Gore's guru, Dr. Roger Revelle, disagreed with alarmism

The Financial Post, a Canadian newspaper, shows much more evidence that Al Gore's mentor, Dr. Roger Revelle, thought that the significance of the greenhouse effect was unproven and existing knowledge didn't justify any "action".



The evidence includes not only his widely discussed paper with Singer and Starr but also earlier letter to lawmakers and others.

Unfortunately, his student was a pretty lousy student. Even more unfortunately, lousy students are those who have much influence in this sometimes lousy world.

Meanwhile, another student who is a staunch AGW believer and became an official member of "Al Gore's cavalry", which is the official name of the greenshirts, is surprised that her classmates think that she's nuts. Most of her generation doesn't find global warming that terrifying, she says. Thanks God.

Similar nutcases as Claire who have made it into the European Parliament want to outlaw burping, so far only for cows. Poor cows. For 50 million years, they thought that they were free to burp. Suddenly, everything can change. ;-) According to the U.N., farm animals create 18% of the greenhouse effect, more than 14% created by transportation. And because the greenhouse effect became politically incorrect, poor cows must change their diet and recycle their manure.




There is only one thing we can say about this lunacy: "Boo!"

The New York Times asks:

• Carbon-neutral is hip but is it green?

and explains that the environmentalist gestures have no positive effect on the environment. They quote the president of an environment grant-making group that the whole indulgence game needs a new Martin Luther.

Well, I am afraid that it probably needs a new Winston Churchill instead - but even Luther would be progress. It is somewhat but not quite unexpected to find relief in the New York Times at the same time when we can't rely on sanity of the White House and many companies in these issues anymore.

In the Financial Times, Lawrence Summers correctly argues that the carbon policies won't lead to any good results if they don't include the developing world where most of the growth will occur. However, the hard-to-swallow conclusion is that the developing world should really be choked, and most of the article is dedicated to technicalities how to choke it. As I see it, the text is written with the assumption that the global warming believers own the world and the only question for them is how to figure out the details of the policies to control everyone on this world and everyone's carbon cycles.

I just can't believe that some of the analogous attitudes were still insufficiently left-wing for many people at Harvard. I consider these particular comments extremely left-wing. The Western politicians or professors don't own the world or the developing countries and don't have any right to dictate someone how much carbon dioxide he should be emitting. They wouldn't have this right even if their theories looked convincing - and they don't.

Well, I happen to think that if someone really plans to do these nasty things to the third world - things based on the assumption that the absurd "fight against climate change" is as important as their future -, they will eventually understand what is the goal and they may try to protect themselves, and guess whether I would be too sad if they assassinated a couple of promoters of the carbon regulation who want to prevent them from developing.

And if I am gonna make any medium-term prediction, I don't believe that China and India will accept any significant mandatory cuts of CO2 emissions. China is already becoming the leading country to oppose this lunacy.

Update, May 1st:

My prediction about China turned out to be precious. The position of the country that will become the #1 CO2 emitter this year has intensified.

Reuters reported that according to the Global Times - daily that, because of idiosyncratic Chinese societal arrangements, represents the opinion of 1.2 billion people - Western politicians are using climate terrorism to put the Chinese growth at risk, and China will oppose it.

Of course that any ban or restriction will just move the corresponding industry to China that will benefit. I wonder whether algores want to do something about it. Do they want to threaten China with nukes, to accept their megalomanic Kyoto-like plans? China has nukes, too. Moreover, China has a fifth column in the West. I dislike communists but if this clash became serious, I would, for example, instantly promote the pro-market Chinese communists to the status of fellow fighters for freedom! ;-)

Algores' insane plans to control the carbon cycle in the whole world will surely lead to some escalation of tension and emotions and these algores may soon find themselves in the same situation as the German chancellor in the late 1930s. Let's hope that fewer human lives will be wasted before they're stopped than what happened 65 years ago.

Resolving the Big Bang

Sean Carroll wrote a bizarre essay arguing against the cosmological principle and against many sane ideas we have about the beginning of the Universe, while trying to oversell many less sane ideas. Because I think that many comments about these issues are based on basic and widespread misunderstandings, let me try to re-analyze these questions.

Cosmological principle

The cosmological principle says that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic at large distance scales. Of course, this principle isn't a religious dogma we received from the heavens. It's an assumption about the Cosmos. Do we know it's true? Well, even though it can't be obvious a priori, the answer is Yes. Observations show that the visible Universe is homogeneous and isotropic at distances longer than 300 megaparsecs or so.

Does it mean that the Universe has satisfied the cosmological principle in the past? Once again, the answer is not obvious but it is Yes. Why? Well, it's because the inhomogeneities increase with time. In the past, they were smaller. This statement may be supported by particular calculations as well as observations. For example, the cosmic microwave background that was created 300,000 years after the Big Bang is much more uniform than the distribution of galaxies in the present Universe.

Can we extrapolate this statement to the very beginning? Well, we can extrapolate it to an arbitrary moment in the past in which classical general relativity coupled to other objects was a good zeroth approximation of reality. This certainly includes later stages of the inflationary era. In fact, during inflation, the Universe was as homogeneous as you can get because it was essentially empty. Inflation has the remarkable ability to turn the rules of the game upside down. Inflation makes the Universe more uniform. Do we know this is the case? Well, we know it theoretically and obviously, it is not easy to test it by direct experiments. But as long as we agree about the definition of the word "inflation", we should agree that it tends to make the space empty.




The same conclusion also implies that the Universe could have been very inhomogeneous and complicated before the inflation and it wouldn't destroy its future. But was it? The second law of thermodynamics makes entropy increase with time. At the beginning, the entropy of the Universe had to be much lower than it is today. Although we can't construct a rigorous proof, the extremely small Universe should simply be describable by a small number of degrees of freedom. As long as this Universe has a geometric description, they can be connected with overall uniform features of space or the first few spherical harmonics. There is simply not enough room for more information. The low amount of information is thus either equivalent to a largely uniform Universe, or to a Universe described non-geometrically.

Causality, before, and outside

In the second paragraph, Sean claims that it is pure moonshine to say that there was nothing before the Big Bang and nothing outside the Universe or to say that the distant points are behind each other's horizons. Well, I don't see any moonshine here. Comments about moonshine are pure, uniform fog. Because different questions often have different answers, a rational thinker must avoid general clichés about moonshine and, unlike Sean, he must answer these questions separately.

As long as we accept the picture of the Universe that started from a tiny size (and I will discuss other pictures below), there was nothing before the Big Bang. The spacetime geometry simply doesn't allow us to extrapolate before the first moment. Asking what was before the Big Bang is equivalent to asking what is closer to the center of Earth than the center of Earth. Well, the answer is nothing. There is nothing paradoxical about this answer even though many people, especially laymen, would like to argue that there is a paradox here.

