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.

Mid-wits? What is the average IQ of the visible political opportunists?

And what are the actual causal relationships between the IQ, the immoral behavior, and the rise of the unhinged neo-Marxists?

Ganzrationaler Testudinadler asked me what I thought about the August 2020, 34-minute-long monologue by Edward Dutton,

The Psychology and Rise of the Mid-Wit

He argues, somewhat repetitively, that (currently) the neo-Marxist ideology is spreading due to the rise of the mid-wits, people whose IQ is about 120 in average which is just right for determining what the "dominant" ideology is, for figuring out that it's good for their material well-being to embrace it, and for embracing it. A higher IQ that is needed for meaningful scientific research is 130 or above, geniuses are 150 etc., and those typically have a higher interest in the truth regardless of its proliferation in the society.

When a flu epidemics wasn't the end of the world: 1995-1996

Covid-19 has been compared to the swine flu, SARS, Hong Kong flu, Spanish flu, and others. I was told about a rather high number of flu fatalities in Czechoslovakia of the early 1980s. But only yesterday, I was reminded about something that I should totally remember but I don't.


In 1995-1996, within just seven weeks, 11% of Czechs (over 1.1 million) contracted flu. The number of cases with complications was about 90,000 while 12,000 people died (although some later studies claimed that the number was just 5,000, still high). With Covid-19 in 2020, after six months, 635 Czechs died with Covid-19 so far.

OK, in 1995-1996, I was spending a lot of quality time ;-) on Liane BBS, a North Bohemian Bulletin Board Service (Liane stands for the Liberec Academic Network, Liberec is a North Bohemian/Sudetenland city) which was launched in early 1994. You may still read my (Lumo King Superstring's) 181 posts on the CZscience board. ;-)

Coronazis' anti-Swedish propaganda gets hardcore

Sweden is a good example of a country that has enforced virtually no Covid restrictions, has never shut down its schools etc. but it did much better than other European countries, both medically and economically. Brazil had a mixed regime after extensive disagreements between the sensible president and many crazy local politicians but it still did better than almost everyone in Latin America. Belarus is the best example, however. It didn't impose any restrictions, neither centrally nor locally, and it only has 800 deaths now (almost 10 million people) and the expected GDP drop for 2020 is just 2.3%.

Well, it is super-tempting to compare Sweden (10.2 million people) with Czechia (10.7 million people). My Czech homeland has enforced an early and rather rigorous lockdown in the spring. Along with Slovaks, we were the first white nations to introduce mandatory face masks. For months, they were needed even outside. Restaurants and tons of businesses "interacting with the people" were shut down for 1.0-2.5 months, depending on the type, before the restrictions were lifted mostly in May. From July 1st to September 9th, we didn't need any face masks. In some respects, our lockdown was always relaxed, however. In particular, people were never terrorized for being outside (although, as I said, masks were needed even outside, for more than a month, and this duty was only gradually lifted for runners and then others).

Boleslaus I the Cruel, a brilliant Czech ruler

Picture: the cruel brother Boleslaus

Today, Czechia celebrates its Statehood Day, a national holiday. On September 28th, 929 or 935 (not quite clear), Duke Wenceslaus I was murdered by his younger brother and/or his aides. St Wenceslaus is known as the "Good King Wenceslaus" in the Victorian carol but he is the Czech Catholics' patron saint.

Czechia's most well-known statue is arguably the St Wenceslaus statue at the large Wenceslaus Square which is named after the same duke. The space "under the tail of the horse" may also be the #1 place where the Czechs often meet with their friends. Celebrations and pilgrimages are held in Stará Boleslav, the place of Wenceslaus' death. An extremely old chorale worshiping Wenceslaus exists. I think that this melody is too old and music still sucked when it was written down.

How did Max Planck come up with the quantum theory of light?

Reposted from Quora

Back in 1900, Max Planck just wanted to find the right formula – which we know as Planck's law now – saying how much energy a black body (which absorbs everything and doesn’t reflect any light) emits in electromagnetic waves in any interval of frequencies (or wavelengths) when it’s heated up to a given temperature.

At low frequencies, it was known that the Rayleigh–Jeans law – a simple power law – did a good job to describe the density of energy per unit wavelength. A classical derivation from the first principles was known, too: it’s based on the simple Boltzmann distribution applied to the possible values of energy carried by the electromagnetic waves.

Klaus: stuck in the coronavirus loop

By Václav Klaus, second president of the Czech Republic



The Covid hysteria is culminating. The words "coronavirus" and "Covid" have conquered the news media once again. But it is no second wave of the disease that rules (the disease has no waves) but the second wave of the alarming news which has been scheduled by the fearmongers for a long time in advance. Is Covid-19 a mere disease? Or is it an instrument designed to transform the society?

Czech PM is currently more Covid-hysterical than the nation

Maybe his Slovak ancestry (and Slovaks are less rational than Czechs) is showing up?

On Monday, the Czech government underwent an apparently negative development. In the morning, the minister of healthcare Adam Vojtěch resigned, mentioning "previous careful thoughts about the current situation". Many pundits describe the situation by saying that "he has been a scapegoat who was prepared to be sacrificed at a favorable moment for a long time". Now, Adam Vojtěch has been rightfully praised as a key man who helped to minimize the impact of Covid in Czechia in spring and summer.



Let It Be, sung by the fired minister when he was a minister a year ago. It is occasionally out-of-tune but you can hear that he's still a guy with some singing background.

OK, this young man became well-known to many Czechs already in 2005 when he participated as a singer in the Superstar (American Idol) contest. He completed a law school later and was rising in politics, going through the ministry of finance and then ministry of healthcare. Later on Monday, at 8 pm, PM Andrej Babiš thanked Adam Vojtěch and framed him as a child whom "Babiš raised at the ministry of finance".

