Halloween: Mooney and Moonbat

Fullscreen

Happy Halloween and enjoy the flash animation featuring Chris Mooney (the blue Gentleman who raises not only consciousness) and George Moonbat (the brown hybrid of a gremlin and a moon bat).

However, don't be too frightened: both characters are just ludicrous bugaboos and everything they ever show is plain fiction that can only scare little children. If you want to scare your friends a little bit more, you will have to create Forbes' mask of the anti-Christ. ;-)

Incidentally, Gore's grades at Harvard have placed him in the weakest 20% of students for two years in a row. This student who ate hamburgers and smoke marijuana in the Dunster House received a "D" in Natural Sciences 6 (Man's Place in Nature) and "C plus" in Natural Sciences 118. There were many other "C" grades, too. Yes, I talk about the guy who tries to teach others about man's place in Nature.

Invisible tanks

The British military seems to be the fastest institution to develop and use the invisibility cloak that we discussed previously. John Pendry who wrote articles about similar systems is the main voice of science. See

FoxNews

A subtle system of mirrors and projectors allows soldiers, guns, and tanks to be invisible from a certain region of space.



On the picture above, only one half of the tank was made invisible. ;-) YouTube offers you a video with similar technology making Japanese guys invisible. ;-)

See also 11 preprints about invisibility cloaks on the arXiv. Be careful when you make invisible experiments with children.

Japan: Kyoto is another Hiroshima

As Benny Peiser informed us,

Japan will pay USD 10.5 billion for Kyoto permits.

That's something like 1 percent of their general annual budget. The economic damages of the latest huge earthquake in July 2007 was about USD 10.5 billion, too. I think that is is obvious that if Japan cannot quit Kyoto at this moment, paying the bill is much cheaper a method than to try to reduce CO2 emissions by 8 percent. If the CO2 emission reductions were cheaper, Japan would have already made them.

Now, there is no real problem with Japan because the Japanese have been servile for 60 years and maybe even during the war. They will effectively pay an additional USD 100 tax per person and everything is fine. But I assure you that if such a difficulty occurred in a country whose citizens have a somewhat higher self-confidence, it could be a real problem. Well, former Japanese politians (and their voters) are the only ones to be blamed for the Japanese signatures under the Kyoto protocol.

It has always been very clear that the emissions wouldn't be dropping and any decrease would be linked to a decrease of the GDP. Only post-socialist countries that had a lot of useless heavy industry waiting to be phased out could have benefitted from Kyoto. But the politicians who were signing the protocol were usually thinking about their image rather than the actual economic implications of the treaty.

David Gross: The coming revolutions in fundamental physics

A similar talk by Gross: Stringfest in Israel



Separate page...

The video of the lecture from 10/19/2007 at UC Berkeley where he studied is 98 minutes long. The woman who introduces him says that he was awarded a nice award: Gross became one of 800 students who were arrested in 1964 for the free speech movement's Sproul Hall sit-in.

Frances Hellman, the boss of physics at UC Berkeley, thinks that it is the most important achievement of Gross's. Incidentally, I can't resist to point out a sad fact that Hellman's recent article was an anti-Summers rant in Science back in 2005 written with roughly 100 feminist co-authors.

Gross begins to speak at 3:40.

Cartoons and memories

Gross says that the beginning of his physics life was more important for him at Berkeley than some other events at the same school. He shows his favorite cartoons, including some recent ones that were influenced by two "rather silly books". Gross was depressed by the "Harvey's place" cartoon until someone sent him the "String theory: When physics gets physical" ad that restored his confidence in the American media. ;-)

Particle physics: SM and beyond

He instantly returns to the structure of elementary particles (8:58). Appraisal of the Standard Model is at 13:00. It may work up to the Planck scale. At 17:30, he cherishes the informed ignorance that the Standard Model has produced. Gross asks many "why" questions that became more interesting than 45 years ago. At 20:50, some advances of cosmology are discussed.

At 24:05, the search for unification starts. Gross chooses SO(10) as the nice GUT: good choice. At 33:45, he gets to the LHC and supersymmetry (Zumon's superpartner is in the audience) - his superspace-focused presentation of SUSY is very similar to mine. At 48:20, gravity enters the game. At 51:10, quantum gravity appears for the first time.

Quantum gravity and strings

At 52:30, he explains that we must go from GR to string theory, a (54:54) conservatively radical modification of the principles of physics. Gross argues that you should always modify as little as possible because otherwise, you are pretty much guaranteed to be inconsistent with reality, logic, or both. String theory only changes the building blocks. The mathematics is a bit more complicated but in 100 years, it will be taught at high schools (58:30). ;-)

Nice surprises occur with interactions because all the nasty uncertainty in the singular vertices of Feynman graphs goes away (59:30). Pants diagrams are non-singular, uniform, and create no new parameters, for the first time in physics. At 64:30, he explains the amazing property of string theory that it predicts everything, including the dimensionality of space. And both gauge forces and gravity appear automatically, without being inserted.

More triumphs of string theory

At 66:30, achievements of string theory are summarized: finiteness, incredible uniqueness, richness, the calculable fate of black holes. Gross expects that eventually the string revolution will be on equal footing with relativity or quantum mechanics. At 69:20, he talks about the information loss. String theory saves the day, 70:00. The origin of the Universe, 70:50, remains an open question, together with the right compactification of extra dimensions, right SUSY breaking, and the cosmological constant problem (72:10).

At 73:00, you see the Calabi-Yau manifold from this blog's background. Half a minute later, zillions of non-realistic vacua are mentioned. At 74:30, the vacuum energy is described. At 78:20, the landscape scenario is sketched; at 80:05, Gross unfortunately can't prove that the A-word principle, proposed by his otherwise rational colleagues, is wrong. Dirac faced the same mystery but he was much too Dirac (82:10) to envoke anthropic arguments. Gross explains that the Dirac's Mproton/Mplanck tiny ratio has actually been explained by QCD's log running of alpha from the unification scale. Also, the seesaw mechanism explains the small neutrino masses.

Unknown definition of string theory

At 87:00, we don't know what the basic and full equations of string theory are, only many descriptions. Perhaps ST is like QFT, a framework. But it can't be modified. Maybe something is missing but we don't know what it is. But maybe we need new rules, 88:50. Witten's comment that space and time may be doomed scares some people, 91:20. According to Seiberg, they're illusions - pretty good ones for Gross who has gone much over one of them. Space is emergent, 91:40, but time must thus be as well and we have no idea about timeless physics, 92:40. A summary starts around 93:40, including AdS/CFT (94:35).

We have a wonderful theory but the most exciting questions wait to be answered, exciting new discoveries about our crazy but elegant universe (see below) are behind the corner. End, thank you.



Update about the rate of progress

The author of one of those "rather silly books" comments that a little has changed in these popular talks during the last 3 years. I am amazed by this surprise. Changes that substantially influence popular talks about physics, as opposed to the technical perspective, happen - sometimes gradually - once in 20 years or so and there is nothing unusual about the current rate of changes in comparison with the history of science. Compare the popular talks between 1934 and 1937 - or almost any other 3-year period - and you won't see any significant difference either.

Physics as started by Newton has been around for 350 years and people were trying to understand the world for millenia. These authors of silly books would like to impose absurd deadlines and other sensational criteria upon science, ignoring reality. Just like in catastrophic global warming, the predictions that influence an average citizen and the apocalypse must double every year and new fads should supersede the previous ones at least once a year, they think.

But this mystification, hype, and fashionable excrements are not how real science has ever worked. This is how it works in the skulls of retarded pseudoscientists and charlatans, and I am surely not talking about global warming salesmen, Mr Woit, and Mr Smolin only. Serious science is a conservative enterprise and its philosophical summaries only change very rarely and very subtly. Intellectual diarrhoea - like the production of Lee Smolin's papers - is something very different than science.

And that's the memo.

Religiosity vs wealth

... Deutsch ...

Sean Carroll comments on several points from this extensive survey about the attitudes towards immigration, free trade, moral values, gender issues, democracy, and religion in individual countries of the world. There's a lot of interesting data in the 144-page-long report.

But I will focus on religion and related values, too.



Many graphs like that, including time evolution, dozens of quantities, and all countries in the world may be drawn with Gapminder (direct link).

Sean presents the U.S. as the bad boy because it is more religious a country than other rich countries. In the graph above, religiosity is drawn as a decreasing function of wealth. Sean thinks that Kuwait is away from the curve because the only reason why this country is rich are its oil reserves and I tend to agree with this guess.

Well, in the purple circle of Eastern Europe, you can also find the richest and least religious country, namely the Czech Republic. They have calculated religiosity from several polls.

For example, people were asked whether one must believe in God to be moral (page 33 of the report, 37 of 144).

85 percent of Czechs say No. In the rest of Eastern Europe, this number is safely below 70 percent. In Ukraine, it is 50 percent. Only Sweden beats Czechia among the old EU member countries: 86 percent answered No. In France, it was 83 percent and the rest of Western Europe as well as Canada had between 60 percent of Germany - the most religious among the six Western European countries according to this poll - and 75 percent in Britain.

I guess that the Netherlands could have slightly beaten everyone - as an anti-religious country - but Holland was not included in the survey.

The number 85 percent becomes 0 percent in Egypt and Jordan. It is 1 percent in Indonesia. Asia has between 0 and 37 percent except for Japan with 53 percent and China with 72 percent. African countries have between 10 and 25 percent of "No" answers. Latin America goes from 16 percent in Brazil to 52 percent in Argentina.

In the U.S., 41 percent of citizens answer "No" which is close to South Korea or Mexico - nothing to be ashamed of even if you're an atheist.

People were also asked whether homosexuality should be rejected.

Only 9 percent of Sweden and 9 percent of Spain say "rejected". The bronze medal goes to Czechia with 16 percent. Germany and France with 17 percent follow. Latin America and moderate Muslim countries are around 20-80 percent while the hard core Muslim countries and most of Africa reject homosexuality in more than 95 percent of cases. In Canada, it is 21 percent and in the U.S. it is 41 percent.

Success determined by outside forces

Incredibly, 64 percent of Canada and 64 percent of the U.S. disagree: the highest percentage of "No" answers in the world indicates that North Americans trust themselves. In Eastern Europe, Slovakia has the highest score with 52 percent, followed by Czechia with 48 percent. Other countries of Eastern Europe have 30-38 percent who disagree - i.e. who think that success is only up to yourself. These figures are comparable to Germany with 31 percent but Italy has even less: 24 percent. The smallest number of people who disagree is found in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Turkey - 14,17,19 percent, respectively.

Finally, I would like to say that it is always possible to define quantities in which your country is going to be exceptional. Sean did it with the U.S. and to a certain extent, I did it with Czechia, too. There are so many fluctuations here that we shouldn't think that our country is a deviation just because we can find a discipline in which it is a winner. And be sure that there are many polls in the survey in which either Czechia or America is among the average countries.

What determines the power of religion?

Incidentally, I think that Czechia is much less religious than other countries such as our cousins in Poland and even our brothers in Slovakia simply because religion may have become associated with Germans and Austrians who have been "oppressing" the average Czech peasant. But I have no fully consistent simulation that would also explain why protestantism including Hussism, something that started in Czechia, has largely disappeared as well.

Also, I have no simple explanation for a relatively high influence of religion in the U.S. - except for repeating some points in the history and linking its religion to individualism and multiculturalism. But neither of these arguments is convincing for me. Fanatical religion can be associated with collectivism as well as cultural homogeneity.

Mukesh Ambani: richest person in the world

According to Indian media, Mukesh Ambani born in Yemen - who is a citizen of India - just became the wealthiest man in the world. With USD 63 billion of oil-related assets, he is now ahead of Carlos Slim as well as Bill Gates who only have around USD 62 billion each.

Pagebull: search engines with screenshots

I guess that a certain fraction will find this search engine better than Google. Try

pagebull.com

and a search query, for example CO2 lags temperature. You immediately see how the pages look like. For example, if you see the "Veritas" ("The Truth") logo in the upper left corner, you know that the page is trustworthy. :-) You may configure the number of thumbnails on the screen and the location of the pages.

Resurrection of Austria's doomed ski resorts

Figure 1: Schladming, Austria (see 1 week ago)

Last year, we would be reading dozens of articles arguing that ski resorts in the Alps are doomed because of climate change. For example, The New York Times wrote in December 2006:

This season is certainly shaping up as a nonclassic, but it may be a milestone of another kind. The record warmth — in some places autumn temperatures were three degrees Celsius above average — has brought home the profound threat of climate change to Europe’s ski industry.

If venturing outdoors without a jacket is not enough evidence, there are two new studies — one that says the Alps are the warmest they have been in 1,250 years and another that predicts that an increase of a few more degrees would leave most Alpine resorts with too little snow to survive.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsored the second study, stopped short of predicting ruin for Europe’s ski industry. But Bruno Abegg, a researcher at the University of Zurich who was involved in it, said low-lying resorts faced an insuperable problem. "Let’s put it this way,” he said. “I wouldn’t invest in Kitzbühel."

Well, the warming comrade has missed a pretty good investment: see this fresh snow video from Kitzbühel. Snow has returned to the doomed ski resorts. They opened one month earlier than planned. Some slopes already hold more than one meter of snow.

Where does this miraculous change come from? It is called the weather. Although it may sound incredible, sometimes it is warm and sometimes it is cold.

And that's the memo.

Imagining the tenth dimension

Well, I don't quite follow what the guy is trying to say above the fourth dimension but he seems to think that 10 dimensions is the maximum number he can imagine using his Möbius strip-based framework. If you understand this fun clip, please explain it.

Hat tip: Zeroflux, String theory is cooler than you.

Czechoslovakia born 89 years ago

Czechoslovakia was born 89 years ago. The country that we call "The First Republic" (1918-1938), an island of democracy, music, and prosperity in the sea of emerging totalitarian regimes was created on the recycled material of the beloved Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, k.u.k.



Figure 1: Yes, this 1928 map also includes Ruthenia in the East, an underdeveloped multinational territory that chose to join the Soviet Union in a referendum after the war (not a smart move). I remember a small demonstration on the Prague's Wenceslaus Square of people from Ruthenia back in 1992. They wanted to join Czechoslovakia again. Because it was a few months before the Velvet Divorce, they were not able to explain us what they wanted to do with Slovakia in between us. ;-)

Incidentally, we use the term "The Second Republic" for the period with the reduced territory after the Sudetenland was merged with the Third Reich following the Munich Betrayal, 1938-1939. "The Third Republic" was restored after the war; a short democratic period, 1945-1948, was stopped by the communist coup in February 1948, the so-called "victorious February" as we learned it at school. ;-)

The only other three additional political events you should know are the Prague Spring of 1968, a period of democracy killed by foreign communist tanks, the Velvet Revolution in 1989, and the Velvet Divorce at the end of 1992.

To summarize, the Czech Republic celebrates its national holiday. We played some floorball and saw ice-hockey. HC Lasselsberger Pilsen defeated HC Slav Ústí Lions, 5:2.

You may see what I wrote one year ago.

Incidentally, let me mention a story that shows what real Nazism looks like. Czech neo-Nazis wanted to celebrate the 69th anniversary of the Reichskristallnacht, the night of broken glass, a major pogrom against the Jews in Greater Germany, November 1938. How did they want to celebrate it? Well, they probably wanted nothing less than to repeat it. They planned to march through the Jewish Quarter of Prague! It's kind of amazing what they find appropriate. Some authorities are hopefully going to make the event illegal. Some people have forgotten what the actual Nazism looks like; Watson's pessimism about the future of Africa is surely not an example.