Was there something outside the Universe? Well, it depends on your definition of the Universe. If the Universe means everything there is, which is my preferred definition, there can't be anything outside the Universe, by definition. We often use the description of a curved Universe in which a membrane is embedded in a higher-dimensional space. But when this trick is meant to be just a pedagogical tool to teach conventional 4D general relativity, it is important to realize that the space "outside" the membrane is just a misleading relic of the analogy, not a true property of our spacetime.

If you use the word Universe to define just a brane or similar object embedded in a higher-dimensional space or its generalizations, then there can be things outside your Universe. But whether these things are allowed (compatible with known facts) is a question that can be studied scientifically - by theory and, speculatively, also by experiments. Again, it is certainly not moonshine.

Are different, distant points behind each other's horizons? Well, if you truncate the Universe at age of 1 minute or any other moment that is still described by the Big Bang cosmology, the answer is definitely Yes. Although the answer is a result of a calculation, this part of the Big Bang cosmology has been verified experimentally, too. On the other hand, the uniform cosmic microwave temperature indicates that different points of our Universe had to be in causal contact i.e. their past light cones should overlap, after all. Inflation is the most natural framework that allows such a causal contact and/or thermal exchange. As long as causal spacetime geometry continues to hold, at least approximately, something like inflation is in fact necessary.

Alternatively, the very childhood of the Universe could be described by a set of non-geometric ideas that don't care about causality and locality.

Adding pre-history

In the scientific, minimalist picture, the Universe started as a small seed that was itself expanded by inflation. Before the inflation, the only thing we can find is the creation from "nothing". Such a creation, if it follows some laws, almost certainly follows laws based on the ideas of Hartle and Hawking or their generalizations. It is likely that the full laws of quantum gravity, i.e. string theory with all of its strings, branes, extra dimensions, dynamical dimensions, topology change, microscopic black holes, non-commutative geometry, and other concepts, must be taken into account to derive something solid about the pre-inflationary Universe.

I think that completely different, additional eras of the life of the Universe in which it was large are extremely unlikely fantasies. They are not needed to explain anything in the observed data, most of them are in a subtle tension with the second law of thermodynamics, and all of them fail to solve the question of the initial conditions because they just move the enigma further into the past. This black list includes entries such as

• big bounce: a contraction preceded our expansion in a symmetric fashion
• pre-Big-Bang cosmology: there was a large, cold, flat Universe that shrank in order to start to expand again
• cyclic or ekypyrotic Universe: the number of contraction-expansion cycles was in fact extremely large
• and, to a large extent, eternal inflation: our Universe was created as a bubble in a much larger multiverse and we should track its ancestry for many generations and study the existence of completely different Universes who were grandfathers of ours

Unlike ordinary inflation, these theories don't solve any problems of the well-established framework of the Big Bang cosmology. They're not theories that are meant to explain data or problems with previous theories: they're just meant to add something new that is not needed and something that is not mathematically robust. I don't like this kind of theories.

Also, neither of them can be shown to be inevitable by solid calculations. There are so many of them exactly because neither of them is well motivated. It is virtually guaranteed that we won't have any experimental evidence for any of these scenarios in the next few millenia. Will we ever have any theoretical evidence for them? I don't think so.

But even if we will, the derivation of one of these scenarios from a solid underlying theory - probably string theory - will be much more important than the random guess that has predicted its validity. If someone proved the validity of one of these theories kind of rigorously tomorrow, I would still think that it would have been a complete coincidence that someone else has guessed the answer in advance.

Note that I listed four examples. The average probability of one of them to be right is at most 25%. Be sure that the actual probability is way smaller, with the exception of the eternal inflation. I assign this theory a probability of 10%, somewhat less than 20% I gave to the statement that the anthropic explanation will remain the only explanation of the smallness of the cosmological constant.

Imagine that you want to describe your origin. You will end up with the egg. Would you think that the egg was created by shrinking an elephant, or infinitely many times oscillating donkey? Maybe you would but you would be wrong. The egg was never large. The only other interesting events in the past are connected with your parents - your ancestors are analogous to eternal inflation. But operationally speaking, starting with the fertilized egg and continuing with the conventional evolution explains everything about physics of yourself. ;-)

To summarize: Occam's razor was exactly designed to remove speculations of these kinds. We shouldn't be inventing new structures that are not needed for an explanation of any data and that are not needed to explain any theoretical discrepancy.

Dirty games with the arrow of time

Sean also discusses some theories where the arrow of time is spontaneously reverted. I think that these speculations are mad, stupid, and I won't honor them with too a long response except for saying that a fixed arrow of time is an inevitable component of any picture of reality based on special relativity that is compatible with any semi-realistic macroscopic physics. The arrow can't be reverted, and the idea that it can be suddenly reverted is not useful to explain anything about the Universe. The likelihood that the arrow of time gets flipped is much lower than the probability that Jesus Christ is born from a virgin, and if Sean thinks otherwise, he only reveals his deep exo-religious bias.

Sean argues that the "right" expectation would be that the entropy should be increasing into the past. Obviously, it doesn't. In the whole Universe, the macroscopic entropy was always increasing in the same direction as it is today, namely from the past to the future. Isn't it enough to show that Sean's speculations that it should have been the other way around are just wrong? They are circularly based on the wrong conclusion he wants to derive, namely that the entropy of the Big Bang should be "naturally" high.

Of course that we know that it is bogus. There exists no rational method based on science and verified theories and/or principles that would imply that the entropy should be higher in the past. The entropy of the young Universe is low and there is nothing wrong whatsoever with this picture.

Any argument meant to show that something is wrong here is an artifact of sloppy and dogmatic thinking, thinking denying the known basic fact that the initial conditions are defined in the past and what evolves out of them is the future - never the other way around.

Loop quantum cosmology

In Sean's mishmash or random ideas, he seems to put loop quantum cosmology on equal footing with the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction. I don't know whether it was meant as a joke but if it was not, I think that it is an insane approach to these questions.

The work of Hartle and Hawking is an essential and robust proposal explaining the only known natural way how the initial conditions of the Universe may be derived dynamically, from the known path integral or an equivalent definition of dynamics. The existing calculations of the wavefunction of the Universe are arguably primitive but in a more complete theory, it is conceivable that someone just takes their ideas and repeats the calculation in a more rigorous and controllable way that will lead to much more familiar and encouraging results.

The Hartle-Hawking proposal also trivially explains why the entropy of a young Universe is tiny: it's because the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction is really a pure state whose entropy is zero and this value can be trusted as long as the Universe is microscopic.

Loop quantum cosmology is, on the other hand, a silly oversimplification of loop quantum gravity whose purpose is to present childish kindergarten games as a work on quantum gravity although these games have clearly nothing to do with physics of gravity. Loop quantum cosmology doesn't even follow from loop quantum gravity. Loop quantum cosmology is obtained by similar dumb "quantization" procedures directly from the special FRW classical cosmological Ansatz as the procedures that lead from classical 4D general relativity to loop quantum gravity.

Given the fact that even the full loop quantum gravity is demonstrably inconsistent and silly and the procedures themselves are clearly flawed, making further oversimplifications makes the situation really disastrous. Loop quantum cosmology doesn't satisfy any elementary consistency criteria we expect from a theory of quantum cosmology - such as unitarity or the existence of space and particles with spins and familiar interactions - and it will clearly never say anything interesting about physics.

