Finland: first elections co-decided by the climate hysteria

The fight against the panic may lift the Finns Party to 15-20 percent

Today, both true and untrue Finns are choosing their representatives in the Parliament. According to the opinion polls, up to nine parties could be represented in the Parliament – Czechia has nine – but it's really five parties that are large, between 12% and 20% of votes. They are, in the order expected in the latest survey:

• SDP, their social democratic party, that was suppressed in recent years but may return to the top
• PS, Finns Party, the authentic right-wing party that was mainly anti-immigration but the theme has calmed down (except for some child abuse by foreigners which will help them) so they rediscovered themselves as an anti-green party
• KOK, National Coalition Party, probably a CDU clone
• KESK, the Center Party, some other nameless pro-EU party
• VIHR, the Green League, the Finnish edition of the Far Left

PS+KOK+KESK teamed up to make the coalition after 2015. Due to the True Finns' internal chaos, the party split and a branch of theirs, Blue Reform, replaced the Finns Party, but the Blue Reform looks weak again now.

Since December 2018, the graph of the support for the climate skeptical Finns Party (previously True Finns) paradoxically looks like the hockey stick graph ;-), indicating a doubling of votes in 4 months.

Media simply invented the "creator" of the black hole picture

Instead of some reflection and errata, they defend their falsehoods with increased aggressiveness

Hat tip: Charles, Jaime, Rick, Connor, Samwise...

I haven't dedicated a special blog post to this topic but it seems like a classic story at the intersection of recurring themes of this weblog – and the questions have apparently been answered.

OK, who created the first photograph of the black hole?

Everyone who has a clue about this Big Science knows that the number of workers has been large – 200 folks in this case but the lists contain roughly hundreds if not one thousand names in similar cases (and 2x 3,000 both for ATLAS and CMS) – and, while the individual contributions have been extremely unequal, many folks in this large set were really essential. The Event Horizon Telescope Wikipedia page describes the collaboration as one including 13 stakeholder institutes plus almost 100 "affiliated" institutes.

Some of the senior members of the collaboration were presenting the science during the press conference on Wednesday; see a list of some senior names here. Like in almost all similar experiments, men represented an overwhelming majority of the researchers.

Black hole picture is mainly a triumph of engineering

There has been lots of excitement – and hype – surrounding the "first photograph of a black hole". Sensible people think beyond the mindless hype, of course, and they are really asking themselves: What has actually happened? Is that important or interesting? If it is, in what respect it is important or interesting? Which kind of work was hard? Which kind of information has it brought us or what can the method bring us in the future?



I think that despite the thousands of articles in the mainstream media, these basic questions aren't being answered well – or they're not being answered at all. Let me try to clarify some of the basic facts about the big picture.

Removal of Roger Scruton

With a delay of 1 day or so, the Czech press (especially Echo) informed us that the mob has gotten Roger Scruton on second try (that's the title chosen by the Washington Examiner). See also Roger Scruton's sacking threatens free speech and intellectual life (The Telegraph) and The real Roger Scruton scandal (Spiked) or The smear of Roger Scruton (The National Review); thank God these sources stood on the side of freedom and Sir Roger (something that wasn't guaranteed anymore).

A well-known British philosopher was a government adviser for housing (and previously for architecture) – an unpaid position – but the leftist mob doesn't want any conservative in the old-fashioned sense to be anywhere. So they were attacking him all time. It didn't work a few months ago. Now, Scruton (75) agreed to give an interview to a young leftist George Eaton (deputy editor of New Statesman).

And it was a trap – the interview was manipulated in order to make predetermined claims, "Scruton has said blasphemous things", and the left mob was joined by some conservative-in-name-only leftists around Theresa May's party who criticized Scruton for these "blasphemies" and Scruton was sacked.

Assange is (also) a terribly treated hero

I just independently used the same noun as Pamela Anderson, it turns out

Julian Assange has spent seven years at Ecuador's embassy in London. The new leader of the Latin American country Mr Lenin [no kidding] Moreno has never liked him too much so he abolished the asylum today. He could have allowed Assange to quickly run to another embassy but instead, he invited the British cops to the embassy – to the Ecuador's territory – and they dragged Assange to a British jail by force.

The event was probably ignited by a U.S. extradition request. In America, Assange faces a risk of death penalty for his publication of classified documents.

Clearly, Assange has been an insightful and important man – I've liked some tweets of his – but he's been also breaking some laws. Hacking computers must be treated as a crime and investigated, I think, and the same holds for the distribution of classified information and other things. In Sweden, he is also accused of rape.

