wouldn't be fired. Instead, she would simply say that she only hasn't received the degrees because of white male sexist pigs who prevented her from getting them. She would be given the three degrees and as a hero of the feminist struggle against the last remnants of common sense and moral integrity, she would be promoted to the president of the university.

I assure you that comparable although not as striking situations can be found everywhere in the Academia. Thousands of activist women and radical members of other "oppressed" groups - groups that actually control this whole disgusting theater - pretend that they are much more than they are and the whip of political correctness guarantees that they can do so. Feminism and other types of victimism are forms of organized crime.

And that's the memo.

Wolfgang Pauli: a quantum mechanical hero

Wolfgang Pauli was born on April 25th, 1900, and he was one of the brightest physicists of his generation. See also Backreaction.



His approach to physics was very sharp and sophisticated. The Pauli matrices and the exclusion principle are named after him (Nobel prize 1945 for the exclusion principle) and he has proven many things such as the spin-statistics relation and the CPT theorem. In 1949, he co-authored the Pauli-Villars regularization but of course his contributions were far more numerous, including contributions that are not published anywhere.

His encounter with David Bohm

Wolfgang Pauli didn't like sloppy thinking - and especially various kinds of mishmash of unconscious projections and science - such as the morphogenetic fields and similar primordial forms of the "New Age" garbage. If you look e.g. at this page, you can see where the famous "not even wrong" epithet comes from.

Pauli was talking to another physicist, most likely David Bohm. You may know that it's hard for me to love David Bohm because Bohm was both a communist as well as a hater of orthodox quantum mechanics. So it's not surprising I like this story. :-)

Bohm was apparently emitting a lot of philosophical preconceptions - imagine something like one of Lee Smolin's silly theories - and at one moment, he self-confidently asked "But, surely, Pauli, you don't think what I've said is completely wrong?" to which Pauli replied: "No, I think what you said is not even wrong." ;-)

Too bad that between 2001 and 2006, his nice statement has been misused exactly by the intellectual heritors of crackpots whom Pauli addressed his wise comment in the first place. I am virtually certain that if Pauli were alive today, he would be a string theorist because he always demanded as high mathematical standards from a theory as string theorists do.

I hope that in 2007, we can already say that the intellectual garbage that was trying to damage Pauli's name and misinterpret his statements is already moved to the dumping ground of the history of physics.

Pauli and God

At the 1927 Solvay Conference, Dirac spent some time criticizing religion. Because Heisenberg's attitude was rather tolerant, Pauli gave the summary. He said: "Well, I would like to point out that our friend Dirac has a religion, too. Its first commandment says that 'God does not exist and Paul Dirac is his prophet.'"

It is also a well-known story that after his death in 1958, Pauli was granted an audience with God. Pauli was allowed to ask a question. So he asked why the fine structure constant was equal to 1/137.036... God started to write equations on the blackboard and Pauli was satisfied for a while. However, he soon started to shake his head violently: "Das ist ganz falsch!" :-)

Chernobyl: 21 years later

Exactly 21 years ago, the Ukrainian power plant exploded. Last year, we wrote about

• thriving wildlife in Chernobyl.
  

A new study has found that the long-term health impact of the Chernobyl disaster was negligible. All kinds of mortality rates were at most 1% higher than normally.

• ScienceDaily, full study.
  

Everyday life is riskier.

Yushchenko calls for a revival of the zone. His proposals include a nature preserve - which is more or less a fact now - as well as production of bio-fuels and a science center. The Korean boss of the U.N. calls for aid to the region.

Financial Times: carbon permits fraud is widespread

As Willie Soon has kindly pointed out, the Financial Times have revealed that most of the transactions with carbon permits are fraudulent. Companies pay for CO2 emissions reductions that never occur while others greatly benefit.

For example, an Indian company earned 600 million USD by a trick. Russians also know what to do in this complete chaos: Gazprom will sell Brazilian credits to Europe.

This massive international fraud should stop as soon as possible and those responsible for it should be arrested. Otherwise, as the U.S. Congressional Budget Office report found out, the CO2 cap-and-trade schemes will devastate the economy, especially the poor.

By the way, the current price of the European 2007 permits is 0.64 euro, down from 30 euro one year ago by a factor of almost fifty.

Censorship and propaganda

Other climate news: the website climateofdenial.net contains a letter of 30+ modern inquisitors who demand The Great Global Warming Swindle DVD to be banned. Prof Will Alexander became another victim of a witch hunt in South Africa.

Meanwhile, USA Today reports that Al Gore is cloning himself to create what the paper calls a "global army" of about 1000 men, mostly aggressive senile fat men. Pretty scary: not even Saddam Hussein succeeded in this cloning army strategy.

200 countries

The number of countries that have visited The Reference Frame according to the counter in the sidebar has reached 200. That's well above the number of U.N. nations. While several entries are non-countries such as "Anonymous Proxy" and "Europe", we are close to saturation. A further increase of the number of nations will probably lead to a discovery of extraterrestrial aliens.

Klaus in Russia

The Czech president had a friendly phone call with his U.S. counterpart, mostly about the radar base. George Bush will visit Prague in June 2007.



Today, Václav Klaus started an official visit of Russia. His relations with Vladimir Putin are much better than the average relations between two international leaders which will make any possible controversy about the radars less violent.

String theory in 2 minutes: blackthornba

This looks like a serious contestant to me although I can't promise you that the video is more than a union of pieces collected elsewhere. ;-)

History of gravitational waves

Daniel Holz discusses some history of gravitational waves. Click the animation above to get to his article. Note that my animation (LM) showing how space gets stretched in the presence of such a wave is rotated by 45 degrees relatively to Dan's animation (DH): they are two different "linear" polarizations. If you take the combinations

• LM + i DH, LM - i DH,

you will obtain a different basis of the so-called circular polarizations. In the corresponding pictures, an ellipse would simply rotate around, in one direction or the other.

In my wave, if you label the plane as x-y and the wave moves in the third, z-direction, it is the component g_{xy} of the metric tensor that fluctuates around zero. In Dan's wave, g_{xx} and g_{yy} fluctuate around one (in the East Coast convention); the two components oscillate in the opposite directions so that g_{xx} g_{yy} remains constant, equal to one. In the linearized approximation, it's equivalent to keeping g_{xx}+g_{yy} constant.

Einstein apparently knew about gravity waves as early as in 1918: he used linearized general relativity, the same modern approach that a particle physicist or string theorist would use today. It had to be very clear that the diffeomorphism symmetry wasn't enough to make all these waves unphysical - removable by pure gauge transformations - because the number of polarizations simply grows like D^2 or so with the dimension D while there are only D parameters in a diffeomorphism.

Nevertheless, there were doubters who argued that gravity waves shouldn't exist. It was a very stupid opinion that can mostly be blamed on the spiritual power of Mach's principle. According to Mach's (and Leibniz's) philosophy, empty space should be really empty - only relative positions of objects make sense - which means that an empty space shouldn't allow any gravity waves. General relativity however implies something completely different.

Gravitational waves are known to exist because certain binary stars lose exactly as much energy by emitting them as general relativity predicts. The 1993 physics Nobel prize has been given for this observation: the period of the pulsar orbit decreases by mere 75 microseconds every year but it can be measured. The energy carried by gravitational waves is quantized into "E=hf" Planck's units, just like for electromagnetic waves, and the quanta are called gravitons. Of course, individual gravitons haven't yet been seen, unlike photons, because they are too weakly interacting.

In perturbative string theory, gravitons are particular vibrations of a closed string with low enough energy so that it can give a massless spinning boson.

Gliese 581 has a habitable planet

Gliese 581 is a star that is 20.5 light years from us. It is smaller and colder than the Sun: in fact, it is a red dwarf. That's why habitable planets may be much closer to the star.



Gliese 581 c is a planet whose radius is about 1.5 times the radius of Earth. The planet is 14 times closer to the star than our distance from the Sun. But because the star is so much smaller, the planet is expected to have temperatures between 0 and 40 Celsius degrees which is pretty pleasant. Indeed, you can see liquid water on the satellite photograph. ;-)

The planet is about 5 times heavier than Earth. Because the radius is 1.5 times greater than the radius of Earth, the gravitational acceleration is about 5/2.25 = 2 times greater than on Earth. That's why the citizens have somewhat thicker bones: look at the picture.

The Wikipedia article about 581 C informs that a few hours ago, intelligent radio signals arriving from the planet were detected. ;-) This information was added by a witty editor from statefarm.com.

See news.google.com or a video (the first 20 seconds is a commercial).

Interview with Richard Lindzen

Relax, the planet is fine

National Post (Canada) had a nice interview with Prof. Richard Lindzen on Saturday.

There are many usual things - warming and human influence is not proven, it will probably be beneficial e.g. for Canada, indulgence industry is a huge business that can feed whole nations, scientists direct their research to get funding etc.

Lindzen also mentions the story of Roger Revelle who was one of the greatest oceanographers of the 20th century at Harvard University. One of the last papers he wrote was one with Fred Singer and Chauncey Starr

What to do about greenhouse warming: look before you leap

that argued, among other things, that existing science justifies no action to mess up with the climate.

Alarmists hated the paper so much that Al Gore, together with another Harvard professor, created a whole disgusting fairy-tale that Roger Revelle was senile and manipulated. Fred Singer sued the #$#$ alarmists and won a full vindication. Mainstream media are, of course, silent about this lawsuit.

They also talk about Gore's cynicism and about children used for alarmism - an approach that closely resembles Hitlerjugend. The happy end of the interview is that we should learn math and physics so that we don't get fooled by this idiocy. Well, I couldn't agree more.

Via Benny Peiser whose CCNet brought other news today:

• China delays national climate action plan indefinitely
• China will become the #1 emitter this year
• Indian company earns 600 million USD by an indulgence trick
• Turkey rejects Kyoto as being against their national interest
• IPCC WG3 mitigation - some unrealistic optimistic comments
• Danish emissions grew 16% in 2006
• Germany plans 26 new coal power plants
• Canada to join anti-Kyoto
• Spanish ceramics maker is earning more money by doing nothing, eating bananas, selling indulgences

plus some semi-private correspondence.

New format: listen to Philip Stott's Global Warming Podcast #1

P vs NP & NP-completeness

Michael Sipser of MIT gave a very clear - and perhaps too elementary - colloquium about P vs NP and NP-completeness. Let me make a short introduction to these questions.

P and NP problems

Use a computer to multiply two numbers, 7x13 = 91, or some longer numbers. It will be done "quickly". For large enough input with "N" bytes, the required number of operations (time) will go like a power law, "N^a", where "a" is an exponent. These are the P (polynomial) problems: they are quickly solvable.

Then there are possibly harder problems that may be more time-consuming but if you have a solution, you can quickly prove that it satisfies the conditions. This class of problems is called NP (non-deterministically polynomial) and includes these seemingly difficult problems:

• find the best schedule for students
• find the factors whose product gives you a large number with "N" digits
  
• find the clique of size "M" (a number comparable to "N"); a clique is a subgraph where all vertices are connected with each other
• compute the permanent of a "N x N" matrix (determinant without the minus signs)
• protein folding - minimize the energy by folding a protein
  
• find a proof of a true theorem, a proof that has "M" characters
• find a vacuum with the smallest positive cosmological constant in some toy models of the landscape with "exp(N)" vacua
  

and many others. (About two entries were added by me.) Once you find a solution, you can check that it is a solution in polynomial time, "N^a". But apparently, the only way to find such a solution is to search through a significant part of possibilities which takes time longer than any power law, namely time such as "exp(N)" or even "N! ~ (N/e)^N".

NP problems are "quickly verifiable". You can easily see that P problems are a subset of NP problems: if a problem is quickly solvable, it must also be quickly verifiable. But is it a proper subset? Can't they be identical sets?

History

When was this science invented? It was around the mid 1960s, independently by Russian and American authors. When you have a Russian and an American who invent the same thing at the same time, you're usually not getting the whole story. If I tell you that it was all invented 10 years earlier, what was the citizenship of the inventor? Yes, you're right. It had to be a Czech. In fact, he was not just Czech: he was a German Czech at the IAS. ;-)

I claim that the description "German Czech" matches the U.S. standards - it is constructed just like e.g. "African American" - but no sane Czech person with a possible exception of your humble correspondent would ever seriously call Kurt Gödel a "Czech". ;-)

Recent analyses of John von Neumann's archive showed that in 1956, Kurt Gödel sent a letter to (ailing) von Neumann (both IAS Princeton) asking how much time "phi(N)" one needs to find a mathematical proof of a valid assertion, a proof that is known to contain "N" characters. It could be a power law, he speculated. This fact if true would have profound consequences for mathematics. He has also sketched other problems where similar questions can be asked. Gödel was clearly interested in the issue of finding proofs but his comments were more general and the other guys just repeated it 10 years later.

NP-completeness

The most important later development was NP-completeness. There exists a large and important subclass of NP problems that are exactly as difficult as each other. This NP-complete class contains many granddaddies - but the clique problem is one of them. This really means that a difficult, NP-complete problem can be converted to a clique problem (or one of many other granddaddies that are dual to each other).

The set of NP problems also contains problems that are not proven to be NP-complete such as the factorization problem. A factorization homework can be transformed into a clique problem which means that factorization problems can't be more difficult than the clique problem: but they can be easier although there exists no proof whether they're easier in either way.

