Mochizuki's proof gets officially published

The \(abc\) conjecture is a hypothesis in number theory (i.e. a Fermat-last-theorem-style claim in mathematics) that sort of imposes a bound on \(abc\) assuming \(a+b=c\), i.e. it finds a fuzzy relationship between the sum and product of three integers. See TRF texts.



If someone is Japanese, it doesn't mean that he is not world class in seemingly "Western" activities such as in directing Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony. In the video, the most fashionable part of the composition, Covidio Pandemio, erupts at 22:16. ;-)

Since 2012, Šiniči Močizuki has claimed a proof of this old problem in mathematics using his whole new technological toolkit called the Inter-Universal Teichüller theory (a smoother synonym: arithmetic deformation theory). The alleged proof is long and difficult. In 2018, criticisms by those who still hadn't understood the proof escalated.

I am not sure whether this multi-faceted proof is correct although I have understood some parts of the arguably clever approach. My feeling is that the theory is a refined version of "how can you permute primes in such a way that the additive relationships between their products change just a little, in some measure of the change". But I am sure that the widely hyped criticism of Mochizuki's proof – criticism revolving around the hatred towards "Corollary 3.12" – is incorrect. In effect, that criticism says, using physics jargon,

You cannot ever use gauge-variant (non-gauge-invariant) quantities at intermediate steps of your derivations.

Well, that's rubbish, Ladies and Gentlemen. Both in physics and mathematics, gauge invariance is useful exactly because it can be used and should be used and it makes lots of derivations prettier and more effective. In physics, gauge invariance is needed for a manifestly Lorentz-invariant description of spin-1 particles. At the end, we can only measure gauge-invariant observables but it's important that this condition is imposed at the very end, "inside the apparatus". All the intermediate calculations may use gauge-variant quantities and it's a very powerful thing to do.

Financial illiteracy of pro-shutdown folks is staggering

There is a fraction of the people who completely understand that the "cure" is worse than the "disease" (COVID-19). Candace Owens, Peter Hitchens, Lord Sumption, RJ Smith, perhaps Laura Ingraham, Brit Hume, I could consider for a while.

Here's an updated graph of initial unemployment claims in the US. In the last week alone, nearly 6 million Americans filed for unemployment. This breaks the previous record of ~3 million... which was set the previous week. We're dealing with truly staggering numbers here. pic.twitter.com/8IOwHMxYAf

— Dorsa Amir (@DorsaAmir) April 2, 2020

The lockdowns and the excessive social distancing culture is clearly killing the whole civilization. The animation above is a sort of black humor (the graph gets vertically compressed almost 20-fold in the last steps) but, as Sheldon Cooper has said, it's funny because it is true. It shows how, for half a century, during all the "famous recessions" and wars and big hurricanes, there were those 345,000 new unemployed Americans a week in average. But the last two weekly numbers were 3+ million and 6.7 million, respectively.

F-theory with non-small Hodge numbers predicts a rich dark sector or a new stabilization mechanism

Mirjam Cvětičová plus Halverson, Lin, and Long (Slovenia+UPenn, CERN, Northeastern, Cornell) managed to post the first hep-th paper during the earliest possible second, like so many papers did before. I would be interested in their algorithm to adjust the timing of pressing "enter" at the sub-second precision. Surely this technology has made progress in recent 20 years. Do they connect the "enter" key to atomic clocks? ;-)

Constraints on Standard Model Constructions in F-theory

They prove that at least one of the following statements must be true in F-theory models:

1. The Hodge number \(h^{1,1}\) is really small (not moderate or large)
2. A new stabilization mechanism outside the supergravity approximation, i.e. outside LVS-or-KKLT-like calculations, is employed
3. A new dark sector of particles attached to 7-branes is predicted

They have some rather specific F-theory models in mind, many of which have \(h^{1,1}=35\) (from a polytope) which is counted as a "moderately" large value.

OK, they consider some compactification using the tools of SUGRA, need to cancel a tadpole, get some high enough contribution related to seven-branes, and the Standard Model and/or new dark sectors are shown to exist simultaneously at prime toric and/or square-free divisors. They discuss some examples of geometry and also try to derive the statistical distribution of the Standard Model couplings.

Lockdowns are man-made, not how Nature heals Herself

Srikanth Hegde told us that the coronavirus hysteria isn't avoiding India. On the contrary. India – whose population is about 1.35 billion – has 1998 cases and 58 deaths now. So the virus is still basically non-existent there. The number of deaths per million people is 0.04. Compare it with Lombardy at 700. The ratio is about 18,000!

The practical non-existence of the virus in the country hasn't prevented hundreds of millions of Indians from getting hysterical – in a similar enough way that we know in the West. Almost two weeks ago, PM Modi told the whole nation to clap their hands. When 1.35 billion Indians manage to clap their hands, the virus would disappear. You may see that in cutting-edge technologies, India got ahead of China. Well, at least if we talk about technologies that were widespread when the humans were monkey-like savages.

Lombardy has probably already undergone 50% of the worst case scenario

O(50%) of the inhabitants could be immune by now

If you check the basic global Covid-19 data, you will see that Italy is safely the #1 country in the number of fatalities: 13,155 after the April 1st 6 pm update.



Italy has 60.5 million people and its first region that became a virally troubled zone, Lombardy – approximately the crimson area in the center of Northern Italy above – has 10 million people. It became so troubled because there are many Chinese textile workers over there. It got combined with the polluted air, multi-generation houses, and other aspects of their back luck.

A slowdown of a rise of cases saves almost no lives

"Models" and people claiming otherwise are deceiving the public

There are lots of data, rapid societal changes, conceptual principles to discuss during these Covid-19 times. Finally someone has made the same rudimentary yet absolutely essential point that I have been emphasizing for more than a month (but never dedicated a special blog post to):

If your package of restrictive policies only manages to "slow down" the growth, it saves virtually no lives.

This point was made by Maria Chikina, assistant professor of molecular biology at Univ. of Pittsburgh, and Wesley Pegden, associate professor of mathematical sciences at Carnegie Mellon Univ.:

A call to honesty in pandemic modeling

Thanks to Čebyšev for the URL. I think that you must have seen these claims many times because they're everywhere. "Our measures have already saved 100,000 lives" or something like that. The only problem is that all these claims are lies.

Why exactly Sweden is the last sane unlocked European country?

Many details about the impact of Covid-19 on various countries were hard to predict and probably unpredictable. Why did Northern Italy become the first European viral hot spot? Is it because of the polluted air, lots of seniors, multi-generation houses, or something else?

But the differences in the policies are even stranger.