Nevertheless, most Czechs find events such as the planned neo-Nazi march irrelevant. Unhinged teenegers are behind these plans and pretty much everyone seems to think that they are not a real threat to anyone.

End of science

On May 5th, 1997, a book called "The End of Science" by John Horgan was released. Since the moment when this Gentleman announced the end of science, the following discoveries, among thousands of others, were made.

In high-energy physics, I only include some results usually with more than 500 - and in almost all cases, more than 1,000 - citations:

• it was found that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating; the cosmological constant problem got more serious because the constant is apparently nonzero
• neutrino masses and oscillations were finally measured, including some accurate numbers; later, sterile neutrinos were excluded
• the WMAP satellite provided us with detailed evidence of scale invariance of the spectrum, supporting inflationary cosmology, and measured deviations from scale invariance for the first time
• the holographic AdS/CFT correspondence was found, evidence for it was collected, and its implications were studied in 5,000 papers
• among these results, string theory was used to calculate properties of the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions at RHIC more accurately than older methods, putting ancient stringy interpretation of strong interactions on a firm ground
• noncommutative geometry and K-theory were derived as limits of string theory
• the entropy of many black holes included in string theory has been calculated to all orders in a perturbative expansion
• it was realized that the additional dimensions of space may be as large as many microns; later, it was also realized that the additional dimensions may be warped which even allows them to be infinite in size
• a large number of AdS and metastable vacua of string theory were constructed, leading to the prediction of a landscape, possibly consistent with the cosmological constant at the top,

and so on. In climate science, the predictions got roughly 100 times more catastrophic than ever before. The newly found incredible clarity of the subject has even allowed the former vice-president Bc. Al Gore to become the leader of the field and win a Nobel prize for it. ;-)

OK, for entertainment purposes, I had to include a rotten apple. Nevertheless, I think that even climate science has made progress - it is just elsewhere than in the reports served by the mainstream media.

In genetics, the first animals were cloned, the human genome was fully scanned, and the genetic origin of hundreds of diseases, conditions, and characteristics of organisms were identified. I could continue for a long time and include other disciplines.

Nevertheless, the author of the stupidity from 1997, after those ten years that have demonstrated that his stupidity is among the greatest stupidities that have ever been pronounced by homo sapiens, has the stomach to come in front of a conference in Portugal and repeat the same stupidity.

How is it possible? Well, it is because there are almost no people who would be pointing their fingers at this - very politely speaking - intellectual shit that keeps on contaminating the public sphere. That's why the likes of Horgan keep on thriving. If we allow them to thrive, they can indeed force science to end on a sunny day in the future. This is the only way how science could possible end. Let's not allow it.

And that's the memo.

Skin color gene

A remarkably high number of people have suggested that James Watson was referring to a field that is outside his field of expertise - or even unrelated to DNA. I don't know how many of those people actually believe that race is not encoded in DNA but the number of people who have verbally contradicted basics of elementary school biology in this fashion is incredibly high anyway. Color of plants and color of other things are the first examples that are discussed whenever genetics is taught at school.

The skin color gene

Let me be very specific. The relevant gene is called SLC24A5. The acronym means that it is included in the solute carrier family and it is the member 5. The gene has 21,420 base pairs (plus minus one because of two possible deletions). See the sequence. If you care where it is, it is on the long (q) arm of chromosome 15, on position 21.1, starting from base pair 46,200,461 and ending on 46,221,880 (no Java).

The gene is expressed in brain (!), hindbrain(!), medulla oblongata (!), nervous system (!), and cone photoreceptors.

Alleles

Now, look at the 111th amino acid. You will find that in between 93 and 100 percent of the East Asian, native American, and African population, the 111th amino acid is alanine (A which is encoded as GCU, GCC, GCA, or GCG): the allele (version) of the gene is then called ala-111 for obvious reasons. In something like 98.7 - 100 percent of the European population, the 111th amino acid is threonine (T which is encoded as ACU or ACA) and the allele is then called thr-111. See the sequence (GCA or ACA) of Craig Venter's personal DNA code around the ambiguous nucleobasis (G/A) number 15 46213776. It is one of only six nucleobases in the 22,420-base-pair-long gene where variations are known.

You shouldn't confuse alanine and threonine (amino acids, building blocs of proteins) with (thrice) simpler blocs of DNA, the small letters or nucleobases, namely adenine, thymine (or its counterpart uracil in RNA), cytosine, and guanine.

It is estimated that this allele - a single bit that is changed and that also influences pigmentation - only appeared 6,000-10,000 years ago or so. The Biblical Adam could have been the first white person, after all... These insights have only been known since 2005 (see e.g. the Washington Post).

Because the white genes are mutations of the genes of the original men of color - and males are mutations of the original females - we can finally answer the question "Is God black?" The answer is "Yes, She is." Entertainingly enough, the gene also exists and decides about the color in other species. It has been demonstrated in zebrafish, a common research proxy for evolution biology. ;-)



Figure 1: Races of zebrafish. To be sure: the left fish is African American while the right fish is Caucasian. As far as I am concerned, the original N-word zebrafish is prettier but I don't know which of them is smarter.

Knowledge can't be undone

There are surely several additional genes, for example SLC45A2, that carry the information about race - and distinguish the remaining races, among other things - but this one is arguably the key. Although it is just one base among more than 3 billion bases, it accounts for at least 1/3 of the differences in skin color. Some people like to say that everything is multi-dimensional and complicated but certain things are really stored in one or several base pairs. They are not complicated at all once they are understood.

I wonder what the people who find the biological origin of races (and perhaps even sexes?) to be a taboo want to do with all this scientific knowledge. They would not only have to erase all the 22,000+ web pages and burn the books that contain this information but also execute everyone who knows what is the answer and suppress the curiosity of all new students of biology as well.

I am afraid that this won't and can't work. The genetic origin of many features of organisms, including humans, starts to be understood and it is all but inevitable that the degree of our understanding of these issues will keep on increasing. For example, you can download Craig Venter's and James Watson's genomes from this FTP website. If someone wants to build the future upon the assumption that these things will remain unknown, he or she is preparing the soil for some very bad conflicts and he or she will surely stay on the wrong side.

And that's the memo.

Left brain vs right brain

Click to get a more economical page with the animation.

Is she rotating clockwise or counter-clockwise?

If clockwise, your right hemisphere is more active which makes you oriented towards big picture, fantasy, religion, philosophy, spatial perception, and risk taking.

If counter-clockwise, as most people, your left hemisphere is more active which makes you oriented towards details, logic, words, order and pattern perception, strategy forming, practicality, and safety.

Your humble correspondent is so hopelessly clockwise that he was unable to see her rotate in the opposite direction after five minutes of attempts. ;-) It took me one more minute to prove that it is actually possible that the leftists can see the opposite direction of motion.

Why are both interpretations possible? Well, if the two-dimensional picture can be seen as a projection of some three-dimensional scene S, then you can create a mirror image of the three-dimensional scene, S', by changing (x,y,z) to (x,y,-z) where "z" is perpendicular to your screen. The rotation in S and S' have the opposite directions to each other.



Update: I have changed my mind. The leftists who see her rotating counter-clockwise are clearly deviants. Here's a proof. Look at the two screenshots above. On the left picture, you see that the leg on the right side is shorter than the other one. Why is it shorter? It is because it is more closely aligned with the direction where you look: it goes behind the screen, at least assuming that your eyes are not below the height of her buttocks. It follows that on the left picture, you can't see her face.

On the other hand, you see that both legs are comparably long on the right picture. It is because you can see her face and the flying leg is pointing in front of the screen. The angle between the photons coming from her knees to your eyes and the direction of her leg is almost independent of what leg you choose. This is the interpretation that the clockwise rightwingers offer: the right picture includes her face when colors are added. The leftists have the opposite interpretation - they think that they can see the face on the left picture not the right picture - which is wrong. And the arguments about the (x,y,z) and (x,y,-z) mirror images above don't work once you take perspective into account. If you realize that you're looking at the beauty from a height above her buttocks and it is thus not a parallel projection, the symmetry between the two cases (or between S and S') disappears, the rightists are shown to be correctly evaluating the picture and the leftists are proven, once again, to be a majority (?) of charlatans. ;-)

And that's the memo.

Hat tip: Yorick

Science: Climate uncertainties cannot go away

Science magazine has just released a peer-reviewed paper by Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker,

Why is climate sensitivity so unpredictable? (full text)

The authors argue that during the last 20 years, no significant progress has been made to reduce the uncertainties about the climate, especially the climate sensitivity, despite skyrocketing numbers of scientists, funding, and computer power. Moreover, they think that this fact won't change in the future. More concretely, they say that even if various things will be known more accurately, we won't be able to say more unambiguously what is the probability that the climate sensitivity is very high, e.g. higher than 4.5 Celsius degrees. The invent a probability distribution for the climate sensitivity that decreases slowly for large values of the sensitivity and proclaim that this is the ultimate form that won't go away.

Nude Socialist, American Thinker, and others assume that skeptics will be enthusiastic about these claims. What do I think?

First of all, I agree that during the last two decades, not much progress was made in these questions, especially if you look at the knowledge of mainstream scientists. But unlike Roe and Baker, I don't think that it is a consequence of fundamental limitations of such a chaotic system. It is a consequence of having too many incompetent, politically passionate, corrupt, and dishonest people in the discipline.

Can predictions about the climate get better?

The answer is obviously "Yes". Virtually every prediction in the past that an answer to a question would be forever unknown or forever inaccurate has been shown incorrect as soon as science advanced in an unexpected way. The predictions are always extracted from the assumption that the specific algorithm that the authors imagine is the only one that can be used to study the system. They are always proved wrong.

What are the exceptions? The main exception is the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. It wasn't really "predicted": when Heisenberg first formulated it, he already had a rigorous proof and almost the whole theory (matrix mechanics). ;-)

Back to the climate. Let us ask a frequently discussed question:

Can we predict the (long-term) climate without being able to predict (short-term and medium-term) weather well? The correct answer is that We don't yet know.

Some people correctly say that certain unimportant features of the weather may "average out" when you focus on the long-term climate. Consequently, the subtleties that appear in the short run may be irrelevant. They are right. It can be so. We know many examples from physics where an effective approximate theory correctly describes the low-energy, long-distance, or long-time limit of a physical system whose high-energy, short-distance, or short-time behavior is unknown. For example, one can determine the properties of the molecules without knowing nuclear physics.

But I emphasize that it is possible, not guaranteed, that the long-time behavior of the climate may be understood before details about the weather are fully mastered. It doesn't have to be like that. For example, the chaotic dynamics of the climate can very well lead to a scale-invariant behavior whose description is qualitatively equal - and equally uncertain - at all time scales.

But the size of the Earth is finite and it is unlikely that an object of this size can generate interesting new dynamics at arbitrarily long time scales. This "infrared cutoff" allows me to assume that the internal contributions to the long-term climate can be understood after some effort.

Possibility to learn is something different than actual knowledge

More importantly, we must realize that if something can be answered in principle, it doesn't mean that we have already answered it. The correct long-time effective theory may be subtle, may include unexpected degrees of freedom and unexpected interactions. It is almost certainly a different theory from the first guess that you write down and it is probably a different theory from those that are popular today. Less intelligent champions of the global warming theory usually assume that if science is correct, it follows that their fashionable guess is correct. But science is something different than scientists - and science is very different from bad scientists.

Central limit theorem

Even if the climate is inherently chaotic and non-deterministic, there exist quantities that are objective in character. The probability distribution for various values of the climate sensitivity would still be a legitimate target of science. In principle, we could find what it is. Analyze the data from the whole history of the Earth - or organize experiments with the same planet for hundreds or millions of years in the future - and determine the responses of temperature to CO2 changes in many types of circumstances.

If you do it many times, the answers will converge somewhere. Either they will converge to a well-defined value of the climate sensitivity - and the probability distribution will start to rapidly approach the normal distribution by the central limit theorem - or you will be getting different temperature changes in different cases but you will still be able to draw a well-defined distribution. Assuming that we classify all possible internal phases of the Earth, the distribution itself can't be ill-defined in principle.

What do I actually think about the distribution?

First of all, the fact that the climate sensitivity is not yet described as a number with a normal, Gaussian distribution means nothing less than the fact that this scientific discipline hasn't yet become a fully quantitative one.

Second, the "bare" climate sensitivity without feedbacks is a well-known and calculable number - at least for those who know how to compute the absorption by a CO2 molecule. This number is modified by responses of clouds and other effects - by feedbacks. Is the strength of these feedbacks well-defined? Well, it may certainly depend on other internal degrees of freedom of the climate system. For example, the feedbacks can be stronger or weaker during El Nino than during La Nina. But this is exactly the kind of subtlety that will go away assuming that the long-term frequency of El Ninos and La Ninas (and similar effects) is well-defined, too. You can just take a weighted average. So a well-defined averaged numbers encoding the feedbacks should exist, after all.

Third, we should avoid obvious bias in talking about the specific value of the sensitivity. Many kinds of arguments indicate that the sensitivity is around 1 Celsius degree. The observed temperature change in the last 100 years indicates that the sensitivity is around 1 Celsius degree and the bare value is not far either. Because of uncertainties, the correct number can be somewhat different. But if the best methods - including Svensmark's and Friis-Christensen's analysis of the patterns to isolate the effects of cosmic rays, El Ninos, volcanos, and low-frequency signals - are continued to be refined, we may learn this number pretty accurately.

But this point should have been about the bias. I think that many scientists are far too interested in one types of values, including Roe and Baker. They are interested whether the climate sensitivity is higher than 2.0 or 4.5 Celsius degrees but they never seem to be interested in the probabilistic distribution on the other side. It's as if one half of their brain is completely missing. If you start with the bare greenhouse effect value of 1 Celsius degree, the feedbacks can go in both ways. The climate sensitivity can even be negative: CO2 can cause cooling in the long-term average. Be sure that every argument that puts the probability distribution equal to zero for negative (or even for small) values of the sensitivity is a mathematically faulty argument.

I surely do agree with Richard Lindzen that the feedbacks are going to be negative because feedbacks of apparently stable systems usually are negative. But even if you have a different opinion, all scientists should agree that both possible signs must be studied. People don't do it these days. Not even Roe and Baker are doing it. Well, it's because they are interested in applications: the main application is fearmongering. Their climate science is so "applied" that "corrupt and dishonest" could be more appropriate adjectives.

It is pretty clear that the more balanced assumptions about your calculations you make, the more symmetric the probabilistic distribution will be. The probability that the sensitivity is higher than a certain pretty high limit is similar to the probability that the sensitivity is negative.

Is there a reason why the probability distribution should be pretty much symmetric? Some people could argue that if you invert the relationship and ask what is the CO2 change needed for 1 degree of warming, the corresponding inverted distribution will be non-Gaussian (or asymmetric) even if the original distribution was Gaussian (or symmetric). So why do I assume that the first one should be Gaussian (symmetric) but the inverse one doesn't have to be?