Discrimination of dead-alive superpositions allows resurrection

...but the confusion about these simple insights shows some people's trouble with the state-dependence and indeed, with the universal rules of quantum mechanics, too...



In a new, 12-page-long quant-ph preprint,

On the Hardness of Detecting Macroscopic Superpositions,

Aaronson and Atia (Austin) and Susskind (Stanford & the Google Evil Corporation) make an interesting observation, and I think that it is basically a correct one:

If you had the measurement of Schrödinger-cat-like superpositions \(\ket{{\rm dead}} + \ket{{\rm alive}}\) under full control, you could slightly extend your gadget and the extended gadget would also allow you to resurrect the cat.

In this form, I think that the statement is correct. The detection of complicated superpositions is mostly equivalent to the reversal of decoherence; and it is also, perhaps less trivially, equivalent to the ability to transform the distinct states onto each other (which means to turning dead cats into alive ones).

A somewhat technical intro to quantum computing

First, news on beyond the Standard Model dark bosons: In an MIT search (PRL) involving transitions in ytterbium nuclei, a 3-sigma deviation from the expectations was found; while in a Danish search using calcium (PRL), there was no deviation. The MIT excess may be due to some higher order effects, however. See a popular summary.

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Some equations in this blog post are long and I don't want to break them to too many short lines. Please switch to the mobile template in this case, thanks. Also, right-click at an equation and set "Zoom trigger" to "click": a left mouse click on the formulae will magnify them afterwards.

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Classical computers operate with classical information, e.g. bits encoded in the voltage of a capacitor. \(5 = 00000101\). Their working should be deterministic.

Additional reading if you wish: books such as "The Physics of Quantum Information" by Bouwmeester, Ekert, Zeilinger (a hyperlink appears later)

Richard Feynman was the first one to propose that there could also be computers that follow the laws of quantum mechanics instead of classical physics. While a tremendous progress has taken place in the recent year or two, a practical construction of a useful universal quantum computer remains a dream for the future (although the leading teams promise that it may be done within a few years; some limited algorithms or a simulation of quantum chemistry have already been achieved), nevertheless a lot has been learned about the theory and the algorithms and some preliminary steps to overcome the technical difficulties and realize the idea have been made.

Dishonesty of the Coronazi fearmongers and bullies is too obvious

You Are My Lord, from the musical Dracula. Music by Karel Svoboda (the genius who shot himself dead).

The celebrities meet more people than the regular citizens and they are also more likely to be tested (or to need tests) which are reasons why the percentage of "known" positive Covid cases is higher among celebrities. The Czech ones (singers and actresses etc.) who have undergone the virus include Ivana Andrlová, a princess from 1980s fairy-tales, singer Hana Zagorová, her husband Štefan Margita (who is known as her husband in Czechia but he is also an opera singer LOL), Mr Ladislav Frej, Mr Láďa Vízek, Mr Lukáš Konečný, and more.

The latest announcement came from Ms Lucie Bílá (*1966; some YouTube videos). Since the 1990s or so, she has arguably been the #1 Czech female singer. To say the least she has won the Czech Nightingale contest 20 times, one-half of Karel Gott's 40 victories in the male category LOL. She announced her victory over the coronavirus in this Facebook video (92 seconds).

Czechia, Israel have many more daily "cases" per 1M than any Covid powers ever had

...and still nothing is happening...

The radical leftists have rebranded themselves as carriers of the gospel that a flu-like disease named Covid-19 will kill everybody and they made billions of gullible sheep obsessed with the number of "cases" which means positive tests. So all the media for morons have been filled with irrelevant factoids about XY "cases" in this or that country, in the world, during a day, week, or month, "cases" surpassing one psychological threshold or another.

Only top immunologists etc. in countries like mine (e.g. Dr Beran) got the opportunity from the media to explain something that the people should actually know from the high school biology. There is nothing worrisome about a "case" (a positive test). It doesn't mean that the person is actually ill. And the tests on similar viruses including flu would end up positive in a far higher percentage of the tests. Moreover, the number of positive tests is an irrelevant number because it's heavily dependent both on the total number of tests that are being done (and that is always much lower than the full population); and the methodology to choose who gets tested (because the more "suspicious" people you test, e.g. the contacts of recent positive tests, the higher percentage will be positive).

PC cripples technological progress

The unhinged extreme left is ruining the fundamental Western values: freedom, democracy, nation states, family, natural roles of sexes, control of the traditional cultures over territories, integrity of the scientific research, cultural heritage, the historical truth, moral values rooted in the Judeo-Christian religions and the Greco-Roman civilization, and many other things.

These pernicious trends are mostly promoted by "people working in certain convenient jobs" such as education and media (jobs that are subsidized and/or detached from the broader economy – where the employees do well when everyone else is in trouble which really means that the inkspillers and NGO members and others are parasites, not constructive members of the whole) but it is easy to see that the insanity is penetrating to most other jobs and industries, too.



Managements of corporations are increasingly turning into despicable pußies serving far left perverts. But there is still some engine beneath all these things that allows the society operate and the science and technology to advance, right? Well, only to some (shrinking) extent because the technological progress is being undermined by the SJW junk, too. I want to use a seemingly apolitical fact – the fact that the Czech Škoda Enyaq SUV was embraced with far more enthusiasm than other cars based on the Volkswagen Group's MEB brand – and argue that basically everything about the superiority is political in character. And this political disadvantage of the VW brand cars is a prototype of the gradual sublimation of the Western industrial supremacy in general.

A fun trinification \(E_8\) string-inspired model

This funny yet silly 2011 song about Greece's living beyond its means (and how it should be inspired by some Czech tricks; the song targets the Czech character more than the Greek one) has collected almost half a million views. Slovaks recorded a similar song about the Greek debt (secured by Russia), a parody on Modus' Little Pieces of Glass (1984).

