There's no measurement problem

...just carefully physically define the wave function to see why...

Wikipedia describes the (non-existent) measurement problem as follows:

The measurement problem in quantum mechanics is the problem of how (or whether) wave function collapse occurs. The inability to observe such a collapse directly has given rise to different interpretations of quantum mechanics and poses a key set of questions that each interpretation must answer.

These sentences are very representative of the confusion of the real-world people who repeat the totally incorrect statement that there is something wrong, illogical, inconsistent, incomplete, or scientifically unsatisfactory about the basic postulates of quantum mechanics.

OK, so the first sentence conveys the message that these people don't understand "the collapse of the wave function". On the other hand, the second sentence pretty much answers the would-be question in the first question – the collapse cannot be observed, at least not in detail, as a sequence of steps – and it postulates that people must be split to many "interpretations", like in a multicultural society, and answer all the questions differently depending on their camp.

Shared horoscopic memorization

...and other cool twists in education...

Many of us have agreed that undesirable trends in education lead to the decline of – and existential risks for – the civilization. It seems that kids are not learning the reasons why things are the way they are; they are not even led to ask the question "why"; when they learn something at all, it is usually some ideological clichés and/or ephemeral details that are bound to get obsolete very quickly.

The ideological clichés are too general and too sociological (and also wrong, in most cases); the ephemeral details are too localized. But the whole "foundations" or the "skeleton of knowledge" that can be reliably extended is somewhere in between when it comes to the generality – and it's largely suppressed at contemporary schools.



Elements according to their "endangered species" status

Many of these trends in education reflect the Zeitgeist. In fact, when I was a teenager, I may have wanted the education to be changed in this direction – maybe the pendulum has just swung too far in the direction we used to favor. At the high school, we were expected to memorize too many isolated facts – about organic compounds; novels and novelists, and more. I was – and, I assume, most kids were – overwhelmed by so many random things that didn't look relevant for us, that didn't have anything to do with us, that didn't inspire any emotional attachment of ours.

Decline of civilizations: fragmentation of knowledge, unsustainable growth of bureaucratic complexity

Edwin has brought us a one-hour-long talk by Jonathan Blow, a world's top coder (currently working on a new programming language), given in Russia in May 2019:

Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only)

I've watched it and it's amazing. Also, I agreed with every sentence he presented – including quoted sentences from the CEO of SpaceX whom I otherwise dislike. Blow has talked about the decline of the civilizations – such as the Roman civilization and, maybe, the current one. Our civilization may be in the process of the decline also because the technology will be increasingly breaking as software is increasingly complex and unfixable by increasingly incompetent people.

Magic angles of twisted di-graphene

The Quanta Magazine has recently revived its campaign to promote the superconductivity of graphene twisted by a magic angle. Pradeek Mutalik just added some solution to his previous puzzle.



From an MIT press release

In an April 2018 Nature paper, Cao et al. have reported the remarkabke phenomenon of superconductivity observed in a pair of graphene layers that are twisted by 1.1 degrees before they are placed on each other. In just 15 months, the paper has acquired almost 700 citations which indicates that it's one of the most thrilling trends in current condensed matter physics.

Well, more precisely, they have observed both "proximate superconductivity" and a "Motl insulator" ;-), seemingly opposite behavior patterns, in the same pair of layers. The phenomenon is so stunning that even if you look just at the picture of the two graphene layers (see above), it looks like it is animated! If you keep on watching for 5 minutes, your own head will revolve around the Earth as if it were the Sun. :-)

Kellner: Europe is plagued by the culture of entitlement, egalitarianism, and attack on traditional values

Petr Kellner (55) is the #1 wealthiest Czech. His net worth is some $15.5 billion (Forbes, March 2019). His financial group PPF reported nearly a $1 billion profit in 2018 – yes, it's the same one billion dollars that e.g. Tesla has managed to burn so far in 2019. PPF operates globally with some key activities in China (and also Russia).



