Cosmological constant from pixels

I've known Jonathan Heckman as a brilliant Harvard student – I think that he was still an undergrad when he was greatly contributing to papers with Vafa and others. And it's great to see this UPenn assistant professor (the same state where Ashtekar works at PSU – my point is that the string theorists could potentially face some extra friendly hostility in Pennsylvania) as a senior co-author of a provoking paper:

Pixelated Dark Energy.

They did very well in the speed contest. By several milliseconds, they have beaten two competitors who also submitted the paper at 19:00:03 UTC :-) so their paper appeared at the top of the hep-th listings today.

It's a very novel scenario to explain the small cosmological constant – or dark energy or, even more generally, the accelerated expansion of the Universe. You must have seen many papers written by authors with great egos. Their lists of references – especially if they're full-blown crackpots – often look like this: [1] I, [2] I, [3] I, I am so great, and so on. ;-)

Jonathan is different. So their paper has 227 references and the most important one, one by the same set of authors minus Sakstein from November 2018, F-theory And Dark Energy, is the reference number 160 in the new paper. :-) That's what I call a quantification of humility.

Best moment to short $TSLAQ could be on Thursday

Unless you should hurry up and use the last opportunity today, of course
Tesla may report EPS $2.23 per share in Q4, jump above $320, and only go to zero afterwards

As you may have noticed, I am one of the staunchest Tesla bears.

The most general and impersonal business problem that I see is that with the current prices and technologies, the electric cars are some $25,000 more expensive than they should be (than their non-electric counterparts) – which is why they're not competitive in the mass market.

Electric cars may still be great for a smaller set of rich enough buyers (and in a decade, for everybody, if prices of things change). Tesla could have become a profitable producer in this niche category but it has never generated an annual profit and 2018 will not change it.



Tesla was a huge Czechoslovak electronics company during communism. The company was founded as "Elektra" in 1921 (capitalism) and originally renamed after Nikola Tesla in 1946 but the name was later explained unemotionally and cleverly as an acronym for "Technika slaboproudá", i.e. "Technology of the Weak Currents". Tesla and Yugoslavs were probably too capitalist for our comrades after Tito refused to sleep with Stalin. Almost all electronics in Czechoslovakia – and we weren't too bad – was Tesla. We had lots of fun with PMD 85, a computer close to Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as kids. Add TVs, radios, components, microprocessors cloned from Intel, vinyl records players, and hundreds of other things. In the voucher privatization, I even bought hundreds of Tesla stocks for a few crowns LOL – Tesla Glass TV Components went out of business rather soon, however. It no longer shows up in my list of stocks – the Harvard Industrial Holding still does (I have 10 stocks, they can't be traded LOL, greetings to Viktor). A tiny fraction of the Tesla factories was revived and "Tesla" CZ produces set top boxes and a few other things today.

Some other companies start to produce luxurious electric cars that have a chance to be profitable. But Tesla couldn't and can't. One reason is that it doesn't have the stream of money from from petrol and diesel cars. Another problem is Elon Musk. In my eyes, Elon Musk is a classic villain – the kind of a character from the movies who makes me enthusiastic when someone finally kills him. The business survived this long because of his lies, distortions, hype, and blackmail. Lies to consumers, investors, bondholders, and employees. Blackmail to real traders.

Most of the people on his side seem to be brainwashed submissive pußies dreaming about their enslavement by someone like Musk. I also noticed that almost everybody in those corners is a climate hysteria fanatic. Even when they get brutally fired, they still worship him. The unavoidable result is that he is the only person who makes important decisions at Tesla – a would-be Hitler surrounded by tons of sycophants. Others just lick his aß. And a great fraction of the decisions are unavoidably stupid because Musk is a rather stupid man. His people have to call these decisions ingenious and disruptive – just because they're sometimes different than the decisions by more standard rational managers (which means "worse" in most cases but they're not allowed to say it). The model is completely wrong because a much higher number of people of many types have to contribute to the decision making in a healthy company.

Global warming left when the Midwest needed it most

Czechia is enjoying a standard winter, with lots of snow in the mountains and temperatures a degree or two below the normal January temperatures (daily average is some –1 °C in Czechia and we may have –2 °C or –3 °C these days) – exactly the kind of an old-fashioned winter that was promised not to happen anymore.

