Repeating Dallas in Houston

No, not the traffic or the sprawl -- we already own that -- and not the success on the professional gridiron nor the failure on the diamond, though we're trying hard. Back to the local political scene for a moment.

Kristen Mack -- who wrote a truly atrocious report of John Edwards' Houston stop -- provides a pretty good update on Harris County's strategy to go blue in the next cycle:

Democrats in Harris County have been eyeing Dallas County since last November, when their counterparts recaptured every countywide seat. The locals hope to mirror that success here.

"I've had extensive conversations with Dallas about what their strategy was," Harris County Democratic Party Chair Gerald Birnberg said. "I believe we can replicate that here in Harris County and intend to do so."

Birnberg will likely call on Matt Angle, of Lone Star Project renown, to run the county's campaign, filling the local party office with at least one staff member tapped by the Angle/Martin Frost/Fred Baron brain trust. More on that later. Birnberg has been busy recruiting prospective candidates as well:

Former Houston Police Chief C.O. Bradford will take on GOP District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal. Houston City Councilman Adrian Garcia is eyeing a challenge to incumbent Sheriff Tommy Thomas. And former Houston City Councilman Vince Ryan will run against County Attorney Mike Stafford.

Former county Democratic Party Chair David Mincberg will run for county judge against whomever emerges from the GOP primary. The incumbent, Ed Emmett, is in. District Clerk Charles Bacarisse continues to test the water.

Pausing to address that last bit, former HCRP chair Gary Polland wrote in his "Conservative Stench" newsletter of the Bacarisse/Emmett spat:

Is It Time For The Bacarisse Campaign For
County Judge To Come Out Of The Closet?

Texas Conservative Review believes that everyone who wants to seek elective office should go for it. The present situation involving Charles Bacarisse and this shadow campaign for County Judge is not acceptable. He's not in and he's not out. Of course under the rules, a Harris County official must resign once they declare for another office.

Regardless of that fact, the Bacarisse exploratory campaign continues to snipe at Harris County government while he says nothing on the record. Those in the unofficial shadow campaign are only going to end up hurting the ultimate GOP nominee, be it Bacarisse or incumbent County Judge Ed Emmett, against a growing Democratic threat led by former Democrat County Chair David Mincberg.

If it's the goal of the Bacarisse exploratory committee to midwife a Democratic victory in November 2008, then they are off to a great start. If not, call off the sniping spokesman and get into the race now.

Heh.

Mack has more on the Bradford/Rosenthal "grudge match" (her words), too:

Bradford, who served as police chief in Mayor Lee Brown's administration, still has some battle scars.

Among them, a last-minute pay raise Brown gave Bradford that increased his pension, the crime lab debacle that began during his tenure, and an indictment on a perjury charge that eventually was dismissed by a trial judge.

Bradford was considering running for sheriff — going from the top cop in the city to the top officer in the county seems a more natural jump — but his strategists advised him that Thomas would be able to capitalize on each of those mishaps.

A matchup against Rosenthal would play like a grudge match, potentially giving Bradford some inoculation.

It was Rosenthal who prosecuted Bradford on the perjury charge, which a judge dismissed in mid-trial saying the case was weak. Rosenthal also holds some responsibility for the state of the crime lab.

Rosenthal questioned the former chief's credentials for the DA's job. Bradford has a law degree, but he's never practiced law. He has served as a senior associate at Brown Group International, the former mayor's consulting group, since leaving the city.

...

In the 2004 election, the last time Rosenthal's term was up, he garnered 55 percent of the vote to a relative unknown. Facing a well-known challenger, even one with baggage, is a different game.

This last point is significant also for this reason: so many Democrats came so close to winning, particularly judicial candidates like Jim Sharp and Mary Kay Green, that the average percentage for a Democrat on the ballot in Harris County was 48% (according to Birnberg).

We're flipping this county Democratic in 2008, and no amount of coordinated voter suppression tactics on the part of Republicans is going to be able to stop it.

Not even Matt Angle's minimalist strategy and maximist credit-taking for the results will be able to screw it up. I hope.

Number three thousand

Nineteen years ago

... I had been married for a year and a half, was the advertising director for the Plainview Daily Herald, and had no way to keep up with my Astros at all, so I didn't know any of this:

Nineteen years ago today, Craig Biggio took a red-eye flight from Tucson and walked into the Astrodome for the first time on almost no sleep. Clubhouse man Dennis Liborio found him a place to nap. He might have slept 10 minutes. Regardless, manager Hal Lanier woke him up and asked: ''Can you play?''

''Yes,'' Biggio said.