Two months ago, I discussed a Mexican string-inspired \(E_8\)-based model of particle physics. "Not quite stringy" but "suspiciously string-like" models with \(E_8\) in ten dimensions must be getting more popular. Today, a Athens-Munich-Potsdam-Geneva paper

\(N=1\) trinification from dimensional reduction of \(\NNN=1\), 10D \(E_8\) over \(SU(3)/U(1)\times U(1)\times\ZZ_3\) and its phenomenological consequences

by Manolakos, Patellis, and Zoupanos uses a compactification of the \(E_8\) gauge theory on a 6-dimensional manifold with some Wilson lines, too. But while the Mexican paper chose an orbifold of the (flat) six-torus, this Greek paper exploits a curved, fancier manifold, namely\[ \ZZ_3 \backslash SU(3) / (U(1) \times U(1)). \] At least I hope that the coset written on both sides is correct, they were a bit sloppy about it. The Wilson lines chosen on the \(\ZZ_3\) transformations break \(E_8\) to \(SU(3)^3\), the gauge group of "trinification" models (a relative of "unification" models that is, in some sense, equally "unified" as unification, assuming a generalized usage of "unified").

The cases for a \(17\MeV\) QCD axion and cosmic strings

Today, after some time, I was intrigued by very ambitious interpretations of two experiments. First, there is the delirium over beryllium, a nuclear signal at \(17\MeV\) observed by Krasznahorkay et al. in Hungary (Krasznahorkay is the Hungarian transliteration of Krásna Hôrka, The Beautiful Little Hill [a castle], in Slovak).

In a new preprint,

Signals of the QCD axion with mass of \(17\MeV/c^2\): nuclear transitions and light meson decays

Daniele Alves of Los Alamos proposes a wonderful conclusion: the excess is real and the particle is nothing else than the QCD axion. The particle's mass is comparable to tens of \({\rm MeV}\) which sounds great, decays to electron-positron pairs, and is piophobic, Islamophobic, and homophobic, which a good axion should be. Note that an axion is a light scalar field \(A\) that is coupled to the QCD instanton density \(F\wedge F\) and is driven towards \(A\sim 0\), thus explaining why the coefficient of the instanton density is tiny and close to the CP-invariant value (zero). The axion is something that can solve the strong CP-problem (the problem why the coefficient of the CP-violating instanton density is so tiny), we say.

Czech PM Babiš: Keep Calm & how the CZ Covid response teams work

Lots of the sensationalist media in Czechia and in the world paint the Covid situation in Czechia as bad. Of course, it's not bad at all. Nothing bad is happening here at all, and I am just 5 km from the district (Pilsen-South) that had the highest number of cases in 7 days per 100,000 folks up to the last night.



In this Sunday video, the Slovak-born prime minister of Czechia sported a "keep calm and wash your hands" T-shirt and he delivered a calm message, indeed. In the spring, I believed that Babiš actually was the right man for a similar situation and he would quickly regain his composure and did a lot to keep the economy running etc. But only in the recent month or two, I am sure about it.

Here is a transcript.

Prime minister Babiš: About the face masks and the death due to Covid

So ciao folks, it's Sunday today. I will obviously talk about Covid-19, about the coronavirus, about the testing, about the lethality rates. And especially, I understand that you're bombarded by negative news from all directions. But I am here to calm you down, to give you some positive news that the Czech media, especially the public Czech Television, are not broadcasting.

Leftist war on meritocracy becomes overt

Bill has pointed out that Andrew Sullivan reviewed a new book, The Cult of Smart, which identifies meritocracy (especially in the world of thinking and intelligence) as the ultimate enemy of the leftist utopias (beneath the four main enemies, of course: they are spring, summer, fall, and winter).

For many years, we have seen that the post-modern or neo-Marxist left was increasingly fighting against some values that have been considered important for a long time, such as:

freedom (including freedom of speech, academic freedoms, freedom of assembly etc.), democracy (with the respect to elected leaders), family, natural roles of sexes, manliness and muscles, courage, women's physical beauty and smile, nation, competition, faith, harmony within a society, hard knowledge, industrialization, fossil fuels, fiscal responsibility, accountability, meat, sugar, fat, ... meritocracy.

The list is far from complete but even in this restricted list, many entries are really very, very important. Nevertheless, meritocracy is arguably more important than the average entry. Meritocracy has been important in the evolution of species – natural selection is just meritocracy involving "less intelligent than human activities" – and in the development of political ideas, scientific and technological know-how, and basically everything else that people do, especially if they are "achievers".

Lithium reserves: enough for 1-5 generations of "cars across the world" and nothing else

Lithium-battery electric cars are a niche market and they will always be. And if most cars were replaced by lithium-battery cars, mankind would run out of lithium after the first generation of cars would be produced. Or soon afterwards. And it's possible that other materials such as cadmium (reserves are estimated at half a million tons only) are even more constraining.



First, note that the number of cars in the world has surpassed 1.4 billion. How much lithium do we need for 1.4 billion electric cars with 70 kWh lithium-based batteries?

I am proud of the Czech, typically non-German, Covid rationality

A commenter with a complex German nickname brought the following Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung diatribe to my attention:

From a model student to a problem child

The German author describes Czechia and Slovakia as the countries that defined the European Covid-19 strategy in spring – Czechia adopted the mandatory face masks on March 18th, the first white nation to do so, and Slovakia quickly followed (although in some limited contexts, Slovakia was ahead; please, brothers, I really don't want you to join the German fascists again, for stupid reasons, again LOL).

