Velvet revolution and discarded flowers

Today, Czechs and Slovaks celebrate the Day of the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy. On November 17th, 1989 i.e. 29 years ago, we kickstarted the Velvet Revolution. I surely count myself among the top 1% of the nation that should be credited for those changes. Yes, at some moments, I had hoped that folks like me would be appreciated for the changes – that have already increased the wealth of the nations by an order of magnitude, among other (sometimes more important) things – but as you can guess, it has never materialized and the very basic heritage of the Velvet Revolution is at stake, too.

The same 17th November is also the International Students' Day, the only international holiday whose origins are purely Czech. In 1939, exactly 50 years before the Velvet Revolution, the Czech students clashed with the Nazi law enforcement authorities after the rallies on October 28th (anniversary of Czechoslovakia) and the funeral events for a student of medicine, Jan Opletal, who was injured and died. The Nazis decided to close all Czech universities for 3 years – the actual plan was a permanent closure of the universities and the complete liquidation of the Czech elite and intelligence. In November 1939, Hitler was angry and complained that the Czechs hadn't been treated as the Untermenschen on par with the Poles. Due to our decision not to fight, we were gradually reclassified as semi-Untermenschen. One-half would have been eradicated (including the whole intelligence etc.), one-half of the rest would be moved to Siberia or Patagonia, and the mostly blue-eyed blonde rest would be Germanized. Those were just plans. Thankfully, no one knows what would be the exact outcome of those long-term plans – the 1000-year-long empire only got some 6 more years after it started the world war.

In 1989, students in Prague commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 1939 events and they expressed some dissatisfaction with the communist regime, too. The rally was permitted by the regime but the students were violently treated, anyway. It wasn't brutal violence but it was enough to make lots of parents and other Czechs and Slovaks seriously pissed off. These days, there is also a disagreement about the relative importance of the two holidays, how the day should be called, and so on. You may imagine which kind of political groups prefer which of the events. The 1939 events are surely highlighted by communists and similar folks who have a problem with the 1989 Velvet Revolution.

AdS/CFT as the swampland/bootstrap duality

Last June, I discussed machine learning approaches to the search for realistic vacua.

Computers may do a lot of work and lots of assumptions that some tasks may be "impossibly hard" may be shown incorrect with some help of computers that think and look for patterns. Today, a new paper was published on that issue, Deep learning in the heterotic orbifold landscape. Mütter, Parr, and Vaudrevange use "autoencoder neural networks" as their brain supplements.



The basic idea of the bootstrap program in physics.

But I want to mention another preprint,

Putting the Boot into the Swampland

The authors, Conlon (Oxford) and Quevedo (Trieste), have arguably belonged to the Stanford camp in the Stanford-vs-Swampland polemics. But they decided to study Cumrun Vafa's conjectures seriously and extended it in an interesting way.

Son of Czech PM abducted to Crimea

...by his own father's Russian aide...
Another story in English here (one more)

Czech PM Andrej Babiš has been charged with subsidy fraud. By obfuscating the identity of the owner of a farm, the billionaire pocketed a $2 million subsidy for small businesses in the tourism industry when he was building The Stork Nest, a luxurious family farm and conference center. By now, police has about 10 huge packages of evidence (witnesses of many kinds, documents, data about the registration of Internet domains etc.) that he executed the subsidy fraud deliberately.

While he may be arrested for up to 10 years (the Parliament has stripped him of his immunity for this case) and this is not his only apparent crime, $2 million is obviously not a global story. But last night, two Czech investigative journalists have released a truly shocking story. A year ago, Russian people who work for Czech PM Andrej Babiš have abducted the prime minister's first own son, Andrej Babiš Jr, to (Moscow and then) the old new Russian peninsula, Crimea, to make sure that he – clearly a key witness – wouldn't be interviewed by the police during the Stork Nest investigation.

It makes perfect sense that the Russian guy (or someone else) chose Crimea – almost no Czech or Westerner would dare to go there.

Illegal migrants apparently given prepaid Mastercard debit cards by Soros, EU, U.N.

In several separate but analogous programs. Soros' projects are still being negotiated.

An hour ago, I was stunned by articles in the Czech media that were sent to me.



What is this Mastercard? Note that it is decorated by symbols of Mastercard, the European Union, and a branch of the United Nations. It's a prepaid debit card that was apparently found in the pockets of illegal migrants that are flowing to the territory of the European Union through the Balkan route that someone is apparently trying to revive.

According to Sputnik (original from The Hungary Journal) and other sources, the ruling parties in Hungary – Fidesz and the Christian Democratic People's Party – demand an explanation of these debit cards from the European Commission. The Western press seems to be completely hiding this story – or am I overlooking something?

Bitcoin price is where it was 1 year ago

In 2017, the Bitcoin price went from some $1,000 to $20,000 on December 18th. Since that moment, the price lost 66% while the Google searches for the Bitcoin plummeted by 92%.

In a recent month or so, the Bitcoin price lost much of its volatility and seems to be stuck close to $6350. That's pretty much exactly where it was a year ago, sometime on November 12th, 2017. That factoid is just a coincidence but it allows us to make certain interpretations.

New veins of science can't be found by a decree

Edwin has pointed out that a terrifying anti-science article was published in The Japan Times yesterday:

Scientists spend too much time on the old.

The author, the Bloomberg opinion columnist named Noah Smith (later I noticed that the rant was first published by Bloomberg), starts by attacking Ethan Siegel's text that had supported a new particle collider. Smith argues that because too many scientists are employed in science projects that extend the previous knowledge which leads to diminishing returns, all the projects extending the old science should be defunded and the money should be distributed to completely new small projects that have far-reaching practical consequences.

