Optimistic cubic fits for log Covid hospitalizations

If you're worried about you and SARS-CoV-2, simply use a mouthwash (as simple as Listerine) for 30 seconds. It will inactivate over 99.9% of the viruses, a Penn State paper showed. A summary is here. Note that it is a good idea to do an experiment whenever Donald Trump invents a potentially great idea such as the drinking of bleach!



Sorry, sufferers from the Trump Derangement Syndrome but the Donald was basically and preciously right on this one, too.

OK, now when America was made great again and Covid-19 has been turned into a purely academic problem, let me show you a simple interpolation that makes some sense as a method to forecast numbers that tend to exponentially grow or decay. An infectious disease has the precise exponential growth and/or the precise exponential decrease as the most typical behavior, a zeroth-order approximation. On top of that, the exponential speedup is universally slowing down, the doubling times are getting lower, before the growth switches to a decrease. This optimistic evolution is unavoidable because every dramatically growing disease – whose graph resembles the Tesla stock or any other Ponzi scheme – is ultimately running out of victims, just like the Ponzi schemes do.

Here is a simple example of a cubic fit you may play with.

Michael Levitt disinivited from a conference building on his breakthroughs

The Coronazi terror respects nobody

Michael Levitt (now at Stanford) was born to a Jewish family in South Africa in 1947. His father came from Lithuania; his mother has lived in my Czech homeland. And I tend to think that the influence of the parents' geography on his thinking was nonzero although it is much smaller than the influence of the genes.

In 1968-1972, he was a PhD student in the British Cambridge. Not too many people were coding at that time but he already wrote an essential program to investigate molecular conformations. These are changes to molecules that may be obtained by rotating two parts of a molecule – which are connected by a single bond – around the axis of the bond, in your left and right hand.

The Old Town Square primarily saw a civil protest against the government

A commentary by Mr Ivo Strejček and a collective from the [Czech ex-president] Václav Klaus Institute



The Sunday October 18th 2020 demonstration at the Prague's Old Town Square was a civil protest against the government's anti-coronavirus policies. Most participants were regular citizens of various ages and occupations that represented groups across the whole society. The meeting didn't depend on any internationalist professional troublemakers who are recently making up a significant fraction of all Old Town Square demonstrations.

May WHO studies be trusted?

The Director-General of the World Health Organization is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a veteran of the Ethiopian Marxist-Leninist League of Tigrai and a supporter of (the Chinese communists, obviously, but also) the dictator Robert Mugabe who "provided health care to all". I was rather persuaded by some videos claiming that he belongs to the Hague.

One man is not the only problem. The whole organization seems to have a truly radical left-wing flavor and there have been good reasons to think that China has a disproportionate influence on the organization. I think it was a great decision for the U.S. to withdraw. The Covid events have unmasked the useless or corrupt character of this organization. The WHO has been wrong about pretty much everything: it said that Covid couldn't be transmitted from a human to another human, face masks didn't change anything, borders shoudn't be closed, it has made a U-turn on all important drugs, and even on the desirability of the lockdown. And I don't need to mention all the wildly ludicrously overstated WHO projections of the numbers of fatalities etc.

The mistaken tolerance of a gigantic debt

By Czechia's 2nd president Václav Klaus



The classic economics textbook view says – and it has been accepted for centuries – that the government's budget deficit is evil and irresponsible. It's also true that the larger the deficit is, the more evil it becomes. This is where an economist may stop and perhaps admit that exceptions such as wars may exist. But we need to remember that wars typically cause a complete financial havoc and tend to produce high inflation rates that are ruining the financial systems. In many cases, a political and societal breakdown follows, too.

Democratic Party voters already mentally live in a new Stalinist regime

I was intrigued by the unbelievable corruption in Joe Biden's family and especially shocked by the extreme left-wing Internet companies' efforts to censor the news and interfere with the U.S. presidential elections that are just 18 days away. It is my belief that these companies should be nationalized and the people responsible for the interference should be sent to jail for many, many years.

Hunter Biden was born in 1970 and he is dumb as a doorknob. But his father became a U.S. Senator in 1973 and Hunter enjoyed the treatment of a spoiled brat from a corrupt family of a (mostly left-wing) politician. Of course that the Senator's son must be admitted to a high school. Or even a college. A law school! Meanwhile, it is still the same Hunter Biden. So of course he becomes a drug addict with zero skills, no talent, and no desire to work and sells the only thing he can offer. "I am a beloved son of a powerful U.S. politician, so pay me for the contacts." Ukrainian folks only paid tens of thousands while the disappeared Chinese Big Energy entrepreneur was negotiating $10 million for Hunter Biden every year (for 3 years), just for the "introductions". This man is my father Joseph, also known as Joe. Ten millon! ;-)

A fun calculation of the maximum speed of sound

Let us spend some time by temporarily abandoning fears that Trump won't decisively beat the loons and domestic terrorists on November 3rd, and from our peaking Covid-19 infection in Czechia (which is almost reaching the level of epidemics in the first district, so for the first time, I have at least a "moderate" understanding for the online schools and some other changes, hopefully a very short-lived policy; I think it's great that Czechia avoided excessive preventive policies and only regulates the virus when it's arguably defensible). I could write lots of stuff about various news reported on my Twitter account but at the end, I think that most of these topics aren't deep enough to deserve a full-blown, extensive, penetrating TRF blog post. Or I am rather exhausted by the news about insanity from so many directions that is overwhelming us.

Willie sent me a fun article that just appeared Science Advances,

Speed of sound from fundamental physical constants

by Trachenko et al. The preprint is from April 2020 but I obviously don't systematically follow all cond-mat preprints.