While the U.K. has played with the "let it be" and "herd immunity" approach for some time, they have dramatically changed their attitude towards the draconian, suicidal measures that are common in much of Europe (but also in some U.S. states and even in Moscow where the infection is basically non-existent).

Although the disease is almost nonexistent in Hungary (500 cases, 16 deaths), Viktor Orbán was just promoted to a dictator. It is simply sick, I say as his fan.

Jair Bolsonaro is doing the right things in Brazil, pointing out the fact that Covid-19 is just a little flu and behaving correspondingly, despite the fact that some lower-tier politicians would like to emulate the Western suicidal policies. In Europe, of all places it is Sweden that avoids the lockdowns (and perhaps Belarus).

Does an ER wormhole have a doubled entropy compared to a black hole?

There are many interesting hep-th papers today, including one on machine learning in the stringy standard models. But I picked

ER = EPR revisited: On the Entropy of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge

Herman Verlinde (Princeton U., also one of the three co-fathers of matrix string theory who slept with the mother of matrix string theory when she was in the 3rd month of pregnancy) discusses a seemingly simple question: when you connect two black holes into the Einstein-Rosen bridge by the entanglement glue, what is the entropy of the resulting wormhole? Is it just \(S=A/4G\), the entropy of each black hole in the pair, or \(S=A/2G\), twice as much i.e. the sum of the two entropies?

Among whites, Czechs are the face mask pioneers

If you look at it, I have considered the face masks to be a key tool in the suppression of the propagation of similar flu-like viruses at least since January, a tool that has clearly been successful not only in China but also in Japan, Taiwan, and some other Asian countries. On March 11th, I explicitly wrote the minister of health to make them mandatory and it basically occurred since March 18th.



The girl, actress Aneta Kernová (*1996), is a typical communicative pretty Czech girl that foreigners may date etc. Through some fast DNA-GPU calculations, I can see that if I were pretty and a girl, I would look almost just like her.

The Czech data really suggests that the peak of the daily new cases occurred about a week after that new duty, as expected. The change of the trend due to the mask is visible, unlike the hypothetical change of the trend due to the cancellation of events and businesses.

Lockdowns may increase viral doses, mortality

Well:

I have increasingly believed in the following thesis: the heavily affected patients and regions (Wuhan, Lombardy, 53-year-old fat Prague Uber driver) were infected by a much larger amount of viruses to start with, and that's why their disease is more serious.

— Luboš Motl (@lumidek) March 28, 2020

You know, the troubled spots, e.g. in Wuhan and Lombardy, seemed to have a higher fatality. But it's the first Czech "domestic" infection, the 53-year-old obese Uber driver (who is receiving Remdesivir with some first good news after 3 days or so), that has hugely provoked my pattern recognition instincts. Why a cab driver (who also rents a house, perhaps via Airbnb)? He's surely confined much of the time and he could have met very many customers. They may be spluttering at him for a long time and he can't defend himself.

Tragic suicides: viral hysteria as reverse natural selection

Millions of people will be miserable due to the economic hardship started by the irrational overreaction to the flu-like virus. Many will commit suicide. The victims of the societal responses may be basically divided to

* victims who were actually brainwashed by the hysteria
* people who like freedom and just can't withstand the shutdown and the choking of the normal life
* people who don't find their economic ruined life worth living

The first group includes e.g. an Italian nurse who contracted this glorified cold and felt so guilty – clearly due to the omnipresent hysteria – that she committed suicide in order to protect others. Did she disinfect herself so that her corpse doesn't infect someone when transferred? How did she do it?

To a lesser extent, another nurse (in the U.K.) who committed suicide may be counted in the first group although some "stress" of her work may be credited, too.

The third group isn't too different from "economic suicides" whose underlying reasons are diverse. This case only differs by a particular economic recession that was "intentionally" created by the media and the gullible people who were infected by the hysteria in the media.

Can China take over the West peacefully?

In the U.S., the initial unemployment claims were filed by 3.283 million people last week, obviously an all-time record. That's slightly up from 250-450 thousand that you get during a mundane hurricane such as Katrina. The shutdown is equivalent to a Katrina that takes place in every state and in every week. I expect the reading published next week to be even worse.

In spite of that troublesome figure, the Dow Jones continues its rises of this week and goes up by 4.5% today. It's a bit fishy. Maybe some whale is buying? Can a country like China, the strongest non-Western power, exploit the trouble that has moved from China to the West and peacefully overtake the Western companies and countries?

Many people have suggested that China has been downplaying the death figures. Because some 21 cell phone numbers disappeared, surely there is a mass grave with 21 million Chinese people, someone said. ;-) I am afraid of the opposite thing – that China was inflating the figures and it never really had any significant epidemics. It just invented the story and sent the virus to the West.

Just to be sure, I still believe it would be extremely unwise for China to invade Western countries militarily now. The reaction would be about the same as it would be months ago – unless the bosses of the Pentagon have already classified the pressing of the nuclear buttons as unhygienic, of course. ;-)

Remdesivir, hysteria, and the value of basic science

RT and LM: I wrote an op-ed for RT.com (formerly Russia Today), Decadent like the late Roman Empire, the West is committing suicide through its irrational response to Covid-19. A kind native speaker who is a master of his language helped me with that tongue and compression of my talkative prose.

After several days of delays, the most closely watched Czech Covid-19 patient, a 60-year-old obese Uber driver from Prague that is considered the first "domestic infection", received his first Remdesivir dose on Tuesday. The plan is 10 infusions, one per day, each of them lasts 30 minutes. Sadly, after the first day, the hospital reports "no improvement". Update: 48 hours after the first infusion, mild improvement. I hope that they agree that as an obese man with more viruses than others combined, he naturally needs a bigger dose.

Let me translate a fun Czech article about the unexpected hotness of the basic science.



Photo from Reuters

Only "weirdos" were interested in coronaviruses. Antonín Holý is why Remdesivir landed in Czechia

Some 20 hours ago, the General Faculty Hospital in Prague began to serve Remdesivir to a patient with severe symptoms of Covid-19. It is a drug developed by a team led by Dr Tomáš Cihlář [Thomas Brickmaker] which was kindly given to Czechia by the U.S. company Gilead Sciences. Biochemist Mr Jan Konvalinka from the Czech Academy of Sciences describes why it was exactly Prague that was chosen as a recipient of the drug, despite the enormous demand for the compound.

It's totally obvious that these lockdowns are nothing else than an unprecedented waste of money

Britain has switched to the full-blown house arrest, too. It basically seems that Peter Hitchens is the only British pundit who heroically keeps on fighting against the new emerging Coronafascism. The absolute collapse of the British – and other – elites is something I wouldn't be willing to consider, let alone able to predict, even a month ago. People are much more stinky trash than what I found imaginable.