Disclaimer: He is paying at least for the rent of the Hanspaulka Chateau where the Václav Klaus Institute resides. So I guess Kellner may have paid for some parties as well and I may owe him some $100 – however, the train tickets have cost the same. ;-)

Fans of the Czech oligarch prime minister Andrej Babiš, a former communist cadre and agent, are usually pensioners and some of them resemble a cult. They often parrot this exact sentence: "Who else should lead or advise all of us than this guy who has shown his skills and who really can't be bribed because he's already the #2 wealthiest Czech?" Even if I accepted the logic, which I don't (he's much more greedy and dependent on the public finances than the average politician and his proven skills are of a very limited, aggressive type), there would be an obvious answer:

What about the #1 wealthiest Czech who is 4.5 times wealthier than Babiš? ;-) Surely all the proclaimed advantages of Babiš also hold for Kellner – 350% more so. And as a man who really doesn't owe anything to communism and has no reasons for the communist nostalgia, Kellner has a substantially different view on many key ideological issues than Babiš.

Beauty of physical laws doesn't have the purpose of pleasing humans

Under the previous "baryon number R-symmetry" blog post, Santa Claus wrote several sentences that have increased my blood pressure. The most effective sentence was the following one:

But beauty in the dark sector would be wasted beauty.

Wow, you are just joking, Santa, aren't you?



Paul Dirac wrote this important observation on a blackboard in Moscow in the early 1950s. The sentence is still there as of 2019. Vladimir continues in the nice tradition introduced by his predecessor Joseph – to send every janitor to the Gulag if he indicates a tendency to erase the principle above.

Clearly, Santa Claus implicitly assumes that it's important whether some beauty involved in the laws of physics impresses many humans with some aesthetic sense. Humans don't usually look at the dark matter – it's hard because dark matter is dark – which is why throwing the beauty to the dark sector is similar to throwing it into the trash bin, he thinks! It almost seems as if he believed that Mother Nature would deserve to be criticized for such a wasteful behavior. ;-)

Baryon number as R-symmetry, baryogenesis, Dirac gauginos

As in many other cases, the most exciting hep-ph paper today is the first one

A Supersymmetric Theory of Baryogenesis and Sterile Sneutrino Dark Matter from B Mesons.

The degree of excitement is obvious from the fact that the paper was submitted at 18:00:00 UTC, in the first second required to be at the top of the daily list. The authors, Ann Nelson et al. (AáENX), mainly build on their October 2018 paper that was also submitted within the first second of the business day, to make your thinking harder if you think that the timing is a coincidence. ;-)

Tesla and Nokia: opposite reports

Tesla and Nokia reported Q2 results last night and minutes ago in the morning, respectively. It's amazing how these companies are similar in size – but opposite in their credibility and profitability.

In Q1 2019, Tesla reported a huge $700 million loss. Investors almost started to behave rationally and the Tesla stock price slided down to $179 or so on June 3rd. However, at that time, the data were far and the bulls started to pile up the price again. With hindsight, it looks unavoidable to me. And they added some 50% from the lows.

So yesterday before the results, Tesla closed at $265. The loss per loss was expected as $0.40 – almost break even – but it came out as $2.30. So Tesla is losing 11% after-hours, down to $235.

Some climate alarmists embrace chemtrails

According to a popular conspiracy theory, long-lived condensation trails behind airplanes are chemtrails whose longevity is enhanced by the addition of some special compounds. The governments are adding these chemicals to harm the population or make it obedient or something like that.



Most of the believers are probably considered "right wing nut jobs". Why would you get obsessed with the innocent "man-made clouds" whose main component is clearly partly condensed water vapor? Well, not all of them are right-wing. A month ago, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics published a paper by two ladies

Contrail cirrus radiative forcing for future air traffic (by Bock and Burkhardt)

whose clear purpose is to give the pop-science alarmist inkspillers something slightly new to write about – and to make the writers more visible. And be sure that it works. At Yale, Fred Pearce has quickly promoted the preprint. All climate alarmists – including the Gretenist cult – should be worried about the chemtrails, too!