We're not at war, we don't need draconian restrictions

Statement by the Václav Klaus Institute, October 13th



1. The evolution of the coronavirus epidemic mustn't be underestimated and we are not underestimating it, either. We are seeing the numbers supplied by the government but we see them a bit differently than Mr Hamáček [Czech minister of interior and leader of social democrats], Prymula [minister of health], and similar men. The interpretation of these numbers mustn't be left to the physicians; statisticians (experts in time series) must speak about them. And the conclusions must be made by politicians. We are – in harmony with a spectrum of leading Czech immunologists – convinced that Covid-19 is only threatening those who are already seriously ill. On top of that, we emphasize once again that the people with a positive test are infected, not necessarily ill.

Remdesivir, a target for loons, pseudoscientists, and conspiracy theorists

At this moment, Czechia is by far the most Covid-active country in the world, a fact that is caused by Czechs' not being afraid of this disease now, despite the efforts of the prime minister, minister of health, and a few others who would like to reignite the fear. We still had concerts, ice-hockey matches with thousands of fans etc. last night, the life is continuing normally. Culture, sports, and fun will be banned for two weeks from next Monday; after the totally free July and August, we basically added another month of almost complete freedom in which it was already clear that the disease was quickly growing.

It's nothing pleasant. This infection beating rates of positive tests that were seen anywhere in the world, ever, brings us first tangible negative stories. We know the first people around us who suffer from Covid and/or whose relatives and friends are not only positive but may be at risk; whose girlfriends lost their smell, and so on. We're afraid of the outcomes of their struggles.

With 8617 new cases on Friday, Czechia became #8 Covid-active country in the world in absolute numbers https://t.co/dinWCryDpr after India 73k, US 61k, Brazil 28k, France 20k, Argentina 15k, UK 14k, and Russia 12k (and by far #1 country per capita).

— Luboš Motl (@lumidek) October 10, 2020

Being the #8 power in the world (in absolute numbers; relatively, it's some 800 new cases per million inhabitants and per day) gives the Czech doctors some extra right to claim that they're experts. With those 8600 cases a day, we're still getting just some ~25-30 deaths a day in average in recent days.

President's illness and the sick America

By Alexander Tomský, a Czech publicist who has been a political scientist in the UK for many years

It is probably the first time since the Civil War when democracy in America finds itself at existential risk. The progressives have been controlling the Democratic Party for quite some time, much like the humanities at the universities, almost all media, and the large corporations. Building on their utopian demand for social justice, they are attacking the capitalist economic inequality, the "institutionalized" racial discrimination, the traditional family, as well as the churches and they are undermining the legitimacy of the foundational 1789 American Constitution.

Penrose, Genzel+Ghez share the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics

It's all about the black hole existence now, stupid

Roger Penrose has done a lot in mathematical and theoretical physics – and in the popularization of these fields (popular books etc.). Twistors and Penrose tilings (2D quasicrystals) are two very serious examples, I wrote a lot about both (including a proof of the completeness of the tiling, plus some code drawing them; the 5D definition was included in my and Zahradník's textbok on linear algebra, I am pretty sure that it's the only such an undergraduate linear algebra textbook in the world LOL). Quasicrystals could have deserved a Nobel Prize by themselves because they are far more "empirical" than most people think. Don't forget the Cosmic Censorship Conjecture, wildly inspiring, partly wrong (in the strong sense), but probably right in a weak sense and equivalent to the Weak Gravity Conjecture. Then the Penrose stairs and the Penrose triangle and the annoying beatle notation for tensors etc. ;-)

Of course, while many of his great ideas (like those in the previous sentence) are closer to recreational mathematics and/or non-empirical mathematical physics, many of these contributions have greatly influenced the adult physics world.

One-half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Roger Penrose for the proof that black holes are really predicted to emerge almost everywhere, e.g. after the collapse of the heavy enough stars.

Specialization is sometimes wildly underestimated, often wildly overestimated

In the media, real experts are sometimes diluted by tons of non-experts; in other cases, most of the relevant experts are being censored and replaced by a tiny, politically convenient subgroup

I have wanted to make this simple yet important point for a long time. The media and the public err in both ways and hugely so. In some cases, especially in fields like theoretical physics, the media (and the part of the public that is brainwashed by the media) seem to think that the expertise doesn't matter and the opinions of a much broader spectrum of "pundits" are equally credible, to say the least.

When it comes to the research into quantum gravity and the unification of forces, some O(1000) people in the world are currently professionally involved with the research and competent at the same moment; about O(10,000) may be expected to have informed opinions about many questions. It's just a hard field that requires a very high intelligence as well as decades (time) to build a pyramid of knowledge that depends on the lower stories of the pyramid. However, this is also a field that is presented as something that is "collectively built" by millions of talking heads and the opinions of tons of talking heads – who clearly don't belong to the group of actual experts (e.g. just some media-savvy pseudoscientists or scientists who did their good research 50 years ago) – are being constantly sold by the media as if they were the "real science".

Trump's approach to his Covid condition is exactly right

OK, Donald Trump and his wife got their positive test some two days ago. At some level, it was almost unavoidable that a man who is exposed to so many other people would get infected, soon or later, and his history of "protection against the virus" may be said to be futile by now! ;-) Fine, he contracted it (unless it is a giant theater). He could have locked himself at the top of the White House but he decided to go on the offensive – by picking an army hospital he considers great.

pic.twitter.com/gvIPuYtTZG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2020

You can see he is doing very well, speaking carefully, as a loving leader of the whole world, not just the U.S., and praising the drugs he is receiving: Regeneron's REGN-COV2 (8 grams, already on Saturday) and Gilead Sciences' Remdesivir (see recommended doses). I first promoted the latter on March 3rd; it is still not quite approved in the U.S. which is rather incredible after those 7-8 months of hysteria, given the clear evidence that it helps.