Ripple vs SEC: has the elimination of the crypto Ponzi schemes begun?

PF 2021

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The cryptocurrency world isn't just a part of the criminal underground. It is something worse, a top symbol of the absolute degeneration of the Millennial generation. A proper organized criminal knows that he is cheeky, he is doing something wrong, but it's fun. The Bitcoin Millennials are worse. They have convinced themselves that by redefining the reality, they are virtuous. Holy cow, I hate them.



The intrinsic price of one Bitcoin is self-evidently zero. It's true by definition. There are no material assets or rights hiding behind the record in the Bitcoin ledger. How do the Bitcoin Millennials react to this point? They tell you that the value of anything is relative, a result of social conventions, and when many of them believe that one Bitcoin is worth $28,000, it's just worth $28,000. The value is absolutely relative. What's worse: the truth is about everything is absolutely relative for them. The cryptocurrency trading is an example of the absolute victory of moral relativism and postmodernism within this fudged-up cohort. They are a hopelessly brainwashed stupid herd of sheep who are also staggeringly poor, too lame to study the matrix model, and too flabby to defend the nation according to the U.S. generals.

Puss' and Pup's cake: not a promising way to do physics

Josef Čapek (1887-1945) was a visual artist and the older brother of Karel Čapek, an essential playwright in the interwar Czechoslovakia. In 1920, Karel also wrote the play R.U.R. which introduced the word "robot" to the world. Well, that word was actually invented by Josef, the brother-painter. Aside from some paintings, Josef is also known for the 1929 series "Adventures of Puss and Pup" stories for kids.

After the 1938 annexation of Sudetenland by Germany, Karel was driven by some nasty pro-German trolls to pneumonia and death on December 25th (what a date to die). Josef's life continued for some time. Scholars may add places like Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard to their CV. Our German friends have exploited Josef's skills, too, so between 1939 and 1945, he added the following places to his CV: Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Bergen-Belsen. Do you have a similarly impressive CV? ;-) He was working as a sign painter (creating nice pedigrees for the Nazi apparatchiks), a painter of walls in these concentration camps, and died in the last one when an epidemic of typhus exploded there. Mortality of untreated typhus is between 10-60 percent but the Germans worried less than now they worry about Covid-19 which has below 0.2 percent.

Midsize miracles of perturbative string theory

A big part of the reason why all competent high-energy BSM+QG theoretical physicists are basically certain that string theory is the correct unifying theory of this Universe is that

* it makes the right qualitative predictions (without assuming something equivalent) of the qualitative traits of the approximate laws of physics that were determined empirically
* it solves problems with consistency and finiteness in a way that looks "infinitely unlikely" or "miraculous" in a generic similar yet non-stringy framework (and the alternative theories are the greatest examples)
* it interpolates between various kinds of effective theories in ways that would also look miraculous to someone not familiar with the "stringy exception"

Concerning the first point, we must realize that the progress in physics has been incremental and for quite some time, physicists were switching from a working hypothesis to a "theory that is one step deeper" than the previous one. String theory really does nothing else than that, too. You may ask whether the step is greater or smaller than previous steps but this question is operationally meaningless because there exists no way to compare the steps between completely different pairs of situations.



Click the screenshot to 3D navigate the 6D Calabi-Yau with your mouse

Was the electroweak theory a bigger step than Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism? One cannot say, the conclusion is purely subjective or convention-dependent because the two advances are not commensurable.

Poland likely to outlaw the Big Tech censorship

Two weeks ago, I praised Hungary for its protection of the European value and the traditional family and sexual identity rules in particular. Well, the other European country that actually cares about what the West used to symbolize is preparing something impressive, too:

Poland threatens hefty fines for social media companies that censor legal speech, users everywhere celebrate (RT)

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Poland to Pass Law Protecting Online Free Speech Against Big Tech Censorship (Breitbart)

Zbigniew Ziobro, the minister of justice, is preparing the law. A new fully online appeal court should be created. If the likes of Facebook, Twitter... remove your content or account and you think that what you wrote was legal, you may appeal. The posting or account will be restored or... the company will face a €1.8 million fine.

The master of overfitting

Merry Christmas 2020!

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Back in 2014, I competed in the

Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge (leaderboards)

At the end of the contest, when everyone could see that I was "apparently a frontrunner", I teamed up with Christian Veelken (giving him some 20% of "my team") who was actually an active coder, unlike me, and (while he probably didn't change things too much) we ended up as #1 among #1784 teams in the public leaderboard. That nice ranking dropped to #8 in the private leaderboard which mattered so we ended up without any financial compensation (winners got tens of thousands of dollars).



"With four parameters you can fit an elephant to a curve, with five you can make him wiggle his trunk" - John von Neumann

Just to be clear, the #8 was still many categories ahead of all the people who are supposed to do such things professionally. Only machine learning experts i.e. "purely computer people" (plus me, perhaps) succeeded in the contest. The best CMS professional experimental physicist who also enjoyed this challenge (co-organized by ATLAS, the competitor of CMS) was Tommaso Dorigo at #640 (public leaderboard) and #743 (final, decisive, private leaderboard). With all my humility, CMS is a different league than your humble correspondent, isn't it? ;-)

Insane hysteria over a new strain of Covid-19 no longer surprises me

...but I am still infuriated by it and I will always be...

The SARS-CoV-2 virus normally has 29,903 base pairs which you are invited to memorize (30 kB uncompressed). Well, that's how the page presents it – as if it were a DNA double helix – but the virus really carries an RNA, not DNA, and it doesn't have base pairs but just the single bases, right? RNA is a single helix and instead of the A,C,G,T letters of DNA, it has the A,C,G,U letters.

At any rate, both RNA and DNA normally mutate all the time. Two humans' DNA differ in millions of base pairs (1/1,000 of the 2 times 3 bilion bases typically differ in two humans). The Covid-19-causing virus is also evolving and mutating and many mutations have been observed. The most carefully observed one was D614G. The old virus had D at some position 614 which was replaced by the newer G. The new one is the G614 virus. And it was seen to be more contagious. No one really cared much because the media and stupid politicians haven't told the millions of brainless sheep to be hysterical.

Mobile data conspiracy theories and scientific illiteracy

Some fellow opponents of the Covid lockdowns are anti-mobile-communications conspiracy theorists. Vaccines are being served by some malicious powerful puppet masters along with a new generation of the mobile data and these things will cripple the world, they say.

You can imagine that I have mixed feelings about such allies (and the Nokia stocks in my portfolio, about 25% in the red numbers now, are among the smallest reasons for the mixed feelings LOL). On one hand, the Covid hysteria is the most urgent threat for the civilization in 2020 which is why one can't afford to dismiss too many allies. On the other hand, fear of the microwaves is quite an embarrassing symbol of scientific illiteracy. We live in a very imperfect world where we're forced to befriend people who are this ignorant of science in order to survive.

A friend of mine is into Eastern religions and she's also afraid of the waves that are used by the cell phones. They may cause cancer or other diseases, she tends to believe. Clearly, this fear is widespread. I am confident that it is correct to say that everyone who is really afraid of such things has zero understanding of physics, even at the undergraduate level, and if he or she has physics degrees, they couldn't have been legitimately earned degrees.

EU encourages Bulgaria's fascist distortion of the Macedonian history

On Friday, Czechia and Slovakia teamed up again, and while ignoring the Velvet Divorce, we and our brothers acted as one nation and we vetoed an EU document (mostly a document pushed by Bulgaria) on the accession of North Macedonia (and Albania) despite the fact that (and maybe because, as I will explain) both Czechia and Slovakia are arguably greatest supporters of the enlargement of the EU.



