Click the picture for AFP's summary of the Handelsblatt's interview with Czech President Václav Klaus.
Full interview in German
Click the picture for AFP's summary of the Handelsblatt's interview with Czech President Václav Klaus.
Full interview in German
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8:42 PM
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Eight days after the Big Ben lowered his defining interest rate by 0.75 percentage points, they subtracted extra 0.5 points, ending at 3.0%. The sum, 1.25 percentage points in 8 days, is unprecedented. Even after the 9/11/2001 attacks, the interest rates were only lowered by 0.5 percentage points.
The interest rates in the U.S. should have been higher by 3-5 percentage points during the last 5 years or so. Let me sketch several general reasons why it was wrong for the Fed to reduce the rates so rapidly and why it is generally bad for the Fed to maintain low rates and to allow the U.S. currency to weaken.
Regulators should regulate fluctuations
As we have discussed repeatedly, markets have the tendency to amplify various fluctuations. The herd mentality of the investors is one of the reasons. Such economic cycles may lead to crises. These things are natural but if they are excessive, they are unhealthy. If the central banks and federal bodies are supposed to do something, they should try to make the behavior of markets more constant, not more violent.
So they should act as a kind of negative feedback. They should never try to overreact. They shouldn't try to overcompensate an effect by another but stronger effect or amplify the overall havoc on the markets.
Now, most slowdowns are preceded by various unsustainable bubbles. In many cases, various equity prices grow faster than certain sustainable rates. While the growth may be trusted in the short run and many people earn cheap money from it, it is very clear that eventually, it must stop or collapse. The dot com bubble and the housing bubble of the last decade are two recent examples.
In my opinion, responsible officials should try to regulate these movements already when they are going up. They might want to say what prices and their time derivatives they consider reasonable and try to influence and calm down the psychology of the markets. Some price dynamics is clearly unsustainable. For example, if housing prices increase by 10 percent every year while wages only grow by 5 percent or less, it is not hard to see that houses are rapidly getting increasingly unaffordable. Constant affordability essentially means the same average growth of the housing prices and wages.
Still, it is not unusual that the housing prices sometimes increase by 10 percent for a couple of years. However, it is then obvious that these prices must sometimes also drop by comparable fractions. If the authorities didn't act to slow down the excessive increase of prices, they shouldn't act against their drop either. A further drop in housing prices by 20-50% is pretty much unavoidable and responsible people shouldn't pretend that it is not.
Now, a decreasing feeling of wealth surely reduces consumers' spending which might be considered a bad thing by some people. But the very same sentence also holds in the opposite direction. Increasing home prices are (or were) artificially increasing consumption above the rate that would exist if the housing prices were increasing sustainably. I feel that too many people want to see only one side of this coin (and many other similar coins). If they become financial government officials, they inevitably lead the economy to an unsustainable behavior that must obviously end up in amplified cycles and deeper crises.
Inflation and exchange rates are more robust measures of the proper value of money
Finally, all central banks look at inflation because inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. The Federal Reserve in particular emphasizes the economic growth. It uses lower rates to stimulate it when the growth slows down. I think it is a wrong perspective.
While lower rates do stimulate the economy, they also lead, to one extent or another, to many other effects, including higher inflation, weakening currency, increasing spending, increasing debt. I think that the primary goal of the central banks should be to keep the value of money constant.
In the past, the value of money was determined by the gold standard, by the ultimate "constant" precious metal. However, gold doesn't play such an important role today. Neither does silver, the second candidate for a "prototype" of value. In fact, the gold/silver price ratio has been dramatically fluctuating during the last two centuries. A much more robust definition of the value of money involves all possible products that people buy.
The inflation rate measures how the value of money with respect to the basket of actual consumable things changes every year. This number should be kept more or less constant because price stability defines the equilibrium of supply and demand for money.
The GDP growth depends on many other things - for example the weather in agricultural countries - and there exists no principle that would dictate that this figure should be constant. Also, stock prices are derived quantities that determine the ability of companies to create values under certain (and changing) circumstances. Again, there is no a priori reason why these things should be constant. But a non-constant value of the money - with respect to things that people actually need - is simply a bad thing.