I think it's clear that the masks reduce the propagation of the disease. The disease was dropping in Czechia up to early July and when we threw away the masks completely, the disease started to grow again, albeit slowly. The growth accelerated when the kids returned back to school but there's no problem with it. The masks rather demonstrably make a difference (which may turn a growth to a decrease) but it doesn't mean that it's sensible to wear it at all times and in all places. The masks are still annoying and they also discourage people from going outside, to pubs, shops etc. The devil is in the details, only some times and places are reasonable (public indoor spaces were at least somewhat reasonable in April when some uncertainty still existed about the ability of the virus to kill us or cripple us); nations that already have herd immunity who adopted the masks in the summer are way too late and this decision was just totally dumb.

And the text notices that in Czechia, the atmosphere has changed dramatically since March and April and Czechs don't have a problem with the number of cases that was over 1160 on Monday and they have really returned to the normal lives, a fact that the author clearly hates. Czechs have turned into problematic teenage drug addicts, we learn. Well, Czechia almost matched all of Germany on that day (Monday, yesterday) when it comes to this quantity (number of positive tests) and stood at the respectable 8th place in Europe.

Covid: science vs politics, propaganda, and obedience

Fewer than 900 deaths out of 5800+ Swedish deaths with Covid had Covid as the direct cause of death.

In one interview after another, the Czech epidemiologists, infectiologists, and other doctors (mainly top doctors) repeat that they're not worried about the rising number of cases (note that nothing is rising e.g. in Sweden that has nicely reached herd immunity), the disease isn't a big deal, it must be understood as a disease that is analogous to flu etc. Despite this pretty much consensus (which is being increasingly incorporated into Czechia's loose policies, as I happily predicted in early April), many journalists still keep on pushing the "narrative" that Covid is something serious.

I am talking about the physician Martin Balík who has treated lots of serious Covid cases, epidemiologist Jiří Beran, infectiologist Jiří Beneš, female bosses of the infection departments of big hospitals, and dozens of others. Today, a government scientific committee should meet and recommend a further loosening of the Covid rules (note that for a week, the personal quarantine in Czechia lasts for 10 days only instead of the previous 14 days). Only the serious cases should be traced; there should be no quarantine for the people who meet a Covid-positive person if they are asymptomatic; having had an FFP2 respirator in the presence of a Covid-positive person may become a reason for exemption from the quarantine, too.

Most laymen completely misunderstand what a black hole is

I am receiving lots of e-mail from young and armchair physicists. It's often a pleasant exchange. Sometimes the sender wants a theory to be confirmed. And among the layman senders, most of the theories or "theories" are seriously wrong. Many of the misconceptions keep on repeating all the time.

One of those invalid memes that I want to discuss – because I got several copies of that meme just in recent hours – is the idea that

The point of the black hole is the singularity. That is what makes a black hole a black hole and that's also where the mysteries of black holes hide.

This opinion is completely wrong. In this case, however, I have some empathy for those who think of black holes in this way. When I was 8, I (mis)understood black holes similarly – due to the influence of Newtonian prejudices combined with some popular explanations – despite the fact that some of the popular explanations, including those in the TV show "The Windows to the Universe Are Wide Open", went much deeper than to this misconception and I did watch them and read them.

Morens' and Fauci's nutty Gaia religion

Willie Soon sent me a link to a critical comment about an incredible article by David Morens and Anthony Fauci:

Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19 (Cell)

Aside from some generic Covid-19 hysteria which has crippled millions of other brains as well, these two authors promote a rather hardcore version of an older, Gaia religion. It really looks like these two men have completely lost it.

Nobel Prize winners' support for Biden proves their madness

Br sent me this list of 81 U.S. science Nobel Prize candidates who have already endorsed Biden. From some broader perspective, it's unspectacular because they also represent the huge left-wing bias of the scholarly institutions. They're not just "good scientists"; they are results of the selection that has (from the 1960s or so) demanded the people to be a mixture of "scientists" and "mindless Stalinist and Maoist fanatics", with the increasing importance assigned to the latter.

However, the fact that they did throw this support for the mentally deteriorrating puppet of the most destructive forces now, in 2020, is particularly troubling.

Joe Biden: "Covid has taken this year, just since the outbreak, has taken more than 100 year, look, here's, the lives, it's just, when you think about it." pic.twitter.com/D3dDY6njfD

— Trump War Room - Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) August 31, 2020

The ultimate guru of many U.S. scientists is crisply revealing the deepest and most perfectionist discovery about the coronavirus.

When I looked more carefully, I realized that I know more than ten of them in person. Starting from the most familiar ones to me, the first four are probably Gilbert, Glashow, Gross, Wilczek. Given the overrepresentation of these four in my perspective, it's likely that with some weight, more than 1/2 of the winners whom I know are subscribed here. The notable absences may be more interesting, e.g. Steven Weinberg.

Max Born in Bangalore

Willie Soon sent me a rather fascinating story at an Indian website

When Raman Brought Born to Bangalore

Everything that follows in this blog post are spoilers so think twice whether you want to read my comments before the page above.

Monstrous moonshine and string theory: a compressed popular book

Because an excited reader of popular books has claimed that he has learned more from this Quora answer of mine than from a whole popular book on monstrous moonshine (which is promoted at the bottom of this text), I decided to repost it here and call it "a compressed popular book". An advantage of such a free, compressed book is that you may save your money for a book and buy the bottle instead, the same bottle that Andrew Ogg promised to anyone who proves the monstrous moonshine.

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How did string theory help Borcherds solve the monstrous moonshine conjecture?

First, let me state a simplified version of the Monstrous moonshine conjecture. The conjecture states that the numbers 196,883 and 196,884 that appear at two seemingly totally different places of mathematics are so close for a rational reason. It says that it isn’t just a coincidence.

What are the two places? First, consider the Monster group. It is some group (set) of operations (the “group” means that there is a rule how to compose i.e. “multiply” two operations) analogous to the rotations of a cube or dodecahedron that keep the shape unchanged. Except that the monster group has almost \(10^{54}\) elements.

