## Thursday, March 04, 2021 ... //

### Gregor Wentzel and the path integral

Provoked by the previous blog post about the path integrals, Frank S. sent me two fascinating 1924 papers by Gregor Wentzel which "almost" defined the Feynman's path integral definition of quantum mechanics but two decades earlier (and a year before Heisenberg started quantum mechanics as we know it). If you find English somewhat more comprehensible than German, like I do, you may read a 1998 review of these papers by Salvatore Antoci and Dierck-E. Liebscher

which probably contains more than what we will actually ever need, unless we plan to write a detailed book about the history of science. First, Wentzel may sound like a forgotten name. But on this blog, you find it in two previous texts. He had something to do with dispersion and Kramers etc. After all, Wentzel's name starts with a W, like WKB does, and indeed, he is also the first guy remembered in the WKB acronym. But how many people know what (J)WKB stands for now?

Just a Czech comment. Wentzel sounds very German because it's spelled in a German way. But it's just a Germanization of the Czech, Slavic name Václav. Why? Because the original form of the name, used some 1000 years ago, was Věnceslav (like Víceslav) which really means "more fame" or "more famous".

Ironically enough, "Boleslav" had the same meaning ("bole" is still a Russian word for "more"). Boleslav was the brother who murdered saint Václav. They were brothers but their first names had the same meaning. English adopted the old Czech "Věnceslav" as its (Good King) Wenceslaus, German shortened it to Wenzl or Wentzel, and modern Czech shortened it to Václav (or, colloquially, Vašek or Venca, the latter is probably a Bohemization of the German name Wentzel; note that Venclovský was the first Czech who swam over the English Channel while David Vencl – the surname is just a Bohemian respelled Wentzel – recently improved the world record in swimming under the ice to 81 meters, a great Czech dude)...

## Wednesday, March 03, 2021 ... //

### Feynman's path integral & superpositions of histories

What happens in between is "everything", Feynman diagrams are another basis of the "space of histories"

In January, I was asked on Quora What happens in between the initial and final states in quantum mechanics. Well, everything happens and nothing happens or it's meaningless to say what happens. A basic principle of quantum mechanics is that the results of the measurements of observables $$L$$, i.e. statements $$L=\lambda_i$$ obtained by measurements, are the only facts. Quantum mechanics is a set of rules to predict or derive or explain some facts (or their high probability) from other facts. A theory in classical physics could be given this description but also a "more specific one", a classical model of something, but the more specific one has been impossible after the discovery of quantum mechanics.

Feynman's path integral approach to quantum mechanics is a very explicit way to see "in what sense" everything happens. Assuming some initial and final states (in a position-like basis, to simplify the questions about the bases of initial and final Hilbert spaces), the probability amplitude for a transition (i.e. the complex number that determines the matrix element of a unitary evolution matrix) may be calculated as${\mathcal A}_{{\rm initial}\to {\rm final}} = \int{\mathcal D}x(t)\,\exp(iS/\hbar)$ where the infinite-dimensional integral goes over all trajectories $$x(t)$$ connecting the points $$x(t_{\rm initial}) = x_{\rm initial}$$ and $$x(t_{\rm final}) = x_{\rm final}$$. If you consider generic initial wave functions, you must pre-add two additional integrals over $$x_{\rm initial}$$ and $$x_{\rm final}$$, the weights $$\psi_{\rm initial}(x_{\rm initial})$$ and $$\psi_{\rm final}(x_{\rm final})$$, and then the integral becomes the integral over literally all functions $$x(t)$$ defined on the interval of time between the initial and final time (be sure that while I admire $$\rm\TeX$$, it's faster for me to write these mathematically heavy sentences in words than in mathematical symbols!).

## Tuesday, March 02, 2021 ... //

### Triangles in a row

My friend Prof Vlasta Dlab (Ottawa-Bzí) sent me his solution (which will appear in a Czech MathPhys Journal) to the following puzzle (well, its generalization from $$4$$ to $$n$$ triangles):

He was deeply dissatisfied with a solution of this puzzle on YouTube (posted in January 2021) because a part of that derivation is a blind application of a geometric formula (a sine formula for triangular areas) which doesn't really reveal the simplicity of the situation and its independence of angles, precise shapes... I completely agree with Vlasta. While the YouTube solution looks short, it uses an excessively heavy and irrelevant tool, and the person using these methods would probably waste too much extra time if he were supposed to solve a nearly isomorphic problem.

A good mathematician should look what matters and what doesn't matter. And an important point about this calculation of areas is that the angles don't matter at all! Correspondingly, you shouldn't be using the Pythagorean theorem, a sine formula for triangular areas, Heron's formula, and similar tools that deal with angles and, almost equivalently, with ratios of lengths of line intervals that go in different directions. In a good, conceptual solution, the "square roots of three" and similar things shouldn't appear at all (while they appear in the YouTube video).

### SJW awokening harms mathematics more than communism did

At Twitter, PartTimeRacer has informed me about the essay (at "Common Sense With Bari Weiss", a brand that hasn't built name recognition with me so far)

There Is No Such Thing as "White" Math
by Sergiu Klainerman, a Romania-born Jewish male mathematics professor at Princeton. (Here we do try to maximize the information that readers might find important, and given the sociological focus of these discussions, rightfully so.) I have mentioned his name four months ago.

Bucharest

Klainerman is introduced as someone who left the Soviet bloc and who could do wonderful things in the U.S., partly because mathematics is a great equalizer. The solid method to look for the right and (to eliminate) wrong answers is universal across cultures, the beef of mathematics doesn't depend on the white race or any other group of humans in any way. Well, Klainerman is still PC in the sense that he likes to "assume" that mathematics skills are universal across cultures etc.