He caught Jim Deshaises that night, didn't get a hit but threw out two base runners. He didn't play much after that for awhile, and was sent back to the minors briefly when Alan Ashby returned from the disabled list. But that was the beginning for Craig Biggio.

He got his first hit off Orel Hershiser, a line-drive single. ''No break from the official scorer,'' he said. He got his first home run off Goose Gossage, a game-winner.

''I'm like, 'Yes!''' he remembered

Those early months are still etched in his mind, especially those days in the bullpen when he'd sit and listen to Danny Darwin, Dave Smith, etc., tell their stories. This week, the memories have come rushing back. Small things like how Nolan Ryan would bring fried pies from Alvin on the days he pitched. He remembered Glenn Davis would hoard pies to take home.

He smiled the other day recalling the day Alex Trevino failed to tag the runner after a Nolan Ryan strikeout bounced in the dirt. He simply rolled the ball back to the mound and headed for the dugout as the runner took off to first.

''Nolan was one angry Texan,'' Biggio said.

There was the day Doug Harvey told him a pitch caught the plate by "an eighth of an inch.'' He has remembered countless acts of kindness by John McMullen and the emptiness he felt at Ken Caminiti's passing.

We're left with a sorry ballclub that needs reconstructive surgery, but those are stories for another day. This week belongs to Craig Biggio.

As I finished this post, Biggio slapped #2,998 to left field. History to be made for the little catcher/second baseman and the franchise, maybe later tonight.

How time flies

Just one week ago, the headlines were: Bush vetoes the stem cell research legislation, Michael Bloomberg dumps the Republicans, and Fred Thompson flirts a little harder with running.

I could have spent this week writing about Dick Cheney's bullshit, or Ann Coulter's horse shit. Too bad I was too busy.

I did take time yesterday to go to Melissa Noreiga's reception and John Edwards' appearance in Houston, but since others wrote and photographed it already, I'll skip that, too.

A few hours ago the Senate defeated immigration reform, sending nativists, bigots, and xenophobes across the country into orgasmic frenzy. Yawn. No one except the vilest conservatives give a damn about immigration anyway.

Speaking of racial, there's a Democratic presidential debate coming up shortly that will feature some of the issues that concern African-Americans. This comes hot on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision which disfavors public education's efforts to achieve racial diversity. Guess what the candidates will be talking about?

I may watch, but at the moment I'm tuned to the Astros and Craig Biggio's chase for 3,000 hits, along with the NBA draft.

Priorities. For sanity's sake.

Bald eagle no longer endangered

Bald eagle has not only survived hunting and DDT but is thriving and will be removed from the U.S. endangered list today.



Let me admit that with this favorite hat of mine that I bought in the New York City about 4 years ago, it was very easy to feel endangered in the People's Republic of Cambridge, too.

Of course there have been dozens of other threats, too. :-)

Is Witten working on loop quantum gravity?

In this text, I would like to analyze the methods and logic of PW, a well-known critic of string theory, in one particular context.

Relevant sources for this article:

Frame: Monstrous symmetry of black holes
Frame: Witten's paper is out
Wrong: Assorted news
Musings: Report on Witten's talk
Witten: Preprint
Witten: PDF for his talk

This text will be exclusively dedicated to the analysis of the description of Witten's work by PW which I find rather incredible (see "Assorted news"):

• Witten’s talk is entitled “Three-Dimensional Gravity Revisited” ... So, at least one talk there will be about a non-string theory approach to quantum gravity more along the lines of the LQG program.

Wow. ;-) The picture below is a refined version of a photograph by Chehak and symbolizes how sane, natural, and correct the statement of PW approximately is:



Let us start with a simple question:

Why does PW write such a statement that will be shown to be a flagrant absurdity?

Well, the answer is obvious. If you read his blog or his book, you will learn that he believes that decisions in science do reflect and should reflect the emotional power of authorities. Edward Witten is such an authority, even according to PW, which is why PW thinks that if he manages to convince others about his interesting "story" that Edward Witten has largely switched from string theory to loop quantum gravity, it will have a dramatic impact on the scientific community.




Well, I happen to think that if Edward Witten started to work on loop quantum gravity, as defined by the existing contemporary methods and standards of the loop quantum gravity community, it wouldn't mean that physics is undergoing a phase transition. Instead, it would simply mean that Edward Witten would be getting senile. We all admire him and love him, if you want me to say strong words, but he is still a scientist, not God.

There have been many cases in which his opinion had much weaker impact on other scientists than what I would have found appropriate. And there have been cases in which quite many people started to do things because Witten did. On the other hand, it's clear that if Witten were saying things that don't make sense and can't be used by anyone to do logically coherent research, no one sensible would listen to him.

