Theories with special properties are more valuable, more likely than generic cousins

In an interesting conversation, someone complained about the recently published numerous new swampland constraints by saying that they "go too far".

While I don't know whether these constraints are valid, I believe that the complaint that a scientific hypothesis "goes too far" simply isn't a valid scientific argument – and it is downright harmful. Why? Because those of us who like science and progress in science actually want the new theories to be as far-reaching as possible – we just want the new results to go very far! The idea that they "shouldn't go too far" is equivalent to saying that the speaker "doesn't want much progress in physics"!

If some hypothesis "goes too far" in the sense that its proposition is too strong, it should be easier, and not harder, to disprove it – assuming that the statement is indeed wrong. When it's so, we should be more demanding and indeed expect an actual disproof and not just some emotional or prejudiced complaints that something "goes too far", right?

Green Nazis effectively fired Dr Crockford (polar bears)

This is just a short linker-not-thinker story. We may be approaching the "Lidice 1942" moment of this conflict. Nazi Germany was growing in self-confidence and area up to mid 1942 or so – and suddenly the trend got reversed.

It's impossible to completely attribute the peak to an event but I choose the Lidice massacre in June 1942 – the first act of genocide that the Nazis bragged about (village eradicated and flattened because of untrue rumors about its responsibility for the assassination of Heydrich) – to be the event that has reversed the sign of the trend.

Soon afterwards, the U.K. revoked its signature under the Munich Treaty and all the Allies on the edge started to take the anti-Nazi fight seriously. While presenting Greta Thunberg as an authority, the environmentalist extremists may have jumped the shark – and if they haven't, it's one of the other acts they are doing these days that may be classified in this way.

Demagogic puzzles involving randomness, quantum mechanics

Pradeek Mutalik is a "puzzle columnist" in the Quanta Magazine. Readers are usually invited to solve some problems or puzzles. But they're not "just puzzles". They're always claimed to have implications for the fundamental laws of physics. This latest one is

How Randomness Can Arise From Determinism

and it is clearly presented as "puzzles that help the reader think about quantum mechanics".



The only conversation under this video is: Frederick Mush: It's fraud. - Sazka Corp: Why should it be? - Because I don't see a notary and I don't win much when I guess three numbers right.

After all, the word "quantum" appears in the first sentence and 6 other places in his article (and 18 times on the HTML page now). The only problem is that everything that the reader "learns" about randomness in quantum mechanics is completely wrong.

In effect, Mutalik's "puzzles" are an excellent example of the omnipresent demagogy and misinformation in the "mainstream" media that makes the readers of such media increasingly deluded and scientifically illiterate.

Letwin amendment: a dirty, silly trick to make Brexit politics meaningless

I have watched the British House for several hours again. PM Boris Johnson has impressed me – with his clear enough ideas, politeness, and consensus building. He wanted the MPs to approve his Brexit deal – which looks much better for both sides than what I thought possible just a month ago.

Sadly, Oliver Letwin submitted an "amendment" which actually implies than any real vote about a Brexit deal is delayed up to the moment when the legislation is complete. Because of this new delay – caused entirely by the British MPs in this case – one has to pay attention to the September 2019 Benn Act.

Squeezing amino acids from comets

...in order to create life...

Just a short comment. Yesterday, the Astrobiology Magazine discussed a paper that will be heavily promoted in the coming issue of Chemical Science,

Synthesis of functionalized nitrogen-containing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and other prebiotic compounds in impacting glycine solutions

by Rebecca Lindsey and 2 men from LLNL. (I chose the middle author because the name is both female and easy to pronounce. That's how it works today, sorry, Gentlemen.) They used some nice quantum quantum chemistry approaches to argue that comets could have been helpful for the birth of life on Earth.

Top IPCC's paleoclimatologist agrees that Mann's hockey-stick papers were wrong

Two days ago, Tom Nelson (via Willie Soon) informed us about some juicy revelation:

"News scoop" by McIntyre 1:00:50!: In 2006, current IPCC co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte told McIntyre that she "agreed w. our criticism of Mann's work" but asked that her name not be disclosed. She's now granted that permission. @valmasdel @ClimateAudit https://t.co/Uo9q9lMM9z

— Tom Nelson (@tan123) October 16, 2019

Note that the tweet also includes a link to a McIntyre audio on Watts' blog.

According to an influential IPCC official, McIntyre and McKitrick were right in their criticism of the papers by Michael Mann et al. – the so-called hockey stick reconstruction of the global mean temperature.

Primitive communism is mostly a myth

As schoolkids in the communist 1980s, we were taught that the human society has evolved from the primitive communism to slavery, feudalism, capitalism and its later stage, imperialism, to socialism – which we were just enjoying – before we would arrive at communism. To avoid misunderstandings, our countries were officially "socialist" countries while "communism" was the money-free nutty utopia where you may "do whatever you like to do and take whatever you want". ;-) The last stage hasn't worked too well so far although, especially in recent years, many brainwashed people want to restore this sickly fantasy about the future.

