EU apparatchiks want a 55% CO2 emissions cut by 2030

After the Covid hysterical demagogues have caused lockdowns that have subtracted ~10% from Europe's GDP in a quarter, and perhaps 5% of the GDP in a more permanent sense, I was shocked to find out that the Gr*tenist terrorists (which are pretty much the same people) are still around, too. We surely need to cripple the European economy more than it was crippled so far, they say.

EU leaders agree to cut emissions 55 percent by 2030

The price of carbon indulgences went up from €25 last month to €31 a ton of CO2 (now). It was below €3 in 2013.

Poland (which still naturally exploits King Coal) has been fighting against similar insanities. In the new deal, it's just being stated that "poorer EU members will get a financial help" (how much of a help is being promised and similar details are extremely hard to find out: transparency about the planned EU blow to the national economies isn't needed, is it?) and "nuclear and lower-emissions energy sources will be allowed". The OK to the nuclear power plants is fine but the 55% target is still economically murderous.

Just consider some activities that produce CO2. Personal transportation yields a fifth of that. Will personal transportation contribute a representative 55% cut in the CO2 emissions? This could mean that 55% of the car owners will either forced to stop using cars; or replace their cars by new electric cars by 2030. Are you serious? The average worker has to work for years to earn the money for an electric car that is comparable to his or her current petrol or diesel car; he needs to save for one year to earn just the "electric premium" (roughly €10,000). Don't expect the electric cars to get much cheaper. The electric batteries are likely to become more expensive if the demand builds up.

Celestial sphere and the anti-Wilsonian paradigm

In the mid 1990s, Andrew Strominger and Joe Polchinski would explain their \(p\)-branes and D-branes to each other during the lunches in Santa Barbara. Their brains didn't immediately notice that the ideas were equally insane in the membrane. It took some cycles of digestion to figure out that the branes were really the same thing – and a big explosion of the Second Superstring Revolution was one of the consequences.



The other celestial sphere...

Can this Ansatz for a discovery be repeated? I think that Andrew Strominger (Harvard) and Nima Arkani-Hamed (IAS) have never written a paper together before – if you needed to connect them through co-author relationships, you had to go through someone like Cumrun Vafa or your humble correspondent. Today, they teamed up with two former Strominger's students and here is the first paper:

Celestial Amplitudes from UV to IR

The co-authors are Monica Pate – who has been a Harvard Junior Fellow for a year – and Ana-Maria Raclariu who is a fresh postdoc at the Perimeter Institute. And yes, the paper sort of combines Strominger's and Arkani-Hamed's industries of the recent decade. Strominger was all about the soft particles and hair that may be seen on the celestial sphere etc. (de Boer and Solodukhin studied similar things in 2003, the 2017 revival was due to Strominger, Shao, and Sabrina Speedy Gonzalez Pasterski, the pilot and aircraft constructor); Arkani-Hamed was all about the analytic structure of amplitudes, especially if expressed in twistor-like variables. The industries have been largely isolated although the overlap of the mathematical tools and hypotheses have been self-evident.

On the departure of an AI ethics researcher from Google

Synchlavier has told us about the removal of Timnit Gebru (Wikipedia, Heavy.com, Twitter) from Google's AI ethics research team:

We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says

---

...MIT Technology Review...

She was born in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, and her mother is black African. Both parents moved from Eritrea (which is small and was independent from Ethiopia since 1991-1993). Her father died when she was a kid and he was an electrical engineer. My understanding is that he was white but I am not sure. Even with a half-white heritage, you won't find too many Eritrea-born Silicon Valley researchers, I think! She has done AI research in Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Most recently, she was de facto fired from Google.

Optionally mandatory vaccines and conspiracy theories

Like most of my compatriots, I surely plan to avoid the Covid-19 vaccination as long as it is possible. All experts seem to agree that the available Covid-19 vaccines have much more violent and unpleasant side effects than any other vaccines that have been used en masse (mostly local pain, inflammation, sometimes fever, headache etc.). As a kid, I had reactions to regular vaccines (including fainting, a few times) and I have other reasons to think that the costs and damages would safely exceed the benefits for me.



The average size of a Covid-19 shot. A warning for Google's officials and people with a similar IQ: this comment is a joke and the picture above is a party costume.

More generally, if we ignore my idiosyncrasies, some people worry that the vaccine is unsafe. I believe that if a particular vaccine were made with the purpose of helping the people who get it, it is safer than the virus itself (because the vaccine should be something resembling the virus, without the full ability to grow in your body) and the virus isn't terribly harmful. However, I do share worries that the vaccines may be intentionally modified to cause some extra effects.

The best Czech epidemiologist vs Covid brown shirts

A few days ago, I translated the letter from the Czech ex-president Klaus to the current minister of health which protested against Klaus' being cited as a "source of misinformation" on a ministry web page (authored by a private propaganda company and a Russophobic group at the ministry of interior).

Klaus appears as a target of a nasty sentence along with Prof Jiří Beran whose analogous letter to the minister is an even better example of the Coronazis' disrespect for the freedom of speech and for the highest quality science.