## Sunday, February 28, 2021 ... //

### Do dogs and cats depend on eating plants?

A better, more strategy-oriented, and more quantitative "life sciences" curriculum for kids should prevent people from becoming scientifically illiterate vegan or Luddite ideologues

Last night, aside from many other interesting things ;-), I "learned" from an amateur Prague-based public intellectual that it is great to feed dogs and cats with a balanced diet rich in fruits and vegetables. Also, it turned out that animals in Nature never fight and if an animal ever dies, it is only an animal that was going to die very soon, too. The predators are very decent and avoid any physical violence. It was entertaining to some extent but I just don't have the stomach to stomach similar things that come from an adult for hours (unlike cows that have four stomachs and can stomach everything, as we will see).

Two weeks ago, I argued that a proper and captivating education of history for kids should be filled with the basic capitalist financial literacy. Now, I think that that the kids' biology classes should be full of adventurous and emotionally relevant National-Geographic-style stories about animals, something that the kids become involved in, and something that should ultimately teach the logic of Darwin's theory, evolution, and natural selection to the kids.

In fact, these two proposals are completely analogous – in some sense, they are almost the same thing. Capitalism is a counterpart of the "struggle, competition, and cooperation between animals" that is brought to the world of investment and corporations. The reasons why capitalism and natural selection lead to improved well-being of the whole and progress are fundamentally the same.

## Saturday, February 27, 2021 ... //

### Edwin's understanding of QM: Part I, physics vs mathematics

Today I have listened to a large number of interviews, especially on the brilliant Free Universum Radio hosted by the smart opera singer Ms Martina Kociánová. But I also saw a 10-day-old quantum mechanical video with Edwin Steiner.

### Millions of Czechs will strongly violate the draconian restrictions

It's often said that 40% of Czechs totally oppose most of the non-cosmetic Covid-19 restrictions and my reading of the in-real-life interactions as well as the Internet discussions agrees with this estimate (yes, of course, I am inside this 40% group). And yes, of course I think that this natural support for "ordinary freedoms needed to live ordinary lives at the individual level" (something that even all the foreign overlords respected at almost all times) is also the main reason why Czechia leads the world in the number of "Covid-19 cases" per million people – and I am proud about it. The number of Covid-19 cases really is a great approximation for a moral virtue in a nation. After the announcements last night, the anger in the discussions is intense and omnipresent.

Even though the Czech Parliament has refused to extend even the mild state of emergency that has existed so far, the Czech government has decided to introduce a new one with much more draconian measures from Monday, March 1st. So the face masks are mandatory outside and on the workplace; cloth masks aren't enough; two face masks or a respirator are needed in the public transportation (and...) and the grocery stores, almost all other shops are ordered to be shut down (exceptions are scheduled to drop by 50%, flower shops remain the most surprising exception, they're claimed to be open to remember the Covid victims but only 1-2 persons die in a district each day and what about the remaining thousands of flowers?).

But the restrictions on the movement seem most shocking and they almost resemble the Australian insanities. Every movement to another district (Czechia is divided to 76 districts plus Prague that will act as one district, good for them) must be justified by some incredible paperwork, a receipt from the employer or the doctor or something like that. So any "casual" movement in between the districts (like that of the people who have a romantic relationship in the adjacent municipality; or even the visit to parents or kids who live elsewhere) is claimed by the government to be banned from Monday (millions of people actively say that this is an inhuman restriction). One can walk a dog but only 500 meters from his home, and only during the day. Very shockingly, people who will be located on their cottage on Sunday night must stay there (or at least in the same district) for three weeks (the cottage will legally become their home for these purposes)!

## Tuesday, February 23, 2021 ... //

### Prague's municipal court endorses a freshman, orders in-person learning to be restarted

Every court must have its opinions about what is legal and constitutional

As "citizen" has pointed out, the Municipal Court in Prague decided against a high school where teachers were getting a salary while not fulfilling their duty to teach a student in person (which is what teachers do at most schools not only in Czechia now, as you know). The freshman T.N. has sued the school and won. The essence of the verdict is the judges' opinion that the state of emergency that was started on February 15th (last Monday) is the same as the previous one and whose extension was vetoed by the lower chamber of the Parliament on February 10th.

Gymnázium Na Zatlance, the high school that lost a lawsuit and was ordered to restore the proper education

Because there is no legally valid state of emergency now, the school has no valid justification for not fulfilling its pedagogical obligations.

Now, the prime minister has used a sleight-of-hand by emphasizing that a "fundamentally new" state of emergency started on November 15th, after the regional governors asked the government to extend the state of emergency (a discussion with zero legal implications) despite the lawmakers' veto (according to the prime minister, the state of emergency was "new" and responding to "new conditions" but this is in no conflict with his assertion that nothing changed about the restrictions between February 14th and 15th). The prime minister wasn't too clear why the state of emergency with the same cause and the same justification would be "new". But he must have believed that simply by saying it was "new", the courts would consider it "new": maybe it is because you never enter the same river twice. To say the least, he wanted 10.7 million Czech citizens to believe a story like that and to behave as if the state of emergency had been lawfully extended. According to the law, the government has the right to declare a "new" state of emergency at any moment. The government has to inform the Parliament and the new state of emergency may be later terminated by the Parliament.