Irresponsible behavior should be punished
We have discussed the issue or moral hazard many times. Once again, irresponsible behavior must be punished. If someone takes a risk and makes a profit, it must also be possible that sometimes the risk works against the person and leads to a loss. If the government or the central banks save the speculators - both rich as well as poor ones - in such a way that the sign of the speculators' profit is always positive, it leads to increasing speculation, less stable markets, and less efficient markets where people effectively insured by the government earn cheap money for activities that are not useful for anyone (except for the person who makes the money).
The Fed shouldn't be a slave of the Wall Street. The decisions of the Federal Reserve influence many other types of people - such as U.S. students who must now pay a lot of money abroad. The bankers should be independent from all pressures of limited subgroups of the population or the economy.
Strong dollar policy is beneficial for the U.S.
The strong dollar policy has been a very good policy for the U.S. and if someone openly or secretly believes that it is not the case, he or she is extremely wrong.
First of all, a strong dollar has been one of the major reasons that is (or was) making American economy, science, and technology superior. A stronger currency means higher salaries - when converted to another currency - and higher salaries attract skilled workers and increase the competition. All these things increase productivity and related observables.
It is an effect that we also know from individual countries. For example, Prague is able to concentrate skillful, hard-working, smart people because it has a richer local economy than the rest of Czechia. The causal relationship goes in both ways. The local economy is strong because there are lots of hard-working people who have something to offer and they are there because the local economy is strong and offers them high salaries.
If the effect of concentrating people worth high salaries diminishes, the comparative strength of the city or the country diminishes, too. What do I want to say? For example, the U.S. still may have about 3 times higher salaries than the Czech Republic if measured by conversion (but 2 times as measured by the PPP). Will this ratio of 3 or 2 persist? I think that the answer is No unless the U.S. restores the strong dollar policy. If it doesn't, the average salaries in both countries will eventually coincide - just like the average IQs (98) and other objective quantities describing the economical environment in both countries coincide.
Once again, the currency strength has a profound impact on the attraction of brains and qualified workers in general. The competitive edge of a country largely depends on these things.
Relationship with trade balance
Moreover, America has a significant trade deficit. While it is true that a weaker currency could reduce it, it takes some time. In the short run and medium run, it is much easier to reduce it by a strengthening U.S. dollar simply because the imports become cheaper in the U.S. dollars and imports are more important for the overall calculation than exports because they are larger (because of the trade deficit).
I think that a weak currency significantly helps the trade balance only if the country already has a significant surplus (an example is or was China). For countries with a large trade deficit such as the U.S., a weak currency may make the balance even worse and the last 6 years demonstrate this fact pretty clearly.
On the other hand, there is nothing wrong about having a large trade deficit for many decades because the growth of the economy - and population - of different countries may simply differ for whole centuries. There would be nothing surprising about the U.S. economy growing, building, and importing more than the Japanese economy simply because there is more space in the U.S. for people, their houses, and their new companies.
I want to say one more thing: a strategic, political observation. Friends of the U.S. are much more likely to hold the U.S. dollars while the U.S. enemies have a much higher probability to bet against the U.S. currency. By weakening the currency, the Fed effectively helps the enemies of the U.S. financially while it punishes its friends. It is a very bad evolution for the American (and not only American) strategic interests.
Fast rate cuts create the feeling that something really serious is going on
Another observation is so obvious that I will only dedicate two sentences to it. Fast rate cuts create the impression that the U.S. economy is in a serious trouble and such an impression has the ability to transform itself into reality. Such a dramatic behavior repels all kinds of investors, especially the international investors who are influenced not only by the prices of U.S. stocks etc. denominated in the U.S. dollars but also by the value of the U.S. dollar.
Americans borrow easily and they need higher rates
Finally, America should have higher rates than many other countries simply because the Americans are clearly not shy to borrow money. After all, their self-confidence in borrowing money is one of the driving forces behind the trade deficit. This comment is another reason supporting the thesis that lower interest rates "help" to increase the trade deficit.
If I summarize, I think that the importance of one causal relationship - between interest rates and the stimulation of the economy - is being heavily overestimated because of some flawed, Keynesian thinking while many other, more important relationships and principles are being largely neglected. When you think about all these things, you will see that the bankers are creating at least as much damage as they help.
And that's the memo.