This whole enterprise is just a tool for some people to convince themselves that a game shallower than LEGO can be marketed as quantum gravity. All details are wrong and all questions it offers are completely disconnected from real questions needed in physics. And because there are many stupid people around, be sure that it can be marketed in this way.

Sean's collection of random, mostly flawed ideas is an example how physics would look like if the lowest possible standards were accepted. It would become a conglomerate of myths, religious and anti-religious dogmas, confusion about things that are not confusing at all, and contrived, arbitrary, and mathematically shallow constructions that don't explain anything.

And that's the memo.

IPCC AR4 WG1: full text

The climate panel's working group I has just published the full report:

• IPCC WG1 full text

A preliminary version of the same document has been available via JunkScience and the structure of the final document seems almost identical. You may read the first reactions of Steve McIntyre.

Officially, we have had the summary for policymakers (SPM) only - until now. You may see that the long document contains a lot of serious albeit boring science and data. Concerned members of the IPCC have however (mis)interpreted the results in catchy ways in their summary. Journalists are even more concerned and their presentation is much closer to nutcases like Al Gore than the boring content of the IPCC report. This multi-level hysterization and cherry-picking is a primary mechanism fuelling this whole global idiocy.

Comments about the IPCC working group II summary for policymakers, originally posted on April 6th

Recall that the U.N. climate panel (IPCC) has three parts:

• WG1: physical processes
• WG2: impact on life and societies
• WG3: how to cool down Earth :-) ... next week, they will recommend nuclear power and GM crops

Buy your personal CO2 box today!
(Thanks to the creator written in the corner of the ad.)

WG1 is composed of scientists led by government bureaucrats and political activists: these three subgroups are far from disjoint. Their list includes every scientist who has been in contact with them but hasn't yet threatened them with a lawsuit - which is what e.g. Prof Paul Reiter had to do before he was removed from the list of the corrupt scientists. Their pre-determined task is to "prove" that most of the recent climate change is man-made, despite any scientific evidence that shows the opposite. Their fourth report, IPCC AR4, will be released on April 29th (officially May).



It is necessary for WG1 to prove what they're asked to prove, otherwise it would become clear that the very existence of the groups WG2, WG3 is a gigantic fraud - much like the existence of a large WG1, after all.

In the same way, it is necessary for WG2 to prove that the exaggerated yet modest warming "predicted" by WG1 will have extremely bad consequences. If they failed to prove it, it would become clear that the very existence of WG3 - and to a large extent WG2 - is a huge fraud. The political framework is given and scientists are only expected to make it look convincing by inserting scientific jargon and cherry-picked data into the big gaps in the whole orthodoxy. That's a classic example of intellectual prostitution.




WG2 doesn't even pretend to be based on natural science. Just like WG1 that provided us with a demo (summary for policymakers) although many people apparently think that WG1 has already released a report, WG2 only offers us the table of contents, press conferences, and their

• IPCC WG2 summary for policymakers.

You can also see a webcast of this conference: a black window together with a screenshot that allows you to safely remove zero types of hardware.

Some of their statements

Even though the full document is rumored to have 1572 pages (what else it can be than just a worthless conglomerate of myths that hundreds of random people add to it?), we must rely on the summary and press conferences as reported by the media e.g. Bloomberg. The working group is informing us that species will go extinct even though it is pretty much known that higher temperatures have been historically increasing the diversity of species, especially mammals.

They feel certain that all infectious diseases will become extremely widespread although the correlations between the temperature and diseases are questionable, to say the least, while millions of people are dying today as opposed to a result of a hypothetical change in the future.

They are telling us that there will be many more storms even though rudimentary atmospheric physics implies that storminess should decrease because it is driven by the temperature difference between the equator and the poles and this difference is predicted to shrink because the polar warming should be faster.

They are also convinced that the droughts will spread although some of the newest scientific results indicate that rainfall in Saharan Africa could increase substantially within a few decades in the case that the warming trend continues and undo the natural devastation of that region.

They are telling us that the poor people may be the hardest hit ones. That's almost certainly the case but what they're not saying is that 99+ percent of their ability to cope not only with a hypothetical climate change but also with the status quo depends on their future wealth and on their access to technology - something that these comrades want to prevent.

To summarize, what WG2 is saying is mostly a shameful piece of crap but it is a politically correct piece of crap, and that's what really matters these days. The Whacko Gang #3 will release their "findings" how to cool down Earth later. A leading contaminator of science, Stephen Schneider who is known for his Schneider doctrine about the necessary compromise between the scientific integrity and fraud that every scientist must adopt in order to be effective, claims that the Bush administration was helping this bureaucratic tumor of professional parasites and liars to grow in 85% of cases. President Bush should be ashamed.

And that was the memo on April 6th.

Map: we know your location

The Reference Frame knows where you are. Please feel free to bookmark this page or link to it if you find it useful. Feel free to drag the map, zoom it in, zoom it out, and so on.




(C) 2007 Luboš Motl, KGB, StB, CIA, FBI, MI5, Google Maps, Microsoft

The Texas Youth Commission scandal is much worse than Sharpstown

And the consequences for all of those involved, from Governor 39% all the way down to the lowliest prison guard, should be at least as severe.

Rick Perry knew about sexual abuse in the TYC system as early as 2001, yet took no action. He appointed cronies and contributors to the TYC board, and when the crimes came to light, named his former chief of staff to oversee a cover-up of his involvement.

He should resign.

Attorney General Greg Abbott ignored the reports from a Texas Ranger, and instead had OAG agents peeking into the bathroom windows of little old ladies in a wild goose chase for evidence of Democratic voter fraud.

He should also quit his post.

Even Alberto Gonzales and the USDOJ refused to heed the warnings, but naturally the Prezdent still has full confidence.

These revelations are months old, and still there is little public outcry and even less effort to bring those responsible to account.

The larger question is how much embarrassment can Republican officials in Austin and Washington endure before they get the message, or at least acquire some shame. We know Bush is ignorant, and we know most of the people he surrounds himself with are as well, but you have to wonder when someone -- some Republican somewhere -- will stand up and say "the Emperor has no clothes". Will it be Medal of Freedom winner George Tenet, on 60 Minutes tonight but also selling his book? Will he be the tipping point?

Really, how much is it going to take? How many lies, how big a scandal, how serious the crimes?

The signs of GOP depression

It's too early to begin celebrating, but it looks like Karl Rove may be succeeding in creating that permanent majority. Thanks, Turdblossom!

President Bush's unpopularity and a string of political setbacks have created a toxic climate for the Republican Party, making it harder to raise money and recruit candidates for its drive to retake control of Congress.

Some of the GOP's top choices to run for the House next year have declined, citing what Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) called a "poisonous" environment. And Republicans' fundraising edge, an important advantage over the last five years, has dwindled.