The motivation of PW is clear so let us ask another question:

Is PW's statement true?

No, it's absurd. Let's start with a simple, sociological description of the situation that should be comprehensible to non-experts.

If you open the preprint, you will see that most papers that are being cited were written by string theorists. You will see names like Maldacena, Strominger, Kachru, Dixon, Ginsparg, Harvey, Dijkgraaf, Moore, Seiberg, Verlinde, Friedan, Shenker, Gukov, Maloney, Vafa, and, indeed, Witten, among many others. They are related to physics of conformal field theory, AdS/CFT correspondence, partition sums, black hole physics. Their results and methods are used throughout Witten's paper.

On the other hand, one paper about loop quantum gravity by Ashtekar is cited in a footnote on page 3 of Witten's preprint as a curiosity and no results from that paper or any other loop quantum gravity paper is ever used by Witten. That would be really impossible because all of these results are wrong. They're simply results of faulty math.

Even without a deeper knowledge of physics, the reader should be able to verify that Witten is not doing anything that is "more along the lines of the LQG program", as we were told by PW. But let us analyze some details a bit more carefully.

Spacetime dimension and loop quantum gravity

Witten talks about physics of three-dimensional gravity in the anti de Sitter space. Is that the same dimension as loop quantum gravity? The answer is No. Loop quantum gravity is only loop quantum gravity if the spacetime dimension is four.

Neither Witten nor any other sane physicist I know of thinks that it is possible to define four-dimensional or higher-dimensional gravity - i.e. general relativity - as a pure gauge theory in the same number of dimensions. Witten, just like other big shots, thinks that the loop quantum gravity people have no standards. Physicists like Witten, Gross, and others would never discuss loop quantum gravity in a polite company. It's been a polite standard to allow the loop quantum gravity people do whatever they want, and simply ignore them.

What we're talking here, in the context of Witten's recent work, is another possible reinterpretation of a gravitational theory - namely three-dimensional gravity - in terms of gauge-theoretical degrees of freedom, namely using something that has also been called Chern-Simons-Witten theory. Fine, so let's ask:

Is Chern-Simons-Witten theory equivalent to three-dimensional gravity?

We must realize that the bulk of this question is vacuous.

Three-dimensional gravity is very different from gravity in higher dimensions because it has no local excitations. Why? Because Einstein's vacuum equations, namely Ricci flatness, imply complete flatness because in three dimensions, both the Riemann tensor R_{abcd} as well as the Ricci tensor R_{ab} have three independent components. These two tensors can therefore be calculated from one another. It follows that no gravitational waves are allowed. By quantizing this empty set, we obtain an empty Hilbert space of gravitons. There are no gravitons. There is no S-matrix to calculate. The situation is vastly less interesting than it is in four dimensions.

If there are no scattering amplitudes to calculate in this theory, what do we mean by the equivalence of two systems of equations both of which predict zero objects? Well, we mean that there must exist some other mathematical objects that can be mapped onto each other. Is it true?

Is Chern-Simons-Witten theory equivalent to three-dimensional gravity in some more general setup?

Sloppy physicists like to say Yes because at the classical level, one can make a field redefinition that changes the three-dimensional metric to a gauge field. Witten and more serious physicists have been explaining for quite some time that the answer at the quantum level is No. The Chern-Simons-Witten action and the gravitational action are not globally equivalent, they imply different ranges of path-integration, and absolute values from the gravitational action are not included in the Chern-Simons-Witten action.

Witten has also explained that the Kodama state, a popular formal solution of four-dimensional gauge theory occasionally employed for loop quantum gravity with a positive cosmological constant, is unphysical for a variety of reasons.

So is his new work finally confirming the LQG-like description?

The answer is "Just on the contrary." One of the main messages - or, using the words of Jacques Distler, the main message - of the work is that the gauge degrees of freedom simply don't give the right & full description of the quantum gravitational system.

The three-dimensional gravitational theory has no gravitons or other local excitations but it has black holes that macroscopically look like BTZ black holes. However, the precise quantum character of these black holes is not included in the Chern-Simons, gauge-theoretical description of the system. For example, the Chern-Simons gauge field gives us no hint that the black hole microstates transform as representations of the monster group, at least for some values of the curvature, even though this fact can be argued to be the case by other methods.

So Witten's point is really the opposite one than what PW wants his undemanding readers to believe: Witten argues that even in systems that can superficially be written in terms of bulk gauge fields and nothing seems obviously wrong - such as the case of three-dimensional gravity that predicts no light local excitations - the bulk gauge-theoretical description is always a bad language to talk about the theory at the quantum level.