Photograph of a black hole will be shown today

...just one but some of us expected two...

Today at 15:00 Prague Summer Time (9:00 Boston Summer Time), the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration will present its first photographs of two black holes:

NSF press conference on first result from Event Horizon Telescope project (NSF press release)

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A Non-Expert’s Guide to a Black Hole’s Silhouette (Matt Strassler's intro)

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LIVE BROADCAST (from D.C., at 15:00 my time, it's over, replay 63 minutes)

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Google News

What does it mean to have a photograph of a black hole? Well, yes, it could be a completely black JPG file, like the photograph of five black cats in a tunnel. ;-) Yes, I have repaired this popular Czech joke to make it politically correct because I feel threatened a big time.

The EHT experiment was mentioned at TRF 3 years ago.

Should you worry about Candida Auris infections?

In Fall 2012, I realized that the source of numerous health – albeit sometimes cosmetic – issues of mine were yeast, most likely from the Candida family. Before that time, I didn't even know that yeast or fungus could be a health problem for humans (only viruses and bacteria seemed relevant) – maybe a fungus is a problem for an apple but humans?

The Candida genus shares certain traits and the accumulation of symptoms was so clear – along with some diagnosis – that I decided that extra information wasn't really "necessary". I've never known which Candida species was harassing me. The most widespread species is Candida albicans. Every human has it in his or her guts and it's mostly innocent. But it may also get to the bloodstream through a leaky gut (which may be caused by some Crohn's disease; vitamin B12 etc. recommended) and infect organs, skin, and lots of other things.

At some level, it doesn't matter which Candida species one deals with. The cure is similar. Except that in some cases it does matter. In the recent week, Google Trends show, the interest in the Candida auris skyrocketed.

Pilsner ice-hockey war: players vs fans

Core fans are a great net asset and shouldn't be reeducated

Pilsen has top teams both in soccer and ice-hockey. In the recent decade, FC Viktoria Pilsen won about 1/2 of the seasons – although it will be second now, after its main rival Slavia Prague. HC Škoda Pilsen is also very good. It was third before the play-offs... and it is now playing the semifinals against Třinec (which was second before play-offs).

Pilsen took a lead... but yesterday Třinec won and it's 2-to-2 by matches. Four winning matches are needed.

But what I want to talk about are Pilsner fans who are... special.

Category theory as an egalitarian religion

Several TRF essays have discussed the controversies around the Mochizuki proof of the \(abc\) conjecture, most recently in November 2018. The conjecture states that whenever integers obey \(a+b=c\), then the maximum number, let's assume it's \(c\), isn't parametrically larger than a (multiple of a) power of the product of all primes in \(a,b,c\). So it's some inequality linking both the additive relationship between \(a,b,c\) with some multiplicative one.

Šiniči Močizuki's solution is a corollary of a whole new ambitious theory in mathematics (possibly a flawless theory, possibly a flawed one at some point) that he has developed, the "Inter-Universal Teichmüller (IUT) theory" or "arithmetic deformation theory", these terms are synonymous. He claims to study some permutations of primes and integers etc. as if these permutations were analogous to continuous deformations.

Equivalently, he claims to disentangle the additive and multiplicative relationships between the numbers by looking from many perspectives, by using new terms like "Hodge theaters". I've read and watched many texts and promotional videos and they look incredibly creative and intelligent to me. I am of course far from being capable of verifying the theory up to the applications – one needs to master at least 500 pages plus some 500 more pages of the background etc. I am not motivated enough to go through, in particular because I don't really see why the \(abc\) conjecture should be important in the grand scheme of things.

But I am very interested in the general complications that great minds often seem to face – and things don't seem to be getting better. In the recent issue of Inference, I read the thoughtful essay by David Michael Roberts,

A Crisis of Identification.

Roberts' writing is highly impartial – after all, Adelaide, Australia is "just" 8,000 kilometers from Japan. He sketches some history of the proof, similar proofs in the past, the Grothendieck approach as a driving engine of many mathematicians on both sides, the social dynamics, and the philosophy of the category theory and its predecessors since the era of Hilbert.

Physics knows a lot about the electron beyond the simple "Standard Model picture"

Ethan Siegel wrote a text about the electron, Ask Ethan: What Is An Electron?, which includes some fair yet simplified standard conceptual facts about the electron's being a particle and a wave, about its properties being statistically predictable, and about the sharp values of its "quantum numbers", some discrete "charges" that are either exactly or approximately conserved in various interactions.



