Financial illiteracy of pro-shutdown folks is staggering

There is a fraction of the people who completely understand that the "cure" is worse than the "disease" (COVID-19). Candace Owens, Peter Hitchens, Lord Sumption, RJ Smith, perhaps Laura Ingraham, Brit Hume, I could consider for a while.

Here's an updated graph of initial unemployment claims in the US. In the last week alone, nearly 6 million Americans filed for unemployment. This breaks the previous record of ~3 million... which was set the previous week. We're dealing with truly staggering numbers here. pic.twitter.com/8IOwHMxYAf

— Dorsa Amir (@DorsaAmir) April 2, 2020

The lockdowns and the excessive social distancing culture is clearly killing the whole civilization. The animation above is a sort of black humor (the graph gets vertically compressed almost 20-fold in the last steps) but, as Sheldon Cooper has said, it's funny because it is true. It shows how, for half a century, during all the "famous recessions" and wars and big hurricanes, there were those 345,000 new unemployed Americans a week in average. But the last two weekly numbers were 3+ million and 6.7 million, respectively.

F-theory with non-small Hodge numbers predicts a rich dark sector or a new stabilization mechanism

Mirjam Cvětičová plus Halverson, Lin, and Long (Slovenia+UPenn, CERN, Northeastern, Cornell) managed to post the first hep-th paper during the earliest possible second, like so many papers did before. I would be interested in their algorithm to adjust the timing of pressing "enter" at the sub-second precision. Surely this technology has made progress in recent 20 years. Do they connect the "enter" key to atomic clocks? ;-)

Constraints on Standard Model Constructions in F-theory

They prove that at least one of the following statements must be true in F-theory models:

1. The Hodge number \(h^{1,1}\) is really small (not moderate or large)
2. A new stabilization mechanism outside the supergravity approximation, i.e. outside LVS-or-KKLT-like calculations, is employed
3. A new dark sector of particles attached to 7-branes is predicted

They have some rather specific F-theory models in mind, many of which have \(h^{1,1}=35\) (from a polytope) which is counted as a "moderately" large value.

OK, they consider some compactification using the tools of SUGRA, need to cancel a tadpole, get some high enough contribution related to seven-branes, and the Standard Model and/or new dark sectors are shown to exist simultaneously at prime toric and/or square-free divisors. They discuss some examples of geometry and also try to derive the statistical distribution of the Standard Model couplings.

Lockdowns are man-made, not how Nature heals Herself

Srikanth Hegde told us that the coronavirus hysteria isn't avoiding India. On the contrary. India – whose population is about 1.35 billion – has 1998 cases and 58 deaths now. So the virus is still basically non-existent there. The number of deaths per million people is 0.04. Compare it with Lombardy at 700. The ratio is about 18,000!

The practical non-existence of the virus in the country hasn't prevented hundreds of millions of Indians from getting hysterical – in a similar enough way that we know in the West. Almost two weeks ago, PM Modi told the whole nation to clap their hands. When 1.35 billion Indians manage to clap their hands, the virus would disappear. You may see that in cutting-edge technologies, India got ahead of China. Well, at least if we talk about technologies that were widespread when the humans were monkey-like savages.

Lombardy has probably already undergone 50% of the worst case scenario

O(50%) of the inhabitants could be immune by now

If you check the basic global Covid-19 data, you will see that Italy is safely the #1 country in the number of fatalities: 13,155 after the April 1st 6 pm update.



Italy has 60.5 million people and its first region that became a virally troubled zone, Lombardy – approximately the crimson area in the center of Northern Italy above – has 10 million people. It became so troubled because there are many Chinese textile workers over there. It got combined with the polluted air, multi-generation houses, and other aspects of their back luck.

A slowdown of a rise of cases saves almost no lives

"Models" and people claiming otherwise are deceiving the public

There are lots of data, rapid societal changes, conceptual principles to discuss during these Covid-19 times. Finally someone has made the same rudimentary yet absolutely essential point that I have been emphasizing for more than a month (but never dedicated a special blog post to):

If your package of restrictive policies only manages to "slow down" the growth, it saves virtually no lives.

This point was made by Maria Chikina, assistant professor of molecular biology at Univ. of Pittsburgh, and Wesley Pegden, associate professor of mathematical sciences at Carnegie Mellon Univ.:

A call to honesty in pandemic modeling

Thanks to Čebyšev for the URL. I think that you must have seen these claims many times because they're everywhere. "Our measures have already saved 100,000 lives" or something like that. The only problem is that all these claims are lies.