With GOP clout diminished after November's election losses, the Republicans' national committee and their House and Senate campaign committees together raised the same amount as the Democrats in the first quarter of the year — and Democrats ended the period with more cash in the bank. At this point four years ago, Republicans had more than twice the money Democrats did.

"The reality is the Republican brand right now is just not a good brand," said Tim Hibbitts, an independent Oregon pollster. "For Republicans, the only way things really get better … is if somehow, some way, Iraq turns around."

Jennifer Duffy of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report said the party was "desperately in need of some Prozac."

"Toxic climate". "Poisonous" environment. And we're not talking global warming.

"Not a good brand". And I don't mean General Motors.

"Desperately in need of some Prozac", and we're not referring to Seung Hui Cho.

Save your Republican friends (if you care and if you can). Here are some of the danger signs of severe depressive disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health:

• Persistent sad, anxious, or "empty" mood
• Feelings of hopelessness, pessimism
• Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, helplessness
• Loss of interest or pleasure in hobbies and activities that were once enjoyed, including sex

Well, maybe not the sex part.

Sunday Funnies (Delete All edition)

I could be outdoors, playing with my puppy

But instead I'm blogging live from the afternoon general session of the Texas Democratic Party's quarterly meeting in Austin ...

Susan Bankston and I are holding down the fort here at the end of the ballroom. She gave me a flash report from the grassroots committee meeting this morning that sounds ambitious and enthusiastic: formation of a precinct/county chair support committee, which would share and communicate ideas on minority outreach, a New Democrat package to be given to newly registered voters, an update to the TDP handbook, and local/regional issues which could be synergized by coordination among counties, (such as efforts to block the Trans-Texas Corridor, for example). They also intend to establish a Yahoo group to take input from the real grassroots.

The chair recognized two candidates in attendance who have announced for CD-10, Larry Daughtery and Dan Grant. Various committee reports were offered and accepted.

Some extended discussion and adoption of various rules from Rules occupied the balance of the next half-hour. The focus finally turned to the proposed revisions in the state convention's delegate selection. Rep. Yvonne Davis rose in opposition, indicating that many disincentives arise under the proposed structure. Ken Molberg indicated Dallas County would lose three hundred delegates under the proposal. Another SD member spoke in support of the plan. Fidel Acevedo also spoke against the change, and Bill Brannon pointed out that the percentages stayed the same even if the raw numbers varied widely.

The change was adopted overwhelmingly by the SDEC.

Update (4/28, 2:30 p.m.): Boyd Richie reported on his nine townhall meetings. The good news included fundraising: TDP has raised more money to date than any year since 2000. Boyd recognized Susan and her blog for linking Kelso's column on Voter ID, probably the best take so far on the subject.

Update (2:35 p.m.): The interns from St. Edwards University who worked in the TDP office -- William Rodriguez, Jackie Villanueva, Aira Jimenez, Rachael Pena -- were acknowledged. Worthy young men and women with bright futures in politics sat on the end with Susan and I and received their proclamations from the chairman.

Update (2:45 p.m.): Convention plans for 2008 (to be held at the Hilton in downtown Austin) proceed apace. The committee is open to suggestions for themes and activities for this conclave from the Democratic public.

Update (3 p.m.): Resolutions on matters ranging from global warming to remembering those who have recently passed are adopted.

Update(3:15 p.m.): I'm going to ask Evelyn Burleson, chair of Calhoun County, permission to do a profile here. Susan's favorite quote of hers is "Conservatism is just a political justification for being stingy." She sounds like my kind of lady.

Chairman Richie completes old business and announcements and adjournment wraps it up. We're gathering in our caucuses so more to come (but it may be tomorrow).

Boadecia also posted live.

An MIT dean with high school education (or less)

Dr Marilee Jones, PhD joined the MIT Admission Office in 1979 to lead the recruitment efforts for women. That was exactly what was expected from certain powerful cliques so she became the Dean of Admissions in 1998.

Last year, she co-authored a booklet called "Less Stress, More Success". She emphasized that "you must always be completely honest who you are."

Dr. Marilee Jones, PhD is the recipient of MIT’s highest award for administrators, the "MIT Excellence Award for Leading Change", as well as the "Gordon Y. Billard Award" and the "Dean for Undergraduate Education Infinite Mile Award for Leadership". I could continue. She has simply been a star.

Except that last week it turned out that among her three degrees from schools in upstate New York, she hasn't received a single one. See

• The Crimson
• The New York Times
• News.Google.COM.

She is not a Dr. She is not a PhD. She hasn't finished a college. She hasn't seen the two colleges out of three at all and she has only attended the third one as a part-time student for a year. Indeed, with much less stress, she achieved much more success: she earned about 3 million USD more than if she didn't cheat. And she has been teaching students how to achieve the same thing with minimal effort. It's not surprising they liked her.

An obvious question is whether anyone has noticed during these 28 years. Is it really that difficult for those thousands of people who have interacted with her to distinguish a PhD from a former torch singer at upstate New York clubs with high school education? Maybe it's not difficult but it is certainly hard to point out that the woman has been a complete fraud because of an outrageous totalitarian ideology called feminism.

Its power is so overwhelming that even if you're the most obvious scholarly zero as you can get, you can not only live with these lies for 28 years but also collect the highest awards on the market, as long as you help to spread certain fashionable lies.

If she were a Harvard dean and not an MIT dean, she wouldn't be fired. Instead, she would simply say that she only hasn't received the degrees because of white male sexist pigs who prevented her from getting them. She would be given the three degrees and as a hero of the feminist struggle against the last remnants of common sense and moral integrity, she would be promoted to the president of the university.

I assure you that comparable although not as striking situations can be found everywhere in the Academia. Thousands of activist women and radical members of other "oppressed" groups - groups that actually control this whole disgusting theater - pretend that they are much more than they are and the whip of political correctness guarantees that they can do so. Feminism and other types of victimism are forms of organized crime.

And that's the memo.

Wolfgang Pauli: a quantum mechanical hero

Wolfgang Pauli was born on April 25th, 1900, and he was one of the brightest physicists of his generation. See also Backreaction.



His approach to physics was very sharp and sophisticated. The Pauli matrices and the exclusion principle are named after him (Nobel prize 1945 for the exclusion principle) and he has proven many things such as the spin-statistics relation and the CPT theorem. In 1949, he co-authored the Pauli-Villars regularization but of course his contributions were far more numerous, including contributions that are not published anywhere.

His encounter with David Bohm

Wolfgang Pauli didn't like sloppy thinking - and especially various kinds of mishmash of unconscious projections and science - such as the morphogenetic fields and similar primordial forms of the "New Age" garbage. If you look e.g. at this page, you can see where the famous "not even wrong" epithet comes from.




Pauli was talking to another physicist, most likely David Bohm. You may know that it's hard for me to love David Bohm because Bohm was both a communist as well as a hater of orthodox quantum mechanics. So it's not surprising I like this story. :-)

Bohm was apparently emitting a lot of philosophical preconceptions - imagine something like one of Lee Smolin's silly theories - and at one moment, he self-confidently asked "But, surely, Pauli, you don't think what I've said is completely wrong?" to which Pauli replied: "No, I think what you said is not even wrong." ;-)

Too bad that between 2001 and 2006, his nice statement has been misused exactly by the intellectual heritors of crackpots whom Pauli addressed his wise comment in the first place. I am virtually certain that if Pauli were alive today, he would be a string theorist because he always demanded as high mathematical standards from a theory as string theorists do.