### Yellen, Lagarde vs Bitcoin

Two weeks ago, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) Christine Lagarde said that Bitcoin was unlikely to be held by central banks, it is used for funny business. At about the same time, Elon Musk added the word "Bitcoin" to his Twitter profile. The Bitcoin price added some 15% in hours as a result – as millions of dimwits interpreted the comment as an order to BUY BUY BUY.

In the process of merging the two most notorious one-trillion bubbles of the contemporary crazy financial world, the uncompetitive carmaker Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and said that it would accept it as compensation. The supporters of Tesla and Bitcoin bubbles are highly overlapping sets of hopeless idiots. Thinking positively about one of these bubbles is quite a sign of the person's stupidity – but celebrating the hybridization of these two bubbles (in which all the risks amplify each other and the absence of any beef is illuminated from both sides) is probably yet another level. Of course, Tesla hasn't ever produced any real profit from cars so the Tesla profit from the appreciation of BTC surpassed all the conceivable profits of the carmakers that have something to do with cars. ;-) Imagine how fudged up the people have to be if they see nothing wrong about such "money" and such "carmakers". Do you really prefer a world where "producers" actually make their billions by manipulating millions of simpletons by ordering them BUY BUY BUY instead of producing useful, competitive products? If your IQ happens to be below 70 but you were capable of learning to read, anyway, let me remind you that the fair Bitcoin price has always been and still is$0.00. Among Bitcoin cultists, this number $0.00 isn't applied too accurately, they are paying about$50,000 (and the peak was $58,354 a day or two days ago). In early 2019, the price at which the cult was trading the$0.00 Bitcoin was $3,100 (a local low). The 16-fold increase in these 2 years basically means that the number of dimwits who have been persuaded that it is clever to invest into this bubble grew by a factor of 16. Each of them evaluates the Bitcoin price inaccurately and the inaccuracy per person grew from the$3,100 discrepancy to $50,000, by the same factor of 16. That's why we could say that the total amount of stupidity contained in the Bitcoin cult actually grew with the second power of 16, by a factor of 256. I think that the people in this cult do believe that by collecting a sufficient number of dimwits and inflating the bubble to a huge enough size, they change the truth and$0.00 will be equal to $50,000 or something (just like when Bill Gates says that 2+2=4 is just a racist invention and other answers may be made more correct when minority SJWs are fighting hard enough). Sorry, idiots, it won't. The Bitcoin is still worth$0.00 and you are just a larger pile of more hardcore morons than what you were before.

## Saturday, February 20, 2021 ... //

### The Gates fund "math is racist" junk

The number of such shocking news is absolutely terrifying these days. But this one was particularly disappointing minutes ago:

Rantz: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation bankrolls ‘math is racist’ lunacy
Far left activists are spreading the "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction" for children who are 12-14 years old and this absolute garbage is being funded by Melinda and Bill Gates. You can find relatively recent blog posts (pre-Covid posts, however) where I was still expressing a hope that Bill Gates was far wiser than other billionaires who run similar charities and "charities". I've liked him as a "Microsoft fan" when I was an undergrad and my sentiments got even more favorable when I learned tht he coded the BASIC for my Commodore 64 which I have spent a lot of time with as a boy. But should these things be enough to give thumbs up to a man?

## Thursday, February 18, 2021 ... //

### Kosovo PM elect wants Kosovo to be annexed by Albania

Kosovo was the cradle of the Serbian statehood. In the recent century or so, Albanians over-migrated to this administrative region of Serbia (which was a part of Serbia even in the times of Yugoslavia) and over-copulated. The migration and the higher natality rate made them 90% of the population by now – well, it's been the case for a decade or two.

In 1939, when Adolf Hitler turned Czechia into the Protectorate of the Third Reich and bragged that he would be the greatest German at Valhalla ever, Benito Mussolini felt like the inferior member of the Axis and invaded Albania which was turned into a Protectorate of Italy. Well, he still remained inferior because Albania has always been heavily inferior to Czechia but let's not be distracted by such details LOL. This Italian-controlled Albania was supposed to expand to new territories including Kosovo but Mussolini and Hitler lost the war, Hitler wisely commited suicide, and victorious Serbia took control of Kosovo again.

In the 1990s, I was rather neutral about the Yugoslav wars. I had mixed feelings about almost everything. It was partly because like millions of Czechs, I still found some uncritical attitude to the West natural and the West wanted to punish Serbia. Poor Milošević – who was really nothing else than a Serbian clone of Joe Biden or something socialist like that – was promoted as the ultimate Devil. But I felt something really terrible was taking place. These days, and for a decade, I have no doubts that the Serbia were (and are) basically the good guys and the Kosovo separatists were the worst ones among the Serbia's foes. They were also responsible for drug sales, organ trafficking and other things.

## Wednesday, February 17, 2021 ... //

### Irreversibility of measurements is straightforward

For some reasons, the recent 24 hours brought an explosion of the confused talk about the irreversibility of quantum mechanics (and especially the measurements in it).

Well, people have posted lots of other crazy stuff about quantum mechanics. For example, the dog with many phase-shifted legs above, one created by the Czech 3D artist in London, Mr Ondřej Zunka, is surely totally cool. But the idea that this animation has anything to do with the way how our quantum mechanical Universe works is dumb beyond imagination. Quantum mechanics doesn't add many new legs to the dogs. Quantum mechanics just makes the uncertainty about the existing legs more unavoidable and adds some new causal relationships between the properties and their uncertainties.

## Saturday, February 13, 2021 ... //

### American patriots, Second Amendment fans should celebrate the purchase of Colt by CZG

I must start with the proud disclaimer that I hold some stocks in CZG, the Czech Armory (Česká zbrojovka Group), a position that I doubled on Thursday.