Skopje, North Macedonia

We're often talking about the incorporation of the Western Balkans into the EU. "Western Balkans" is the Western part of the peninsula and in practice, the phrase "Western Balkans" refers to the combined territory of (former) Yugoslavia and Albania – usually minus Slovenia (even though it was a part of Yugoslavia) because it's already far enough from the peninsula proper and politically tightly aligned with Austria.

Hungary: an unexpected beacon of the European values?

In Hungary, the mother is a woman, the father is a man, and the sex is determined when you're born. What a shocking sequence of propositions ;-)

Two years ago, Székesfehérvár was trying to become the 2023 European Capital of Culture, something that my hometown of Pilsen could still easily become in 2015.



This was one of the videos in which these folks promoted themselves. They were abruptly eliminated because the video features too high a percentage of happy, white, straight, and even Christian people. And the European Union, the NGOs connected to its rectum, and other would-be humanist entities don't like such people! White people are bad, the EU says, almost like the orange people.

Needless to say, the conflicts between the common sense pro-European Hungary and the unhinged anti-European EU didn't start in 2018. The history of this increasingly tense relationship largely overlaps with the biography of Viktor Orbán, the current PM.

WSJ shows a trace of a spine while dealing with a fake doctor

Leftists are defined as the pests that are ruining and poisoning mankind by inserting and claiming "equality" everywhere – by denying the self-evident fact that almost no two things in the world are actually equal. For this reason, they are also responsible for the bulk of "grade inflation" and "inflation of degrees" and similar pathological trends in the Western education systems. They want to selectively help the people in certain groups (especially but not always groups that they belong to) and hurt others – so they constantly claim that the former are "equal" to the latter although (especially when we compare certain individuals) the former are self-evidently worse than the latter.

The wife of a left-wing politician who is believed by many to replace Donald Trump within five weeks (after what looks like a demonstrably fraudulent election) – let me call her Mrs Still Bidet because my point is far more general – is using the title "Dr" at many places. What is the justification for the degree? When she was 55 (that's much higher than the age when almost all talented people get their basic degrees), she received an EdD (doctor of education) degree in educational leadership from the University of Delaware.

The 2020 Nobel talks and the fate of singularities

A few days ago, Roger Penrose and two less famous co-recipients gave the 2020 Nobel Prize lecture.



The Nobel Prize is a relatively famous award, arguably the most famous one in the world, and Penrose is one of the most famous living mathematical physicists. Still, the video above has 16,000 views now; this version of Despacito has over 7 billion views. The ratio is about half a million which places the public interest in science into a perspective.

EU apparatchiks want a 55% CO2 emissions cut by 2030

After the Covid hysterical demagogues have caused lockdowns that have subtracted ~10% from Europe's GDP in a quarter, and perhaps 5% of the GDP in a more permanent sense, I was shocked to find out that the Gr*tenist terrorists (which are pretty much the same people) are still around, too. We surely need to cripple the European economy more than it was crippled so far, they say.

EU leaders agree to cut emissions 55 percent by 2030

The price of carbon indulgences went up from €25 last month to €31 a ton of CO2 (now). It was below €3 in 2013.

Poland (which still naturally exploits King Coal) has been fighting against similar insanities. In the new deal, it's just being stated that "poorer EU members will get a financial help" (how much of a help is being promised and similar details are extremely hard to find out: transparency about the planned EU blow to the national economies isn't needed, is it?) and "nuclear and lower-emissions energy sources will be allowed". The OK to the nuclear power plants is fine but the 55% target is still economically murderous.

Just consider some activities that produce CO2. Personal transportation yields a fifth of that. Will personal transportation contribute a representative 55% cut in the CO2 emissions? This could mean that 55% of the car owners will either forced to stop using cars; or replace their cars by new electric cars by 2030. Are you serious? The average worker has to work for years to earn the money for an electric car that is comparable to his or her current petrol or diesel car; he needs to save for one year to earn just the "electric premium" (roughly €10,000). Don't expect the electric cars to get much cheaper. The electric batteries are likely to become more expensive if the demand builds up.

Celestial sphere and the anti-Wilsonian paradigm

In the mid 1990s, Andrew Strominger and Joe Polchinski would explain their \(p\)-branes and D-branes to each other during the lunches in Santa Barbara. Their brains didn't immediately notice that the ideas were equally insane in the membrane. It took some cycles of digestion to figure out that the branes were really the same thing – and a big explosion of the Second Superstring Revolution was one of the consequences.



The other celestial sphere...

Can this Ansatz for a discovery be repeated? I think that Andrew Strominger (Harvard) and Nima Arkani-Hamed (IAS) have never written a paper together before – if you needed to connect them through co-author relationships, you had to go through someone like Cumrun Vafa or your humble correspondent. Today, they teamed up with two former Strominger's students and here is the first paper:

Celestial Amplitudes from UV to IR

The co-authors are Monica Pate – who has been a Harvard Junior Fellow for a year – and Ana-Maria Raclariu who is a fresh postdoc at the Perimeter Institute. And yes, the paper sort of combines Strominger's and Arkani-Hamed's industries of the recent decade. Strominger was all about the soft particles and hair that may be seen on the celestial sphere etc. (de Boer and Solodukhin studied similar things in 2003, the 2017 revival was due to Strominger, Shao, and Sabrina Speedy Gonzalez Pasterski, the pilot and aircraft constructor); Arkani-Hamed was all about the analytic structure of amplitudes, especially if expressed in twistor-like variables. The industries have been largely isolated although the overlap of the mathematical tools and hypotheses have been self-evident.

On the departure of an AI ethics researcher from Google

Synchlavier has told us about the removal of Timnit Gebru (Wikipedia, Heavy.com, Twitter) from Google's AI ethics research team:

We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says

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...MIT Technology Review...

She was born in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, and her mother is black African. Both parents moved from Eritrea (which is small and was independent from Ethiopia since 1991-1993). Her father died when she was a kid and he was an electrical engineer. My understanding is that he was white but I am not sure. Even with a half-white heritage, you won't find too many Eritrea-born Silicon Valley researchers, I think! She has done AI research in Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Most recently, she was de facto fired from Google.

Optionally mandatory vaccines and conspiracy theories

Like most of my compatriots, I surely plan to avoid the Covid-19 vaccination as long as it is possible. All experts seem to agree that the available Covid-19 vaccines have much more violent and unpleasant side effects than any other vaccines that have been used en masse (mostly local pain, inflammation, sometimes fever, headache etc.). As a kid, I had reactions to regular vaccines (including fainting, a few times) and I have other reasons to think that the costs and damages would safely exceed the benefits for me.



The average size of a Covid-19 shot. A warning for Google's officials and people with a similar IQ: this comment is a joke and the picture above is a party costume.

More generally, if we ignore my idiosyncrasies, some people worry that the vaccine is unsafe. I believe that if a particular vaccine were made with the purpose of helping the people who get it, it is safer than the virus itself (because the vaccine should be something resembling the virus, without the full ability to grow in your body) and the virus isn't terribly harmful. However, I do share worries that the vaccines may be intentionally modified to cause some extra effects.

The best Czech epidemiologist vs Covid brown shirts

A few days ago, I translated the letter from the Czech ex-president Klaus to the current minister of health which protested against Klaus' being cited as a "source of misinformation" on a ministry web page (authored by a private propaganda company and a Russophobic group at the ministry of interior).

Klaus appears as a target of a nasty sentence along with Prof Jiří Beran whose analogous letter to the minister is an even better example of the Coronazis' disrespect for the freedom of speech and for the highest quality science.

I admire Beran not only for his great achievements in epidemiology and related fields (which are mentioned below) but also for his amazing rhetorical skills and refined Czech. So here is the translation of...



Jiří Beran's letter to the minister of health Jan Blatný

Dear minister,

we have never met so let me introduce myself and say several words about me.