Why exactly Sweden is the last sane unlocked European country?

Many details about the impact of Covid-19 on various countries were hard to predict and probably unpredictable. Why did Northern Italy become the first European viral hot spot? Is it because of the polluted air, lots of seniors, multi-generation houses, or something else?

But the differences in the policies are even stranger.



While the U.K. has played with the "let it be" and "herd immunity" approach for some time, they have dramatically changed their attitude towards the draconian, suicidal measures that are common in much of Europe (but also in some U.S. states and even in Moscow where the infection is basically non-existent).

Although the disease is almost nonexistent in Hungary (500 cases, 16 deaths), Viktor Orbán was just promoted to a dictator. It is simply sick, I say as his fan.

Jair Bolsonaro is doing the right things in Brazil, pointing out the fact that Covid-19 is just a little flu and behaving correspondingly, despite the fact that some lower-tier politicians would like to emulate the Western suicidal policies. In Europe, of all places it is Sweden that avoids the lockdowns (and perhaps Belarus).

Does an ER wormhole have a doubled entropy compared to a black hole?

There are many interesting hep-th papers today, including one on machine learning in the stringy standard models. But I picked

ER = EPR revisited: On the Entropy of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge

Herman Verlinde (Princeton U., also one of the three co-fathers of matrix string theory who slept with the mother of matrix string theory when she was in the 3rd month of pregnancy) discusses a seemingly simple question: when you connect two black holes into the Einstein-Rosen bridge by the entanglement glue, what is the entropy of the resulting wormhole? Is it just \(S=A/4G\), the entropy of each black hole in the pair, or \(S=A/2G\), twice as much i.e. the sum of the two entropies?

Among whites, Czechs are the face mask pioneers

If you look at it, I have considered the face masks to be a key tool in the suppression of the propagation of similar flu-like viruses at least since January, a tool that has clearly been successful not only in China but also in Japan, Taiwan, and some other Asian countries. On March 11th, I explicitly wrote the minister of health to make them mandatory and it basically occurred since March 18th.



The girl, actress Aneta Kernová (*1996), is a typical communicative pretty Czech girl that foreigners may date etc. Through some fast DNA-GPU calculations, I can see that if I were pretty and a girl, I would look almost just like her.

The Czech data really suggests that the peak of the daily new cases occurred about a week after that new duty, as expected. The change of the trend due to the mask is visible, unlike the hypothetical change of the trend due to the cancellation of events and businesses.

Lockdowns may increase viral doses, mortality

Well:

I have increasingly believed in the following thesis: the heavily affected patients and regions (Wuhan, Lombardy, 53-year-old fat Prague Uber driver) were infected by a much larger amount of viruses to start with, and that's why their disease is more serious.

— Luboš Motl (@lumidek) March 28, 2020

You know, the troubled spots, e.g. in Wuhan and Lombardy, seemed to have a higher fatality. But it's the first Czech "domestic" infection, the 53-year-old obese Uber driver (who is receiving Remdesivir with some first good news after 3 days or so), that has hugely provoked my pattern recognition instincts. Why a cab driver (who also rents a house, perhaps via Airbnb)? He's surely confined much of the time and he could have met very many customers. They may be spluttering at him for a long time and he can't defend himself.

Tragic suicides: viral hysteria as reverse natural selection

Millions of people will be miserable due to the economic hardship started by the irrational overreaction to the flu-like virus. Many will commit suicide. The victims of the societal responses may be basically divided to

* victims who were actually brainwashed by the hysteria
* people who like freedom and just can't withstand the shutdown and the choking of the normal life
* people who don't find their economic ruined life worth living

The first group includes e.g. an Italian nurse who contracted this glorified cold and felt so guilty – clearly due to the omnipresent hysteria – that she committed suicide in order to protect others. Did she disinfect herself so that her corpse doesn't infect someone when transferred? How did she do it?

To a lesser extent, another nurse (in the U.K.) who committed suicide may be counted in the first group although some "stress" of her work may be credited, too.

The third group isn't too different from "economic suicides" whose underlying reasons are diverse. This case only differs by a particular economic recession that was "intentionally" created by the media and the gullible people who were infected by the hysteria in the media.

Can China take over the West peacefully?

In the U.S., the initial unemployment claims were filed by 3.283 million people last week, obviously an all-time record. That's slightly up from 250-450 thousand that you get during a mundane hurricane such as Katrina. The shutdown is equivalent to a Katrina that takes place in every state and in every week. I expect the reading published next week to be even worse.