Here is a monologue by a man who thinks that the operation (which was officially announced as completed on Thursday night, some stamps from regulators are waiting) is good news. So first, Colt is a legend, especially in Czechia.

### Czech state of emergency should be over from Monday

On Thursday, I spent at least 5 hours by listening to the Czech Parliament (the lower house) which discussed the government request to extend the state of emergency again (the current one has been in place since late September). The state of emergency isn't quite the same thing as a lockdown; but they are closely related because the state of emergency is a legal framework that allows the government to do potentially harmful things that it simply cannot do otherwise, at least not without very special ad hoc justifications. They include the closure of all non-essential shops in an area. Our non-essential shops are closed now (although they were opened in December for weeks) and even some supermarkets are not allowed to sell non-essential goods (I couldn't clearly see the difference, however, the rules must be confusing).

Communists whose votes are needed to keep the minority government (coalition of ANO i.e. the billionaire PM Babiš and the social democrats) in power already had doubts about the extensions of the state of emergency in the past. They often succeeded in reducing the duration of the extension but it didn't matter because the state of emergency was later extended again, anyway. Now they helped to cancel it which finally could matter. Only ANO and social democrats want to continue. Other lawmakers have adopted the prevailing view of the Czech public that it is just too heavy a weapon that doesn't really bring much of an improvement in anything. The government hasn't been able to refine its policies so that the people would feel that the policies help more than they harm.

## Friday, February 12, 2021 ... //

### PandaX-II seems to slightly strengthen XENON1T's hints of dark matter particles

The recent Chinese 3D remake of the legendary cute Czech Little Mole features a new, bigger friend of the Central and Eastern Europe, I mean of the little mole, namely the People's Republic of China, I mean a big fat panda. ;-) This was the first episode among many.

This blog post is very brief because I don't think it's a good investment of time to write full-blown texts. But as you know, the hints of any new particle behind the Standard Model are extremely weak or almost non-existent.

Last June, Elena Aprile and her XENON1T folks (yes, one ton of xenon in the detector) saw some

Excess Electronic Recoil Events in XENON1T
(not to be confused with nuclear recoil events that they also like to observe) which represented the excess around 3.0-3.5 sigma above the background.

## Thursday, February 11, 2021 ... //

### French public, elites will fight cancel culture

The demagogy and terror spread by the unhinged new leftists is often presented as an inevitable trend. They are so strong and they will win everything, I often hear from people who otherwise pretend to be my allies. With such "allies", who needs enemies? The actual fact is that the fans of cancel culture are intrinsically super-weak, worthless, easy-to-suppress stinky worms and if you consider these worms your "unavoidable future overlords", it is because you are an even weaker, more pathetic, collaborationist pile of manure. Your weakness and collaborationism may be a greater problem than the worms themselves, especially if you allow me to count tens fo millions of snowflakes like you.

In the wake of the woke scum's contamination of the universities in the U.S. and similar enough institutions in similar enough countries, these collaborationists often claim that it is equally unavoidable that this lying poison will also take over all of Europe and many other places. Oh, really? Two days ago, Satoši Nakamoto wrote an interesting text for the New York Times about the moods in France:

Will American Ideas Tear France Apart? Some of Its Leaders Think So
French politicians and academics are largely dismissing the pathologies or an "intellectual matrix" (the words of the French education minister) that are being "entirely imported" from the U.S. and that threaten France. Emmanuel Macron, the president who has tried to maintain his "centrist" image and didn't discuss these important questions in the past, said that the woke garbage from the U.S. universities "ethnicizes the social question and breaks the republic in two".

## Wednesday, February 10, 2021 ... //

### Why civilization owes everything to capitalism: a lesson of a new subject

I spent about five more hours on the phone with someone whom I understand rather well. But when I heard that all the landlords are parasites, all rents are excessive, and people have the human right in live in their real estate, well, I saw that the understanding has some limits.

It seems to me that schools should be teaching some kind of economic and financial literacy – and especially the basics of capitalism, what it means, and why it statistically directs mankind in the optimum direction. Such a subject could be combined with history.

### A screenshot of Android apps, widgets

This is an extremely simple and unimportant blog post: 7 commented screenshots of screens with apps and widgets on my tablet, Huawei MemoPad M5.

Nevertheless, I believe that simple "real life" blog posts are rare on the web.

Incidentally, it is an amazing tablet with a great display, thin and formidable metallic construction, impressive audio, fast and reliable fingerprint reader, good enough battery, fast charging etc. I haven't turned it off for 18 months and it's doing great. The Amazon URL goes to a 10-inch one, I have a smaller one.

## Tuesday, February 09, 2021 ... //

### Fat tails of sub-freezing temperatures

For a decade, since the freezing winters 2008-2011 or so, the chilly weather and deep snow has been relatively rare in Czechia – e.g. here in Pilsen. Well, it's different now. After the safely above-the-normal rainy weather 2020 that ended the ludicrous fearmongering about the once-in-500-years drought (see the maps at Interdrought.cz; even one meter of soil is saturated with water almost everywhere now), we also enjoy a standard old-fashioned white winter.