Well, it's because in this hypothetical relationship and mechanism (the greenhouse effect), CO2 is the cause and temperature is the effect determined with a certain coefficient (sensitivity). It is these coefficients - that multiply the causes to obtain the effect - that normally have symmetric or Gaussian distributions.

Summary

Ideally, climate science should become a science again. Once it is a science, it will recognize that there exist only two possibilities whether we roughly know the climate sensitivity: we either don't know it, not even qualitatively, or we know it, at least qualitatively. In the latter case, the distribution inevitably approaches the normal distribution and further work is guaranteed to make the central value more accurate. In the former case, we shouldn't be pretending that the science is settled and it should lead to important consequences for policymaking.

There exist many possible mechanisms, potentially scary, whose character is not fully understood. For example, "cow sensitivity" measures how much more angry a photon from cell phones makes a cow. When the cattle's grumpiness exceeds a certain value, all cows (and pigs) will stop reproducing and everyone will have to become a vegetarian. Due to some complexities of the cow brain, the "cow sensitivity" may be nonzero or high, indicating that we, meat-lovers, should abandon cell-phones. But I think that a rational attitude is not to think and talk about these relationships at all until there is some reason to think that they are nonzero or important. Thinking about every conceivable relationship has normally been referred to as "paranoia".

Climate science should avoid paranoia, it should dedicate equal efforts to study both kinds of answers to many questions, and it should do its best to make certain numbers accurate and increasingly accurate. Only when the methods to do so are found and used, its long-term predictions can be taken seriously as scientific results. Once such scientific results are available, it is still not clear whether they are going to be important for policymakers. That's how science works: if you do it honestly, it is just not true that every result is "useful" for applications.

And that's the memo.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

NeoPlanet

I don't expect that I will revive the license when it expires...





But you may try to click this relatively well-known planet for two weeks. The daily visitors are shining. ;-)

James Watson resigns & support from Nigeria

James Watson (click and see the previous story and a video of his talk at Google Inc.) has resigned as the boss (and member of the board) of his laboratories after a bloody attack by the politically correct. He wrote:

• Closer now to 80 than 79, the passing on of my remaining vestiges of leadership is more than overdue. The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired.

Well, exactly. 79+ years is a good enough age to retire but the circumstances are rather unimaginable and certainly unpleasant. It's bad but some people feel super.

Watson also recalls the humane lessons he got from his parents and some fascinating progress in the decoding of the human genome and the cure for cancer that he helped to shape.

See also: race gene

Meanwhile, Idang Alibi of Nigeria has written an extremely sophisticated essay in perfect English, supporting Watson's views. How many people such as Idang Alibi there are in Africa? One hundred? One thousand? People who not only want to make Africa better but who can also realistically analyze the history and realize the present reality?

Al Gore's friends probably behind wildfires

The fire in San Bernandino has been officially declared arson and another fire was almost certainly arson, too. One suspect - a 27-year-old from Arizona - has been shot dead by the police and another one - John Hund (48) of Hesperia - was arrested.



Figure 1: FBI warning had included prospect of attack with flames. The person on the picture above is not necessarily the culprit.

Arnold announced a USD 50,000 reward for arsonist arrest: not so much in comparison with USD 1,000,000,000 of damages. I think that private detectives in Nashville, Tennessee can also win it. ;-)

Jack Cashill argues that eco-terrorists who fight against human imperialism are much more likely to be behind the acts than the Islamic ones. The Earth Liberation Front website says:

• Did you know that Al Gore invented the Internet? Find out the truth about Al Gore invented the Internet - we have Al to thank for the World Wide Web. ...
• Any individuals who committed arson or any other illegal acts under the ELF name are individuals who choose to do so under the banner of ELF and do so only driven by their personal conscience.

In other words, arsons are private business of the environmentalists and they will deny any collective efforts.

Tre Arrow, an eco-terrorist behind previous arsons, was just ordered back to Oregon. Eric McDavid was found guilty of arson conspiracy last month: he planned to blow up Sacramento's Nimbus Dam in 2006. The ELF was behind arson in San Diego, 2003.

Évariste Galois: 196th birthday

Évariste Galois was born on October 25, 1811 and died 20.5 later - mostly because of a woman although the story has been made more romantic than it actually was. While the time interval that this staunch Republican ;-) has spent on this planet seems short, he became a co-father of modern algebra nevertheless. He both invented the concept of group and gave it its name.

The most well-defined task that has led him to these discoveries was the question whether the equation of fifth degree can be solved in radicals - whether there exists a compact formula that includes various roots (sqrt and higher) to calculate the roots (solutions) of the quintic equation.

At the high school, I was also obsessed with this problem - although, frankly speaking, I abruptly found it less crucial when I refocused on physics. Eventually, my formula for the equation of fourth degree was written on two pages - also because I didn't set the cubic coefficient to zero. A week later, I realized that it could have been a good choice but I already wanted to finish the general case. And I was only able to find a satisfactory proof that the quintic equation can't be solved in radicals because I knew the result. ;-)

Let me just mention a popular, truly elementary version of these arguments.

Quadratic equation

Solve the equation

• x^2 + bx + c = 0

I have set "a=1" which you can easily do by dividing the original formula by "a". How do we find the roots? Well, we realize that if "x" is equal to one of the roots "x1" or "x2", then "x-x1" or "x-x2" vanishes. It follows that "(x-x1)(x-x2)" vanishes, too. But "(x-x1)(x-x2)" is clearly the only quadratic function of "x" starting with "x^2" that vanishes if "x" is either equal to "x1" or "x2", assuming that the roots differ. The same property is shared by "x^2 + bx +c", so they must be equal.

I probably had to use the fundamental theorem of algebra - that every equation of n-th degree has "n" complex solutions - but we're going to discuss more fascinating aspects here that depend on the degree of the equation more intimately.

Because "(x-x1)(x-x2) = x^2 + bx + c", you can see - by expanding the product - that "-b = x1+x2" and "c=x1.x2". So the problem is to invert these relationships and calculate "x1,x2" from "b,c". That's not quite trivial because both "b" and "c" are completely invariant under arbitrary permutations of "x1" and "x2" (in the quadratic case, there is only one non-trivial permutation). But "x1" itself is surely not invariant under the permutation as it becomes "x2". So how the hell can we calculate an asymmetric animal such as "x1" from "b,c" that are symmetric?

The square root helps.

The first step is to calculate "(x1-x2)^2" from "b,c". Here we find a nice surprise: "(x1-x2)^2 = x1^2 + 2 x1 x2 + x2^2" (what we call the squared discriminant because it is going to disciminate "x1" and "x2" from each other in less than one minute) is invariant under the permutation of "x1,x2". So it is not hard to write it in terms of "b,c". It is "b^2 - 4c". Once you have "(x1-x2)^2", you can calculate "x1-x2" by taking the square root. The square root really has two different values, "x1-x2" and "x2-x1", and these two get interchanged when you permute "x1" and "x2". We have successfully discriminated the roots and everything makes sense. With a known value of "x1-x2", you can easily add "x1+x2=-b" to get "2x1", and if you know how to divide by two, the usual formula for the quadratic equation follows.

In Europe, this trick has probably been known for 1,000 years or so. Its discoverer had to be very happy to find it.

Cubic equation

It is less trivial to solve the cubic equation, "x^3 + bx^2 + cx + d = 0". Here we have three coefficients. By playing the same game with the product "(x-x1)(x-x2)(x-x3)", we see that

• "-b=x1+x2+x3",
• "+c=x1.x2+x1.x3+x2.x3",
• "-d=x1.x2.x3".

Once again, the coefficients b,c,d are fully symmetric under all six permutations of "x1,x2,x3". So how do we solve it in this case? Well, use the letter "W" for a non-trivial cubed root of unity (a complex number such that "W^3=1"). Now take the following cyclically democratic combination of "x1,x2,x3":

• x1 + W x2 + W^2 x3

Note that "W^2" is the complex conjugate of "W".

This is not quite symmetric under the permutations but it could play a similar role as "x1-x2" in the quadratic case, you might think. So take the third power of the combination above. Will you obtain a result that is invariant under permutations? Not quite because the coefficient of terms like "x1^2.x2" and the other two cyclical permutations will be "3W" while the coefficient of the opposite three cyclical products such as "x1.x2^2" will be "3W^2".

But again, this problem can be solved using the trick from the quadratic equation. So inside the formula for the cubic equation, you will find a square root whose result will count the two possible results ("x1^2.x2+x2^2.x3+x3^2.x1" and the sum of the three "opposite" terms) with a relative minus sign. But this square root will be embedded into a cubed root and you will need to take some polynomial actions. You will have to take a combination of "-b=x1+x2+x3" and two "opposite" cubed roots that represent "x1+W.x2+W^2.x3" and the "opposite" combination with "W,W^2" interchanged.

When the dust settles, you divide "3x1" by "3" and end up with Cardan's formula published in 1545 or so.

You should see a new lesson here. When we were taking the square root inside, the expression had to be symmetric under some subgroup of "S_3" of all permutations. In this case, it was "A_3", the group of cyclical permutations which is the same thing as even permutations in this case of three elements: in this case, "A_3" is isomorphic to "Z_3". The subgroup "A_3" sits "firmly" inside "S_3" in the sense that it doesn't depend on the identity of the elements "x1,x2,x3". Mathematically speaking, for a given conjugation, the set of conjugate elements is again "A_3". We call such a subgroup "normal" or "invariant".

Quartic equation

Now we're getting fast, so let's try the fourth degree. The coefficients in the equation are

• "-b=x1+x2+x3+x4"
• "+c= sum (xi.xj) over different pairs i,j"
• "-d= sum (xi.xj.xk) over different triples i,j,k"
• "e=x1.x2.x3.x4"

How do we get "x1,x2,x3,x4" from "b,c,d,e"? Well, we may try to calculate

• (x1+x2) - (x3+x4)

It is not terribly symmetric under all permutations. But if you square it, you get closer to a symmetry except that "x1.x2" and "x3.x4" (1/3 of mixed terms) enter with the opposite sign than the remaining four terms (2/3 of mixed terms). But this task to "break" the symmetry down to "A_3" is already known from the cubic equation. After some time, you can discover the right formula. Inside the roots, you will find the roots that copy the tricks from the cubic equation but they are used not to calculate "x1,x2,x3" but something like "x1.x2+x3.x4" and its various permutations (there are three different ways how to divide "x1,x2,x3,x4" to pairs - and these three different ways are treated much like "x1,x2,x3" in the cubic equation).

Again, the first roots that you must calculate must be invariant under a normal subgroup of "S_4". Note that "S_4" has "4!=24" elements and the relevant subgroup is "A_4" of twelve even permutations. Surprisingly, this "A_4" has its own normal subgroup, "B_4", that has 4 elements, and is isomorphic to "Z_2 x Z_2". It is the group of even permutations of "x1,x2,x3,x4" where you find no "triangle" in the decomposition into cycles, just transpositions. You need this smaller normal subgroup of "A_4" as you construct "layers" of the formula that are further from the very internal roots. But it can be done.

Quintic equation

Can you solve a general equation of fifth degree? Not really. Why not? Well, you can still construct some expressions, using a square root, that will distinguish even and odd permutations of the roots: you can break "S_5" to "A_5" (its normal subgroup), if you wish. But then you will be instantly stuck. You won't have any clue how to continue. The reason is that "A_5" has no non-trivial (different from "{identity}" and "A_5" itself) normal subgroups.

Galois had to invent all these concepts, groups, normal subgroups, their properties, and their role for the analytical structure of the polynomials. If you take a hypothetical formula based on roots that solves the quintic equation and if you carefully study how its components - especially various quadratic, cubic, and higher roots in it - behave under various permutations of the roots of the equation - you will be able to prove that such a formula can't exist. The higher-order equations can't be solved either because if you had a formula for such a 6-th order equation, you could take a limit and obtain a quintic formula, too.

When you're finished, write it down very quickly because you have a duel tomorrow with a bastard because of a woman whom you passionately love and you may very well get killed! ;-)

And that's the memo.

Nature: Time to ditch Kyoto

Journal Nature has finally published something sensible about the Kyoto protocol:

Time to ditch Kyoto

Two economists say that while Kyoto might be a symbol of something, it is not a working tool. It has had no positive results and no positive results can be expected in the future either. They also warn against a bigger version of Kyoto. See also a story in the National Post.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

An Inconvenient Truth: 23 minutes

Update: The full propaganda movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is now freely available. See these 9 parts per 10 minutes (the list is upside down) with Spanish subtitles.

Because Al Gore has become a prophet, this blog offers you 23 more minutes of An Inconvenient Truth, including Czech subtitles. ;-) In Czech, it is called "Nepříjemná pravda" (An Unpleasant Truth).

Part 1 - Part 5

In Part 1, Al Gore argues that American carmakers are unsuccessful in China because ... they can't meet the Chinese environmental standards. I kid you not. ;-) In real China, unconstrained pollution by anything and anywhere is the ultimate golden standard - see e.g. Chongqing Steel and Iron Factory - but for Al Gore, it is the unreachable example for the U.S.

I wonder whether he has ever heard that labor is cheaper in China - and in Germany where it is not cheaper, they produce popular powerful and less environmentally friendly cars such as BMW and Mercedes.

In Part 2, he shows those CO2 and temperature graphs and an elevator to predict or postdict that the increase of CO2 from 280 ppm to 380 ppm should have heated up the planet by roughly 8 Celsius degrees, i.e. the temperature difference between ice ages with 180 ppm and interglacials with 280 ppm (although he doesn't use numbers - too difficult concepts for a prophet). That's cute.

The only thing that this "argument" of Al Gore contradicts is the so-called reality. The warming that could perhaps be attributed to the man-made CO2 increase so far is about 0.6 Celsius degrees, not 8.0 degrees. Well, 0.6 and 8.0 probably look similar to Al Gore but they're not the same thing. The reason is well-known: CO2 doesn't significantly affect the climate and the graph actually shows the reverse influence of temperature on CO2 in the past. This influence has recently become unimportant because nowadays, CO2 is primarily driven by our activity rather than by temperature and outgassing.

At least, he tries to humiliate skeptics - something that always makes his retarded audiences happy.

In Part 3, he shows some decent animations of circulation of water in the oceans. He talks about some historical events involving the Great Canadian Lakes that has influenced the salinity circulation and brought Europe into a new ice age. That's very cool but his statement that this is expected in 10 years now is indeed pretty amusing. How will the ice age in Europe start? Well, instead of the water from the Great Canadian Lakes, he wants to use water from the Greenland ice sheets. That's very funny.

The difference between these two regions is that the water from the Great Canadian Lakes was ready to flow to the Atlantic while the Greenland ice sheet would have to melt first. It is not quite the same thing although I understand that a brain at the Gore level simply can't be enough to comprehend such things.

In Part 4, Gore tells us that a friend told him a prophecy back in 1978 that if ice melts on the Antarctic Peninsula, it is a signal from God that global warming has started. And indeed, the temperature increased exactly at the same peninsula where they were predicted to increase by Gore's fellow prophet in 1978! ;-) Antarctica in average has cooled down in the last 50 years, in contradiction with the global warming models, but that's the last thing that could diminish the power of Gore's revelation.

The story continues with some ice sheet that melted more rapidly than someone expected and misinformation about some evacuation. He famously predicts a six-meter sea level rise - either with the help of Antarctica or Greenland. Florida, San Francisco, Holland, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Bangladesh are gone. You've heard about it.

