Privatization, revival of North Korea

Dear Kim Jong-un,

I have just listened to your speech in which you sounded rather desperate. The people of North Korea should expect the most difficult period in the history of the country and a hardship that may trump the famine of the 1990s. That could have killed between 0.1 and 3.0 million people. Let me assure you that when I look at you, I don't see any signs of a famine yet!

It looks clear that the economic situation isn't good for the 25 million of the people in North Korea. The already low $1500 GDP per capita seems to be falling further. Note that you use wons as the currency. 900 wons is one U.S. dollar according to an apparent peg.

FNAL: Combined muon \(g-2\) discrepancy grows to 4.2 sigma

Particles have a quantized spin (their own angular momentum) and leptons such as electrons and muons always have \(J_z = \pm \hbar /2\). Yes, the electrons are spinning and it is other ideas than that which you need to modify (you need to switch from classical physics to quantum mechanics).

They also carry an electric charge, \(-e\), which is effectively orbiting around the center of mass at the radius comparable a "typical dimension of the particle" (which is inversely proportional to the particle mass) and therefore creates an electric current.



So the particles also behave just like solenoids and they are also magnets with a magnetic moment. Adopting Feynman's pragmatic definition that I completely sympathize with, the magnetic moment \(\vec \mu\) is a vector that multiplies the magnetic field \(-\vec B\) in a term in the Hamiltonian, \[ \Delta H = -\vec \mu \cdot \vec B. \] How big is the electron magnetic moment? Well, it is (if I choose one form)\[ \vec \mu_s = -g_s \frac{e}{2m_e} \cdot \vec S \] where \(g_s\approx 2\). Note that the Bohr magneton \(\mu_B\) is sometimes used which represents the constant \(e\hbar / 2 m_e\) in the SI units. The Dirac equation gives you \(g_s=2\) exactly.

Covid is ending in UK, CZ... no one must be allowed to obfuscate the fact

Here is the graph of the daily "cases" i.e. first positive PCR Covid-19 tests of a person. It's taken from the main Czech national Covid statistics page.



You may say that we have had about four "waves". You probably see the three big ones on the right but there is also a tiny one on the left, look carefully, which occurred exactly one year ago. In fact, the highest daily number of "cases" in Spring 2020 took place on April 3rd, and it was 333. There is a tongue twister in Czech that involves 333 and the letter Ř. ;-) We had April 3rd last Saturday. That's quite a reason to expect an even faster drop after April 3rd, 2021, as I will argue.

Susskind's de Sitter rant

LHC: Phys-Org about a 2.8-sigma CMS excess in the search for stealthy SUSY.

First, Michio Kaku is releasing his new popular book, God Equation, tomorrow. It could be a similar book about the theory of everything as some books that were published years ago but I guess that God may place a more central role here.

You may also read an interview in the Grauniad where he mentions string theory, colliders, and his view that it may be a stupid idea to obsessively contact the aliens. I can confirm the worries. Alza.cz, a Czech competitor of Amazon, allowed extraterrestrials to be hired. What happened? They have completely dominated the commercials from that moment on. Each ad has a stupid green extraterrestrial with a dwarf's voice. ;-)

Virus, bacterium species have to fight for survival, too

...and almost all of them lose this battle...

I was immensely bothered by an anonymous user's comment under my analysis of the Czech population pyramid and Covid-19.

Traveller wrote: Any mention of "natural" herd immunity should have a mandatory disclaimer that, to date, the only ways humans have acquired herd immunity against any virus has been via vaccines.

The claim that this troll wants to make "mandatory" is dumb beyond imagination but at the same moment, you can detect quite some incredible amount of arrogance in the simple sentence. If she or he had tools to do so, any scientifically literate comments about viruses and bacteria would be banned. This is no funny business.



Joseph Stalin (right) de facto banned all of genetics in the Soviet Union (as a capitalist pseudoscience) and even Czechoslovakia, the place where Řehoř Mendel found the laws of genetics, was affected by this insane bastardization of life sciences. At least, Lysenkoism that was encouraged (Trofim Lysenko speaks on the photograph, far left) was a version of Lamarckism, a not too distant cousin of Darwin's correct theory. (Recall a funny question about virgins that the great physicist Lev Landau asked to Lysenko.) This troll would like to ban Darwin's evolution along with all the conceivable relatives and all of common sense in her or his country – and maybe globally. We simply mustn't allow the likes of Stalin to do things that he has done against the dignity, freedom, and survival of the people and the fundamental pillars of the civilization.