Quanta Magazine's anti-quantum zeal

Most people enjoy the summer. There are lots of things to write about but the interest is refocused on the holiday activities.

To avoid week-long hiatuses, let me mention a new article by Philip Ball in the Quanta Magazine:

Quantum Darwinism, an Idea to Explain Objective Reality, Passes First Tests

What I find remarkable is that virtually every single sentence in the article is completely wrong. The "new story" that is discussed is about the purported tests of "Quantum Darwinism": the information that can copy itself in a nearly classical way becomes the information that is likely to become the information perceived as classical in a classical limit. So the observables compete for the "survival of the fittest", Wojciech Zurek said, and that's needed for the classical limit to emerge.

Apollo program was economically sound

Fifty years ago today, in the evening of the European time, the final steps to send the two men on the Moon began. My nation has a particularly close relationship to the astronauts: the primacy ;-) of Czechoslovakia was that it was the third country with an astronaut.

Scott Aaronson "summarizes" his opinions by saying that the Apollo program really was faked (it just included the landing of the people on the Moon) and it was "economically insane". The moonlanding pictures are a testimony of a bygone era in which the civilization was way more cohesive than today – right – and the number of the moonlanding deniers will probably increase, he opines. Well, it probably will. It's even more likely that the far left stinky "elite" will ban any talk about that achievement of the white males altogether.



OK, I don't understand what he means by saying that the moonlanding was "faked" – except that he is a conspiracy theorist by himself. But I understand what he means by saying that it was "economically insane". A majority of Americans used to say the same thing. They were wrong. Do you know what Moondoggle was? It was the forgotten opposition to the space program. In 1979, only 47% of Americans said that it was "worth" to pay for the moonlanding. That percentage increased to 77% by 1989. As you can see, the decision of JFK etc. to go to the Moon was undemocratic in the narrow sense but democratic in the long run. The critics of the program were on the wrong side of the history and are forgotten by now.

Feminists at NYT, WaPo spit at Moonwalkers

Half a century ago, between July 20th and July 21st, 1969 (UTC), the first men were landing on the Moon – four days after the July 16th Apollo 11 launch, just like predicted by Jules Verne. The men who went through the final stage were Commander Neil Armstrong and LM Pilot Buzz Aldrin. LM doesn't quite stand for Luboš Motl, it stands for Lunar Module. They sound similar but the difference may also matter.

Armstrong took the New World Symphony to the Earth's only natural satellite.



The first woman on the Moon

OK, as discussed by Fox News, NewsBusters, and Summit News, two America's leading left-wing newspapers had a great idea to "celebrate" the anniversary: by demonizing all the people who have made it possible through disgusting identity politics.

To make it to the Moon, women have to escape Earth's gender bias (Kowal, NYT)
The hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck (Heller, WaPo)

The NYT diatribe seems more ideological, hateful, and obnoxious.

Ursula Leyen will accelerate putrefaction of Europe

Frans Timmermans was ultimately eliminated as a candidate for the replacement of Jean-Claude Juncker. That didn't mean that the European Union was going in a much better direction.



Farage evaluated Leyen yesterday.

I think that Ms Uršula Kluková will remain the most famous Uršula in Czechia LOL. In this dialogue, she is the owner of a new whorehouse after 1989. During communism, whorehouses were abolished but the brothel (disorder/mess) was here throughout communism, too. I think that these comments apply to Ms Leyen's EU, too.

Emmanuel Macron has proposed Ursula Leyen as a compromise candidate. This failing minister of defense has emerged out of thin air – despite her being inadequate according to SPD, Germany's CDU's coalition partner. Yesterday, a required majority of the 751 members of the European Parliament voted "Ja". She was the only candidate.