I hope that in 2007, we can already say that the intellectual garbage that was trying to damage Pauli's name and misinterpret his statements is already moved to the dumping ground of the history of physics.

Pauli and God

At the 1927 Solvay Conference, Dirac spent some time criticizing religion. Because Heisenberg's attitude was rather tolerant, Pauli gave the summary. He said: "Well, I would like to point out that our friend Dirac has a religion, too. Its first commandment says that 'God does not exist and Paul Dirac is his prophet.'"

It is also a well-known story that after his death in 1958, Pauli was granted an audience with God. Pauli was allowed to ask a question. So he asked why the fine structure constant was equal to 1/137.036... God started to write equations on the blackboard and Pauli was satisfied for a while. However, he soon started to shake his head violently: "Das ist ganz falsch!" :-)

Chernobyl: 21 years later

Exactly 21 years ago, the Ukrainian power plant exploded. Last year, we wrote about

• thriving wildlife in Chernobyl.
  

A new study has found that the long-term health impact of the Chernobyl disaster was negligible. All kinds of mortality rates were at most 1% higher than normally.

• ScienceDaily, full study.
  

Everyday life is riskier.

Yushchenko calls for a revival of the zone. His proposals include a nature preserve - which is more or less a fact now - as well as production of bio-fuels and a science center. The Korean boss of the U.N. calls for aid to the region.

Financial Times: carbon permits fraud is widespread

As Willie Soon has kindly pointed out, the Financial Times have revealed that most of the transactions with carbon permits are fraudulent. Companies pay for CO2 emissions reductions that never occur while others greatly benefit.

For example, an Indian company earned 600 million USD by a trick. Russians also know what to do in this complete chaos: Gazprom will sell Brazilian credits to Europe.

This massive international fraud should stop as soon as possible and those responsible for it should be arrested. Otherwise, as the U.S. Congressional Budget Office report found out, the CO2 cap-and-trade schemes will devastate the economy, especially the poor.

By the way, the current price of the European 2007 permits is 0.64 euro, down from 30 euro one year ago by a factor of almost fifty.

Censorship and propaganda

Other climate news: the website climateofdenial.net contains a letter of 30+ modern inquisitors who demand The Great Global Warming Swindle DVD to be banned. Prof Will Alexander became another victim of a witch hunt in South Africa.

Meanwhile, USA Today reports that Al Gore is cloning himself to create what the paper calls a "global army" of about 1000 men, mostly aggressive senile fat men. Pretty scary: not even Saddam Hussein succeeded in this cloning army strategy.

200 countries

The number of countries that have visited The Reference Frame according to the counter in the sidebar has reached 200. That's well above the number of U.N. nations. While several entries are non-countries such as "Anonymous Proxy" and "Europe", we are close to saturation. A further increase of the number of nations will probably lead to a discovery of extraterrestrial aliens.

Klaus in Russia

The Czech president had a friendly phone call with his U.S. counterpart, mostly about the radar base. George Bush will visit Prague in June 2007.



Today, Václav Klaus started an official visit of Russia. His relations with Vladimir Putin are much better than the average relations between two international leaders which will make any possible controversy about the radars less violent.

Conservative hysterics

Via The Agonist, The New York Sun reports that Deadeye Dick Cheney is the GOP's best hope in 2008 ...

For all the talk about potential candidates who haven't entered the 2008 presidential race — from Mayor Bloomberg to Vice President Gore to Senator Thompson and Speaker Gingrich — the one that who would bring the most to the race is Vice President Cheney.

Commenters there declare Dick and running mate Tom DeLay as the unbeatable combination for rogue elephants longin' to keep hangin' in the White House. Here's a sampling of campaign slogans and bumper sticker ideas:

Cheney/Delay Just a Heartbeat Away
Dick & Hammer (I can see the logo, can't you?)
"30% of Americans can't all be wrong"
Cheney 2008: "Pump Action"

In other hilarious news, right-wing blogs discovered the plot to hide WMDs in Iraq. This delusion has been making the right-rounds for quite a few years now. It's almost as ridiculous as Laura Bush saying "no one suffers more than the president and I" and almost as funny as Rudy Giuliani thinking a gallon of milk costs a dollar-fifty. Almost.

And don't watch this video of Michelle Malkin leading cheers until you've peed first. Really.

Much less funny: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher declared to audience members in a subcommittee hearing that he hoped their families would "suffer the consequences" of a terrorist attack.

It's important to note that what I find funny about this demonstrated ignorance is the sheer cluelessness of the Republicans spouting this nonsense and their believers believing it. The popularity of Fox News among this subset is also proof of their stupidity.

Of course it would be much more funny if people and planets weren't dying because of it.

String theory in 2 minutes: blackthornba

This looks like a serious contestant to me although I can't promise you that the video is more than a union of pieces collected elsewhere. ;-)

History of gravitational waves

Daniel Holz discusses some history of gravitational waves. Click the animation above to get to his article. Note that my animation (LM) showing how space gets stretched in the presence of such a wave is rotated by 45 degrees relatively to Dan's animation (DH): they are two different "linear" polarizations. If you take the combinations

• LM + i DH, LM - i DH,

you will obtain a different basis of the so-called circular polarizations. In the corresponding pictures, an ellipse would simply rotate around, in one direction or the other.

In my wave, if you label the plane as x-y and the wave moves in the third, z-direction, it is the component g_{xy} of the metric tensor that fluctuates around zero. In Dan's wave, g_{xx} and g_{yy} fluctuate around one (in the East Coast convention); the two components oscillate in the opposite directions so that g_{xx} g_{yy} remains constant, equal to one. In the linearized approximation, it's equivalent to keeping g_{xx}+g_{yy} constant.




Einstein apparently knew about gravity waves as early as in 1918: he used linearized general relativity, the same modern approach that a particle physicist or string theorist would use today. It had to be very clear that the diffeomorphism symmetry wasn't enough to make all these waves unphysical - removable by pure gauge transformations - because the number of polarizations simply grows like D^2 or so with the dimension D while there are only D parameters in a diffeomorphism.

Nevertheless, there were doubters who argued that gravity waves shouldn't exist. It was a very stupid opinion that can mostly be blamed on the spiritual power of Mach's principle. According to Mach's (and Leibniz's) philosophy, empty space should be really empty - only relative positions of objects make sense - which means that an empty space shouldn't allow any gravity waves. General relativity however implies something completely different.

Gravitational waves are known to exist because certain binary stars lose exactly as much energy by emitting them as general relativity predicts. The 1993 physics Nobel prize has been given for this observation: the period of the pulsar orbit decreases by mere 75 microseconds every year but it can be measured. The energy carried by gravitational waves is quantized into "E=hf" Planck's units, just like for electromagnetic waves, and the quanta are called gravitons. Of course, individual gravitons haven't yet been seen, unlike photons, because they are too weakly interacting.