People are cross-country skiing in Pilsen and downtown Prague. Yes, the links offer you skiers on the Charles Bridge, Old Town Square (this photo of the mayor of Prague over there is pretty cool, indeed), and kids bobsleding near the Prague Castle (the minister of interior claims that the Petřín Slopes aren't slopes and cops may collect up to $500, oh, really? I hope they won't try to fine Borat.). ## Friday, February 05, 2021 ... // ### JT supergravity and SYK described as type 0B strings One of the themes that string theorists and string-like theorists recently spent time with is the JT (Jackiw-Teitelboim) supergravity. It's some gravitational theory in 2 spacetime dimensions. Well, there aren't too many gravitons and other things propagating in such a low spacetime dimension. But you may calculate $$Z(\beta)$$, a partition sum. I consider this theme a "microrevolution" because it doesn't quite reach the threshold of excitement for a minirevolution. This JT supergravity, a 2D dilaton gravity, has been linked to the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK, random magnets) 1D quantum mechanical model which is pretty much a holographic description ("CFT") for this quantum gravitational theory. OK, such "apparently non-stringy" quantum theories of gravity are always risky. The low spacetime dimension means that many of the methods and principles that operate in realistic quantum gravity in 4-11 spacetime dimensions may become invalid. Nevertheless, it is a highly justified position to assume that all truly consistent theories of quantum gravity should be a part of string/M-theory. Is that true for the JT supergravity? ## Monday, February 01, 2021 ... // ### Edwin Steiner's video about "plus" in between the wave functions Many of you know Edwin Steiner. He sent me the following video that he has recorded about quantum mechanics, about the "plus" in quantum mechanics, in between terms in the Hilbert space (i.e. a video about the "superpositions"). After years of his smart comments, I am confident that he understands the universal postulates (and rules) of quantum mechanics and a quick review confirms that. Well, he does say that the "plus" means "OR" (just like in the probability distributions), not "AND", as many popular books like to erroneously say. I would have preferred if we dedicated more time to the physical relevance of the relative phases between the terms (which is a way to describe the main difference between the classical and quantum case). ### Shortsellers are neither evil nor mathematically impossible And if you weren't a brainwashed imbecile, you would occasionally be a shortseller, too The GameStop mania is a religious movement involving millions of staggering and overwhelmingly young idiots who believe that * shortsellers are extremely evil and to fight them, you have to sacrifice everything * they are doing something that doesn't even mathematically make sense * by panic buying a shorted stock for a price that is overstated by a factor of 10-1,000, all the participants are going to make astronomical profits This kind of stupidity just leaves me utterly speechless (by the way, I am instantly banning every commenter who shows any inclination to believe either of these amazing propositions because interactions with creatures who are this dumb simply terrify me and I won't allow the comment sections to become unfiltered cesspools). The situation is probably even worse than it seems. According to a Harvard College Consulting Group research, 31% of U.S. "investors" below 24 want to make a "quick cash" (I immediately imagine the "lawyer" from Idiocracy who said that he liked money) and about the same percentage (around 30%) use Reddit as a recommendation what to do. The number of registered users of WallStreetBets sub-Reddit grew from 3 million to 7.7 million in a week but a much larger number of people follow the forum without any registration. ## Saturday, January 30, 2021 ... // ### Czechia had fewer deaths in 2020 than in 1990 By 0.1%-0.3% from the truly absolute numbers + 0.3% from the extra day of a leap year + 0.4% from the population growth Up to a moment in October 2020, I tended to believe that Czechia (and many other countries) wouldn't see a significant increase in the total number of deaths per year (2020). It became clear to me when the first self-evidently elevated numbers from late September 2020 were coming out at this web page of the Czech Statistical Office (and especially in this table; you should download an updated version of the "tab" file if you read this text after January 2021). Suddenly, it was clear that the deaths with Covid were mostly real extra deaths due to Covid, indeed. The graph is taken from this page of the Czech Statistical Office where I picked the maximum interval 1814-2019. The year 2020 will add a death dot at the level of the 1990 death dot. Imagine that I spent 5 minutes by editing the picture above. The worst weeks of 2020 brought us ~4,200 deaths instead of 2,100 deaths which is normal in a week, a true doubling. Surrounding months saw 3,000 per week or so, the increase by 50 percent or so. ## Friday, January 29, 2021 ... // ### Energy conservation holds in quantum mechanics Sometimes (and increasingly often), totally wrong and dumb papers are accepted by arXiv.org. An example is a quant-ph paper Energy Non-Conservation in Quantum Mechanics by Sean M. Carroll and Jackie Lodman which should have prevented the authors from passing the most elementary undergraduate course of quantum mechanics but it didn't. Instead, we live in the era when the mass media are intensely misinforming and indoctrinating the readers so you may read a promotion of this pseudoscience at the moderately widely read blog of the male co-author. OK, they claim that the only meaningful conservation of energy in quantum mechanics is the conservation of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian; that this is violated; that this violation can be arbitrarily large; that this violation cannot be attributed to the energy of the observer or the apparatus; and that the "many-worlds interpretation" makes all these questions more controllable. Each of the five statements is absolutely and fundamentally wrong. ## Thursday, January 28, 2021 ... // ### GameStop: the steps that deflated the bubble are even more outrageous than the bubble itself I didn't expect Wild West financial market trading of masses to be a flavor of the first weeks of the new far left regime in the U.S. However, as I described in the previous blog post, "anti-shortseller activists" at Reddit WallStreetBets have targeted several stocks and drove their prices to insane levels. They included mainly GME, AMC, NOK, BB, and BBBY. Nokia is the only one in the list whose current price remained close to the widely perceived intrinsic value; BlackBerry is second. The rest are just insane bubbles created by the kids who put their life savings whatever the price is, just like what they have done with Tesla and Bitcoin. GameStop Corp, a network of outdated videotape and game media shops in the dirty passages, became the most important target of the group. The stock price was a bit below$20 on the first days of 2021; some hedge funds thought it was still too much. If you click at the hyperlink in this paragraph, you will see the incredible growth up to $470 earlier today (the price doubled in a day and it has done so many times). Because the company has 70 million shares, the two numbers translate to$1.4 billion and $33 billion, respectively. Yes, by capitalization, the GameStop company became a bit bigger than Nokia itself. Well, it is no longer the case. ## Tuesday, January 26, 2021 ... // ### WallStreetBets Reddit & Robinhood: a herd distorting the markets Even a broken herd may be right about once a decade I have been aware of the insane Tesla and Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) bubbles which show how (mostly) the Millennial generation makes the markets – or at least the price discovery – dysfunctional. But those are just the most extreme tips of an iceberg. This new culture of hyper-conformist obedient sheep that are tied to the social media has an effect on many other corners of the financial markets. Well, sometimes the effect may be healthy and push the prices towards fairer values (but I believe that it is mostly a coincidence when it is so). For some time, I have been aware of the Robinhood trading platform. I didn't pay much attention to it. It looked like another platform – why should it matter what you use to trade your stocks and options? You should register at robinhood.com and download the app there (Robinhood may be found in the app store). There are alternatives (such as Webull, also search) but it seems that "virtually everyone" who belongs to the sheep culture simply must use Robinhood. ## Sunday, January 24, 2021 ... // ### Petr Kellner's transactions look like pure, clever, and ethical capitalism to me Petr Kellner is the wealthiest Czech. A Forbes list shows his current net worth as CZK 293 billion (USD 1 = CZK 21.5 now; so it is$13.6 billion). The following four men, Vítek, Křetínský, Babiš (the prime minister), and Komárek, only have CZK 86-71 billion.