Clique problem

Imagine that you have a group of scientists (vertices of a graph) with the information which pairs have shared a paper (links in this graph). Your task is to find the largest subgraph (subgroup of scientists) in which everyone wrote a paper with everyone else.

In paleoclimatology, it is clearly a P problem. The fast solution to identify the largest clique is to find Michael Mann in the graph, list all of his co-authors, sort them by a number of papers co-authored with Mann, and take the upper "M" of this list that still form a clique, if you want to get the largest clique in the graph.

This algorithm was discovered by Dr. Edward Wegman, a statistician who was asked by by the U.S. lawmakers to investigate similar problems connected with that particular bizarre clique generating a remarkable large number of flawed papers, especially about broken hockey sticks.

P=NP or not P=NP

However, the real question is whether this problem is quickly solvable for random large graphs outside paleoclimatology. If there is a solution that avoids the brute force search, then P=NP. Because such an identity would allow one to crack all possible codes, solve scheduling problems, identify cliques, calculate permanents, and even find proofs of true mathematical statements automatically and quickly, it is generally expected that P=NP is not true.

However, there are examples where similar intuition is wrong, such as the primarily test. One can quickly test whether a number with "N" digits is a prime by using Fermat's little theorem. It takes much less time than testing all possible factors up to those with "N/2" digits. The Lucas-Lehmer primality test is a similar example of this dramatic speed-up although it only works for Mersenne numbers.

NP-completeness means that if you find a universal fast (power law time) solution of one of those hard but easily testable problems, you can prove that you have solved all of them. Not all NP problems are NP-complete, but many of them - such as the clique problem - are.

Sipser continued with some additional questions whether we can check that someone knows a solution to a problem such as the isomorphism of two graphs. These are toy models of some concepts that are important in contemporary cryptography - such as the methods for someone to prove that she knows a password without revealing what it is.

Finally, he also mentioned how different levels of complexity that require memory or time scaling as various, generally different functions of "N" can be related to each other, suggesting that these relations could have something to do with the relations of space and time in physics. Well, I would guess that probably not but everyone is free to try to find this relation with physics, of course. ;-)

And that's the memo.

Joe Kernen outshines Laurie David and Sheryl Crow

Flash has pointed out this interesting TV confrontation: a CNBC video clip is available on the website under Sheryl's picture below. Or try YouTube including Patrick Michaels' reaction.



I think that both Sheryl Crow (is she "All I wanna do is have some fun" or "Girls just wanna have fun"? Both are great hits) and Laurie David (the prettiest among those who earn big bucks from "An Inconvenient Truth") are attractive women.

Sometimes it is not enough to be pretty and to create great songs or earn big bucks. Joe Kernen, a skeptic, received a support of 80% of viewers against the two alarmist ladies. It's not hard to see why. For example, when asked how she wants to replace hydrocarbon (nuclear?), Crow answered that we should burn clean coal instead. Coal without hydrocarbons - that's what I call a really clean coal. ;-)

These women wanted to teach college students about the climate and energy issues! It would be much more useful if they returned to the elementary school and learned some basic things again.

Sheryl Crow has also become famous with her project to fight against global warming by allowing only one square of toilet paper to be used in the restroom, except for the pesky situations when you are allowed to use two or three. This is a real scientific way to deal with the issue! Unfortunately, her finger so far seems insufficient to replace three tractor trailers, four buses, and six cars for her concert.

Incidentally, Sheryl Crow also tried to sexually harass and touch Karl Rove, to get him on her side. He refused. Laurie David described his reaction as follows: "How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow?"

I wonder how many men on their tour didn't say "Don't touch me" as Karl Rove and became alarmists. ;-) Unlike Crow, David only tried to insult Rove, and "she succeeded", as Rove admitted.

Explanations of their failure

If you remember the Intelligence Squared Climate Debate, Gavin Schmidt has offered an explanation why the alarmists lost: Michael Crichton is tall.

Sheryl Crow has also offered her explanation why she and Laurie David lost: it's because unlike Joe Kernen, they were not sufficiently beautiful in the morning because they didn't sleep enough. :-) Another reason is that they faced a skeptic whose goal was to show that the AGW theory was wrong. That's really outrageous! :-)

She conjectured that Joe Kernen, who is incidentally MSc from MIT in molecular biology, must be paid by the tobacco industry. :-) If you imagine that IQ is additive, Kernen's match with the two ladies was a fair game. And I think it's great if two stupid women become associated with the whole ideology.

The only problem I have with Kernen's comments is his promotion of the dominant role of volcanos which is an error in the Great Warming Swindle documentary: volcanoes currently produce about 50 times less CO2 per year than we do although cumulatively, of course, they have emitted much more than we have.

Boris Yeltsin died

Figure 1: Billary Clinton: "He's so cute."

Boris Yeltsin (*1931) grew up in Yekaterinburg = Sverdlovsk, my hometown Pilsen's twin city, where he was the party boss. Later he became the first post-Soviet president of Russia, 1991-1999. He liked to drink and other things. Not everything was perfect about his reign and life but he is one of the people who should be credited for the expansion of capitalism and democracy in Russia.

Hartle & Srednicki vs. typicality

Jim Hartle and Mark Srednicki explain that all details of the assumptions about "typicality" - an inherent part of the anthropic reasoning - should always be explicitly stated and some of these assumptions lead to ludicrous conclusions.

They use the Bayesian reasoning to explain that a theory in which the observers like us are more typical are not preferred. If you click at the link in the previous sentence, you will get my article with a similar argument (search for "huge landscape" to get to the main assertion).

Some of their examples of ridiculous conclusions obtained with the assumptions of typicality are related to the Boltzmann brains. Because I clearly agree with their assertions, let me paraphrase the main points from their first page:

• Predicted atypicality of humans is not enough for falsification of a theory
  
• Deciding about validity of theories mustn't depend on counting of intelligent observers and their properties because this would kill objectivity
  
• All accessible reliable data may be used and should be used unless it can be shown that they are inconsequential
• Predicting a higher or lower number of copies of observers like us and observations like ours doesn't modify the degree of validity of a theory
• We shouldn't assume that something about us was created by a random process unless there is evidence for this assumption
• Bayesian inference may be used to guess measures that may be implied by a fundamental theory but don't have to

Some people assume that we are randomly selected from a class "C". Hartle and Srednicki call this misstep "selection fallacy" because its essence is to neglect some known data.

Selection fallacy is a special example of political correctness applied to the class "C". Needless to say, if you're a member of the complement of "C", e.g. a conservative, you will be in trouble. ;-)



Figure 1: Jovian atmosphere. Should the predicted number of exo-women of color in this environment influence the selection of the right compactification before we actually count them? ;-)

They say that a theory that would predict that life thrives in the huge atmosphere of Jupiter shouldn't be disfavored before we know whether they do. I added the "before..." part although they don't say it explicitly at the beginning of their paper. Indeed, I think that once we learn that there's no life on Jupiter, a theory predicting life on Jupiter should face some backlash.

The black list of people who are making the error of thinking that theories predicting localized life in Jupiter's atmosphere are already disadvantaged includes Page, Dyson, Kleban, Susskind, Bousso, and Freivogel. ;-) I agree with Hartle and Srednicki that all these physicists have used these logically flawed arguments.

Hartle and Srednicki also try to define "us". In fact, we are "IGUS" - information gathering and utilizing system. ;-) IGUS must be extended once we start to collaborate on scientific theories with aliens. It sounds funny but I think it is very true. We shouldn't be imprinting our properties into our theories because the resulting theories should be valid objectively, even for numerous aliens who may be living on very different planets. Our theories shouldn't be anthropomorphic even though some of the proposed theories are anthropogenic. ;-)

I've been saying it for some time.

Returning to the Jupiter example, they show how the wrong reasoning may proceed - remarkably similar to some reasoning used by the landscape community. For example, you could say that because both authors of their paper are human, theories that allow lots of non-human intelligent beings should be suppressed not by a small number "P" but even "P^2". That's clearly false because the probabilities of Hartle and Srednicki being human are not independent, for example because both of them share the same monkey ancestor. ;-)

Moreover, there exists a simpler argument to show that the typicality reasoning disfavoring theories with life on Jupiter is flawed. It's simply because the numbers of intelligent beings on the two planets are causally disconnected quantities - as everyone familiar with the history of the Solar System should agree - and there has been no thermal equilibrium that would try to compare the human quotas on the two planets. In their example, it is very clear that no random selection process that would try to compare citizens of Jupiter and Earth has taken place.

In some other examples it may be harder to show that such a process didn't exist - and it might exist, after all - but we should never assume that we know that the random process existed because it is not a fact.

The priors may be chosen in such a way that the theories without life on Jupiter will be favored, after all, but these priors seem to have the desired conclusions inserted as input which is a kind of scientific misconduct.

They also modify the example with counting beings on Jupiter to the case of counting cycles and time in various cyclic cosmologies or eternal inflation. Again, they argue that it doesn't matter whether a Universe with the observed properties is predicted to be more frequent or less frequent by a cyclical or eternal theory. The only thing that matters is that the theory allows the Universe with our observed properties to occur at least once. Whether there exist observers who see something else than we do is irrelevant for our procedures of validating our theories and for our predictions.

Finally, they present the different "measures" as different choices of the priors and argue that the right way to refine these priors is to present evidence and adjust them by Bayesian inference, not by inserting more personal preferences. One must carefully distinguish prejudice (priors) from logical deduction (including probability calculations) and from facts (data).

I think it's hard to disagree with them but I am sure that some people do.

And that's the memo.

Jazz and women

Clifford Johnson has complained that a woman considered jazz to be a male sexist genre, if you allow me to simplify his text a little bit. Well, yes, most feminists are sexist. ;-)

Well, I am not sure whether Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Carla Bley, Alice Coltrane, Hana Hegerová - one of the people in the 1966 Czech jazz opera "A Walk Worthwhile" (that Miloš Forman is just bringing to the traditionally classical Czech national theater!) -, Vlasta Průchová, Jana Koubková, or a Californian female string theorist whom I know (and who still likes jazz more than I do) would agree that women can't like jazz. I don't think so.

Instead, let me offer you a few compositions.



This is Jaroslav Ježek's 1928 classic, Bugatti Step. I was never good enough to play this one. Ježek was an extraordinary Czech composer, the third friend of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, two eminent Czech comedians from "The Liberated Theater" who became famous in the 1920s.



The composition above, resembling the inner workings of Bugatti, is so difficult that you won't easily find a free copy on the Internet that is flawless; try a string version (...) or YouTube anyway. Be sure that girls like to play Ježek's compositions, too, for example "Heaven on Earth" (Nebe na zemi).

A week ago, when we recalled Yuri Gagarin, we also linked to an MP3 file, "Honor to the Astronaut" (1961).

Try also numerous jazz bands on the streets of Prague.

Finally, Clifford should realize that the Czech president is, among the current leaders, the most enthusiastic fan of jazz - and the organizer of "Jazz on the [Prague] Castle". I hope that this will be enough for Clifford and others to join Klaus' fight against political correctness and against the global warming religion! :-)

Nevertheless, my answer to Clifford's main question is that I don't see any significant signal that would indicate that jazz is more anti-female than other genres. Men dominate the composition and instruments - but that's the case in other genres, too.

Colony Collapse Disorder

A bee & CCD: to bee or not to bee?
Bee afraid, bee very afraid

Last fall, the mysterious illness started. Colonies simply disappear. In January 2007, the size of the problem became obvious. About 27 U.S. states see the problem that has already decimated roughly 1/2 of their bee populations. In February 2007, your humble correspondent warned Bee about the problem.

Video above: music by Karel Svoboda, an ingenious composer who shot himself: memorian, Slivers of Glass I, Slivers of Glass II.

In March, the problem was dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) although BBC preferred a Vanishing Bee Syndrome (VBS).

What can be causing such an abrupt decline of the bee populations in the U.S.? It must be something fast, something that has changed rather abruptly. Some possibilities:

• A virus
• Changes in the ultraviolet background: bees see in the UV spectrum; it could be related to the ozone hole
• Changes in the IR spectrum
• Social collapse caused by external factors, e.g. infiltration by Cape honeybees from Africa: they produce their own young, with no respect for the queen's brood; it won't be trivial to find and execute the African intruders
• Social collapse caused by internal factors, i.e. a new kind of communism or environmentalism forcing the freedom-loving bees to emigrate; it won't be trivial to find and exterminate the alarmist bees
• A new kind of nutrition supplement or other stuff given to the bees, e.g. genetically-modified crops
• A new chemical compound that appeared in their environment such as new pesticides
  

Some research has been made with 1.9 GHz cordless phones, indicating that they could have some impact. Journalists talk about "cellphones" which seems inaccurate although the frequencies are similar. It is not impossible that cellphone signals suddenly start to have impact on bees: still, I find it unlikely.

If this problem doesn't go away, it may become a story. Still, the annual value of pollination in the U.S. is estimated at 15 billion USD only, about 0.1% of the GDP. I think it is a significant underestimate of the importance and value of the bees, these hard-working friends of ours, but on the other hand, I don't think that a huge decline of bees would imply anything comparable to a decline of the civilization.

And that's the memo.

Václav Klaus: Blue, not Green Planet

The book is being translated to English, German, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Bulgarian, and other languages but I can't tell you when it is going to be released so far

What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?