My name is Jiří (George) Beran (Ram), I am a physician, candidatae of sciences in epidemiology, an associate professor of epidemiology, and a professor of epidemiology appointed by President Havel. Your minister of health granted a specialized licenses to me, in the field of epidemiology and also the medical microbiology. I have also worked in the terrain as an epidemiologist for three years and I had to solve about a hundred of epidemics in that role.

Boson sampling vs silly quantum computer skeptics

You've heard about quantum computers, right? Last year, Google achieved the quantum supremacy for the first time – performing a calculation on their quantum computer that would take an insanely long time on any classical supercomputer. Meanwhile, the SJWs have demanded the phrase quantum supremacy to be abandoned and replaced with the "quantum black lives matter" or something like that. ;-)



Now, as Scott Aaronson pointed out, Science has published the second quantum supremacy result which was produced by a Chinese group,

Quantum computational advantage using photons,

which performed boson sampling with a transformation of "50 to 100" photons. Now, boson sampling is a computational task that was specifically designed by Aaronson and Arkhipov (note that Aaronson cleverly chose his name to start with Aa... to be ahead of everyone else in the alphabetical lists), building on the work by Tishby and Troyansky, to prove the quantum supremacy.

The leader of the Chinese team is Pan Jianwei (a brother of Pan Tau) who is also the leader of the Jiusan Society, a minor political party in China. It is as independent and cool a political party in China as you can get; like many Scott Aaronson's comrades, it works under the direct leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. :-) The Jiusan Society dares to say that the Chinese people should be prosperous and powerful, try to appreciate the courage.

During the long eclipse

By Ilona Csáková, Roman Horký, and Kamelot

A somewhat less optimistic yet deeper Covid song that Mirai's Put On a Face Mask



00:00 Roman Horký: Hi, along with Ilona Csáková and Kamelot, we recorded a new videoclip. So watch it through the end.

Czech ex-president vs unelected Covid brown shirts

These Corona brown shirts really seem like a fifth column serving some truly pernicious foreign players

I am increasingly worried that the gradual disappearance of freedom and democracy that we were witnessing in the recent decade or so will switch to an abrupt end and a sharp start of a new totalitarian regime. The latest correspondence between the Second President of Czechia, Prof Václav Klaus, and the current minister of health, Assoc Prof Jan Blatný, may be another good example of the clash of the two different worlds.

Klaus has complained that a ministry web has explicitly mentioned him as a source of misinformation about Covid, along with the brilliant immunologist Jiří Beran. The ministry web discusses various types of alleged misinformation about Covid; the last paragraph is dedicated to the VIPs like Klaus and Beran (but if they had more space, they would have included singers and others, too). Well, I consider a significant fraction of the statements mentioned on the page to be misinformation, too. But some are correct and... our constitution still guarantees the freedom of speech (even for those whose statements are considered wrong by me); moreover, the percentage of misinformation is much higher in the articles and statements by those who are trying to fan the hysteria about the most fashionable disease of 2020 and they are not being censored or attacked. These double standards are typical symptoms of a non-democratic political system.

Two interesting swampland papers

Cumrun Vafa's swampland paradigm is the assumption that the apparent consistency conditions of low-energy effective field theory are just a small portion of the conditions that are required for the spectrum and interactions of a theory to be compatible with quantum gravity. Matter coupled to quantum gravity (e.g. string theory which may be a synonym) is far more constrained and far more unique than the low-energy optics suggests.



In 1978, in order to earn a demijohn of slivovitz, Ivan Mládek composed this song, Joey the Swampthing, which was my #1 favorite song in the kindergarten years (and I have won many contests by singing it LOL). In recent years, every ambitious band has to perform this song (here is Metallica's attempt). As this English translation shows, the song has successfully predicted the rise and fall of Joe Biden.

The swampland program is the plan to maximally isolate these extra conditions that are invisible to the effective field theory and perhaps use this extra information to map the string landscape – and to help to find the right vacuum describing this particular Universe. The string landscape is large but the point is that the space of the effective field theories is much larger and its anti-string portion (the swampland) that is incompatible with the swampland conditions must be drained. The draining led by Vafa will continue at least up to January 20th, 2021 when the swampland creatures may take over the U.S. again. Incidentally, I think that Vafa still doesn't realize how important Trump has been for Vafa's program to drain the swamp. Nobody is perfect.

A childish topological TOE of mine and what made it unwise

When I achieved some real, important enough realizations about physics, like matrix string theory, I was happy but I slept well. Things suddenly fit together and after a few minutes, one may get pretty much certain that the nontrivial new statements are right. They pass a lot of consistency checks. One may try to deduce many consequences and calculate some other things. But once you know that it works, you may leave it for tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or someone else. Some fun should be left for the other people, shouldn't it?



It was the ultimately wrong ideas that have prepared several sleepless nights for me when I was a kid (or a teenager). And that may be how I learned that losing your sleep doesn't necessarily increase the depth of the theory. Let's discuss the theory. Sometime in 1987 when I was 14 or so, I decided that I had just found a theory of everything (of all elementary particles). Be ready, it was a theory of a nearly Leo Vyukesque "strawberry TOE" caliber.

Hana Lipovská: birth of a legend

Can a modest young female scholar tame the neo-Marxist octopus in a country?

For a decade, I have read the IVK Newsletters published by the Institute of Václav Klaus, the second president of Czechia. Well, in recent 6 years, I have really read every sentence. The pro-freedom texts are very intelligent and touch many political, societal, and philosophical themes. One of the brilliant authors who has repeatedly caught my attention was Dr Hana Lipovská, now a 30-year-old economist. If you use a search engine, you will find out that this young scholar has published something between half a dozen and a dozen of books, including a serious economics textbook.



None of the superficial left-wing activists has read those things. Well, they wouldn't understand any of it. Many of them (including actresses who are painted as cornerstones of the intellectual elites of Czechia) are high school dropouts. Almost all of them are innumerate and some of them are borderline illiterate, too. Lipovská's texts may be considered sequences of dry, hard facts and logical reasoning. They're not the explosives full of misleading slogans and emotions that are useful to manipulate masses. In this sense, Lipovská's field is very similar to theoretical physics. It's no coincidence that between 2001 and 2005, we considered economist Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, to be a natural ally of the physicists.

Robbert Dijkgraaf and the end of pure science

OK, Albert Einstein found most of his deep ideas in Ulm, Bern, Zurich, Prague, and Berlin, but most people associate him with Princeton, New Jersey, where he was employed as an older man who was already famous but no longer too explosively original (imagine: Princeton gets almost all the credit while Prague where Einstein realized that he needed a theory with the equivalence principle gets almost no credit). The NJ employer was the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) and for a few years, Robbert Dijkgraaf was the director of the IAS. Dijkgraaf is my fellow co-father of screwing/matrix string theory (Dijkgraaf is the biologically non-identical twin in the Verlinde triplet, as Susskind has pointed out) and a co-author of a small paper of ours.



Fine, he just wrote an essay for the Quanta Magazine,

Contemplating the End of Physics.

He says that physics isn't ending but some of his detailed argumentation sounds very similar to the – intellectually incompetent and impotent – pseudointellectuals who have talked about ludicrous concepts such as "the end of physics" for decades. Before we get to some content, I must say to Robbert that if he is "contemplating" the end of physics, he should also be "contemplating" his moral duty to return all the salaries and grants he has received in Amsterdam and Princeton because he was hired to manage physics and drive it to progress, not to end it! Quite generally, I find it stunning for people to "contemplate the end of physics" and similar things when they are paid huge salaries for "doing physics" instead. These two should be totally incompatible, shouldn't they?

