The incredible shrinking expertise in Brian Greene's books

Brian Greene has released and is promoting his fifth full-blown book for the popular audiences, Until the End of Time. I read the table of contents, a few extra pages, reviews, and summaries of some talks. I feel totally disillusioned by the trend.

You know, the first book, The Elegant Universe (which I enthusiastically translated to Czech, like The Hidden Reality, the third book; The Fabric of Cosmos #2 was left to my friend who has a name day today), contained a legitimate explanation of the relativity of simultaneity, presentation how the ultraviolet catastrophe was solved by the light quanta, why the spacetime has to be curved to communicate the gravitational force, topological expansion of string theory, T-duality, mirror symmetry, its application on the counting of spheres in a quintic, and much much more.

EU: Václav Klaus' prophetic talk 11 years ago

Today, it's 2020/02/20 but let us look 11 years, 1 day, and 1 hour to the past when Czech president Václav Klaus gave a speech in the European Union's Parliament (Czech video):

Speech of the President of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus in the European Parliament (English transcript)

I encourage you to read all those 20+ paragraphs. The fundamental problems with the European Union look self-evident to all the sane people today but it wasn't always like that and in 2009, almost everybody – including most of us, I think – viewed Klaus' warnings as remote.

Petr Macinka (IVK) has picked some statements from the speech.

Leftism, Marxism really are mental disorders

Sometime in 2013, Ann Coulter famously said that liberalism is on the spectrum of mental illness. Well, this was surely not the first time when a similar quote emerged. In 2010, Michael Savage released the book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder.

Those statements might sound like memes or insults. The only problem is that they're not only memes and insults. They're also approximations of cold hard facts.

Slate Star Codex has organized a survey involving 8043 participants and investigating links between the formal mental diagnoses and the self-identified political beliefs of the people. Slate Star Codex is proud about the survey, it just finds it heretical for others to report the results or to link to them – so I won't do that. Instead, let me link to nicely reviewed stories

Sickness to Socialism: Leftists Are More Likely to Have Mental Problems, Survey Shows (The New American)

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Survey Finds People Who Identify as Left-Wing More Likely to Have Been Diagnosed With a Mental Illness (Summit News, Paul Joseph Watson)

All the numbers below divide the people mentally to those who have been formally diagnosed at least with one of four disorders; and those who haven't. The four disorders are depression, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.

Jeff Bezos throws away $10 billion of his money

...to fund organized crime based on pseudoscience...

Last night, the media informed us about a shocking decision that was greeted by arrogant titles in far left outlets such as

Billionaire Jeff Bezos Figures He Might as Well Try to Help the Planet He Currently Lives On

He will never live on any other planet. The suggestion in the title is fake news and pure arrogance. He said:

Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet.

What a staggering moron. There is no climate-related threat to our planet, let alone a big one. Instead, the actual threat to mankind – not to planet – are active morons ("aktivní blbec" has been used in Czech at least for 50 years), psychologically ill Scandinavian spoiled brats, and children who were left behind and who are "capable" of saying breathtakingly stupid sentences such as the quote above.

Dawkins vs Molyneux on eugenics

On Sunday, Richard Dawkins posted this tweet that many expected to lead to his absolute, immediate, and hysterical cancellation:

It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 16, 2020

Yes, Dawkins wrote that "eugenics works" which just doesn't mean that it's a right policy to introduce. Needless to say, as a sane and honest biologist, he has to write it: humans are just another species of mammals and breeding and similar things (including genetic engineering) surely work for the other mammals, so it must work for humans, too.

A cute Czech bank robbery in Switzerland

Chur, Switzerland

Lots of events around us are full of violence, existential threats, and hatred. On Thursday, Chur, a town in Southeastern Switzerland, had the opportunity to see the advantages of criminals imported from Czechia over those from the Middle East and other regions:

A Czech robbed a bank and ordered a beer (DE)

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Bank robber owes me six francs (DE)

A 55-year-old Czech man came to the main hall of a Cantonese bank, Graubündner Kantonalbank, on the Poststrasse 2. He drew a starting pistol and shot in the air twice, carefully avoiding the people.

RIH Pachauri: 1940-2020

The sad death of many people who have been great to mankind and who have contributed something remarkable is a part of the decay of our civilization. The generations of achievers, sometimes modest and constantly smiling and self-sacrificing achievers, are being replaced by the generations of frowning spoiled brats that whine about microaggressions and stolen childhoods while on their intercontinental yacht trips that are paid by someone else.

Well, statistics makes exceptions unavoidable. On Thursday, February 13th, the 79-year-old Rajendra Pachauri ceased to live due to his long-term heart problems. He was an Indian railwayman, a sexual pervert, and one of the most notorious fraudsters in the world who has also led the IPCC panel promoting the climate change alarmist scheme.

Rot In Hell, monster.