To be released on 5/15/2007 in Czech...
Sold e.g. at KOSMAS.CZ

Global warming has recently become both a symbol and a prototype of the tension between the truth and propaganda. One politically correct truth has taken over and it is not easy to oppose it although a significant number of people, including top scientists, see the climate change issues, its reasons, and its impact very differently. They are scared by the arrogance of the advocates of the global warming hypothesis and the related conjecture that connects this warming with particular acts of Man. They are afraid of the consequences that it will have for all of us. The best environment for humans is the environment of freedom. It is the only right criterion to judge all environmentalist visions and all their categoric demands. The current debate about global warming is thus inherently a debate about the freedom.

Author: Václav Klaus

Czech name: "Modrá, nikoli zelená planeta. Co je ohroženo: klima nebo svoboda?"

Publisher: [nakladatelství] Dokořán

Tropospheric warming not as fast as the surface

A weekly dose of peer-reviewed denier literature on the climate.

Christy, Norris, Spencer, Hnilo (ADSABS) have studied the temperature of the lower troposphere in tropics (-20...+20 latitude) during the 1979-2004 period in their article in Journal of Geophysical Research (2007).

See also: Wrong fingerprint of greenhouse warming

They used two sources, UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville) and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems). The nighttime trend is 0.12 K/decade while the daytime trend is 0.07 K/decade - a strange difference indicating that an adjustment may be needed.

For generic readers, K is Kelvin and the temperature difference in Kelvins is the same thing as the temperature difference in Celsius degrees.

The overall trend from UAH is 0.08 K/decade while the data from RSS give 0.15 K/decade. An elimination of the most "anomalous" entries in both datasets can of course bring them closer. At any rate, you see that the difference between the trends from different sources is greater than the magnitude of the detected warming according to one of them.



Moreover, they argue that the RSS data show a strange warming jump around 1992, indicating a particular bias, probably coming from a change of methodology around the time when the new NOAA-12 satellite was included. This makes the larger trend from the RSS data less robust. The authors continue to work on elimination of all kinds of both positive biases as well as negative biases - they have found representatives from both groups.

The authors finally end up with the following figure for the trend in tropics:

• +0.05 +- 0.07 K/decade.

You can see that this interval is fully compatible with the conjecture that there is no tropospheric warming in tropics at all. On the other hand, it seems incompatible with the prediction of the greenhouse theory that the tropospheric warming trend should be 1.3 times greater than the surface warming: the surface warming trend is 0.13 K/decade while the troposphere is only 1/2 of it, and even when you add the error margin, it is still less than the surface trend and much less than the trend 0.17 K/decade predicted from the surface trend by the AGW climate models.

The opinion that there's no warming in the troposphere at all seems alive while the opinion that the warming in the troposphere is dominated by the greenhouse effect doesn't seem to be alive.

And that's the memo.



Neptune is warming, too

The readers of The Reference Frame may know that Mars, Jupiter, Triton, Pluto, and Earth recently experienced warming. You should add Neptune - another planet that is blue not green - to the list. Moreover, Hammel and Lockwood argue in Geophysical Research Letters vol. 34 that the trends on Neptune and Earth were pretty well correlated, indicating their solar origin.

Samir Mathur: comments on fuzzballs

The author, Prof Samir Mathur, is a physicist at Ohio State University

The information paradox arises if we assume that the effects of quantum gravity extend only over Planck distances. String theory, as a complete theory of quantum gravity, must offer us a way out of this paradox. The way it does this is that string theory states "puff up" in proportion to the number of quanta they carry, changing the notion that there is no information stored near the horizon.

There have been some comments on this blog regarding the classical / quantum nature of microstates. Here are my brief comments on the issue; for more details one can look at the reviews hep-th/0502050 or hep-th/0510180. More details on the nature of states etc can be found for example in hep-th/0607222, hep-th/0609154.

The simplest model is the 2-charge extremal hole. We can dualize the charges to NS1-P; that is, a string carrying momentum. The total winding and momentum are taken large, so that we can match the entropy to the Bekenstein-Wald classical value.

The entropy arises from the way the momentum can be partitioned among harmonics. Let us first look at some special (i.e. non-generic) states. The simplest possibility is to put all the momentum into a large number of units N of the lowest harmonic. Recall that each Fourier mode of vibration is a harmonic oscillator. Thus the lowest frequency oscillator is in the state /N>. Since N is large we expect some classicality. To get classical motion we can replace /N> by a suitable superposition of states ... /N-10>, /N-9>, ... /N+10> ... This makes a coherent state, which gives a classical "pendulum motion" to the oscillator. The string then carries a helical wave, with a small quantum spread (order 1/N) around the helical profile. The generated metric will also be close to classical, with a small ~1/N order spread from quantum fluctuations.

We already see a key feature: the transverse oscillations of the string give it a transverse size that grows with N. Dualizing to D1-D5, the geometry has a "throat", but instead of ending at a point-like singularity, it ends in a locally AdS3 "cap".

Now let us split our energy among, say, five different harmonics. This gives more complicated string profiles, but also note that since the occupation number N of each mode is smaller, the quantum fluctuations are slightly larger. But since N was big to start with, we can still think of a family of classical string profiles.

The generic state of the string is given by a thermal distribution of vibrations. The occupation number for harmonic k is

• n(k) ~ 1 / [ exp(k / sqrt N)-1]
  

There are ~sqrt(N) different Fourier modes excited. The average harmonic order of the modes is ~sqrt(N). The "occupation number" of each Fourier mode oscillator is now ~1, so it is not helpful to try to make a coherent state. So we will not describe the state by a string profile, but just say that the transverse vibrations generate a largish "fuzzball". (The term fuzzball is supposed to signify that the generic state is very "quantum fuzzy".)

How big is this fuzzball? We are given a total energy of excitation. One finds that the transverse size of the state depends on the mean harmonic number that is excited, while the fluctuations depend on the occupation number of the typical mode. So to estimate the size of the generic state we take the wavenumber k=sqrt(N) and put all our energy in it - this gives an occupation number sqrt(N) >> 1 so we can use the classical profile description. One then finds a size that is just the order of the horizon radius of the 2-charge hole, so fuzzballs are horizon-sized objects. Now imagine splitting the energy into more modes, still with sqrt(N) as the mean. The size remains the same, while the fluctuations grow larger. Finally, we reach the generic state where the size is as computed, but fluctuations are O(1).

I would expect that this general idea remains true for 3 and 4 charge systems ... special states can be classical and help us to understand the behavior of generic states; the generic states themselves are very quantum "fuzzballs". Iosif Bena has talked of a "strong form" of the general conjecture where the situation is as above for 2-charge, but the states become much more classical for 3-charge. I do not understand these arguments well, so I will take my conservative view that for all cases the generic states are very quantum string-theoretic objects.

The work of Bena-Warner has shown that large families of 3-charge objects can be made by having different arrangements of "dipole charges". These can be reduced to 4-D by a method of Bena-Kraus, and Balasubramanian-Gimon-Levi have obtained large families of four-dimensional solutions with different locations of poles containing different possible dipole charges. The simplest cases have just two poles, but as we go to a limit where the numbers of these poles becomes large I would expect that quantum effects set in - stringy degrees of freedom get excited between the charges at the poles, and all we can say is that we have a very "quantum fuzzball". For the non-BPS hole one would use brane-antibranes degrees of freedom, which will generically give a very quantum state, too.

(Gautam Mandal commented that a similar thing happens in LLM: when all the fermions are in their lowest state we can write a classical geometry, but for a general state of the fermions we will get large fluctuations.)

Thus the important point of the fuzzball proposal is that the size of the bound state is always large (horizon size) and not Planck size. Classical solutions are obtained for specially chosen microstates, but these help us understand the size of the generic state. The throats of extremal holes end in "fuzzy caps" rather than in a horizon, and this solves the information puzzle.

MIT: Daniel Barclay died

Daniel Barclay (22), an MIT political science & economics senior, has been missing since April 8th. Although it could be his body that was found on Cape yesterday, there's still a non-zero chance. He hasn't spent any money or used his cellphone since 4/8. If you have any idea about his location, please call the MIT Police at 617-253-1212 or anonymous 617-258-TIPS (8-8477). Click the photograph for more details at Boston Herald.

Update: unfortunately the dead body was him. We are very sorry to hear that.

Simon White on fundamentalist physics

Fundamentalist physics takes over astronomy

Sean Carroll at cosmicvariance.com has pointed out an article by

• Simon White

that explains that the cosmological constant is a conspiracy created by the fundamentalists - also known as high-energy physicists - to take over astronomy. :-)

That's interesting. I thought that the cosmological constant was a conspiracy theory of astronomers meant to dismantle high-energy physics and fill it with all kinds of traditionally astronomical garbage such as the anthropic principle. :-)

As you can see, most of the people on the hypothetical two sides of the battle between the laws of the small and the laws of the large agree that the cosmological constant is an evil thing. Even Einstein himself agreed when he called the intellectual intercourse that led to its discovery "the greatest blunder of his life". :-)

Simon White argues that the fundamentalists, represented in the context of cosmology by their fifth column and their WMAP satellite, are uniform teams with predetermined big goals and their work leads to improvements in statistics. The astronomers and traditional cosmologists, represented by the Hubble Space Telescope, are, on the contrary, a diverse group of many loosely connected small teams with many unexpected results.

I think it's a fair observation but I don't think that the difference is created by "culture" or "social conventions". The difference arises from the distinct character of the questions that these two types of scientists are asking.

When you're asking how the Universe works at the most fundamental level, the number of detailed fundamental questions and possibilities is simply not large. For example, there are not too many things like the Higgs boson that we will observe soon. Also, the work with the WMAP data is inherently similar to the work of particle physicists. Such a proximity to the most fundamental questions inevitably makes the community more unified because they inevitably share certain basic theoretical pillars and certain big open questions.

Astronomy used to be a sloppy activity of senile philosophizing grandfathers and their excited grandsons from the kindergarten. Today, there also exists something else about the Cosmos: a high-precision science known as modern cosmology that unsurprisingly works in a similar way as particle physics.

Of course that if one studies different types of processes inside stars and galaxies, there is much less need to communicate with each other, the problems are more specialized, and the community ends up looking more diverse.

There are different levels of diversity and some fields naturally lead to higher diversity than others because it is a better strategy to make progress. However, the boundary between "diverse" fields and "united" fields is not sharp. It is completely inevitable that if one studies questions that are as "interdisciplinary" as the cosmological constant - something that tightly connects high-energy physics with the cosmological observations - the boundaries between the specializations will be blurred and the methods will be mixed with each other.

I don't think that it's right to be worried about some "cultures" taking over "other cultures". Whatever strategy to answer certain questions and discover new things is more efficient will lead to successes and will spread. On the other hand, I agree with Simon White that the cosmological constant shouldn't become the #1 question in science. It is, after all, just one number. It is very far from being the only fundamental question and moreover, not all interesting questions are fundamental. Because scientists don't quite understand the origin of one number that was recently observed doesn't mean that they should abandon millions of other methods, insights, and open questions about the Universe they have.

And that's the memo.

Siberia-Alaska tunnel

As Larry pointed out, Russia has reinvented a project to build a tunnel between Alaska and Chukotka (map), with a safe highway, railroad, oil pipelines, and fibers to speed up The Reference Frame for readers in Eastern Siberia.

The project expected to become an international one will soon be presented to the people in the U.S. and Canada. Walter Hickel (GOP), a former governor of Alaska (and a secretary fired by Nixon), is already among the staunch supporters of the project, together with the LaRouche conspiracy family that has been promoting this tunnel for decades. ;-)

Its 100 kilometers are twice the "chunnel" under La Manche between Britain and France. The tunnel itself would only cost $10 billion but with the additional 4000 miles of railroads needed on the continents to make it useful, it is a $65 billion project, about 1/5 of money annually wasted for the Kyoto protocol.

It is a purely business project. Note that Russia sold Alaska for 7.2 million old dollars which is 1.67 billion new dollars. So the tunnel, to be completed around 2020, will cost 40 times more than what Russia earned by selling Alaska itself. But it still seems as a good investment to me, especially because $20 billion a year may be saved for electricity costs on both continents.

The Reference Frame also recommends American investors to design and build a 112-mile tunnel from Florida to Cuba and Japanese and Korean investors to build a similar tunnel from Japan to South Korea. The Chinese investors should connect Taiwan and continental China, too.

History

The idea is not new. It was first proposed in 1905 by Nicholas II of Russia, the last czar. Unfortunately, in 1918, when the new Czechoslovak legions occupied about 1/3 of Siberia, the #$#$ bolsheviks were afraid that as the Czechoslovak troops return home and possibly take over Yekaterinburg, they would free the czar. So a #$#$ bolshevik called Sverdlov ordered to exterminate the imperial family immediately. His comrades were so grateful that they renamed Yekaterinburg to Sverdlovsk.

After similar but less bloody events occured in Czechoslovakia itself 30 years later, Sverdlovsk became a twin city of my hometown, Pilsen, and I spent summer 1988 over there, teaching Czech language to our Russian friends again. This trip is also the reason why I have been to Asia 100 times: what can you do on the boring border between the continents for 2 hours else than jumping back and forth? The trip was an interesting experience - virtually everyone in that city strongly believed in communism - unlike most Czechs - and they were extremely proud about the U.S. airplane they shot down in 1960.

Off-topic: EU ETS carbon indulgences were sold for 1 euro two months ago. Now they're below half a euro, see euets.com.