In Part 5, he asks whether there is a disagreement about climate change among scientists. Not really, he incredibly says. He refers to crackpot Naomi Oreskes to support his rather extraordinary statement. There are zero papers that disagree with the global warming orthodoxy, he asserts. If he looked at peer-reviewed articles discussed on this blog only, he could find at least 50 recent counterexamples.

He also says that it's just like with the tobacco industry. Al Gore emotionally adds that alarmists are being prosecuted, humiliated, fired, and destroyed: they never get grants and other money. Wow. ;-) Attacks on the White House, Bush family, and ExxonMobil follow. Do costs of mitigation matter? No, because if we decide that costs matter, we won't have a planet. ;-) The last minutes show dozens of rules how you should behave environmentally. For example, you should pray that people will change. Also, you should recommend this movie to your friends. :-)

At any rate, I am flabbergasted how unbelievably stupid the people who buy this crap must be. If a teacher showed me something like that at school, presenting it as science, I would have become really aggressive. ;-)

And that's the memo.

Wildfires: due to global warming?

Update: Al Gore's pals probably behind wildfires

It was inevitable. The terrible fires in California are being used by some people to promote global warming. Scott Pelley of CBS, Michael Oppenheimer at NBC, Barbara Boxer (D-California), and Harry Reid (D-Nevada), Senate majority leader, were the less surprising culprits. CNN moderately predicted a "century of fires". FoxNews may be more surprising but at least they also admit that fires deposit nutrients into the soil.

Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly II thinks that the fires are part of illegals' reconquista. ;-) More seriously, one of the great fires has already been declared arson!



Whenever something bad happens, we hear that it is due to global warming and it is now going to occur very frequently. Hurricane Katrina was linked to global warming and such devastating hurricanes were predicted to occur every year. In reality, Katrina had nothing to do with global warming and it was devastating because it managed to hit a city that wasn't ready. There has been no splash of hurricanes and sensible people don't expect a splash of hurricanes in a foreseeable future. In the same way, there won't be any strengthening splash of wildfires.

The whole history of environmentalism is a history of invented simple and scary ad hoc relationships that never work beyond one or two examples - and I could tell you dozens of stories that confirm this general wisdom. The people who promote this stuff don't care that there is no relationship between their scaremongering and reality and that all of their predecessors' previous screams (and, indeed, sometimes even their own screams) have been falsified. Why don't they care? Well, because there exists almost no one who would give them a proper thrashing.

In a more ideal world where survival would depend on getting these relationships correctly, environmentalists and all their allies would have already died away 10 times. But in our world, this garbage is apparently welcome and the shitheads who promote this trash are actually in advantage: it is viewed by many people as a "nice" thing to generate these bogus warnings and to blame the innocent. Like it or not, a garbage ideology trumps the truth.

Are wildfires caused by global warming or correlated with global warming?

For example, look at this graph.



It shows the number of wildfires in various regions of the world between July 1996 and January 2006. First, global warming would predict an increasing trend. There is clearly none: the graph is noise. Second, global warming would predict that warmer years would have more fires than colder ones. But you can see that the hottest year of 1998 had a very small number of fires. The years with the highest numbers of fires such as 1996 or 2003 were pretty cold years or at least, there is simply no detectable correlation here. Even if you invent a more complicated theory with a lag, you won't get a good signal.

Is there a physical basis for expecting that the number of fires would grow? If you think how fires are created, you will have to answer "Yes but the influence is negligible." If you want to start a fire, you need to get extremely high temperatures - temperatures comparable to 100 Celsius degrees or more. Magnifying glasses or very dark and dry species of grasses under the clear skies can help. These are the things that really matter. If you increase the temperature by 0.6 Celsius degrees in a century, it doesn't help much. Such an increase of temperature can slightly change the probability of a fire but many natural causes as well as our increasing ability to detect them or deal with them is surely much more important.

The amount of lies and myths spread in the society will keep on increasing until sufficient regulating mechanisms will emerge. The people who produce this stuff must be intensely attacked. They're very similar to wildfires and nothing else will stop them.

And that's the memo.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

This week, politically sensible students and other people at the U.S. universities participate in a protest that is called

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.

It was organized by several right-wing pundits such as David Horowitz. According to the organizers, the main goal is to point out two big lies shamelessly promoted by the academic left, namely that

1. it was George W. Bush who started the war on terrorism;
2. global warming is a more serious threat than terrorism.

D0: new limits on fermionic superpartner masses

D0, a consensus of 500 scientists listed on the first two pages ;-), decided that inside 1.1 inverse femtobarn of data, there are no SUSY femions. At 95% confidence level, the lightest neutralino is above 125 GeV and the lightest chargino is above 229 GeV. As expected, the MSSM Higgs Conway bump around 160 GeV has disappeared, too, debunking not-too-careful rumors. Nevertheless, an introduction to MSSM and the Higgs is included in the article below.

CDF, the other detector team at Fermilab, has measured the width of the W boson as 2.032 GeV, in a good agreement with the Standard Model.

ILC, the International Linear Collider, has created a slick brochure (passport) promoting their future project:

Flash, PDF

MSSM and Higgs: introduction

There has been a bump in the data around 160 GeV. The bump is gone. Nevertheless, let us say a few general words about the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), its Higgs sector, and supersymmetry.

In the early 1970s, it was known that physical states of strings in string theory had to be invariant under all angle-preserving i.e. conformal transformations of the worldsheet. The group of such transformations is infinite-dimensional because they can be identified with complex holomorphic functions and such functions are given by an infinite set of Taylor coefficients, if you wish. A particular generator - the overall scaling - in this "Virasoro algebra" is called L_0. It turned out that the condition that L_0 annihilates a physical state is equivalent to the condition

• p . p = m^2

i.e. the usual relativistic relationship between energy, momentum, and the rest mass. The squared rest mass m^2 is calculated as a certain total number of internal excitations of the string, in appropriate units. Well, this was how the old bosonic string theory worked. That theory only allowed bosonic excitations of a string i.e. it only predicted bosons in spacetime, including the obnoxious tachyon.

Pierre Ramond wanted to see that fermions were a part of string theory. Fermions are a part of reality and because reality is described by string theory, it was pretty clear to him that they had to be included in string theory, too. So he realized that the condition

• p . p = m^2

was nothing else than the Klein-Gordon equation for the bosons in spacetime and the natural counterpart for fermions should be the Dirac equation. However, the Dirac wave function has to transform as a spacetime spinor. You may obtain spacetime spinors by quantizing fermionic zero modes on the worldsheet: the spinors are a representation of the algebra of gamma matrices and you obtain the same algebra if you replace the gamma matrices by the zero modes of the fermions in the vector representation.

Because the fermions had to have zero modes - modes that don't contribute to the spacetime mass - they had to be periodic. This periodic sector - a subspace of the Hilbert space of one string - is nowadays called the "Ramond sector" and has to be supplemented with another sector, the "Neveu-Schwarz sector", whose importance for the description of bosons was realized by two physicists whose names can be guessed by the most intelligent readers of this blog. Much like the bosons, Ramond's fermions on the worldsheet transformed as spacetime vectors. In fact, there was a one-to-one correspondence between the worldsheet bosons and worldsheet fermions. Moreover, the Dirac equation

• p slash = m

that had to be satisfied when acting on the spinorial wave functions followed from the invariance of the physical states of the string - the superstring - under an extended algebra of superconformal transformations: the new key fermionic generator squares to the L_0 generator much like the Dirac operator times a similar one is the Klein Gordon operator. Supersymmetry was born.

At the same time, Russian mathematical physicists discovered supersymmetry by pure algebraic considerations. Shortly afterwards, Wess and Zumino have borrowed Ramond's idea of supersymmetry and applied it to the four-dimensional context to build new interesting models that don't directly depend on string theory. The first interacting model was the Wess-Zumino model - a model with a complex scalar, a Weyl fermion, and the usual renormalizable interactions with parameters related by a constraint that allows for the cool new symmetry to work beyond the level of free particles.

Effect of SUSY on particle spectrum

What does supersymmetry do with the particle content? In four-dimensional theories (or less), it is always possible to visualize supersymmetry as a symmetry acting on an extended version of the normal space, the superspace. Let me simplify a bit. The superspace has the usual coordinates x0,x1,x2,x3 but it also has an anticommuting coordinate theta. In reality, it has two thetas (components of a Weyl spinor) and their two independent complex conjugates but the qualitative conclusions won't change if you do things carefully. So let's call about one theta. What does it mean that it is anticommuting? Well, if you exchange the order of factors, you obtain the same result with a minus sign. It means, for two copies of theta, that

• theta . theta = - theta . theta

Well, this means that theta squared equals zero! That's funny because any function of theta may be Taylor-expanded and almost all terms may be dropped:

• f(theta) = a + b.theta

The remaining terms are simply zero! Now imagine that you have a superfield F - which means a field in the superspace. It can be Taylor-expanded in theta:

• F(x0,x1,x2,x3,theta) = f(x0,x1,x2,x3) + theta g(x0,x1,x2,x3)

You see that one superfield F is equivalent to two ordinary fields f,g that only depend on the usual coordinates x0,x1,x2,x3. Because theta is a fermionic object, f is bosonic while g is fermionic or vice versa: f,g are nothing else than the fields that create particles that are superpartners of each other! One of them is bosonic and the other is fermionic.

So supersymmetry doubles the number of particle species. For each boson, there must exist a fermion, and vice versa. If you want the Standard Model to be a part of a supersymmetric theory, it turns out that no known particle can be a superpartner of another known particle. You must accept that each of them has a superpartner that remains to be seen. They're called sleptons, squarks, selectrons etc. in the case of bosonic partners of known fermions and wino, zino, photino, higgsino, gravitino in the case of fermionic partners of known bosons.

MSSM

What is the most economical supersymmetric theory with the Standard Model in it? It is called MSSM, the minimal supersymmetric standard model. Besides the usual partners of leptons, quarks, and force messengers, we must double the number of Higgs fields. Why? In the normal Standard Model, a Higgs field is able to make both upper quarks as well as lower quarks massive. It's always the same Higgs doublet, after all: "2" is a pseudoreal representation of SU(2). In supersymmetric theories, the complex conjugate Higgs transforms as a different kind of superfield (that depends on theta-bar as opposed to theta) and can't be included into the "superpotential" - a generalized potential in the superspace that generates the normal potential energy, among other couplings.

So the counting is different. In the normal Standard Model, you have one Weinberg toilet i.e. one Higgs doublet. It is made out of two complex i.e. four real components. Three of them are eaten by the W+, W-, Z bosons that become massive: their family of polarizations is extended from two to three in each case. The remaining fourth component of the Higgs doublet is the field that creates the (sometime in the future) observable Higgs particles.

In the MSSM, the Higgs scalars have eight real components. Again, three of them are eaten by W+, W-, Z bosons. If you can compute 8-3, you may find out that five real components are left. Two of those five fields are CP-even and electrically neutral while the remaining three fields are CP-odd: their charges are 0,+1,-1, respectively.

The CP-odd neutral MSSM Higgs is the particle we were talking about in the context of the CDF bump. Its mass could have been about 150-160 GeV but now it is gone.

Virtual Earth 3D: Cambridge

If you have a computer that is at least as powerful as mine, large memory (over 1 GB), and an internet connection that is at least as fast as mine, you must certainly try the new version of Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D:

maps.live.com

They have added quite many features and cities that you can view including the 3D models of all houses and other non-planar structures. Among them is Greater Boston, including Cambridge.



Figure 1: Click at the Memorial Hall to see a more detailed picture where the Science Center, Memorial Hall, Jefferson Lab, Terry Terrace, and 1 Chauncy are indicated. (The last two places is where I have lived for some time.)

Google Earth is still faster and smoother in some sense and it offers Panoramio, the photographs associated with places in the map, among other things, and various 3D models (plus the realistic but photograph-based StreetView of a few cities in maps.google.com), but Microsoft has certainly surpassed them in the quality of the three-dimensional models of whole cities.

It's just beyond my understanding how they create models of thousands of houses so that it works. I am sure it is automatized in some way but I don't fully understand how.

When you try maps.live.com and download the necessary software, be sure that you try tilting up/down, zooming in/out, and rotating left/right (didn't they exchange the two arrows? Or am I the only one who thinks about active rather than passive transformations?). The scenery is truly three-dimensional when you rotate it, tilt it, or zoom it.

If you right-click a scenery, you can also download 3DVIA that allows you to create and add your fictitious 3D models in between the real ones and offers a market of 3D models competing with Google 3D Warehouse.



Figure 2: Click to see a scenery with Manhattan from the Liberty Island.

Higgs as the inflaton

Bezrukov and Shaposhnikov argue that they have revived "economical" models where the inflaton is represented by the Higgs boson: the Standard Model would be enough to inflate. They do so by including the "Higgs squared times Ricci scalar" term with an intermediate dimensionless coefficient between 1 and 10^{17}, in order to avoid problems with cosmology as well as particle physics.

At the quantum level, it is not clear what the rules of the games exactly are because we are adding a higher-dimension operator (two dimensions higher than the Einstein-Hilbert term whose non-trivial part is already non-renormalizable) but classically, we should check them because if it were possible, such a Standard Model inflation would be more predictive than general inflation.

James Watson: an inconvenient father of the double helix

I have put this week's most discussed text at the top and added this fascinating Google talk:



Video 1: Google talk about biology. The introduction starts at 6:50, the main speaker starts at 10:40, and the questions start at 50:50. Google has chosen one of the most authoritative biologists, James Watson, and asked him to talk about a very appropriate topic, namely "DNA and the brain". Dr. Watson explains that the key to uncovering the causes of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, fragile X syndrome, Alzheimers, etc. is in our genes. He depicts the strides being made by scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research institution in the biological sciences, as they search to find the genetic basis of neurological disorders. CSHL scientists search to root out disease genes related to mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia...

He answers the "nature vs. nurture" by the word "nature", talks about many details of male brains vs female brains, and recommends you not to be the smartest person in the room because you have no one to help you (very true; elsewhere, he wrote that his IQ was only 122 - three point below Feynman - and as far as I am concerned, I do believe him - he is fascinating but he is also a normal wise guy at the same moment). He shows the DNA patterns behind autism and other interesting things. He recommends mathematically ingenious men to marry beautiful women to avoid autism of children - probably a great idea. ;-) He explains that children's autism is analogous punishment for two intellectuals as HIV/AIDS is a punishment for two homosexuals. ;-) At 48:50, he starts to talk about inequality and political correctness.

Back to his young years. Watson decided to quit bird-watching once he read "What is life?" by Erwin Schrödinger. He chose a university with a good basketball team, discovered the molecular essence of genetics after Rosalind Franklin - an autistic woman and crystallographer who didn't know crystallography too well and who hated other people and especially Francis Crick, the physicist with a loud voice - saw a helix on a picture (she died of cancer...), won a Nobel prize, and became the boss of one of the leading U.S. science institutes. Watson's talk says a lot about the confusions of his contemporaries.