Position, momentum modulo a grid may be measured simultaneously

Spiros leaked a trivial observation from a talk given by John Preskill: in quantum mechanics, the position and the momentum may be measured totally accurately and simultaneously, but only modulo \(\Delta X\) and \(h / \Delta X\), respectively.

The proof is a simple application of the CBH-like formulae such as\[

\exp(A) \exp(B) = \exp(B) \exp(A) \exp([A,B])

\] whenever \([A,B]\) is a \(c\)-number. And indeed, it is the case if \(A,B\) are linear in \(x,p\), respectively. The precise position \(X\) modulo \(\Delta X\) may be expressed by the (unitary) operator\[

\exp(A)=\exp(2\pi i X / \Delta X)

\] while the analogous momentum \(P\) modulo the inverse spacing \(\Delta P = 2\pi \hbar / \Delta X\) is expressed as\[

\exp(B) = \exp(i P \Delta X/\hbar)

\] Nice. So apply the CBH formula to get\[

\exp(A)\exp(B) = \exp(B)\exp(A) \exp([A,B])

\] to see that the commutator appearing as the last exponent is \([A,B]=-2\pi i\) and, as you know, its exponential is therefore one. If you choose units with \(\hbar=1\) and a dimensionless \(X,P\), you may democratically pick the spacing \(\Delta X =\Delta P = \sqrt{2 \pi}\), as announced in the original tweet.

Bojowald: Ashtekar school is fundamentally misguided

Hat tip to @mmanuF at Twitter

Martin Bojowald has been a well-known name in the loop quantum gravity corners and especially in loop quantum cosmology. Aside from other things, while he was working at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam, he co-authored three papers with Abhay Ashtekar, a guru of loop quantum gravity, in 2003, 2005, 2005.

Amusingly enough, now, when Bojowald and Ashtekar are colleagues at Penn State, he just released a gr-qc paper

Critical evaluation of common claims in loop quantum cosmology

that tries to critically look at some basic aspects of the "Ashtekar school", as he calls it. Bojowald concludes that the Astehkar school fails in all of his nontrivial tests. It makes assumptions about the semiclassical behavior of the metric tensor degrees of freedom while the semiclassical approximation is almost certainly inapplicable in these examples. Also, Bojowald points out that characteristically quantum mechanical effects – such as ambiguities resulting from quantization – are incorrectly assumed not to exist.

Needless to say, loop quantum gravity people may be classified as full-blown or generalized anti-quantum zealots – people who actually think classically and who misunderstand everything in which the classical limit fails to be "basically right".

Mad commie Sanders: a good reason to evacuate the U.S.

A great PC game for free: Kingdom Come Deliverance (EG page), an amazing 55-gigabyte 2018 Czech game about stories of Henry, a son of a blacksmith (in Rataje nad Sázavou, Bohemia, Holy Roman Empire), in 1403 AD (see Wikipedia), will be available up to Feb 20th for free (it went live on 5 pm today, Czech Winter Time, or here now) through the EG site. See a trailer and Amazon or YouTube. The creator-in-chief is Dan Vávra, a brilliant and politically sensible guy who also masterminded the famous Mafia 1 and 2. You need a good enough gaming PC with 8 GB or more and perhaps to download the EpicGames' platform first, too. Hat tip for the game, 2018: Crabik-Manzo

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Viruses: A fascinating article on the Quanta Magazine about HIV and especially narnaviruses whose RNA may be read backwards and makes some sense, a very rare property. The curious people such as you and me immediately ask "why". The leading hypothesis is that they want the host to read the RNA backwards and think that it's meaningful but harmless – but the right reading is in the first direction in which it is meaningful and harmful, and the host gets fooled. ;-) Like people don't suspect that A Beers Dinners is dangerous but it is one of the 11796 anagrams of Bernie Sanders, a toxic thing.

On one hand, Bernard Sanders (I find the affectionate form of the first name crazy to be applied to a hardcore Bolshevik apparatchik) was a victim of the Democratic Party establishment. They probably stole the 2016 nomination from him and they were trying to do the same now. On the other hand, the Democrats' worries are understandable and by now, they're probably accepting the fact that he is a rather likely candidate to win the nomination.

Moderates such as Joe Biden aren't too moderate. On top of that, Biden is incoherent and his whole family should spend their lives in a prison for the corruption in Ukraine (and probably elsewhere). However, all these personal things are details relatively to what can change the United States of America and the most dramatic changes are associated with the name of Bernard Sanders.

Even with Enyaq, electric cars make no economic sense

In the morning, we learned that the Eurozone's industrial production has dropped by 4.1% year-on-year. It's clearly one of the manifestations of the devastating impact of the neo-Marxist Luddites who took over the bureaus of the undemocratic transnational institution known as the EU.