Meanwhile, the American Midwest is freezing. You can't survive in your swimming suit for an hour outside. The U.S. president has excited everyone by this obvious tweet:

In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2019

Let me assume that he typed it with his own little hands – something that the Czech prime minister would never be capable of doing. Andrej Babiš has never successfully touched a computer, not even now when he proudly met Bill Gates, Tim Cook, and the boss of Huawei. ;-)

It's just amazing when this 19th century-style Bolshevik nurtures his image as the man of the future who is connected with the technological elite of the 21st century.

But let's return to the Donald. Instead of "covfefe" and "hamberder", the readers could see "waming" without "r". So exciting. I often post tweets that have such typos because the tweet is not supposed to be a repeatedly proofread artistic work that will be celebrated for millenniums. It's a piece of digital junk that just gets mixed in the noise for a while.

Most of the typos (at least serious ones) in the blog posts are caught by Bill Z. whose sensitivity for details is amazing. ;-)

A fun simple problem in quantum computing

Before the lunch, Hallyu Website provoked me to solve a neat straightforward optimization exercise in quantum mechanics which could be a nice exercise in QM courses.

After very many factor-of-two errors were fixed (I like Feynman's methodology to do science which starts with "guessing the right results" and it sometimes doesn't work immediately LOL), some of which made a huge impact on the result LOL, I hopefully got the correct solution at the Quantum Computing Stackexchange.

Jjbid asked:

Consider the following game:

I flip a fair coin, and depending on the outcome (either heads/tails), I'll give you one of the following states:\[

|0\rangle \text{ or } \cos(x)|0\rangle + \sin(x)|1\rangle.

\] Here, \(x\) is a known constant angle. But, I don't tell you which state I give you.

How can I describe a measurement procedure (i.e. an orthonormal qubit basis) to guess which state I'm given, while maximizing the chance of being right? Is there an optimal solution?

I've been self-studying quantum computing, and I came across this exercise. I don't really know how to even start, and I would really appreciate some help.

I think that a good strategy would be to perform an orthogonal transformation with \[

\begin{bmatrix}
\cos(x) & -\sin(\theta)\\
\sin(x) & \cos(\theta)
\end{bmatrix}.

\] Can't make much progress...

A proposed Czech law to punish Zuckerbergs for censorship

Social networks could face 3-year jail term, €2 million fines, or abolition for illegitimate filtering of discussion on essential political topics

Especially in recent months, we discussed several stories about censorship organized by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social networks against users with opinions labeled "politically incorrect". Look at the discussions about the terror against gab.com, Alex Jones, and many others.

While e.g. Angela Merkel's government of Germany seems to be openly organizing this censorship – and it even hires some former agents of Stasi, the East German counterpart of KGB, to do such things – a group of Czech lawmakers intends to clarify the legal system of Czechia in a somewhat opposite way. If someone like Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, or individual administrators filtered posts by users that don't actually violate any laws or public morality – especially posts about publicly important topics such as migration, environment, and others – he or she would be ordered to pay a $20,000 fine (small individuals) or a $2 million fine (entrepreneurs and companies), or be jailed for 6-36 months.

The law applies to social networks open to the public with at least 100,000 users in Czechia (whose population is 10.5 million, 5.1 million out of them are Facebook users, 1.5 million are on Instagram, Twitter could possibly be beneath the threshold, I am not sure) – that's a particularly chosen threshold that defines what we considered the "[digital] public spaces".

FCC collider tunnel: Will Elon Musk save billions?

On month ago, we laughed about Elon Musk's new Hyperloop science-fiction futuristic mega-invention which turned out to be... a tiny useless road tunnel. Well, to make it more impressive, he has also built car elevators for cars to get there, so that the traffic through the tunnel is even slower than it would otherwise be. That one-mile tunnel of diameter around 4 meters had cost about $10 million.

Elon has bragged that he could save 99% of the expenses which is completely ludicrous because he just bought a boring machine, told his employees to read the instruction manual, and they did exactly what anyone else does with a boring machine. So as long as as the people and utilities and others are paid adequately and one compares tunnels with the same internal equipment, or the lack of it, they will cost almost exactly the same.