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10:23 PM
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Part II: Extra Dimensions (and Susskind's DNA/compactification landscape analogy)
Our Universe Among Others I, II, III (22+24+19 minutes with Susskind; subtitles in 12 languages, saving of our planet by becoming a vegetarian, spirituality, and God's direct contact to An Inconvenient Truth is included in the Supreme Master Television's powerful package) :-)
Brian Cox channel
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5:17 PM
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7:28 AM
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Today's news about cosmic strings start with
PhysOrgwhere they wrote a story called "String Theory Gets a Boost" about a preprint that was recently accepted to
Phys. Rev. Lett.even though careful readers of the arXiv have known it nearly for a year as
astro-ph/0702223.Quite a long time for the "speedy" PRL. In the paper that has collected 25 citations so far, Neil Bevis, Mark Hindmarsh, Martin Kunz, and Jon Urrestilla statistically investigate the cosmic microwave background. They try to parameterize it by two models. One of them is based on ordinary inflation - what matters is the scale-invariant spectrum - with an adjustable power law tilt. The other has cosmic strings included.
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5:38 PM
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Abdus Salam, the first Muslim and the first Pakistani Nobel prize winner, was born on January 29th, 1926. What was his main goal? Well, let me speak himself:
See also 35-minute interview with Abdus Salam (start with the last one and continue to the left; Salam superenthusiastically celebrates string theory from around 4:45 of the part 2/4; at the beginning of 3/4, Salam has a funny description of Edward Witten) and dozens of other videos.
As you can see, he had pretty much the same goals as other great and passionate theoretical physicists and he has made a substantial contribution towards this goal.
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7:31 AM
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Science Daily,
PhysOrg,
Wired Science
inform us that a group at University of Illinois has proposed a new method to search for signatures of cosmic strings in the skies. The project is based on the 21-centimeter Hydrogen line.
Recall that the Hydrogen line arises from transitions between two nearly ground states of the neutral Hydrogen atom that are split by the so-called hyperfine structure: its origin is in the interaction between the spins of the electron and the proton. The two states, distinguished by different total spins, differ by a very small energy whose corresponding photon has frequency of 1420 MHz or the wavelength of 21 centimeters.
A direct transition between these two states is highly suppressed and almost certainly unobservable in the terrestrial labs (the rate is less than 3 emissions per 10^{15} seconds). However, there is a lot of Hydrogen in the Cosmos so this 21-cm line is easily observable. However, the radiation whose wavelength is 21 cm today is not what the people want to observe.
Instead, they want to focus on the radiation whose wavelength was 21 cm right during the decoupling era. By the expansion of the Universe, the wavelength is now closer to 20 meters and they would need to build a network of powerful radio telescopes and try to see something. I might misunderstand something, but I wouldn't expect this stretched spectral line to be too sharp.
Such signals, if observed, could nevertheless not only identify the inhomogeneities caused by cosmic string networks - that are unobservable in the normal CMB spectrum - but even determine the string tension and perhaps some other features of such cosmic strings hypothetically imprinted into this portion of electromagnetic radiation. Note that cosmic strings appear in various unified theories, starting from grand unified theories and ending with superstring theory itself: cosmic strings can literally be fundamental strings from string theory stretched into astronomical distances.
It looks as a rather interesting and unexpected experimental idea that should be looked into very seriously. Such possibilities highlight that creative people may often solve questions that look too difficult at the beginning. They also emphasize how incredibly idiotic are the aggressive crackpots' proclamations that modern theoretical physics in general and string theory in particular is untestable.
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10:19 PM
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This article is about the geological epochs. Paul Crutzen, a Nobel prize winner, has been promoting the notion of a new, recent geological period started in the 19th century, the so-called
Anthropocene.The beginning of the year 2008 brought us two new papers defending this concept: see some news from Australia. It is almost certainly becoming a topic of serious discussions between the people who have the power to modify textbooks. I mostly think that the idea is silly. But let us begin with some basic facts describing the eons, summarized in the (hopefully) most transparent way you have ever seen:
Note that Tertiary covers both Paleogene as well as a part of Neogene while Quaternary ("čtvrtohory") roughly coincide with the broader human race. Now, there are hundreds of other facts that the mankind has learned that you might expect me to reproduce here. But I won't. Let me focus on more general facts.
Each geological eon, era, or period is associated with some geological events as well as with some epochs in the evolution of life. But because all of them are geological periods, it should be the rocks that determine the natural boundaries.