In spite of that troublesome figure, the Dow Jones continues its rises of this week and goes up by 4.5% today. It's a bit fishy. Maybe some whale is buying? Can a country like China, the strongest non-Western power, exploit the trouble that has moved from China to the West and peacefully overtake the Western companies and countries?

Many people have suggested that China has been downplaying the death figures. Because some 21 cell phone numbers disappeared, surely there is a mass grave with 21 million Chinese people, someone said. ;-) I am afraid of the opposite thing – that China was inflating the figures and it never really had any significant epidemics. It just invented the story and sent the virus to the West.

Just to be sure, I still believe it would be extremely unwise for China to invade Western countries militarily now. The reaction would be about the same as it would be months ago – unless the bosses of the Pentagon have already classified the pressing of the nuclear buttons as unhygienic, of course. ;-)

Remdesivir, hysteria, and the value of basic science

RT and LM: I wrote an op-ed for RT.com (formerly Russia Today), Decadent like the late Roman Empire, the West is committing suicide through its irrational response to Covid-19. A kind native speaker who is a master of his language helped me with that tongue and compression of my talkative prose.

After several days of delays, the most closely watched Czech Covid-19 patient, a 60-year-old obese Uber driver from Prague that is considered the first "domestic infection", received his first Remdesivir dose on Tuesday. The plan is 10 infusions, one per day, each of them lasts 30 minutes. Sadly, after the first day, the hospital reports "no improvement". Update: 48 hours after the first infusion, mild improvement. I hope that they agree that as an obese man with more viruses than others combined, he naturally needs a bigger dose.

Let me translate a fun Czech article about the unexpected hotness of the basic science.



Photo from Reuters

Only "weirdos" were interested in coronaviruses. Antonín Holý is why Remdesivir landed in Czechia

Some 20 hours ago, the General Faculty Hospital in Prague began to serve Remdesivir to a patient with severe symptoms of Covid-19. It is a drug developed by a team led by Dr Tomáš Cihlář [Thomas Brickmaker] which was kindly given to Czechia by the U.S. company Gilead Sciences. Biochemist Mr Jan Konvalinka from the Czech Academy of Sciences describes why it was exactly Prague that was chosen as a recipient of the drug, despite the enormous demand for the compound.

It's totally obvious that these lockdowns are nothing else than an unprecedented waste of money

Britain has switched to the full-blown house arrest, too. It basically seems that Peter Hitchens is the only British pundit who heroically keeps on fighting against the new emerging Coronafascism. The absolute collapse of the British – and other – elites is something I wouldn't be willing to consider, let alone able to predict, even a month ago. People are much more stinky trash than what I found imaginable.

As Hitchens said, England started in 1066 and ended in 2020, with a giggle, not a bang. That's how glorious countries end.

The U.K. and most other countries seem to be hopelessly filled with irrational, brain-dead herds of cattle that are encouraging each other to behave ever more destructively and suicidally. The super-devastating recipes have no reason to be believed to work and the empirical evidence strongly indicates that they don't work. Lots of other approaches – like getting some of the damn promising drugs – would work far more efficiently but no one seems to care about those. Delay this or that promising drug by another 2 months, why not? We may turn off the world economy for as many months or centuries as you want, it's fun! Holy smokes.

The lockdowns are pure losses with no benefits. Hundreds of millions of people in the West don't seem to care – they are excited to endorse this absolute insanity that keeps on growing.

Who was Feynman's Mr Young and what was his rat paper?

The irrational, hysterical behavior of many people – perhaps most people on Earth – reminds me of the Middle Ages, witch hunts, and various instinctive rituals performed by mobs many centuries ago (see Monty Python's "She's a Witch"). Nothing much has changed and many post-modern mobs are dumber than the medieval ones. Mindless ritual sacrifices are just combined with some kind of "socialist thinking" which is probably meant to be the "modern" aspect of their behavior.

When I watched this irrational behavior, the mindless promotion of "what must be done to fix the epidemics", I couldn't forget about the wonderful 1974 Richard Feynman's Caltech commencement speech that is included as

Cargo Cult Science,

a chapter in his popular book Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman. In that speech, Feynman mentioned some medieval superstitions and charlatans. How could people believe those gurus when it was rather clear that nothing really worked? However, Feynman continued, it's a silly question because people are still behaving equally stupidly in the modern era.