Kellner became his convincing journey towards being an almost crown billionaire soon after the Velvet Revolution when he founded some PPF funds that participated in the voucher privatization (only 11th by size at that time). By now, he has lots of assets in Russia and China (he probably wants to exit the latter because it's not really safe), especially the global Home Credit company. In Czechia, by now, he has acquired either 100% stakes or majorities in the O2 big telecommunication company, Cetin the telecom infrastructure, Air Bank, Home Credit CZ and SK, Czech Pojišťovna Insurance (with Generali), CETV with the largest commercial TV NOVA, Škoda Transportation making trams and trains here in Pilsen, a CZK 0.25 billion horse for his daughter that Bill Gates couldn't afford, and lots and lots of other things (in his PPF Group).

## Saturday, January 23, 2021 ... //

### Why should we be afraid of the new Joe Biden Administration?

By 2nd President of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus

The unexpected, violent, albeit totally chaotic, disorganized, planning nothing and signalling nothing incursion of the Trump supporters (but also all other groups that love any attack against the official institutions, regardless of their ideological underpinnings) into the U.S. Capitol has diplaced all the serious and highly desirable debate about the new president. Biden has been successfully "promoted" to a position that cannot be debated and cannot be criticized and this promotion was an amazing move, whether it was preplanned or it just exploited the events a posteriori.

## Thursday, January 21, 2021 ... //

### Parasites, retards, scum, terrorists gained full power in the U.S.

I don't consider myself an optimist but I did hope that some adults in the room would emerge after the rigged 2020 U.S. presidential election and prevent the inauguration of the last leg of a full Democratic Party government in some way. It didn't happen. Trump escaped D.C. as if it were not a big deal. Genuine Americans were defeated, betrayed, and pißed upon by creatures that don't belong to the U.S. at all but they were able to take over the superpower, anyway. The destruction of the U.S. as it has existed since 1776 has utterly demoralized and demotivated me but my apparent impression that virtually no one seems to care about the actual castrophe is even worse.

If you are just another opportunist spineless rat, like millions of others, a rat that may even be willing to collaborate with the new powerful, you probably don't have a clue how much work had to be done by the people who have a moral compass to slow down the decline of the Western civilization in the recent decade or so, in the environment in which e.g. lying mentally defective teenage psychopaths exploit power tools that are stronger by orders of magnitude than anything that the decent people possess now.

## Sunday, January 17, 2021 ... //

### Satoshi's (?) Tulip Trust is moving and I found a cool message

My confidence that Craig Wright is the creator of the Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is comparable just to 50%. Sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower. But some entertaining and potentially exciting events occurred in recent days.

One year and three days ago, Craig Wright claimed to have received the private key from the "Tulip Trust" where over 1 million Bitcoin (currently worth over \$35 billion) were hidden. He submitted a list of 16,405 public keys (Bitcoin wallets) where the wealth is supposed to be hiding to the courts. The addresses may be random addresses mined in the first years of the Bitcoin; but they may be addresses genuinely mined by Satoshi Nakamoto who may be Craig Wright (with or without Dave Kleiman or someone else).

Three days ago (exactly 1 year after Wright allegedly got his private keys), the first BTC 50 wallet obtained from an early block has moved:

BTC wallet 1DGWivpu9x1ZFkYJvhS91o1zp851CguPXB
Click at the link above. It's cool. With my time zone, the page says that the BTC 50 was mined (moved from the "Coinbase" which has nothing to do with the cryptoexchange, it's just a word for the ultimate Pilsner Urquell of the coins) on July 14th, 1789. OK, I mean 2010 but it was the Bastille Day, anyway. The revolution in France started in the afternoon; my page above says that the coins were mined at 13:04. It sounds OK for a revolution.

## Friday, January 15, 2021 ... //

### In Norway, the vaccines might kill more people than Covid itself

Even more extreme results may apply to Australia and others

A natural Norwegian cure for diseases is distilled six times.