The first question is about the name of a psychologist who studies male vs female brains. Watson mentions Baron-Cohen (and recalls Summers' comments). The second question from a black woman is about the correlation of race and autism: Watson quotes no definite results and makes no predictions. The same woman asks a third question about John Nash: Watson is not sure how the problems can be distinguished. The fourth question is about Craig Venter who left the human genome project and who is called "a Hitler" by Watson. ;-) Watson says that the reason for Venter's exit was different than she thought but sticks to technical points. The fifth question of an excited guy is how the (CS) audience can help him. He answers that large databases are needed. The sixth question is from a female fan who is however irritated by "one-dimensionality" of Watson's picture - IQ axis or male vs. female mind. She thinks that the lesson of DNA is that it is enormously multi-dimensional. He answers that everything is complex but when you want to answer particular questions such the origin of autism, you must make projections and they are useful. The level of testosterone surely matters.

At 60:40, Watson says that Summers' statement on 1/14/2005 was correct and his mistake was the apology. The self-described empathetic woman :-) says "Not at all!" But I must add that Watson's comment in the interview was probably correct but his mistake was the mortified apology! :-) Watson says that the origin of autism is important for some parents but PC at MIT is blocking some research. A male alarmist claims that there must be non-genetic essence of autism because it is rising rapidly. Watson says it does not, only the definition is changing. Another PC guy argues that phenotypes and nurture are the "real frontier" as opposed to genotypes and nature. ;-) Watson explains that we study the genome and the genetics of autism because it recently became possible and the phenotype has to wait when we understand its structure and definition. The reductionist approach dictates to study the genes first. The last question, from a woman, is how the progress in computational biology will improve our knowledge of evolution etc. Watson says that computers are necessary and predicts that 50% of the future genetics departments will be mathematically trained - one half of the likes of Franziska Michor, so to say.

Wise guy.

Other Google talks discussed on this blog: Gell-Mann, Taylor, Boussard

---

James D. Watson, a 79-year-old American co-discoverer of the role of the DNA molecule - one of the most profound discoveries of the 20th century science - and a Nobel prize winner for a hard discipline became the latest target of political correctness.

Why? During an interview in England where he promotes his new book "Avoid Boring People", he avoided boring people and subtly suggested that tests indicate (and employers of black employees confirm) that the Africans are not as intelligent as whites. He predicted that Africa won't be equally successful because the society requires a certain degree of intelligence - or a smart fraction - that seems to be non-existent on the black continent, according to the tests. Whoops.

CNN story

His lectures are being canceled because of his "incendiary" claims. Yes, some DNA pioneers are no longer acceptable in the Science Museum. The blogosphere is full of statements that he is racist and his comments about genetics are not even wrong. Those people don't find it strange at all to dismiss the DNA discoverer's credentials in genetics. He says something inconvenient so he must surely be a bigot, right?



The black-white IQ gap remains at 15-18 IQ points, about 1.1 "white" standard deviation. Whatever is the cause of this difference and whatever is the right reaction to it, the number seems to be so perfectly reproducible and rather accurate so that some people have nicknamed it the "fundamental law of sociology". I don't like the word "denial" too much but I feel that in the case of this piece of cold hard data, it is rather appropriate.

To be sure: this politically correct attack is not limited to leftists. Some creationists use Watson's words as a proof that evolution is inherently racist. Well, I don't know whether it is inherently racist and what this description is supposed to mean. What I find more important is that evolution is true. More generally, I am already disgusted by so many people from so many groups who first look at the political or religious impact of certain answers in science before they decide which answer they are going to believe and defend.

Because others call the facts behind Watson's opinions garbage science, we should ask: is this dispute really about some shaky IQ tests only? I don't think so. I think that a disagreement with Watson's trivial observation is indeed a direct attack against all of evolution. I don't think that someone understands evolution is he or she thinks that groups of organisms that have been virtually isolated from other groups for millions of years keep the same characteristics such as the intelligence. I would say that it is, in fact, the very basic point of evolution that these characteristics are evolving in various ways that are influenced by the environment and other factors. In the case of homo sapiens, the isolation of races has lasted for 50,000-100,000 years only but it is still many thousands of generations!

At any rate, this episode is another example of the fact that even if you work hard, if you are lucky, and if you make one of the three most important scientific discoveries of the century, you will still have no right to talk about your own discipline freely. It's sad but I hope that the politically correct societies will die out sometime in the future and the future scientists, whatever their skin color is going to be, will have a somewhat easier life.

And that's the memo.

P.S. As expected, under the gigantic pressure from the PC gestapo, Watson said he was "mortified" and "unreservedly apologized". That's a well-known ritual that often saves people's lives but it doesn't clean one because some semi-rational members of the PC gestapo still correctly realize that Watson thinks what he thinks, despite "apologies".

P.P.S. Of course, the prediction was correct. One day later, Watson's administrative responsibilities as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory were suspended which is a politically correct way of saying that he was dumped.

Daniel Botkin: Global warming delusions

Two days ago, Prof. Em. Daniel Botkin, the former chairman of environmental studies at University of California in Santa Barbara, the author of many books, and my fellow Rutgers PhD alumnus, wrote an article in in the Wall Street Journal,

Global warming delusions.

He unmasks various myths about the hypothetical negative impacts of assumed warming on life. For example, among the mammals, only a few megafauna species went extinct during the ice ages and interglacials of the last 2.5 million years. Botkin criticizes the idea that models replace reality and their limitations are suddenly ignored.

Warming is not always bad, not all bad things are caused by warming, and Erik the Red would surely agree. ;-)

Botkin explains that the temperature is not really correlated with malaria, ice at Mt. Kilimanjaro, or the favorite holiday destinations of mockingbirds (who really moved to New York City because of the arrival of some exotic plants). He shares the opinion of many other wise men that such warming, if it exists, should be looked at with the help of a careful cost-benefit analysis.

The global warming hacks at RealClimate.ORG are irritated and respond by pointing out the highly relevant assertion that George W. Bush apparently kills people before they disagree with him for the third time (see the conclusions of their article). David Archer also writes that an animal needs millions of years to adapt to climate change (interesting that most animals live for a few years or decades only and their genes haven't changed substantially for millions of years).

Archer reveals that he is afraid of dust bowls more than malaria because "they can destroy civilizations" (interesting that the worst dust bowls occurred in the 1930s not now). Archer insists on previous RC crackpot articles that even denied that we know that melting of the Mt. Kilimanjaro ice cap cannot be reduced to warming. The punch line of Archer's answer is composed of a few additional hateful slogans against the Wall Street Journal and George W. Bush. How the moderate alarmist George W. Bush got into the picture is really beyond me.

It's pretty sad that in the environmental sciences, people like Botkin have been replaced by the likes of Archer - politicized, junk scientists - during the last 20 years. Moreover, the previously third-class science with honest but not exceptional people has turned into a science that claims to be one of the most important ones - as soon as it was overrun by the leftist intellectual trash.

And that's the memo.

Carbon health warnings for new cars

Next week, loads of dopes who have been elected as members of the European Parliament are probably going to approve a new fantastic regulation. Twenty percent of each new advertisement for a new car must be dedicated to a cigarette-style health warning. See

The Times, Reuters

Figure 1: Commercial. Škoda Joyster kills. If you buy this car, you will become a dirty stooge of the oil industry. But the car only kills 2/3 of the people killed by the new Mercedes or BMW.

Related: Bill Steigerwald's interview with Fred Singer

I tried to exaggerate but the percentage of space dedicated to environmental warnings in my ad actually fell short of the required 20 percent. Wow. The complementary sane news is that the new draconian limits on grams of CO2 per kilometer will be postponed.

This combination of news is nothing new. Even more terror and dumb propaganda causes even less positive effect on anything than ever before.

Hat tip: Marc Morano

Grünberg: honorary citizenship getting ready

The Pilsner deputies are going to vote about the honorary citizenship for Dr Peter Grünberg, a new Nobel prize winner, on their next meeting, probably November 15th. It shouldn't be surprising that such proposals can only be raised by big cats ;-), so I chose the mayor, Mr Pavel Rödl (ODS) and he liked the idea.

The rest is a translation of this article.

Pilsen associates itself with a Nobel laureate

PILSEN - The fresh Nobel laureate should soon become an honorary citizen of Pilsen. "By the following meeting, I will prepare a bill seeking honorary citizenship for this excellent scientist and I believe that the deputies will support my proposal. At the same moment, I am sending Mr Grünberg a congratulatory letter that invites him to our city," Pavel Rödl, the mayor of Pilsen, explains.

It is the first time when Pilsen may be proud about "its" winner of a prestigious award. The German physicist's roots are exactly in the region's capital. The fresh Nobel prize winner was born 68 years ago in Pilsen right before the war erupted. Until the post-war expulsion, he lived in the Dýšina suburb [English home page] with his parents.

LM: As a child, he ate a lot of topinka's (fried bread, toast) and played with Merkur.

A gift in the form of a pint with a personal dedication and a promised package of beer will reach the laureate from Pilsner Urquell. "If you decided to celebrate your success with friends, we will happily deliver our beer to your party," the largest domestic brewery intriguingly offers. The brewery has sent its own invitation for the winner. Peter Grünberg won the physics Nobel prize together with Albert Fert of France.

The pair managed to discover the GMR phenomenon that makes the modern computer hard disks possible. Employees of Škoda Holding's archive have revealed additional information linking Grünberg to the town of his birth. They found out that Grünberg's father has been working in Škoda Pilsen until 1941, with an interruption.

"Engineer Feodor Grünberg worked in Škoda from 1928 to 1932 when the Great Depression made him leave the factory," Ms Ladislava Nohovcová from the Škoda Holding's archive describes. However, Grünberg the father has returned to the company soon afterwards. "He was hired again in 1935 and resigned in 1941," Nohovcová adds.

In Škoda, Grünberg was working as a design engineer. Originally he contributed to production of vehicles, later he was focusing on work in the military division. He was an emigrant from Russia where he fought against Bolsheviks during the civil war. At the end of 1939, he acquired German citizenship. His family was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1946. It is probably the father from whom Peter Grünberg inherited the technological aptitudes that he was developing at universities in Frankfurt and Darmstadt after the war.

His main scientific activity takes place in Jüllich where he has been working since the 1970s. Now he has reached the scientific Olymp when he won the Nobel prize last Tuesday.

by Evžen Zavadil

Hermann Nicolai: Back to basics

Prof Hermann Nicolai wrote a two-page story for Nature:

Back to basics

He talks about the AdS/QCD correspondence. Subscription is unfortunately required so it might be hard for you to see the full article unless you want to pay USD 18. Nicolai's article is nice but you can save USD 8 if you pay USD 10 by paypal.com to your humble correspondent, read my story about AdS/QCD, and keep the change. ;-)

Hat tip: David Goss

ABC: John Stossel on global warming myths

Update: The full video of Stossel's program

"20/20" libertarian co-anchor John Stossel, the winner of 19 Emmys for exposing con-artists, is going on the attack against "experts" who warn about manmade global warming – along the way berating Al Gore for saying the debate over climate change is over.

ABC, Friday 8 p.m. Eastern time.

He is going to discuss misinformation in Gore's movie, as recently summarized by a British court, talk to children who are being brainwashed and scared about polar bears and the sea ice level, and argue that only nuclear energy, not new light bulbs, is a known and realistic method to reduce consumption of fossil fuels today.

More details here.

Hat tip: Marc Morano



Video 1: John Stossel about AGW at FOX News (4 minutes)

Croatia vs Czechia, 95:91

Because of the renovation and other work, I can't post much. Croatia was elected as a temporary member of the U.N. security council, together with Libya, Vietnam, Burkina Faso, and Costa Rica. Costa Rica beat the Dominican Republic while Croatia has defeated Czechia: it was the closest race.

As I previously indicated, a membership of some Czech bureaucrats in this body is one of the last thing I would care about. Moreover, I have virtually nothing against Croatia. It was the most popular destination of Czech tourists and I have been there many times. However, the Czechs are getting pretty rich so many of them start to choose more luxurious destinations.



Figure 1: Krk, Croatia

Nevertheless, Croats remain the culturally closest people to the Czechs who have access to a nice sea! ;-) Croats were the Yugoslavs who were (and are) always closer to fascism than communism. But because Croats were not those who were doing the worst crimes during the war, I am far from certain whom I would support in the context of battles in Yugoslavia 65 years ago or so.

Back to 2007.

While Czechia has received 91 votes, Croatia has gotten 95 votes. Some diplomats have suggested that Václav Klaus' skeptical speech about the climate could have added a few votes for Croatia that could have changed the final result. I find it perfectly plausible that a few votes were changed in this way while other votes could have been influenced by other events. But the membership in this body is the first thing I would sacrifice for my president's right to say what he thinks in the U.N. headquarters.

If our representatives were not speaking their mind but rather a sequence of universal colorless politically correct clichés, why would we care who is elected anyway? Despite all these speculations, Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech secretary of state, assumed responsibility for the "U.N. flop". Given the fact that it is not necessarily "purely" his fault, I find his reaction generous. This is the kind of behavior expected from decent aristocracy and I feel that I would enjoy certain aspects of feudalism although most others could have been pretty annoying! :-)

This posting as well as the previous posting may be used for a general discussion about climate and politics.

Climate news

Some critics of Al Gore's award:

• Claude Allegre, a Frenchman who is both an esteemed scientist and a new socialist (and a new skeptic), calls the Friday Nobel announcement "a political gimmick"
• Klaus, Lomborg, Gray
• Richard Lindzen: the award shows that the issue is now about fashions and politics and not science
• Manchester Union Leader: the award is a fraud on the people
• William Gray: the theory behind the prize is ridiculous and in 10-15 years, everyone will know it
• Tehran Times: the award is an attack of old Europe against the Bush team
• Anthony Watts: there are emerging calls initiated in New Zealand to rescind Gore's Oscar etc. because of the inaccuracies in the movie
• Republican American: Gore is as much a liar as he was before
• Business and Media Institute: Gore won thanks to the hysteria in the media

Let us abolish the IPCC:

• Vincent Gray, a fresh co-winner of the Nobel peace prize, proposes to abolish the IPCC because the whole process is a swindle
• David Henderson: scientists are not in charge of the IPCC (Wall Street Journal)

Maestro has grave doubts about carbon trading:

• Alan Greenspan thinks that the cap-and-trade carbon market either destroys the economy or won't work

About Osama's motivation:

• Timothy Ball recommends to be skeptical about Kyoto because Osama bin Laden has correctly figured out that it could seriously hurt the West

Amazon shaman fights green colonialism:

• Davi Kopenawa, a shaman, visits Britain and blames the anti-greenhouse religion for sickness, depression, suicide, obesity and drug addiction of the indigenous people

Snow:

• Colorado gets a foot of snow

Eco-hypocrisy admitted:

• Robert Redford and his lovely Porsche
• Clooney and private jets

Gore is jealous:

• Britney, OJ, Paris get more media attention than global warming (count news.google.com hits), a fact that drives the prophet up the wall

News from Marc Morano, thanks!

German company does geological work for the Brdy radar

We have made another bike trip to Míšov in the Brdy hills.



Today, it was very easy to check that we have found the right peak, 718 meters above the sea level. Intense and noisy work was in progress. The employees of a German geological company answered - in English - that they were just drilling a water well. They are perfectly trained to give the "right" answers, in a rather friendly way.

We were told by someone else that a German company was chosen instead of a Czech one because it was ... cheaper!