As Hitchens said, England started in 1066 and ended in 2020, with a giggle, not a bang. That's how glorious countries end.

The U.K. and most other countries seem to be hopelessly filled with irrational, brain-dead herds of cattle that are encouraging each other to behave ever more destructively and suicidally. The super-devastating recipes have no reason to be believed to work and the empirical evidence strongly indicates that they don't work. Lots of other approaches – like getting some of the damn promising drugs – would work far more efficiently but no one seems to care about those. Delay this or that promising drug by another 2 months, why not? We may turn off the world economy for as many months or centuries as you want, it's fun! Holy smokes.

The lockdowns are pure losses with no benefits. Hundreds of millions of people in the West don't seem to care – they are excited to endorse this absolute insanity that keeps on growing.

Who was Feynman's Mr Young and what was his rat paper?

The irrational, hysterical behavior of many people – perhaps most people on Earth – reminds me of the Middle Ages, witch hunts, and various instinctive rituals performed by mobs many centuries ago (see Monty Python's "She's a Witch"). Nothing much has changed and many post-modern mobs are dumber than the medieval ones. Mindless ritual sacrifices are just combined with some kind of "socialist thinking" which is probably meant to be the "modern" aspect of their behavior.

When I watched this irrational behavior, the mindless promotion of "what must be done to fix the epidemics", I couldn't forget about the wonderful 1974 Richard Feynman's Caltech commencement speech that is included as

Cargo Cult Science,

a chapter in his popular book Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman. In that speech, Feynman mentioned some medieval superstitions and charlatans. How could people believe those gurus when it was rather clear that nothing really worked? However, Feynman continued, it's a silly question because people are still behaving equally stupidly in the modern era.

Great Viral Depression

The number of things that are happening in the context of the Covid-19 hysteria is too high. Billions of gullible people were programmed to be impressed by every death caused by this flu-like disease if not every infection – and to eagerly expect the news about a new death. So they're even more impressed when these numbers doubled in a week, and they did. There will be more doublings. The propagation looks almost identical to flu: in two or three months, it may also spread from "almost nobody" to 2-3 percent of the Czech population.

However, before the Covid-19 deaths are substantially above 600,000 (let's assume that in 2020), we can't even say that this is a year with the higher-than-average mortality due to flu-like diseases. This is obviously one of the basic points underlying any rational perspective on this new virus type. Even now, it's possible that the number of flu-like deaths (which is meant to include pneumonia) will be globally lower in 2020 than it was in 2019 or 2018.

Meanwhile, the civilization is being totally deconstructed. An economic growth in 2020 seems impossible and the word recession seems like an almost guaranteed euphemism, too. Due to the hysteria ignited by the filthy scum that we should have neutralized but we were too obviously too weak, we're surely heading towards a Great Depression. I will call it the Great Viral Depression, GVD. Whether it will be deeper than the Great Depression of the early 1930s is yet to be seen.

California under curfew: a truly crappy apocalyptic movie

A few hours ago, a wannabe Hitler, the governor of California, has issued the self-evidently unconstitutional "order" (he emphasized it wasn't just a "request") to 40 million Californians – inhabitants of the world's most admired state of a comparable size, at least in modern technologies – to stay home for a month. A positive detail is that many of the locals have "online jobs", anyway. But that's not the case of many other states that will probably emulate this insanity soon. Increasingly unhinged psychopaths are clearly increasingly taking over everything that is left from the civilization.

This guy has also ordered 56% of Californians (such a nice precision!) to contract the virus in 8 weeks. Clearly, the actual number isn't known even plus minus two orders of magnitude (and greatly depends on details of the definition of "infected", anyway). To claim he can predict two significant figures just proves that he is a complete hack.



Affluenflammation is about the pathological obsession with looking for medical problems. The original song was Californication. This remake is mainly against anti-vaxxers but you know what: When the vaccine is available, most of the hysterical people won't want the vaccination, anyway.

In 2-3 days, it may be upgraded to "martial law", he explicitly said. So much for the claims that Americans are so exceptional that they would never allow tyranny to arise. There's nothing qualitatively special about Americans and Californians are probably more extremely far left in average than the Europeans. A bunch of people who are terrified of a flu-like virus seem more than enough to establish tyranny in California.

This wannabe Hitler will almost certainly try to keep the power indefinitely and cancel all future elections. There exists an understandable reason: his life will become indefensible at the moment when he loses his very expensive guards because the elimination of individuals such as himself was pretty much the original purpose of the Second Amendment according to a very large number of Americans.

Italy's lockdown doesn't seem to work

Apparently struggling countries should learn from the apparently successful ones
And the successful ones should cordially share know-how and drugs

Tonight around 6pm, Italy will surpass all of mainland China as the country with the highest number of Covid-19 fatalities – above China's 3250 or so. We probably couldn't have predicted that exactly Italy would become such a troubled place when the infection was getting started. Despite the Italian leadership, we were still more shocked by the pictures from China, right? It's because most of the shock was caused by their impersonal scenery, not by the underlying severity of the disease.

Maybe the Pakistani patient zero spreading the infected Chinese food was the reason. Maybe something else. But the Italian number of cases looks huge, has almost certainly surpassed the annual flu fatalities of Italy, I think, and the apparent fatality rate is even higher, clearly due to the insufficiency of testing that overlooks lots of mild cases, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them.

Can freedom, prosperity return at all?

The Covid-19 hysteria has shown us that many people – including many of those who pretended something else – actually hate the civilization as it existed up to 2019, with some freedom, technological achievements, culture, sports, human contacts, religious events, and other things. In fact, many people – including TRF commenters – literally love the idea to spend their lives in a cage. And they demand everyone else to spend the life equally. They probably think it's fair for everyone's life to suck because theirs does.



Wolfgang Wodarg, a German lung doctor, 11-minute English voiceover. He compares the Covid-19 virus with a hundred of others and concludes that the emperor of the Covid-19 hysteria has no clothes because some deaths that would happen on previous years are just attributed to Covid-19 which just happens to be intensely tested in 2020. The effect of Covid-19 on deaths can actually be claimed only after the number of deaths (significantly) exceeds the "percentage of coronaviruses in flu-dying patients" times the "number of flu-like deaths". (Well, I am pretty sure that this inequality was surpassed in Italy where only 240 people died of flu between October 2019 and January 2020 but otherwise I do think that his points are true and important. In particular, a rational discussion whether the virus is qualitatively new or new at all is completely non-existent.)