But I want to focus on the first stage, the primitive communism. The meme was coined by Marx and greatly elaborated upon by Friedrich Engels, the Thunberg-like spoiled brat from a wealthy family who decided to rebrand a stinky lazy homeless vagabond Karl Marx as an intellectual. In the German original, the regime was called Urkommunismus – it is the same Ur as in Pilsner Urquell (The Primordial Source [of Golden Transparent Beer] from Pilsen) – and for some reasons, we use a very different term

prvobytně pospolná společnost

in Czech which sounds contrived, self-explanatory, a bit poetic, and non-ideological. It roughly translates as the "primordially-settled together-ish society". I would like to know the details but I guess that the first translator of Marx's and Engels' rants to Czech decided it was a great idea to replace the ideological word revolving around "communism" with a non-ideological one. It may speed up the propagation of the meme in the anti-ideological Czech nation, he may have believed. Well, it has worked for me.

Czech PM: expansion of nuclear energy stands above the EU law from our viewpoint

PM Babiš has earned some positive points from me recently – by his at least partly critical attitude to Greta, to some new mass migration proposals, and by his dropping from the 2nd wealthiest Czech citizen to the 4th place (I am a compassionate conservative). But today, he got some new points for nuclear energy.

Ironically, as I have previously mentioned, this year of Gretinism – which would produce a lot of support for nuclear energy if there were at least some rationality in this movement – has been accompanied by a new anti-nuclear wave, too.



The eyes on Temelín's cooling towers were real (in 2018) and became the largest videomapping in Czechia so far (the Prague Astronomical Clock videomapping was surely much more sophisticated, however). And they were created by Mr Milan Cajs, the drummer of Tata Bojs. Not bad.

Aside from the climate hysteria, we are constantly bombarded by anti-nuclear propaganda, too. A month ago, Reuters hyped a "study" saying that nuclear energy was too slow and too expensive to save the climate. Cool!

Political prisoners in Germany and Spain

While the post-communist part of Europe behaves sanely these days, Western Europe is split and a big part of it has been devoured by novel political movements that want to totally destroy all the opposition, everyone who disagrees with them, and they are ready to use the worst possible tools.

Germany is currently led by a hardcore ecofascist government that wants to punish the German citizens even for their very disagreement with ecofascism. A driver has decorated his car in this way. The pigtails are nicely hanging from that car and the author of the idea wisely and generously recommended a young Scandinavian political leader to "fudge off, Greta" and he rightfully bragged that the climate change "problem [was therefore] solved".

What is the reaction by the ecofascist Merkel government? Three years in prison for that driver. The driver has just expressed his opinion about an extremely troubling political movement that is contaminating much of Europe and North America these days. The pigtails are clearly just a symbol of the unhinged ecofascism we are seeing everywhere around us. That particular spoiled brat wasn't in any way threatened by that driver.

Drought left Czechia, no apologies heard

Like most other places, Czechia has seen some drier periods and some humid ones. The latest "big flood" took place in 2002. Recent five years were relatively dry.



This is what the drought conditions looked like yesterday, on a beautiful sunny Sunday October 13th, according to Intersucho.cz (Interdrought). Almost everything is white – no risk of drought. On that Intersucho.cz website, you may choose Czechia, Slovakia, or Europe; and the interval to play the evolving dry places as an animation.

Governor of North France demands a war budget against the political Islam

In my country and elsewhere, it's taken for granted that countries like France have already been lost and their drift towards becoming Islamic republics is unstoppable and irreversible. Well, I am an optimist who happens to think it's far from clear.

Le Point published some explosive pronouncements by Xavier Bertrand, a former Republican and the governor of Hauts-de-France, the Northernmost province of France with 6 million people.

Equalities are the most vital equivalences

The equal sign is innocent, it doesn't prevent us from studying some very abstract geometric structures

A few days ago, Kevin Hartnett wrote a provoking article about mathematics for the Quanta Magazine,

With Category Theory, Mathematics Escapes From Equality

If you think that some mathematicians finally fight against the left-wing egalitarianism and its worshiping of equality, well, the truth is somewhat less optimistic. ;-)

The human hero of the story is Jacob Lurie, a mathematician who recently moved from Harvard to IAS Princeton. I do believe that he is an extremely good mathematician – also because of his classifications of topological field theories, research into exceptional groups, and more. But the Quanta Magazine article is about Lurie's somewhat idiosyncratic hobby, namely his holy war against the equal sign.

There shouldn't be any equalities like \(2+2=4\), the article argues. Instead, all equalities should be loosened to equivalencies, like in category theory, which are better because equivalences come in many flavors and degrees. And the original category theory of Eilenberg and MacLane (1945) wasn't loose enough which is why we need to switch to "infinity categories" and Lurie's articles that are some 8,000 pages long in total.