An April Fools' Day paper on the swampland rules

On April 1st, 2021 various individuals and companies came with their April Fools' Day pranks, see e.g. this thread where I found the Cybermouse to be particularly well-made. Some scientists have also posted preprints that weren't meant as a serious contribution to science. One of them was from William Kinney, a cosmologist in Buffalo:

The Swampland Conjecture Bound Conjecture

For a few seconds, before I understood it was a prank, I thought that the double appearance of the word "conjecture" was a typo. But be sure it is not a typo. This paper is a "meta-research" that counts the number of papers with swampland conjectures, and tries to please you. Maybe the number of such papers won't be too huge, after all, just a cubed googol so that the papers will require a similar number of visible patches of the Universe to store all the physicists who write them etc.

The point of the paper is clearly to humorously express the author's opinion that the number of papers about the swampland is too high. The detailed jargon-filled, science-like-sounding propositions aren't hard to invent in real time, I would probably end up writing a similar April 1st paper if I wanted to express the same point (although I hope that mine would be funnier).

How holograms work

You may really look at the mouse hologram from different directions.

The holographic principle states that a theory of quantum gravity is secretly hiding the information about (spatially) 3-dimensional objects in a plane ("photographic film" or "holographic screen") that is just (spatially) 2-dimensional i.e. whose dimension is lower by one.

In both cases, the information about the extra dimension, the "depth of a point", is encoded in the typical wavelength of an interference pattern that appears on the screen. In some generalized sense, dinograms or stereograms do exactly the same but the holograms can really store the information even about points that are overlapping each other, not just about the "closest layer".



Let's try to explain how the image of a 3D object such as this mouse is encoded in a hologram a bit more quantitatively. We will need a coherent source of light which has the precise (angular) frequency \(\omega\). A laser. Dennis Gabor, a powerful Hungarian theorist, invented the holograms in December 1947 but the lasers only emerged as "real things" in 1960 and it took a few years for the holograms to be made, too. Gabor got the 1971 Physics Nobel Prize.

Impact of Covid within the Czech age-sex pyramid

According to the standard global Covid data, my Czech homeland is the world's #1 country above 1 million according to the "cases per capita" as well as "deaths per capita".



Note that this 2017 pyramid shows the local minimum of the width in the age of 15-19 which means that the "decline of the population" looked worst around 2000 and the natality started to grow again.

If we switch to our official national tables, the country of 10.7M (M is mega, a million) has detected 1.546M people as positively tested (14.4% of population) and 26,765 people have died with Covid so far (0.25% of population). It is generally agreed by the epidemiologists that the actual percentage of the population that has acquired Covid antibodies is at least around 50% and probably between 50% and 100% – and many of us think it is much closer to 100% than 50%.

Facebook has banned the voice of Donald Trump

ItIsWhatItIs kindly informed me that the usual Google searches that have pointed to this website has disappeared. I cannot really validate such claims, your measurements will be welcome. It's possible that Google behaves differently according to users or their places.

Meanwhile, (mainstream conservative comedian of a sort) Steven Crowder's accounts were blocked on Twitter and especially YouTube, despite millions of subscribers (and millions of views per video). The Twitter suspension could be temporary (before it won't be); the YouTube has issued a hard one-week block along with the permanent demonetization.

While doing so, YouTube has violated all of its previously declared rules such as the pledge that individual channels whose content is distinct may only be punished separately. Crowder plans to "fight like hell".



But this other Orwellian act of the day seemed even more insane to me. Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, recorded the first video interview of Donald Trump after the fraudulent inauguration of Joseph Biden.

The 18-minute-long video above – which I took from her theRightView.com – sounds very relaxed, pleasant, yet important. It is about the decline of the U.S. under the Biden regime, the disappearance of the freedom of speech; the Southern border and other international topics; and the hope that he will return to D.C. She also posted it to a Facebook account and an Instagram account. What happened?

The status was deleted. But it is the explanation that Lara Trump has received which is absolutely shocking – and tragicomically so. In the wake of the previous ban of Donald Trump, "Facebook incl. Instagram doesn't allow the voice of the U.S. President Donald Trump anywhere on their servers". Wow. ;-) Any account that posts something with Trump's voice may be penalized, too.

Pinball, heavy strings, black holes, saddles, and chaos

The new hep-th preprints mention the word "string" 27 times today – in 4 abstracts of new hep-th papers, 2 new cross-listed ones, and 2 replacements. I think that the most interesting paper in this "string set" is

Chaotic scattering of highly excited strings

by (QCD co-father) David Gross and Vladimir Rosenhaus. It is about some high-energy scattering, in this case that of heavily excited strings, the the chaos that it exhibits.