In perturbative string theory, gravitons are particular vibrations of a closed string with low enough energy so that it can give a massless spinning boson.

Skilled facility postpourri

Today Mrs. Diddie's mother is moving from the hospital to the nursing home.

Here's a few updates on things that you have probably been able to follow elsewhere ...

-- Republicans are determined to disenfranchise Texas voters (they had help from two House Democrats who failed to show up for the vote), but Rodney Ellis and other Senate Democrats are just as determined to stop them. Kuffner has a good link assembly.

-- Pulitzer author David Halberstam was killed in an auto accident this week. Eye on Williamson has a nice remembrance. And also Boris Yeltsin, whose mighty heart finally gave out. Don't miss mcjoan's eulogy.

-- The Army lied about Pat Tillman's death and Jessica Lynch's ordeal. As I posted at this link:

Why does the Pentagon feel it necessary to concoct these falsehoods? Is this war lacking heroes?

Were the fabrications invented to give the GWOT some measure of credibility that the generals perceive it to be lacking?

And do the military leaders take their cues on lying from their civilian commanders?

-- Bush says "Screw you" to Gonzales critics (which means everybody in the world).

-- The storms are again swirling around the Turdblossom. Paul Wolfowitz takes Abu Gonzales' lead and digs in, refusing to quit the World Bank over his girlfriend scandal. Dennis Kucinich files articles of impeachment against Deadeye Dick. Another Republican congressman resigns his committee seats over his relationship to Jack Abramoff, and DeLay aide Ed Buckham moves deeper into legal jeopardy as well.

More when I can.

Gliese 581 has a habitable planet

Gliese 581 is a star that is 20.5 light years from us. It is smaller and colder than the Sun: in fact, it is a red dwarf. That's why habitable planets may be much closer to the star.



Gliese 581 c is a planet whose radius is about 1.5 times the radius of Earth. The planet is 14 times closer to the star than our distance from the Sun. But because the star is so much smaller, the planet is expected to have temperatures between 0 and 40 Celsius degrees which is pretty pleasant. Indeed, you can see liquid water on the satellite photograph. ;-)




The planet is about 5 times heavier than Earth. Because the radius is 1.5 times greater than the radius of Earth, the gravitational acceleration is about 5/2.25 = 2 times greater than on Earth. That's why the citizens have somewhat thicker bones: look at the picture.

The Wikipedia article about 581 C informs that a few hours ago, intelligent radio signals arriving from the planet were detected. ;-) This information was added by a witty editor from statefarm.com.

See news.google.com or a video (the first 20 seconds is a commercial).

Interview with Richard Lindzen

Relax, the planet is fine

National Post (Canada) had a nice interview with Prof. Richard Lindzen on Saturday.

There are many usual things - warming and human influence is not proven, it will probably be beneficial e.g. for Canada, indulgence industry is a huge business that can feed whole nations, scientists direct their research to get funding etc.

Lindzen also mentions the story of Roger Revelle who was one of the greatest oceanographers of the 20th century at Harvard University. One of the last papers he wrote was one with Fred Singer and Chauncey Starr

What to do about greenhouse warming: look before you leap

that argued, among other things, that existing science justifies no action to mess up with the climate.

Alarmists hated the paper so much that Al Gore, together with another Harvard professor, created a whole disgusting fairy-tale that Roger Revelle was senile and manipulated. Fred Singer sued the #$#$ alarmists and won a full vindication. Mainstream media are, of course, silent about this lawsuit.

They also talk about Gore's cynicism and about children used for alarmism - an approach that closely resembles Hitlerjugend. The happy end of the interview is that we should learn math and physics so that we don't get fooled by this idiocy. Well, I couldn't agree more.




Via Benny Peiser whose CCNet brought other news today:

• China delays national climate action plan indefinitely
• China will become the #1 emitter this year
• Indian company earns 600 million USD by an indulgence trick
• Turkey rejects Kyoto as being against their national interest
• IPCC WG3 mitigation - some unrealistic optimistic comments
• Danish emissions grew 16% in 2006
• Germany plans 26 new coal power plants
• Canada to join anti-Kyoto
• Spanish ceramics maker is earning more money by doing nothing, eating bananas, selling indulgences

plus some semi-private correspondence.

New format: listen to Philip Stott's Global Warming Podcast #1

P vs NP & NP-completeness

Michael Sipser of MIT gave a very clear - and perhaps too elementary - colloquium about P vs NP and NP-completeness. Let me make a short introduction to these questions.

P and NP problems

Use a computer to multiply two numbers, 7x13 = 91, or some longer numbers. It will be done "quickly". For large enough input with "N" bytes, the required number of operations (time) will go like a power law, "N^a", where "a" is an exponent. These are the P (polynomial) problems: they are quickly solvable.

Then there are possibly harder problems that may be more time-consuming but if you have a solution, you can quickly prove that it satisfies the conditions. This class of problems is called NP (non-deterministically polynomial) and includes these seemingly difficult problems:

• find the best schedule for students
• find the factors whose product gives you a large number with "N" digits
  
• find the clique of size "M" (a number comparable to "N"); a clique is a subgraph where all vertices are connected with each other
• compute the permanent of a "N x N" matrix (determinant without the minus signs)
• protein folding - minimize the energy by folding a protein
  
• find a proof of a true theorem, a proof that has "M" characters
• find a vacuum with the smallest positive cosmological constant in some toy models of the landscape with "exp(N)" vacua
  

and many others. (About two entries were added by me.) Once you find a solution, you can check that it is a solution in polynomial time, "N^a". But apparently, the only way to find such a solution is to search through a significant part of possibilities which takes time longer than any power law, namely time such as "exp(N)" or even "N! ~ (N/e)^N".




NP problems are "quickly verifiable". You can easily see that P problems are a subset of NP problems: if a problem is quickly solvable, it must also be quickly verifiable. But is it a proper subset? Can't they be identical sets?

History

When was this science invented? It was around the mid 1960s, independently by Russian and American authors. When you have a Russian and an American who invent the same thing at the same time, you're usually not getting the whole story. If I tell you that it was all invented 10 years earlier, what was the citizenship of the inventor? Yes, you're right. It had to be a Czech. In fact, he was not just Czech: he was a German Czech at the IAS. ;-)

I claim that the description "German Czech" matches the U.S. standards - it is constructed just like e.g. "African American" - but no sane Czech person with a possible exception of your humble correspondent would ever seriously call Kurt Gödel a "Czech". ;-)

Recent analyses of John von Neumann's archive showed that in 1956, Kurt Gödel sent a letter to (ailing) von Neumann (both IAS Princeton) asking how much time "phi(N)" one needs to find a mathematical proof of a valid assertion, a proof that is known to contain "N" characters. It could be a power law, he speculated. This fact if true would have profound consequences for mathematics. He has also sketched other problems where similar questions can be asked. Gödel was clearly interested in the issue of finding proofs but his comments were more general and the other guys just repeated it 10 years later.