A steak and a beer in the Míšov grill was helpful after those 20 miles in the beautiful forests. The owner of the grill is an entrepreneur but she explains that virtually everyone else in the village (except for the mayor) is an anti-radar communist. The Czech government vowed to pay about USD 60 million of compensations. For this money, I would allow Putin to build a Russian radar in Pilsen. ;-)

Work in progress

I won't be able to post too much in the following two days because I began to replace the floor in my apartment. That requires me to remove lots of floor tiles and do many other things before a new floating floor may be installed. Sorry.

12 people becomes 13 people

Count the people on the picture. You should get 12. Wait for 12-13 seconds. The people will permute their organs. Count them again. You should get 13. Write the best answer to the question "Where did the 13th person come from?" to the fast comments. ;-)

Spoilers

Click the picture for a colorful version of the same puzzle. On that page, you may also find an explanation.

Czechia: record cold temperature

Figure 1: The Cathedral of Saint Vitus in 1887. The construction started in 1344 and ended in 1929. ;-) On Wednesday, we did a cool guided tour to secret places of the Cathedral and the Castle.

On October 14th, 1887, when the Prague Castle looked like the picture above, Prague experienced a pretty cold weather with -0.7 Celsius degrees of temperature. Today, 120 years later, the record was finally updated. And Šerák, a peak in Moravia, has seen the first snow. It is not clear whether the record is going to be broken tomorrow, too: On October 15th, 1784, Prague saw -1.5 Celsius degrees.



Figure 2: Temperatures today at 8 a.m.

This week I face the first freezing temperatures in Europe after 11 years because in September 1997, I left for a trip to the U.S. that was longer than expected. Because I was traveling to Europe every summer, I thought that I was in touch with everything that takes place in Czechia. And it was almost the case. But such an argument neglects a subtlety: seasons.

In fact, I've never been in the U.S. during one month after the Independence Day, and this is my first autumn in Europe after 11 years. There are interesting emotions associated with these experiences. Things are a little bit different during different seasons.

Equally importantly, the air in Pilsen is a little bit different than the air in Piscataway or Cambridge. Different plants are emitting their aroma. The level of humidity is different, too. Moreover, sometimes we can breathe a characteristic mixture of the oxides of sulphur, carbon monoxide, and other compounds. ;-) Don't get me wrong: the air is much cleaner - literally by orders of magnitude - than it used to be when I was a kid. But still, there exists a certain "fingerprint" that is able to bring one's memory back to the childhood.

There is one more difference related to aromas. When most people from Eastern Europe traveled to the West for the first time, they had to notice that there was much more perfume in the air in the shops and malls. Czechoslovak retailers just didn't want to fill the air with perfumes or they didn't care. Also, the bakeries were much less scented than their Western counterparts. Today, when the Czech shops and malls are more or less visually indistinguishable from their German or American counterparts, I still think that they are less fragrant.

The way how aromas are stored in the long-term memory of the brain must be pretty funny.

Doris Lessing on political correctness

Doris Lessing, the winner of the 2007 Nobel prize for literature, has been described as an epicist of the female experience. You might think that she is just another colorless feminist, the kind of literary foam that has been awarded many recent awards. That would be highly inaccurate, to say the least.

The New York Times

re-published her op-ed from 1992, the last year when her writing was readable, according to the newspaper. She describes political correctness as the most obvious legacy of communism that hasn't yet been eliminated. Language is the first aspect to see this fact: both spiritual frameworks like to fill pages with mind-deadening jargon that lacks any content.

Those of us who have lived through communism can surely recognize a few clichés such as the "interpenetration of opposites", a universal principle of Marxist dialectics. ;-) Lessing argues that many Western journalists have been writing in a purely Marxist style without realizing it. Needless to say, many more journalists and sociologists are doing so today.

Another part of the communist or politically correct writing is that the journalists assume that every writer (or everyone) should be doing the same thing - when they ask "What should writers do...?" A popular universal cliché from the Marxist discourse is "commitment" and its newer variation, "raising consciousness". Lessing uses exactly these words. It just happens that the IPCC and Al Gore have received a Nobel prize for "raising consciousness" yesterday. Only Lessing and a small percentage of enlightened readers of the New York Times realize that these are Marxist mind-deadening, propagandist pseudoideas.

Al Gore should get a proper thrashing rather than an award for these methods.

Apple has a fresh, brand new design. Click the picture to learn more. Thanks to Rae!

"Raising consciousness", "political correctness", and "commitments" are continuations of the old bully, namely the communist party line, she explains - even though this is certainly not a new revolutionary discovery for your humble correspondent. ;-)

Lessing argues that most of the contemporary literary critics are Marxists as well. A typical aspect of their attitude is their opinion that a novel must be "about something". So they always invent one topic that your novel is "all about": the Palestinian problem, or AIDS, or something else. This is a way of thinking directly inherited from socialist realism where novels had a clear goal in the scheme of propaganda. A story written for the sake of storytelling is a "reactionary" concept. ;-)

Lessing speculated that "political correctness" was born exactly when "communism" was dying because the emitted communist methods of thinking and controlling the society were simply absorbed by different people, often without admitting it. She argues that arts are incompatible with these rigid frameworks and with witch hunts because they are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be uncomfortable (or, using modern adjectives, inconvenient).

Hat tip: Tony Zee, thanks!

Affirmative action for rightwingers?

Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economics professor, looks at extreme findings by Larry Summers and others concerning the extraordinary suppression of conservatives in the Academia. The numbers are scary and I am sure that you don't have to see them to believe me.

Be sure that the real situation is even worse because some people describe themselves as "conservatives" only relatively to the far left environment where they live: the word "conservative" doesn't mean the same thing as it does in the general society.

The main question is, of course, whether it is a good idea to try to introduce affirmative action to support right-of-center scholars. Mankiw predicts that the leftists are more likely to endorse any kind of affirmative action, including this one, than the rightwingers.

As far as I am concerned, he is right. Any kind of discrimination, positive discrimination, irrational discrimination, complex discrimination, or another discrimination is a wrong thing. The problem with the Academia is not a lack of discrimination but a huge excess of it.

I am sure that if the academic officials and others were both honest as well as competent, no affirmative action would be needed or desirable.

The situation in reality is very different. The Academia is full of individuals and groups of people who shouldn't be there, who are not qualified, and who are being hired for ideological reasons. This is the primary wrong thing that should be fixed.

There are whole departments where people are quite generally incompetent and almost never reach the scholarly qualities of their colleagues in standard departments. All these departments of gender studies, African studies, and similar overspecialized and redundant constructs are artificially constructed to create a false impression of balance in questions where balance cannot exist because of facts of biology. These departments have become the key driving forces for politicization of the Academia. I think that responsible university officials should try to shrink these departments as much as they can but no one is actually doing so.

The perverse political opinions of the people in these departments are often imported to other departments, too. The infection rate is very high.

Meanwhile, wrong people are being absorbed to many standard departments, too. At all levels, ideological bias is huge. Members of racial and other groups that are likely to be extremely leftist are being hired more often than members of other groups. In the case of natural sciences, many women decide to go to science mainly because of their feminist ideological beliefs. Because there are not many responsible colleagues who would make it impossible, the percentage of feminist women in science also grows out of proportion, pushing the average further to the left.

Quite generally, the fields that are most brutally affected by the leftist political bias are the same fields where mechanisms to create this bias may be easily detected. In social sciences, politically correct myths about all kinds of pacifism, egalitarianism, and other -isms are considered to be a plus for people to be hired even though these myths have clearly nothing to do with the scholarly merit.

Entertainingly enough, the healthiest field are health sciences where Bush actually narrowly defeated Kerry in 2004. What is my explanation? In health sciences, hiring an incompetent individual for ideological or other reasons can have the same result: it can end human lives. And that is perhaps higher a price than what the people want to pay. On the other hand, people are ready to sacrifice quality of Earth sciences or even biological sciences - and, of course, social sciences - because of ideological goals.

In the most politicized fields of natural sciences, the situation is analogous. In climate science, incompetent individuals are constantly being hired and rewarded for their political attitudes rather than their skills and achievements. I can enumerate dozens of corrupt officials who are doing these things and dozens of wrong decisions where such tendencies dominated.

Once again: the scholarly world doesn't need more politicization and discrimination of various groups. It needs less of it and more meritocracy instead. The bad current situation is not a result of a missing special policy or regulation but a result of concrete bad decisions and acts done by very concrete, corrupt, irresponsible scholars and officials.

And that's the memo.

IPCC and Al Gore win Nobel peace prize for climate porn

Fairbanks Daily New-Miner, Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 (thanks to Gerhard Kramm)

Friday, October 12th, 2007 is a day that has transformed the Nobel peace prize into a gigantic joke at least for one year. People who are co-responsible for one of the most serious sources of international tension and whose goal is to keep the third world in poverty and to clip the growth in the first world were identified as heroes of peace.



A self-invited institution of mediocre and politicized scientists together with a hypocritical semi-educated individual were awarded for their "dissemination" of climate porn. Previously, they have convinced loads of dopes that the Earth faced a "planetary emergency" and earned a lot of money with this hoax that has impressed the Nobel peace prize committee, too.

We are not the only ones who is surprised by the choice. See Czech president's reaction. Also, most CNN.com readers express disdain for Mr Gore and the prize. Hollishillis created a documentary film to calm down her anger. ;-) Marlo Lewis criticized the award on CNN.

Gore and IPCC share the 2007 Nobel peace prize and they were able to join Yasser Arafat and other unlikely winners of this occassionally prestigious award. By the way, try to Google search for gore ipcc.



The video above explains why Al Gore has previously invented the Internet. Ellen Feiss exchanges her opinions with porn actor Will Ferrell and other Apple switchers but once the Norwegian royal family humiliates itself by giving the prize to the jerk in December, the Apple switchers in the ad may be replaced by the king and his kin, too.

In the original musical (lyrics), masturbation is led by Princeton. Nevertheless, the current climate masturbation is dominated by Columbia University. Finally, we may repeat the official White House reaction to the 2002 Iraqi presidential election:

"It is not a serious day, not a serious vote, and nobody places any credibility on it."

Saddam Hussein had to wait for four more years to be executed. We will see whether the former vice-president is faster.

And that's the memo.

EFTs and seesaw

Xi Yin explains how to calculate the partition sum of the monstrous pure 3D gravity in terms of gravitational instantons.



V.V. Kiselev and S.A. Timofeev discuss the cosmological constant seesaw mechanism. Their approach is exactly I meant: the mixing of the flat and AdS vacua occurs because of the analogous instantons that induce decay - except that the corresponding bubble in this case can't grow and only induces the mixing. They also discuss how this small vacuum energy may be generated in the context of gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking.

University officials vs alcohol

Harvard students are considering boycotting the inauguration of the new president. The immediate reason is not terribly deep: it is the undergraduate Party Fund, a negligible part of the budget that may have much more significant impact on the students.

It is surely not my main goal to promote drinking undergrads. On the other hand, I am convinced that the Harvard students could afford many more such parties and that this aspect of life deserves expansion in the Ivy League. Whether you like it or not, alcohol helps to create emotional links between humans, too.

I find the age restriction in the U.S. to be absurdly stringent and it seems even higher in the context of elite university students who are expected to get mature earlier than their friends. To summarize: the Party Fund is not the most respectable among the possible reasons to complain but I do understand them, after all.

Eat kangaroos, save Earth

Greenpeace urges consumption of kangaroos to save the world from global warming.

They argue that unlike cattle and sheep, kangaroos don't burp, don't fart, and don't clear the land. For example, this picture is an oil industry propaganda because kangaroos don't need any food.



It turns out that there are also people who don't burp, don't fart, and don't clear the land. Think twice before you decide what to cook today and save the Earth! :-)

I wonder whether these comments are going to remain jokes. Because the eco-maniacs have already convinced the Conservative party in the U.K. to try to ban plasma TVs and there seems to be no obvious qualitative difference between these bizarre suggestions how to "fight climate change", we may very well be advised to eat each other next week.

Mildly left-wing professor chastises conservatives

... and he is right!

Left-wing people are rarely right in politics. If they were right, they wouldn't be left. But this audio is a remarkable exception. A self-described mildly left-wing professor criticizes the British conservatives at their CPS Fringe Event and he is quite right.

What the British conservatives are doing in the context of climate change - such as the recently proposed plasma TV ban - is absolutely outrageous and it is very good that Philip Stott told them in his inimitable way.

Nigel Lawson, one of the brightest politicians in the U.K. history, speaks after Philip Stott.

Truck driver mostly beats Al Gore

Incidentally, while the leaders of the British conservative party lost their mind, the British judges still have some rational thinking left. Stewart Dimmock, a truck driver from the New Party, has sued the British education system because it wanted to indoctrinate children with Al Gore's propaganda movie.

What did the judge think about the case? This page reveals the verdict:

• it is legal to show Al Gore's movie at schools
• however, the teachers must make it clear that it is a political propaganda movie that only shows one side of the argument
• if a teacher presents the movie without this important disclaimer, he or she will be prosecuted for political indoctrination according to section 406 of the Education Act 1996
• the teachers must specifically correct eleven inaccuracies in the movie:
  
  1. the real reason for Kilimanjaro melting is reduced precipitation;
  2. the CO2 lags temperature;
  3. Katrina can't be blamed on global warming;
  4. Lake Chad didn't become dry because of global warming;
  5. only four polar bears drowned and it was due to storm, not warming;
  6. Gulf Stream cannot stop;
  7. disappearing coral species are not due to warming;
  8. Greenland won't melt for millenia;
  9. Antarctic ice is increasing;
  10. there won't be any migration in this century due to sea level rise (only 40 cm not 7 m);
  11. evacuation of Pacific islands because of warming is bogus, too.

Well, if the children are going to be taught all these things together with An Inconvenient Truth, I think that such an addition to their education could actually be helpful for the kids' scientific skills.

Physics Nobel prize 2007: Fert and Grünberg

Magnetoresistance wins

I just watched nobelprize.org/live.asx. Nice music. The room had thrice as many paintings than what would look normal. ;-)



The winners are Peter Grünberg (Germany) and Albert Fert (France) who discovered giant magnetoresistance, a phenomenon behind hard disks we use today. They have previously shared the 2007 Japan Prize so you can read the standard popular comments there.

I wrote that Peter Grünberg was German. That might be OK but he is actually my citymate. Peter Grünberg was born in Pilsen (Plzeň), the very town where I was born and where I live, on May 18th, 1939.

It used to be a town in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. I am afraid he is not in town because we expelled his whole community in 1945. Bad for us but it was their fault! :-) I have already encouraged the mayor to give him an honorary citizenship. Let me pre-emptively assure you that his father wasn't a Gestapo cop but an engineering graduate and they moved to Lauterbach, Hesse, after the war.



The Square of the Republic, Pilsen, 1940

As we reported in 2006, Thomson Scientific predicted Grünberg and Fart as the second most likely group of winners a year ago but they didn't repeat this precious prediction this year.

GMR: basics

They made the discovery independently in 1988: one deals with thin non-magnetic and ferromagnetic alternating layers of film and he observes a rapid decrease of resistance once he turns on the magnetic field and change the mostly anti-ferromagnetic relation between the magnetic layers into a parallel orientation.



iPod hard drives use their physics.

While it is difficult for me to appreciate the purely theoretical value of this discovery, the effect has been used in modern hard drives and MRAM memory chips that makes the practical importance of the discovery pretty indisputable.