These people have been extraordinarily strengthened by the hysteria accompanying a somewhat new respiratory infectious disease. They have been strengthened because the 24/7 hysterical propaganda by the fake news media has genuinely scared tens or hundreds of millions of other people (although I believe it's still a minority that is really afraid of the virus). While China has ordered a "complete regional shutdown" for a month which allowed the country to return back to business soon afterwards, the rest of the world – and I mean the traditional "West" – seems to be doing something else.

Countries are ordering "almost complete" shutdowns whose efficiency is clearly lower (people began to wear masks in Czechia today – it looks silly but of course I think it's a more important detail than the cancellations of events themselves). But they plan these policies to last much longer. How much longer? For example, Australia's government just declared its desire to keep some bio-emergency regime at least for 6 months. Half a fudging year. Wow. And what happens next?

Candace on pro-curfew conservatives

When I praised some very good black scientists or right-wing pundits in the past, I often did add some "minor" affirmative action to my judgement. "They're great" often slightly meant "they're great given their ancestry". However, Candace Owens really is great, without any affirmative action. She is a brilliant suntanned, intellectually white girl for me and I am sure she understands why this is a great compliment. And I am happy she has "liked" one tweet of mine LOL. Nobody else "liked" that tweet, by the way.

Three hours ago, she broadcast this 18-minute-long monologue (press the play-triangle):

@RealCandaceO took every single word right out of my mouth. Amen sis.

I add only one thing...TAX CUTS FOR ALL.https://t.co/V9QHmQubU8

— Jessi Melton (@votejessi2020) March 17, 2020

And it's cool, indeed. First, she said that the coronavirus has had political and ideological implications and caused some "regrouping" of the political groups. On one hand, many of those conservatives have become socialists who say "of course we need to stop the individual freedom now". On the other hand, the pro-mass-migration leftists had to become fanatical advocates of the closed borders which is ironic as well.

The enthusiasm with which the West commits suicide is staggering

About 94,000 people are currently infected with Covid-19, a bit over 7,000 have died plus 78,000 have been cured. The number of deaths per month approximately doubled from the previous one-month period as the disease moved from China to Europe or elsewhere. Asia seems to have tamed the disease completely. China has largely reopened for business despite a dozen of new deaths per day.

Those 7,000 deaths should be compared with approximately 650,000 deaths due to flu in the world in the recent year. Covid-19 clearly continues to be a negligible killer relatively to flu – and the latter hasn't ever led to any significant hysteria. Covid-19 may be seen to have the potential to surpass flu as a killer (and probably has done so in Italy) but nobody knows whether this potential may be realized in the whole world. Even if Covid-19 becomes the most important killer among respiratory diseases, it will be just a quantitative change in the industry of flu-like diseases.

We're seeing amazing restrictions on the human movement, contacts, events, economy. I am writing it from the first day (out of 8) of the Italy-style softcore martial law in Czechia. Similar restrictions are imposed almost everywhere. Every hour, a country joins the lockdown; Canada did it minutes ago. Half a billion schoolkids are skipping classes now – Greta Thunberg is no longer too special. Bars and restaurants are closed in about one-half of the world. Carmakers are stopping the production in all of Europe. You can read comments on social networks written by people who were just laid off every second. Also, I think that the real estate prices are likely to drop once the closed hotels and other things are being sold.

Covid-19 worst case scenario shortens the average existing life by 3 months

And only once per the history of mankind

The uninterrupted apocalyptic propaganda in the fake news media makes the more gullible one-half of mankind believe that we're in midst of a plague that will kill most of us and shorten our lives by a decade in average, or something like that. In the Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens nicely wrote about his handles-germophobia etc. and the infection of Britain by a bad case of madness.

OK, what is the actual shortening of the life implied by the hypothetical worst case scenario? Note that about 150,000 people have been infected with Covid-19 so far, less than 100,000 are detected as active cases now. The undetected cases may be at most another 100,000 in the world, I think. But we're going to imagine a completely different situation in which 7.7 billion people – which is 50,000 times the current accumulated number – get the infection. Some fraction will die, it's mostly the older people who didn't have much life ahead of them.

All the people who die see their life shortened; this is one of the negative side effects of death that has actually existed for a long time ;-), despite the implicit claims in the fake news media to the contrary.

"Flattening the curve" is a striking example of innumeracy of the fake news media

Many of us were amazed by the insight of one female journalist – and indirectly all the people in her news outlet – that if a candidate divided $500 million for a campaign among the U.S. citizens, each citizen would get over $1 million! ;-)



This example of the leftists' mathematical skills is extreme but in less extreme forms, we encounter their shocking stupidity many times a day. If you sometimes post something about Covid-19 on social networks, you had to experience a particular reaction or insight yesterday. A hysterical user arrives and says something like

We had to abolish the NHL and NBA in order to "flatten the curve". See the picture above. Without the ban of these sports events, our hospitals get overloaded, but with it, they will always be fine. As you can see on the picture, the 99% of the capacity will be utilized during the maximum.

The stupidity needed to parrot this stuff – and indeed, all these people are parroting it basically verbatim – is just absolutely flabbergasting.

Italy: for people below 50, Covid is on par with flu

And that's why the elderly should be segregated, protected, and the younger ones should own most of the free world

An hour ago, Italy reported disturbing high new numbers: 2547 new infections and 250 new deaths (huge but well below 2,000 daily deaths in Italy). Both numbers are a daily record. The daily deaths are almost twice as high as China's peak in mid February, despite China's having a population larger by a factor of 23 (1.4 vs 0.06 billion people).



A terribly cynical Ivan Mládek's song about a grandma in Blatná who administratively transferred some real estate in Blatná, Czechia to her descendants but – to make the descendants really pissed off – she seems totally immortal. Cruel but still funny, indeed.

It's troubling and this evolution of Italy is something that I didn't predict weeks ago – and arguably couldn't predict (interestingly, both Italy and Iran were also heavily affected by the Spanish flu in 1918). But look at this graph which is about 2 days old:



The middle column percentages are computed from the total number of fatalities, the CFR is the case fatality rate, the probability of death for an infected person.

Among 803 Italian deaths counted (it's 1266 now), only two fatalities are younger than 50 years. They belong to the 30-39 and 40-49 brackets (1+1). There are no Italian deaths below 30 years at all. So for the infected people below 50 years of age, the average probability of death is around 0.05%, lower or equal to flu! And the rate is probably much lower even than 0.05% because most of the infected people with mild symptoms (and those are especially the young ones) are escaping the Italian tests. Note that flu is more capable of killing young people (it's more age-blind) than Covid-19.

