Greta never went on strike

...she is served by apparent gangsters funded in an opaque way...

Willie Soon sent me this 28-minute long Rebel News video that was posted yesterday:



The journalist, Mr Keean Bexte, has shown quite some courage and professional attitude when he tried to find the answers to some elementary questions about the first events that led to her fame (or infamy), about the funding for assorted activities that surround her, and other things.

I don't believe that this coronavirus is new

China – but, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world – is terrified by the newly named coronavirus, a new potential pandemics that could produce as much anxiety and danger as SARS, the symptom of the abruptly terminating breathing. Note that in 2017, researchers have traced SARS – that exploded in 2002-2003 – to horseshoe bats in Yunnan province.



The Chinese eat bats and cook soup from bats and similar monsters – did you give them the permission, Batman? – and it is clear that this kind of inter-species multiculturalism increases the risks that the viruses jump. I have chosen the Chinese cuisine for most lunches in a year or two while in Greater Boston but I prefer to eat "tested food". Also, I insisted on a fork and knife, as a civilized person – to avoid the extra work that Zdeněk Izer had to perform when he was served the chopsticks.

Kung Pao Chicken has surely become a regular food for me that I am not afraid of (but any regular enough sauce with beef and pork is also good enough – and so are eggplants and even that exotic bamboo). The Chinese and many other nations have a pretty high life expectancy which is the reason why I don't believe that an occasional Chinese lunch (or a kebab that I had last night once again) will seriously reduce my (or another individual's) life expectancy.

RIP, Tony Smith, a kindest and most prolific of crackpots

I learned from the GA Net, Geoffrey Dixon's blog, and Not Even Wrong that Tony Smith died on October 11th, 2019. He was one of the Internet's most famous... "alternative physicists"... and I've had some communication with him over the years.



viXra.org shows that he has posted an incredible 102 preprints over there. They're mostly about the Clifford algebras and exceptional groups as unification dreams; and some philosophy of physics and its relationship with other disciplines.

European Green Deal: 120 silly demands

In Summer 1989, many of us were making fun of Milouš Jakeš, the boss of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (especially because of his notorious Red Little Castle leaked speech to his comrades 3 miles from my home), and other commies had a similar image.

But I must really apologize for having mocked them: neither Jakeš nor any other top Czechoslovak communist could compare to the previously unseen imbeciles who are employed as members of the European Parliament and who approved

European Parliament resolution of 15 January 2020 on the European Green Deal (2019/2956(RSP))

one week ago. If I were a teacher or a neurosurgeon whose task would be to fix these MEPs' brains, I would give up. There is not much that can be done with these utterly fudged up brains – perhaps if we started from scratch on the other side of the body, in the rectum. That's where the most promising seed of a new, better brain could be found within these MEPs.

Wigner wasn't wrong

When you don't see patterns or elegant solutions, it doesn't mean that they don't exist

The featured Quanta Magazine article right now is about the connection between the colliding blocks and quantum search. If you have never watched the "surprising appearance of \(\pi\) in a counting problem", you should watch these three videos by 3Blue1Brown:

* Pi: how it appears in colliding blocks (5 minutes)
* Why it's so (15 minutes)
* Add a beam of light (14 minutes)

A small block is moving back and forth between a wall and another rectangular block where the mass ratio is a power of 100. The collisions are elastic and you need to count how many collisions there are. You will find that the number of collisions is a number like 314159... And it goes on and on, you clearly see the pi. In the phase space, the critical points belong to a circle, a beautiful problem with a beautiful solution due to Gregory Galperin (2003).

The new Quanta Magazine article points out that the very same "approximation of a circle" by many points appears in Grover's algorithm, the most famous quantum computer's method to search in a database. In that algorithm, the state vector is also being gradually turned to the right direction so you're also approximating a circle. The similarity of the "quantum search" and "the billiards" was promoted in a recent preprint by Adam Brown.

Kubera, Czech constitution's man #2, abruptly dies

I do think that the cigarettes "helped" the sudden cardiovascular event to come

The chairman of the Senate, the upper chamber of the Czech Parliament, Mr Jaroslav Kubera abruptly died today (of a heart attack, unconfirmed reports say; ambulance was transferring him to a cardiovascular center), at age of 72. He belonged to the tolerable wing (or at least to the joint connecting the wing with the chest) of ODS, the Klaus-founded party that I supported up to Spring 2019.



