Melbourne 2nd lockdown: fool me once...

First, basic facts. Australia has some 25 million inhabitants. Sydney and Melbourne are the largest cities, in the New South Wales and Victoria, respectively. The basic statistics page shows that Australia has had 9k cases and 100 deaths or so, only 4 of those were after May 23rd. The number of deaths per capita has been basically zero. Note that the seasons are reversed relatively to most of ours but the (currently ongoing) winter is really mild, too.



OK, because of "roughly a hundred positive tests per day", the Victorian authorities have re-established a harsh lockdown on the city. The 5 million people who are trapped inside cannot really leave the area for six weeks (a siege). They can't visit relatives. Restaurants, barbers, and most of other would-be non-essential things are shut down and so on.

Harvard's purely online learning is a fancy way to turn education into a complete farce

Harvard University is one of the most hardcore leftist places that want to cancel the in-person instruction entirely; all teaching and learning should be done online from the Fall. Donald Trump has rightfully pointed out that this decision is ridiculous, an easy way out for which they should be ashamed. Many other universities are "more moderate" and they prepare a hybrid system which is partly in-person, partly online.

More than 304,000 likes in 9 hours - among the strongest tweets for @realDonaldTrump in some time. Reopening schools is a powerful issue that crosses party lines. pic.twitter.com/JQY8MbEq5Q

— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) July 7, 2020

Trump previously tweeted that the schools must open in the autumn. The tweet got over 300k "likes" which is unusually high even according to his standards. The desire to stop the hysteria and open the schools is almost certainly a "bipartisan cause". All pro-civilization people, including former voters of the Democrats, realize that the education is important, young people are pretty much completely resilient to Covid-19, and the benefits of the education vastly exceed the risks for the public health. And I strongly believe that the plan to remove the far left indoctrination from schools would also have a rather strong bipartisan support and Trump should add it as a visible part of his program.

Steven Pinker, the latest target of "cancel culture"

Steven Pinker is Harvard University's most prominent evolutionary psychologist, a man who knows how to explain why the people (and animals) evolved to think in the ways that we observe.

Aside from hundreds of technical papers that have collected almost 100 thousand citations, he is also well-known for many popular books dedicated (not only) to the intelligent laymen. "The Blank Slate" is one of them; his latest bestseller, "Enlightenment Now...", is an optimistic description of the world we inhabit. During the witch hunts on Larry Summers around 2005, I was fortunate to communicate with him as one of the beautiful minds with a spine. I've also attended some ingenious lectures he gave.

"Time will tell" has become a favorite replacement for arguments from those who spread lies

The seemingly innocent phrase is responsible for a big part of the decay of the West

Don't get me wrong. The sentence "time will tell" has been an innocent, and nearly tautologically true, sentence that many people have used at many moments. The sentence means that in the future, we will know more. It's true. To say the least, someone will know more about the events that lie in the "future" for us but they are the "present" for him, especially the events (and it's almost all events) that will be affected by Nature's quantum mechanical random generator.

On this website, you may probably find dozens of copies of this sentence written by me, too. However, in recent weeks, I saw that "time will tell" has turned into something much less innocent: into a religious slogan that is particularly favored by those who are wrong about all the important propositions they are making – and who are demonstrably wrong because they simply deny facts and proofs that already exist now.

Cumrun Vafa vs sloppiness of "lessons from JT gravity"

A decade ago, the main topic that clumped fundamental physicists to two camps was almost certainly the anthropic reasoning – or its flawed character. It gradually faded away because people agreed that there was no argument that would settle the question – and in the case of the anthropic approach, there wasn't a consistent theory that was ready to be used. Aside from some correct propositions that were worthless because they were tautological, the anthropic school was just an extreme ideology and it remained an extreme ideology.



Coleman's \(\alpha\)-parameters from baby universes were a prank or funny gesticulation, not a serious lecture about the actual mechanisms of quantum gravity.

But numerous other topics were fundamental enough and answered by highly controversial views. For example, late Joe Polchinski and his co-authors who are alive and kicking were promoting the idea that there was a firewall on the boundary of every black hole. It's obviously wrong and Joe was sort of accepting that it was wrong – but some people still enjoyed giving evidence to the answer that was wrong, the arguments were clever, and as long as you didn't throw away your common sense, you could have learned some things.

July 1st: end of nationwide Covid restrictions in CZ

Czechia had some kind of a lockdown since March 12th, before there was any "fatality with Covid" in the country. On March 18th, after just 3 days in which the experimental "face mask meme" spread to many corners of the Czech society, we became the first white nation with mandatory and omnipresent face masks (many of which were homemade at the beginning). In late March – which was arguably the peak of Covid hysteria – the percentage of Czechs who walked outside with face masks exceeded 98%.



Yo Yo Band: Karviná, 1993, an extremely famous post-Velvet-Revolution song. In the most recent week, the miners' town of Karviná in Northeast Czechia (well, Moravian Silesia) became "our closest proxy to Bergamo", beating the "cases per capita" in other towns by orders of magnitude, but still at negligible levels. [Accidentally, I just had a call with a woman in Karviná who wanted my electricity to be moved to Innogy LOL.]

For some six weeks since March 12th, many shops and almost all restaurants were closed. Some factories including Škoda Auto were shut down for a month or so. During these six weeks, it was gradually becoming more certain that the number of newly infected Czechs was dropping (the statistical significance of this proposition was going up). The hysteria was correspondingly fading away during April. In late April, a 5-stage plan to reopen Czechia began. First, small shops were opened, restaurants could be opened in the takeaway regime, some sports activities were allowed etc. Things looked really good so the 5th stage was sped up and merged with the 4th stage which was in late May (instead of June 8th as initially planned). For more than a month, we didn't have to wear any masks outside.

Appeasement towards unhinged leftists may be a bigger mistake than in 1938

The Cultural Revolution in the U.S. has accelerated. Aside from the liquidation of statues including the presidents such as Wilson, Roosevelt, Jackson, and even Lincoln, the "revolutionaries" have abolished the flag of Mississippi, are planning to ban the U.S. anthem and the name of John Wayne from an airport in the Orange County, have erased some of the most famous images and labels on the U.S. food products, and performed an incredible new Stalinist surge on the big Internet servers. Similar and increasingly bad events are happening almost every day.



Just yesterday, within several hours, Reddit deleted the forum The Donald which had 1 million users who were rather essential for Trump's 2016 victory; Amazon-owned Twitch deleted Trump's own account (it's a server for posting conversations in the video format); and YouTube has banned Stefan Molyneux, a prominent Canadian centrist philosopher who had 1 million subscribers and 650 million views, aside from many others. In fact, the number of banned YouTube accounts was 20,000 just yesterday; it is clearly in the Stalin's category.

Madmen at Princeton remove Wilson from a school, everything

Burning of the bridges has arrived to universities, Czech media informed us in the morning. The stated reason: "He was a racist", of course. The Wilson's School of Public and International Affairs has to be renamed, a board of unwise fat cats has voted.



Prague's main train station, the station of president Wilson. The second part of the name was the main name in 1945-1948 and since 1989, it is considered an "honorary name" that is only used during historical and official events.

Needless to say, the school was a perfect match for Wilson's name because he's done a lot to create a modern world based on redefined public and international affairs. While many Republicans may be annoyed that he greatly contributed to the rise of the "Big Government" in the U.S., and I understand how they feel, the Czechoslovak Republicans among us appreciate that Wilson was a de facto co-founder of Czechoslovakia, and that's the main reason why Czechs and Slovaks celebrate him.

SJWs murdered modern Czechia's most famous martyr 70 years ago

Her name was Milada Horáková...

Exactly 10 years ago, I wrote a blog post about the 60th anniversary of the most famous judicial murder in the modern Czech history. You may also watch this 5-minute-long video summary in English.