Continental drift and the creation of various mountains and other huge structures belong to the defining events of the geological classification. Life is added as a cherry on a pie. Its fossils are confined within the rocks.
Journey to Prehistory ("Cesta do pravěku", Karel Zeman, Czechoslovakia, 1955): brontosaur in Mesosoic
If we look at very ancient eras, it is clear that our time resolution diminishes a little bit. For example, the Hadean lasted nearly for one billion of years and it has no official subdivisions. The fact that the recent subdivisions are finer has two major reasons:
I guess that the objective aspect dominates in the very recent periods. In principle, we can measure time rather accurately even for events that occurred tens of millions of years ago. But we simply don't divide those events to as short periods as one million of years or thousands of years because we are not aware of too many dramatic events that occurred a long time ago.
It is not just that we are aware: many of us are convinced that the frequency of events worth human attention was limited, indeed.
Life occurred rather quickly after the Earth was created. While there has been a lot of rather sophisticated life on Earth in Phanerozoic, it doesn't mean that there was no life in the previous eons. In fact, you can find life not only in Proterozoic but even in Archean.
Consider modern life with internal membranes in cells and cytoskeleton, those that usually have the nucleus. These life forms are called "eukaryotes". Well, what is the evidence for the oldest eukaryote? It wasn't found by your humble correspondent but it was found by Jochen Brocks, his former roommate, and it probably lived 2.7 Gyr BC, in Neoarchean.
That's when the Earth was roughly 50% younger than today.
Only in Phanerozoic, in about the most recent 10% of the Earth's life, we could see abundant life forms around. And only in Cenosoic, the most recent 1% of the Earth's life, there have been mammals around. In the most recent 0.1% of the Earth's history, we saw some kinds of humans around. The white race as defined by the SLC24A5 mutation has only existed for the last 0.0001% of the Earth's history.
Things seem to be speeding up.
Well, it is plausible but unlikely that a similar acceleration occurred in the past and dinosaurs or other distant cousins were driving their SUVs around - before they were destroyed. Let us assume it is not the case and the Quaternary is the first geological period when the evolution of intelligent life forms started to speed up exponentially.
Fine.
But now the main point. With all my admiration for the unbelievable progress that life has recently made, I think that we - the mammals, humans, or whomever you want to include - have a very limited impact on the features of our planet that geologists will be able to study in the year 10,000,000.
I think that the notion of an anthropocene is arbitrary, its beginning is ill-defined, its justification is not really based on geology, and one could invent even newer, more recent eras associated with another kind of human progress.
Note that according to the classification above, we already live in Phanerozoic as well as Cenosoic as well as Neogene as well as Quaternary as well as Holocene. Holocene, the shortest period, approximately coincides with the existence of oldest civilizations as we know them. Do you really want to add Anthropocene to the list?
I don't see too many qualitative geological events that occurred in the last 200 years but that would distinguish us from the ancient Greeks or Romans. Honestly speaking, I consider myself to be much closer to some old people in Greece or the Roman Empire than most politically correct loons who live in the "Anthropocene".
Will we also have to add Microprocessorocene, Multiculturalismocene, or something else? Please stop this insanity. Create new mountains. If you can't do it, please wait until Mother Nature does it for you. Then you can start a new era. ;-)
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8:03 PM
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7:28 AM
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Click to zoom in.
Note that the retreat of ice in Ilulissat, Greenland (satellite) has been pretty much uniform and monotonic and began at least 165 years before Henry Ford established his company.
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7:35 AM
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Alexander Cockburn has written a book combining Stephen Hawking with Michael Crichton, A Short History of Fear, to be released in April. But already now, in
Spiked,he describes how the warming church has almost crucified him.
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6:16 PM
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Joseph Louis, comte de Lagrange, an eminent mathematician and a tragic figure, was born on January 25th, 1736, in Turin as Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia. His father was a rich manager of the funds of the Sardinian royal army.