NP-completeness

The most important later development was NP-completeness. There exists a large and important subclass of NP problems that are exactly as difficult as each other. This NP-complete class contains many granddaddies - but the clique problem is one of them. This really means that a difficult, NP-complete problem can be converted to a clique problem (or one of many other granddaddies that are dual to each other).

The set of NP problems also contains problems that are not proven to be NP-complete such as the factorization problem. A factorization homework can be transformed into a clique problem which means that factorization problems can't be more difficult than the clique problem: but they can be easier although there exists no proof whether they're easier in either way.

Clique problem

Imagine that you have a group of scientists (vertices of a graph) with the information which pairs have shared a paper (links in this graph). Your task is to find the largest subgraph (subgroup of scientists) in which everyone wrote a paper with everyone else.

In paleoclimatology, it is clearly a P problem. The fast solution to identify the largest clique is to find Michael Mann in the graph, list all of his co-authors, sort them by a number of papers co-authored with Mann, and take the upper "M" of this list that still form a clique, if you want to get the largest clique in the graph.

This algorithm was discovered by Dr. Edward Wegman, a statistician who was asked by by the U.S. lawmakers to investigate similar problems connected with that particular bizarre clique generating a remarkable large number of flawed papers, especially about broken hockey sticks.

P=NP or not P=NP

However, the real question is whether this problem is quickly solvable for random large graphs outside paleoclimatology. If there is a solution that avoids the brute force search, then P=NP. Because such an identity would allow one to crack all possible codes, solve scheduling problems, identify cliques, calculate permanents, and even find proofs of true mathematical statements automatically and quickly, it is generally expected that P=NP is not true.

However, there are examples where similar intuition is wrong, such as the primarily test. One can quickly test whether a number with "N" digits is a prime by using Fermat's little theorem. It takes much less time than testing all possible factors up to those with "N/2" digits. The Lucas-Lehmer primality test is a similar example of this dramatic speed-up although it only works for Mersenne numbers.

NP-completeness means that if you find a universal fast (power law time) solution of one of those hard but easily testable problems, you can prove that you have solved all of them. Not all NP problems are NP-complete, but many of them - such as the clique problem - are.

Sipser continued with some additional questions whether we can check that someone knows a solution to a problem such as the isomorphism of two graphs. These are toy models of some concepts that are important in contemporary cryptography - such as the methods for someone to prove that she knows a password without revealing what it is.

Finally, he also mentioned how different levels of complexity that require memory or time scaling as various, generally different functions of "N" can be related to each other, suggesting that these relations could have something to do with the relations of space and time in physics. Well, I would guess that probably not but everyone is free to try to find this relation with physics, of course. ;-)

And that's the memo.

Joe Kernen outshines Laurie David and Sheryl Crow

Flash has pointed out this interesting TV confrontation: a CNBC video clip is available on the website under Sheryl's picture below. Or try YouTube including Patrick Michaels' reaction.



I think that both Sheryl Crow (is she "All I wanna do is have some fun" or "Girls just wanna have fun"? Both are great hits) and Laurie David (the prettiest among those who earn big bucks from "An Inconvenient Truth") are attractive women.

Sometimes it is not enough to be pretty and to create great songs or earn big bucks. Joe Kernen, a skeptic, received a support of 80% of viewers against the two alarmist ladies. It's not hard to see why. For example, when asked how she wants to replace hydrocarbon (nuclear?), Crow answered that we should burn clean coal instead. Coal without hydrocarbons - that's what I call a really clean coal. ;-)




These women wanted to teach college students about the climate and energy issues! It would be much more useful if they returned to the elementary school and learned some basic things again.

Sheryl Crow has also become famous with her project to fight against global warming by allowing only one square of toilet paper to be used in the restroom, except for the pesky situations when you are allowed to use two or three. This is a real scientific way to deal with the issue! Unfortunately, her finger so far seems insufficient to replace three tractor trailers, four buses, and six cars for her concert.

Incidentally, Sheryl Crow also tried to sexually harass and touch Karl Rove, to get him on her side. He refused. Laurie David described his reaction as follows: "How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow?"

I wonder how many men on their tour didn't say "Don't touch me" as Karl Rove and became alarmists. ;-) Unlike Crow, David only tried to insult Rove, and "she succeeded", as Rove admitted.

Explanations of their failure

If you remember the Intelligence Squared Climate Debate, Gavin Schmidt has offered an explanation why the alarmists lost: Michael Crichton is tall.

Sheryl Crow has also offered her explanation why she and Laurie David lost: it's because unlike Joe Kernen, they were not sufficiently beautiful in the morning because they didn't sleep enough. :-) Another reason is that they faced a skeptic whose goal was to show that the AGW theory was wrong. That's really outrageous! :-)

She conjectured that Joe Kernen, who is incidentally MSc from MIT in molecular biology, must be paid by the tobacco industry. :-) If you imagine that IQ is additive, Kernen's match with the two ladies was a fair game. And I think it's great if two stupid women become associated with the whole ideology.

The only problem I have with Kernen's comments is his promotion of the dominant role of volcanos which is an error in the Great Warming Swindle documentary: volcanoes currently produce about 50 times less CO2 per year than we do although cumulatively, of course, they have emitted much more than we have.

Boris Yeltsin died

Figure 1: Billary Clinton: "He's so cute."

Boris Yeltsin (*1931) grew up in Yekaterinburg = Sverdlovsk, my hometown Pilsen's twin city, where he was the party boss. Later he became the first post-Soviet president of Russia, 1991-1999. He liked to drink and other things. Not everything was perfect about his reign and life but he is one of the people who should be credited for the expansion of capitalism and democracy in Russia.

Hartle & Srednicki vs. typicality

Jim Hartle and Mark Srednicki explain that all details of the assumptions about "typicality" - an inherent part of the anthropic reasoning - should always be explicitly stated and some of these assumptions lead to ludicrous conclusions.

They use the Bayesian reasoning to explain that a theory in which the observers like us are more typical are not preferred. If you click at the link in the previous sentence, you will get my article with a similar argument (search for "huge landscape" to get to the main assertion).

Some of their examples of ridiculous conclusions obtained with the assumptions of typicality are related to the Boltzmann brains. Because I clearly agree with their assertions, let me paraphrase the main points from their first page:

• Predicted atypicality of humans is not enough for falsification of a theory
  
• Deciding about validity of theories mustn't depend on counting of intelligent observers and their properties because this would kill objectivity
  
• All accessible reliable data may be used and should be used unless it can be shown that they are inconsequential
• Predicting a higher or lower number of copies of observers like us and observations like ours doesn't modify the degree of validity of a theory
• We shouldn't assume that something about us was created by a random process unless there is evidence for this assumption
• Bayesian inference may be used to guess measures that may be implied by a fundamental theory but don't have to

Some people assume that we are randomly selected from a class "C". Hartle and Srednicki call this misstep "selection fallacy" because its essence is to neglect some known data.