I admire Beran not only for his great achievements in epidemiology and related fields (which are mentioned below) but also for his amazing rhetorical skills and refined Czech. So here is the translation of...



Jiří Beran's letter to the minister of health Jan Blatný

Dear minister,

we have never met so let me introduce myself and say several words about me.

My name is Jiří (George) Beran (Ram), I am a physician, candidatae of sciences in epidemiology, an associate professor of epidemiology, and a professor of epidemiology appointed by President Havel. Your minister of health granted a specialized licenses to me, in the field of epidemiology and also the medical microbiology. I have also worked in the terrain as an epidemiologist for three years and I had to solve about a hundred of epidemics in that role.

Boson sampling vs silly quantum computer skeptics

You've heard about quantum computers, right? Last year, Google achieved the quantum supremacy for the first time – performing a calculation on their quantum computer that would take an insanely long time on any classical supercomputer. Meanwhile, the SJWs have demanded the phrase quantum supremacy to be abandoned and replaced with the "quantum black lives matter" or something like that. ;-)



Now, as Scott Aaronson pointed out, Science has published the second quantum supremacy result which was produced by a Chinese group,

Quantum computational advantage using photons,

which performed boson sampling with a transformation of "50 to 100" photons. Now, boson sampling is a computational task that was specifically designed by Aaronson and Arkhipov (note that Aaronson cleverly chose his name to start with Aa... to be ahead of everyone else in the alphabetical lists), building on the work by Tishby and Troyansky, to prove the quantum supremacy.

The leader of the Chinese team is Pan Jianwei (a brother of Pan Tau) who is also the leader of the Jiusan Society, a minor political party in China. It is as independent and cool a political party in China as you can get; like many Scott Aaronson's comrades, it works under the direct leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. :-) The Jiusan Society dares to say that the Chinese people should be prosperous and powerful, try to appreciate the courage.

During the long eclipse

By Ilona Csáková, Roman Horký, and Kamelot

A somewhat less optimistic yet deeper Covid song that Mirai's Put On a Face Mask



00:00 Roman Horký: Hi, along with Ilona Csáková and Kamelot, we recorded a new videoclip. So watch it through the end.

Czech ex-president vs unelected Covid brown shirts

These Corona brown shirts really seem like a fifth column serving some truly pernicious foreign players

I am increasingly worried that the gradual disappearance of freedom and democracy that we were witnessing in the recent decade or so will switch to an abrupt end and a sharp start of a new totalitarian regime. The latest correspondence between the Second President of Czechia, Prof Václav Klaus, and the current minister of health, Assoc Prof Jan Blatný, may be another good example of the clash of the two different worlds.

Klaus has complained that a ministry web has explicitly mentioned him as a source of misinformation about Covid, along with the brilliant immunologist Jiří Beran. The ministry web discusses various types of alleged misinformation about Covid; the last paragraph is dedicated to the VIPs like Klaus and Beran (but if they had more space, they would have included singers and others, too). Well, I consider a significant fraction of the statements mentioned on the page to be misinformation, too. But some are correct and... our constitution still guarantees the freedom of speech (even for those whose statements are considered wrong by me); moreover, the percentage of misinformation is much higher in the articles and statements by those who are trying to fan the hysteria about the most fashionable disease of 2020 and they are not being censored or attacked. These double standards are typical symptoms of a non-democratic political system.

Two interesting swampland papers

Cumrun Vafa's swampland paradigm is the assumption that the apparent consistency conditions of low-energy effective field theory are just a small portion of the conditions that are required for the spectrum and interactions of a theory to be compatible with quantum gravity. Matter coupled to quantum gravity (e.g. string theory which may be a synonym) is far more constrained and far more unique than the low-energy optics suggests.



In 1978, in order to earn a demijohn of slivovitz, Ivan Mládek composed this song, Joey the Swampthing, which was my #1 favorite song in the kindergarten years (and I have won many contests by singing it LOL). In recent years, every ambitious band has to perform this song (here is Metallica's attempt). As this English translation shows, the song has successfully predicted the rise and fall of Joe Biden.

The swampland program is the plan to maximally isolate these extra conditions that are invisible to the effective field theory and perhaps use this extra information to map the string landscape – and to help to find the right vacuum describing this particular Universe. The string landscape is large but the point is that the space of the effective field theories is much larger and its anti-string portion (the swampland) that is incompatible with the swampland conditions must be drained. The draining led by Vafa will continue at least up to January 20th, 2021 when the swampland creatures may take over the U.S. again. Incidentally, I think that Vafa still doesn't realize how important Trump has been for Vafa's program to drain the swamp. Nobody is perfect.

A childish topological TOE of mine and what made it unwise

When I achieved some real, important enough realizations about physics, like matrix string theory, I was happy but I slept well. Things suddenly fit together and after a few minutes, one may get pretty much certain that the nontrivial new statements are right. They pass a lot of consistency checks. One may try to deduce many consequences and calculate some other things. But once you know that it works, you may leave it for tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or someone else. Some fun should be left for the other people, shouldn't it?