Probabilities of various theories: climate change

The following list is the global warming counterpart of a similar table for fundamental physics:

• 99.9% - The global temperature is cooling and in 100 million years, it will be measurably below the current 2.7 Kelvins ;-)
  
• 99% - Doubling of CO2 from 280 ppmv to 560 ppmv adds more than 0.2 Celsius degree to the expected average temperature
• 95% - Higher life can easily withstand three times higher fluctuations of the decadal average temperatures than those seen in the last 100 million years
  
• 90% - Scientists in 2100 will find contemporary climate models as naive as we view models from the early 20th century
• 85% - Temperatures that would instantly jump 2 Celsius degrees above the present ones (giving us no time for adaptation) would have a smaller negative economic impact on life and the civilization than a world war (such as WW2) under way (war-like death rate is not assumed to be a part of the impact here)
  
• 80% - A satisfactory theory of cloud formation and of the main drivers influencing it is necessary to get a good zeroth approximation for the climate at the millenial timescale or longer
• 75% - Annual average global temperatures have differed by more than 5 Celsius degrees from the present ones in both directions during the last 10 million years
  
• 70% - Cosmic rays have a detectable and statistically significant influence on temperatures at the multi-million-year timescale
• 65% - 2025 will be warmer than 2005
  
• 60% - Long-term solar variations have a detectable influence on the climate at the centennial scale
• 50% - A future warming by 1 Celsius degree - regardless of its origin - will be beneficial for the society, economies, and most animals, or a future cooling by 1 Celsius degree will not be beneficial
• 40% - Turbulence and largely unpredictable motion in the atmosphere and the ocean is responsible for more than 30% of the decadal variations of the climate at a fixed continent
  
• 30% - The climate sensitivity for CO2 doubling is a well-defined quantity, it is greater than 2 Celsius degrees, and it will be measured with a 20% error or more accurately by 2100
• 20% - The average decadal temperature in at least one of the decades in the last 20 million years differed from the most recent decade by more than 10 Celsius degrees in either direction
• 10% - Positive feedbacks amplifying the external perturbations influencing the temperature are stronger than the negative feedbacks
  
• 5% - Under business-as-usual scenario, newly emitted man-made CO2 will contribute more than 2 Celsius degrees to the temperatures in the next 50 years
  
• 5% - The temperature trend of the 20th century puts it among 3 most spectacularly changing centuries in the last 1 million years
• 3% - Under the business-as-usual scenario, the 21st century will be the warmest century in the last 1 million years
  
• 1% - Human production of CO2 is responsible for more than 80% of the decadal climate variations of the 20th century
• 1% - Benefits of CO2 reduction according to currently contemplated plans will exceed the costs
  
• 0.1% - Investments to influence the global climate using present technologies today are wiser and more economical than investments into similar plans in 2020 using future technologies
  
• 0.01% - The climate sensitivity for CO2 doubling is greater than 5 Celsius degrees
• 0.001% - The effects of climate change under the business-as-usual scenario will remove more than 50% of the integrated GDP by 2100 or its equivalent
• 0.0005% - The sea levels will rise by more than 5 meters in the next 50 years
  
• 0.000001% - Extinction of mammals because of any climate change by 2100 (includes solar dysfunction)
  
• 0.0000001% - Extinction of life because of any climate change by 2100
• 0.00000001% - Extinction of mammals because of CO2-driven climate change by 2100
  

Again, if you carefully negate the assertions and subtract the numbers from 100%, you get additional estimates. ;-)

Richard Lindzen: Iris effect remains alive and well

Some readers may want to look at

• a lecture by Prof Richard Lindzen of MIT - 51-slide PDF file (backup)

about the Iris effect, originally published in 2001. The claimed agreement of existing climate models with reality may be described as curve fitting. There are good reasons to think that there is a couple of important negative feedbacks related to water vapor and clouds that make the CO2 climate sensitivity small.

ABC of the iris effect: when the Earth is warming, the rain at places where air flows in the direction up becomes more intense. This reduces the amount of water droplets available for high-altitude cirrus clouds. Warming thus reduces the number of cirrus clouds and because these clouds have a warming effect, the overall impact of this mechanism is a slight cooling which means that the ultimate warming will be smaller than if the iris effect wouldn't exist.

A 2007 paper by Roy Spencer et al. on cirrus clouds brought some new evidence for the iris effect. See also

Roy Spencer: Global warming and Nature's thermostat: precipitation systems

Incidentally, NOAA climate models have just obtained the same result about the future hurricane rate

• there will be less hurricanes and they will be weaker

as people who have read at least initial chapters of meteorology textbooks know - although the microscopic details of the explanations are different. (Thanks to Alexander Ač, no kidding.)

You may also read a semi-popular text of a lecture by Prof Lindzen called

• Nature of Arguments for Anthropogenic Global Warming
  

about the ways how bias is being introduced to climate science. When Lindzen talks about a "certain kind of errors" that are selectively "corrected", we may think of many examples. Unfortunately, a recent correction of

• Lyman et al. 2006

may be another example. The file above contains the correction (first 5 pages) as well as the original paper (last 15 pages). The authors originally reported that the ocean lost 32+-11 zettajoules of heat (zetta is 10^{21}, after tera, peta, exa) between 2003 and 2005 (it cooled down). In the correction, they don't say what the new numbers and error margins are but they offer a lot of "biases" whose "correction" will probably change their cooling into warming, or at least reduce the cooling.



Given the fact that zetta- doesn't appear in the original paper and the correction systematically misspells zetta- as zeta-, one may conjecture that the correction to the paper was written by a less intelligent but more concerned writer than the original paper.

It's very plausible that there can exist errors and biases but if one looks for them with a particular "big idea" in mind, it is likely that he will get skewed results. And it is hard to avoid the feeling that skewed results are actually the real goal in many cases.

And that's the memo.

Falsifying non-local realism

Off-topic: Seed magazine offers a tool (PDF) for living in the 21st century, namely a basic introduction to string theory. Clifford Johnson was apparently an adviser - so he told them that a Hydrogen atom is a deuterium ion with four electrons, as Wolfgang has pointed out. ;-)

Scientific American describes a new experiment of Anton Zeilinger et al. - laser light split into entangled pairs whose polarizations are then measured in different angles - whose authors claim that it falsifies "nonlocal realism".



Figure 1: A Zeilinger. The picture is not 100% relevant but I want to avoid accusations that most physicists discussed on this blog are male. :-)

The title of the SciAm article, "Quantum Mechanics Fails Reality Checks", is unfortunate because it creates the impression that they have shown something wrong either with quantum mechanics or with the Czechs. Quite on the contrary: they have shown that quantum mechanics holds, just like the Czechs say, even in cases when some critics would like to create doubts. ;-)

The normal Bell inequalities, combined with the known EPR experiments that agree with quantum mechanics, falsify "local realism", i.e. the combination of assumptions that some values of physical quantities objectively exist before they're measured - in contradiction with the postulates of quantum mechanics - and moreover they evolve according to local laws.

They are able to falsify this combined assumption because the (wrong) assumption implies, through Bell's proof, that the measured correlations must belong to a certain interval. But quantum mechanics predicts and experiments confirm that the actual correlations are often outside this interval. Quantum mechanics allows you to get much stronger correlations or anti-correlations than any hypothetical underlying local classical theory with hidden variables.

The sane conclusion is, of course, that we must finally do what all fully sane friends of Max Born did in 1926, take quantum mechanics seriously, and abandon "realism" (I don't mean political realism which is good but quantum realism which is bad!): only probabilities may be predicted and it makes no sense to talk about the "real" values of observables of a quantum system before these values are measured. Only results of experiments have a physical meaning.

Nevertheless, some people - for reasons that look completely irrational to me - still insist that it is plausible that "realism" holds and locality is what is violated. I find these statements completely bizarre because they contradict not only the spirit of quantum mechanics but they also contradict special relativity - and not just a little bit but in a strong way.

Relativity requires that the fundamental degrees of freedom - such as quantum fields - must evolve according to local and causal laws. This statement must be true with huge accuracy: it's not only beautiful but it has been experimentally validated. Getting this result approximately and "randomly" from a starting point that fundamentally disagrees with such a final outcome is equivalent to assuming that Jesus Christ's mother was a virgin: I apologize to my Christian readers for this metaphor.

Such an assumption is equivalent to a belief in huge miracles.

On the other hand, Zeilinger et al. now argue that they have falsified a large class of "nonlocal realist" theories, too, because the measured correlations are higher even than what "nonlocal realist" theories allow. I don't quite know how they can achieve such a goal. It is clearly a theoretical goal.

I think that every sane quantum physicist can predict the result of all these experiments and there can't be any new surprises here: quantum mechanics works and physics behind all these experiments is controlled by the same simple laws that give clear predictions to every setup. On the other hand, they must be using some "improved" version of Bell's theorem that also applies to some "nonlocal realist" theories, not only "local realist" theories as the original Bell's theorem. I don't know what this hypothetical improved version of the theorem is.

Nevertheless, I happily endorse their position that the results of all these experiments make any attempt to preserve "realism" - i.e. to deny the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics - highly contrived. The more you understand how these experiments work, the more you agree with us.

And that's the memo.

Probabilities of various theories: fundamental physics

This is the first set of estimates what are the probabilities that various theories are correct. The precise numbers don't mean much - the *exact* answer is actually either 0% or 100% in each case, nothing in between - but they may express a kind of "qualified guess". Everyone can add entries and/or comment on (vastly) different estimates of various numbers below. Let me start with fundamental physics.

• 99.9999% - The Standard Model is a perturbatively consistent quantum theory, from a mathematics viewpoint
• 99.9995% - Pure QCD is a non-perturbatively consistent quantum theory
• 99.999% - String theory is a mathematically consistent theory including quantum gravity, even non-perturbatively, at least in some highly supersymmetric vacua
• 99.999% - General relativity correctly predicts phenomena such as frame dragging and classical gravitational waves in the real world, at reasonable distance and other scales
• 99.995% - Black holes exist
• 99.99% - The Standard Model with neutrino masses is the correct description for all interactions of currently known particles in particle physics below 100 GeV with errors that can be parameterized as small corrections
• 99.99% - The semiclassical approach to general relativity is correct and its predictions such as the black hole entropy and the existence of gravitons and similar concepts may in principle be verified
• 99.95% - String theory in principle allows one to calculate properties of a supersymmetry-breaking semirealistic vacuum arbitrarily accurately
• 99.9% - The Big Bang, an expansion of the Universe from a very small size and huge density, is a correct description of its history, at least from the age of one minute or so
• 99.5% - The LHC will find a Higgs boson, elementary, composite, or otherwise - neutral, charged SUSY, or any other boson of this type
• 99% - Evaporating neutral black holes in the real world preserve information when described by the exact correct quantum mechanical model
• 95% - The standard model of cosmology including the cold dark matter and dark energy is correct up to small corrections - no qualitatively new large terms or concepts are necessary to explain the data
• 90% - Inflationary cosmology is a correct effective description of an earlier era of cosmology
• 85% - String theory is the correct unifying theory, i.e. when dust is settled, it will be clear that the same equations that describe our Universe more accurately than any other theory also imply the existence of the well-known 10-dimensional and 11-dimensional vacua
• 70% - Supersymmetry exists at the GUT scale or lower
• 60% - At very high energy scales, a GUT theory with unified gauge interactions becomes more natural zeroth approximation: GUT is correct
• 50% - Supersymmetry will be found at the LHC
• 40% - The Hartle-Hawking wavefunction or its generalization that will require the author(s) to cite Hartle and Hawking correctly predicts non-trivial features of the initial conditions of the Universe
• 35% - Eternal inflation can either be rigorously proven to be necessary from a complete theory, or it will lead to correct and verifiable quantitative predictions
• 30% - New elementary fermions or Z' gauge bosons will be identified below the TeV scale
• 20% - The anthropic selection will remain the only constraint on the value of the cosmological constant that will be accessible to theorists by 2100
• 15% - Cosmic strings exist and will be observed or produced by 2100
• 10% - The Higgs sector is described by a theory capturing the main ideas of the little Higgs theories and its variations
• 5% - Light axions exist and are responsible for some phenomena observed by 2100
• 2% - Features of the Randall-Sundrum warped geometry will be detected by the LHC or the following collider
• 2% - The acceleration of the Universe or the Pioneer anomaly or similar observable effects may be explained by a dramatic modification of general relativity at very long distances comparable to the Hubble scale, or very small accelerations at the same scale
• 1% - Some predictions of old large dimensions by ADD will be experimentally supported in the next 20 years
• 0.5% - Noncommutative geometry constructions at the level qualitatively not exceeding Alain Connes' existing papers can tell us something correct about particle physics that doesn't follow from effective field theory
• 0.2% - The LHC will produce evaporating black holes
• 0.2% - The LHC will produce excited string modes with a clear stringy pattern
• 0.1% - A model of cyclic or ekpyrotic Universe will be experimentally shown much more correct than any inflation-based cosmological model in the next 100 years
• 0.05% - New unknown light neutrino flavors exist
• 0.02% - Torsion or similar tensors generalizing minimal general relativity that seem unnatural from a particle physics perspective is physically relevant for our Universe
• 0.01% - Quasinormal modes "know" about characteristic quantum-gravitational phenomena that are not seen semiclassically
• 0.005% - Locality is violated more than by small higher-dimensional operators or exponentially tiny correlations associated with Hawking evaporation
• 0.002% - A discrete model without a continuum limit is strictly more fundamental and accurate a description of the world than any continuous model
• 0.002% - A model that studies quantum gravity separately from other sources and assumes that nothing beyond pure gravity exists will lead to true and valuable insights about the workings of the real world by 2100
• 0.001% - Doubly special relativity is a refinement of special relativity that becomes much more accurate in a wide class of phenomena
• 0.0005% - Basic postulates of quantum mechanics such as superposition principle and the method to obtain probabilities as squared amplitudes will be modified and the extension will describe a class of phenomena much more accurately than orthodox quantum mechanics
• 0.0002% - Loop quantum gravity is able to describe physics whose low-energy limit is general relativity while avoiding an infinite number of fine-tunings
• 0.0001% - Loop quantum gravity, with the metric as the only and well-defined degree of freedom and with quantized area, is a correct description of gravity in the real world at the Planck scale
• 0.000001% - One of the ESP phenomena measured in the Princeton lab actually exists and can be measured again with a similar equipment

If you carefully negate the sentences and subtract the numbers from 100%, you get new estimates. ;-)

See also climate change probabilities.