Even though my former colleague Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the first Czechoslovak working-class president and alcoholic Klement Gottwald (just like Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, and many others), Gottwald kickstarted her execution by his signature. She wrote a very touching letter to her daughter and other relatives, resisted for 15 minutes on the rope, but ultimately she surrendered and was hanged. Mr Mrnka recorded the movie about her in 2017; it probably isn't too deep and personal a movie. (The film director Mr Mrnka didn't get any money from the Czech pro-film government institutions, Czech billionaires, and others, all of them had some complaints or excuses: only Netflix said Yes at the end. An Israeli actress starred as Horáková.)

Stunning dishonesty behind the "second wave" fake news

While Czechia has apparently restored its sanity completely and the last traces of the Covid-hysterical era should be removed on July 1st (e.g. face masks in the public transportation), and even the hexupling of the percentage of the positive tests isn't changing much about it (from 0.5% at the lows to about 3% now; epidemiologists do manage to preserve the realistic image of the elevated number of "cases" as a measure of irrelevant local outbreaks that are wrestled with locally), the U.S. fake news media have apparently decided that they have the power to start the second wave of the coronavirus hysteria in the country.

(That wave has already started in Australia, because of 1 "Covid" deaths after more than a month: 1,000 soldiers are visiting every house in Victoria and lots of people even restarted the crazy punic buying, holy crap.)

Open CNN.COM now and you will see a huge headline "US sees record number of new Covid-19 cases". What a news story. The U.S. is doing many more tests so of course a larger absolute number of them end up positive. It seems very clear by now that this filth wanted to increase the number of tests just in order to be "able" to create these fraudulent headlines. The actual disease is obviously much weaker in the U.S. than it was some two months ago.

If many ETs exist, they have diverse characters and political views

But it is still true that SJW-like and similarly pathological species get extinct soon

A week ago, under a SETI article, the discussion evolved towards a widespread theme in the extraterrestrial discussions: What behavior can be expected from the ETs? Are they predators? Are they shy? Are they downright cowards? Do they favor equality? ;-) There are lots of questions of this kind. As the title indicates, the main message of this text is the answer "it depends" or:

Among many ET species or civilizations, there will be a big diversity of behavioral patterns, moral characters and personalities, and political views.

Can I prove it? I can't. Sociology of ETs isn't as rigorous as mathematics. Well, as you know, it isn't even as rigorous as physics. To make things worse by several levels, it's less rigorous than social sciences about humans. It's much more speculative because the existence of the ETs is just a possibility, not a fact.

Redistributed money is the outsourced power to decide

And that's why I don't want the money to be redistributed to less refined people

European and other countries are capable of feeding all their citizens. One may nicely survive with $200 for food per month and even the most modest welfare systems give much more to the people who can't earn more by themselves. The governments may also provide everyone with some housing and other existentially needed things. My point is that a vast majority of the money we produce is "excess production" and goes to some kind of "non-minimal if not luxurious things". It has been the case at least for decades.

As a rightwinger, I think it's ideal when almost all the money is left in the pockets of the people who earned it and who can decide what to do. Some portion of the money is redistributed. Police, armies, courts, and a few other things undoubtedly represent the most important things that are paid from the public budgets (and all the people who want to abolish the police are dangerous psychopaths). In reality, various social programs swallow much more than that.

It's clear to me that the construction of several state-of-the-art big projects that do something new, like some cutting-edge space research or the largest synchrotron (or a bunch of other pure science projects), belong to the most exciting, most justified, and most permanent ways to spend the concentrated taxpayer money. What is good about them is that they are supposed to produce visible results – and in the case of colliders, I emphasize that the collider itself (with maps of collisions) is visible, one doesn't need a new particle. People's energy is concentrated to do something that may be admired and that may even have a lasting value.

Why I don't believe that a Bitcoin puzzle was honestly solved

...And why you need to assume that everyone in the cryptoworld is lying to your eyes unless you have a rigorous proof indicating otherwise...

Especially a month ago or so, I spent roughly "a dozen of hours" or perhaps "dozens of hours" by the "Bitcoin halving puzzle". If you successfully extracted 12 words (in the right order, each from the list of 2048 English BIP39 words), you could unlock a Bitcoin (basic Segwit, 84/0/0/...) wallet and send a modest amount of money, around $500, to your Bitcoin wallet. Recall that in the cryptocurrency world, knowing the private key is equivalent to "possessing the funds" because the private key is necessary and sufficient to sign messages "I want to send BTC XY from that wallet to some particular other wallet".

I previously wrote three blog posts and up to yesterday, I didn't know the central question "whether there was a chance for me or a typical 'you' to solve it". The puzzle was announced as solved yesterday and the money was taken by an alleged Pogo or Elron V. Hubbard who wrote a perfectionist solution. It was the last day before the contest would be ended, and a few hours after some nontrivial but not decisive final hints were posted by the author of the puzzle, Logic Beach (allegedly astrophysicist Herman Falker).

Now I feel almost certain that I couldn't have solved it even after years (good that I completely stopped "working" on it a few weeks ago, and advised the same to E.T.) – and while I am less certain about the following claim, I also think that no other person on Earth except for the creator could have solved it "completely".

Libya: rooting for Egypt to beat Turkey

Egyptian president al-Sisi has advertised his opinion that Egypt (Northeast of Africa) has the right to visit Libya, its Western neighbor, and bring order to the country (the most well-known temporary would-be government of Libya, GNA, seems unable to do the basic things, not to mention that they are Turkey-funded and UN-supported jihadists who deserve their 72 virgins to be shoved down their aß). Al-Sisi thinks that he has the support of many other countries. He surely has the support of your humble correspondent. Like in 2017, I believe that Egypt still enjoys the support of the Visegrád countries.

I just keep on approximately watching the evolution of some countries and I believe that Egypt is doing well, at least comparably well as it did during Mubarak's rule, and it is also behaving decently towards European and other countries (unlike Turkey). As a PFNonwovens (textile) stockholder, I even think that Egypt guarantees good enough conditions for the Western business. Also, I greatly appreciated Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian telco billionaire, who threatened to commit suicide if the insane lockdown continued.



See some relevant battlefront maps.

Now, Libya has 1.7 million squared kilometers and is much larger than Egypt at 1.0 million and Turkey at 0.8 million. According to population, Libya is an empty country (they don't have the Nile). It has less than 7 million while Turkey has 82 million and Egypt, the most populous country of the Arab world, has 98 million. Somewhat unfortunately, Turkey is the wealthiest country of the three and our NATO "ally". On the other hand, not that I would be a fan of that kingdom, Saudi Arabia stands on Egypt's side. And France (a NATO member) seems to back anti-jihadist General Haftar and stand against Turkey, too. More secretly, Israel is behind Haftar, too. Add Russia, Emirates, and Greece to the coalition.

Why \(\pi\neq 3.1446\)

Despite the absence of any university (or liberal high school) education, a friend of mine is very intelligent and kind of educated. Even when I am rather keen on e.g. a portion of organic chemistry, it seems obvious to me that he actually knows it better than I do. But one of his favorite discoveries on the web is this

Harry Lear's page about an alternative value of \(\pi\)

which claims that all mathematicians are wrong and the actual value of \(\pi\) is approximately \[ \pi = \frac{4}{\sqrt{\varphi}} \approx 3.144605511 \] instead of the usual \(\pi\approx 3.14159265358979\dots\). Here, \(\varphi=(1+\sqrt 5)/2\approx 1.618034\) is the golden ratio. Of course, it's been proven that \(\pi\) is not algebraic. OK, I must admit that this belief partly makes me smile, partly annoys me. When I was 10, I memorized 100 digits of \(\pi\) and I can still tell you what they are at 3 am. At roughly the same time, I also used Commodore 64 to calculate 38000 digits of \(\pi\) according to Machin's (totally precise) formula\[ \pi = 16 \,{\rm atn} \frac{1}{5} - 4 \,{\rm atn} \frac{1}{239} \] whose proof I understood a year later (see Proving Machin's formula here). There are tons of other methods that allow you to calculate \(\pi\) with any accuracy you want. Will I persuade him that \(\pi\neq 3.1446\) and Mr Lear is just an unwise king who harasses his best, third daughter and can't even spell the word "real"? ;-)

CERN backs the FCC, a 100 km, €21 billion collider

I returned from a 60 km bike trip but my buddy had to cover 100 km... The latter quantity made it ideal for me to read a message from Willie saying that the CERN council has (unanimously) approved the circular collider as the next step, a ring of circumference of 100 km whose second stage can achieve the center of mass energy of 100 TeV (higher than 13 TeV of the LHC two years ago).