While his statements look overwhelmingly right, there is a general theme that I expected to bother me and that bothers me: Siegel presents a frozen caricature of the particle physicists' knowledge that could be considered "a popularization of the snapshot from 1972 or so". There doesn't seem to be any added value of his text relatively to e.g. the Wikipedia article on the Standard Model. After all, the images such as the list of particles above were just taken from that article.

Dimon's capitalism vs AOC's socialism

Many of us feel that the civilization is falling into the gutter.

Pillars of the society and nation states are being systematically attacked by numerous folks. Those of us who have been asking "why did the Roman Empire decline" see an answer in the ongoing repetition of the process. Too many people simply lose any attachment to everything that is good about the society and deliberately start to promote changes that are terrifying and destructive. In the absence of truly formidable competitors, great civilizations collapse simply because the people inside want that collapse and those who don't lose their power to prevent it.

One of the aspects of the anti-civilization movement are the increasingly widespread criticisms of capitalism itself – the freedom of entrepreneurship. The young generation is increasingly absorbing pathological opinions about a great fraction of the political and societal questions. The opposition to capitalism is an example. In 2018, less than one-half of Americans between 18 and 29 years of age said to have a positive relationship to capitalism – a drop by 12 percentage points in a few years. Given these numbers, is capitalism sustainable at all?

Three days ago, these challenges were discussed by the dean of the Harvard Business School. The obvious question is whether this anti-capitalist delusion is also widespread among the HBS students. I think it is and I think it is a systemic failure. A person who can't understand why capitalism is economically superior over socialism just shouldn't be allowed in the HBS buildings – at most like a janitor. The very name indicates that the school exists to nurture business, not to decimate it. Business is a defining activity of capitalism – in socialism, we weren't quite allowed to even say "business". The understanding of the creative power of capitalism is a matter of apolitical expertise (or rudimentary knowledge), not a political issue where you should look for both sides of a "story". The story may have two sides but one side is right and the other side is wrong.

"Search for holography in your kitchen" instead of the FCC is the return to alchemy

Anna has linked to a WUWT story about a $50 million fine that a fake journal has to pay. Much like Theranos, such fake open-access journals deceive their users about all the normal ingredients that are responsible for the quality control – about the identity or the very existence of referees, the existence of the review process, they heavily overstate the impact of the journal, and co-organize fake conferences (I really mean conferences whose scientific quality is non-existent but someone pretends it exists).

By the way, how many of you are getting daily "calls for abstracts" from some strange conferences that don't seem to be related to your interests?

Many armchair scientists who were ignored may suddenly find someone who wants to publish their texts, so they pay for the publication. Ambitious new "scientists" who can't publish, and therefore expect to perish, may suddenly survive. Some of them may even become "big leaders" after a few publications that appear in fishy outlets. At some level, people are happy – they get what they want. These "scientists" finally publish their stuff and the publishers get paid. The price is high – the whole ecosystem is being flooded with mostly wrong results and claims that pretend to be verified by someone who is careful but they are not. Readers get something else than they're told to get. Scientists waste time with bad papers – the wasted time is maximized in the ambitious yet truly marginal cases of papers that "almost" look like serious ones but ultimately turn out to be wrong for somewhat subtle reasons that would still be caught by a proper reviewer.

To some extent, this decrease of quality is an unavoidable consequence of the "open-access approach". While the "open-access" ideologues like to hide it, the "open access" – just like "open borders" – often reduces to nothing else than "the absence of a reliable enough quality (or security) control".

Time cannot be racist

Honza has brought me reasons to be proud of my Rutgers University PhD. ;-) Just days ago, Bill Zajc and I discussed the influence of philosophy departments over the interpretation of quantum mechanics. I mentioned an important character – Sheldon Goldstein – who is a philosopher of science at Rutgers. Well, he's formally a distinguished professor of mathematics even though his papers have been about the philosophy of physics, statistical physics, and perhaps some related topics.



Clock in a Droste effect. The exponential spiral is mixed with the cyclic time. This conflation is mathematically deep because the periodic functions may be generated from \(\exp(ix)\), a conceptually small variation of \(\exp(x)\).