Just try to appreciate what it says about the state of democracy in Europe. Each of these MEPs annually collects hundreds of thousands of Euros in salary – but they're collectively nothing else than a machinery obliged to codify absolutely random and counterproductive inventions of a random pompous Emmanuel. He invents a name, there is no other candidate, and they just vote Yes. The top Western European politicians have absolutely no moral right to criticize countries such as Iran, Cuba, China, or North Korea for the lack of democracy – it's no better in the EU today.

Strings 2019 wasn't a comprehensive string conference

The main reason I didn't want to write about Strings 2019 in Brussels (July 9th-13th) was that I am not thrilled about getting dozens of nasty attacks by moronic crack pot-smoking trolls brainwashed and radicalized by pathetic one-dimensional anti-physics websites combined with the silence of those who aren't idiots.



Another reason is that I didn't see much new that I would overlook during the year – which is probably normal for those of us who diligently follow (not only) hep-th on the daily basis. But after some inspection, it became clear to me that it's not just because of my regular arXiv habits. The conference just didn't really cover most of the stringy craft. The holes were obvious both in the topics and the list of participants.

An incredible hoax-like multi-gender paper made it to astro-ph

Tom Anderson has pointed out a tweet by Prof Janice Fiamengo:

For those who believe (oh antiquated thought) that academics who specialize in Astrophysics should be investigating the origins and structure of the cosmos, you'll be saddened to learn that instead they're paid huge salaries to write nonsense about gender: https://t.co/niYlpdQ8RS

— Janice Fiamengo (@JaniceFiamengo) 14. července 2019

And indeed, a few days ago, an unbelievable paper was posted to arXiv.org and classified in astro-ph as the primary archive. The title is

The Nonbinary Fraction: Looking Towards the Future of Gender Equity in Astronomy

Well, the list of authors is even more interesting and I copy it from the title page of the PDF file:

Kaitlin C. Rasmussen (she/they), Erin Maier (they/them), Beck E. Strauss, (they/them), Meredith Durbin (they/them), Luc Riesbeck (they/them), Aislynn Wallach (they/them), Vic Zamloot (they/them), Allison Erena (they/them)

Very nice. Note that you not only have to accept many genders to understand this list. You also have to abandon the rules of English grammar because "they" may be a case of "she". Well, all other authors are individually known as they/them which is great. Formally, their problem no longer seems to be the inability to identify and accept their own sex. Their problem seems to be the inability to determine "their" number – most sane individuals can count themselves and obtain the result 1. ;-)



Cornell University, the owner of arXiv.org

By the way, the 19th century Czech had a fancy formal way to refer to other people. Instead of "you" (which exists in the singular and plural form in Czech and the plural form may be used as the polite singular one, too), people were saying "they" ("oni"). This way of conversation was probably inspired by German – where "you" and "they" may be expressed by "Sie" – and was known as "theying" ("onikání").

Facebook shouldn't be allowed to issue its currency

Yesterday, Trump finally said what he thought about the cryptocurrencies. And although a big Bitcoin cultist Peter Thiel has been his adviser, it turned out that Trump's views are very close to mine (and other pundits in the conventional financial markets).

Meanwhile, the true Bitcoin cultists celebrated the following criticism because they love to imagine they are a credible foe to the likes of Donald Trump – a reason why I consider the Bitcoin cult to be just another part of the postmodern leftist movement.

I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 12. července 2019

As the zeroth approximation, it's just right. With no backing, material or hard commitments, Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies aren't money. That's nearly equivalent to their high volatility. Aside from the Ponzi-scheme-like lottery, the only good application is the criminal one.

MWI fans are collapse deniers, hypocritically assume collapse in the past, anyway

Ben asked me to refute the Many-Worlds Interpretation again.



I think that the first sentences of the Wikipedia article do a wonderful job in explaining what the typical people promoting the "MWI brand" actually want to believe, and one might argue that this is what Hugh Everett actually meant, too:

The many-worlds interpretation is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts the objective reality of the universal wavefunction and denies the actuality of wavefunction collapse. The existence of the other worlds makes it possible to remove randomness and action at a distance from quantum theory and thus from all physics...