The boundary conformal field theory whose existence is postulated via string-theoretical arguments always gives a more accurate description of the full quantum theory and the sloppy LQG-like formulae should never be viewed as the full story, not even in the cases where it's harder to show that they're inconsistent.

The three-dimensional anti de Sitter background is not connected with the ten-dimensional and eleven-dimensional vacua in any obvious way but such a fact never means that a given background is not a part of string theory: we already know a lot of islands where moduli are frozen which makes decompactification and other processes impossible. However, what's important is that the basic framework in which the physical laws are formulated and in which the observables are calculated and the consistency of the theory is deduced is the standard framework of string theory - including the AdS/CFT correspondence, one of the main topics of string theory in the last decade - and it has nothing whatsoever to do with loop quantum gravity as we know it.

Summary

You can see that one needs to write many kilobytes of text to carefully debunk vicious lies that PW can compress into one short sentence but I hope that it should now be clear to virtually everyone that these particular statements by PW are lies.

However, consider that PW has been intentionally generating tens of thousands of such lies on his blog for more than three years. Virtually everything he has ever written is junk and he's been probably preparing to do this dirty job for decades. And many people are so uneducated and uninformed that they are ready to buy some of these lies. If they don't buy all of them, 1% is enough because it is still hundreds of vicious lies.

You can't be surprised that using Bush's jargon from 9/11/2001, I think that we should make no distinction between the individual who generates these lies and those who harbor him. ;-)

And that's the memo.

Mitt Romney & new Marshall plan

An occasional reader of this blog who is a Mormon located in Massachusetts liked our musings about a possible new Marshall plan that we proposed in May. Because he just happens to be running for POTUS, he decided to invent a fresh new idea called

a new Marshall plan

or equivalently, "Partnership for Prosperity and Progress", with a special focus on the modern world infrastructure in the Muslim world which is exactly what I had in mind.

Even though the idea didn't get the best reviews from the readers of The Reference Frame, mostly because the present conditions are not as favorable for such projects as they used to be, I still feel that it is not such a bad idea, after all. Not sure whether it is catchy enough for Mitt to beat Hillary because Mitt is sometimes nicknamed a new Kerry. ;-)

Chile: coldest months in 20 years

May and June 2007 have been Chile's coldest months in the last 20 years. Correspondingly, natural gas consumption hit a record, too. You may also read about the brutal cold May 2007 in South America.

During the weekend, parts of Australia have experienced the chilliest June day on record. Last week, record cold temperatures had to be edited in Queensland, too.

Another continent that overlaps with the Southern Hemisphere is Africa. What weather do you associate with Zimbabwe? A few days ago, they recorded -7 Celsius degrees. Several people froze.

Strings 2007: website

Update: Jacques Distler is live-blogging: Monday

The official website of Strings 2007 (Mon-Fri)
Strings 2007 video blogspot site

There are menus under the nine Spanish aristocrats on the painting by Goya. The Reference Frame is the only place in the world where you can learn that the painting is "Blind Man's Buff", 1788. No, it's really not "bluff" as the page indicates.



Because I have learned that not everyone understands the painting, let me tell you that the blindfolded female aristocrat in the middle symbolizes the bulk of M-theory and the similarity with the hexagon drawing is no coincidence. We haven't been told whether the participants will play this M-theoretical game after the talks. :-)

Witten's monstrous paper is out

It has 82 pages. The previous blog text about the topic was

Monstrous symmetry of black holes.

Properties of the CFTs dual to pure AdS3 are considered. The allowed central charges are identified. The discussion of the Chern-Simons description may look a bit overblown given the fact that this description can't be made non-perturbatively exact in any known way.

The monster symmetry of the minimum choices is supported by numerology based on the dimensions of irreps of the monster group and applied to some partition sums - I have almost no doubt that the conclusion of this numerology is correct - but the dimensions of the irreps seem to be the only property of the monster group that is ever used which I find somewhat disappointing: someone else will have to find something more about the importance of the monster group and its rich properties in this gravitational setup later.

And that's the memo.

Graviweak unification

I was also intrigued by two papers by Fabrizio Nesti who is incidentally also the author of the JHEP LaTeX macro. The second of these papers was written with Roberto Percacci. Unfortunately, the excitement lasted for 140 seconds only (and that's more than it would be otherwise because I have looked at it with a 56k modem).