2007 Nobel prize for medicine: gene targeting

Unfortunately, either hackers or incompetent employees eliminated the nobelprize.org server a few minutes before the planned announcement so the server cannot tell you who is the winner.



We can. Mario R. Capecchi (US), Oliver Smithies (US), and Martin J. Evans (UK) share their prize for gene targeting in mice: homologous recombination can be applied to inactivate specific genes in embryonic cells. The accuracy is perfect. The methods are so far used for mice only but they always teach us things about life and aging in general.

The same gentlemen have received the 2001 Lasker Award so you can read an article about that prize.

US budget deficit drops to USD 162.8 billion

One of the quantities that was predicted to exponentially grow out of control - much like the global mean temperature, population, and other things - was the U.S. budget deficit.



However, the graph from 1993 shows something different. The fiscal 2007 deficit was smaller than the deficit of any of the years in this list: 1983-1986, 1990-1995, 2003-2006 even if you don't discount anything.

After USD 248.2 billion deficit in 2006, the USD 162.8 billion deficit in 2007 is just 1.2 percent of the GDP. The U.S. could safely join the European Union if it wanted: the Maastricht criteria require the budget deficit to be below 3 percent of GDP.

Lenny Susskind & census taker's hat

In his new long paper, Leonard Susskind tries to reconcile these assumptions:

• inflation was long enough (50+ e-foldings) for us to know that the whole universe has at least 1000 times greater volume than the observable patch
• because the cosmological constant has begun to dominate, the observable patch no longer grows and the previous point will hold forever
• vacua in the string theory landscape are metastable
• complementarity holds in quantum gravity and requires one to specify a causal patch for quantum mechanics to be well-defined: the degrees of freedom are stored on the boundary
• inflation populates diverse pocket universes

These are pretty diverse assumptions. Moreover, Susskind wants to find a holographic version of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation.

According to him, his "obvious" assumptions imply that the universe has surely tunneled many times before it reached the present low cosmological constant. Where did it start? Well, it started in an "Ancestor" vacuum, Susskind thinks. He believes that the primordial background could be given these kinds of evidence:

• the spatial curvature of the cosmos is negative
• CMB has tensor modes but only with the minimum values of "l"

Together with his gang, Susskind considers eternal inflation, bubble nucleation, and a multiverse "all but inevitable". But he agrees that we lack tools to study this "most extravagant extrapolation in the history of physics", using Bjorken's words. So what does he do?

Stalin and the Central Committee

First of all, he realizes and exploits the fact that all people in his gang are leftists. Susskind agrees with Steve Shenker that in order to achieve a natural, egalitarian treatment of the patches, one needs a preferred observer to take care of everything. The preferred observer is called either "Stalin the Daddie" or "Kim Jong Il" but in the final version of the manuscript addressed to Western readers, Susskind used the moderate term "Census Taker" that was coined by Susskind and Shenker in a Palo Alto Café but none of the two gentlemen was the first one who said it! :-)

Susskind gave his talk in Korea but maybe he confused North Korea and South Korea. :-)

Stalin can't do everything so he has a "Central Committee of the Communist Party" known as "Census Bureau" in the Western edition. The committee is defined, they admit, as the end of history and the causal patch is therefore defined as its past light cone. A figure on page 4 indicates that the central committee is above Stalin and survives him.

Page 5 explains that the term "Stalin" was introduced for the "inevitable" observer who is responsible for other observers, Hydrogen atoms, galaxies, colliding bubbles, and civilizations beneath him. :-) At the bottom of page 5, Susskind assumes that government is an extremely intelligent entity who chooses a very good place where the committee should be located, and it's not the big crunch singularity.

Well, this is about 7th assumption that seems obviously wrong to me - this one is really bad - but let's go on reading. I still haven't understood what question he exactly wants to be answered. Equally seriously, I don't understand whether he thinks that his speculation about the location of the central committee is a hypothesis with some evidence, a nice hypothesis without evidence, God's ad hoc decision, or why does he exactly believe it.

Susskind suggests that the central committee should build its headquarters near the tip of the hat of an FRW geometry. His comrades will surely think it's a great idea but I am not refined enough to appreciate it. More importantly, he doesn't seem to say how Stalin is exactly supposed to control the causal patch i.e. what are the degrees of freedom. Can he define an S-matrix for every committee? His comments that "something" should be associated with the committees sound extremely vague to me and some obvious ways to clarify what he means seem to be either wrong or extremely ugly.

Physics is not about census taking. It is about quantitative causal relationships between observable quantities in the past and in the future. Neither of these quantities is "the number of patches or bubbles". These additional concepts can only be introduced if they're relevant for answering physical questions and physical questions are about observables such as the angular momentum.

Susskind then writes some FRW formulae and draws diagrams of the negatively curved spatial slices, including Escher's famous picture. He proposes the surface of the hyperbolic space to be the holographic screen except that it is infinite and the O(3,1) symmetry acting on the hyperbolic space seems to be broken in every realistic cosmology involving an "Ancestor". This breaking seems obvious but if you want a paper, read Garriga, Guth, Vilenkin. Susskind doesn't seem to agree or care about it, at least not at this moment which is why his text just seems to be plain wrong.

Preferred holographic screens

Susskind asks why flat and AdS spaces allow simple rigorous descriptions of string theory and others don't. Well, it's because these descriptions are associated with simple rigid holographic surfaces at infinity - the AdS boundary or ScriPlus/Minus - where the asymptotic states can be easily defined and "solved" (i.e. they are independent of the exact location of the screen at infinity). He gives essentially the same answer although, in my opinion, his "cold" comments make it look more complicated than it is. But I agree with him that the time-dependence is at most a technical complication and has nothing to do with the essence of the problem how to describe quantum gravity at a causally non-trivial background.

Several comments about the Wheeler-DeWitt equation are written so that they look completely non-stringy. I would disagree that it's natural to choose the metric as a set of privileged degrees of freedom or that the "Hamiltonian" is a preferred operator. Susskind says that the WDW equation is useful if you avoid extreme quantum environments. I think that if you avoid extreme quantum environments - or, equivalently, if you also avoid tiny corrections that quantum phenomena imply for ordinary environments - then the whole problem with complementarity in patches is absent. In other words, you can't solve these deep problems in the semiclassical description. At this level of approximation, complementarity is inconsequential.

Some standard lore about the emergence of time from the WDW equation follows.

Holographic WDW

His holographic WDW equation seems to be nothing else than a dimensional truncation of the WDW equation to the boundary. I have no idea how it actually looks like for the N=4 background or another background. More precisely, I think that this whole concept is incorrect because the very essence of the boundary descriptions is that the gravitational character (and diff symmetry) completely evaporates so it is completely wrong to use WDW-like equations for these boundaries. Moreover, the Hamiltonian becomes physical, nonzero, and well-defined on the boundary.

Susskind uses some contour calculus and AdS/CFT basics to check the locality of a boundary theory.

A minute ago, Susskind incorrectly postulated a WDW-like equation for the boundary. In Section 6, he correctly shows that this incorrect assumption also forces him to incorrectly introduce a non-existent Liouville sector responsible for the metric fluctuations on the boundary. In reality, the very point of the boundary in all working descriptions is that these fluctuations are suppressed or they become unphysical. An exact description of a superselection sector of quantum gravity is possible exactly when it becomes effectively non-gravitational.

His bizarre Liouville sector is responsible for diff transformations on the boundary that are locally perpendicular to the boundary - diff transformations that are identified with RG flow, according to another lore, but it doesn't seem that Susskind uses this lore in a new or coherent way. He also tries to incorporate Bousso's bounds but it is hard to follow the role of these comments at this place, too.

Section 7 finally combines some RG scalings with Stalin's government.

As Stalin moves closer to the central committee, he is supposed to make some RG-like scaling procedures when he counts the observers. This section seems to highlight the problems I have had previously. The goal of a physical theory is to predict relationships between the actual degrees of freedom such as spins and momenta of asymptotic particles, not just to count them. As far as counting goes, RG flows are OK in a field theory because the number of degrees of freedom is infinite anyway. If the number of degrees of freedom became finite or even small, it would be impossible to have RG-like flows that would still preserve the accuracy of the equations.

I have a feeling that Susskind tries to present some approximate RG constructions as accurate ones. Moreover, he doesn't want to write the scaling prescription for the actual degrees of freedom but rather for some meta-degrees of freedom such as the "number of patches". That's a misunderstanding of dynamics of quantum gravity because the "number of patches" is surely not an observable in the technical sense - and even more clearly, it is not a complete set of observables. The very goal of the complementarity principle is that you shouldn't be asking about physics behind your patch which is why e.g. the number of other patches should be excluded from the menu of recommended policy measures. ;-)

In other words, I still don't understand how to relate these speculations with dynamics i.e. the relation between observables.

In Section 8, it is explained that the idea to introduce Stalin was originally meant to define a measure on the landscape. Well, that's why all these Stalin-like ideas are incompatible with the complementarity principle. In a couple of subsections that follow, Susskind simultaneously tries to generalize the conclusions of Garriga, Guth, Vilenkin, as well as deny their basic setup (where the O(3,1) symmetry is broken). I don't think it's possible.

The last Section 10 is a warning to Stalin written in italics.

These causally non-trivial aspects are confusing. I am also confused about some of them but I feel that I am almost certainly less confused than Susskind. It might be a good idea to write a coherent presentation of these things instead of comments about an incoherent one. ;-)

And that's the memo.

Costa Rica backs free trade

During the last 100 years, Costa Rica has been the most democratic country in Central America. It is thus not surprising that it is currently the most prosperous one, too.

Huge and intense demonstrations of up to 100,000 people opposed DR-CAFTA, the Central America Free Trade Agreement that includes the U.S., Dominican Republic (DR), El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

But the referendum was won by the silent majority rather than the loud minority. Almost 52 percent of voters supported "Yes": this camp included President Oscar Arias, the 1987 peace Nobel laureate. Good for them. It will allow them to sell and buy what they need more easily.

Costa Rica was the only place that held a referendum about the question and became the last one where the agreement was ratified.

The critics are right that the agreement will make it harder for some companies in Costa Rica, especially the state-run companies. They will indeed have to face tougher competition and it is a good thing, too, both for the rich and the poor.

Craig Venter: DNA-burners

As we reported in June, Craig Venter has decided that DNA-reading has become a trivial science and he was working on DNA-burners.

The Guardian informs us

that the first material result is a 381-gene-long chromosome with 580,000 pairs of genetic code based on Mycoplasma genitalium: Mr Craig was inspired by a bacterium created by his colleague, Ms Nature. The synthetic organism will be a microscopic parasite.



Video 1: Wall Street Journal interviewed J. Craig Venter a week ago. In the first part they talk about his personal DNA code that he has published so that you can create your own Venter in your lab. ;-) Since 3:00, they discuss the synthetic life - including genetic engineering of new fuels.



Figure 1: A more advanced result of his line of research. The corn develops an XBOX360 at the center. Patent pending. Hat tip: Viktor K.

Richard Dedekind: 176th birthday

On October 6th, 1831, Richard Dedekind was born.



Yes, this stamp is from East Germany. Click to learn more about him.

Dedekind was one of the mathematically inclined 19th century string theorists.

In mathematics, Dedekind studied the relations between rational and irrational numbers (recall Dedekind cut). He was one of the first people who appreciated the concept of groups in algebra and arithmetics. He investigated number fields, ideals, and many other aspects of number theory.

Dirichlet who essentially discovered D-branes 150 years before Polchinski was his close friend and Riemann was another contemporary.



Nevertheless, 21st century theoretical physicist surely remember Dedekind for his eta function, essentially the inverse partition sum of a boson in string theory.

The picture above shows the real part of the modular discriminant defined by Weierstrass as a function of "q = exp(2 pi i tau)". The modular discriminant is the 24th power of the Dedekind eta function, up to a power of 2 pi - exactly the inverse of what you get in the light-cone bosonic string theory partition sum.

RSS MSU: September 2007 was 7th coolest month in this century

According to the new RSS MSU satellite data, September 2007 was the 7th coldest month among 81 months since January 2001. It has made it to the 9% of the coolest months of the 21st century so far. Their gadgets measure temperature at latitudes between -70.0 (S) and +82.5 (N) - about 94.5% of the surface if I compute well.

In the last month, the global temperature was just 0.12 Celsius degrees above the long-term average which means that it was 0.78 Celsius degrees cooler than the temperature in April 1998 when the anomaly was +0.9 Celsius degrees. The main reason is La Nina that is getting stronger and might continue to do so for a few months.

The Southern hemisphere was 0.015 Celsius degrees cooler (!) than the long-term average, fifth coldest month since January 2001. Antarctica has cooled down by roughly 1 Fahrenheit degree in the last 50 years.



Figure 1: La Nina conditions on October 4th, 2007. Click for other dates. The surface sea temperature anomalies are divided to 0.5-Kelvin steps and colored. White means sea ice, black means land.

La Nina, i.e. the female baby Jesus (Spanish speakers agree that this is the right translation unless they discriminate against girls by thinking that they can't become baby Jesus!), is famous for the blue (cool) strip in the equatorial Pacific ocean. Because this ocean is pretty big, La Nina typically lowers the global mean temperatures, too. More importantly, it brings distinct patterns of temperature and moisture to different parts of the world.

By the way, in an interview with Dennis Prager, Prof Robert Giegenback who is a geologist at UPenn describes some climate issues from a geological perspective. Among other things, he argues that only during 5% of the last one billion of years, the Earth could support permanent ice on both poles. We're living in one of the coolest periods of the geological history.

Note added later: According to RSS, October 2007 was the 2nd-3rd coldest month in this century so far.

Finally, some less serious stuff



Video 1: An Inconsiderate Troupe: a movie about the last glacier that is melting - a parody to Al Gore's movie for penguins. Incidentally, a climate skeptic, Britney Spears, talks to an alarmist called Paris Hilton. See also Al's and Tipper's Summer Nights.

Solvay Conference 1927: eighty years later

Brussels has been a good neutral place to meet for quite some time. The most famous Fifth Solvay Conference occurred in the second part of October 1927, right after some of the most dramatic advances in physics of all time took place.

The participants were not bad: Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Planck, Born, de Broglie, Curie, Pauli, Schrödinger, Lorentz, Kramers, Compton, Debye, Ehrenfest, Langevin, and a few others. It is likely that it won't ever be possible to gather that many people who are responsible for such significant breakthroughs.

Concerning quantum mechanics of particles such as electrons, there was a portion of physicists who knew very well what was going on - Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Born, Ehrenfest, Debye, and partly Kramers - while the majority of the attendants, despite their qualities, were confused.

De Broglie was there primarily because he had prepared the ground for wave mechanics of Schrödinger but Schrödinger himself didn't quite understand the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics or the equivalence of his picture with Heisenberg's matrix mechanics proven by Dirac. Einstein's admiration for determinism is a well-known story.

Einstein, Planck, Lorentz, and Kramers were stronger in dynamics of photons. At that time, relativity was still waiting to be reconciled with quantum mechanics and Dirac became the main guy in this mission. Among the quantum founding fathers, I would say that Wolfgang Pauli had the most modern and the most penetrating approach. He unambiguously became a relativistic field theorist and he would almost certainly be a string theorist today: it is truly paradoxical that crackpots in 2007 abuse exactly his name and quotes against string theory.