Swiss ICUs and end-of-life wishes

Among the Western countries, the otherwise hyper-PC Sweden is unique because its medical elite was capable of keeping the nation in a good psychological shape, extinguishing unnecessary Covid fear, rejecting the "global duty" to wear face masks, and avoiding the closure of schools and shops at all times (although mass events are still restricted; and the border was closed for some time). The pictures of Swedish cities have looked like a different world since March. "Everyone else" thought it was common sense to be hiding in the basement like a rat (and tens of millions ludicrously think that the world will never get to the "old normal" again); meanwhile, millions of Swedes continued their normal lives.

Some Swedes were still hiding like rats but they did so on the private basis which is exactly how things should be (I think that a much higher percentage of Swedes is willing to hide in this way, relatively to more "individually courageous" Czechs, and that's why we saw a much faster Covid dynamics here in Czechia). In November, the Swedish statistics page makes it clear that Sweden's approach was a great success. 6500 Swedes died with Covid but the actual "excess death tally" is just about 1000-2000 i.e. 1-2% of the annual deaths (which is pretty much undetectable by eyeballing if you look at the annual charts). Czechia already has 7499 deaths with Covid so our more stringent spring lockdown almost certainly wasn't a good investment for the final tally. The second wave came to Sweden because \(R_0\) is higher in these months than what it was in late spring and the summer, so the required fraction for herd immunity is higher (which is why these diseases are seasonal). The peak "deaths per day" were 34 in this wave so far, well below 115 in the spring, so Sweden is pretty much the least affected Western European country now. The total number of casualties of this "next wave" will be some 1/6 of the first wave. With a third wave, expect something like a geometric series: you may just ignore other waves.

Why do many professors suffer from TDS

It's the defense of a group think and collective interests

Vít Bláha sent me an interesting essay by Philip Patrick, a lecturer in Tokyo,

Why academics hold Thatcher and Trump in such contempt.

Note that only guys who are safe enough, like being employed in Japan (or Hermites in Pilsen, for that matter LOL), have the freedom to discuss these important matters these days. First, I tried to give my answer to this vital question and I thought that Patrick was too kind to the instructors who suffer or suffered from the Trump (or Thatcher) Derangement Syndrome. But after some more reading, I decided that my view is pretty much exactly the same as Patrick's.

Climate Hustle 2: excellent

I discussed Climate Hustle 1 in 2016.

This is just a short advertisement. I watched Climate Hustle 2 last night, a cool movie by Marc Morano from ClimateDepot.com and a few others around him. See John Stossel's review for some comments. There's another host in the movie – and MiniAOC joins the men and makes it somewhat cuter and more relaxed than it would be otherwise. Petr Mach and Václav Klaus make sure that my nation is punching above its weight.

Rogue Harvard students demand a campus-wide ban for Trump officials

John Harvard would be a Trump official if he avoided the self-destructive career move in 1638, namely his death. Now, the plan is to muzzle him, too.

It hasn't been determined yet who will be the U.S. president between 2020 and 2024 and a group of "Harvard students" is distributing this petition that demands that all the officials within the Trump administration are banned on campus.

Petition circulating at Harvard to stop former Trump administration officials from attending, teaching or speaking at the university (Fox Business)

They couldn't attend, teach, or speak there; the intent is to prevent them from walking through Harvard Yard, too. Kayleigh McEnany, a smart, courageous, and blonde Trump spokeswoman (and a Harvard alumnus) already has plans to violate at least the latter restriction.

Velvet Revolution at 31: much of the freedom was just temporary

Back in 1989, I was intensely interested in politics, listening to Radio Free Europe every day, writing petitions etc. On Friday, November 17th, I was a high school student and the university students in Prague organized an anti-totalitarian rally. Note that exactly 50 years earlier, on November 17th, 1939, the Nazis shut down the Czech universities after some skirmishes at the funeral of Jan Opletal, an anti-Nazi student activist who died after some conflicts during the October 28th (birth of Czechoslovakia 1918) events.



Because of the 1939 events, November 17th has been celebrated as the International Students' Day. Needless to say, the events that came exactly 50 years later strengthened the reasons to celebrate it as the International Students' Day. Today, it's a national holiday in Czechia, a "Day of Fight For Freedom". Note that just like the Nazis, the Coronazis are shutting universities across the world and the press doesn't dare to criticize the Coronazis just like it didn't dare to criticize the Nazis in 1939.

Klaus: On flimsiness (and therefore untrustworthiness) of the American presidential elections

By the second Czech president Václav Klaus, in the LN daily

Even though the U.S. electoral system and its weights of various states of the Union is rather strange for a person – an ordinarily attentive (i.e. not so attentive) to details of politics – from a unitary state such as Czechia, we respect that it reflects a historically evolved American federalism. It wasn't drawn by an election expert who was sitting behind his desk. The U.S. were born through an evolution and they were undergoing a transformation in time.

The New York Times inkspillers attack Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton has founded not only classical mechanics but also true quantitative science – physics rooted in advanced mathematics – in his seminal three-volume 1687 Principia (Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica). The world-changing importance of this text is self-evident to everyone who isn't brain-dead.

Now, this story starts with a simple question: How many copies of the opus' first edition were there? 189 were known so far (and one was auctioned for $3.7 million in 2016, a record price for a science book). This number was clearly a lower bound and after some census, "sleuths in Europe" found 198 more, as the article makes clear, including new copies in Prague. I am almost certain that there were many thousands and the "number of copies we still possess" and the "number of copies that have existed" are two wildly different numbers. Why should almost all copies be preserved for almost 350 years?

The matrix model is too sexy for Millennials, New York, and Japan

'Cause I'm a Motl, you know what I mean



I came to the U.S. (primarily) after I wrote rather influential papers on the BFSS matrix model of M-theory. That original paper by the four physicists (three of whom were high) has over 2800 citations but I think that especially by 2020, it is a heavily understudied line of research. Maldacena's first AdS/CFT paper shows over 16,000 citations at Inspire now (and the video above has over half a billion views!). Yes, I do think that the papers should be comparable because both describe holography of some sort; and both include a new description of quantum gravitational physics that differs from the "effective quantum field theory in the bulk".

They are not comparable because the matrix model is too sexy for... especially for the younger generation. What has really happened was that lots of people have joined the field who mentally want to stay at the level of the undergraduate or early graduate school quantum field theory (throughout their lives). Even if they want to pretend to be at the cutting edge, they don't really want to go beyond the cutting edge as defined in 1930 or at most the 1970s. Most of the papers on AdS/CFT work in that mental framework.

A very stupid day for Dow Jones to return to all time highs

In mid February when Covid-19 was getting to Italy, I thought that the hysteria would be over in 3 days or so and already the first 3% drop of the stock markets was an unbelievable overreaction to this slightly new kind of a flu-like disease.

Well, the markets dropped over 30% and bottomed around March 23rd when the fear was omnipresent. That was when the blood was in the streets, that's when you should have bought stocks like mad. My expectations of the shrinking hysteria were wrong numerically but they were right qualitatively. Now, 9 months after the first Italian hysteria, Dow Jones is the last U.S. index that is setting new all time highs (it was at 29,995.5, beating the spring record below 29,600).

Those 9 months ago, I was pointing out that after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. stock markets returned to setting new all time highs within a month. It could have been true in this case, too. Here, I was wrong just by a factor of 9 or so. ;-)

A Trumpless White House could hugely damage the geopolitical conditions

The left-wing media including Fox decided to name Biden as the winner even though the presidential contest will enter another stage, perhaps a more important one, tomorrow. Because they seem to believe that the election can't be taken from them anymore, some predictions have materialized. Lots of people have predicted that the SARS-CoV-2 virus would disappear from the left-wing media once Trump is removed. Open cnn.com and there is no Covid on the first two pages of that website! Fact-checked: true.