Source: Profimedia.cz. Sorry, I couldn't find a picture without a cigarette, such moments were rare

He's been a true veteran of (nationwide and North Bohemian regional) politics. He was chosen as the chairman of the Senate in 2018 and, as promised, he became the uniter and the social glue that dramatically improved the relationships between the main constitutional representatives of Czechia and the parties, too.

Critic of science: universities should protect physics students from Arkani-Hamed's ideas on QFTs

...the ultimate safe spaces...

Mark Goodsell is a young (but habilitated) HEP professor at LPTHE, Paris. He has a not very well-known blog, Real Self Energy, and wrote something about the critics of HEP yesterday:

How to make progress in High Energy Physics

His article starts with an LHCb CERN press release about some... 1-sigma... flavor violation seen by the experiment that is sort of compatible with some other flavor violation excesses at LHCb. That's great and it might indeed be a small step towards making a clear picture of a new, flavor-violating (electron-muon-asymmetric) phenomenon or a new decaying particle.

But even if that will be the case, I am afraid that I will always consider a 1-sigma step as something that is right to ignore – and I would see it in this way even if the flavor-violating new physics is discovered and I reinterpret the history with hindsight.

The culture of chronic complainers

The decay of the Western society is mostly powered by the postmodern Left. All of us know the typical words associated with this growing, degenerated portion of the society – verbs that must be repeated more often than Allah is repeated by the Muslims. They're words like

discriminate, privilege, oppression, victim, microaggression, offended, diversity, outrage, cancel, racism, Islamophobia, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, pedophilophobia

and many others. Clearly, some of these are associated with radicals who still represent at most 15% of the Western nations. But there is one "more civilian" verb that used to be rather normal but whose role in the society has transformed to dangerous proportions and it's the verb

to complain.

Each of us may sometimes complain, there may be good reasons for it but complaints may also be unjustified. My main point is that our societies have transformed to the worshipers of complainers.

Craig Wright claims to have received $10 billion

...it's more likely that he is Satoshi...



The prices of cryptocurrencies have increased by something of order 10% in a recent day or two. The total capitalization is $238 billion at this moment, the BTC Bitcoin is 66.4% of it i.e. $158 billion. It's followed by Ethereum at $18 billion, Ripple at $10 billion and...

BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) championed and engineered by Craig Wright has become the 4th cryptocurrency by capitalization, over $6 billion right now (since Christmas, its price has quadrupled).

The fifth is the old Bitcoin Cash (it jumped above BSV some hours after this text was written, it's a fierce contest), the sixth is Tether USD, and the seventh is the Litecoin.

The main reason is that Craig Wright, the Australian self-admitted father of the Bitcoin, has submitted the documents claiming that he has received the keys needed to unlock his BTC 1.1 million (well, plus over a million of all other forks of the Bitcoin). Only he can be sure whether he may unlock the coins but a sufficient market was persuaded by the validity of the claim.

Cosmologists neglecting the motion of the Solar System are crackpots

For a year or two, all of us were aware of discrepancies in the measurement of Hubble's constant.

Several updated, comparably plausible methods yield values of \(H_0\) that differ by as much as 10%. I think that without the elimination of some of these determinations, we are forced to admit that very many cosmological parameters, perhaps including the age of the Universe, are only known with the precision of 10% or so and the "high-precision cosmology" started in the late 1990s was an illusion, at least at this moment it should be treated as one.

It is possible that the resolution to these strange results will be mundane – some error in some of the methods. It may be very deep, connected with some of the deepest facts about string theory that we still don't understand – some deep insights that will completely change our views about the landscape, swampland, and the cosmological constant in string theory. There exist various strategies by which the people try to wrestle with this new Hubble confusion.

Jonathan Kerr, a new featured anti-quantum warrior

Dark energy an error? Phys.org reviewed a one-month-old Korean preprint claiming to have made measurements and showing that type IA supernovae's light intensity is correlated with their population age, after all. Such an "astrophysical" drift of the "standard candles" may mimic the "cosmological" behavior attributed to dark energy and dark energy as extracted from the supernovae may therefore be spurious. Of course it's plausible (and would be far-reaching if true), we may hear from others soon... Well, Rubin+Heitlauf have already claimed that the Koreans err in their treatment of distributions and even neglect the motion in the Solar System. Colin et al. (who wrote a similar paper to the Koreans in August 2018) disagree and they even criticize the corrections from the Solar System motion as "arbitrary corrections". Sorry, this is silly. Failing to recognize Galileo's "And yet it moves" is a pretty serious and unquestionable mistake. Galileo isn't an "arbitrary correction". ;-)

We haven't discussed the "mainstream" media's hype about a perfectly deluded critic of quantum mechanics for a few weeks.