Green scientific illiteracy enters small nuclear reactors, too

I was asked about my opinion about the news story

Bill Gates' nuclear venture plans reactor to complement solar, wind power boom.

OK, this story is a combination of two very different things:

* a proposed (not quite) new type of reactors
* framing this incremental evolution as a part of a widespread ideology

The second component is totally sick but the first one is unspectacular, too.

I-folds, anomalies, and how string theory agrees with "pure thought" when it comes to the allowed ranks

At Harvard, Miguel Montero and Cumrun Vafa were fighting for their new and exciting paper

Cobordism Conjecture, Anomalies, and the String Lamppost Principle

to be the first one in the hep-th listings today. To win, your paper has to be the earliest one posted after 18:00:00 UTC. And they got 18:00:01 UTC. Too bad, it was only enough for the silver medal today. Try harder next time, Gentlemen. ;-)

It's a paper within the Swampland program that is refining the evidence in favor of the String Lamppost Principle. In plain English (i.e. when the technical language of cobordisms and anomalies is removed), the principle says the following:

If you don't like that string theory is absolutely needed to define a consistent theory of quantum gravity, then you are a dick or an aßhole that should go fudge himself or herself.

You may protest that there is a complementarity problem here: if you are a dick, you may apply the verb on others, but you can't be the passive element at the same moment. And on the contrary, if you are an aßhole, you can be the passive one but not the active one. Indeed, complementarity poses a problem for these individuals but it's their problem, not a problem for those who sort of know that the principle is right.

A really simple code drawing a Swedish herd immunity graph

Unlike most countries whose public health authorities were taken over by anti-science leftist ideologues doing very dirty politics, Sweden has chosen a rigorously scientific approach to the Covid-19 contagion.

It has achieved the most beautiful state of herd immunity in the world and its graphs look really organic and nice. Click at the Swedish statistical Covid page and focus on "avlidna per dag" (deaths per day) in the right lower corner. The peak of 115 deaths per day occurred twice, on April 8th and April 15th, and the disease started to drop at that time and the average number of deaths in late August is below 2 per day. These numbers are bound to decrease further. Despite its "no lockdown policy", Sweden already has fewer "cases" and deaths per day (in recent weeks) than Czechia, a country with the same 10+ million people which did a rather draconian shutdown in spring (and has 420 deaths with Covid instead of Sweden's 5800 now). Czechia only paid 2.5% of the extra GDP drop for its unwise lockdown, relatively to Sweden, but the advantages of that lockdown have become clear disadvantages by now. Sweden knows that no substantial restart of the disease is coming; Czechia can't be this sure because the degree of Czechs' immunity is much lower. That's why Swedes may live without fear now and especially in the autumn; Czechs may still have some fear (although most of us don't) and the temptation to lock extra things in October.

An interesting German textbook on particles and strings

Arthur Hebecker is a professor of physics in Heidelberg (picture above: the bridge is almost like one in Regensburg, our twin city), a traditional German mathematics hub (the list of famous and brilliant people linked to that town is incredible for a town of 160,000). He's done GUT, orbifolds, and many other things but Springer (which has HQ in Heidelberg, Berlin, NYC, Dordrecht) is preparing a textbook. Here is the free version of it:

Lectures on Naturalness, String Landscape and Multiverse (PDF)

It is an interesting 269-page-long textbook with stuff from particle physics to some cutting-edge topics in string theory and around string theory that is appropriate for the year 2020.

Unity Biotechnology failure: aging isn't a disease

In recent years, some rich people and companies started to invest into a "desirable" technology that we know from some science-fiction films: "Let us stop aging". Doubled or infinite lives are great, they said. Google founded Calico in 2013, Oracle's Larry Elison made an investment. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel invested into a competing San-Francisco-based Unity Biotechnlogy Inc.

Only minutes ago, I read the mission of Unity Biotechnology:

[to] extend human healthspan, the period in one’s life unburdened by the disease of aging

I exploded in laughter. This looks like the ultimate snake oil with a science-fiction flavor. OK, many people want to stop aging. But is it possible? And is it right to call aging "a disease"? My answer to the second question (and probably the first one) is a resounding No.

Lidl CZ is 10+ years ahead of other supermarket chains

In Beroun, a town between Prague and Pilsen, they had opened a "new generation store" already in 2015 (which recently was and probably still is the largest Lidl store in Central Europe). Now in 2020, our local Pilsner-Doubravka store got upgraded to a similar if not identical "new generation" and it really makes a difference.

Dieter Schwarz (*1939), a German Jew, is the 3rd wealthiest German ($18 billion or so) and the owner of the Lidl and Kaufland chains. The local Lidl has been my grocery store of choice since its birth almost a decade ago. I have believed that they were ahead of others. But minutes ago, I returned from that store after an 8-day-long reconstruction and expansion (Friday-to-Friday, August 14-21; I had to go to a Norma once and Coop twice, not too pleasant); it was far from the first expansion of that shop. And I am just impressed.

Lidl is currently a decade ahead of the competing chains. The difference is literally comparable to the difference between the capitalist grocery stores and communist grocery stores in the 1980s. I am stunned. My visits to the other stores are often unpleasant, products are missing, most things are 30% more expensive, employees are slow, they chat with friends and ignore consumers, long lines, and so on.

Millennials: shallow education & lack of stubbornness are linked to each other

The Czech minister of healthcare, Adam Vojtěch, was born in 1986 – a Millennial – and became semi-famous in 2005 when he was a contestant in the Czech Superstar (American Idol). His nickname was Ken because there was also a girl, Světlana Šáchová, who was nicknamed Barbie. Fine. In the subsequent 15 years, he got a law degree and was named the minister of healthcare – probably because the billionaire Babiš was told by his PR folks (perhaps Mr Marek Prchal himself) that it was a great idea to have a minister who is considered a "male model".