Today, as Pablo C. told me, Elon Musk has decided to revolutionize another field, particle physics. Here is the hilarious tweet:

Director of CERN asked me about Boring Co building the new LHC tunnel when we were at the @royalsociety. Would probably save several billon Euros.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2019

LOL, that's just amazing. Hours after this blog post was written, media reports about the tweet appeared in The Independent, Business Insider, and elsewhere.

Tesla's final quarter, China's shopping spree

Last week, Donald Trump figured out that China was far more honorable than Pelosi and Schumer, the top Democrats. It's easier to deal with them, you may trust them.

This is a sad testimony about the contemporary leftists in the West. I must confirm that these people are harder to interact with than those that have been considered textbook examples of the evil left-wing ideologies. I have always considered communists to be foes and I still think that they're dangerous for the evolution of my homeland. But e.g. on Twitter, I found their bosses much easier to communicate with than with the "contemporary" social justice warriors. The latter are far more fanatical, malicious, eager to do nasty things.

On Friday, the stock markets jumped by a percent or two – mostly because of a claimed Bloomberg leak that China agreed to go on a shopping spree to the U.S. in the next five years. They should promise to buy $1 trillion of goods more than previously expected and achieve a balanced trade with the U.S. in some five years. That would be quite an impressive development in the Sino-American trade war, indeed, as the trade war would turn into the Sino-American trade romance.

25 deceptions, lies, malicious attacks, and errors in the Gillette commercial

Some clueless people ask what's wrong with the Gillette ad. I wasn't particularly insulted by this ad – which is approaching 20 million views and 1 million downvotes – because similar stuff has become a part of our everyday lives.

But let me calmly answer the question as if it were a serious one and explain why I consider creators and apologists of the 108-second-long video (TRF) to be bad human beings who need to be treated as such.

There are hundreds of deceptions, lies, manipulations, demagogic statements, mispresentations of facts, and malicious attacks against particular men, all white men, all men, and against innocent examples of masculine behavior, not to mention lots of manifestations of prejudices. Out of these hundreds, I chose twenty-five.

0:00-0:05 – Buzzwords without full sentences are deceptively mixed

We hear noise from the media that talks about "bullying", "the MeToo movement", and "masculinity". In some cases, these words don't form full sentences. They have nothing to do with shaving or with a sensible discussion. And a healthy man turns off the radio or TV or switches to another channel or radio station when the quality of the content drops this low.

What is worse is that these completely different buzzwords are being mixed in order for the viewer to think that they are associated with each other if not equivalent. They are not equivalent at all and a fair person shouldn't automatically associate them.

0:00-0:05 – MeToo wasn't created by masculinity at all

The MeToo mania is a decadent movement encouraging women to invent false accusations against men – and pushing everyone to take them seriously, thus suppressing the presumption of innocence. Everyone who hasn't spent the recent years in a cave knows that most of the important faces of the movement have been proven to be shameless liars. Some of the notorious examples are reviewed in a parody of the Gillette ad, The Best WOMEN Can Be.

FCC submits a 1244-page plan to EPJ

Those people who aren't quite satisfied with a 75-second-long popular video about the Future Circular Collider (FCC) at CERN – a video with some usual nice pictures saying that the experiment wants to study particle physics and the Universe – have the opportunity to look at a somewhat more detailed study.

Today, the FCC Collaboration has submitted their paper to the European Journal of Physics:

International collaboration publishes concept design for a post-LHC future circular collider at CERN (CERN press release, different layout)

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FCC Conceptual Design Report (CERN website)

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Big papers in PDF: 222 pages on goals (EPJ C), 371 pages on lepton collider, 361 pages on hadron collider, 290 pages on HE-LHC (all EPJ ST)

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Update documents in PDF: 20 pages (0007), 20 pages (0003), 22 pages, 19 pages

Here you have a 2-minute FCC video starting with the documentary proving that the Earth is flat.