Exponential functions and hysterical epiphanies

The ongoing insane hysteria about the new kind of cough has revealed a new bunch of hysterical ideologues who are dreaming about a nanny state and who previously pretended to be deep thinkers who understood why socialism or the constant martial law were wrong.

It seems that lots of people who should be smart and/or who think that they are smart have had this epiphany:

Wow, this graph must be the famous exponential function. It's really the exponential function and it will therefore diverge to infinity, and very quickly so. Why didn't they tell me that there are exponential functions in Nature? If I had been told earlier, I would have been on the side of the likes of CNN for years!

So deep. But not so much. ;-)

1348 vs 2020: how much mankind and leaders have degenerated

10 Good times create weak men. Weak men create bad times. Bad times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Go to 10.

This meme looks so optimistic now. We're undoubtedly in the epoch of the weak men, the bad times are starting, and the other stages of the cycle look infinitely far. No one seems strong enough to resist the numerical advantage of the weak men without character and values who have contaminated every corner on Earth.

One gets extremely depressed about the present if he compares the reactions to infectious diseases in 1348 and in 2020. I am talking about the Black Death. This 14th century pandemics was probably caused by Yersinia pestis, a bacterium. We can't be quite sure. But we know that it did plague Eurasia and killed between 75 million and 200 million people, i.e. about 30 and 70 percent of the population. Covid-19 has so far killed less than 5,000 people, i.e. less than 0.0001% of the population. Although the current percentage is smaller than the 14th century percentage by a factor of 500,000 or so, contemporary mankind has already reacted more hysterically than our 14th century ancestors.

The 14th century disease peaked in Europe between 1347 and 1351. It just happens to coincide with the Golden Era of Bohemia.

Almost all policies to fight the contagion are ludicrously useless rituals

Conferences, tours, concerts, elementary and high school classes, university semesters, and lots of other things have never been canceled in such huge numbers as what we experience now, during the ongoing coronavirus hysteria. It's a disease that potentially kills O(1%) of the infected people, largely the very old and immunocompromised ones. So there is some potential for it to be important even though the number of fatalities around 4,000 is still tiny relatively to all major diseases we know.

It's the first similarly "promising" infectious disease that takes place during the period when most people are attached to their phones and social networks for hours a day – and those surely help to fan the hysteria. And mankind has been brainwashed for many years by the terrible yet self-evidently non-existent dangers of climate change and related things. So hundreds of millions of people were pre-programmed to become "really hysterical" when a threat appears that actually has at least some beef. And it has happened.

Lots of people have joined the movement to fight against the virus using all thinkable and unthinkable means. They spray deodorants and sometimes pepper sprays on the Asian Americans in the subway (that's crazy also because almost no Asian Americans are infected), dress plastic bags for trash on all their limbs, fight over toilet papers in the supermarkets (these jammed supermarkets are a great place to catch the virus, by the way, karma may work), and they "fight" the disease in lots of other "interesting" ways.

Well, almost none of these hysterical reactions is any helpful to reduce the rate of contagion at the level of the individuals let alone the aggregate numbers. This disease was tamed to near non-existence in China – which has reduced the daily new cases from the peak around 1500 to dozens – but it was at a painful cost.

Czech microbiologist on the Covid panic

Dr Václava Adámková is a bacteriologist who recently expressed her shock from the coronavirus hysteria. The Free Universum Radio has recorded a new 30-minute-long interview with her (recorded on Thursday, posted yesterday). She's the senior doctor of microbiology at a big General Faculty Hospital in Prague and the chairwoman of the Antibiotics Center.

Here is... Ms Martina Kociánová, the host and Ladislav Henek behind the scenes. In our "Forward to the Past" program, we will talk about the coronavirus which is by far the most widespread topic of discussions in recent days or weeks. We went through the panic of swine flu, SARS, MERS, so we should be used to them. But it seems that the world has never cancelled this many international congresses, tours, conferences, trade fairs... Politicians talk about the isolation of countries and closure of the borders. Do we stand at the beginning of a global pandemics? Or are we witnessing the powers of the concentrated collaboration between politicians and the media? My guest is... Adámková. I am happy to have you here. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Unregulated Soros-aligned media pose an existential threat

Plans to shut down NYT, MSNBC, CNN, and similar garbage must be prepared

The U.S. media have worked very freely since the beginning and for decades, it has worked rather well and U.S. TV stations became the gold standard of the international media landscape. This freedom has contributed to many Americans' pride about their nation and its seemingly special relationship to freedom. However, especially in recent years, and from Trump's election as the U.S. president in particular, almost all these media have turned into nearly identical toxic cesspools that pump lies, garbage, and extremist propaganda to their viewers, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) may be used as an explanation of these activities.



With their fair and balanced approach, the likes of Sean Hannity and Trish Regan have become exceptions in the media landscape that has been turned into a near-monopoly of lying hysterical imbeciles

These fake journalists and hacks have been emitting an uninterrupted sequence of overlapping, idiotic conspiracy theories about the Russia collusion, global warming, Ukraine scandals... and especially the coronavirus hysteria in recent weeks. What's bad is that tens of millions of Americans (and similar numbers of other nationals, of course) have turned into brain zombies who will just mindlessly buy anything that these media tell them to buy. $500 million over 327 million equals $1 million? Why not. It must be true because it's been said on those TV stations!

Children in Lombardy should undergo "let's all taste Covid-19"

Societies should reward, exploit the Covid-19 survivors' superpowers

One minor aspect of the intentional and deceitful coronavirus hysteria fabricated by the dishonest media is the claim that there are over 100,000 infected people. In reality, those 107,000 that have been Covid-positive include 42,500 active cases (that number began to slowly grow again but it has already touched a local low around 38,000 days ago) and 64,500 or so closed cases, including 3,600 fatalities.

Those 61,000 people (mostly in China so far) who have been cured and discharged are extremely interesting – yet almost completely overlooked. They have antibodies that will probably protect them from the disease for years if not decades (before the antibodies fade away). So they are immune against something that hundreds of millions if not billions of people are hysterically afraid of. Let us not hide the shocking yet simple truth:

They are supermen and superheroes! ;-)

Humans are a part of the ecosystem

Donald Trump can't defend your right for immortality

I will start with two stories. Both of them are examples of the denial of the fact that humans are a part of Nature, the ecosystem, and the environment. Let me remind you that humans are actually mammals and they have evolved from common ancestors with apes and monkeys – those ancestors looked almost like the modern apes or monkeys themselves.



Jehovah's publications are the best illustrations of people's belonging to the ecosystem (of the paradise, in this case). Please ignore the captions LOL.