Suddenly, celebrations of the likely decline of the U.S. – economic, mental, and moral decline, not to mention the relative decline of the U.S. stocks and the U.S. dollar which is expected by experts as well as me – are no longer painted as superspreader events. These individuals in CNN, Fox (except for Sean, Laura, Tucker, Judge Jeanne, and a few others) and similar organizations only confirm that they're exactly the dishonest, deceitful, vicious, manipulative, quasihuman jerks that many of us have identified inside them a few years ago.

AOC is just a joke

Capitalism beats socialism for many reasons; one of them is that it manages to assign the people to the right places. The invisible hand of the free markets does much of the job. In socialism, e.g. in the conditions that exist internally in the Democratic Party, the processes are different. Consider a hypothetical deadbeat, retarded bartender who spills every other glass of wine. What do the two systems do with such a job market commodity? In capitalism, the bartender is fired and the former employee may recommend her a new job. Perhaps she is more talented in cleaning the toilets.



In socialism, it's different because the bartender has done something for someone who is ideologically influential within the regime (such a circumstance is unlikely to emerge in proper capitalism); and they simply need to pick someone "intersectional" for ideological reasons (in capitalism, quotas and duties of this kind just don't exist). So she just can't be downgraded to a toilet cleaner. Instead, why don't we turn her into a politician? She gets a highly troubled district of New York where the average IQ is close to 80 and where a doorknob would be elected if there were socialist stickers on it. By the triangle inequality, a bartender who is dumb as a doorknob must be elected, too, serving as an excelent example of the consequences of the arrangement in which literally everyone can vote. Well, if everyone can vote, the representative democracy guarantees that literally everyone can be a lawmaker, too. To make things even better, Twitter has donated millions of followers to this "lady".

USA really seems to drift towards a Soviet-style totalitarian hell

The winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election is still uncertain and while Biden seems closer at this moment, highly justified lawsuits may change the situation. The apparent multi-dimensional evidence in favor of the greatest voter fraud in the U.S. history that I have seen is persuasive and shocking. Tens of thousands of non-residents have apparently voted in Nevada and elsewhere. More tragicomically, thousands of people who are dead have voted, too. Here is Steve McIntyre:

there's a pastebin list of 1361 people in MI over 100 who voted in election. Most appear to be dead. I did random check on one voter born in 1912. "She" applied for absentee ballot on Jul 20, ballot sent on Sep 25, ballot received on Oct 21. She died in 1992. pic.twitter.com/Zm9jONsMv2

— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) November 6, 2020

Just the people who are more than 100 years old in Michigan seem to give you 1,000+ fake votes. And I am pretty sure that tons of the "voters" who are between 80 and 100 will turn out to be dead, too. I've listened to the testimony of the Democrat who saw the backdating ballots. Software apparently sent 6,000 Trump votes to Biden, a tabulating software glitch (the software, Dominion is its suggestive name, was used in tons of places in every single major swing state). A lawmaker determined that 20,000 ballots were fraudulently submitted and counted after the election day just in Harris, PA. A Texas social worker ordered 134 ballots for mentally disabled patients in order to steal their votes. I've seen the videos of the black truck drivers selling whole packages of ballots. Accusations that Democratic voting committees were fixing thousands of Democratic ballots that would otherwise be invalid. Vehicles with the ballots often had Biden-Harris stickers and the counting staff often Biden-Harris hats. The counting staff has often violated the court orders and prevented the Republican observers from being 6 feet away from the process. Even if you ignored all the likely hardcore fraud, I think it is immensely unfair that a clearly cheaper, less demanding mail-in ballot which was mostly pro-Democratic is counted as equally important as the in-person, mostly Republican, votes. This fake equality is another typical example of the extreme leftists' promotion of equality where the reality is clearly unequal.

Counting of SAT assignments: a parametrically less brutal brute force algorithm

I have often returned to my view that \(P=NP\) has been neither proven nor disproven and both possibilities should be considered "comparably plausible" because any other assumption is just a reflection of someone's prejudice that is both dishonest and dramatically hurting progress in the case that the belief is incorrect.

Donald Knuth has expressed a similar conclusion with quite some details about the philosophical Ansatz. In particular, he has emphasized that the number of algorithms – and complex, extremely clever algorithms that use the degree of cleverness, know-how, and identities that humans don't know and won't know for some time – is huge. Well, the number of algorithms is obviously infinite but the real point is that new and new clever features and identities (which have the power to simplify the solutions) keep on emerging once you allow "longer" algorithms.

As you will see, Giorgio Camerani has quite some computer science background. But he has posted the following beautiful preprint

The Long, the Short and the Random

as an unaffiliated researcher. You may verify that the paper is beautifully typeset and formatted as a perfectionist mathematics paper in computer science. More importantly, it is a great example of the possibilities that the \(P\neq NP\) religious fundamentalists overlook and want to overlook.

USA elections: a banana republic

I went to bed for 6 hours and woke up at 3 am my time (9 pm Eastern Time). The U.S. presidential election began to converge towards a certainty of another Trump victory. Some five states were undecided and the required advantage for Biden would have to be huge, relatively to the counted ballots, for him to win. So all these states were almost certain to go Trump. But Biden needed at least 2 of them if Pennsylvania were counted, or at least 3 of them if not.



However, around 7 am my time (1 am Eastern Time), all the counts got totally stuck. For hours. And after a few hours, some amazing updates appeared that suddenly placed Biden above Trump in various states. Nevada. Then Wisconsin (that state is now claimed to be final, with 20,697 in Biden's advantage, but Trump's campaign requested a recount due to the apparent irregularities). And then even Michigan. It's probably the official story that they suddenly counted some huge batches of mail-in ballots. However, many of us saw an incredible jump like this one (which Twitter works hard to censor). Over 130,000 votes were suddenly added to Biden while the Trump got zero from that batch. What is the probability that such a score, 138,339-to-0, happens fairly and naturally? Maybe they updated Trump a minute later so he also got something, it was just awkwardly reflected in the timing.

Sane, achieved Americans need to think about emigration

You should also know where & how to hide your money from the organized thieves

I still believe that Trump will win handsomely tomorrow (see CNN: key model shows that Hillary will win 332-206 exactly 4 years ago or these comical left-wing idiots LOL) but that conclusion is largely based on fuzzy thinking, extrapolated and amplified corrections resulting from the 2016 mismatches, and feelings. Some of you may also be optimists but you may be shocked by the events tomorrow. You may suddenly become unable to think sharply. That's why you need to think about these matters in advance. You need to create a plan how to think tomorrow if catastrophic events take place.



There is a nonzero risk that the Democratic Party will take over the Senate, House, and the White House. And if you really failed to take notice, the current Democratic Party is no longer the party of Andrew Jackson, the ethnic cleanser and tyrant. Jumping to the 20-21st century, it is not a party of the racist Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Bill Clinton, and not even Obama.

One "potential infection" shortens the (total) remaining life expectancy of mankind by minutes

The potential infection may be worth 12-48 cents

I still can't understand how – despite those 8 months we have had to sort these questions in our minds – someone who could have been hired as a CERN scientist is "capable" of writing something as incredibly wrong as Tommaso Dorigo's text that has "calculated" that (when it comes to the harm done to the society) Joe's going to a party in 2020 is approximately equivalent to shooting several people by a Kalashnikov. His "calculation" contains pretty much all conceivable childish errors you can think of: the exponential growth is neverending; the whole tree of infections should be blamed on one particular member of a branch (instead of all the people inside the infection chain); the Covid-19 CFR is huge, and so on.



The Czechoslovak "vz 58" (vzor 58 meaning Model 1958) is a totally non-equivalent counterpart of the Kalashnikov and the Czechoslovak weapon is arguably superior. BREN successors of it are produced today.