Selection fallacy is a special example of political correctness applied to the class "C". Needless to say, if you're a member of the complement of "C", e.g. a conservative, you will be in trouble. ;-)



Figure 1: Jovian atmosphere. Should the predicted number of exo-women of color in this environment influence the selection of the right compactification before we actually count them? ;-)

They say that a theory that would predict that life thrives in the huge atmosphere of Jupiter shouldn't be disfavored before we know whether they do. I added the "before..." part although they don't say it explicitly at the beginning of their paper. Indeed, I think that once we learn that there's no life on Jupiter, a theory predicting life on Jupiter should face some backlash.

The black list of people who are making the error of thinking that theories predicting localized life in Jupiter's atmosphere are already disadvantaged includes Page, Dyson, Kleban, Susskind, Bousso, and Freivogel. ;-) I agree with Hartle and Srednicki that all these physicists have used these logically flawed arguments.

Hartle and Srednicki also try to define "us". In fact, we are "IGUS" - information gathering and utilizing system. ;-) IGUS must be extended once we start to collaborate on scientific theories with aliens. It sounds funny but I think it is very true. We shouldn't be imprinting our properties into our theories because the resulting theories should be valid objectively, even for numerous aliens who may be living on very different planets. Our theories shouldn't be anthropomorphic even though some of the proposed theories are anthropogenic. ;-)

I've been saying it for some time.

Returning to the Jupiter example, they show how the wrong reasoning may proceed - remarkably similar to some reasoning used by the landscape community. For example, you could say that because both authors of their paper are human, theories that allow lots of non-human intelligent beings should be suppressed not by a small number "P" but even "P^2". That's clearly false because the probabilities of Hartle and Srednicki being human are not independent, for example because both of them share the same monkey ancestor. ;-)

Moreover, there exists a simpler argument to show that the typicality reasoning disfavoring theories with life on Jupiter is flawed. It's simply because the numbers of intelligent beings on the two planets are causally disconnected quantities - as everyone familiar with the history of the Solar System should agree - and there has been no thermal equilibrium that would try to compare the human quotas on the two planets. In their example, it is very clear that no random selection process that would try to compare citizens of Jupiter and Earth has taken place.

In some other examples it may be harder to show that such a process didn't exist - and it might exist, after all - but we should never assume that we know that the random process existed because it is not a fact.

The priors may be chosen in such a way that the theories without life on Jupiter will be favored, after all, but these priors seem to have the desired conclusions inserted as input which is a kind of scientific misconduct.

They also modify the example with counting beings on Jupiter to the case of counting cycles and time in various cyclic cosmologies or eternal inflation. Again, they argue that it doesn't matter whether a Universe with the observed properties is predicted to be more frequent or less frequent by a cyclical or eternal theory. The only thing that matters is that the theory allows the Universe with our observed properties to occur at least once. Whether there exist observers who see something else than we do is irrelevant for our procedures of validating our theories and for our predictions.

Finally, they present the different "measures" as different choices of the priors and argue that the right way to refine these priors is to present evidence and adjust them by Bayesian inference, not by inserting more personal preferences. One must carefully distinguish prejudice (priors) from logical deduction (including probability calculations) and from facts (data).

I think it's hard to disagree with them but I am sure that some people do.

And that's the memo.

More Sunday Funnies

Jazz and women

Clifford Johnson has complained that a woman considered jazz to be a male sexist genre, if you allow me to simplify his text a little bit. Well, yes, most feminists are sexist. ;-)

Well, I am not sure whether Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Carla Bley, Alice Coltrane, Hana Hegerová - one of the people in the 1966 Czech jazz opera "A Walk Worthwhile" (that Miloš Forman is just bringing to the traditionally classical Czech national theater!) -, Vlasta Průchová, Jana Koubková, or a Californian female string theorist whom I know (and who still likes jazz more than I do) would agree that women can't like jazz. I don't think so.

Instead, let me offer you a few compositions.



This is Jaroslav Ježek's 1928 classic, Bugatti Step. I was never good enough to play this one. Ježek was an extraordinary Czech composer, the third friend of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, two eminent Czech comedians from "The Liberated Theater" who became famous in the 1920s.



The composition above, resembling the inner workings of Bugatti, is so difficult that you won't easily find a free copy on the Internet that is flawless; try a string version (...) or YouTube anyway. Be sure that girls like to play Ježek's compositions, too, for example "Heaven on Earth" (Nebe na zemi).

A week ago, when we recalled Yuri Gagarin, we also linked to an MP3 file, "Honor to the Astronaut" (1961).

Try also numerous jazz bands on the streets of Prague.

Finally, Clifford should realize that the Czech president is, among the current leaders, the most enthusiastic fan of jazz - and the organizer of "Jazz on the [Prague] Castle". I hope that this will be enough for Clifford and others to join Klaus' fight against political correctness and against the global warming religion! :-)

Nevertheless, my answer to Clifford's main question is that I don't see any significant signal that would indicate that jazz is more anti-female than other genres. Men dominate the composition and instruments - but that's the case in other genres, too.

Sunday Funnies

Colony Collapse Disorder

A bee & CCD: to bee or not to bee?
Bee afraid, bee very afraid

Last fall, the mysterious illness started. Colonies simply disappear. In January 2007, the size of the problem became obvious. About 27 U.S. states see the problem that has already decimated roughly 1/2 of their bee populations. In February 2007, your humble correspondent warned Bee about the problem.

Video above: music by Karel Svoboda, an ingenious composer who shot himself: memorian, Slivers of Glass I, Slivers of Glass II.

In March, the problem was dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) although BBC preferred a Vanishing Bee Syndrome (VBS).

What can be causing such an abrupt decline of the bee populations in the U.S.? It must be something fast, something that has changed rather abruptly. Some possibilities:

• A virus
• Changes in the ultraviolet background: bees see in the UV spectrum; it could be related to the ozone hole
• Changes in the IR spectrum
• Social collapse caused by external factors, e.g. infiltration by Cape honeybees from Africa: they produce their own young, with no respect for the queen's brood; it won't be trivial to find and execute the African intruders
• Social collapse caused by internal factors, i.e. a new kind of communism or environmentalism forcing the freedom-loving bees to emigrate; it won't be trivial to find and exterminate the alarmist bees
• A new kind of nutrition supplement or other stuff given to the bees, e.g. genetically-modified crops
• A new chemical compound that appeared in their environment such as new pesticides
  

Some research has been made with 1.9 GHz cordless phones, indicating that they could have some impact. Journalists talk about "cellphones" which seems inaccurate although the frequencies are similar. It is not impossible that cellphone signals suddenly start to have impact on bees: still, I find it unlikely.

If this problem doesn't go away, it may become a story. Still, the annual value of pollination in the U.S. is estimated at 15 billion USD only, about 0.1% of the GDP. I think it is a significant underestimate of the importance and value of the bees, these hard-working friends of ours, but on the other hand, I don't think that a huge decline of bees would imply anything comparable to a decline of the civilization.

And that's the memo.