As recently as two decades ago, the appreciation of this statement – humans are animals and metaphysically the same as other animals – was one of the sources of pride of the folks who called themselves leftists. It was them who "inherited" Darwin's theory while the stupid conservatives are those who denied such things (mostly for religious reasons, at least in the U.S.). Times have changed a lot.

It's the current postmodern, radical left that is the main denier of the notion that the laws of Nature – and the laws governing ecology and life on Earth – apply to humans, too. They deny the well-definedness of the biological sex. They deny the differences between groups – defined by their sex or race or other things. The two stories I promised you are

* a shocking criminal complaint about a female lawmaker who wrote about invasive species and migration a year ago
* the arrogant assumption of some people that they are entitled to be immortal...

Einstein in Bohemia: a book

I've been meeting Michael Gordin, a historian of science (Prof at Princeton now) and a former fellow Fellow in the Society of Fellows (I still don't know a good Czech word for a "fellow" in this scholarly context so I jokingly translate it as a "comrade"), thrice a week for three years (we were in the same group of 8). He is a brilliant historian of science with numerous encyclopedias and their unpublished extensions concentrated inside his skull; and a great entertainer – at least for those of us who prefer a deeply intellectual kind of entertainment.

Previously, he wrote about six books, about Mendeleev (I know him as a focused expert on that guy), science before and after English, and other topics.

Weeks ago, he released "Einstein in Bohemia" about the famous physicist's 16-month-long stay in the Czech capital, the third most important city in Austria-Hungary, in 1911-12. Some very positive reviews may be found in Nature, Science, Community News, The Wall Street Journal, and Radio Prague, among other places. Michael is often praised for his amazing prose.

Diverse irrational reactions to Covid-19

The irrationality of many people's reactions to the newly followed, more harmful cousin of the common cold virus is just amazing.

In many countries, there are shortages in the shops. What's amazing is that (aside from the chemistry for cleaning and disinfection which make some sense) the most typical product that is sold out is... toilet paper. We had toilet paper shortages in Czechoslovakia of the 1980s – Western Europe could make fun out of it, a rather rare example of a failure of our socialist economy. But these days, there doesn't even exist a sensible reason why people should buy lots of toilet paper.



Matt Gaetz, a Republican in the House.

If you haven't learned it yet from my otherwise deep and informative texts about cutting-edge physics and mathematics of monstrous moonshine, toilet paper is good for wiping your bottom. Why should people do it more often when there is a new respiratory infection around? There are only two explanations I can see:

* the uninterrupted media hysteria actually makes the people šit into their pants many times a day; because of fear, they actually consume vastly more toilet paper than normally

* it is a herd effect; some random person started to buy it and other moronic sheep who actually belong to the same herd started to emulate him or her or it. It must be simply clever to buy tons of toilet paper (and similarly food that will expire in a few days) because N other sheep are doing so as well, let me join! ;-)

The "argument" I just wrote down (it is not an argument, it is just an instinct of brain-dead people who need to belong to the middle of a herd and just can't use their own brain at all) was equally irrationally applied to the Chinese reaction. The Chinese government has declared science-fiction-style curfews in much of the country (and car sales dropped 80% in all of China!) so there must be a very good reason and the virus must be lethal for mankind.

Not really. This is not how proper logic works. China has enforced the draconian measures because it could, because the affected citizens don't have any real rights in a non-democratic country. That's the actual reason why we saw what we saw. We saw dramatic pictures of ghost towns that showed a high level of precaution but not a high level of risk. It's more convenient for a shepherd like Comrade Xi to protect his herd (with 1.4 billion members) and fight against threats in this brutal way. But that doesn't mean that it's more right or that it is fully justified. It doesn't really mean anything at all.

Hexaquark dark matter

Harvard politics: Warren would win among Harvard faculty and only 1.46% of faculty managed to be conservative. That places conservatives beneath transsexual Muslim vegans. Oops.

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Thank God, blacks in the South were more conservative than demanded by the grassroot Democrats and Sleepy Joe won Super Tuesday and reduced the probability of a Great October Democratic Socialist Revolution (a standard euphemism for a communist coup in November). U.S. stocks reacted by a 5% rise although the attribution is never quite clear.

Dark matter seems to be there, its composition remains unclear. WIMPs, axions etc. are waiting to be directly detected. Science Alert published a press release

Physicists Think We Might Have a New, Exciting Dark Matter Candidate

Well, I would choose to say that it is a not quite new and a boring dark matter candidate. Protons and neutrons are created out of 3 quarks (3 is odd which is why they are fermions), mesons are made of quark-antiquark pairs (and they are therefore bosons). But exotic bound states with 4,5,6 (tetraquarks, pentaquarks, hexaquarks) have been proposed and somewhat uncertainly measured.

Remdesivir: why don't they stop the dying today?

First, some cosmology (off-topic) news:

Persian-Indian physicists: LIGO-Virgo's strain sensitivity favors power law inflation with parameters predicted by the string-theoretical KKLTI models: https://t.co/BRYhTveOZj - I don't quite understand the argumentation as of now but I can't show it's wrong yet, either.

— Luboš Motl (@lumidek) March 3, 2020

Another paper, liked by Willie and perhaps predicted by Freeman Dyson: proteins/ETs in a meteorite found

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The Federal Reserve lowered the interest rates by 0.50%, two weeks before it was expected. Meanwhile, Czechs were informed that our Yankee friends would give us remdesivir, the only promising cure for Covid-19. Other America's allies, starting with South Korea, may be getting the same things. We surely get it because the drug was developed by Czechs led by Mr Tomáš Cihlář.



In test tubes, it has been successful against the Covid-19 and there is a story about one patient who dramatically improved after getting the pill. Trials are just starting in Nebraska and they say that it will be "very fast" and in half a year, the testing may be over. Cool. Is half a year really fast?

Czechia is most transparent, very sensible about the pompous flu

There is a lot of secrecy in the world surround the patients with the viral pneumonia, as they nicely call Covid-19 in Thailand. Well, Czechs don't really see a point for this secrecy. So we know virtually everything about first three cases. All of them feel fine, even their temperature is almost normal, and their symptoms are comparable to a common cold.

All three patients were moved to a famous but not terribly pretty hospital Na Bulovce (on Bulovka) – not very far from our students hostels in Trója – that leaves me with some bitter memories because around 1995, I and my then Christian sweetheart were visiting a younger classmate who was dying (and soon died) of leukemia there. Some people think that I am tough but of course I am not and she was much calmer about these conversations and experiences. I still don't understand what gave her the strength. Cruelty, Jesus Christ, or Pat Robertson's protein shake?