OK, how much harm (quantified as the total shortening of the other people's lives) do you actually cause if you are an average person, with an average probability of being Covid-positive for your country, and you get close enough to another person so that the other person gets positive in the case that you are positive as well? According to Dorigo, it's "dozens of years" if not "centuries" because you have basically murdered several people by a Kalashnikov. In reality, it's just several minutes.

Jakl: people succumb to the delusion that governments are ensembles of specialists in assorted fields

An interview with Ladislav Jakl, an aide to the Czech ex-president Klaus

---

Mr Jakl, let us talk about two important events. The first one was October 28th, an anniversary of the 1918 birth of the independent Czechoslovakia when the primary goal should be to remember that event, not just to hand out some awards. How do you view this special day and should the medals have been picked in person, as in previous years? Or is it right that the president has postponed this ritual?

Your question seems to imply that you have embraced the delusion, like a substantial part of the Czech journalists did, that the essential event that takes place at the Prague Castle on every October 28th is the Ceremony of Handing Out the State Awards or something like that. But don't despair: the current president Miloš Zeman has succumbed to the same delusion. So I would like to clarify these matters: the medals aren't the main focus of the holiday event at all. It is the Ceremonial Assembly Marking the National Holiday – the Day of the Republic. Something like the State of the Union address which they have in the U.S. The most important presidential speech in every year. The most important message of the head of the state to his nation. A speech exposing the balance sheet and evaluating the recent 365 days, proposing the president's views about the essential societal problems, his opinions about the main topics that are hot in the country, answers to questions that haven't been posed and a response to the public's worries. A speech where the president tries to capture the vital societal and political trends, expose the international context, attempt to redefine the idea on which the country was built, as shaped by the ongoing civilizational and cultural shifts and movements.

George Musser and the final solution to the black hole information puzzle

George Musser wrote a very informative article to the Quanta Magazine,

The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End

which discusses several recent papers about "why and how the information gets out of the evaporating black hole", starting with the already well-known February 2020 paper by Marolf and Maxfield. When Hawking admitted that he had lost the bet and the information was preserved, he also offered a solution that no one considered kosher. That solution included some new, topologically distinct, configurations that contribute to the path integral and where the black hole is basically absent. The information doesn't stay confined inside the black hole forever because in the most relevant histories, the black hole doesn't really exist, he confusingly argued.

A new minister, a new hope

Fer137 recommended us a very nice article on lockdownism, a new totalitarian ideology (or religion) that is spreading like fire. It is an extreme form of germophobia that tries to pretend it is healthy instead of a pathology (which is what germophobia has been for centuries – and I say it as a former child germophobe although probably a lite version of Sheldon Cooper). It envisions an ideal world where people never meet let alone touch each other.

If you want to read a text demonstrating lockdownism at the intelligence level of a 2-year-old communist, check Tommaso Dorigo, a CERN physicist (!). Summary: All of us share commodities and fuel tanks because we live in an advanced communist society. Everyone can infect someone else which is an exponentially growing process. An exponentially growing process is infinite, an infinite amount of harm is being done, and that's why going outside is at least on par with shooting tons of people with a Kalashnikov. It follows that everyone is obliged to show the huge courage by staying home! I kid you not. I just can't believe Tommaso is serious because this is so incredibly stupid. I haven't ever met a baby who was actually this stupid.

(OK, Tommaso: the exponential profile doesn't last indefinitely and doesn't go to infinity. The rate of increases always naturally slows down. The total damages end up at shortening the average life by 0.5-2.5 days which is compensated by 5-25 days of the natural increase of the life expectancy which adds a year to the average life in every decade. And that shortening must be compared to the huge costs of the restrictions which are clearly larger, like 10% of the GDP or more in each quarter with these policies, plus the loss of freedom, culture, education of kids, and comfort. On top of that, the infection is largely unavoidable and an infection of Y by X may be a good thing because X usually makes Y immune – and capable of abandoning fear. It is BS that the infection is always a negative thing, too. Only clueless parasites in the ivory tower can afford moronic fairy-tales about the "moral justification of staying at home". Someone else must be working for clueless egotist Bolshevik parasites like you to survive, Tommaso.)

OK, the almost universally hated Czech minister of health, Prof Colonel Roman Prymula 007, a former apparent officer of the communist secret police, was finally replaced today, a day after he managed to receive the Order of the White Lion, Czechia's most valuable official award (despite his terrible results: in five weeks, he increased the Covid activity in the country by a factor of 15 and destroyed 50% of several industries, too). Note that the double-tailed white lion has been Bohemia's coats-of-arms since 1247.

Klaus: Let us not allow fear to take over our lives

Remarks of the 2nd Czech President commemorating the 102th anniversary of the birth of Czechoslovakia

One-hundred and two years ago, a free and democratic country was declared in this very building whose heir is the current Czech Republic. This anniversary used to be celebrated in a dignified manner, with a respect and humbleness towards the achivements of that bygona era, and with a confidence and faith in the future. Today, it isn't the case.



Pics (5), pics (31), iDNES, users' comments

The founding fathers of our republic didn't succumb to fear in the difficult wartime circumstances and they were capable of turning their intents into reality. Let us follow their example. Let us not allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear that is being intentionally spread. It is only up to us whether we will be defeated by that fear.

Covid-19 shortened the average Swedish life by 2 days (over six)

In 2020, Sweden became a remarkable country because unlike pretty much all Western white nations, it responded correctly to a new variant of a flu-like virus: it imposed virtually no ad hoc (Covid-only) mandatory nationwide restrictions. People were encouraged to be careful and improve their hygiene; some vulnerable people were increasingly protected in special facilities. Public health officials were monitoring the situation and dealing with local events. In June, Sweden just allowed a far higher number of "cases" than the rest of Europe where the spring waves were artificially suppressed, "flattened", or prevented.

But all schools remained open at all times, no regular people were ever required to wear face masks anywhere, restaurants remained open, the border remained in both directions open most of the time, and so on. Some mass events were banned, however. The business in restaurants was lowered because of the people's individual decisions (a nice aspect of that is that the people who could gain by isolating themselves were more likely to isolate themselves – and they know about the need more than the government does). By doing the right thing, Sweden helped not only itself. It has also served mankind as a wonderful laboratory showing what Covid-19 actually is and what it isn't. Sweden has provided mankind with a wonderful template to follow – which no other government seems to be explicitly following even now when it is 100% clear that the Swedish approach was right and the opposite countries' decisions were the gravest mistakes in the world history.

It's been 94 days since Sweden reduced COVID-19 deaths to near zero without lockdowns or mask mandates. pic.twitter.com/MWuVEVOh6O

— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) October 27, 2020

The tweet above contains a graph from the lower right corner of the Swedish Covid-19 statistics page. The word "avlidna" means deaths, that's what you need to know. Well, while the peak of the deaths with Covid was 115 in Sweden (reached twice, on April 8th and 15th) which is already fewer than the Czech Near-Lockdown Republic's record (139 on Monday), the deaths with Covid-19 became infinitesimal over 3 months ago. Even though daily positive tests reached 1870 five days ago, the deaths safely seem to be in the 1-4 range or fewer. In the cooling weather, \(R_0\) is increasing and so is the fraction required for herd immunity but this will only cause a very slow "burning".

Does a unitary black hole evolution imply the absence of global symmetries?

I won't write a full-blown blog post because the benefits don't surpass the costs in this world increasingly dominated by morons but I will mention that a nice paper

Global symmetry, Euclidean gravity, and the black hole information problem

was written by Daniel Harlow (yes, that one) and Edgar Shaghoulian a week ago. It was dedicated to Leonard Susskind for his 80th birthday. Congratulations, too.

May America vote to ban fossil fuels?