CERN backs new £19 BILLION (CZK 560 billion) particle accelerator that is four times bigger and six times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider (The Daily Mail)

The construction may only begin in the late 2030s when the high-luminosity (i.e. future-upgraded) LHC will have become as boring and exhausted as the normal LHC seems to be by now. I sincerely hope that the construction will be faster.

Stephen Hsu is a "heretic", too

Stephen Hsu is the "Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation" at Michigan State University, a trained theoretical physicist whom I partly know as a protégé of Anthony Zee, a blogger at InfoProc, and a dude who is interested in education, IQ scores, and perhaps even startups that want to pick smarter embryos in order to reach IQ=1000.

I've previously used some of his data concerning the IQ of different fields and similar things. Given his sanity concerning the existence of the IQ, interest in group IQ differences, and plans that could be considered close to eugenics, you could wonder why it took so much time for the far left inquisitors to accuse him of heresy. Well, the answer is that these leftists are ardent but they are also stupid and their brains are extremely slow and mostly dysfunctional.

Most physics PhDs don't look at the world through "physics of the world"

I adopted this exchange between Penny and Sheldon as the canonical response to the people who boldly claim that I shouldn't understand the discipline XY. A real physicist understands the Universe and everything important in it – and, as an updated version of Sheldon, I also know who is Radiohead! ;-)

And since the kindergarten years, I felt certain about the unity of knowledge – about the statement that the separation of the knowledge into individual scientific disciplines is ultimately a fuzzy and fundamentally unjustifiable construct, pretty much a social convention. And on top of that, it's obvious that something that was termed "physics" is the most fundamental level of knowledge from which other disciplines may be deduced.

XENON1T: our excess is due to tritium junk, axions, or magnetic neutrinos

This result has been known for a year or so. Grad students were tortured by the requirement of their silence. But the news got out today. XENON1T claims a 3.5-sigma excess in the search for neutrinos.



As of 2020, XENON1T is the leading detector of dark matter. Elena Aprile designed the xenon-based detectors years ago – and she is still the boss of the 163 folks. 1T indicates "one ton"; previous generations of the detector had lower masses of that inert gas. They really used 2 tons for detection and another 1.2 tons around it. They claim to have the world-class tiny background rate, 76 events per ton, year, and keV.

Zero is still the most likely number of ETs in the Milky Way

Last night, I received a press release with a highly provocative title,

New Calculations Hint There Could Be at Least 36 Alien Civilisations in Our Galaxy

Excellent. So science has now determined that there's not just a single ET in the Milky Way but at least 36 of them. We could call them JanuaryA... up to DecemberC. ;-) But is the statement true? And is it scientifically justified? The answer to the first question is "probably not", the answer to the latter question is "certainly not". And the precision with which these people claim to have calculated "the number of ET civilizations" (36) is truly laughable. Even children must be able to see that it's just nonsense.

These day, I find it obvious that this "discipline" – whose mandatory conclusion "we are surrounded by many ETs" – is a canonical example (and possibly the ultimate cradle) of the postmodern pseudoscience.

Homework from Feynman (1997-1998): formulate string theory

Beauty: Robbert Dijkgraaf, the director of IAS Princeton and once a co-author of misogynist homophobic capitalist racists, wrote a wonderful Quanta Magazine essay about the two types of beauty in mathematics, generic and exceptional. The exceptional taste of beauty seems more generic ;-) among scientists but the generic sense of beauty is ultimately needed, too. Kepler was obsessed with the exceptional beauty (Platonic polyhedra) before he discovered the wagon of manure (ellipses) that gave rise to the Newtonian quantatitative revolution in physics.

Warlords from "Black Lives Matter" and "Antifa" (whose new "constructive" slogan is shut down STEM, so kind!) generously allowed new papers to appear on arXiv.org today. Thanks a lot for your mercy, comrades. The last hep-ph "paper" has 98 pages and 117 figures:

Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions

You may know one of the authors, Richard Feynman. The other one – who is probably responsible for the submission (assuming the resurrection no-go theorem) – is James Cline. Feynman died after an acute cancer episode on February 15th, 1988. But these 22 lectures were supposed to be a full course at the Caltech Grad School (1987-1988) and the plan was to turn this course into a booklet, too.

Gravity is different, but not metaphysically different, from other forces

In the Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover asked four physicists

Why Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces.

Well, I think that in an impartial setup, the first question should be whether gravity is different, not why is different, but thankfully, the implicit statement is "largely true" in this case. (It's "largely true" but a complementary article "why gravity is basically the same as other forces" would still be totally desirable, too.)

Well, in our "theory of nearly everything" (TONE), there are four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force. Gravity is largely described by Einstein's general theory of relativity – whose long-distance Newtonian limit is often enough – while the three other forces are described by the Standard Model i.e. by quantum field theory. In the Standard Model, electromagnetism and the weak force are actually mixed and rotated into two factors of a gauge group – and these two forces therefore cannot be considered quite separate even in the Standard Model: they are quasi-unified there.

After 4 months of hysteria, Covid-19 hasn't beaten annual flu yet

In January 2020, we started to hear about the new coronavirus causing the disease later called Covid-19. In the first blog post, I mentioned that I didn't believe that the virus was really new. Well, it seems that this statement – like many other propositions that I made about the disease – was increasingly supported by evidence. For example, indirect evidence summarized in a Harvard study and criticized by the BBC yesterday indicated that the virus already existed in August 2019.

I am sure that many of you understand that the actual point of my first article about Covid-19 was the shock that some people wanted to ignite a new "story of global importance": whether or not the virus was "new" (at most a month or two), there was really nothing substantial that changed about the world of diseases in early 2020, it was absolutely irrational to act as if "something huge had taken place", and I was certain about this statement despite some initial uncertainties about the "parameters" of Covid-19.

Prof John Huss King about the anti-white racism at Berkeley

The guest blogger is a history professor at UCB, as confirmed by Tom Sowell and another journalist who know the name

Dear profs Xylitol, Young, and Zechariah:

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.



In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

HBO, BBC censor the best films ever; US, UK becoming the prime enemies of the civilization

A despicable, stupid, violent criminal and drug addict (also an ex-con who terrorized a pregnant woman during a 2007 robbery) was donated a golden coffin and the funeral of this piece of trash whose life shouldn't matter at all (regardless of the skin color) was turned into the most important story of the Anglo-Saxon world (so that the transparently unlikeable scumbag was presented as a role model!). This treatment has filled his soulmates – the trash of the Anglo-Saxon societies – with incredible self-confidence (and their cowardly opponents with fear) which is why the attacks against the fundamental values of the Western society escalated in recent days.

Statues of some of the most important Americans and Britons were vandalized and torn down. We may overlook these events as excesses caused by uneducated savages living on the streets. It's more shocking what's happening to the films because the managers of the movie databases are reasonably expected to be more enlightened than the average street thugs and drugs addicts. Gone with the Wind and Little Britain were among the films and series that were censored by the HBO and BBC, respectively. They were not sufficiently politically correct for the present, the explanation said.

SJWs are looting arXiv.org today

ArXiv.org isn't just another server for me. To say the least, it is the server that was most responsible for the fact that I have spent a decade in the U.S., as you may understand from a New York Times article written at those times when the Gray Lady was still capable of promoting nice stories of full-fledged rightwingers.

Surely, I am not the only one who is used to checking new papers at 1-4 subarchives of arXiv.org, the server with "STEM" papers that may be posted long before some bureaucracy in the journals is completed. The server was originally founded as a mailing list by Paul Ginsparg, a string_theorist-turned-important_coder. It used to have the URL xxx.lanl.gov and was hosted by a Los Alamos lab. XXX was misinterpreted by the airport security systems as "porn". After decades, the main address is arXiv.org and it is hosted by Cornell today.