He only began to be interested in maths at the age of 17. However, two years later, he wrote a letter to Euler in which he solved the isoperimetrical problem (finding a curve minimizing [thanks, Carl] the perimeter, given a fixed area inside; the solution is clearly a circle but he gave a proof) using variational calculus. Let us say it bluntly: he used a kind of Lagrangian approach. ;-)
Euler and Lagrange: the leaders
Leonhard Euler, a fellow string theorist, instantly understood that Lagrange's methods were important. Euler generously withdrew his own, more primitive paper about similar issues, allowed the young Italian guy to take the full credit for his discovery, and even invented a catchy name for Lagrange's techniques. Lagrange instantly became a celebrated mathematician: only Euler was above him.
Despite Euler's generosity, we still usually talk about the Euler-Lagrange equations that physicists usually derive from "delta S = 0".
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4:42 PM
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Le secret de l'origine de l'Univers?
(The Bogdanov Equation: the Secret of the Origin of the Universe?)
Presses de la renaissance,
240 pages, 140 x 225 mm,
ISBN-10: 2750903866,
ISBN-13: 978-2-7509-0386-2
Click the picture to buy it for EUR 19, passwords from amazon.com probably work
Table of contents (why you should learn French)
About the author
Preface by Clovis de Matos, ESA
Introduction
1. The great mystery of the origin
2. A brief history of physics
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2:09 PM
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Thomas Dent has asked the following interesting question:
Given that we agree not to use an assumption of 'typicality', is there any reason to discard a cosmology where the overwhelming majority of brains are Boltzmann brains? (And the majority of stars, planets, galaxies etc. are also Boltzmann-stars, planets, galaxies...)The short answer is No. Here is my longer answer.
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7:51 PM
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First, you should know that John Christy and Roy Spencer (UAH MSU) have identified an error in their competition's data (RSS MSU). You should notice that two climate skeptics have actually made some data look warmer than previously reported. Would the champions of the global warming alarm ever actively identify an error whose correction would cool down the Earth?
The corrected RSS MSU results are approximately 0.1 °C warmer for 2007 than previously reported and they are closer to UAH MSU and articles such as one about the very cold year 2007 will have to be corrected. See the link at the top of that page.
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8:56 AM
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A cold January is not the most likely month for such "anniversaries" but statistics happens:
I bought the BC 500 speedometer in Summer 1995 or so and it has measured kilometers on two continents. If I were riding my bike along a geodesic instead of those small gravitational quantum loops, I could have arrived to the antipole of Pilsen (1000 miles Southeast from New Zealand). But the puzzle is: what will happen with the number above after another kilometer? It will either
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8:40 PM
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Paul Langevin was born on 1/23/1872 in Paris. Because he was a rather important representative of French science and a science official, great physicists have encountered him at many conferences. Langevin was also a leading figure who promoted relativity in France.
The modern interpretation of diamagnetism and paramagnetism in terms of electron clouds asymmetrically or anisotropically located within atoms is due to Langevin. In statistical physics, he wrote down the Langevin equation describing Langevin dynamics. The simplest example is Brownian motion in a potential: Langevin's equation is then Newton's equation of motion with the classical potential term, a friction term, and a noise term. He also designed some ultrasound-based technology based on the piezoelectric effect (previously demonstrated by the Curie brothers) to locate submarines during the war but when the gadget was ready, the war was over.
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8:39 AM
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Cold wave intensified and ten feet of snow have killed soldiers etc. in India, bringing the toll to 137.
New KeralaTo avoid similar problems, the Indians should sell the remaining stocks and pay a few trillion dollars to cool the whole planet by 0.001 °C and please the God of climate change. ;-)
Seattle Post Intelligencersays so. The effect used to be called erosion and it has been fought against for decades but now it has become a new result of cutting-edge science because urban-based journalists have no idea about the actual environment.
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9:19 PM
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Recently we wrote about a physicist who died exactly 100 years ago, namely Lord Kelvin, and a physicist who was born exactly 100 years ago, namely Edward Teller.
Lev Davidovich Landau belongs to the second category because he was born on January 22nd, 1908 into a Jewish family in Baku, Azerbaijan, Russian Empire, to become the most stellar Soviet and Russian physicist of his century.
Another ordinary prodigy
As in many other cases, he was a child prodigy. At the age of 13, he completed his high school. Because he couldn't enroll in a university, he at least did two schools in Baku simultaneously. In 1924, he moved to the physics department of Leningrad University where he graduated three years later, at the age of 19. He received a doctorate two years later, at the age of 21.