Too bad, these claims are self-evidently wrong and don't pass even the most elementary, 1-minute-long consistency checks, thus proving that the defenders of this indefensible position lack intelligence.

Finns: clouds control temperature, CO2 sensitivity 0.24 °C

Jaime has pointed out that there is an interesting physics.ao-ph paper on the arXiv:

No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change (Jyrki Kauppinen, Pekka Malmi)

I was greatly skeptical about any meaningful content in the article. Six pages is short, affiliations are missing, and there is some kind of broken English – commas before "which" (as if they were Czech), wrong order of the words ("control mainly" in the last sentence), "green house" spelled with a space, and more. Wouldn't you expect some slaying dragon crackpots?

Roboticist: self-simulation yields self-awareness

...an amusingly specific attack on the mystery of consciousness...

John Pavlus wrote an article for the Quanta Magazine yesterday. I initially ignored it – like the commenters, there are still zero comments there – but it looks very interesting now:

Curious About Consciousness? Ask the Self-Aware Machines

The hero of the article is Hod Lipson, a robot expert at the Columbia University. He has played with similar robots for over a decade.

Multiverse is primarily a scientific concept

Right or wrong... Tabooization of the concept is what is anti-scientific

The Vafa-Ellis-Rubenstein debate about the multiverse has reminded me about the extraordinary difficulty that the laymen – such as the host of the debate, David Malone, a Green Party politician and BBC filmmaker – may have with simple enough terms such as the "multiverse". There must be something fatally wrong about the very word, right?

Shouldn't scientists be prevented from using the term "multiverse"?

The word "universe" comes from Latin; "universus" means "turned into one". Note that "uni-" is one, "versus" is a past participle of "vertere", i.e. "turned". Similarly, "multiverse" is a neologism used to represent "many universes". All of being is represented as belonging to several universes.

First of all, a sociological answer. You really don't want to plan a ban of the multiverse in the scholarly papers. Google Scholar lists 22,800 papers that include the word "multiverse". Top cited papers with the word in the title have about 500 citations. You may find papers on physics and cosmology but also those on proteins and the Indian cinema, among other things.

Clearly, these unusual places where people use the word are "derivative" or "experimental" exploitations of the physics terminology and marketing seems to be the main goal of this choice of the words.

Vafa, Ellis debate with a bright religion scholar

MarkusM has pointed out that a more pleasant, entertaining, and physics-oriented public discussion took place in recent days, in the Institute of Art and Ideas (iai):

Does the Multiverse Exist? | Full Debate (43 minutes)

Participants were Harvard's string theorist Cumrun Vafa whom I know very well, you know, CERN's phenomenologist John Ellis, and an assistant professor of religion, feminism, gender, and sexuality Mary Jane Rubenstein of Wesleyan University. Religion and feminism is quite a combination – maybe she hasn't noticed yet that according to religion, feminists will burn like brown coal in the hell for the eternity (because of the eternal character of the oxidation, feminist corpses in hell count as a renewable energy source). As we will see, she was the nicest surprise of that event.

A frustrating Guardian discussion on string theory

On June 28th, The Guardian's Ian Simple invited David Berman, a very good string theorist whom I know, and Eleanor Knox – both of them did great – to discuss the question

What happens when we can't test scientific theories?

Just to be sure, a good scientist tries to extract evidence in clever ways and hard work, whether easy tests in a foreseeable future look possible or impossible. And indeed, easy tests of string theory look impossible – and have looked impossible in the recent 50 years. When asked about the progress in the future which nobody can know, otherwise it would take place now, they were sketching a century – or thousands of generations – of efforts.

It's possible that people need this much time. It's possible it won't be enough. It's possible that mankind will turn into hopelessly stupid apes again. But it's also possible that the progress could be faster. Clearly, the estimates how quickly a theory of everything is going to be found depends on the recent advances and their extrapolation – on the people's enthusiasm and self-confidence which, in the case of intelligent people, reflects some actual facts or experience. That's why sensible people such as Witten found it totally possible in the mid 1980s or mid 1990s that the theory of everything would be completed within weeks.