It was the ultimately wrong ideas that have prepared several sleepless nights for me when I was a kid (or a teenager). And that may be how I learned that losing your sleep doesn't necessarily increase the depth of the theory. Let's discuss the theory. Sometime in 1987 when I was 14 or so, I decided that I had just found a theory of everything (of all elementary particles). Be ready, it was a theory of a nearly Leo Vyukesque "strawberry TOE" caliber.

Hana Lipovská: birth of a legend

Can a modest young female scholar tame the neo-Marxist octopus in a country?

For a decade, I have read the IVK Newsletters published by the Institute of Václav Klaus, the second president of Czechia. Well, in recent 6 years, I have really read every sentence. The pro-freedom texts are very intelligent and touch many political, societal, and philosophical themes. One of the brilliant authors who has repeatedly caught my attention was Dr Hana Lipovská, now a 30-year-old economist. If you use a search engine, you will find out that this young scholar has published something between half a dozen and a dozen of books, including a serious economics textbook.



None of the superficial left-wing activists has read those things. Well, they wouldn't understand any of it. Many of them (including actresses who are painted as cornerstones of the intellectual elites of Czechia) are high school dropouts. Almost all of them are innumerate and some of them are borderline illiterate, too. Lipovská's texts may be considered sequences of dry, hard facts and logical reasoning. They're not the explosives full of misleading slogans and emotions that are useful to manipulate masses. In this sense, Lipovská's field is very similar to theoretical physics. It's no coincidence that between 2001 and 2005, we considered economist Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, to be a natural ally of the physicists.

Robbert Dijkgraaf and the end of pure science

OK, Albert Einstein found most of his deep ideas in Ulm, Bern, Zurich, Prague, and Berlin, but most people associate him with Princeton, New Jersey, where he was employed as an older man who was already famous but no longer too explosively original (imagine: Princeton gets almost all the credit while Prague where Einstein realized that he needed a theory with the equivalence principle gets almost no credit). The NJ employer was the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) and for a few years, Robbert Dijkgraaf was the director of the IAS. Dijkgraaf is my fellow co-father of screwing/matrix string theory (Dijkgraaf is the biologically non-identical twin in the Verlinde triplet, as Susskind has pointed out) and a co-author of a small paper of ours.



Fine, he just wrote an essay for the Quanta Magazine,

Contemplating the End of Physics.

He says that physics isn't ending but some of his detailed argumentation sounds very similar to the – intellectually incompetent and impotent – pseudointellectuals who have talked about ludicrous concepts such as "the end of physics" for decades. Before we get to some content, I must say to Robbert that if he is "contemplating" the end of physics, he should also be "contemplating" his moral duty to return all the salaries and grants he has received in Amsterdam and Princeton because he was hired to manage physics and drive it to progress, not to end it! Quite generally, I find it stunning for people to "contemplate the end of physics" and similar things when they are paid huge salaries for "doing physics" instead. These two should be totally incompatible, shouldn't they?

Swiss ICUs and end-of-life wishes

Among the Western countries, the otherwise hyper-PC Sweden is unique because its medical elite was capable of keeping the nation in a good psychological shape, extinguishing unnecessary Covid fear, rejecting the "global duty" to wear face masks, and avoiding the closure of schools and shops at all times (although mass events are still restricted; and the border was closed for some time). The pictures of Swedish cities have looked like a different world since March. "Everyone else" thought it was common sense to be hiding in the basement like a rat (and tens of millions ludicrously think that the world will never get to the "old normal" again); meanwhile, millions of Swedes continued their normal lives.

Some Swedes were still hiding like rats but they did so on the private basis which is exactly how things should be (I think that a much higher percentage of Swedes is willing to hide in this way, relatively to more "individually courageous" Czechs, and that's why we saw a much faster Covid dynamics here in Czechia). In November, the Swedish statistics page makes it clear that Sweden's approach was a great success. 6500 Swedes died with Covid but the actual "excess death tally" is just about 1000-2000 i.e. 1-2% of the annual deaths (which is pretty much undetectable by eyeballing if you look at the annual charts). Czechia already has 7499 deaths with Covid so our more stringent spring lockdown almost certainly wasn't a good investment for the final tally. The second wave came to Sweden because \(R_0\) is higher in these months than what it was in late spring and the summer, so the required fraction for herd immunity is higher (which is why these diseases are seasonal). The peak "deaths per day" were 34 in this wave so far, well below 115 in the spring, so Sweden is pretty much the least affected Western European country now. The total number of casualties of this "next wave" will be some 1/6 of the first wave. With a third wave, expect something like a geometric series: you may just ignore other waves.

Why do many professors suffer from TDS

It's the defense of a group think and collective interests

Vít Bláha sent me an interesting essay by Philip Patrick, a lecturer in Tokyo,

Why academics hold Thatcher and Trump in such contempt.

Note that only guys who are safe enough, like being employed in Japan (or Hermites in Pilsen, for that matter LOL), have the freedom to discuss these important matters these days. First, I tried to give my answer to this vital question and I thought that Patrick was too kind to the instructors who suffer or suffered from the Trump (or Thatcher) Derangement Syndrome. But after some more reading, I decided that my view is pretty much exactly the same as Patrick's.