Two more years later, the Rockefeller Foundation teamed up with Stalin's government and allowed him to visit Göttingen, Leipzig, and especially Copenhagen: Landau always considered himself to be a pupil of Niels Bohr. In 1930, he became a friend of Edward Teller, among others. Landau traveled to Cambridge and Zürich before he returned to the Soviet Union, to lead theoretical physics in Kharkov, Ukraine.
Physics Today: a family portrait of Lev Landau by his nieceThe Landau school
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12:01 AM
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While many places on Earth recently witnessed the coldest days in many decades, many not quite reasonable people continue in their crusade to regulate the world's carbon cycle in order to "fight climate change".
While the U.S. department of energy argues that the U.S. won't follow Australia and regardless of the winner of the 2008 elections, it won't join Kyoto, several more "progressive" regions of the world prefer a less reasonable approach.
A powerful German energy lobby group has calculated that certain new rules proposed by the EU could increase the costs of the carbon trading scheme 18-fold and make things more expensive for Germany by EUR 17 billion. They see the European industry in danger, following their calculation assuming a EUR 30 price per ton.
Meanwhile, the current EU ETS price of carbon emissions is between 1 and 2 eurocents per ton. ;-)
Food fights between the EU members are beginning and Germany expects that one million of jobs may be lost as a result of the new scheme. Steelmakers and representatives of other industries argue that if this lunacy is going to continue, they will simply leave Europe.
Moreover, Japan is wise enough to propose 2000 as the new reference year, instead of 1990, to determine future emissions according to a successor of the Kyoto treaty. This fact also makes the situation more difficult for Europe.
One of the main reasons why Europe has been so supportive of these schemes is that they were pegged to 1990 and Europe's CO2 production actually dropped during the 1990-2000 decade. The reasons had nothing to do with global warming - see e.g. Communism, capitalism, and environment - and Europe could simply benefit from being already below the 1990 numbers.
I personally think that if a regulation scheme would have to be adopted - which I don't believe to be the case - it would be more fair if a later year were chosen as the reference year. With 1990 as the reference year, many regions of the world are being punished for their growth in the 1990s while Europe is irrationally rewarded.
One sixth of Britons, close to a 10-year record, suffer from fuel poverty (more than 10% of income spent for utility bills). Green energy policy is one of the underlying reasons of this bad trend.
Thanks to Benny Peiser.
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1:45 PM
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André-Marie Ampère was born on January 20th, 1775, in Lyon, France, to a family of a rich and smart merchant and a pious mother. He was a child prodigy who lived in a nearby burg. André-Marie was able to resum long arithmetic series using pebbles and biscuits before he knew the figures.
His father wanted to teach him Latin but it was realized that the boy prefers maths and physics. Nevertheless, André-Marie had to learn Latin soon, in order to read the papers by Euler and Bernoulli. ;-)
Love and faith
In 1796, he fell in love with a very religious woman, Julie Carron, who was from the working class and they married in 1799. However, two years later, he moved to Bourg, to earn some money for the family as a professor, leaving his ailing wife and son (later, French philologist Jean-Jacques Ampère) in Lyon. Sadly, she died in 1804 and his heart was broken forever. Exactly when she died, he copied a touching verse from the Psalms and started to read the Bible and the Fathers of the Church more regularly.
When he was 18, he quoted the following three events as the key to his life: his first holy communion; the reading of "Eulogy of Descartes" by Thomas; and the taking of the Bastille.
Electrodynamics
Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre was impressed by Ampère's probabilistic analysis showing why the gamblers always win in the long run and he made sure that Ampère stayed in physics. What did Ampère do on September 11th, 1820? No, he didn't fly into the World Trade Center and he didn't defend his PhD thesis. Instead, he heard of Hans Christian Ørsted's strange new phenomenon: a magnetic needle moves when there is a voltaic current nearby.
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8:25 AM
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Press releases can occassionally be useful.
Japanese KEKhas pointed out a work of the kind I always wanted to do.
Jun Nishimura et al. (Phys Rev Lett)have numerically calculated the properties of non-supersymmetric D0-like black holes in the maximally supersymmetric BFSS matrix model. The most difficult part is the strong coupling that is relevant for the Schwarzschild black holes which is what the D0-branes become.