Taylor vs Fourier, smooth vs \(L^2\): battle of beauties and surprises

Simplicity of spectrum vs locality

As a kid, I liked smooth functions early on. You may add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers and there is also the exponentiation, \(x^y\). At some moment, I realized that all those regular functions may be obtained from the addition, \(\exp(x)\), and its inverse, \(\log(x)\); the infinitely many branches of the latter (as a function of a complex variable) are extremely interesting and subtle but won't be discussed here. Nice smooth (or "holomorphic", informed people could say) functions may be obtained by various compositions of these procedures.

Note that \(x\cdot y = \exp(\log x + \log y)\) and \(x^y = \exp(y \log x)\).



This is the graph of \(1/\Gamma(x)\) on the real axis, a function that must surely be included in the category of nice smooth functions.

OK, for 40 years, I have singled out a subset of the mathematical concepts, the fertile and beautiful ones – those were relevant for the the understanding of the true and really deep truths about mathematics and physics.

Covid-19 impact may lead most UK universities to bankruptcy

Sussex economist Peter Dolton wrote an interesting article in VoxEU:

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a crisis in the UK universities

Cambridge and Oxford – the two hot spots of the English scholarly pride – are the only two UK universities whose financial survival looks close to certain now. All the other universities – let's call them mediocre and lousy universities – are threatened by a looming default.

Senior Czech Canadian chemist, the latest target of SJW witch hunts

Tomáš Hudlický is a prominent Czech Canadian organic chemist, a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at Brock University, an innovator of the year, a man with 13k+ citations. Days ago, he published an essay

“Organic synthesis—Where now?” is thirty years old. A reflection on the current state of affairs

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(full text PDF, a very difficult file to find due to the censorship)

in Angewandte Chemie, a chemistry journal. The first words of the title are recycled from the title of a famous (in their field) article published 30 years ago by Dieter Seebach whom Hudlický dedicated his essay (a birthday). Hudlický's essay touches numerous aspects of his field and its – sometimes unhealthy – interactions with the societal dynamics.

100 years after Trianon: Hungarian anxiety and irrationality

Yesterday, we commemorated the 100th anniversary of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. The Kingdom of Hungary lost all its non-Hungarian territories, Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and a piece of Austria. It was superseded by a new nation state – which was a ministate relatively to the previous 100 years.

Sadly and somewhat surprisingly for us (and especially Slovaks and others who are directly involved), lots of Hungarians including PM Viktor Orbán apparently cannot really reconcile themselves with the (not so) new Europe that began 100 years ago.

Floyd hysteria: the U.S. is a "different kind of civilization"

The nearly global Covid-19 shutdown was unprecedetend and absolutely insane but we could see that a similar breakdown of the laws and of people's common sense has affected almost all nations in the world.

(Thank God, after Elon Musk's suggestion that Amazon may need to be broken to pieces as a monopoly, Jeff Bezos canceled the atrocious censorship of Alex Berenson's anti-hysteria book. Amazon was clearly the single company that most benefited from the insanity of the shutdown – check this unmatched 50% increase of the stock price since late 2019 – so the clash of interests displayed by this monopoly is staggeringly obvious.)

However, when it comes to the reactions to the unfortunate death of a single guy named George Floyd, I can see that the U.S. is a place that has nothing to do with largely sensible places like my homeland. I am watching the events with pure amazement, just like if I were watching beheadings in The Islamic State or some arguments between the extraterrestrials.

Grand unified groups: a beauty contest

A few days ago, I discussed the LHCb B-meson anomalies that could be signs of either Z'-bosons or leptoquarks. I wanted to know whether I would be able to find out that such new particles are natural and pretty enough to be almost guaranteed to be exploited by Nature.

Maybe.

The Standard Model has the gauge group \(SU(3)_c\times SU(2)_L\times U(1)_Y\). Symmetry breaking is a mundane thing and it's common sense that this group may be a subgroup of a larger one that is broken to the Standard Model group, either by Higgs-like field-theoretical methods or some fancy, stringy ones.

"Stay at home" switched to "looting is justified" in a blink of an eye

AMS: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer claims new surprises in PRL, see CERN. For some elements, the dependence on rigidity is universal above some rigidity (rigidity is in volts, it is energy in GeV over Z, the charge, and interpreted as a "resistence towards magnetic bending"). For other elements, it's different so Sam Ting et al. claim that there are two types of primary cosmic rays!

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Brilliant.org is a pretty nice website to teach mathematics, science, and computer science through puzzles that have more math-like wisdom than average puzzles. It is free for a month or so, try it with your Google or FB account.

Lots of people – maybe a majority, maybe not – still take the media such as CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times seriously. They behave according to these fake journalists' instructions. I am amazed by the staggering stupidity and immorality of those sheep. It isn't possible for me to have any significant respect to these people.

Before the coronavirus hysteria was put in place, these sheep would happily consume several "big stories" such as the climate hysteria, Australian bushfires, Russiagate, and several more. All of these stories have always been hysterically exaggerated and distorted as if they were arguments against the civilization, right-wingers, and/or Donald Trump in person. In reality, most of those stories were untrue and those that were true were relatively unimportant and surely unrelated to Donald Trump. E.g. the Australian bushfires were at most events of regional importance.

In February, these media were reprogrammed to spread the (most likely) greatest hysteria in the history of mankind. And they succeeded, indeed. Hundreds of millions of people began to be afraid of a slightly new flu-like disease. For the first time in the history of civilization, the healthy majority "quarantined itself" and suicidally suspended most of the human interactions and something like 50% of the economic activity.

Insightful corrections and the weak gravity conjecture

Natalie Wolchover wrote an unnaturally good update about the topic of "corrections to the Weak Gravity Conjecture and their far-reaching implications" for the Quanta Magazine:

Black Hole Paradoxes Reveal a Fundamental Link Between Energy and Order

I wonder whether she did it herself or there is a "real physicist" (one or many?) behind the article.



Centory: Take It to the Limit. 1995 was a really good year for Eurodance (and pop music).

She starts with saying that physicists like to investigate the properties (and events) in the extreme regime because qualitatively new things often happen and it's exciting. Black holes have defined extreme enough conditions for half a century or one century, depending on what you count. She mentions the Hawking-Bekenstein discovery of the thermal traits of black holes in the 1970s.

Then she focuses on our 2006 Weak Gravity Conjecture (to find a new deep lesson from a black hole, you gotta take it to the limit), explains some basic equivalent forms of it, and chooses two recent papers that made some advances.

Twitter's censors have finally made Trump angry

Many of us were often shocked by the censorship that the Silicon Valley companies seem to enforce globally. Donald Trump has sort of agreed with us but it seemed obvious that he wouldn't ever act.



Well, I think that it is no longer so obvious. What was needed was some harm done to Trump's ego; he needed to be personally absorbed into this fight. Well, two days ago, Twitter introduced a new policy: it decided to label politically inconvenient messages by disparaging labels. And it has quickly tried this new policy against the most popular victim of this harassment, the U.S. president.

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

This tweet and its followup was decorated by an anonymous troll who works for Twitter: the addition to this tweet (and its followup) said something like "orange man bad, check the progressive truth about the mail-in ballots". And the "truth" said that Trump had to be wrong for some reasons. I think that the embarrassing label was already erased.

\(B\)-mesons at LHCb: \(Z'\)-bosons or leptoquarks?

The LHCb experiment

Charlie Wood wrote an intriguing article for the Quanta Magazine,

Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes

which mostly covers this March 2020 LHCb paper about the decay of \(B^0\to K^{*0}\mu^+\mu^-\) which is CP-averaged. The decay involving the muons is easier to measure.

Book: At least two philosophers understood background independence

While the fake news media are still obsessed (but less so) with the fake Chinese cough apocalypse, among similar things (and with fake scientists who promote fake theories or irrational hysteria), Tiziana Vistarini, a philosopher at the University of Rome, has published a new book about one of the most important topics in the Universe. Yes, it is

The Emergence of Spacetime in String Theory (Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Mathematics and Physics Book 5) (click to buy at Amazon)

You may be rather sure that the fake science journalists won't promote this book because it actually has some valuable beef. Hardcover and eVersions of the book are available.