Gillette will only produce razors for feminists' beards and mustaches

Gillette is one of the companies that have greatly changed the culture by its quasi-monopoly. In Czech – as well as all small Baltic and Slavic languages that use letters from the Czech alphabet ("ž"...) – the word "žiletka" refers to the general thin razors for shaving, regardless of the company that made it.

The company was founded in 1901 and has headquarters in Boston. It is currently owned by Procter & Gamble, a truly large corporation. The British marketing unit has decided to change the image of the company by releasing We Believe: The Best Men Can Be | Gillette (a two-minute short film).

Wow, it wasn't accepted too well. Out of 2.7 million views, they have accumulated 240,000 negative votes (still fewer than YouTube Rewind 2018: 15 million downvotes) and just 30,000 positive ones. The film basically says that most men have toxic masculinity (their being male implies that they're bullies, rapists etc.) that they have to shave off. A far left "Young Turks" host is presented as a role model, boys that are playing and men who are praising women are being criminalized. Hundreds of thousands of comments were posted under the YouTube video and hundreds of thousands of comments were erased by the company – only 64,000, mostly supportive ones, were kept as of now.

An unexpected encounter of digits of \(\pi\) in the counting of collisions

Peter F. and John A. simultaneously sent me a nice video on the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel that wonderfully popularizes various mathematical curiosities and gets well-deserved hundreds of thousands of views for that:

The most unexpected answer to a counting puzzle (a 5-minute video)

Imagine two boxes on a line, a big one and a small one. The big one is \(M\) times heavier than the smaller one. The small box starts at zero speed, the big one approaches from the right, collides with the small one. And the small box elastically oscillates between the big box and a static wall.

You count all the "clacks". When the boxes are equally heavy and \(M=1\), you will get \(3\) clacks. When \(M=10^{10}\), you will get... \(314,\!159\) clacks. It's almost like digits of \(\pi\). And indeed. The rule continues. Why do you get digits of \(\pi\) in a counting problem? And why are they multiplied by powers of ten?

DNA: cranks fully expel James Watson from his lab

Genetics used to be banned in the Soviet Union up to the mid 1960s.

A crackpot named Trofim Lysenko proposed alternative, superstitious methods to increase the yields in agriculture (basically some reeducation camps for crops – contemporary cultural Marxists would approve Lysenko's methods because they were also all about "nurturing") and he became a darling of an influential local mass killer named Joseph Stalin.

That man therefore banned genetics – the discipline established by Czechia's German Gregor Mendel – and all scientific methods in agriculture.

It was before the DNA was discovered. Just to be sure, Mendel's genetics determined the probabilities that the offspring has one trait or another but it didn't say "why". DNA emerged as the detailed microscopic molecular explanation why those probabilities work as Mendel has experimentally determined.

Americans like to view the story of Lysenkoism as some tale about savages who are surely nothing like Americans. Too bad, when it comes to the freedom to do research and report the results, the atmosphere in the U.S. is already as bad as it was during the Soviet Lysenkoism era if not worse and the Yankees' ideas that the Soviets were worse are just unsubstantiated fantasies driven by the primitive and widespread anti-Russian racism.

Self-immolation of Jan Palach: 50th anniversary

In August 1968, five European communist countries' armies invaded Czechoslovakia and terminated the Prague Spring, an era of the socialism with a human face (or some accelerating liberalization of communism if you wish).

Within months, almost all the people got used to the renewed neo-Stalinist conditions, opportunism, spying, restored censorship, and firing of the inconvenient folks (starting from those who led the liberalization in 1968) – the process of reversal of the Prague Spring has been termed "The Normalization" by Brezhnev and his comrades and those of us who are terrified by that process use the euphemism, too.



For some time, students kept on protesting but they figured out that no one dares to support them – no one apparently wants them to fight – which is why this student resistance faded away. There was one 20-year-old student of history and political economy, Jan Palach, who couldn't swallow the people's becoming spineless and passive in this way.

On Wednesday, it will have been 50 years from his January 16th self-immolation at the top of the Wenceslaus Square – not far from the St Wenceslaus statue and the National Museum (which is freshly renovated now).