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1:31 PM
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Half of the USD 500,000 total award goes to Rashid Sunyaev (middle) and two quarters go to Maxim Kontsevich (left) and Edward Witten (right), respectively. Congratulations. Click the picture for more details.
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8:10 AM
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Two years ago, we discussed the Bayesian reasoning in a critical light:
Bayesian probability I, III have emphasized that the Bayesian probabilities are subjective in character. They depend on the precise evidence that one uses in his reasoning. It is meaningless to calculate Bayesian probabilities too accurately or claim that science has calculated one of them to be 90%. For example, if a report says that the probability that most of the 20th century warming was caused by man-made CO2 emissions was determined by science and equals 90%, it proves that the authors are just parrots who don't know what such probabilities mean. Why?
Retrodicting the pastArticles on this blog criticizing the anthropic reasoning are far too numerous to be listed. Try the landscape category.
Myths about the arrow of time
New York Times about reincarnation
P(H_i|E) = P(H_i) P(E|H_i) / P(E)where P(E) is the normalization factor equal to the sum of P(H_i)P(E|H_i). Note that with this factor, the sum of the posterior probabilities P(H_i|E) equals one. Also, this number P(E) is equal to the weighted average of the conditional probabilities P(E|H_i) of the evidence E over different hypotheses. It is naturally weighted by the prior probabilities of these hypotheses which is why it is natural to call it simply P(E), the so-called marginal probability of seeing the evidence E.
P(H_i|E) / P(H_i) = P(E|H_i) / P(E),which is why you should believe that its essence kind of remembers the underlying H-E symmetry that becomes the time-reversal symmetry if we use the formula for retrodictions.
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Luboš Motl
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11:53 AM
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Dennis Overbyehad an entertaining article in the New York Times about some cutting edge cosmology. Its scientific content is bizarre but I think that Overbye faithfully reproduces the actual discussions between theoretical cosmologists - including the most famous ones - and the ideas that they are currently thinking about. Yes, it seems that many of them are losing their minds.
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Luboš Motl
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10:46 AM
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Click the picture for more information and one more picture from the funny rally. These warriors are lucky that they don't have to protest in Russia where temperatures will drop to minus 67 degrees Fahrenheit at some places.
Hat tip: Drudgereport
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Luboš Motl
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8:02 AM
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The Holy Father was expected to give a speech at the Rome University that would start the new academic year. As
Tommaso Dorigodescribes, the Pope eventually cancelled his visit after a protest of 67 professors, led by Emeritus Professor Marcello Cini, who didn't like the fact that in 1990, Cardinal Ratzinger supported the following quote by Feyerabend:
In the age of Galileo the Church showed to be more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The trial against Galileo was reasonable and just.
Galileo was not condemned for the things he said, but for the way he said them. He made statements with a sectarian intolerance, like a ‘missionary’ of a new gospel …. Since he did not have objective evidence for what he said, the things he said in his private letters to those men [of the Roman College] made him suspect of dogmatism supporting the new religion of science. One who would not immediately accept the entire Copernican system was ‘an imbecile with his head in the clouds,’ ‘a stain upon mankind,’ ‘a child who never grew up,’ and so on. At depth the certainty of being infallible seemed to belong more to him than to the religious authority.Also, Galileo is criticized for the fact that the boundaries between religion, philosophy, and science were fuzzy in the 17th century. I doubt it was Galileo's fault and I don't really care whether Galileo's teaching was a new religion, new philosophy, or new science. I think it is much more important that he was right and his wisdom turned out to be essential for the development of our civilization. I happen to care about the fact that Galileo was infallible in the fundamental questions, unlike the religious authority. This fact introduces a certain asymmetry and the asymmetry might lean to the opposite side than the side that Vittorio Messori would like.
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Luboš Motl
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1:11 PM
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This weekly dose of peer-reviewed skeptical literature about the climate looks into Science magazine:
Isotopic Evidence for Glaciation During the Cretaceous SupergreenhouseAndré Bornemann and eight co-authors investigate whether there were ice caps in the Turonian, a warm period roughly 90 million years ago that lasted for 4 million years.
CCNewsNeedless to say, such a finding implies that the estimates of possible sea level rise - even in the case of hypothetical insane alarmist warming - would have to be scaled back a lot.
Daiji World
The Telegraph
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Luboš Motl
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10:58 PM
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