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

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

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

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

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

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

Insightful corrections and the weak gravity conjecture

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

Black Hole Paradoxes Reveal a Fundamental Link Between Energy and Order

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



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

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

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

Twitter's censors have finally made Trump angry

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



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

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

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

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

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

The LHCb experiment

Charlie Wood wrote an intriguing article for the Quanta Magazine,

Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes

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

Book: At least two philosophers understood background independence

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

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

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

Balance between creation and creative destruction

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

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

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

Can someone hear the Morse code?

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

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

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

Satoši or pal just moved BTC 50 mined in 2009

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

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

17XiVVooLcdCUCMf9s4t4jTExacxwFS5uh

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

The logical relationship between quantum gravity and extended objects

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

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

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

A symmetry principle for emergent spacetime

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

Win $500 easily: a taxi surrounded by 10 trees

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Some people favor extremely unlikely, contrived hypotheses

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

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

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

Feigenbaum helps you to solve a puzzle, win BTC 0.05

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

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

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

The water conservation law and irrationality of the fight against drought

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

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



The Great Bolevec Pond

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

Deborah Cohen, BBC, and models vs theories

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

Have I had a Covid finger?

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

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

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



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

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

Elon Musk, a rare CEO who cares about freedom

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

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

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