Richard Lindzen, an inconvenient expert

Juliet Eilperin, an alarmist correspondent of the Washington Post, has written a portrait of Richard Lindzen,

An Inconvenient Expert

for "Outside" and it's not bad. I apologize to Dick for putting her photograph here instead of his face. You can find his face in her article. Inside this blog, we prefer high quality of content as well as the form which is why in this case, we describe the words of Lindzen and include the journalist's photograph. ;-)

Lindzen predicts that in 20 years, it will be generally accepted that global warming will have been a non-issue. He thinks that everyone will be saying that they will have been saying these things all the time and other scientists might have to take credit for the prediction instead of Dick himself.

Ig Nobel prizes 2007

Glashow, Laughlin, Mello, and other Nobel prize winners have handed out the 2007 Ig Nobel prizes:

• "Chemistry" - Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin, or vanilla fragrance and flavouring, from cow dung.
  "She seems to claim if companies start using this method it might help with global warming because some of all the cow dung that causes problems in the atmosphere will start getting used," Abrahams said in an interview.
• "Linguistics" - Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona - for a study showing rats sometimes fail to distinguish between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
• "Peace Prize" -- The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon, the so-called "gay bomb", that "will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other".
• "Biology" - Dr Johanna EMH van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for their census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi that share our beds at night.
• "Economics" - Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device in 2001 that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them, known as the "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately".
  The inventor, however, could not be found by Ig Nobel representatives in Taiwan "We had people in Taiwan looking for him. He's vanished. Somebody suggested to us the possibility that maybe the poor man was trapped inside his own machine," Abrahams said.

Svensmark and Friis-Christensen: reply to Lockwood and Fröhlich

The Sun is still alive

Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen wrote a reply to the article by Lockwood and Fröhlich. Many graphs are extended up to 2007.

I think it is an excellent paper because it seems to give hints how the climate actually works. Look at this extremely impressive correlation captured in their figure 2b:



The blue graph is the radiosonde temperature anomaly - a source of temperature data that Svensmark and Friis-Christensen consider to be the physically "cleanest" source. The word "anomaly" means that the effect of El Nino, the North Atlantic Oscillation, volcanic aerosols, and additional 0.14 K/decade warming trend was removed.

The "hardcore" skeptics will have to swallow the last entry in the previous paragraph. ;-)

The red curve shows the cosmic ray flux (upside-down) as a function of time.



You might agree that the result is quite impressive. The short-term details of the temperature anomaly that are reproduced by the negatively taken cosmic ray flux are arguably non-trivial enough to justify the choice of roughly four coefficients that have to be adjusted to reproduce the curve especially because the value of some of these coefficients are known from other considerations.

Think about a different four-parameter interpolation of some of the data points or about another non-linear regression, if you wish, such as a cubic polynomial or a combination of two cosines with adjustable frequencies and amplitudes. Surely, you wouldn't be able to match the curve so accurately.

If you believe the curve, their work not only seems to show that the cosmic rays influence the climate but it even quantifies the sensitivity on the cosmic ray flux and therefore the slopes. Quantitatively speaking, you can see that cosmic rays are routinely changing the temperature by as much as 0.5 Kelvin degrees per decade - essentially the warming trend attributed to the enhanced greenhouse effect for the whole 20th century.

Their added recent 0.14 +- 0.4 Kelvin per decade trend - the figure is identical to the UAH MSU decadal trend for the lower troposphere (in the middle troposphere, UAH MSU only gives 0.06 Kelvin per decade) - is often conveniently blamed on the enhanced greenhouse effect but the authors of course note that this identification is not proven and alternatives exist.

The origin of the trend may be in changes of the natural greenhouse effect or other low-frequency signals (perhaps some additional signals related to the oceans). Even if you believe that man is creating this contribution, you see that the slopes it gives every decade are roughly 3 times smaller than the trend from the cosmic rays. At any rate, this is the kind of high-frequency precision analysis that climate modelers should be trying to verify, reproduce, and improve.

As reported by Rasmus Benestad, A Norwegian website praised Friis-Christensen for having given the "best speech ever" in the annual Birkeland seminar organized by Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (NASL).

Lederman: Global warming is the new Sputnik

Leon Lederman, the author of the term "God particle", promotes his "physics first" paradigm. Physics is based on simpler concepts so it should be taught before chemistry and biology. In the sense of compositeness, biology is more complex than string theory. I agree with that.

He also says that global warming is the new Sputnik. Exactly 50 years ago, on September 4th, the Soviet Union started cosmic research. The communist country showed that America was not necessarily as advanced in this human activity as you would expect from its wealth and other virtues. When it comes to individual problems, Russia could have been faster, stronger, more sensible, and more efficient. I think that global warming might be analogous.



Most Russian scientists don't believe the global warming orthodoxy. The Russian media prefer to talk to scientists who are convinced that the Sun is the primary driver of climate change. For example, Yuri Zaitsev from the Institute of Space Studies wrote an article for RIA Novosti. Climate has always been changing and the causes are not known.

He quotes Lev Zeleny (Lion Green), director of the Institute of Space Research at their national academy of sciences, that before making any Kyoto-like decisions, a proper diagnosis must be made. Yuri Leonov, director of the Institute of Geology at the same academy, thinks that the human influence is so small that it can be dismissed as statistical error. A few years ago, the whole academy voted for a resolution identifying the science behind Kyoto as unsubstantiated nonsense. They have urged Putin to withdraw his signature from Kyoto.

Yuri Izrael, the boss of Russian climatologists and ecologists, agrees that climate change is not necessarily man-made and it is not a global threat.

Even among the public, a majority hasn't heard much about global warming and most people realize that it would be pretty good for Russia if the Earth were a few degrees warmer - a dream that is unlikely to be realized in this century. If they get a sufficiently high amount of money instead, a flat Earth's climate could be even better, they think just like their president :-), but if no money is involved, warmer is better.

Global warming could be another Sputnik, indeed. It could be another example how overpaid and redundant many Western scientists are. Leon Lederman should re-check whether he has interpreted his analogy properly.

And that's the memo.

Brian Greene vs a hippie physics critic

Wired magazine tries to import the idea of "consensus science" to high-energy physics. So they have organized a poll opened literally for everyone. People vote whether Brian Greene's general statements about string theory are better or worse than Lee Smolin's equally general but populist and emotional misconceptions.

Needless to say, 80% of the people who participate have no idea what theoretical physics is while most of the remaining 20% voted for the right answer by pure chance. ;-)

Let's face it: the number of people who can actually evaluate results of papers in high-energy theoretical physics in general and quantum gravity in particular is not 20%: it is smaller than one part per million (ppm) i.e. smaller than 6,500 people in the world. Anyone who is ready to take these polls seriously is crazy. The average participants' IQ is lower than the required one by 40 or more.

Most Americans believe creation and most people in the world believe that we face dangerous man-made global warming. People are ready to believe any stupidity you like as long as this stupidity is sold in such a way that they will find it attractive because this stupidity makes them feel smarter, nicer, and happier. These people want to believe that they're not "missing" anything - which is completely absurd - so they do believe it. Lee Smolin is not only a crackpot but a shameful crackpot if he uses these tactics - if he employs uneducated average people to leverage his influence in science that would otherwise be zero.

I am convinced that high-brow science will simply be unsustainable in current circumstances because the Smolin-like scum will be increasingly using brainwashing campaigns in the media to contaminate the scientific discourse by irrational garbage. Last year, I realized that the situation was already so bad that I couldn't even publicly say something that every good physicist knows - that Smolin is a crank who has nothing to contribute to serious science - not even politely. What will be next? Will scientists be expected to worship such people or write meaningless follow-ups of Smolin's equally meaningless postmodern "work"? Will string theorists be attacked in the media as "deniers" of an alleged "failure of string theory"?

This atmosphere has nothing to do with science. In science, scientists must be allowed to reach any conclusions whether billions of idiots like them or not. This is what the scientific confrontation with the Catholic Church was all about. Physicists at the best places were chosen to do their work because they are far more intelligent, educated, and productive than average people, not because they are indistinguishable from average people. Any pressure attempting to push them to the average is extremely dangerous.

Let us just look at the statements of Greene and Smolin:

• Greene "Here, finally, is a theory that promises to realize Einstein's dream and more; a theory with the capacity to unify all matter and all forces."
• Smolin "You may want a simple unified theory of all the particles and forces, but what you get includes a few extra features, at least two of which are nonnegotiable: extra dimensions and nonuniqueness [i.e., a multitude of versions of the theory]."

What Greene says is a trivial and obviously correct, mostly non-technical statement that describes the unification of forces in a theory and that puts the current research in the proper historical perspective. Smolin's statement is, on the other hand, just a hateful proclamation that tries to attach a negative flavor to two predictions of string theory. Extra dimensions and multiplicity of solutions are not things to be ashamed of: they are proud scientific predictions that a priori have no emotional labels (even though at least the first one is fascinating physics). 800+ imbeciles, don't you like it? Well, then you should better fu*k off. The same Smolin who mentions two universal predictions of string theory is going to contradict himself instantly:

• Greene "We now have more than 20 years of research, filling tens of thousands of pages of calculations, which attest to string theory's deep mathematical coherence."
• Smolin "We have no idea which of the 10-to-the-500th-power versions of the theory corresponds to reality. Worst of all, there is not a single prediction made that might be confirmed or falsified by a doable experiment."

Greene's statement is nothing else than a statement whose validity can only be verified by those who actually understand the papers. It is clear that only 1 ppm of the voters could safely and independently confirm his correct appraisal of coherence of string theory. Smolin's minirant is made out of two sentences. The first one is a popular version of a true result of string theory about the multiplicity of solutions combined with information about the current state of knowledge while the second sentence is a manifestly untrue comment about physics.

Whenever we have any statement that talks about physical quantities, it is falsifiable, whether or not the statement has 3 words "OR" in it or "10^{500}" of them. People who know what they're doing can falsify generic statements more or less quickly. For example, every single paper by Lee Smolin may be shown to be nonsense in less than 5 minutes. If you wish, string theory makes 120 predictions that each major statement in each Smolin's paper is wrong. Isn't it enough to agree that it makes predictions? The fact that string theory is still "alive" is an extremely non-trivial piece of circumstantial evidence that it is the right description of reality at a deeper level. Whoever thinks that he may find a better or simpler theory that still seems to be consistent with reality should work on it and I essentially guarantee to him that he will fail.

• Greene "No one successful experiment would establish that string theory is right, but neither would the failure of all such experiments prove the theory is wrong."
• Smolin "If a theory is believed deeply enough by a large enough group of experts, they will go to ever-more-extreme measures to save it."

Greene is just saying that the framework of string theory goes beyond a single experiment. He honestly says that we don't see one conceivable and doable experiment that would be enough to decide about the most far-reaching question, namely whether string theory is a correct description of reality. Experiments that would be directly relevant are undoable for technological reasons while no cheap doable experiment can be matched to the whole string theory as far as its importance goes. It's very clear that much more work will be needed and work is what the serious people are doing. This is not a "criticism": it is a fact about the structure of physical ideas and our current knowledge about them. Adding emotional flavor to any of these things is completely irrational and Smolin is doing it in every single case.

Smolin's conspiracy theory is truly pathetic. The community of string theorists is not "large enough" in any stretch of imagination. It is composed of roughly 2,000 people in the world. If you're in a random U.S. state such as Oregon, you expect roughly 1-2 string theorists living in your state. Professionally, they're extremely lonely people. They're a small minority even within the particle physics community. Only complete imbeciles - such as those 810+ people who voted for Lee Smolin's proclamation - are ready to believe that the string theory community is "large enough" to lead to "ever-more-extreme measures".

Smolin's hypocricy is breath-taking. On one hand, he wants to dismiss a tiny group of world's string theorists as a huge group that defends some viewpoints by its huge size. On the other hand, he is ready to collect votes of a much larger number of people who have absolutely no idea about these questions in order to support his hateful remarks and junk science.

Hep-th papers on Thursday

Chialva, Danielsson, Johansson, Larfors, Vonk study the topology of the landscape, especially the connectedness of different vacua. It used to be thought that the landscape is made out of many "continents" in which the vacua are connected with each other but the "continents" are disconnected from each other. However, they show that the number of continents is much lower. How do they do it? They find methods how to continuously get from one vacuum to another vacuum, combining conifold-like critical transitions (applied even in the presence of fluxes) with monodromies.

Edward Witten generalizes some concepts of the Langlands program. In the simplest version of the program, one deals with flat connections on a Riemann surface. Adding simple poles in the connection is called "tame ramification" while adding stronger singularities is referred to as "wild ramification" which is the subject of Witten's paper. Stokes' phenomenon and isomonodromic deformation play a role in these new, largely heavily mathematical results.

Jafferis and Saulina compute BPS indices on Calabi-Yau manifolds equipped with two intersecting families of D4-branes. The intersection is a compact Riemann surface. They argue that their index, computed from a q-deformed U(M) x U(N) gauge theory, computes a jump of an index involving one D4-brane that can just split into two on a wall of marginal stability.

Silva and Landim looked at a two-form in a curved spacetime. By Hodge duality, the theory is argued to be equivalent to a scalar and this fact holds even if interactions are taken into account. The stress-energy tensor is calculated.

Sasakura verifies a relationship between (primarily) two-dimensional tori obtained as solutions of general relativity and fuzzy tori. For this two-dimensional theory, he verifies that the "R" term doesn't contribute to the momentum-dependence of the fluctuations because it is topological which is why "R squared" gives the leading nonzero dependence.

Splittorff and Verbaarschot falsify the Banks-Casher formula for theories with the sign problem and work out the arguably correct replacement in the special case of one-dimensional QCD with a chemical potential. The sign problem is a situation when Monte-Carlo evaluation breaks down because the average phase factor (in a one-loop determinant etc.) vanishes in the thermodynamic limit.

Kinoshita constructs a warped dS4 x S4 compactification where the sphere is deformed and connects this new branch of solutions to the conventional unwarped branch with ordinary spheres.

Kitazawa and Nagaoka study the IKKT model in the way that I always considered correct. The IKKT model comes from type IIB D-instantons and has no time coordinate. So you shouldn't be looking for a Hamiltonian. Instead, you should view it as a tool to generate the S-matrix amplitudes beyond the perturbative expansion. To do so, you need vertex operators. At generic couplings, only the supergravity multiplet forms stable asymptotic states. They construct the vertex operators for these graviton states and connect them with the perturbative superstring graviton vertex operators. The matrix vertex operators have exactly the same form I have believed to be correct, namely the supertrace of an exponential of the matrix (k.X): recall that X is a matrix in the model. The exponential is multiplied by polynomials in the fundamental matrix fields before the supertrace is evaluated. Your humble correspondent thinks that this is today's most interesting paper.

Maziashvili offers an entertaining interpretation of the gravitational loop corrections to the running gauge couplings: the naturally defined "spacetime dimension" slightly drops below four as you approach the Planck scale.

Schweigert and Tsouchnika classify equivalences between Wess-Zumino-Witten models and minimal models - the Krammers-Wannier dualities - and show that they only exist for small levels which is what you expected (or knew) anyway.

Castro, De Castro, Hott look at Dirac fermions in two dimensions coupled to scalars and pseudoscalars with (solvable) Pöschl-Teller-l