Identity of Va Tech Asian Gunman: Seung Hui Cho

As we said, the shooter was 조승희 ...
An author of two plays ... (thanks, Rae)

Fingerprints, Korean government, and his own note have confirmed the identity of the Korean shooter

It's horrible news right after my class. At least 32 people plus 1 monster were killed - mostly shot, but some of them chose to jump out of the window - at Virginia Tech University. Dozens of additional people are injured.



The previous shooting at Virginia Tech - last summer - was the work of William Morva: check his background.

The tragedy has become the worst college shooting incident in the history of the world, much worse than a similar incident at University of Texas 40 years ago when "only" 16 people died.

It's so stunning to imagine that a lunatic suddenly enters Jefferson 256 - our physics classroom at Harvard - and shoots everyone in the class.

Learning about the identity

Our preliminary answers on Monday 1:15 pm were 95% correct but the text below was repeatedly updated and it became accurate on Tuesday morning.



Emily Hilscher (18), the girlfriend and the first victim. Click to see her web space. In 2006, she described herself as being "alone".

The killer was a 6-foot tall male East Asian individual staying at a campus. The main suspect, the "most official" boyfriend of the crucial girl, was a student from nearby Radford University (where they just canceled a celebration) but this Gentleman was found alive on Monday, questioned, and released. I believe that it is this man who was dumped by the girlfriend two weeks ago and it is this man who has received his visa in Shanghai before he arrived to San Francisco on August 7th.

On the other hand, the shooter was Seung Hui Cho or Cho Seung Hui if you wish (=Jo Seung Hwee if you hate romanization), a 23 years old South Korean national with a green card (residence: Centerville, VA), and an English major and senior at Virginia Tech. He lived on campus in Harper Residence Hall which are female dormitories (!!!).

Thirty-five days ago, he purchased two guns - one 9 mm caliber handgun (namely Glock 19) and one .22 caliber pistol (namely Walther P-22) - and he wore jeans, a vest or a black leather jacket - probably a bulletproof vest - with too much ammunition in it as well as a maroon cap. Tape showing how he is buying the guns exists: to make this story a bit fine-tuned, these tapes are stored exactly for thirty-five days.



Ryan Clark, the 2nd victim. Click to see his web space.

In the morning around 7:15 am, Mr. Cho went to her dormitory at the fourth floor of the West Ambler Johnston Hall. He shot "his" girlfriend and then the residential assistant, Ryan Clark of Martinez, Georgia who was bi- and who may have dated Hilscher. They thought it was a localized "home shooting" so they didn't shut down the university. Mr. Cho has thus rearmed and continued to look for a new boyfriend of "his" girlfriend or other unlucky people in the engineering classrooms of the Norris Hall - see the picture above - a few hours later.



He didn't know the exact location, so he has visited a few classrooms and lined up all students against a wall. Around 9:20 am, he started with Norris 206 (probably a French course) and continued with Solid Mechanics 3154 in Norris 204. The instructor, a former NASA employee Liviu Librescu, tried to save the kids by blocking the door. But he was shot. One of the heroes of the day.



However, the worst massacre took place at 9:45 am in room 200 where the students were learning German 2105. He shot them one by one; yes, the professor, Jamie Bishop who was a son of science-fiction writer Michael Bishop, died first. My most profound condolences for his family, Jason Erik Lundberg, and other friends...

Finally, the calm animal who revealed no emotions whatsoever killed himself by a shot into his head once he was cornered.

Eyewitness reports
Less direct VA reports from BBC
MSNBC interviews (video)
Bryce's journal (a student in Virginia)
A boyfriend of Kate (who was injured)

The Asian guy above is just a photographer for a VT student newspaper, Shaozhuo Cui or Shao. The shooter looked different when the police got him: for example, a part of his face was already missing.

Other topics

• Has an E8 surfer solved everything?

Intelligent life right after Big Bang

George Smoot, a teacher of string theory and a very entertaining Nobel prize winner, has a cool theory that intelligent life existed a picosecond after the Big Bang. ;-)

So far, the details of his calculations don't quite work which is really the only reason why The Reference Frame is skeptical about his theory so far. ;-)

I feel that whenever not-yet-settled theories are discussed, estimates of the likelihood that they're valid should be mentioned and refined because there is a lot of confusion among the journalists what theories are likely and what theories are just highly unlikely speculations.

It may be a good idea to post a list with some of these probabilities for many theories to be valid.

Ladislav Adamec dies

Ladislav Adamec, the last prime minister of the socialist Czechoslovakia and a moderate, pro-perestroika politician from a mining family, died on Saturday at age of 80.

He was tolerated, to say the least, by the Civic Forum when the Velvet Revolution got started. When the velvet revolutionaries were not yet too ambitious, they were dreaming about being able to make Adamec the most powerful person in Czechoslovakia. ;-)

Democracy and the competition it brings is a good mechanism to find better politicians in the long term but it can't eliminate the fluctuations. When I look back, Adamec would get a much higher score than most leftist activists - and some leftist politicians - whom we can see today.

Gravity Probe B: frame-dragging twice smaller than resolution

Gravity Probe B, a \$700 million NASA satellite experiment with gyroscopes controlled from Stanford University, an experiment that started more than 40 years ago (the oldest physics experiment alive) and that was designed to verify the effect of frame-dragging predicted by general relativity, is still unable to say Yes or No. Rotating Earth should "drag" the space around with it and transfer some angular momentum from the Earth to other objects.



The observed change of the axis of rotation of the gyroscopes can clearly measure the geodetic effect with the accuracy of 1% but the predicted frame-dragging - a general relativistic effect that is the closest reminder of the Mach principle, a flawed principle that motivated Einstein to find a new theory of gravity but one that was eventually refuted - is about twice as small as their current error margin.

They hope to get better results by the end of 2007: see press release.

Leonhard Euler: 300th anniversary

Written three centuries after the birth of a famous 18th century string theorist



Leonhard Euler was born in Switzerland exactly 300 years ago. He introduced modern notation for many functions and sums, figured out how to exponentiate complex numbers and why exp(i.pi)+1=0 which is, according to Richard Feynman, the most remarkable formula in mathematics.

Euler has understood the calculus of variations and the derivation of Euler-Lagrange equations. The Euler-Bernoulli beam equation turned out to be critical for the design of the Eiffel tower. Euler has put Huygens' wave theory of light on firmer ground, thus peacefully reducing Newton's corpuscular authority.

Euler and his friend Bernoulli liked to debunk Leibniz's monadism, a fuzzy philosophy attempting to avoid quantitative laws. For similar reasons, Euler disliked the teachings of Christian Wolff that were "heathen and atheistic". Euler believed the Bible literally.

Euler and string theory

Euler was an eminent string theorist. He introduced the modern complex formalism for Fourier series describing the vibrations of a string and, as Larry pointed out, has solved a large number of partial differential equations relevant for oscillation of strings and drums (membranes).

Moreover, Euler has calculated the scattering amplitude B(u,v), also known as the Euler beta function, for four open-string tachyons 250 years before Veneziano. He has also computed the index of many moduli spaces of string-theoretical vacua, the so-called Euler characteristics.

Euler's favorite worldsheet approach to perturbative string theory were the so-called ghost pyramids. He was the first one who has calculated the key formula

• 1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + ... = +1/4

that counts that central charge of the ghost pyramid (up to a trivial extra factor of 32). The article about this identity is the featured article on the main page of Wikipedia today. A simple modification of the identity leads to the calculation of the zero point energy of a string and the critical dimension - calculations that Euler wasn't able to complete.

Euler has proven the simplest versions of the Euler-Ramanujan identities that follow from the fact that the tachyonic minimum solves the equations of motion of cubic string field theory. Martin Schnabl has used the Euler-Maclaurin formula to prove that his state was a solution of the cubic string field theory.

Euler has discovered three angles that parameterize a general SO(3) rotation and allow one to write down the path integral for a spinning top, something so incredible that Bert Schroer couldn't believe it as recently as in 2006.

There are more than fifty concepts named after Euler and I can't enumerate all of them here.

Appraisal

As you can see, Euler was quite an impressive mathematically-inclined string theorist who was ahead of his time. He counts as the most prolific mathematician of all time and a guy who wasn't stopped by blindness. I wonder whether back in the 18th century, aggressive crackpots were attacking Euler for not being sufficiently scientific just like they do today.

Via Cynthia.

An Inconvenient Truth ... or Convenient Fiction?

Steven Hayward is the star in a new documentary, one of the replies to An Inconvenient Truth.

• Part I, Part II

They showed those 50 minutes to audience in San Francisco and it was a success. I haven't yet seen it.

The other on-line skeptical movies are listed in the article about Doomsday Called Off.

Update: Unfortunately, AIToCF got pretty bad reviews from readers and writers of The Reference Frame. The star of the movie seems less consistent and less passionate than these protesters from a Boston rally this weekend:



More seriously, I think it's just awful to manipulate children in this way - in this case to support entirely insane policies to reduce CO2 emissions by 80 percent. Half of children between 7 and 11 years lose sleep because of this panic.

The people who are selling cigarettes to kids are treated as criminals: are the acts of the alarmists better for the kids' health? Let me say in advance that when the hysteria is over, I will think it is a good idea to prosecute the authors of this insanity.

Alien planet with water

Dry, gaseous, Jupiter-like planet HD 209458b somewhere in Pegasus, 150 light years from Earth, ...



... is the first exoplanet known to have water in its atmosphere according to indirect evidence based on spectral bumps found in computer simulations and compared with observations.

I leave it up to you to decide how far it is from the previous picture of the constellation to the following picture:



See preprint accepted for publication in ApJ or news.google.com.

An even better planet: possibly habitable Gliese 581c.

Global warming bets

BetUS.com, a gambling company, allows you to make a lot of bets about global warming. See

• article at LiveScience

that also contains a list. Their estimated probability that various places of the world will be under water within 5 years or so - as well as the probability that the sea levels will be rising in a mad, Al-Gore-like way - is between 0.1% and 1% with the exception of Florida that is virtually doomed - see the picture below.

Polar bears will go extinct by 2010 with probability 1%, too.

The U.S. government will announce, by the end of 2007, that "global warming has been proven by a flawless paper", with probability of 80%. The bookmakers estimate the probability 30% of the U.S. government's declaration, by the end of 2007, that "a flawless paper has proven that the warming is man-made".

Well, the assertions from the previous paragraphs are pretty likely because governments like to do a lot of idiotic things, almost by definition. ;-)



Figure 1: Florida after a 20-foot sea level rise projected by Al Gore. According to BetUS.com, this will happen by 2011 with probability 10%. ;-)

James Annan and Gavin Schmidt agree with your humble correspondent that all the catastrophic and otherwise unusual statements - about Florida submerged by 2015 or corn grown everywhere in Antarctica in a few years :-) - are absurd and their real probability is orders of magnitude below the probability indicated by BetUS.com who want to earn money from naive people such as Alexander Ač.

When it comes to numbers and gambling, it turns out that Al Gore's statements are as sensible as the prediction about Elvis Presley found alive on the Moon, as James Annan says. Well, it's hard to make bets against James if he actually agrees, whenever he abandons his professional hypocrisy, that all the predictions that drive the global warming hysteria and the funding of tens of thousands of people like himself are absurd. ;-)

And that's the memo.

Petra Němcová: Thai school works

Petra Němcová, a supersymmetric model, has survived the 2004 tsunami under rather drastic circumstances:

• See Petra's speech about her survival

At 3:30 of the video, you learn that she decided to trust the Universe - she really means string theory but doesn't want to make her talk overly technical - and she wasn't nervous at all although her life depended on a sequence of happy coincidences.

After she decided to trust the Universe, she was suddently - it's quite important that it was more than suddenly - released. :-) The last step in her Al Gore rhythm to survive was to catch a genus zero Feynman diagram - a tree - and save a few locals along the way.

Last month, she has finally gotten rid of that guy called James Blunt so she's now very happy. ;-) In Thailand, she just opened a school and a computer center. The kids were very excited and jumping around so her investment was probably a good one.

Radar excursion: visa denied

Two Czech lawmakers, a communist deputy and a Christian democratic senator, were denied U.S. visa for their trip to the Marshall Islands where they were invited to see how the missile defense radar works.

It is hard to avoid mixed, mostly negative feelings. It would be a kind of fun if a communist were denied the visa for being a communist except that it's apparently not the case. They were rejected simply because they didn't submit their documents early enough: for purely bureaucratic reasons.