While he is smart and appreciates some kind of logic very well, it's not quite enough to understand everything important that modern physics has found. So Goldstein, a leader of the Bohmian mechanics people, ends up being an ideologue who is successful because he is really serving his essays in "more welcoming" environment without actual big shot physicists who understand why his views on (and prejudices about) quantum mechanics are just wrong. I think it's wrong (not a promising way to organize scientific research) for the system to allow folks like Goldstein to build whole schools of disciples in "relaxed" environments where Goldstein isn't really facing competent, critical peers because they're focused on other disciplines.

But now we're going discuss a very different level of scholarship. Goldstein is wrong but it's still a "somewhat social science department approach to" physics. We will look at another lower category. There are natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. I think it's right to say that "humanities" are less rational and scientifically meaningful than "social sciences" – by a similar amount by which "social sciences" are less scientific than real, "natural sciences".

Maybe we should distinguish new levels on this ladder: natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and grievance studies. Maybe it makes sense to distinguish the "grievance studies" from generic "humanities" because there's a whole new level of scholarly fallacy that dominates in the grievance studies.

Klaus Jr kept as chair of the education committee

I have enough experience to know that over 90% of the expected TRF readers have virtually no interest in some events in Czech politics – or anything else that has something to do with similar holes in Europe. ;-) And the apparent irrelevance of this story may look even worse. It's about some committee of the lower chamber of the Parliament. And to make things really bad ;-), the main hero of this blog post, Klaus Jr, considered the vote (and the topic of this blog post) "less important than a soccer match" today!

But you know, I just find this to be the country's most important story of the day (or a week or a month), for various reasons.

Just to be sure, over a week ago, the old-fashioned right-winger and outspoken man Václav Klaus Jr was expelled from ODS, a party founded by his father in 1991 that I have voted for 27 years before I became a non-voter in March 2019. The last excuse for the expulsion – a partisan procedure we most typically associate with the communist party after the 1968 Soviet-led occupation when the "reformers" had to be told good-bye – were two apt but overly tense Nazi era metaphors for some current events related to the EU.

Activists must stop harassing scientists

Ms Peggy Sastre, a French writer who holds a PhD in philosophy of science (which already places her above 90+ percent of the popular writers about "science and society") has written a wonderful piece for Le Point which was translated for Quillette yesterday:

Activists Must Stop Harassing Scientists

A part of her text is dedicated to Alessandro Strumia's story – she didn't overlook that Galileo used to work at the same Pisa University as Strumia, to make the analogies between the harassment more visible to the slower viewers. Sastre also mentions the misrepresentations of Strumia's statements by activists such as Jessica Wade who started that particular disturbing witch hunt, by the BBC, and others.

Also, Sastre has been in contact with Janice Fiamengo who frustratingly concluded that the era of the objective science has decisively ended in the West.

Did the latest Bitcoin price spike depend on concentrated intelligent design?

A few hours ago, the price of the Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies underwent a rare massive upward explosion. Within less than an hour, BTCUSD went from below $4200 – where it was slowly growing in many days from a relatively stable plateau of $4000 – up to $5100+ or so, before returning to $4700 at this moment. In the most volatile moments, the spreads were huge and the price was jumping by $50 up and down thrice a second.

The "hockey stick graph" of the Bitcoin price looks extremely unnatural. After days in which the price only changes by some $10 a day, the price could generate a change of almost $1,000 in less than one hour. This discrepancy shows that there's certainly no reliable "order of magnitude estimate of the volatility per unit time" that you could reasonably use in any safe enough planning.

How the freedom of the 1990s didn't last

My country has been tamed by Nazism between 1939 (well, partly 1938) and 1945, and by communism between 1948 and 1989 (6+41 = 47 years, almost half a century). Folks like your humble correspondent have helped the communist system to collapse and we entered the 1990s, an unusually free decade.

People could say anything, try lots of things, travel across the world, and start numerous types of businesses. Political parties started to compete, communist companies were being privatized (and I think it was right to try to do it quickly although apparent imperfections couldn't be avoided), and others were started from scratch.

In 1992-1997, I was a college student in Prague (Math-Phys, Charles University). While I was always too shy to become a visible politician, I found it natural to be a member of the student senate most of the time. We were deciding about many things. For example, we tried to stop the process of creating the "Faculty of Humanities" at the university – which is the main source of certain ideologically extreme social phenomena today. Most of the Math-Phys people were against this "FHS", for reasons that weren't far from what we would say today (although we know much more today), but we failed. "FHS" was created. After all, we did realize that these folks – perhaps "cultural Marxists", using the present jargon – had quite some "momentum" after 1989. But at least, in the 1990s, no one would dispute we had the "right" to vote "No".