Herr Bernhard Meier, the boss of Škoda, the second highest-margin brand in the Volkswagen Group, started to call for help. Spreading their medieval superstitions about the weather, the unhinged Luddites really want to destroy the car industry of the old continent.

Trudeau runs Gestapo that secretly bullies, go after the neck of opposition

Peter F. sent me a totally shocking video with 470,000 views (and 99% upvotes) that was published by Rebel News Network, the main Canadian right-wing TV platform, on January 29th:

HIDDEN CAMERA: Police interrogated me about my Justin Trudeau book. They didn’t know I videotaped it

Ezra Levant published a book on Trudeau's corruption during the October 2019 elections in which Trudeau got 40%. The book made it to #2 at Amazon.

He was summoned to the capital, Ottawa, because of some complaint related to the book. The 26-minute-long video shows that the cops, apparently highly paid cops who previously fought terrorists etc., refused to tell Ezra Levant, the boss of Rebel News Network and the main co-author of the book, what the complaint or accusation was.

Socialist "fighters against socialism" fail to see the important things

William Barr has proposed a sensible, cheap solution to remove the dangerous gap in the 5G mobile data technologies where China is 1 year ahead of Europe and 5-10 years ahead of the U.S.: just invest several tens of billions into Nokia and/or Ericsson, and elevate the indirect strategic control of the U.S. companies but also the U.S. government over these industries. Make sure that the abundant U.S. cash is being poured into these technologies so that the gap is disappearing.

Some clueless ideological hecklers have immediately greeted the sane proposal by Barr, a long-time Telecom companies' lawyer, with the insult: "It is socialism". Because I've been saying the same things as Barr for months, my ideas were labeled equally. I find these comments totally clueless and indeed, very analogous to the screaming "Don't touch Facebook, Twitter, and other private companies, they have the right to ban anyone".

Nazi German lawmakers plan to imprison all Euroskeptics for 3 years

...and/or make them pay dearly...

Much like in the 1930s, freedom has been largely exterminated in Germany again but what we learned today (thanks, Prof Konvička and Counterstream) is perhaps even more shocking than most of the previous events. Several small German outlets have just superficially mentioned a shocking new addition to the German criminal code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB) in progress, namely § 90c StGB, that wants to outlaw any criticisms of the European Union involving its symbols. This initiative has been discussed at the level of a "law of the state of Saxony" since 2018.



My understanding is that even e-mails with this playful satirical picture would be outlawed in Germany.

The Bundestag has already discussed this addition in the first reading in mid January 2020 and the documentation was prepared in October 2019:

Drucksache 19/14378

The proposed form of the new paragraph § 90c is written on Page 5 (in German). The two parts say:

Criminal code is extended by § 90c, Defamation of the EU symbols

• Who publicly, during an assembly, or by spreading a written document defames the EU flag or the EU anthem, will be punished by a prison term up to 3 years, or a financial fine
• The same punishment waits for everyone who removes, destroys, damages, publicly abuses, makes unusable, or publicly humiliates the EU flag. Even an attempt to do so is punishable.

Wow. It is just staggering. But yes, I still laughed when I read the verbs in the second verse. They reminded me of a scene from a Czech fairy-tale, "There Is No Fun With Devils", where the officer says "He is a rebel! When he was being arrested, he seriously injured three soldiers, bruised two soldiers, and... he humiliated another one!"

Barr's right, the U.S. should buy 51% of Nokia and Ericsson

The U.S. Attorney General William Barr gets it and has finally articulated the same proposal that I have been promoting for several months (e.g. in this tweet one month ago):

U.S. Attorney General William Barr said the United States and its allies should consider taking a ‘controlling stake’ in Finland’s Nokia and Sweden’s Ericsson to counter China-based Huawei’s dominance. More here: https://t.co/a5AQ7tqEfK pic.twitter.com/yhAp8Q1L3I

— Reuters Business (@ReutersBiz) February 7, 2020

The U.S. government, with or without a help of the U.S. private companies, should acquire a majority stake in Nokia, Ericsson, or both, and become a major player (and, in a few years perhaps, the #1 player) in the 5G mobile data industry because it will be a vitally important part of the economy that also gives the providers quite some influence and China – with its otherwise dominating Huawei provider of the 5G hardware – poses certain risks for the U.S. and its allies.

Mike Pence and the chairman of the FCC Ajit Pai have already declined to support the proposal, offering a non-solution instead, but that refusal may be just a maneuver to cover imminent plans to buy the stocks.

Can holography in the flat space be made manifest?

The last hep-th preprint today was written by the colaboration consisting of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva:

The Holographic Nature of Null Infinity.

OK, the actual names are Laddha, Prabhu, Raju, and Shivastava but I was pretty close. They courageously claim that you don't need to study anti de Sitter spaces and beyond-QFT effects to establish holography. You may see holography in the flat space and the general relativity quantized in the naive way, too.