Next week: a nice time to join the stock market

OK, millions of people have sold their stocks, often with a loss, turning the week that is ending today to the worst stock-market week in the human history, at least in the absolute numbers. The reason is the end of the world that is coming because out of the 7.8 billion people, a somewhat new kind of "a really bad cold" (20% of cases of common cold are caused by coronaviruses) has already killed 2870 people in China and 124 people outside China (I won't update these numbers; it's almost certain that they will grow at least by tens of percent but whether they will ever double or triple isn't quite certain, I think).

To compare, 150,000 people are dying every day for other reasons. Three folks in Czechia who returned from Northern Italy – a skier *1976, an American female student *1999 in Milan who went for a Prague trip but too late, and a guy *1952 from an Udine conference – were diagnosed with this "pompous flu" (every pompous fool is its natural ally) today. They feel fine, internal policies won't be changed because community spread hasn't shown up.

The sky is clearly falling. Well, it's been falling permanently for many years but it's "falling even more" now. The greatest global victim of the Covid-19 hysteria is the climate alarmist church currently led by Greta Thunberg, a psychiatrically broken Scandinavian teenager (the church has just destroyed its second majestic green lawn, one in Bristol), because the Covid-19 hysteria is clearly much more catchy than the implausible climate change hysteria. It's not surprising: infectious diseases like that have the potential to decimate mankind and they have done so in the past. The potential doesn't mean that they will and this "bad flu" probably won't. If this virus is very successful and spreads truly globally, it may become responsible for up to "dozens of percent" of deaths of humans on Earth although this situation probably wouldn't last for too long.

OK, should you be buying stocks from the brainwashed weak hands that are selling now? The well-known climate skeptic Steve Milloy (do you remember Junk Science?) has a clear answer backed by some tangible acts:

I bought the market yesterday.

My ETF is up.

If the market goes down more, I'll buy more.

Coronavirus hysteria is pure panic -- pumped by the left to hurt @realDonaldTrump.

https://t.co/qMF0ggw9Dd

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) February 29, 2020

You may find a significant number of people like that in your real life and on the Internet.

Anti-quantum activists vs tunneling

At Quora, I mostly answer questions about my homeland or the European history but some of the questions are about physics, too. So I was "requested" to answer a somewhat innocent albeit confused question about the potential well and decoherence:

How do you send a decohered wave to a finite potential well when the wave functions cancel each other out leaving only a single state?

Fine. So I answered that with decoherence, you can't describe the object of interest by a wave function. You need the density matrix i.e. a mixed state. It generally equals to the sum\[

\rho = \sum_i p_i \ket{\psi_i}\bra{\psi_i}

\] and the terms just don't cancel, contradicting the question. Later, I was sent several "almost equivalent" questions. I don't want to copy them because you may easily find them on this page of the author, Joseph Lazar. All of them ask loaded questions of the type "am I a genius by discovering that quantum tunneling doesn't exist because of decoherence?". Or: "What is the equation by which I prove that the density matrix invalidates the uncertainty principle?" (There is none, the principle is always true!)

Freeman Dyson, 1923-2020

Freeman Dyson died at age of 96+ in a hospital near Princeton, New Jersey, due to complications after he fell, yesterday. He was a legendary English-born theoretical physicist (see Google Scholar: S-matrix, the first reviews of QED, spin waves, statistics of eigenvalues, and models for phase transitions, among other topics), futurist, astrobiologist, and many other things. In recent years, he was a well-known climate realist (liking to say that things are complex etc.).

The cropped photograph is still near the top of Google Images for "Freeman Dyson" and I took it in an important Harvard physics classroom, J253, I think. On that day, I was his host and we had interesting chats about the extraterrestrials' strategies and other things.

He was old enough to remember Albert Einstein from the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

What to do right before the end of the world

The apocalyptic mood at many places has been predicted in many science-fiction movies. My most favorite one is Sexmission (Poland 1983). (Cheeky) Max and (shy) Albert volunteer in a hibernation experiment by Prof Kuppelweiser in 1991. Instead of 1994, they are woken up in 2042 in a society led by the League of Women. Kupperweiser has also invented a special bomb that has destroyed the male genes.

Kuppelweiser must have worked for the Wu-Chan Institute of Virology because, as Parravicini pointed out, Covid-19 may damage kidneys and testicles. The feminist ideology rules in that strange society (but much more relaxed than the SJWs today!) that lives, as we learn soon, under the ground. The ladies are told that the Earth's surface is uninhabitable which is a sophisticated lie designed by Her Excellency (who ultimately turns out to be the sole male survivor) to control the women more easily – that theme was a successful prediction of the global warming hysteria.

Calculation of particle masses without string theory is implausible

...or any comparably deep advance in fundamental physics...

Anna V has mentioned a seemingly interesting March 10th Greek talk about a paper that claims to calculate the elementary particle masses with 1% precision out of some gravitational attraction between objects matching the ideas of a schoolkid at an elementary school.

Off-topic, experiment: the gravitational force has been measured down to 50 microns (the distance between the two masses), Newton may relax, he is still OK.

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Usefulness of colliders outside HEP: accelerators' superconducting RF cavities may be helpful to build quantum computers. Also, quantum information theorists talk to quantum gravitists about wormholes which is right although I don't quite understand what's the new insight here

The paper is childish nonsense, of course. You can't answer difficult questions like that with the elementary school algebra (and ideas). The authors have obviously not understood the difficulty of the problem – which is not far from the completion of a theory of everything – even at some vague qualitative level. To derive particle masses, you almost surely need to use the Standard Model gauge group, the representation theory for the particles, non-diagonal mass matrices and their eigenvalues, and probably also the renormalization group running, aside from many other hard components. It's almost guaranteed that very simple formulae with the 1% precision can't exist and even if the final low-energy masses could be given by a miraculously simple formula, you can't possibly derive or justify such a formula from some understanding of particle physics which seems absent in the paper.

As far as I can see, the authors haven't even understood the vast range that the masses span i.e. the hierarchy. They're described by various hierarchies, including the hierarchies in the Yukawa couplings and, in their case, also the standard hierarchy between the weak scale and the Planck scale (which they claim to use). And even a qualitative answer to the question "why those parameters seem so vastly different" seems extremely difficult.

The hierarchy problem has been studied by a huge fraction of theoretical particle physicists for half a century, they have used a lot of ideas and difficult tools, and there's no "clearly winning" solution to explain the hierarchy, not even qualitatively. Would you really believe that some elementary formula written down by Greeks suddenly answers these questions? Then you're a gullible victim of anti-scientific populism. Trivial formulae for hard problems could be nice for you but they're wrong – or it's impossible for them to be right.