Norway is an extremely rich Nordic country of 5.4 million people. Some of its profits come from oil – and they are already buying a greater number of electric cars than proper cars. If you want to save the Earth from the "evil" CO2, you first need to extract a sell a huge amount of fossil fuels! ;-)

The media have reported that Norway has vaccinated 33,000 people against Covid so far. Most of the vaccines were Pfizer; some were Moderna. It's being said that the vaccination "focused" on the elderly and vulnerable. Soon after the vaccination, 23 of these 33,000 died. In 13 of them, an autopsy has already showed that the vaccine was a contributing, basically decisive, factor.

## Thursday, January 14, 2021 ... //

### "Data scientists" don't have any expertise to determine Covid policies

It is absolutely shocking to watch the decay of the United States of America as we have known them since 1776. The degree of censorship and general terror against the political opposition already puts the U.S. among the 10 least free countries in the world. Donald Trump – the most impotant politician on Planet Earth – has been silenced on all well-known Internet servers. People are being fired from their jobs, these fired workers' Pavlik-Morozov-style defective kids are being financially rewarded for reporting that their parents support Trump, Trump has lost the business relationships, many other people lose their regular banking and other things. This already is on par with the Third Reich around 1938 or so.

Also, I watched the proceedings that led to the incredible 2nd impeachment of Donald Trump. It was unbelievable to hear so many fanatical piles of garbage (I mean the Democratic Party "lawmakers") that just parrot hysterical lies that other piles of garbage said before them – and they are earning half a million dollars or so for this kind of "work". I am utterly disgusted by tons of Americans whom I have known and who do literally nothing to save their country. And I am even terrified by folks like Donald Trump or Alex Jones who call for non-violence. I am sorry but to call for non-violence in these grave conditions is a breathtakingly irresponsible, basically criminal act, an outright surrender to pure and escalating evil.

## Sunday, January 10, 2021 ... //

### Hard left at Google, Apple, Amazon teamed up to nuke Parler

Everone who has both a spine and a clue about politics is threatened and needs to fight real hard

Donald Trump still had two weeks of his presidency left but the toxic Stalinist stuff pretending to be human beings already had enough self-confidence to ban his accounts at Twitter (his main tool to communicate with the world's most important politician's constituents), Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere. Imagine what they will be doing to him and others when he's actually out of the White House! An Online Night of Broken Glass followed; tons of very decent people saw their channels and profiles disappear. Many users who were accidentally left saw a substantial decrease of the number of followers (mine dropped 3%) and some of us were blaming the followers. "They must be traitors who unfollowed." No, they were victims who were nuked by the unhinged hard left herd and their fate was worse than the fate of a user who just saw a numerical decrease in the number of followers.

Needless to say, the excuses for this barbarian activity were complete lies. "Trump has incited violence", dumb people were led to believe, "so he must be treated just like these creatures' comrade Stalin treated the inconvenient people in the USSR." In reality, Trump has incited no violence. He only invited genuine Americans to Washington D.C. for a peaceful rally so that they could express their dissatisfaction with the self-evidently rigged election – much like some voters do in Belarus and elsewhere – and that's what happened. The protestors broke a few windows – and no one is sure who were the particular people who did it – and they could enter the Congress (a video shows that a cop invited them in), enjoying the office of a nasty witch and other places for a while. But a visit to the Congress is not violence, unlike the horror that the BLM, Antifa, and related terrorist organizations were making last summer. The only violence was done by the cops who killed four genuine Americans.

## Friday, January 08, 2021 ... //

### When they are effective, vaccines prevent transmission

They were dancing to the tune of song by Elán, a prominent Slovak rock band, about the Nurses of Kramáre (the largest Slovak hospital, in Bratislava, the Slovak capital) but these girls were actually students of a medical high school in Trenčín.

Coronazism revolves around the narrative that people have the duty to give up their freedom and most of the things that have made their lives worth living because if they don't,

they will meet someone who will meet someone who will meet someone who will meet someone who will die of Covid-19 due to this chain of infections.
And because the person who died couldn't have defended himself and he didn't agree to join the same chain that also includes the infected person on the first side of the chain, it was a manslaughter of a sort. Coronazis don't discuss how the guilt is supposed to be divided among the people in the long chain (and why the person who is worried hasn't moved to another planet if he doesn't want to voluntarily share the planet with the people who may be infected) but the argument above would be what they would offer if they had the brain to formulate explanations; and if they didn't have the arrogance to restrict the basic civil rights without a proper explanation.

In several examples in the history, the vaccines have slowed down the propagation of a disease and protected many people. But especially in the case of Covid-19, they do something else, too: they make the argument above invalid. Everyone who feels substantially threatened by the coronavirus (whether the fear is justified or not) may get vaccinated. I actually think that he should. If he doesn't, it means that he doesn't feel threatened and he voluntarily joins the society that wants to live in the old way where unintentional infections, especially in long and indirect chains like the chain above, are legal (and ethically OK). In the old society, unintentional infections are "allowed" simply because the opposite legal system, where one needs to prevent himself from infecting others unintentionally, leads to a precautionary behavior that is far too costly and such a cure is worse than the disease (at least worse than Covid-19).