Tommy Robinson deserves the U.S., Czech asylum

Tommy Robinson, born as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon in 1982, has spent some time in the prison. So far, he's been arrested thrice. While it's plausible that some of the earlier prison terms were justified, it seems absolutely obvious to every sane person that the legal harassment of Tommy Robinson in recent years is politically driven.



Korn: Last evening, I had a beautiful dream that I was Robinson.

The trials against Tommy Robinson are Stalinist-style monster trials and the far left that is de facto in charge of the U.K. wants to turn Tommy Robinson to a political prisoner. Right now, a court has confirmed the previously abolished verdict about Robinson's contempt of court, after he broadcast some defendants in a trial (well, it's journalism). He's supposed to be sentenced to 2 years in jail.

How Czech press informs about the expulsion of Noah Carl

I am thankful to be surrounded by an island of a relative positive deviation whose radius is a few hundred miles.

In post-communist countries and especially in Czechia, many top media outlets still preserve the old rules of journalism. Well, RT (formerly Russia Today) also beats virtually all mainstream media in the West. Look how RT informed about mini-AOC who got death threats from some really nasty leftists defending America's dumbest lawmakers. RT is clearly fair and balanced and discusses the real point.



Noah Carl, from Support Noah Carl

Four hours ago, iDNES.cz (iTODAY in Czechia), perhaps the most mainstream Internet news server, wrote about the story of the IQ expert Noah Carl who was fired by Cambridge. Virtually all commenters are shocked by the rise of totalitarianism in the U.K. – and elsewhere – and 800+ comments were posted in a few hours. Because such articles are rarely published by the Western newspapers, let me show you what totally ordinary Czech readers read about this story and how they react. (A similar article with similar comments appeared in Echo.)

Genes influence the IQ, a scientist wrote. He was pushed out of Cambridge as a racist

The young British researcher Noah Carl was fired by the Cambridge University after hundreds of Academics have accused him of promotion of racist pseudoscience. Carl has written texts also about the relationship between the genes and intelligence and about the crimes committed by the immigrants. To defend him, another petition has been created and Carl plans to sue. Several Czechs have appeared among his critics as well as supporters.

Czech Greta invented a "reprimand" for her strikes

"Progressive" media immediately parroted her lie

When the world was still alright, e.g. during Maria Theresa's reign here in Austria-Hungary, schoolkids who skipped the classes and severely lied about the circumstances used to be spanked so that they couldn't sit on their buttocks for 12 years.

These days, they skip the classes, scream absurdities that e.g. the Earth will evaporate in 12 years, and they receive a special diploma from the principal. That's the case of the Scandinavian premium unleaded autist role model who enjoys lots of advantages. Well, dishonest kids in many other countries want to emulate this success of hers.

"I am a Czech Greta so I also want a Nobel Peace Prize for skipping the classes, or at least one-half of the prize because I am just a Czech outside the Nordic race." That's what some little opportunists think. OK, the Czech counterpart of the Scandinavian autist šithead is called Miss Anna Merzegová, a visually and especially morally repulsive ninth-grader (find her name on YouTube).

ScienceMag: realistic reforestation may devour all of our CO2 emissions

If CO2 were a climate problem, it would cost just some $300 billion to fix it

After a return from a very nice bike trip through the regional forests, our regional Hit Radio FM Plus switched from music to some talking. In recent years, I noticed that I can no longer listen to the public radio for extended periods of time – although I pay fees and although it was my main radio in the early 1990s or so – because there are just way too many totally disgusting far left activists over there. After a few thoughts of the type "I am a strong man who can survive a lot", the thought "does it really make sense to torture myself?" wins.