I view it as a typical example of the system being overrun by uncontrollable bureaucracy. If the U.S. thought that the radar base were a good thing for its national security, it should be completely obvious that trivial formalities such as visas for foreign lawmakers who will help to decide about the fate of this base should be completely circumventable.

The fact that it's impossible to avoid these bureaucratic misunderstandings even under these highly special circumstances shows that something is wrong with the system. The U.S. government or ambassadors should have the right to unconditionally allow entry to the U.S. in special circumstances and this situation should be an example.

And that's the memo.

Gopakumar-Vafa invariants for the quintic at genus 51

Yesterday, Kirill Saraikin was talking about their work focusing on a generalization of the OSV conjecture to non-supersymmetric black holes. It was surprising - i.e. either unlikely or revolutionary - to many people that such a generalization should exist because these non-supersymmetric objects are not protected, according to the state-of-the-art understanding of protection.



The argument needed Nikita Nekrasov's unpublished extension of the topological string by one or two additional parameters corresponding to components of the graviphoton field strength in the 01 and 23 directions in the full string-theoretical spacetime. The statement that an additional subset of protected but non-supersymmetric quantities should exist was controversial and, as far as I can say, remains unsettled.

Duality seminar

Right now, Min-Xin Huang from Wisconsin talked about their methods to evaluate the topological A-model partition sum for various compact Calabi-Yau manifolds such as the quintic hypersurface in CP4 and other complete intersection algebraic varieties in weighted complex projective spaces. They start with the BCOV paper and the holomorphic anomaly equation and attempt to determine the integration constant - an ambiguity known as the holomorphic ambiguity - by imposing the right boundary conditions at special points of the moduli space such as the conifold point, Gepner point, or infinite complex structure limit.

It turns out that for the quintic, these considerations allow you to determine all the unknown coefficient and, indirectly, all the Gopakumar-Vafa invariants up to genus 51 diagrams although they have explicitly quantified the results using their laptop up to genus 26 only which is nevertheless sufficient to fill the whole hard disk and occupy your laptop's CPU unit for days. ;-)

Recall that the topological A-model partition sum is controlled by the worldsheet instantons and it thus counts the number of holomorphic curves of different genera and different degrees that can be embedded within a given Calabi-Yau manifold. These integers associated with the A-model are known as the Gopakumar-Vafa invariants and they are closely related to the Gromov-Witten invariants and, via a transformation, to Donaldson-Thomas invariants.

Note that 16 years ago, it was difficult to calculate the number of twisted rational cubics in the quintic. In fact, mathematicians got a wrong number, 2,682,549,425, while the physicists i.e. string theorists obtained the correct result of 317,206,375 by mirror symmetry. Today it's possible to calculate these invariants for curves whose degree is comparable to one hundred. Of course, the typical magnitude of these invariants is exponentially growing with a power of the genus.

Aneta Langerová: Hříšná těla, křídla motýlí

Aneta Langerová won the first Czech "American Idol" in 2004 and became a professional singer. The video above is her "Hříšná těla, křídla motýlí" - "Sinful Bodies, Butterfly Wings." See more videos from Aneta.

Vlastimil Horváth won the second Czech superstar in 2005 and turned into the most popular ethnic Roma in the Czech Republic.

Zbyněk Drda became the third Czech superstar in late 2006.

Yuri Gagarin: 46 years ago

On April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin said "Poyekhali" (Let's go) and became the first person who was liberated from the terrestrial gravity. As the Czech poster below says, "communism has opened the road towards the stars". :-)



Nowadays, the spiritual heritors of the Soviets may create posters saying that "environmentalism has opened the path back to the caves." :-)

As kids, we were always taught to be proud that the first country that Gagarin visited during his world tour after he returned from outer space was Czechoslovakia. Seventeen years after Gagarin, Vladimír Remek who is now a deputy in the European Parliament for the Czech Communist Party became the first non-Soviet non-American citizen in space.

REMEK stands for "Rychle Eééééé Mluvící Eééééé Kosmonaut" which translates as "Quickly Errrrrr Speaking Errrrrr Astronaut" (Qesea).

An official Czech song "Good afternoon, Mr Gagarin" is available in MP3. The official name of the song was actually "Honor to the astronaut". It took some time before Czechoslovakia adopted the Soviet terminology.



Honor to the Astronaut

(Jaromír Hnilička / Pavel Pácl,
translation L.M., sung by Gustav Brom 4/12/1961)

The whole world heard the news from the Soviets,
the whole world suspended all its chats.
The whole world jumped away from radios,
and it turned all its eyes to the skies.

Good morning, Mr major Gagarin,
we couldn't wait but now it is here.
The whole world drank wine red as your flag,
people were waving all of their hands.

2x Tell the guys who live on the stars,
tell the guys who live on the Moon.
Tell them the message from us humans,
that we will follow your steps soon.

I can't sing this fun song terribly well
because my voice is trembling like mad.
I have heard that you are twenty seven
and the world is as young as you are.

(In the translation, "Soviets" was chosen instead of "TASS", the Press Agency of the Soviet Union. I've exchanged "stars" and "Moon" to make "Moon" rhyme with "soon". Some articles were omitted to fit the syllables.)

When we mention Czech music and astronautics, most people know that Neil Armstrong played Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony on the Moon. It is much less known that the Discovery space shuttle crew including Don Thomas liked to play Jaroslav Vejvoda's famous polka, Roll Out the Barrels (= Rosamunde in German = Škoda lásky in Czech).

Rae Ann was somewhat surprised that there was jazz in Czechoslovakia. Well, there has been a lot of fun music, movies, and culture. For example, you should see what was probably the #1 hit of the early 1980s. It was nothing else than Girls from our Kindergarten. They enumerate a lot of female names and describe how sexy the girls were and how they were getting older - but when you look back, those girls from the kindergarten were still the most attractive ones. :-) You can clearly see that there's no politics in it.

When they would make a cool fairy-tale, such as Three Wishes For Cinderella, Karel Gott would sing both the Czech version as well as the German version of the title song.

UK: pay students to study science

In the U.K., the scientific literacy and the number of students who study science is collapsing and some people started to think about the possibility to pay 500 pounds to students who will take STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).

• BBC

Well, it's a kind of social engineering but it may be in the interest of the society to have people who are literate which may justify this unusual policy. Britain's increasing scientific illiteracy recently became obvious also because the two infamous crackpot books about physics were accepted even more uncritically than in other countries.

Deforestation may cause cooling

If you like and admire ;-) three-dimensional climate models coupled to carbon-cycle models, you may want to know that according to one of these models,

• deforestation at higher latitudes may cause cooling

as large as 10 Fahrenheit degrees. The results of their analysis indicate that cutting tropical forests may release CO2 and warm up the atmosphere in average, while for most forests that are far enough from the equator, changes of albedo (forests absorb more light) and evaporation (including evaporation from leaves of plants) win and cause a net cooling effect.



The work by Bala et al. is published in a new online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I would personally recommend people not to accept such results of climate models too abruptly. On the other hand, it seems likely that the existing models overestimate the role of CO2 in driving the temperature, so if the albedo part of these models is more accurate, the qualitative result holds anyway.

To summarize: if you believe climate models and if you think that cooler Earth is better than warmer Earth, selling chainsaws to Russia, Canada, and Sweden is a way to go. You may be able to cool down Earth by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

Just like animal right activists want to kill baby polar bears, it is plausible that treehuggers who have become fighters against the climate change will advocate destruction of Northern forests. Isn't it ironic? ;-) Well, I happen to be an old-fashioned right-wing environmentalist who finds baby polar bears cute and who has planted a lot of trees in the Bohemian forest, and I would certainly oppose cutting the beautiful Scandinavian forests that I saw a decade ago.

Via JunkScience.

MiniBooNE refutes LSND

Update: there has been a lot of confusion sparked mostly by rumors that MiniBooNE has seen something exciting. This posting has been edited many times. After the dust settled, it is almost clear that the rumors were just false and the result is as uninteresting as possible, is only able to falsify a simple and silly two-flavor oscillation with a sterile neutrino, and can't say anything else, indicating that the normal three-flavor Standard Model picture is correct as almost everyone thought.

I have erased several comments that only increased the amount of confusion and changed the filename to temporarily break links from crackpots' blogs. I apologize to everyone who was affected by any confusion in previous versions of this article, and I hope that the text below is now more or less OK and perhaps the clearest report on the Internet:

See my 1998 notes that contain almost everything you need to know about neutrinos: not much has changed for 9 years although people different from your humble correspondent were less certain about most of these things than I was

Evidence for several types of neutrino oscillations has been known for a decade or more. That includes atmospheric neutrino oscillations (in which muon neutrinos get "lost"), solar neutrino oscillations (in which electron neutrinos get "lost"), and a lab experiment called LSND in Los Alamos.



A simple oscillation in between two neutrino flavors - electron neutrino and muon neutrino - was a natural candidate theory to explain the observations but it couldn't agree with details of the LSND data which is why the LSND results were questioned. The next-to-simplest seemingly natural candidate model was a two-flavor oscillation that would include a sterile neutrino, a new kind of "fourth" neutrino without a charged partner.

Mainstream physicists like myself have always considered sterile neutrinos to be an unjustified construct. Such a particle never emerges from string theory - it seems fair to say that string theory predicts that there can't be any sterile neutrinos - but even outside string theory, models with such a particle feel unnatural. If you add such a new spinor field - which is ugly - it is expected to get a huge (GUT) mass anyway. There's no reason to expect a light sterile neutrino.

Today, Fermilab's MiniBooNE experiment has confirmed that the simplest model suggested by the "anomalous" LSND signal was incorrect and a more subtle explanation than the simple two-flavor oscillation is necessary: the reason is, if I simplify a bit, that they didn't observe any electron neutrinos. You can now view the weak LSND signal as a fluke if not an error. The message is: forget about the the LSND signal.



The result therefore rules out the possibility that the observed oscillation from LSND is a two-flavor oscillation involving a new sterile neutrino. See

• PhysORG.com
• Eurekalert.org

I find these self-congratulatory reports extremely confusingly written - neither of them, in fact, says clearly that they have refuted LSND (this very binary answer is unclear) - so it was not clear to me for a while whether their observations were compatible with a three-flavor oscillation or some other multi-flavor oscillations including antiparticles. Now I think that they are compatible, as you would expect. One could be afraid that they don't want to clearly say that LSND was bogus, partly because the people in these two collaborations overlap. That's not quite honest.

The only thing that seems clear to me is that the phenomena studied by LSND and MiniBooNE can't be explained by a simple oscillation between two eigenstates if you measure things properly. They have shown that the most drastic conclusions from the LSND results are wrong but they don't seem to offer any real conclusions except for refuting the significance of the previous LSND signal: nothing has changed about this observation for several hours.



There are too many uncertainties here which is why titles like "Fermilab experiment resolves long-standing neutrino question" seem inappropriate to me.

There will be many talks about their results today and tomorrow - including a talk at Harvard - and the situation will surely clear up soon. My guess is that the three-flavor oscillation as described by the Standard Model simply works fine - they are just unable to say it clearly - and any evidence of new physics suggested by LSND was flawed. There is no good reason whatsoever to expect any new physics in the neutrino oscillations except for the trivial fact of the existence of these oscillations which sane physicists have known to be a fact for a decade or more.

While I think it's obvious that their results are a big setback for all proponents of sterile neutrinos, they don't hesitate to propose a new experiment - LENS - with a special focus to study possible sterile neutrinos. See PhysORG.com. Sorry to say but it reminds me of the Woit-Smolin type of "falsifiable" pseudoscience whose goal is to generate stupid predictions and test them - while paying tens of millions of dollars - and never care about the results of the experiments.

Science, as I understand it, is about trying to find out how the world actually works, instead of creating unlikely fairy-tales how it could work with the goal of getting predictions out of these fairy-tales that are as spectacular and easily visible as you can get. ;-)



When you generate silly theories and make and test silly predictions, critics of science like Woit and Smolin will confirm that you're doing good science. Sorry, I won't. Scientists must actually care what has already been measured if it has already been settled. Their opinions must be influenced by results of careful experiments, calculations, and arguments.

In this sense, I think that designing expensive experiments to test sterile neutrino models is a bad experimental science simply because sterile neutrino theories are bad theoretical physics and it is very unlikely that such an expensive experiment will bring at least something interesting. Today, LSND seems as a controversial investment that only brought a fake signal while MiniBooNE could only show that the LSND signal wasn't real but it couldn't say anything else. I hope that LENS will say at least something else even in the likely case that sterile neutrinos don't exist. Otherwise I think it would be even worse an investment than LSND and MiniBooNE because it would be a repeated bad investment.

Moreover, I really dislike their comments that is should now become really exciting to test the sterile neutrinos even more accurately. Sterile neutrinos are silly and the news today have strengthened this statement. An honest scientist will take these observations into account instead of designing ever more unnatural theories with sterile neutrinos and ever more expensive experiments to test these bad theories. If funding concerns drive them into twisting reports about their results, it's bad and it remotely resembles climate science.

And that's the memo.

Their new preprint
Dr Heather Ray from Los Alamos reports here
Her text as a Jan 2007 preprint

Chaotic FAS meeting

Before the Harvard's FAS faculty meeting on Tuesday, the professors had received a 25-page PDF booklet containing various proposed amendments for the general education legislation that should be discussed on the meeting.

My immediate comment was that the length, repetitiveness, and chaos in that booklet shows a complete lack of leadership at Harvard these days. It would take at least five hours to discuss it, especially because most of the amendments are highly polarizing. The meeting had to be chaotic, too.