Not even omnipresent seasonal Covid-19 is a rational justification to dramatically change our behavior

China has almost certainly tamed down the infection. The most recent 24 hours show 32 new Chinese fatalities plus 435 new cases. The latter number is almost matched by South Korea, the #2 country sporting the illness, which saw 334 new cases (and one fatality) in recent 24 hours. The remaining countries combined saw just 19 fatalities yesterday. Note that about 150,000 people die in the world every day.

South Korea already has almost the same total percentage of population infected as China (1600 infections in Korea, 78,000 in China, the ratio is about 50 while the population ratio is 27) and a higher percentage of new people infected per day than China during the peak.

The suppression of the Chinese disease is a reflection of the draconian measures taken in China. Whoever says that they are not draconian simply belongs to China or another dictatorial country, not the Western civilization. Clearly, South Korea is more democratic so the taming of the disease, if possible, can't be this fast.

Covid-19 probably peaked in early February

From Monday on, the world markets have seen a new giga-hysterical reaction to a dozen of coronavirus deaths in Italy (out of 300 or so cases there), a reaction that has already exceeded 9/11 (if you add nearby days that probably have the same reason). If you don't remember, the U.S. markets were closed for a week after 9/11, lost 7% on the first day, and recovered within one month.

Meanwhile, the main Covid-19 statistics page shows a dramatic reduction in the new cases and deaths. When we started to cover this story in early 2020, I mentioned that the "doubling time" was comparable to two days or so. Well, we're surely not getting one doubling per day; the actual numbers suggest it is just one doubling after half a year assuming the current rates. Instead, the fresh data show:

80,997 cases in total
...=...48,090 active cases
...-...=...39,251 mild
...-...+...8,839 severe
...+...32,907 closed cases
...-...=...30,143 cured
...-...+...2,764 dead

You can see that the number of cured people has surpassed 30,000, not surprising after a month. At the beginning, the number of cured people was about the same as the number of fatalities. Then the cured people grew a lot and trumped the severe active cases. Within a week, the cured people will surpass all active cases, including the mild ones.

Classical, realist theories just fail to produce unitary gadgets

Nature, quantum mechanics organize gadgets along complex matrices; realism doesn't

In 1925, after 15-25 years of searches in the dark when all the good physicists knew that a radical change of the foundations of physics was urgently needed, physics switched to the quantum mechanical underpinnings. Those are totally and obviously different than classical physics – although they may produce classical physics as a limit – and it's unsurprising that virtually every complex enough experiment is predicted to end up differently by quantum mechanics than by any classical theory.

The difference was nevertheless made explicit in many toy examples starting with Bell's theorem. Bell's theorem studies various types of measurements made on two qubits. It's a straightforward situation – pretty much the simplest situation in which some entanglement exists – and one may calculate the prediction made by a general classical local theory with hidden variables. It produces results that obey some general inequalities and indeed, those inequalities are violated by quantum mechanical predictions as well as observations (the latter two agree).

Old "Miss Germany 2020" is deceitful

The post-modern left-wing NPCs are fighting against everything that the Western civilization has been built upon and that has been admired for hundreds or thousands of years – Christian and European values, nation states, freedom, democracy, private ownership, roles of men and women, the scientific method, meritocracy etc. – and it is unsurprising that the women's beauty is a target, too.

Some of the beauty contests have come under attack in some Anglo-Saxon countries and swimsuits have been erased.

Germans constantly want to retake the crown for the most unhinged left-wing nation in the realm previously known as the West which is why they have demolished the main beauty contest, too. A 35-year-old mom, Leonie von Hase, was allowed to run – she was obviously the oldest contestant in the contest ever, since the 1920s (18-39 years was the allowed age range) – and she was chosen Miss Germany 2020 by a women-only committee.

EU may dissolve due to clashes about modest sums of money

Exemptions for net recipients from Gr@tin, similar harassment campaigns would be better than redistribution

Many of us are partly living in the virtual, exciting, and tense world created by the media, blogs, and the extreme discussion in which psychopaths seem to be several months from imposing Islam and banning carbon in the world, among other things. Meanwhile, the real world – and lives of ordinary enough people – continues to operate along less extreme lines. Instead of a Big Clash of Civilizations, mass conversion of tens of millions of people to the opposite sex, or the heretical status of carbon, the European Union may very well dissolve... because of a few petty billion dollars.



Net recipients and net payers to the EU budget a few years ago

The U.K. has happily left the European Union and it seems that it will be capable of avoiding the old payments to the EU, indeed. The U.K. has been paying below €9 billion to the EU budget annually, less than half a percent of its GDP (try to appreciate how tiny their percentage of the GDP sent to the EU budget relatively was – if you compare it with the relative importance of the EU in the political discussions in the U.K.). It's been a net payer, the second largest one (well) below Germany and (well) above France and Italy.

The incredible shrinking expertise in Brian Greene's books

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

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

EU: Václav Klaus' prophetic talk 11 years ago

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

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

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

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

Leftism, Marxism really are mental disorders

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Bezos throws away $10 billion of his money

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

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

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

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

Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet.

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

Dawkins vs Molyneux on eugenics

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

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

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 16, 2020

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

A cute Czech bank robbery in Switzerland

Chur, Switzerland

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

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

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Bank robber owes me six francs (DE)

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

RIH Pachauri: 1940-2020

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

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

Rot In Hell, monster.

Position, momentum modulo a grid may be measured simultaneously

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bojowald: Ashtekar school is fundamentally misguided

Hat tip to @mmanuF at Twitter

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

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

Critical evaluation of common claims in loop quantum cosmology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even with Enyaq, electric cars make no economic sense

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nazi German lawmakers plan to imprison all Euroskeptics for 3 years

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

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



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

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

Drucksache 19/14378

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Reuters Business (@ReutersBiz) February 7, 2020

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

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

Can holography in the flat space be made manifest?

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

The Holographic Nature of Null Infinity.

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

Consensus vs Czech rate hike

Bloomberg posted this amusing map of the world:



Countries with central banks are divided to three groups: those that haven't made a decision in 2020 yet (grey), those that kept rates (yellow), and those that lowered the interest rates (cyan).

And then there is a fourth group, a league of their own, the Czech National Bank (pink). It raised the discount, two-week repo, lombard rates to 1.25, 2.25, 3.25 percent, respectively, all by 0.25%, today at 2 pm Prague time. (The middle, repo rate is crucial to determine commercial interest rates.) The announcement was delayed by 1 hour – either because they wanted to lower the shock or because they needed an extra hour for wrestling.