Mr Vojtěch clearly became more visible during the 2020 viral hysteria. Czechia locked down things intensely in March. Babiš and his ministers showed that they were holding the power firmly in their hands. And Czechs were disciplined. But the loosening started relatively fast and was sensible. I followed the minister and "liked" tons of tweets as he was introducing the Smart Quarantine, the tracing mechanism to find the infected people, plus the traffic light map.

Many countries, regions insanely fight against infinitesimal numbers of Covid infections

The far left politicians in Victoria are increasingly crippling the economy and life in that region of Australia. They started when the number of "deaths with Covid" in Australia was about 100; now it is 450, just slightly above Czechia's 401 (Victoria, Czechia, Australia have 6.4, 10.7, 25 million people, respectively). It's still tiny. But we may also see that the new draconian policies surely didn't stop the propagation of the disease; we might say that the hard data indicate that they kickstarted the new growth instead. There is no reason to think that the curfew-like conditions make anything better. They have helped nobody so far.

In New Zealand, about 100 infections plus one "death with Covid" in 3 months was enough for the prime minister to get away with the postponing of elections by one month. Lukashenko is being hysterically and so far baselessly accused of rigging the elections but when a lady cancels the elections altogether to easily add one month to her tenure, no one seems to care!

In the U.S. Sunbelt, the number of deaths per million people is 4 times smaller than it was in the Northeast (400 instead of 1700 or so). But the hysteria seems to be the same if not greater. My main observation is that the amount of suffering, hospitalizations, and deaths doesn't seem to affect the hysteria at all. Isn't it ironic? It is ironic and it is true. The hysteria has nothing to do with any facts or medical suffering. It is all about the power to enslave the people.

Maldacena, Milekhin: sci-fi-like semi-realistic traversable wormholes

The wormhole scene from Interstellar, 2014. Traversable wormholes like this one are normally thought "impossible due to the energy conditions" but as long as we ignore these inequalities, the simulation of the observations was created to be as realistic and GR-obeying as possible. Thanks to Kip Thorne for that (he got the Nobel Prize for something else, LIGO).

In April, I discussed Maldacena's playful magnetic black holes where the electroweak symmetry may be restored on the Corona. Along with Alexey Milekhin (both IAS), they just released a morally similar paper with some "not quite mathematically demanding" black hole physics,

Humanly traversable wormholes.

1915 Einstein's general theory of relativity (GR) is our classical theory of gravity – that Einstein built to be compatible with his 1905 special theory of relativity. GR has lots of verified consequences such as corrections to Newton's equations, the Big Bang, and the black holes, among other things.

Czechs have moved on: 70-77% disapprove of the partial reintroduction of face masks from Sept 1st

Between mid March and mid April, the Covid fear was genuine – even in my Czech homeland. It was spread not only among the journalists and the ordinary people but among some (but not a majority of) physicians, too. That's why I consider the Covid comments by our PM Babiš in Harvard International Review fair. Many people including sensible ones indicated fear, the government acted fast, and introduced one of the most strict and most rigorously enforced lockdowns in the world. If a shutdown has ever had a chance to make sense, it must have been very short and intense (like the fuel in a rocket that is burned as quickly as possible to kick it to the orbit). A long-term partial suppression of everything has never made any sense whatsoever (just like the wasting of fuel for keeping a rocket 100 meters above the ground).



Mirai: Put on a Face Mask, March 2020. With 4 million views, they are still using my Lumo English subtitles. ;-)

(It is a nice interview, e.g. when Babiš correctly corrects the journalist who says that Babiš' path to power was "unorthodox". Instead, Babiš' motivation and path were really a textbook example of orthodox democracy. Someone who had some capacity to do politics observed some dissatisfaction and the demand for some kind of politics and matched the demand with his supply. I approve it despite the fact that I haven't ever been a part of that demand.)

Most Czechs got quickly persuaded that face masks were the key difference that helped East Asia to tame the disease. I've been saying it at least since February, I think that the evidence has grown it is the case, and the face masks have become a patriotic symbol of a sort. I think that the reduction of the viral doses by the face masks is probably even more important for the lowering of the fatalities than the complete prevention of the transmission. Since March 18th when the face masks became mandatory in Czechia (and when the face mask song above was posted!), we grew into a nation of face mask missionaries. The pioneers of face masks among whites. Maybe our having lots of the Vietnamese folks has helped to spread this "Asian" culture here.

Surprising anti-Lukashenko warriors are mainly Covid cowards, the new wave of leftists

An amusing report from the May 9th celebrations of the 1945 victory against Germany. No restrictions were imposed on Belarus! The nation of 4 million still has just some 600 deaths with Covid so far.

I am not able to reliably figure out whether Alexander Lukashenko has gotten way over 50% (he says 80%) of votes in the elections. This is the main unknown that makes it hard to make unambiguous conclusions about "absolutely everything". If he improved the results from below 50% to 80%, then it is a huge fraud and he should obviously be removed. I still think that it's wrong for other countries to organize the removal. If that fraud were real, the people of Belarus surely have enough strength and potential to fix their country themselves.

But I find it very likely, above 95%, that Lukashenko's victory is damn real. Let me assume it is the case in the rest of the blog post. Well, if it is the case, then the integrity of the whole country is at stake and the president of Belarus has the duty to defend his country against foreign mercenaries and their domestic fifth columns. With my assumption, those teamed up with the foreign forces are really traitors and while it's sad if someone is tortured, it would be understandable because the whole country is facing existential risks.

A proof of string theory

For a few decades, competent researchers of fundamental physicists have "almost known" that any consistent theory of quantum gravity has to be string theory.