FM Plus is different, the jokes they add are rather pleasing, and I got used to it again. Now, the narrator said:

The experts have finally found out how to solve global warming. It sounds like a storyline from a Hollywood movie but it is true.

OK, some new rubbish, I thought. I had to go somewhere so I needed to find out quickly what the remarkable "solution" was. And I found it immediately, indeed:

The global tree restoration potential (Bastin et al., the technical paper in Science)

---

Adding 1 billion hectares of forest could help check global warming (Alen Fox, Science promo)

---

Restoring Forests Could Help Put a Brake on Global Warming, Study Finds (Sengupta, NYT)

I chose a random mainstream medium.

Unix metadata: two Russians from Pilsen's twin city credited with ClimateGate

One-half of the evidence seems to suffer from a fatal mistake

In 2009, the e-mails and other data that had been exchanged between the people close enough to Phil Jones – and Michael Mann – were released and decent people all over the world were shocked by the total lack of morality among the top alarmist climatologists. They were conspiring to hijack the editorial process, distort the data, liquidate journals and referees, invent fallacious calculations to support predetermined conclusions, and more.

A less explosive second batch was released in 2011.



Yekaterinburg: the Ural Region underwent quite an impressive economic boom in the Putin years.

One of the huge consequences of the ClimateGate that we have never previously discussed – because it looked unimportant – was that ClimateGate was the event that turned a certain man named Donald J. Trump into a climate skeptic. Before these e-mails, he was recommending the world leaders to wrestle with the climate change! The ClimateGate has largely opened his eyes. He wasn't the only one.

Oreskes: huge amount of water disappears in nuclear power plants

Naomi Oreskes is a top influential climate alarmist. She is one of the co-mothers or propagators of the ludicrous "97% consensus" meme. When I was at Harvard faculty, she found out I wasn't a climate fearmonger so she sent one of the e-mails to the whole Harvard hierarchy above me, demanding my punishment.

She was later hired as a history-focused climate alarmist by Harvard itself. Also because she belongs to certain currently privileged groups, she is frequently offering her wisdom about the climate and energy topics. You can hear her speak in every other climate alarmist propaganda film. But does she have at least the knowledge, inteligence, and sanity of an average 10-year-old kid? You decide.

Willie Soon sent me a link to an incredible tweet she posted 10 hours ago. Does she recommend nuclear energy?

This is so important: a reminder that nuclear power is not renewable, because of the huge water demands. @mzjacobson @MichaelEMann @ErikMConway @ClimateOpp @DoMoisan And as the climate heats up, those demands will increase. https://t.co/t6d0mKxKEO

— Naomi Oreskes (@NaomiOreskes) 3. července 2019

Cool! Nuclear energy is bad and non-renewable because – and now listen to me, it's very important – it consumes huge amounts of water, we learn. On top of that, the amount of water that nuclear power plants make disappear will increase as a function of global warming! ;-)

Czech week in Polish Aldi

This is a totally unimportant blog post, especially for most readers who live very far from Central Europe. But Poles should read – what made your humble correspodent, a Czech and Visegrád patriot, smile.

Especially in the Lidl supermarket chain, we often have these weeks with a theme: XXL week and national weeks: American week, Mexican week, Asian week, Greek, Spanish, German, Alpine, French, and a few more. These include exotic nations that are unavoidably interesting – because they are exotic. And then Western nations. But we don't get Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, ... weeks.



Happy Independence Day to 1/2 of TRF readers.

Lidl and Aldi are two of the German discount chains. In Czechia, we have Lidl only. Poles have both Lidl and Aldi – although the shops are completely missing in some 4 top-level regions, especially in Eastern Poland.

OK, I obviously think that Czech food products are good, interesting, competitive, and innovative enough to deserve a national week in other countries. Between July 8th and July 13th, Aldi.pl has the Czech week:

Czech week flier online, PDF

Let's look at the flier.

Christopher Booker: 1937-2019

Christopher Booker died of cancer today at 2 am, aged 81. He was a British journalist who primarily wrote to the Sunday Telegraph – from 1961 (!) up to March 2019 when he retired for health reasons.