It would be a waste of time to go there even if I really cared what they adopt. ;-)

Needless to say, I was almost right except that I forgot to add the time needed to argue about grammar. ;-) As

• The Crimson

reports, they adjourned a meeting filled with procedural chaos after 90 minutes and will continue next week. They didn't even get to the most interesting topics.

Is there a history?

For example, they spent one hour with arguments whether the "Culture and Belief" category of courses should mention "history". Now, I wouldn't care about the wording but on the other hand, it is absolutely obvious that one can't comprehend anything in depth about culture and belief without understanding the historical traditions that inform them, as Prof Hamburger said, just like you can't properly understand biology without knowing how life evolved, as I add.

But I am afraid that the majority of the people who attend the meetings are postmodern scholars for whom subjects such as history are too hard sciences already. These social sciences deal with facts which is no good for them. As you might guess, a majority has decided that history has no room in culture and belief.

Even if someone studies culture, belief, law, political science or anything like that in the context of the contemporary era, it is simply necessary for her to know (some) history. History provides us with the empirical material that is needed to judge where various ideas lead and whether they are good and important or not, after all. If you don't know any history, your opinions about the present (and the future) are no more than unsubstantiated beliefs.

If you build a political or spiritual ideology without paying attention to history, you are bound to repeat many mistakes from the history of your civilization. Needless to say, that's exactly what the postmodernists want.

Science as a postmodernism's slave

One of the proposals that wasn't discussed was the idea of a large portion of sciences - including the whole department of physics as well as Steven Pinker (would it be really so difficult for the physics department to simply sign under Pinker's proposal that includes a well worded explanation?) - to scrap a paragraph describing details of the science education (both for life sciences as well as physical sciences) that says something like this:

• Whenever it's appropriate, the science courses must explain that all of the scientific truth is relative and depends on societal pressures. The science instructors must masochistically admit that their "science" is just a random result of oppression of minorities by white, male, and sometimes Jewish oppressors such as Darwin and Einstein. All of science education must lead to increasing food production for the working class in the next 5 years [added to please Peter Woit].

Indeed, this is the cutting-edge feminist/Smolinian crap whose spirit you can find in the currently proposed rules. The extremely soft "scientists" have simply spread like an illness and they're threatening to kill the very basic features of science education at every single school in the world.

And that's the memo.

LHC: the time machine 1,2

If you have 5+6 minutes, click "Play".



The video starts with archaeologists and continues with the 14-TeV-scale archaeologists who will use the LHC as a time machine to travel 15 billion years to the past. :-)

Also, the movie explains that the LHC must discover the God particle and then all the superpartners.

Full links to both parts of the video:

• LHC: the time machine 1 (5 mins)
• LHC: the time machine 2 (6 mins)
  

You will also find other LHC videos in the sidebar of YouTube such as

• ATLAS experiment part 1 (10 mins)
• ATLAS experiment part 2 (08 mins)

Shockingly enough, the two-part movie above is also available in Czech.

Another movie about the ATLAS experiment follows the template of Star Wars:

• Episode 1..... (7 minutes)
  
• Episode 2a... (8 minutes)
• Episode 2b... (6 minutes)
  

Incidentally, the temperature of the LHC dropped below the microwave background temperature for the first time today: 1.9 Kelvins.

See also videos about CMS and ALICE at the LHC.

Mooney & Nisbet: science should be deliberately politicized

The Science magazine has published a highly controversial text written by Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney whose main message is similar to the message of an equally controversial article about post-normal science by Mike Hulme. Neither Nisbet nor Mooney is a scientist but they are widely viewed by the public as spokespeople of science.

If you don't have subscription, a large portion of their text, starting with the word "Issues", can be found e.g. here.

The authors argue that the laymen don't care about any technical details and scientists should accept this fact and "frame" information to make it "relevant to different audiences" i.e. to define controversies so that they "resonate with core values and assumptions". One of their "great" examples how to do so is the recent decision of some creationist Evangelical leaders to include the climate change orthodoxy as a part of religious morality. Rev. Richard Cizik has thus become a role model for all scientists! ;-)

What Nisbet and Mooney suggest is dangerous and despicable. Don't get me wrong: it is very clear that the public discourse has indeed been evolving exactly in the direction that they like. But it's a wrong direction that should be reverted. The only legitimate way to frame science is to make it accurate enough so that it can appear on the Reference Frame. ;-)

There are many examples of this undesirable dynamics: whole fields of science have become heavily politicized: oversimplified political labels became more important than detailed and fair analyses. While climate change and, to some extent, bioengineering are the two most prominent examples, some people have actually tried to politicize even fields that are as unpolitical as you can get, such as quantum gravity and high-energy physics.

Certain people are indeed "framing" their account to fool the least educated audiences and they try to make the fate of otherwise extremely technical and specialized scientific questions depend on cheap emotional and irrational clichés, naive philosophical preconceptions, prevailing political streams of segments of the society, fundamentalist oversimplified interpretations of notions such as empiricism or diversity, fear, and compassion.

Most laymen, indeed, don't care whether the metric tensor is the only degree of freedom at the Planck scale but they care about the impact of various scientific controversies on their life and on their moral system. The critics of science - which includes both creationists as well as e.g. the recent critics of high-energy physics - have thus been "framing" the "public discussion" in such a way that the social feelings and emotions become primary and the technical questions become secondary or irrelevant.

Al Gore is trying hard to transform climate science from a science to a moral issue.

OK, I am from the old school in which political, ideological, and emotional arguments based on values shared by groups of people simply don't belong to science. They are impurities in science and the people whose goal is to spread these impurities are, indirectly, impurities themselves.

Their attitude is all wrong. If the society is going to avoid a serious setback that would lead our civilization back to the Middle Ages, scientists must fight against this tendency that Mooney and Nisbet actively promote. Scientists must actively say that Mooney and Nisbet are polluting science by undesirable political elements. Whenever they're active, scientists must try as much as they can to teach the public to think scientifically and rationally, at least about scientifically loaded issues.

It is very clear that the average laymen have always been thinking less scientifically than the scientists. They are still doing so and they will think less scientifically than the scientists in the future: this fact is true by definition - I mean the definition of a scientist. But I think it is clear in what direction the amount of scientific flavor in their approach should evolve in the optimistic scenario: it should increase.

Mooney and Nisbet propose that scientists should, on the contrary, adopt the mostly ideological and superficial approach to the truth. Scientists themselves should speak in such a way that politics is ahead of science and ahead of its technical questions in particular, they argue. Answers should be pre-determined by core values and assumptions, they claim. This is an extremely pernicious proposal.

It may be an attractive idea for certain political activists to politicize science because most scientists are leftists and Mooney in particular likes the idea that science will become another slave in the sometimes unholy political struggles of the Left: Mooney is the author of the "Republican War on Science."

The very title of the book is a textbook example of politicization of science. Of course, Mooney can always argue, just like Lee Smolin, that the title is just a collection of typos introduced by the publisher. ;-)

You might think that a dishonest presentation of the scientific results may help you or help the world. But I assure everyone that at a slightly longer time frame, the effects of such policies - if they became official and justifiable attitudes by the societal standards - would be very counterproductive for mankind regardless of the political identification.

I urge everyone to denounce their toxic proposals.

Stem cell research: morality vs science

Eric Berger (SciGuy) has written a thoughtful reply to Mooney's and Nisbet's suggestions. In a discussion with your humble correspondent, he reminded me that parts of science such as stem cell research depend on the public perception. I replied:

Dear Eric,

thanks for your reply. I agree that the expansion of the stem cell research and other activities depends on the public opinion. Moreover, I think that it is correct that it depends on the public opinion.

Why? It is because I think that the question whether it is right to clone embryos and do other things with them is indeed a moral question - one that can't be settled by science. Just like the public opinion and "core values and assumptions" shouldn't have the power to control what answers scientists find in their search for the scientific truth, the opinions of scientists shouldn't have the power to determine what is moral and what is immoral - questions that are beyond the ability of science to answer.

Now, I would of course agree that the approach of some people to bioengineering is based on sentiments that a scientist probably views as unscientific myths. But the people have the right to have these sentiments and in democracy, they have the right to use them to influence policies even without any need to prove their knowledge of biology.

One more thing: as cold scientists, we could perhaps calculate and imagine what would happen if we had policies that e.g. kill weak and sick children. From a scientific viewpoint, there's nothing impossible about these scenarios and we could think about them. But we are also humans, not just scientists, and I choose these policies to be unacceptable to consider. Other people's tolerance may be lower and they find stem cell research to be too much already. I am sometimes not sure myself. They have the right for these sentiments, don't they?

The way to improve the situation is to try to educate and spread the truth as it is. If some arguments are difficult, scientists should try to explain that the explanation is difficult and people should learn how to become more immune against cheap propaganda. The quality of the public debate should increase, not decrease. If science can't determine the answers to some questions, scientists should admit that they can't determine the answers. Everyone should learn that scientists don't necessarily have answers to all questions and scientists shouldn't feel any pressure to pretend otherwise.

People should be led to appreciate wisdom and knowledge and the atmosphere in the society should be such that the people who understand certain questions naturally enjoy a high degree of respect whenever these questions are considered.

There will always be people who decide about many scientific questions by following superficial criteria. We won't change that simply because some questions will always be too difficult for a majority and many people will always have other interests than the scientific truth. Allowing incorrect and inaccurate information to become powerful may be helpful in one particular situation but in the next one, we can pay a very high price for it. It is a flawed and unscientific long-term strategy.

I wrote that people who misunderstand some technicalities will always be around. But hopefully, there will also be people who look for answers by the scientific method, following the usual scientific standards and values, including the extreme desire for accuracy and fairness. Let's not allow Mr. Mooney and Mr. Nisbet to change this fact.

Sean Carroll has also reacted to the proposals.

Carbon dioxide & 800-year lag behind temperature

How alarmists think

As we have explained in 2006, Vostok ice core records show that the carbon dioxide concentration averaged over a few centuries has been correlated with temperature at least for half a million of years. However, we know for sure that the temperature was the cause and the CO2 concentration was its consequence, not the other way around. It follows that the greenhouse effect hasn't been important in the last half a million of years.

There are many ways to see it. The 800-year lag is the most popular one, it has been featured in the Global Warming Swindle (especially in this two-minute-long segment), and we will discuss it below. However, there are other ways to see that the influence of temperature on the concentration of gases has been more important than any influence in the opposite direction. For example, the ice core records show that the concentration of methane was correlated with temperature, too. If the CO2 concentration were the primary cause, we would have no explanation why the CH4 concentration was also correlated. In fact, CO2 and CH4 play the very same role in the ice core records. If some combination of them determined the temperature, we would still have no explanation why these two concentrations were correlated with one another.

Moreover, easy reasoning can be used to show that the ability of oceans to store gases decreases with increasing temperature and this effect is clearly much stronger than the greenhouse effect.

The 800-year lag

However, the most popular - and the most straightforward - explanation of the direction of the causal relationship is the fact that in all cases, the CO2 concentration only changed its trend roughly 800 years after temperature had done the same thing. There have been many papers that showed this fact and incidentally, no one seems to disagree with it. For example, a recent paper by Lowell Stott et al. in Science (2007) showed that 19,000 ago, when the last ice age started to go away, CO2 lagged by about 1,000 years, too.

Every sane person knows that this detailed insight implies that the greenhouse effect couldn't have been among the most important effects. Not only the ice core data fails to provide us with evidence supporting the greenhouse theory of the climate; it provides us with strong evidence against it.

The greenhouse effect has been much less important than outgassing. Although we add more CO2 than what Earth has seen for millions of years, the small characteristic importance of the greenhouse effect probably wins.

For whatever reason, some people are not willing to accept this obvious conclusion. That's why they invent various bizarre verbal constructs to circumvent the otherwise inevitable conclusion. The whole "group" at RealClimate.ORG has agreed that there was a lag. But they say that in the first 800 years when the influence of temperature on CO2 is manifest, it was indeed temperature that drove the gases. But in the remaining 4200 years of the trend, it was surely the other way around: CO2 escalated the warming, they say.

Everyone who has basic understanding of feedback theory knows that what they talk about is a textbook example of a positive-feedback system, and if the climate were such a system, the mutually supportive interactions would lead to exponentially escalating temperatures in one of the possible directions. That's clearly not observed in the data and the positive-feedback hypothesis is thus falsified.

The list of people who understand basics of feedback theory includes Jeff who would like to believe the RealClimate.ORG guys except that he has found their rebuttal "incredibly lame, and, in [his] opinion, plain wrong." So he gave a detailed, technical version of my argument above. He also concluded that the hypothesis that CO2 actually helps to regulate the temperature is much more consistent with the data and he asked the owner of an alarmist blog called Reasic what's the answer and whether there is some other evidence for the greenhouse-driven theory of the climate that could replace this obviously wrong argument based on the ice core correlations.

Reasic answers

What answer did he get? Reasic first mentions several rudimentary facts about the greenhouse effect and what kind of electromagnetic radiation it affects. These comments have clearly nothing to do with the direction of the causal relationship in the ice core records and with Jeff's rather sophisticated concerns. Reasic nevertheless adds a paragraph about the absence of any doubts. In my opinion, there can be no doubts that the reader who would think that the relevance of the greenhouse effect has been proven in this particular Reasic's paragraph should see her doctor.