In the last debate, Donald Trump was presidential, wise, and kind, the same Trump who brought Kevin back to his mother. Under normal circumstances, Trump and Biden would be two relatively close, standard, centrist politicians. Even Biden's corruption is somewhat widespread; and so is his attraction to younger girls. Do you know what is the name of the sexual deviation that makes a man attracted to 17-year-old girls, for example? It's called heterosexuality.

Y'all...

Please listen to the man when he PROMISES you he's going to BAN fracking.pic.twitter.com/Fuksc0cKxj

— J. Hogan Gidley (@JHoganGidley) October 23, 2020

But we are not living in the old-fashioned times anymore. Joe Biden relies and must rely on the grassroot support and the Democratic Party is basically run by the most extreme and unhinged leftists that the planet has seen for a long time, perhaps ever. So he is constantly switching from being a sensible mainstream candidate to being a would-be darling of these far left loons. It's a difficult game. Also, if this puppet were elected, those that made him elected will demand his suicide for greater good so that he may be replaced with a more radical politician, one from a more privileged group. And she would soon be replaced by an even more progressive one, and so on.

The distilled arrogance of power

And its personification, the lame duck Czech minister of health

The Slovak prime minister is a true believer. He seems to genuinely believe that his mission is to shut down Slovakia and to strip all Slovaks of their basic civil rights because of this "terrifying" disease. Well, as you may expect for Czechs in general, his counterpart, the "October minister" of health Roman Prymula, doesn't really believe anything and he's way more rational and pragmatic. He views his job of being the "master of the lockdown" as a great method to gain power and money. This apparent former colonel of the communist secret police is also selling face masks through a company he controls. He has an impressive Elo rating in chess.



The Last Supper. Click for more gold by TMBK

Fine, so Roman Prymula, the main (and perhaps only) "epidemiology expert" in Czechia who agrees with the Coronazis was appointed as the new minister on September 21st, succeeding Adam "Ken" Vojtěch, the handsome singer from the Czech American Idol. He immediately started to tighten the screws up to the "almost lockdown" that began yesterday. Such policies don't work and he doesn't really know how to do things that work so the Covid activity in the country increased by more than one order of magnitude during those 32 days. But it was a personal mistake that apparently removed him.

Slovakia becomes a regional leader in the Coronazi insanity

OK, so Czechia is going through a real Covid epidemic for the first time (the country surely has the highest number of cases per million people, having finally surpassed Andorra LOL), districts around my hometown of Pilsen are among the top 10 most active ones while the 3 larger (and largest) cities, Prague, Brno, and Ostrava, clearly see a significantly lower activity. They have already gained enough immunity of the people so that the rate of the acceleration has dropped. The previous minister of health Mr Adam Vojtěch resigned on September 21st when there were 1400 positive tests a day (and this number stayed almost constant for another week). His successor, Col Roman Prymula who couldn't get the paperwork confirming that he wasn't a colonel of the communist secret police (but no one seems to care), started to immediately tighten the screws. The result is the increase from 1400 to 15,000 a day. Such policies almost never work but the more they fail to work, the more the insane people escalate them.

As the world media write about the (non-existent) Armageddon in Czechia, our "allies" are giving us gifts to save the last lives that can be saved, like 12 mechanical ventillators from the EU or 28 doctors from the U.S. Thanks, it's funny. Czechia doesn't need either and if it needed anything, these tiny "gifts" wouldn't make a difference. My homeland still has some 1,000 spare ICU beds (also because some were added), 55,000 doctors (notice that the number is "slightly" greater than 28) are ready to deal with the patients (and indeed, Covid patients are the easy ones so non-infection specialists may do this job and are sometimes doing this job, too). 4,700 people are in hospitals but 40% of them have no symptoms whatsoever (no one wants to be with them, however), serious cases surpased 700. The capacities are large and medical students are used as doctors, too (sometimes even without compensation which is crazy). But the "gifts" create a great impression of a crisis which is great for harming the image of Czechia, for increasing fear, and for making the Coronazis stronger. These "gifts" are stupid gestures but their main consequence is the reduced sovereignty of the Czech Republic.

Optimistic cubic fits for log Covid hospitalizations

If you're worried about you and SARS-CoV-2, simply use a mouthwash (as simple as Listerine) for 30 seconds. It will inactivate over 99.9% of the viruses, a Penn State paper showed. A summary is here. Note that it is a good idea to do an experiment whenever Donald Trump invents a potentially great idea such as the drinking of bleach!



Sorry, sufferers from the Trump Derangement Syndrome but the Donald was basically and preciously right on this one, too.

OK, now when America was made great again and Covid-19 has been turned into a purely academic problem, let me show you a simple interpolation that makes some sense as a method to forecast numbers that tend to exponentially grow or decay. An infectious disease has the precise exponential growth and/or the precise exponential decrease as the most typical behavior, a zeroth-order approximation. On top of that, the exponential speedup is universally slowing down, the doubling times are getting lower, before the growth switches to a decrease. This optimistic evolution is unavoidable because every dramatically growing disease – whose graph resembles the Tesla stock or any other Ponzi scheme – is ultimately running out of victims, just like the Ponzi schemes do.

Here is a simple example of a cubic fit you may play with.

Michael Levitt disinivited from a conference building on his breakthroughs

The Coronazi terror respects nobody

Michael Levitt (now at Stanford) was born to a Jewish family in South Africa in 1947. His father came from Lithuania; his mother has lived in my Czech homeland. And I tend to think that the influence of the parents' geography on his thinking was nonzero although it is much smaller than the influence of the genes.

In 1968-1972, he was a PhD student in the British Cambridge. Not too many people were coding at that time but he already wrote an essential program to investigate molecular conformations. These are changes to molecules that may be obtained by rotating two parts of a molecule – which are connected by a single bond – around the axis of the bond, in your left and right hand.

The Old Town Square primarily saw a civil protest against the government

A commentary by Mr Ivo Strejček and a collective from the [Czech ex-president] Václav Klaus Institute



The Sunday October 18th 2020 demonstration at the Prague's Old Town Square was a civil protest against the government's anti-coronavirus policies. Most participants were regular citizens of various ages and occupations that represented groups across the whole society. The meeting didn't depend on any internationalist professional troublemakers who are recently making up a significant fraction of all Old Town Square demonstrations.

May WHO studies be trusted?

The Director-General of the World Health Organization is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a veteran of the Ethiopian Marxist-Leninist League of Tigrai and a supporter of (the Chinese communists, obviously, but also) the dictator Robert Mugabe who "provided health care to all". I was rather persuaded by some videos claiming that he belongs to the Hague.

One man is not the only problem. The whole organization seems to have a truly radical left-wing flavor and there have been good reasons to think that China has a disproportionate influence on the organization. I think it was a great decision for the U.S. to withdraw. The Covid events have unmasked the useless or corrupt character of this organization. The WHO has been wrong about pretty much everything: it said that Covid couldn't be transmitted from a human to another human, face masks didn't change anything, borders shoudn't be closed, it has made a U-turn on all important drugs, and even on the desirability of the lockdown. And I don't need to mention all the wildly ludicrously overstated WHO projections of the numbers of fatalities etc.

The mistaken tolerance of a gigantic debt

By Czechia's 2nd president Václav Klaus



The classic economics textbook view says – and it has been accepted for centuries – that the government's budget deficit is evil and irresponsible. It's also true that the larger the deficit is, the more evil it becomes. This is where an economist may stop and perhaps admit that exceptions such as wars may exist. But we need to remember that wars typically cause a complete financial havoc and tend to produce high inflation rates that are ruining the financial systems. In many cases, a political and societal breakdown follows, too.