Balance between creation and creative destruction

A traditional bricklayer's perspective is simple: when you add bricks, you are doing some positive work and you deserve a positive salary. Those who demolish buildings are doing a harm and they should pay. This simple view may be generalized to lots of other realms of the human activity.

They include not only working class jobs but also science and even investing, aside from many other occupations. The identity of the "beneficial" sign often looks clear. You do something applaudable if you lay bricks, create new cars, write papers creating new models and doing new tests, but also when you invest your money into companies. When you are long a stock, you are becoming a co-owner who risks his own money while trying to encourage the company to produce more products or do more of its services.

But things are not always this simple. The destruction is often beneficial and creative, too.

Can someone hear the Morse code?

Yes, Logic_Beach's puzzle that has turned out to be a piece of arts ;-) has consumed a lot of my time and energy, indeed. (It is a piece of arts because I have finally discovered an organizing principle that makes it more than a lame bunch of 12 assorted and vague hints suggesting random words that are unlikely to be written by anyone, especially not in the right order among 12! orders.) I find it likely that I am or we are so many big steps ahead of everyone else (in the "ordering principle" as well as some individual words) that I can give one or several hints about the 12-word seed to everyone.

OK. Just the identity of one keyword is the topic of this blog post – even though we have some know-how edge here, too. Can someone solve this for me? It's about 1/100 of the actual puzzle so you shouldn't waste too much time. If you find it hard or unsolvable, give up quickly.

The Bifurcation album has 10 compositions: YouTube, BandCamp. The second composition is 2:42-5:17 at YouTube. You may download it for $1.00 here or, more likely, for $0.00 here if you click at "buy", fill the price $0.00, and download the files, ideally WAV (uncompressed, about 0.3 GB).

Satoši or pal just moved BTC 50 mined in 2009

Some Christians are waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Similarly, some fans of the Bitcoin expect Satoši to return – a somewhat scary event because he claims to own one million coins.

Finally, hours ago, BTC 50 mined on February 9th, 2009, about one month after Bitcoin were live, were moved to 2 new wallets, as 40 (an old-format address where they keep on sitting) plus 10 (going to a mixer to obfuscate the flows), after whopping 11 years:

17XiVVooLcdCUCMf9s4t4jTExacxwFS5uh

One month is a rather short time and it is very likely that the mover is either Satoši Nakamoto or someone who knows him.

The logical relationship between quantum gravity and extended objects

Aside from the damn time-consuming Bitcoin puzzle (which may be ingenious or stupid, we will see in two days) – something that destroyed 30% of the night between Sunday and Monday for me – I spent hours by thinking about some good old topics, like the relationship between Matrix theory and wormholes, Matrix theory and the black hole complementarity, and more.

I have some biological instincts that want me to share the findings but I have learned enough to see "it is throwing pearls to swine" (dear readers will surely appreciate this assessment) so I won't discuss my advances. If I generously squeeze all my modesty into this sentence, a 22nd century historian decoding some old notebooks sounds like a better audience to me. Let me write about the writings by others instead.

In recent months, many people started to post their semi-technical essays to hep-th. Today's example is

A symmetry principle for emergent spacetime

by Edgar Shaghoulian (Ithaca). I am interested in the nationality of this bizarre name. OK, in his essay written to win some money from an "essay contest" where real physicists often compete with the armchair physicists (and usually lose), he proposes some relationship between quantum gravity (and the emergent spacetime) on one side and the higher-form symmetries on the other side.

Win $500 easily: a taxi surrounded by 10 trees

OK, here you have the nearly complete solution to the $500 Bitcoin puzzle. No people outside TRF know it, except for the author. The BIP39 seed must be

tree tree tree tree tree TAXI tree tree tree tree tree SOMETHING

and I am donating you almost $500. I hope that the person who can get the funds will reimburse me, at least 50%. At any rate, if he doesn't, people will know that he has probably taken it from this website.



A Krkonoše Mountains taxi driver tried to get to Výrovka. He paid a $100 fine because you can't do it a national park.

SOMETHING is one of the 2048 English BIP39 words; each 16th seed passes the checksum so there are about 128 wallets for different choices of something; one of them should contain over $500. I have checked that neither tree nor taxi nor creek nor water gives the right wallet.

Why is this the right password hiding in that electronic music album, Bifurcations?

South Bohemian CFR: 0.02%-0.06% of those with IgA antibodies die

The official Czech government's sampling measurement of the herd immunity (something I was recommending already three months ago) concluded that only 0.4% (out of the 25k sample) of Czechs had antibodies against Covid-19. Well, that's rather implausible although I can't "rigorously" show that this figure is impossibly low. That number of "cases" (40,000) would surpass the officially "confirmed cases" only by a factor of 5 or so.



The Strakonice Castle. Strakonice is also famous for the legend (and a theater play) about Švanda the Titman. He wanted to marry a babe but her family thought he was poor. So he decided to earn the millions by playing the bagpipes. Fortunately, his mother was a fairy who turned the bagpipes to magic ones. He could enchant even princesses... however, an aide wanted to rob him etc.

But antibody tests are subtle and diverse and the details matter.

A new test in South Bohemia led by Martin Kuba (ODS) has ended up with a very different result. 5% of the Czechs have already developed Covid-19 IgA antibodies (early antibodies to fight against the infection). Note that due to this "IgA", this South Bohemian test looks a notch more transparent and well-defined than the nationwide one. We weren't really told at all "what kind of a test" the damn government experiment was using.

Some people favor extremely unlikely, contrived hypotheses

Under the article about Witten's spaceships, we had exchanges with Jakub Scholtz, a postdoc at Durham. Of course, I remember him as a brilliant Harvard undergrad whom I was officially supervising as a coach of a sort – which means about one or two meetings per year. We should have done more than this bare minimum! ;-) But there was something Czech about our staying near the minimum.

At any rate, in Fall 2019, he and James Unwin submitted a paper that Witten has built upon, one proposing that some anomalies in the Solar System are explained by something better than the ninth planet, namely a small black hole. (The word "primordial" is really redundant if not a lipstick on a pig. Because it's supposed to replace a hypothetical planet, the mass of that beast obviously has to be just planetary, not stellar, so it can't be a stellar black hole. The word "primordial" is just a fancy way to describe the disadvantage of the theory that the black hole is much lighter than the range of astrophysical black hole masses that is well supported by observations and theories linked to them.)

OK, it's a very appealing hypothesis that we have some inch-sized black hole at the outskirts of the Solar System. If you followed the conversation, you know that I remained skeptical about the picture. Well, I surely find it somewhat plausible that there are such small black holes around. But I primarily remained skeptical about the suggestion that they have found new evidence in favor of the theory – anything that you only see gravitationally may be suggested to be a black hole but are there specific reasons to think so in this case?

Feigenbaum helps you to solve a puzzle, win BTC 0.05

An atypically intelligent Bitcoin user, perhaps Satoshi Nakamoto ;-), has celebrated the Bitcoin halving 22 hours ago by creating a Bitcoin wallet with BTC 0.05 (originally 0.03) which you may confiscate – it's about $450 – if you solve the following sophisticated puzzle:

A puzzle to celebrate the Halving! Solve it to win the ~0.03 BTC inside

The public key of the wallet is bc1qj7467e7r5pdfpypm03wyvguupdrld0ul2gcutg – click to see that the balance is still there – and you may decode the private key as well if you download 10 WAV files with electronic music. You need the uncompressed files, they have 347 MB in total. Write "$0.00" for the price you want to pay, and then pick WMA before you click at "download" for each.

The water conservation law and irrationality of the fight against drought

Thank God I could switch back to the "classic Blogger" user interface.

Yesterday, Pilsen and much of Czechia has received an inch of rain, after several dry weeks. Quite generally, people say that Czechia tends to suffer from drought. That's partly because people have forgotten about the 1997 and 2002 floods; and they just sometimes mindlessly parrot the whining. I am confident that the plants have looked incredibly green and healthy for years; there is no clear sign of drought in the landscape that you could see by eyeballing.