What a pile of toxic garbage!

A pro-string PBS video

I wrote mostly negative things about the PBS Spacetime" physics videos. But Peter F. sent me a link to a new one,

Why String Theory Is Right (17 minutes).

Before you become excited that string theory finally gets some support from the mainstream media (the video has almost 200,000 views in less than a day), I must warn you: they plan to release a symmetric video "Why String Theory Is Wrong" (and maybe they will say "trouble" or "not even wrong" instead). Judging by the announcements at the beginning, their overall view will be at most neutral.

Heckler Acosta no longer welcome to Trump's house

When I was a kid, and even as recently as 20 years ago or so, I considered CNN to be a rather impressive brand. It had to be better than many other news outlets. Times have changed a lot.



Jim Acosta still calls himself a "CNN White House Correspondent" on his Twitter account – which I consider a fraudulent description because of the outcome of the story I am going to remind you of (he is no longer capable of "corresponding" with someone on the White House side). Fine, during the press conference, Jim Acosta started his "question" by the statement "I want to challenge you".

An SI vote next week may turn \(\hbar\) into a known constant

Update November 16th: Oui, the constants are constant now!

Although it's just a bunch of conventions, I have been sort of excited about the systems of units – and the SI units in particular – for more than three decades.



The most recent blog post, one from July 2017, announced plans to redefine the fundamental SI units so that some universal constants become known constants, much like \(c\) which became \[

c = 299,792,458\,{\rm m/s}

\] after a 1983 reform of the SI system. In particular, I have rooted for a reform that would turn Planck's constant \(h\) to a known constant since my childhood – but a clear blog post from April 2012 is the most explicit thing I can link to.

TRF midterms: a poll

The forecasters seem to predict a 90% chance for a Democratic victory in the midterm elections. I think it's more likely that they'll be wrong – they are probably not "just forecasting". But what do you think?

A purple-haired NPC demands affirmative action favoring fellow NPCs who live inside PCs

The human players, a privileged group of oppressors, has to be stripped of their superior role

I was somewhat randomly recommended a video by the Timcast channel,

The NPC's Are Now Demanding Rights For NPC's,

and for a while, I thought that Timcast had to be extremely exaggerating because the quoted claims were so funny by being so stupid. But he was right. Two weeks ago, I mentioned the NPC meme – that the social justice warriors are basically non-player characters from computer games.



If you remember some details, you know that the meme was greatly resuscitated in the recent month by an article at Kotaku.com that complained about the dehumanization of the SJWs who are being compared to NPCs. Because that article basically admitted that the NPC interpretation of the SJWs has some content that really resonates, lots of people joined the industry of the NPC memes.

Scholze, Stix don't have the magic power to veto arbitrary proofs

The \(abc\) conjecture is a proposition in number theory somewhat analogous to Fermat's Last Theorem. If three relatively prime (possibly negative) integers obey \(a+b=c\), then some inequality holds\[

\Large \max (\abs a, \abs b, \abs c) \leq C_\epsilon \prod_{p|(abc)} p^{1+\epsilon}.

\] In 2012, Šiniči Močizuki (this website is written in Czech English, some of you appreciate it) presented his alleged proof and now, over six years later, the validity of the proof remains disputed and its status is therefore uncertain.

I find the inequality above rather contrived and uninteresting – which very well may be just because I haven't studied those corners (and most corners) of number theory intensely enough – but Močizuki claims to have a whole profound theory, Inter-universal Teichmüller (IUT) theory [=arithmetic deformation theory], which can generate proofs of many number-theoretical propositions. I feel that the broader theory attracts me more than the \(abc\) conjecture itself.

Complexity, simulations in cosmology are pseudoscience

Three days ago, I discussed a new paper by Susskind that promoted the idea that the quantum theory of black holes can be and should be rephrased in terms of the complexity theory – basically a branch of computer science. It seems to me that some people who defended Susskind's view were pure computer scientists who had no idea about physics – and the very meaning of the word "physics" – at all.

But Susskind's paper was probably not the best one to explain what is really so utterly irrational about the attempts to rebrand fundamental physics as a part of computer science. Meanwhile, David Brown asked me about the 2017 paper

Computational complexity of the landscape II - Cosmological considerations

by Denef, Douglas, Greene, and Zukowski. I have known the three male co-authors well and I think that they're powerful minds but writing things like that is just plain stupid. The boldly phrased paper has 8 followups after 16 months so I believe it's right to say that almost all the people in the field share my skepticism. But it's normal to express the skepticism by silence and lack of interest. However, science is really powerful in clearly proving things to be wrong – not right – and because this whole line of reasoning is wrong, it's appropriate to discuss why.

Cosmopapers by Banks and Fischler; and Arkani-Hamed et al.

Some interesting conceptual papers about cosmology have been posted to the hep-th archive for us to see them today. The shorter and vaguer one was posted by my PhD adviser (well, up to 9/11/2001) Tom Banks and Willy Fischler, whom I also know well:

Why The Cosmological Constant is a Boundary Condition

On their 12 pages, they somewhat heuristically – we've gotten used to it – argue that the cosmological constant isn't a field, it isn't a term in local equations. Instead, it's a term in the boundary conditions that is imposed upon the local dynamics by some soft gravitons carried by the holographic screen, the boundary of your causal diamond.

Some approximately one-sentence-long references to the UV/IR duality, Matrix theory, and AdS/CFT are being made to support their case. Unfortunately, in all of them, I would need to ask them: Could you please be a little bit more specific about the Step 2 ("here a miracle occurs")?