Michael Atiyah: 1929-2019

Sadly, yesterday, just months after his lecture about his efforts to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, the Lebanese-British mathematician Michael Atiyah died at age of 89.7. See The Telegraph or some press in Bangladesh (that reprinted the New York Times).



He died 10 months after his wife (from 1955), Lily Brown, also a mathematician, who was 90.

Atiyah articles at TRF...

Quantum gravity from self-collisions of the configuration space

One of the seemingly quirky ideas that are waiting to revolutionize theoretical physics – at least your humble correspondent feels it should be the case – is the unified treatment of world sheets + world volumes + other auxiliary spaces, spacetimes, and configuration spaces. All these spaces may be used to encode the information about physical systems. All these spaces have some quantum gravity on them (I will discuss the last one). They are mapped to each other in various ways.

There isn't a self-evident metaphysical difference between them which is why I believe that the truly exact formulation of quantum gravity doesn't care whether you think that you live on the world sheets, in the spacetime, or on the configuration space. The laws of quantum gravity are certain consistency criteria that have to work on all the spaces above.

For more than 20 years, one of the reasons why I believed in the paradigm above were the Kutasov-Martinec (2,1) heterotic strings. When you combine the left-moving \(\NNN=2\) supersymmetric string theory with the normal 10-dimensional superstring, you apparently get a string theory whose target space dynamics looks like the world sheet dynamics of the superstring – or another world sheet. You may even recursively generate the (2,1) string in the target space of itself.

Is traditional masculinity pathological?

In Eliza Graves, a 2014 horror film, the patients have acquired the keys from a psychiatric asylum, performed a spherical inversion, and kept the physicians in the basement. It seems that a similar spherical inversion has taken place in the American Psychological Association (APA) that has been conquered by psychopaths.

In August 2018, they wrote their APA guidelines for the psychological practice with boys and men. The document was only released yesterday – see a press release – and it has shocked all the people whose brains haven't been completely devoured by the extreme left-wing ideology. See e.g. Christina Sommers at Tucker Carlson's show, Fox News, Breitbart, and lots of other conservative and Christian responses to the insanity.

Unix: 50 years

Willie Soon sent me a tweet by the Bell Labs:

Today, @InventorsHOF announced their 2019 inductees, including Dennis Ritchie & Ken Thompson for their invention of the #UNIX operating system while at Bell Labs. Today, 50 years later, UNIX systems continue to run machinery from computers to smartphones. https://t.co/sacBaD1Pzk pic.twitter.com/MeLzzc3Aa5

— Bell Labs (@BellLabs) January 9, 2019

Yes, as they discuss on the very informative Bell Labs web page, Unix was invented 50 years ago, in 1969. And because the Bell Labs were bought by Nokia – decades after the research center had earned six physics Nobel prizes and years after I wrote "Rip Bell Labs" – and I bought a couple of Nokia stocks a year ago (they are up 30%, which is rare), there's no reason not to overlook this history.

Recent papers: SFT, SUSY GUT, a new light gauge boson, \(p\)-adic string gravity, swampland

I plan to write a heuristic post about some exciting ideas of mine but let me dedicate a comment to recent papers on the arXiv. There were some rather interesting papers on that server yesterday and today.

Yesterday, Hiroyuki Hata (whom I know as a guy from the Kyoto group, a team behind the first string paper that I intensely studied 25 years ago) presented some analytic solutions for cubic string field theory that are supposed to describe an arbitrary integral number of spacetime-filling D25-branes. The work is meant to be a generalization of the \(KBc\) Prague work by Martin Schnabl (who is Czech) and Ted Erler (who is at most an honorary Czech).

The solution is of the form \(U Q_B U^{-1}\) where the product is a product of string fields and, believe it or not, one may write down string fields that behave as unitary matrices under the relevant product. So these folks conjugate the BRST operator by a unitary map and, depending on what the map exactly is, one gets unequivalent configurations that contain a different number of branes. I still haven't been given a good intuitive explanation why the mere unitary conjugation produces something else than an equivalent configuration. In non-commutative field theory, we were comparing kernels and images (the maps would be irreversible on one side) but I don't know what's the trick here.