For a long time, the evidence supporting this statement has been somewhat incomplete, somewhat circumstantial, somewhat built on fuzzy aesthetic criteria, and on the elimination of some imaginable, increasingly large classes of conceivable alternatives (which were never quite "all possible alternatives"). In recent years, however, a more systematic or more axiomatic analysis of the concepts and patterns has made many things clearer to get closer to establishing the equivalence

CONSISTENT QUANTUM GRAVITY = STRING-M/THEORY

which is basically the same thing that Cumrun Vafa calls the "String Lamppost Principle". Jared Kaplan and Sandipan Kundu (John Hopkins) posted a fun hep-th preprint

Closed Strings and Weak Gravity from Higher-Spin Causality

where they prove the existence of the closed string spectrum (a Hagedorn tower) from the assumption that higher-spin particles exist; and causality works.

Klaus: a progressive victory in the US is a more serious worry than the Chinese politburo

A statement of the [Czech ex-president] Václav Klaus Institute, August 13th

Which side do we stand on?

Today, the Czech media have informed about the visit by Mike Pompeo with headlines such as "You have our backs". They were quoting the American secretary who expressed worries about our freedom and democracy which are, in his opinion, threatened by the activities of the competing superpowers, China and Russia. He was assuring us that the U.S. is ready to help us to defend the conditions of liberty. We must praise it, that is how it should look in between allies.

The world according to Thiel

David B. sent me several interesting videos including some interviews with Peter Thiel. Exactly half a year ago, he participated at this Hoover Institution event:

The World According to Thiel

His are great ideas and I agree with virtually everything in this video, except for some comments (including some in between the lines) closer to the end. Concerning China, something we solve intensely these days because Mike Pompeo visited the EU capital Pilsen (I was 3 meters away from him) and he added a less important city named Prague today, and will continue to Poland, Slovenia, and Austria, Thiel said that China is a non-democratic mostly capitalist mixed system and it can survive in this way or it may change. We don't know.

Is China ahead of the West? It often enforces two totally contradictory opinions on the Westerners at the same moment: China is superstrong and ahead; China is superweak and stuck in the Middle Ages. These claims disagree with each other but they're used psychologically to double the impact on the typical listener (the goal is for everyone else to give up). I agree it's all irrational. China is something in between and it will almost certainly be "comparable" to the U.S. for quite some time. It has made a big economic progress but it's equally amazing how poor they still are. They are 1.4 billion people whose average IQ is above the average American IQ but they still have just the GDP similar to the 330 million Americans. A sign that something is still very wrong about the system.

Positivism: relativity, QM just demand questions to be precise

Off-topic: A fun popular stringy talk by Cumrun Vafa from the last week, hat tip: Erwin

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And translatable to well-defined properties of the sensory perception

The laymen usually refuse quantum mechanics – and jump on the bandwagon of moronic pseudoscientific fairy-tales such as Bohmian mechanics, many worlds, objective collapse, or even superdeterminism – because they are just overwhelmed by the very realization that the observer plays any role in the application of the theory.



The insight that observers matter sounds like "soul" or "religion" and materialists in a very broad sense (a set that happens to include many Catholic theologians, it turned out) just instinctively refuse it. But it is simply wrong to reject scientific propositions instinctively; it is wrong to clump and conflate them according to ideological criteria. Even if the quantum mechanical observers were "religion", it's not the same as "Islam" or something like that and your usual arguments against religions simply fail. They certainly fail. In fact, the basic postulates of quantum mechanics and demonstrably true.

Brainwashing about Covid-19 continues at full steam

We have often said or heard that the old, manipulative media are dying and that is why the filth working in them is getting desperate and increasing the amount of lies that they are spreading. This may very well be true but it is also true that they are still alive and turning millions of people into brainwashed mental cripples.



Thankfully, while most of the Western European and North American youth have been persuaded to hide in the basement, their Czech and Slovak counterparts participated at this traditional bucket party on the Zrće beach, Pag Island, Croatia. A bucket party is a party where everyone drinks alcohol from the same 20-liter bucket; the Czech-and-Slovak slang is "párty kýbl" (the correct Czech word for a "kýbl", a cool parasitic Germanism, is a "vědro" or a "kbelík", however). Bucket parties have existed for years before Covid-19 (see videos from previous years) but something was "even more sexy" about drinking from the same bucket in July 2019.

Apologists for Stalinist murders conquered Prague's philosophy department

I read most of tweets by the Archbishop of Prague, Dominika Duka. I have drunk beer next to him several times, he's spent years in my hometown of Pilsen (in the Bory Prison above: he overlapped with Havel at least once) and he's simply a man of integrity who has wise opinions about the historical as well as currently relevant political questions.

Today, his tweet looked like he was worried and the topic seemed unfamiliar to me:

Duka: I get goosebumps when I hear about the revisionist opinions that became widespread at the Philosophy Department of the Charles University in Prague when it comes to the appraisal of the previous [communist] regime – and when I realize that these opinions are often articulated by those who could only hear about the events indirectly.

He linked to his fresh blog post where he supported Michal Klíma, his friend and the boss of the Holocaust Victims' Foundation in his arguments against the dean of the Philosophy Department (who has a German sounding surname).

GUT from \(SO(32)\) heterotic string

Jihn Kim wrote his 351st paper and it's intriguing:

Grand unfication models from \(SO(32)\) heterotic string

At least in the 1980s, the \(E_8\times E_8\) heterotic string theory was the main phenomenologically relevant class of string compactifications, the main candidate for a theory of everything. However, there's another possible gauge group of heterotic strings in \(D=10\), namely \(SO(32)\), more precisely \(Spin(32)/\ZZ_2\).