Well, Max told us that there is no hiatus. The Telegraph's Sarah Knapton (also reprinted at MSN) chose the title

New theory of quantum mechanics shows matter is not in the eye of the observer

We're promised that a 19-page-long paper (PDF) will soon appear in a "well-respected peer-reviewed journal". By a complete accident, a popular book by the author, Jonathan Kerr, just appeared in the bookstores (click at the icon in the corner) and the Telegraph readers are encouraged to buy it.

Bitcoin halvening optimistic arguments, an example of wishful thinking

A great portion of the activists' arguments that are completely irrational may be classified as symptoms of a wishful thinking. Czech ex-president Klaus who has spent years by fights against the wishful thinking would also add the term in German where he has used it often, Wunschdenken. In general, these people often conflate two things:

1. What is true or what is likely to happen
2. What would be good for me or for my favorite product or my social system or my political movement

Arguments defending socialism are often of this type because they implicitly assume that people behave in ways that would make socialism work. They just ignore the fact that according to observations or logical arguments, people actually behave very differently.



The mandatory belief that \(P\neq NP\) in computer science is arguably another example of a wishful thinking. The actual argument that drives those people towards the fanatical \(P\neq NP\) faith is that \(P\) couldn't possibly be \(NP\) because if \(P\) were equal to \(NP\), computers could someday replace the thinkers and left-wing intellectuals (who are looking for the path for a traveling salesman when they're not destroying Trump cereals, the job of theirs that they actually care about) would become unemployed.

It mustn't happen that they become useless, the reasoning goes, and therefore \(P\neq NP\). However, this argument is totally irrational. It may just happen that \(P = NP\) and the exponent and prefactor may even be low and some people's work could really become cheap etc. It could be bad for some people but it doesn't mean that it's untrue or impossible. After all, computers and robots are replacing many of these occupations right now, almost completely independently of someone's belief in \(P\) vs \(NP\).

Truth on Ukrainian Boeing, arsonists slowly unmasks itself

Hours after an Ukrainian Boeing 737 crashed near Tehran, I wrote:

I don't know about you but I would think that the Ukrainian aircraft near Tehran - 180 casualties - was taken down as a part of the revenge against the U.S. and "its allies". [...]

Well, it took a day before before the U.S. and Canadian intelligence services (and any sources in the West) joined me.

For another day, Iran denied that the Boeing was downed by any missiles. Finally, on Saturday morning, Iran admitted that the Iranians shot down the airplane, indeed. It was a mistake, we hear. Well, maybe, we don't know and we will probably never know for sure (because any such intentional downing may be claimed to be a mistake and vice versa, any mistaken downing may be claimed as an achievement by a warrior) but it's almost certainly a "mistake" related to the ongoing U.S.-Iranian tension. It's just extremely unlikely that the same country of Iran would see such two major events at almost the same time if they were unrelated to each other.

I hope that this tragedy will help to calm down the situation. 147 Iranians died along with 12 Afghani, 11 Ukrainians, and 6 Westerners. However, many Iranians had some dual citizenship, too. Some ancestry matters to most of us, however, so most of the fatalities were Persian in this sense.

Dollar: 500th birthday

LHC: ATLAS likelihoods offer theoretical physicists a new way to access the open HEPdata: see CERN, ATLAS

Today, we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the dollar. Well, it was pronounced and spelled "tolar" back in 1520 but the "dollar" is clearly a result of the evolution of that word. And yes, the dollar was born in a Czech town where 3,500 people live right now, Jáchymov.

The same town is also the source of uraninite that has allowed Marie Sklodowska to discover radium and therefore radioactivity. In 1898, she along with a French assistant and the first major sex toy Pierre Curie discovered radioactivity in that ore; in 1910, she isolated radium (along with polonium) inside these rocks.



If you click at the dirty coin above, you may buy a tolar from 1550 or so – minted a few decades after the 1520 beginning – for as little as $500.

The BBC published a fun story, Welcome To Jáchymov, the Czech Town That Invented the Dollar. Cutely enough, we learn that no one in the town accepts the dollars today – only crowns, euros, and perhaps roubles seem to be OK – and they haven't seen an American for 3 years. This town which is really the "Mother of All Federal Reserves" should be a tourist magnet for the Yankees on steroids but it isn't.