The Great Bolevec Pond

In average, Pilsen should receive 600 mm of rain a year, evenly spread over the year which is some 11.5 mm per week. Interdrought.cz shows that Czechia was mostly dry on Sunday – it will be much "whiter" a week later (the new maps are published at Monday 1 pm or so) – but it was worse in April and July 2019, for example.

Deborah Cohen, BBC, and models vs theories

Just like a huge fraction of pundits including former "rightwingers" has completely failed in this viral test of their lifetime, we sometimes see the opposite cases, journalists at unexpected places who have passed the test.



Dr Deborah Cohen is an award-winning health journalist who has a doctor degree – which actually seems to be related to medical sciences – and who is working for the BBC Newsnight now. I think that the 13-minute-long segment above is an excellent piece of journalism.

It's not shocking that most new cases have stayed at home

Lots of things happened around the virus and the reactions of societies to the virus. Much of Europe started to reopen, 30 million new jobless claims were filed in the U.S. in six weeks; a few million will be added today. Meanwhile, Neil Ferguson who was the "scientist" behind the crackpot models predicting millions of dead Britons (by now) was pushed to resign.

The reason wasn't that his crackpottery left the British economy in ruins – no one seems to care about this detail – but because he was fudging a married woman during the lockdown. Ms Antonia Staats, 38, was visiting him. She lives with her husband and kids elsewhere in the U.K., in a GBP 1.9 million villa, and she is green (an activist at Avaaz, an ecoterrorist group). I would bet that she has been the actual driver behind Ferguson's hysterical pseudoscientific predictions (including the climate ones) in recent years and he is just an irrelevant puppet. She probably told him "I will fudge you but you need to spread the hysteria". And he did. Why would a rich, attractive, married woman date such an ugly loser? Her green fanaticism seems like the only possible answer. Alternatively, Staats is a puppet as well and the primordial driver is her sponsor George Soros.

Sue Denim has analyzed the leaked software used in Ferguson's "model" of the epidemics. She's been a coder for 30 years, at Google etc. The model is "SimCity without the graphics", a silly computer game that remembers some attributes of individual people. It uses a random generator and the outcomes often look very different during different runs. There are lots of bugs that are admitted to be bugs. It's rubbish and everyone who has used this model should retract his or her papers, she recommends.

May 11th-12th could be great days to short the Bitcoin

Each 10 minutes in average (a Poisson process), the Bitcoin miners create a new block. So far, 628,912 blocks have been mined, see e.g. btc.com for the current situation.

Each 2016 blocks (which is exactly 14 days if the block spacing is exactly 10 minutes), the difficulty of the useless mathematical tasks that the miners have to solve is reevaluated to keep the frequency at "one block per 10 minutes". The nearest readjustment will be tomorrow, the block 312*2016 = 628,992. The change to the difficulty will be just some modest 1-2%.



However, each 210,000 blocks which is about 3.993 years – it's a nice numerology appreciated by Satoshi Nakamoto that 4 years have 2,104,000 minutes, close to 2.1 million, and that's where the limit "21 million Bitcoin" comes from, after you multiply 210,000 by the geometric series 50+25+12.5+... = 100 – something more dramatic is happening: the halvening. The "lump sum" part of the reward for one block drops by 50%. So the Bitcoin started with a BTC 50 per block, got reduced to BTC 25 in mid 2012, then to BTC 12.5 in mid 2016, and will get reduced to BTC 6.25 on next Monday or Tuesday, see the halvening countdown.

Kurz's Unlocked Alliance may become more important than the EU

Covid-19 has spread very differently in various countries and countries reacted very differently to the epidemics. Some nations were truly hysterical, some were spared, some citizenries were rather responsible and obedient, some countries see a greater support for a nearly permanent lockdown (insanity) than others, and so on.



Karel Gott, Austria's representative at the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest. The complete failure of the contest to predict that the Pilsner guy would be a leading Central European singer in the following 50 years counts as extra evidence that the contest is rubbish mostly promoting kitsch and trash. ABBA's 1974 victory at "Waterloo" ;-) is the only substantial exception.

Czechia responded in a pragmatic, early, China-like style. We did have rather draconian measures – which started before our first fatality – but it was always agreed by everybody that we don't really want such a thing for an extremely long time. We wanted to show to ourselves that we may defeat the virus if we want, and that would be the time for reopening. So by the end of May, all services should be restarted and the face masks (plus some regulations about the 5-feet distance) will be the only clearly visible trace of the unfree Covid epoch. People are split on whether we will keep the face masks for a long time – once you talk about the late July, the voices are about 50-50.

In the most recent 24 hours, we had just 14-18 new infections, down from 380 a day at the end of March; about 250 people have died. The downtrend was temporarily indistinguishable from the noise but by now, it has become totally obvious. Yes, our \(R_0\) was below \(1\) and \(R_0\approx 0.7\) in a recent official estimate. The disease is fading away. Many officials think that the face masks were crucial for taming the virus. The duration of the lockdown has been comparable to 2 months which is economically hurtful but it's not devastating.

Have I had a Covid finger?

I believe that a large portion of the citizens of the Western civilization have been exposed to the virus (and that's the true main reason why the disease is disappearing in many countries).

This opinion is confirmed by numerous immunity surveys that have found Covid-19 antibodies in "dozens of percent" of people in many suburbs, districts, or small nations (Santa Clara, Heinsberg, Iran, and many others). Czechia has been spared but I believe that the percentage of immune people is also between 5 and 25 percent here and the fatalities are tiny mainly because the masks guarantee the low doses for almost all of us. We will get an estimate of this number from the Czech government's "measurement of herd immunity".

For this reason, it's not unreasonable to ask whether I have had Covid-19 as well. Well, I've had some opportunities to catch it, like when I bought several kebabs (with a discount) from a local Bangladesh-born dude in March and April etc. (Twitter search helpfully reveals that I bought my first quarantine-era kebab on April 2nd in the evening, it would be rather normal 4 days to symptoms.) Since January 10th to mid February, I also had a slightly painful left shoulder. It was feeling similar to a mild fracture and I have also seen that it could be a possible Covid symbol. I wasn't even capable of figuring out whether it was muscles, joints, or bones... In the winter, I've had some signs of sensitive bones (lack of vitamin D and sunshine) – two floorball broken bones in 10 years.



This is a photograph from the New York Times, not mine! Mine was 1 ring finger on the right hand and milder and prettier. ;-)

But today in the morning, this picture randomly appeared in front of me on Twitter. The New York Times says that this symptom is an emerging new fingerprint of Covid-19, indicating a healthy reaction of the immune system. These hints were already discussed at Today.com two weeks ago.

Elon Musk, a rare CEO who cares about freedom

When I returned from a trip, Steven S. told me that Elon Musk had had a meltdown. Maybe. But in the recent hour, I "liked" a greater number of Elon Musk's tweets than in the previous history of the Universe combined. And he may be the only one among the CEOs who "gets it", as I will explain below.

OK, his GF Grimeš is mad at him and she is expecting his baby on Monday. He plans to sell almost all his physical possessions, including all the houses (worth $100 million in total at this moment). Physical possessions only drag you down. Things that you own end up owning you, as a character stated in a movie. If you buy Gene Wilder's old house, you must protect it and its historical authenticity, however.

Whether Elon was high or not, he also managed to sing the U.S. anthem. I could sing the U.S. anthem five years before I learned the basic English words. I didn't understand what I was singing but it was right. Who taught me that? Well, the speech emulator at Commodore 64. It's pretty remarkable to realize that in the mid 1980s, we could have been impressed that a home computer was capable of emulating human speech so that one could slightly understand it! ;-)

Witten demands 999 spacecrafts to find Planet Nine (maybe a black hole)

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton seems to be all about "tangible science" these days.

Two weeks ago, Juan Maldacena studied the magnetic black holes of the Mount Everest mass whose magnetism is so strong that the Higgs mechanism is undone.