RIP Petr Kellner, the greatest Czech financier ever

In the morning on Monday, millions of Czechs (starting with the likes of me) were shocked by the event that occurred on Saturday night, local time, near the Knix Glacier, 50 miles East from Anchorage, Alaska.



During heliskiing (which is skiing in which the lift is simply replaced with a somewhat more expensive helicopter), more precisely helisnowboarding, in their case (!), five people died when the Airbus AS350 B3 helicopter (the same model that landed on Mt Everest in 2005) crashed, including the wealthiest Czech, Petr Kellner. Snowboard champion David Horváth (CZ), 48, was the only survivor, he is hospitalized and in stable condition. The five killed in the Saturday accident were identified as (the guide) Gregory Harms, 52, of Colorado; Petr Kellner, 56, and Benjamin Larochaix (France-born snowboard coach and friend paid by Kellner), 50, both of the Czech Republic, and two Alaskans, (one of the best guides here) Sean McMannany, 38, of Girdwood, and the pilot, Zachary Russel, 33, of Anchorage, Alaska State Troopers said Sunday. See this local video that says something about the other men and the details of the event.

Comenius, the father of modern education

On March 28th, 1592, John Amos Comenius was born to a Protestant family in South Moravia, in or near the Uherský Brod (the precise place is not known).

This "Teacher of Nations", as he is nicknamed in Czechia, or the "Father of Modern Education" or "Father of Christian Education", considered himself Czech and spoke (and wrote) Czech perfectly but his family name was actually Hungarian, Szeges (CZ translit.: Segeš; Hungarians' S and Š is interchanged relatively to Polish). Well, the adjective "Uherský" in the name of a town does actually mean "[Old Royal] Hungarian" in Czech and Hungary is not far.



A CSK [Czechoslovak koruna, a retroactively created acronym] 20 banknote with Comenius. He is also at the modern CZK 200 banknote.

Well, the most convincing birthplace is Komňa, a village in the UH District of the Zlín Region, because it would explain his Czech adopted surname Komenský (Latin: Comenius); the adjective based on Komňa is Komeňský which is almost the same LOL.

Maximum generality isn't always the same as mathematical depth

An ATLAS excess: a new LHC paper has an interesting excess on Figure 6, Page 13, in the decay \(H\to aa\to bb\mu\mu\). The invariant mass \(m_{\mu\mu}\approx 52\GeV\). The confidence level is 99.95% (3.3 sigma) locally, 95% (1.7 sigma) globally. Note that in 2018, the CMS saw a dimuon excess at \(28\GeV\), close to a 2016-retro-seen \(30\GeV\) dimuon excess at ALEPH (LEP).

After he read my thoughts about the supremacy of physics-like proofs, Mr H. Turtledove (CZ) has exchanged a dozen of interesting e-mails with me that revolved around the importance, depth, mathematical ideas, physical ideas, and their relationships. I have tried to persuade him that the "fundamental depth in theoretical physics or string theory" is an entirely mathematical characteristic which is nevertheless important both in physics and in important mathematics. A mathematical characteristic may be crucial in physics because the laws of physics are constrained primarily (and perhaps only) by mathematics.



One obvious defining trait of mathematical thinking is the tendency to generalize. If you are asked to compute the total area of three yellow triangles and there is an obvious generalization to \(N\) yellow triangles, it is natural for you as a mathematically inclined person to solve the problem for a general \(N\in\ZZ\).

If you are a baby and you know how to generalize an insight to complex numbers, you should do it because that's what babies are all about. Similarly, if you're a schoolkid, you invent an interesting theorem, and you feel it could be generalized to \(D\)-dimensional shapes or cohomology or K-theory classes or derived categories of coherent sheaves, you should establish the generalization because that's what schoolkids normally do. ;-)

Erdoğan's alternative "science" on interest rates

Turkish Rondo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, edition by Mrs Eva Pillarová. Note that the shabada lyrics coincides with that of Nohavica's song about the Arab who is touching Nohavica's wife.

The Turkish economy has displayed some high, 15% or so inflation rate. It would be unacceptable in almost all standard Western countries (and some others). In November, when the U.S. dollar was already worth some 8.40 Turkish liras (see USD-TRY charts), the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appointed a respected hawk Naci Ağdal to the central bank who has apparently tamed the inflation when he raised the interest rates from 10% to 19%. The lira appreciated up to 5.95 per dollar in mid February 2021.

However, one week ago, the dissatisfied president fired him and replaced him with an unknown dove and the lira instantly went from 7.2 to 8.0 (now) per dollar. What is remarkable is the the president's maneuvers are built on his "science" whose basic tenets are

The interests are the root of all evil.

---

High interest rates also cause high inflation.

Amusing and cute but dangerous.