Skepticism about Standard Models in F-theory makes no sense

Four weeks ago, I discussed a quadrillion Standard Model compactifications that were constructed within F-theory by Cvetič et al. For some happy reasons, Anil at Scientific American wrote his own version of that story four days ago:

Found: A Quadrillion Ways for String Theory to Make Our Universe

I think that Scientific American hasn't been publishing this kind of articles about some proper scientific research – and Anil hasn't been writing those – for years. Some adult who works behind the scenes must have ordered this one exception, I guess. So I am pretty sure that the readers of SciAm must have experienced a cultural shock because the article is about a very different "genre" than the kind of pseudoscientific stuff that has dominated SciAm for years.

Occam's razor and unreality of the wave function

Right after the mid 1920s, every physicist who was up to his or her job (OK, let's not be kidding, no woman really understood QM in the 1920s yet) knew that the idea that "the wave function was a real wave, like the electromagnetic wave" was the most naive kind of misconception about the character of quantum mechanics that a layman could have about quantum mechanics. This knowledge continued for many decades. The second quantum mechanical generation – including Feynman and pals – still understood the things perfectly but they already started to express the things in ways that reduced the negative reactions of the listeners.

Now, almost one century later, after a few decades of unlimited proliferation of pop-science books and completely wrong articles, the "unreal character of the wave function" became one of the most misunderstood basic facts about the natural science among the members of the broad public. Almost all the people were not only pushed to buy the completely wrong "the wave function is a real wave" thesis but this delusion has been turned into a moral imperative of its own kind. You should not only parrot such wrong statements: you should morally despise those who dare to point out that these statements are wrong.

Also, the writers who just can't live with the end of classical physics have not only written lots of wrong and confusing stuff about the physics questions themselves. They have also rewritten the history of physics. If a generic person tries to quickly enough find out what the Copenhagen Interpretation was or what Bohr and Heisenberg actually believed about quantum mechanics (and Dirac, Pauli, von Neumann, Wigner, and a few others), they get almost unavoidably drowned in amazing distortions, demagogy, and downright lies. The amount of mess, censorship, and misinformation about these elementary things already trump the chaos and censorship by the Inquisition of the Copernican ideas.

The motivation for almost all these distortions are ideological in character. It may look surprising that such a technical, almost mathematical point may be affected by ideologies – but it simply is affected a lot. In particular, lots of people realize that some kind of Marxism or another unscientific superstition that they hold dear did really assume classical physics which is why classical physics has to be "saved" from the questioning.

New Slovak president: Slovaks are more "generic" Westerners than Czechs

Slovakia is choosing its new president today.

In the 2nd round, Ms Zuzana Čaputová (who got 40% in the first round, age 45) faces Mr Maroš Šefčovič (20% in the first round two weeks ago, 53 years). The lady will almost certainly win – something like 60% by 40% of voters (bookmakers have odds over 10-to-1). Up to recently, this female lawyer has been a top official in the Progressive Slovakia movement.

Her male antagonist – the campaign contained almost no real fight, maybe he just gave up – has been a life-long diplomat who represents the mainstream "Smer/Direction" Slovak social democracy with its opposition to migrants and other things. Even that ambiguous guy would be extremely far from a "Slovak Orbán", however. After all, he's been an EU commissar and you know that this organ has never allowed any "true soulmates" of Orbán.



A very characteristic song for this blog post. "Words" have been played by radios from Summer 2017. I assumed it's some native speaker – there isn't a glimpse of "our" accent in the song that I could hear. It sounds roughly like Taylor Swift or Katy Perry... I don't really distinguish these women. It could be them, I thought. Only weeks ago, I was shocked when I learned that the singer is Ms Emma Drobná, a Slovak. We have singers singing in English in Czechia but none of them has simultaneously this flawless English and this huge exposure in mainstream radios. In total, the Czech audiences prefer the songs in Czech – more than the Slovak audiences, I guess. And the musicians have to adapt to that fact. Funny: When I completed writing the previous sentence, this very song started to play on the real Pilsner Hit Radio FM Plus.

Čaputová will become another attractive enough young female leader of a European country. Ideologically, the change will be minimal because her views are similarly "progressive" as those of Andrej Kiska, an old, rich, and male current president of Slovakia. But the hopes for Slovakia to move a few steps away from the progressive globalism will probably evaporate tonight.