But it gets even better. Reasic tries to answer the first paragraph that talks about the 800-year lag. The alarmist blog says:

• The idea that this lag somehow debunks the theory of anthropogenic global warming did not originate from the scientists who discovered the lag. It has come from right-wing pundits and skeptics.

Very relevant argument. I am sure that Jeff will be impressed. :-) This kind of "argument" could be good enough for something in between orangutans and chimpanzees. How does Reasic support the statement? Well, the website tells us that the paper that reported the lag contained the following sentence:

• ... is still in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing ...

You have heard the holy word. Well, what Reasic fails to grasp is that science - including experiments, calculations, and arguments - must be reproducible. If an argument can be shown to be manifestly wrong by a careful analysis now, it really doesn't matter whether it's written in one paper or two. Also, it doesn't matter whether the authors of a flawed assertion have previously made some experimental discoveries. These two things have nothing to do with each other. When the Bible used to determine the ultimate truth, the rules of the game may have been different. But times have changed.

Sorry, Reasic. This sentence of that paper is manifestly wrong and one could even speculate that it was added to satisfy politically biased reviewers or co-authors of the article that revealed rather strong evidence against the greenhouse theory of the climate.

Concerning Jeff's main comment about the unobserved positive feedback, Reasic says that he or she is no expert but he or she answers anyway:

• First, some unknown event triggers the warming (and there are several theories on what this event is).

Maybe it's Gaia. At any rate, the main observed features of the graphs and their causes are not what the politically correct people interested in the climate should look at. They should look at the featureless parts of the graphs :-) that carry no information but where Gaia can conveniently hide with all of Her theories and all of Her prophets and their disciples.

• Then, the warming triggers a mixing of the deep ocean, which releases CO2 (a process known as “outgassing”).

Well, if warming of the middle troposphere directly triggers motion in deep ocean, I suppose that this remarkable synchronization was organized by cell phones. ;-) But note that Reasic can spell "outgassing": that's really impressive!

• There is a finite amount of CO2 in the deep ocean, so CO2 cannot be released into the atmosphere indefinitely.

This is another really cute comment. Most kids in the kindergarden will agree with me that there is much more material in the ocean than in the atmosphere. Air is the light substance inside the bubbles from bubbly fu*k - how do I translate this Czech word into English? - while water is heavy. And some of the most educated kids will even know that the oceans contain 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere. Search for 50 times at this page.

The idea that their hypothetical positive-feedback instability would stop growing because the ocean runs out of CO2 is really entertaining. It's like a very fat woman on a diet who has 50 cakes in her (rotating) fridge and who simply loves to eat cakes. The more she eats, the more she loves it. But after she eats one half of the first cake, she decides that she is running out of cakes and stops. While it's completely silly, Reasic offers us several more sentences with the very same content:

• Also, it is believed that the 800-year period is also the mixing time for the deep ocean, further solidifying this theory. So, there is a limit to the amount of natural CO2 that can be released, making a never-ending cycle of temperature increase unlikely.

And some of the alarmist readers are grateful for these great arguments! Well, one person's waste is another person's cake.

And that's the memo.

P.S.: Eric Steig has created another meaningless text composed of lies and fog about this topic. Unlike others, he even wants to question the fact that the lag is there. Instead, he argues that CO2 "leads" the temperature variations on "historical "timescales. I am pretty sure that he must realize that what he writes is a downright lie. There doesn't exist a single example of a correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature in which CO2 would "lead" temperature. Such an opposite relationship didn't occur in the glacials and interglacials and it was not a part of the modern history either. The modern, post-little-ice-age warming started well before significant emissions of CO2. I wonder how stupid the people who buy these obvious lies must be. The people who spread these lies - like Eric Steig - are criminals who should be arrested before it's too late.

Bonus climate articles on The Reference Frame

• Viscount Monckton & global warming fears
• Warming and cooling decided CO2 and CH4 concentrations, not the other way around
• IQ2 US verbal fight: sceptics defeated alarmists
• Temperature-sunspot correlation
• 2006: a year of alarmist setbacks
• 2006: coolest among last five years

LIGO: nothing

LIGO sets new upper bounds and reports that it is very likely (90+ percent confidence level) that there are less than 5 bursts per month of a certain kind - counted using the frequentist paradigm - that they could measure: preprint.

NPR on LHC

Figure 1: A decay of the God particle in the CMS detector. Simulated, so far.

See:

• National Public Radio on the LHC
• LHC on Wikipedia
• LHC home page
• Clifford Johnson's report
  

Via Asymptotia.

Click the category "lhc" below to see dozens of articles about the LHC, its experimental prospects, why the doomsayers are wrong, how it works, many other videos, and so forth.

Reviving Aral Sea

In 1918, engineers in the Leninist Russia decided that the Aral Sea was a "nature's error". According to their project, both rivers that fed it had to be diverted and used for irrigation in order for the Soviet Union to grow watermelons, cotton, rice, and cereals. Crappy irrigation canals were built since the 1930s and in the 1960s, the lake started to shrink. In 1968, a Soviet engineer explained that evaporation of the Aral Sea was inevitable.

In the mid 1980s, when I was a kid, our anti-communist teachers didn't care about Soviet lakes but the pro-regime teachers would often sadly suggest that the Aral Sea was surely going do die. We didn't have to memorize its location. Sad.



Well, it turned out that the real nature's error were the communists but their most visible wrongdoings may probably be fixed, after all.

The area of the lake shrunk to 40% and the volume to 20% of the original values and the Aral Sea dropped from the 4th lake to the 8th lake in the world. What do you think happens with salinity if you reduce the volume five-fold? Indeed, it increases almost five-fold, from 10 g/l to about 45 g/l. The concentration of all possible poisons jumps, too. The cancer rate around the lake thus increased ten times, together with tuberculosis. Fisherman and the rest of economy started to die, too.

In 1990, BBC called these changes the world's worst disaster. These were times when BBC had many sane employees.

Freedom plus geo-engineering work wonders

This description of the newest developments comes from Benny Peiser. An $86 million dam project that started in 2001 has already increased the level of the lake from 30 meters to 38 meters on the Northern, Kazakhstan's side and 40% of the water has already returned: see BBC 2007. At 42 meters, the lake may become viable.



Another $126 million loan from the World Bank will fund one more dam that will return water to Aralsk. Chances are that the Aral Sea will be almost what it used to be - except for some of the species that went extinct.

Let me nention that spending $200 million during a decade for something that was called the world's worst disaster in 1990 is pretty absurd in a world that wastes around $3,000 billion per decade on absurd and manifestly futile policies to "fight the climate change". Yes, global warming - I mean the religion - already swallows 15,000 times more than the world's worst catastrophe.

I urge all sane people with some common sense to realize the absurdity of this comparison. I urge all billionaires who read this blog - and there's quite a couple of them - to at least pay Kazakhstan the second dam so that it is no longer a loan but a gift. Richard Branson - yes, I mean exactly you, don't hide - what do you think? What else do you want to do with your $8 billion? Or do you want to give all the money to insane projects of your idiotic friend?

That is the question.

Decoupling N=8 d=4 supergravity

Jacques Distler reviews the recent paper of Green, Ooguri, and Schwarz about (or against) decoupling of the maximal supergravity in d=4.



The essence of the argument is trivial: one can't send the masses of all monopoles to infinity in the four-dimensional Planck units because the pairs of electromagnetically dual monopoles are inversely related to each other.

There are other ways to show that one can't decouple supergravity from string theory exactly, non-perturbatively. For example, black hole microstates must appear as poles of the scattering amplitudes and their mass (absolute value) starts by something comparable to the Planck mass.

However, I happen to think that this fact doesn't imply that N=8 supergravity can't be perturbatively finite. The supergravity non-stringy calculations should be viewed e.g. as M-theory compactified on the rectangular seven-torus self-dual under the maximum number of U-dualities - which is equivalent to IIB string theory at self-dual radii under T-duality at the self-dual coupling.

You can't decouple SUGRA exactly but it seems plausible that you can decouple it to all orders in perturbation theory.

Nashville, Tennessee: record cold

The city of the Holy Prophet in Nashville, Tennessee has seen its coldest April day in recorded history and the coldest Easter in recorded history: 24 degrees F from 1940 wasn't cold enough (by 1 deg F).

Other parts of Tennessee have only tied the records from 1982 on Sunday morning. The slightly exceptional reading in Nashville can thus be attributed to the Gore effect. Large portions of Southeast and Midwest have approached the record low temperatures, too. Asheville, Arizona has also broken the record. Because these record-breakers end with "ville" and are supposedly smaller towns, you may guess that the urban heat effect plays a role, too.



Unwelcome snow has cancelled or delayed many flights in Halifax, Nova Scotia and postponed (again) Indians-Mariners game in Cleveland, Ohio: the picture of the Seattle baseball players is from Sunday (yesterday). Another game in Pennsylvania was also postponed because of snow.



In Denver, Colorado, snow hops away - but on the other hand, more may drift in. Beware of snow and ice on I-90 around Syracuse, New York on Monday morning. Truro, Canada received over 1 foot of snow during the weekend. Snow has left 27,000 people in Texas without power. Snow advisory was issued for today in Oregon. In Maine, they have good skiing conditions.

Chamail Chalaf killed

Chamail Chalaf was a journalist with Radio Free Europe / Radio Free Iraq, an American radio station with headquarters in Prague - since 1995 when it was moved from Munich.



She was dreaming about the best possible future for Iraq. The mother of three daughters was kidnapped on Tuesday and her body was found on Thursday: she was shot in her head. Almost 100 journalists were killed since 2003; about 20% of them were non-Iraqis.

She seems to be the kind of journalists whom I respect. Sadly, she is no longer around. Unfortunately, these people have much lower life expectancy than the global warming journalists: this sentence is exactly equivalent to the previous one.

Terror speech codes: EU goes 1984

Meanwhile, the European Union has approved a new secret lexicon - a speech code how all the official spokespeople of the member countries should talk about the Islamic terrorists.



For example, the term "Islamic terrorism" should be banned and replaced by something like "terrorism that justifies its acts by Islam above a tolerable level". I kid you not. :-) Also, the word "jihad" should disappear because it is considered to be a "spiritual struggle" by "most" Muslims.

I think it is kind of crazy that the officials in Brussels think that they can create secret lexicons and all public representatives in the whole continent will respect it. My optimistic guess is that e.g. no Czech politician will follow such an inherently non-democratic restriction. More drastically, I feel that it would be a treason if a Czech politician were controlled by secret agreements signed in Brussels, and according to the valid laws, he or she could be prosecuted.

For example, the prime minister Mr Mirek Topolánek prefers this gesture. ;-)

Provocative comments about Romanies

The deputy prime minister, Mr Jiří Čunek, the current leader of the Christian Democratic Union, has answered a question whether other people should receive the same subsidies as gypsies. He said that "they would have to get a suntan, mess up their families, put up fires on the town squares, and only then some politicians would think that they are really miserable people."



This comment, while based on some reality, is a painfully xenophobic and populist one: the second adjective is true because he expressed sentiments shared by 90% of Czechs or so. This guy continues to be supported by his Christian Democratic Union and the prime minister prefers to keep him in the government. Greens disagree.

President Klaus has criticized the words as unacceptable populism that builds on the prejudices of no small part of the Czech public.

I personally find it dangerous if emotions against a group of people - any group of people - are supported by oversimplified arguments. Also, fanning hatred is a crime in Czechia - and some gypsies' NGOs are already suing the deputy PM. The gypsies' life is not easy: for example, about 20 percent of them have regular jobs. I think that it is mostly about them but it is not purely about them and no member of the "majority" society should be overly happy about the status quo. Also, I feel that the subsidies may be cheaper than the harm that the society would face if these subsidies didn't exist. Subsidies are usually wrong but if they're justifiable in some case, the example of gypsies is the best example.

On the other hand, Mr. Čunek argues that one of his goals in the government is to establish conditions in which many gypsies will start to work. If he could do it without leading hundreds to death by starvation, it would of course have to be applauded. But it's just not easy and no politician should create the impression that various things like that are easy.

NetDisaster.COM

If your speakers don't produce a huge amount of noise and if there are no Reference Frame protestors with banners walking across your screen, it is because you haven't yet clicked at this NetDisaster.COM link.

Happy Easter

Full screen

Richard Lindzen in Newsweek: Why so gloomy?

There's no such thing as a "perfect" temperature

In the new issue of Newsweek, Prof Richard Lindzen of MIT explains that climate has always been changing, there is nothing special about one temperature as opposed to other temperatures, models can't be trusted just because someone says that he doesn't know another, correct explanation, and the CO2 growth or a hypothetical warming will bring as many benefits as problems if not more.

• Why so gloomy?

Roger Revelle, a late climate scientist, is described as Prophet Al Gore's mentor. Do you remember who was the mentor of Moses? Revelle, referred to as a scientific giant - because of his 6-foot-4 height (just like Bill O'Reilly), because of his fathership of USCD, and because he was one of the first scientists who studied global warming - argued that the existing knowledge didn't justify any action except if a non-climatic explanation existed.

New Zealand, skeptical radio program

You can listen to this 30-minute-long audio, featuring Richard Lindzen and the NZ Climate Science Coalition, reliability of surface measurements, hockey stick graph, Wegman report, economic absurdity of the Kyoto protocol, bizarre alliance of New Zealand with Europe as opposed to Australia and the U.S., and many other topics. The show ends with a professional Shakespeare-like theater performance of Prof Philip Stott in the New York debate. Thanks to Maksimovich.