As Orion Pax has pointed out, his fellow Breakthrough Prize winner Edward Witten may have trumped Juan in the degree of realism of his down-to-Earth science. (It's down-to-Earth as well as all other directions, as we will see soon.) The astro-ph paper is called

Searching for a Black Hole in the Outer Solar System

Witten has been apparently persuaded that there exists Planet Nine.

Important ingredients of science that are said to be unscientific

Mankind is drowning in fake science and it is overwhelmed by "experts" who don't really understand anything but who are being enthusiastically promoted by the fake news media.

In many cases, these "experts" seemingly authoritatively say that "you can't do this or that because it is unscientific". In most cases, such assertions are incorrect. They are not just "exaggerations". More often, they are upside down.

Here is a list – a highly incomplete list – of 12 widespread assertions that are wrong and they are importantly wrong.

1. It is unscientific to disagree with the consensus
2. It is unscientific to agree with a majority of scientists
3. It is unscientific to say that something is likely or unlikely
4. A theory is unscientific if it says that a quantity is meaningless if or when it is not observed by a well-defined procedure
5. It is unscientific to use aesthetic criteria while picking a theory
6. A theory is unscientific if it agrees with an older theory and they cannot be distinguished in currently doable experiments
7. It is unscientific to reduce a scientific question to an elaborate calculation or a complex mathematical argument
8. It is unscientific to dismiss an experiment (and evidence building on it) as a fraud or bad science
9. It is unscientific to consider people's subjective preferences and/or money in the scientific selection of the best policy
10. It is unscientific to dismiss an observed pattern as a coincidence or a fluke
11. It is unscientific to conclude that an observed pattern is probably not a coincidence and there must be a more detailed explanation
12. It is unscientific to claim that there is positive evidence in favor of a theory

Again, let me emphasize that the sentences above are myths. Let us spend some time with each of them.

Lockdown madness is a triumph of the precautionary principle

As recently as on February 14th 2020, I wouldn't have believed that it was possible for billions of people in the world – plus their elites and "elites", governments, Parliaments, media, bosses of the business world etc. – to voluntarily agree with government regulations that force them to stay home – with the justification that it's desirable to fight against a cousin of flu.

But here we are. 25 million Americans became unemployed in 5 weeks, the U.S. GDP dropped by 4.8% in Q1 of 2020 and Q2 will show much worse numbers. The situation is similar across the world – not only in "the West" but in most other countries, too. Many people want this insanity to continue. As far as I know, it has never happened in the history of civilizations that the bulk of a large enough nation, let alone the world, was kept at home for several months.

FREE AMERICA NOW

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2020

The general public has failed in the test of common sense, the would-be elites have failed, and yes, I must praise Elon Musk as an exception. How did it happen that a majority of the people have agreed with the lockdown – something that only seems to bring catastrophes and no advantages?

I think that this outcome should be blamed on the increasingly pathological propaganda that was spread in the recent decades and especially on the precautionary principle.

In California, medical expertise became heresy

Martin Kasík and JWSpry at Twitter have sent me the following 68-minute long video

Dr Erickson COVID 19 FULL Briefing AUDIO FIXED VERSION

---

(a BitChute backup here)

where Dr Dan Erickson and, to a lesser extent, another Californian doctor (Dr Artin Massihi) are explaining why it's unwise for California to be quarantined. They produce many conclusions based on the data, sometimes the data that were emerging in recent weeks, as well as some wisdom that I have called the "kindergarten basics of immunology".

They were presenting those ideas and data as genuine practical doctors who have worked with the Covid-19 patients.

The original copy of the video has attracted millions of viewers and was censored by the YouTube coronazis.

Mauna Loa: rise of CO2 per year was between 2.1-2.8 ppm in April 2020

The Great Viral Depression may have already lowered the CO2 for this day from 416.1 to 415.9 ppm and the temperature from 14.159 to 14.157 °C, congratulations to everybody

You may go to a NOAA page which offers you several time series with the CO2 concentration. Let us pick the last one, the weekly data.



If you care about the columns in that file, right now, let me say that you may find the CO2 concentrations measured in Hawaii between May 19th, 1974, and April 19th, 2020 (a week ago). The dates are given both by year/month/day as well as year-in-decimals, the integer between 4 and 7 is how many days were used to get the average, -999.99 indicates a missing week, and there are some figures to compare the week with the week 1 year earlier and 10 years earlier.

Czech government lost a lockdown lawsuit, partly surrendered

Have the lawyers allowed to restore freedom in Czechia?

Czechia has clearly tamed the disease, because of the Covid-19 deceleration in many countries as well as our face mask policies. We had just about 50 new cases yesterday – and two fudging deaths in 24 hours. It would make sense to terminate the lockdown nonsense as soon as possible. But we're formally at the beginning of the 5-phase schedule to reopen the country.

New Edge: I've been a user of Google Chrome since Alpha versions but I just switched to the new Microsoft Edge (also on Android, Apple) which is a clone of Chrome based on Chromium, with all Chrome extensions that may be imported (like bookmarks) and everything else, and I find Microsoft less politically unacceptable than Google. Search engines work but can't be imported easily.

The evolution of the Czech restrictions confirms my April 7th predictions.

Two days ago, we learned from the government that the schedule could be accelerated: the last step (including the reopening of generic restaurants) could be added to the 4th step on May 25th, instead of June 8th. That looked promising. But the acceleration was put on steroids hours later.

An analytic proof of the \(abc\) conjecture?

LHCb anomaly strengthens: the decay \(B^{0}\rightarrow K^{*0}\mu^{+}\mu^{-}\) has seen the increase from 3 sigma to 3.4 sigma. It is not the only flavor anomaly at the LHCb. See the preprint and Particle Bites

---

Swampland: a fun Harvard-Cornell paper unifying the Weak Gravity and Distance Conjectures using BPS black holes

Shinichi Mochizuki has given a long proof of the \(abc\) conjecture, it was recently published in a peer-reviewed journal, but only a tiny number of people in the world have a justifiable reason to be certain about the validity (or invalidity) of the proof.

Maybe there is a more elementary proof (as well)?

The \(abc\) conjecture says the following.

For any (arbitrarily small) \(\epsilon\gt 0\), there exists a (large enough but fixed) constant \(C_\epsilon\) such that each triplet of relatively prime (i.e. having no common divisors) integers \(a,b,c\) that satisfies \[

a+b=c

\] the following inequality still holds:\[

\Large \max (\abs a, \abs b, \abs c) \leq C_\epsilon \prod_{p|(abc)} p^{1+\epsilon}.

\] That's it. I used larger fonts because it's still a key inequality of this blog entry. Morally, the conjecture says that the ratio of \(c\), the maximum of \(|a|,|b|,|c|\) where we assume \(a+b=c\) but also positiveness of all these numbers, and \(abc\), with all copies of prime factors removed and exponentiated to the power of \(1+\epsilon\) arbitrarily close to 1, is bounded.

A negative price of oil futures

The global hysteria surrounding the Chinese cold has locked and wrecked a big part of the world economy. Among other things, the oil price dropped to the vicinity of $18-$25. However, aside from the "spot price", companies and people also trade the "futures", effectively bets on the future price at the moment of the expiry of that future.



You could have bought these barrels for a dollar or two, and also for minus one dollar or minus $5,000.

And something shocking happened to the Crude Oil WTI (U.S.) Front Month Futures last night. The price went from the "high" of +$16.74 towards +$3 and then +$2 and then +$1... After some minutes of hesitation, it did reach +$0.01 per barrel. I really mean a penny for that huge cylinder. As a theorist, I was extremely curious whether the price was allowed to go negative.

And it did (people who watched things carefully did notice that the exchange did allow the negative values some time ago). Minutes were enough to probe –$1 but some moments later, the daily minimum of –$37.63 was set. It was oscillating between that minimum and –$20 for a while. Hours later, it apparently went above zero again, showing +$1.35 per barrel now.

Hysteria about the unknown long-term effects of the virus

The most widespread "subtype" of the global Covid-19 hysteria is the worry that "we will all die" or at least "the number of Covid-19 fatalities will be staggering".