## Thursday, January 07, 2021 ... //

### Singularity of anti-meritocracy?

On the parasitic, omega-nary sector of the economy and the unavoidable backlash against this tumor

Socialism of the Soviet kind has brought stagnation and decline to my country and one-third of mankind, too. Things (I mostly mean the economy but not only the economy) weren't really getting better or at least the growth was much more sluggish than it was in the capitalist world. But nothing dramatic was happening. It was approximately true that the system simply stole the means of productions, structures, and know-how created by capitalism; and it was trying to maintain the economy and distribute its products and services according to the ideological criteria which were applied from the very beginning (and if there were a change as a function of time, the hardcore socialist rules were loosening after a few decades). It wasn't exciting; socialism was the ultimate example of boredom. Half a century of boredom. Also, some socialist countries including Czechoslovakia were extremely fiscally conservative and avoided any substantial debt.

The U.S. and other countries are still formally living in some kind of capitalism but things are changing. The new system is similar to the Soviet-style socialism in many ways but it may be more dramatic. Many pathologies are similar – such as the lack of competition (so far in some industries such as the Internet services), the political control over the economy (through regulation and often more directly) and the related nepotism, and the central or quasi-central indoctrination and intimidation of the populace which influences an increasing portion of the financial flows. But details are different. The commies effectively owned the means of production but (almost) none of them (some dictators were exceptions) was allowed to embrace truly luxurious lifestyles. These days, the counterparts of the communist elites may still be billionaires and live correspondingly.

In the previous paragraph, I mentioned that an increasing fraction of the financial flows are determined by the new government and quasi-government (including the Silicon Valley monopolies) and by the loosely centralized indoctrination and intimidation. A quantity is increasing here. Can we be pessimists and extrapolate these trends to some truly grim, and perhaps singular, outcome?

## Wednesday, January 06, 2021 ... //

### Democrats' Senate takeover is a national, global catastrophe

It seems that both Senate seats will go to the Democrats, the worthless young empty suit and the problematic reverend. Joe Biden is destined to become the U.S. president, the Democrats possess a narrow majority in the House, and they will have 50-50 in the Senate which really means a Senate majority because in these conditions, the VP (which will be Kamala Harris) may submit the decisive 51st vote.

Inkspillers have been brainwashing the increasingly stupid readers with lots of conspiracy theories and stories about the Armageddon, the non-existent global warming crisis, the new Covid Black Death which is really just a new and therefore more deadly flu-like strain, and other things. But logically enough, today, when the world's only superpower made the crucial steps towards the abyss, you can't learn about the actual looming Armageddon from any "mainstream" place.

## Tuesday, January 05, 2021 ... //

### Belorusian Covid death data are self-evidently rigged

They may be still doing great with Covid but the data can't be right in their entirety

According to the tables and maps, Lukashenko's Belarus – which has wisely avoided Covid restrictions, both at the level of government orders and the personal behavior of most people – only has 15 Covid deaths per 100,000 people now while e.g. Czechia has 115 deaths per 100,000 people (about 7.7 times higher than Belarus).

It would be a great argument for the Belorusian approach. Too bad, I don't really believe their data now. Look at their national statistics page and find the chart of the daily deaths. Like other Belorusian charts, it's unusually smooth and stable. Can these daily numbers occur by chance? The answer is a resounding No.

## Monday, January 04, 2021 ... //

### UV, dynamical problems are problems with a theory; IR, kinematic problems are just hard work for users

Elias Archer has asked whether and how string theory solves "difficulties and complications" that he sees in the quantum field theory on curved spacetime backgrounds. Well, I do understand this kind of a question. When I was leaving the high school, I still wasn't quite comfortable with quantum mechanics and I did think that string theory would revolutionize the understanding of the measurement so that it would look more materialistic, deterministic, or classical. This idea evaporated in a year; of course the postulates of quantum mechanics are extremely universal and string theory doesn't change anything about these rules and philosophy that are shared by all quantum mechanical theories. And there are no problems with the general postulates of quantum mechanics.

But this broader theme is generally repeated. We the people often misunderstand something about an "older, approximate theory" and expect the "newer theory" to fix the problems or "difficulties and complications". In some situations, the expectations are justified (and sometimes they succeed); in others, they are wrong because our misunderstanding of the "older theory" is our personal misunderstanding that we shoud solve by thinking harder – we really don't understand even the "older theory" correctly and this cognitive problem of ours has nothing to do with the changes that are made by the "newer theory".

## Friday, January 01, 2021 ... //

### EFT-hedron: the landscape within the EFT quagmire

Physicists have clearly worked more intensely during the Christmas and New Year break than the arXiv.org moderators. Consequently, the hep-th archive overwhelmed us with 168 new preprints hours ago (whose identifiers still start with the year '20), including 70 new hep-th-primary papers, 35 new papers cross-listed to hep-th, and 63 replacements. That's some 200% above the daily average.

You may ask which of the new papers is going to be most influential. Well, you have to be cautious, we don't really know. But you may also ask which of them is the longest one. A good idea is to search for -Hamed on the page and you will quickly find this new paper:

The EFT-Hedron
by Nima Arkani-Hamed, Cchu-Čen Huang, Ju-tin Huang (IAS, Caltech, Taiwan)
If you care whether you should write it with a hyphen, it is spelled 3 times with and 61 times without. ;-) Note that even though this paper appeared on January 1st in the morning, it's the 66th paper on that day and is still counted in 2020, unlike the Weak Gravity Conjecture that appeared as the first hep-th paper of 2006.

Well, two days ago, I had a fun two-hour-long chat with one of the authors whose name isn't Huang (not only about the Millenials' lack of independence and ambitions) and he prepared me for that paper. Sometime in 2021, a paper of mine could appear and you might like it. Well, it's January 1st in the morning and it's here. ;-) Unless he meant a different paper that will appear later, of course.