Democratic Party voters already mentally live in a new Stalinist regime

I was intrigued by the unbelievable corruption in Joe Biden's family and especially shocked by the extreme left-wing Internet companies' efforts to censor the news and interfere with the U.S. presidential elections that are just 18 days away. It is my belief that these companies should be nationalized and the people responsible for the interference should be sent to jail for many, many years.

Hunter Biden was born in 1970 and he is dumb as a doorknob. But his father became a U.S. Senator in 1973 and Hunter enjoyed the treatment of a spoiled brat from a corrupt family of a (mostly left-wing) politician. Of course that the Senator's son must be admitted to a high school. Or even a college. A law school! Meanwhile, it is still the same Hunter Biden. So of course he becomes a drug addict with zero skills, no talent, and no desire to work and sells the only thing he can offer. "I am a beloved son of a powerful U.S. politician, so pay me for the contacts." Ukrainian folks only paid tens of thousands while the disappeared Chinese Big Energy entrepreneur was negotiating $10 million for Hunter Biden every year (for 3 years), just for the "introductions". This man is my father Joseph, also known as Joe. Ten millon! ;-)

A fun calculation of the maximum speed of sound

Let us spend some time by temporarily abandoning fears that Trump won't decisively beat the loons and domestic terrorists on November 3rd, and from our peaking Covid-19 infection in Czechia (which is almost reaching the level of epidemics in the first district, so for the first time, I have at least a "moderate" understanding for the online schools and some other changes, hopefully a very short-lived policy; I think it's great that Czechia avoided excessive preventive policies and only regulates the virus when it's arguably defensible). I could write lots of stuff about various news reported on my Twitter account but at the end, I think that most of these topics aren't deep enough to deserve a full-blown, extensive, penetrating TRF blog post. Or I am rather exhausted by the news about insanity from so many directions that is overwhelming us.

Willie sent me a fun article that just appeared Science Advances,

Speed of sound from fundamental physical constants

by Trachenko et al. The preprint is from April 2020 but I obviously don't systematically follow all cond-mat preprints.

We're not at war, we don't need draconian restrictions

Statement by the Václav Klaus Institute, October 13th



1. The evolution of the coronavirus epidemic mustn't be underestimated and we are not underestimating it, either. We are seeing the numbers supplied by the government but we see them a bit differently than Mr Hamáček [Czech minister of interior and leader of social democrats], Prymula [minister of health], and similar men. The interpretation of these numbers mustn't be left to the physicians; statisticians (experts in time series) must speak about them. And the conclusions must be made by politicians. We are – in harmony with a spectrum of leading Czech immunologists – convinced that Covid-19 is only threatening those who are already seriously ill. On top of that, we emphasize once again that the people with a positive test are infected, not necessarily ill.

Remdesivir, a target for loons, pseudoscientists, and conspiracy theorists

At this moment, Czechia is by far the most Covid-active country in the world, a fact that is caused by Czechs' not being afraid of this disease now, despite the efforts of the prime minister, minister of health, and a few others who would like to reignite the fear. We still had concerts, ice-hockey matches with thousands of fans etc. last night, the life is continuing normally. Culture, sports, and fun will be banned for two weeks from next Monday; after the totally free July and August, we basically added another month of almost complete freedom in which it was already clear that the disease was quickly growing.

It's nothing pleasant. This infection beating rates of positive tests that were seen anywhere in the world, ever, brings us first tangible negative stories. We know the first people around us who suffer from Covid and/or whose relatives and friends are not only positive but may be at risk; whose girlfriends lost their smell, and so on. We're afraid of the outcomes of their struggles.

With 8617 new cases on Friday, Czechia became #8 Covid-active country in the world in absolute numbers https://t.co/dinWCryDpr after India 73k, US 61k, Brazil 28k, France 20k, Argentina 15k, UK 14k, and Russia 12k (and by far #1 country per capita).

— Luboš Motl (@lumidek) October 10, 2020

Being the #8 power in the world (in absolute numbers; relatively, it's some 800 new cases per million inhabitants and per day) gives the Czech doctors some extra right to claim that they're experts. With those 8600 cases a day, we're still getting just some ~25-30 deaths a day in average in recent days.

President's illness and the sick America

By Alexander Tomský, a Czech publicist who has been a political scientist in the UK for many years

It is probably the first time since the Civil War when democracy in America finds itself at existential risk. The progressives have been controlling the Democratic Party for quite some time, much like the humanities at the universities, almost all media, and the large corporations. Building on their utopian demand for social justice, they are attacking the capitalist economic inequality, the "institutionalized" racial discrimination, the traditional family, as well as the churches and they are undermining the legitimacy of the foundational 1789 American Constitution.

Penrose, Genzel+Ghez share the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics

It's all about the black hole existence now, stupid

Roger Penrose has done a lot in mathematical and theoretical physics – and in the popularization of these fields (popular books etc.). Twistors and Penrose tilings (2D quasicrystals) are two very serious examples, I wrote a lot about both (including a proof of the completeness of the tiling, plus some code drawing them; the 5D definition was included in my and Zahradník's textbok on linear algebra, I am pretty sure that it's the only such an undergraduate linear algebra textbook in the world LOL). Quasicrystals could have deserved a Nobel Prize by themselves because they are far more "empirical" than most people think. Don't forget the Cosmic Censorship Conjecture, wildly inspiring, partly wrong (in the strong sense), but probably right in a weak sense and equivalent to the Weak Gravity Conjecture. Then the Penrose stairs and the Penrose triangle and the annoying beatle notation for tensors etc. ;-)

Of course, while many of his great ideas (like those in the previous sentence) are closer to recreational mathematics and/or non-empirical mathematical physics, many of these contributions have greatly influenced the adult physics world.

One-half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Roger Penrose for the proof that black holes are really predicted to emerge almost everywhere, e.g. after the collapse of the heavy enough stars.

Specialization is sometimes wildly underestimated, often wildly overestimated

In the media, real experts are sometimes diluted by tons of non-experts; in other cases, most of the relevant experts are being censored and replaced by a tiny, politically convenient subgroup

I have wanted to make this simple yet important point for a long time. The media and the public err in both ways and hugely so. In some cases, especially in fields like theoretical physics, the media (and the part of the public that is brainwashed by the media) seem to think that the expertise doesn't matter and the opinions of a much broader spectrum of "pundits" are equally credible, to say the least.

When it comes to the research into quantum gravity and the unification of forces, some O(1000) people in the world are currently professionally involved with the research and competent at the same moment; about O(10,000) may be expected to have informed opinions about many questions. It's just a hard field that requires a very high intelligence as well as decades (time) to build a pyramid of knowledge that depends on the lower stories of the pyramid. However, this is also a field that is presented as something that is "collectively built" by millions of talking heads and the opinions of tons of talking heads – who clearly don't belong to the group of actual experts (e.g. just some media-savvy pseudoscientists or scientists who did their good research 50 years ago) – are being constantly sold by the media as if they were the "real science".

Trump's approach to his Covid condition is exactly right

OK, Donald Trump and his wife got their positive test some two days ago. At some level, it was almost unavoidable that a man who is exposed to so many other people would get infected, soon or later, and his history of "protection against the virus" may be said to be futile by now! ;-) Fine, he contracted it (unless it is a giant theater). He could have locked himself at the top of the White House but he decided to go on the offensive – by picking an army hospital he considers great.

pic.twitter.com/gvIPuYtTZG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2020

You can see he is doing very well, speaking carefully, as a loving leader of the whole world, not just the U.S., and praising the drugs he is receiving: Regeneron's REGN-COV2 (8 grams, already on Saturday) and Gilead Sciences' Remdesivir (see recommended doses). I first promoted the latter on March 3rd; it is still not quite approved in the U.S. which is rather incredible after those 7-8 months of hysteria, given the clear evidence that it helps.