Since the beginning, careful thinkers among us knew this to be nonsense: the case fatality rate clearly isn't "dramatically" different from that of flu. It was clear to some of us from the beginning that lots of mild cases were and are completely overlooked which is why the probability of death assuming an infection is correspondingly lower than naively expected. A Stanford study in the Santa Clara County, California, says that it's lower by a factor of 50-85. The actual probability of death from Covid-19 is surely way below 1%

Also, we see that the exponential growth of the cases or fatalities cannot ever continue. From the moment of reaching e.g. "one death per million people", every nation or city may see at most 4-5 weeks of growth and then the disease starts to stagnate and decrease. Yitzhak Ben Israel, a famous Israeli scientist, observed that the pattern of the deaths is pretty much universal, regardless of policies.

So it seems clear that Lombardy (and similarly heavily affected places) is the worst case scenario: some 0.1% of the population dies before the peak and some extra 0.1% after the peak. Typical places will have much less than 0.1% of deaths. The herd immunity is basically achieved at these places; one-third of Chelsea, a Hispanic working-class suburb in North of Greater Boston, has antibodies at this moment.

Even the "twice 0.1% of population dies" worst case scenario is equivalent to the doubling of the overall death rate for two months or a 10% increase per one year. And it's a one-time event – the following seasons are surely going to be weaker. Despite 2 months of the global shutdown and the unlimited hysteria (with 24-hour-long special broadcasts at many TV stations), the new virus still killed 3-4 times fewer people in the world than flu normally does during the average season (see a paper on different estimates of flu fatalities per year). Indeed, it's unfair to compare Covid-19 with flu because the former still cannot compete with the latter!

Pirk: Covid-19 was a type of flu for me

Czech VIPs heart surgeon Jan Pirk (who has done some 7,000 heart surgeries) did an interview for Euro News dot CZ.

When I had a flu, I felt close to death, Covid-19 wasn't such a burden for my body, heart surgeon Pirk says

He was feeling lousy, he had a fever, intestinal problems, he didn't eat and slept all the time. However, he still insists that the coronavirus is a strain of the flu. "Despite the criticisms, I am not changing my view. In fact, when I compare the disease to the flu that I had three years ago, when I felt like dying, the coronavirus seems like a milder disease. We must realize that only Czechia has recorded 1500 flu fatalities in 2019," Prof Pirk (the chief physician of IKEM) claims in the exclusive interview for Euro News.

The doubling time always gets longer and longer

Most of the people who try to think about Covid-19 seem to be utterly brainwashed by the villains on TV channels, the flatteners of the curves, and assorted crackpots, liars, and terrorists. But it always shocks me when I see the people whom I expect to know better who also parrot some deep misconceptions.



OK, we were talking about the influence of the mandatory masks on the growth or decrease of the epidemics. And someone told me "but the disease started to decrease already before March 18th", the date when Czechia introduced the mandatory masks. Now, the words "disease decreases" aren't really well-defined but the claim that the "disease either slowed or decelerated" before March 18th seems obviously wrong to me.

Before March 18th, we were really consistently going from units of cases to thousands of cases. So what sort of a "slowdown" could you possibly refer to during the period that looked like an exponential growth? I wondered why it wasn't obvious to someone else. What did he mean by the "slowdown before March 18th?"

T2K: neutrinos have a CP-violating phase

Evidence increased to 3 sigma, published in Nature

Swampland: McNavara and Vafa argue that in \(d\geq 4\) quantum gravity, because of the swampland thinking and the lack of adjustable parameters, baby universes are possible but only if their wave function is unique i.e. a Hartle-Hawking wave function.

The six quarks \((u,c,t;d,s,b)\) have six masses which are eigenvalues. But the up-type quarks, mass eigenstates, aren't exactly \(SU(2)\) partners of the down-type quarks, mass eigenstates. Instead, they are related by the CKM matrix\[

\begin{bmatrix} d^\prime \\ s^\prime \\ b^\prime \end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix} V_{ud} & V_{us} & V_{ub} \\ V_{cd} & V_{cs} & V_{cb} \\ V_{td} & V_{ts} & V_{tb} \end{bmatrix} \begin{bmatrix} d \\ s \\ b \end{bmatrix}.

\] The \(3\times 3\) matrix is a \(U(3)\) matrix which would have 9 independent parameters but 5 may be eliminated by changing the phases of the 6 eigenstates (one overall change of all these phases doesn't change the \(U(3)\) matrix). The remaining 4 parameters are equivalent to 3 parameters of an \(SO(3)\) rotation matrix decorated with an extra complex CP-violating phase \(\delta_{13}\) which is about \(1.2\pm 0.1\) radians.

The \(SO(3)\) part of the CKM matrix is approximately\[

\begin{bmatrix}
0.9743 \pm 0.0002 & 0.2253 \pm 0.0007 & 0.0035^{+0.0002}_{-0.0001} \\
0.2252 \pm 0.0007 & 0.9734 \pm 0.0002 & 0.041^{+0.001}_{-0.001} \\
0.0087^{+0.0003}_{-0.0003} & 0.040^{+0.001}_{-0.001} & 0.99915^{+0.00002}_{-0.00005}
\end{bmatrix}.

\] Now, just like there are 3+3 species of quarks, there are 3+3 leptons – three charged leptons and their corresponding neutrinos \((e^-,\mu^-,\tau^-;\nu_e, \nu_\mu, \nu_\tau)\).

Maldacena: coronas of some magnetic black holes restore the electroweak symmetry

Juan Maldacena may have won a $10 million bet by placing the following picture in his new paper.



The paper is titled Comments on magnetic black holes and Maldacena is very playful: the picture above is simplified and reprinted as Figure 4b.

Herd immunity assuming the co-existence of different R0 regions

Most of the blog posts in recent two months were about Covid-19; I am sure that not everyone likes it. A month or two before the scientific public (and an even longer time before the general public) has figured it out, the TRF folks understood that Covid-19 is effectively just another variation of flu (and should be treated as such; this remains the most important divisive point that separates the sensible people from the hysterical demagogues), it's probably significantly older than from December 2019, flattening of curves doesn't save any lives, almost all similar restrictions are just wastes of money, what is really effective is to isolate the vulnerable and leave the free world for the resilient, the economic suicide and the enthusiasm around it is shocking, lockdowns seem harmful by the empirical data, viral doses matter for fatality rates and probably are increased by lockdowns, masks are more effective than restrictions of people's movement for the reduction of the basic reproduction number R0, and dozens of other key points.



Zoom in by the mousewheel, the map carries the information about the U.S. states and other things, too. Full screen.

In recent days, it becomes empirically clear that numerous countries have peaked as well – and they did so because they have reached the herd immunity calculated for the value of R0 coming from their recent policies, see e.g. this claim about Lombardy where the drop of the deaths in recent days was staggering (from 458 to 110 if you cherry-pick days a little bit).

Fred Singer: 1924-2020

I only learned the sad news today: the A1-class atmospheric physicist Fred Singer died in his sleep (that's how you want to do it) on April 6th. He was 95.5. I was fortunate to know him closely since 2007.

See Marc Sheppard's "My Long Good-Bye to S. Fred Singer" in the American Thinker.

He was born to a rather stereotypical Jewish family in Vienna: his mother was a homemaker while his father was a jeweler. During the Anschluss of Austria, he was 14 and eligible for a children's transport. In England, he became a teenage optician. He emigrated to Ohio, the U.S., and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. But at that moment, he already had his 1943 bachelor degree in electrical engineering. In 1944, he also added A.M. from Princeton University. Think twice about the speed of his academic progress (that took place on the background of those rather serious political and personal events: he would be surely sent to a gas chamber at the moment of his Princeton A.M. degree if he failed to emigrate a few years earlier, compare it with the snowflakes of 2020 who want to get everything for free because they believe that they're a group that is discriminated against and someone has frowned at them).

He continued at that famous New Jersey school and got his PhD for cosmic ray showers in 1948. You might know some names from his PhD defense committee. Singer's adviser was John Wheeler and his committee included Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Nice.