RIP Joan Feynman (1927-2020). Media supporting "women in science" are 100% silent

I had a pleasant and refined German guest-scientist in Pilsen today. We chatted about lots of things and – because of some related work by my guest – we also mentioned Joan Feynman. With some uncertainty, I said that she recently died – because it followed from a tweet by John Preskill that I read in the last week:

Joan Feynman 1927-2020. You can get a sense of how remarkable Joan was from her presentation in 2018 at the Feynman 100 celebration.https://t.co/b0E3xcLXaT

— John Preskill (@preskill) July 23, 2020

I didn't quite internalize the information about her death because "-2020" were the only characters in the tweet that talked about the death. Sadly, a Californian funeral website supports the theory that she died and/or had a funeral on July 22nd.

The video that Preskill embedded shows her lively mental abilities and her charmingly modest yet realistic sense of humor – when she was already over 90 years old. I also think that her way of speaking and gestures are extremely similar to her brother, Richard Feynman. They had the Far Rockaway, Queens, New York accent, some Jewish flavor added into it, but the similarities go much further and deeper, into the rhythm of the smiles and the "preparation for a shooting of ideas" with some degree of a combative, suffering frowning at the right moments that precedes the smiles. You are invited to provide us with a more detailed quantification of their similarities.

A thank-you speech

By Luděk Sobota

0:00 Dear friends,
allow me, on the occasion of handing over this award to me, more precisely of taking over this award... To put it clearly, your handing over and my taking over of your award. Well, of the award that used to be yours but now it is already mine.

0:22 Friends, I am touched and I am moved. I can't even hide my erection... I mean elation... my movement. I cannot move. I cannot find words.

0:39 Friends, I am looking for words and I cannot find them. Friends, on this occasion, let me thank to all those who made it possible for me to earn this prize. In the first place, it was the viewers in the first row.

0:59 But also the viewers in the second row. Viewers in the third row. Viewers in the fifth row. Viewers in the sixth row.

1:13 Friends, I cannot forget the viewers in the fourth row. Last but not least, I thank to the viewers in the last row.

1:40 Friends, I am thankful to the employees of the Czech Television who have built the stage sets, who dressed me, who lubricated me, and who have called me to the stage, often in vain.

1:57 I am also grateful to my colleagues-actors who have collaborated with me and in this way, they created the opportunity for me to come to the fore.

2:20 Thanks to the actresses that they gave me... the same opportunity. Thanks to the film directors that they haven't given me the same opportunity.

2:40 Thanks to the script directors for having crossed out my, often not too witty, text and replacing it with a far different, with a far different text.

3:04 I also thank to all the lighting electricians who have enlightened me. But also to the workers in the power plants who have released the electricity here into us.

3:23 Also, I thank to all those who are reparing the roads and cars. Without all these people, I couldn't get here and without without all these people, I could shove my acting, frankly speaking, I could shove my acting... somewhere.

3:48 Friends, thanks to my wife who has always calmed me and cleaned me; who has always, when I brought the salary from the Czech Television, done the vacuum cleaning. And who is washing me very often. Thanks.

4:14 I mustn't forget about my parents, either. Friends, thanks to my mother who has given birth to me. I thank to my father that he met her... and that he had a child with her and in fact, it was such a child that was one like me. And they made it possible for me to grow in such a grea... to grow in such a great ate ate... for me to grow in such a? Great? ATE ACTOR who has such a terrible prize.

5:25 I am also thankful to the parents of their parents. But also to the parents of those parents and of those parents... Friends, I thank to Forefather Czech for having brought my great great grandparents here.

5:43 I thank to the Slavník Dynasty that they created the room for the Přemyslid Dynasty. I thank to the drug addicts, the narkomen... the Marcomanni, the Quadi, and the Celts that they have evacuated our territory in time so that my great great grandparents could have come here.

6:06 Also, I thank to the Asians that they allowed the Slavs, before the latter found their new home here, to be accommodated on the territory of the contemporary Mongolian People's Republic and its vicinity.

6:23 I thank to the monkeys that, in the prehistoric times, higher, erected mammals could have evolved from them, i.e. the humans, and to Darwin who has made this realization because otherwise I would run out of the people whom I can thank. Thank you!

Terrible Q2 GDP drops could have been worse

I am confident that the second quarter (Q2) of 2020 was the peak of the Covid hysteria and the economy is already vastly more open and prosperous (almost everywhere) in Q3 – and we will see a substantial GDP rise between Q2 and Q3. I also think that there has been some learning and nations won't return to as draconian national quarantines as those that they suffered in Q2 2020.



A financial song from a rare country that didn't lose its marbles because of a dumb coronavirus.

So the Q2 2020 figures should be showing the worst results that the human stupidity – totally unfairly blamed on a nearly harmless virus – could have caused. Many such numbers were published today. In Q2, Germany, Belgium, Austria, and the U.S. are estimated (these are first calculations based on the real data, not some guesswork!) to have dropped by 10.1%, 12.2%, 10.7%, and 9.5% quarter-on-quarter. The first three countries' GDP dropped 11.7%, 14.5%, and 12.8% year-on-year (because there has been a 2% or so drop in Q1).

Here, I need to discuss the American figure, 9.5%. The published figure was 32.9%, slightly better than estimates, but Americans publish annualized figures which means figures extrapolated to one year by an exponential function. I calculated 9.5% by the following formula:\[ 1-(1-0.329)^{1/4} \approx 0.095 \] The American annualization convention is particularly stupid now – because it basically assumes that the GDP growth rate is a continuous function of time (if it is not, then it is very unwise to extrapolate it!). Too bad, even the GDP itself is far from being a continuous function in countries where it's possible to shut down whole industries overnight.

Covid numbers have huge error margins

It helps to show that the virus is really inconsequential.

Because lots of people have been obsessively tested for almost half a year, lots of numbers were produced in the world. The Worldometers statistical page contains a large amount of numbers that describe the "cases" (positively tested people), serious cases, deaths, number of tests in the world's countries (and their states) and their historical evolution.

The two most important official statistical pages in Czechia are Illness-currently and Koronavirus-Mzcr. Let me discuss what was happening to the numbers on the first page.