His last column was partly composed of memories, partly of pessimism about Britain and the West.



His main topic was the climate panic – he was an excellent, fair climate skeptic. But he also enjoyed writing about religion, butterflies, and architecture.

Innocence of beauty in Feynman lectures on physics

Massimo Pigliucci chose Richard Feynman as a champion and user of beauty in physics – and therefore a natural target of a hit piece. While Pigliucci's knowledge of Feynman or physics is basically non-existent, he made a good choice: Feynman did indeed like to refer to beautiful laws, derivations, and pictures in physics.

In this extensive, 56-kilobyte-long blog post (almost exactly 10 times Pigliucci's rant), I decided to review references to the words beautiful, beauty, and pretty in the Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963, online). If you click at the hyperlink, you may get 71 hits. But when you try to see all of them, the number gets reduced to 65. Moreover, a dozen or two dozens of hits use the word "pretty" as a synonym of "rather" ("pretty soon") and whenever it's so, I automatically omitted the references.

Visegrád needs more allies to block Timmermans

Timmermans represents almost everything that is sick about the EU today and his reign may mean a collapse of Europe

In the "European Game of Thrones", as Babiš's wife Monika calls the exercises, the European Union is trying to find the successor of Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission – which is supposed to be a de facto government of the EU. And the progressives want to turn it into a real government – and the EU into a superstate – really soon, indeed. Juncker, a well-known drunkard, is nominally moderately conservative (Luxembourg's Christian social party) – but he is one of the "conservatives" who cry on Karl Marx's grave, in this case literally. Karl, what did you do to us? How can we live without you?



An IQ test: by looking at the color of the men's suits, which of the four Visegrád's prime ministers seems like a new fifth column of an empire with a blue flag?

OK, the EU isn't a democracy so the elections are a farce. Will the successor of Juncker's be a Christian democrat or a social democrat? This question isn't being decided by any elections and negotiations that would depend on the outcomes of elections. Instead, as the EU folks rather openly admit, it is determined by an unwritten rule that the Christian democrats and social democrats are alternating. No one else is ever allowed, if you asked. So it should be time for the social democrats now.

A truly lame hit piece on Feynman, beauty in physics

Our scholarly institutions are thoroughly yet increasingly contaminated by neo-Marxist ideologues, pseudointellectual posers, and unproductive freeloaders. The process of contamination naturally started in the softest departments but it has since spread to most others.

Mr Massimo Pigliucci likes to be called "a professor of philosophy" and on Friday, he wrote a hit piece against Richard Feynman and his comments about the beauty in physics to Aeon.co:

Richard Feynman was wrong about beauty and truth in science

The first eye-catching characteristic of this text is that it is extremely short – less than six kilobytes. Richard Feynman was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century and he has also dedicated whole chapters in books and whole lectures to clarifications of thoughts about the beauty in physics. Does someone really believe that a person who hasn't made 0.001% of the impact of Richard Feynman's may "debunk" Feynman's conclusions about the beauty in physics in six kilobytes?

The second shocking aspect is that Pigliucci only talks about one or two sentences of Feynman's – and he knows nothing whatsoever about the context in which Feynman wrote them or said them. Aside from the "prize, space shuttle, and bongos", Mr Pigliucci really knows nothing about Feynman himself.

It's truly bizarre because – transcending his star status in the world of science – Feynman has become a household name. You know, Hawking's popular book that was published later became a greater bestseller. But the 1985 book "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" sold 500,000 copies. Thousands of people have become full-blown fans of Feynman's – and the cult could have grown after his death. These thousands of people are familiar with his books, interviews, and other things.

Why is it that a "philosopher" who dares to write a text about Feynman – and primarily about Feynman – doesn't know even a fraction of the things that each of the thousands of fans of Feynman's knows? Why did Aeon.co publish a text by this self-evidently incompetent author?