Hata constructs the most general unitary string field \(U\) which depends on some function of two variables and perhaps some additional functions. It is not quite clear to me why this is the right amount of freedom to start with. He constructs the solution. Because one starts with heuristic solutions like that, one must pay some attention to the possibility to transform the formal solutions to something that makes sense, level-by-level, and that has a finite norm and energy density. He demands the correct tension and energy density and claims to have generalizations for any \(N\).

It's not quite clear whether he is sure that those are solutions and whether he has found all solutions of a certain class – his constraints may be too strong or too weak. Also, I find it surprising how irregularly the solutions behave as a function of \(N\). Something new happens for \(N=5\) and higher etc. (suddenly some \(\pi\) appears in the form of some required parameters) – it is just like explaining the grammar of Slavic numerals! ;-) You have "one/jedna minuta", "two-three-four/dvě-tři-čtyři minuty", and "five-or-more/pět-a-více minut". Only 2,3,4 are "truly plural" numerals and the numerals behave a bit like adjectives but 5,6,7... is too much, the individual minutes lose their separate existence, and all the numerals behave like nouns similar to "a dozen" in English! So it is a "dozen of something" – Slavic languages use an analogous construction for almost all numbers starting with five.

Grievance studies hoax author harassed by "disciplinary" action at his university

In October, we discussed a wonderful campaign – Alan Sokal on steroids. Three academics have succeeded in publishing numerous Sokal-like papers in pseudoscientific journals dealing with "grievance studies", as they creatively categorized them.



One of the three authors – and perhaps the main mastermind – was Peter Boghossian who is an assistant professor of philosophy at the Portland State University in Oregon. Well, to prove that the politically correct "scholars" are full of šit is probably politically incorrect by itself which is why some disciplinary action has been initiated against him.

See the College Fix and Google News for more reports. Thanks to Hallyu Website for informing me about the developments.

PLOS ONE: women are privileged across the West

You must have met one of these unhinged loons (sometimes calling themselves "feminists") who claim that women are being discriminated against.

Every sane person knows that in almost all the Western countries, it's the other way around. Authors from the Universities of Missouri and Essex, Stoet and Geary, have embraced this question as a serious one, performed a massive statistical analysis, and published the results:

Men face MORE discrimination than women according to new research (RT, pop summary)

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A simplified approach to measuring national gender inequality (PLOS ONE)
Basic Indicator of Gender Inequality, BIGI (detailed website of the authors)
Data (a list of countries)

Instead of "the Global Gender Gap Index" which is a crackpots' quantity that only allows the result "women are being discriminated against" and that treats the sexes asymmetrically from the beginning to the end, the authors have defined a simpler index BIGI (Basic Indicator of Gender Inequality).

Recent Apple (and FAANG) rally was the dotcom bubble lite v2.0

In mid September 2017, Gene Day wrote an e-mail to me that also contained a certain – somewhat excited – comment that "Apple would surely be the first company whose capitalization surpasses one trillion dollars". It's so incredible, it has such a momentum, he wrote, and so on.



On that day, the stock price was about $160 – now, after yesterday's 10% collapse and today's 3% rise so far – it is $147, significantly lower than what it was when Gene wrote that e-mail. And Gene was right (although Apple was lucky to get there before Microsoft). Apple was the largest company at that time, above $0.75 trillion, and it surpassed $1 trillion in August 2018, reaching the all time high $1.1 trillion in October 2018.

Hanuš Zápal, a top regional architect

Only in recent days, I learned some facts and I was amazed how many buildings that I have known so well were designed by Eng Arch Hanuš Zápal (1885-1964), often considered the most important regional architect of the Pilsner Region of the last 100 years. He was born in a village North of Pilsen, Krašovice, which has just 370 inhabitants. To make it confusing, while also located in the "Pilsen North District", Krašovice is rather far from Krašov, a place with the most powerful communications tower in the region, and another Krašov, a castle on the Berounka River.



OK, this is the Luděk Pik Gymnasium, a high school I used to attend (and mostly dislike). It was built between 1930 and 1932 according to Zápal's plans – and (after the fall of communism) named after Luděk Pik who was the most important social democrat in the region and led the city as the mayor between 1919 and 1938, for quite some time.