They want to unify the Lorentz group with the gauge group - namely a Pati-Salam group - using some magic with spinors. Well, this seems to violate the Coleman-Mandula theorem. They make a funny argument that the theorem doesn't apply because the Lorentz indices are internal - this argument is complete nonsense, as far as I can say (if this loophole existed, one could always use it to humiliate Coleman and Mandula) - and what they have is only a pure bookkeeping device how to organize all the spinor components. There is no sign of genuine unification of gravity with the gauge forces here, for example a unification of the Einstein-Hilbert action with the Yang-Mills action.

I think that all such methods to unify must look like Kaluza-Klein theory or a different limit of string theory. Everyone who has proposed any other logic that "also" unifies the forces - including Alain Connes - is confused about some pretty elementary facts about the identity of forces, the different roles of groups in physics, and about the meaning of the word "unification".

And that's another memo. :-)

IQ: oldest brothers' 2-point edge

A survey in Norway shows that the oldest brothers' IQ is higher by about two points relatively to their younger brothers. The article proposes some sociological theories based on interactions between the brothers. Your humble correspondent thinks that this theory is mostly bogus.

In fact, it's also known that younger brothers are more likely to be gays. Their brains are correspondingly less male in average. There is a good reason - a likely mechanism - behind these facts: mother's womb gradually develops a certain kind of immunity against the male foreign intruder that acts on the younger brother's foetus.

Note that this action of hormones and the antibodies requires time. That's one of possible explanations why similar considerations can't influence the very sex of the child. Indeed, as far as I know, there exists no indication that younger siblings are more likely to be girls or more likely to be boys. In fact, the data are good enough that it is known that the existence of older sisters doesn't enhance a man's probability of being a gay, unlike the existence of older brothers.




A lot of facts are already known today and many more may be found in the future. Some of these facts are very sharp and a generic explanation of these observations based on social interactions may be instantly falsified.

Much like crackpots in high-energy physics such as Smolin or Woit, the defenders of social explanations of these effects don't appreciate how difficult and unlikely it is to create a theory that is consistent with all the available data. They think that it is always possible to emit fog and argue that things are complex and theories with arbitrary underlying ideas are hard to be falsified. But in reality, it is easy to falsify almost all proposed theories simply because a lot of non-trivial facts and regularities are known. And that's true both in quantum gravity as well as the science about intelligence.

And that's the memo.

Sunday Funnies

The Huffington Post and DailyKos endorse Václav Klaus

If we exaggerate just a little bit, there exists a universal consensus by now that Czech president Václav Klaus is right about global warming in his Financial Times article. (See also my synopsis of the Q&A session.) The consensus includes the progressive website called

The Huffington Post (thanks, Willie!)

where they have decided that Václav Klaus is one of their two most favorite people in the world: Greg Gutfeld analyzes the influence of terrorism on global warming and challenges Sheryl Crow, Laurie David, and Leo DiCaprio who behaves as an ecowhacko even though he has played your humble correspondent in the String Kings. And the consensus covers even DailyKos:

DailyKos: Václav Klaus is not wrong

Well, it's true that among the commenters, you find a few contrarians or, as Hamas calls them, mutineers. ;-) But if you had doubts that DailyKos as an entity loves Klaus' article, you may see another reaction:

DailyKos: Unbelievable, extremely useful article

Fine. This guy was somewhat less friendly but he was still excited! :-)

If you find DailyKos insufficiently radical, you can see that even William Connolley :-) reacts in a rather friendly fashion. It seems that most Americans want Klaus to become the U.S. president.

Investor's Business Daily

describes Klaus as the leader of respected scientists who risk their reputation. In the last few minutes, the list of excited reactions includes:

• Posh Boy (Klaus for president)
• Max Borders (come be our president)
• Brussels Journal (Klaus for president of France)
• Three Sources (Klaus to lead the U.N.)
  
• Free Republic (Klaus for POTUS)
• Stone Heads (Czech sense)
• Rob Boyce (this guy is great)
• Danny Adams (hat off to Klaus)
  
• St. Louis blogger (good fight again)
• Mike's America (Klaus did it again)
• Subtle Oak Flavor (declaration of independence)
• Roy Cordato (support from an environmentalist)
• Flaggman (God bless Klaus)
• Nate (there's still wisdom)
• Okie on the Lam (he couldn't agree more)
• Bally Blog (now, this guy gets it)
• L. Graham Smith (a very timely comment)
• Yuppie Horror Picture show (favorite head)
• Perfunctory Hero (AGW is about socialism)
• Logosphilia (VK is an amazing realist)
• Blue Crab Boulevard (it's the freedom, stupid)
• Crowded Frontyard (VK is best friend forever)
• A cool look at GW (nice manifesto)
• Therosered (this article was awesome)
• Frank Warner (special credibility)
• Allen's Image Adjustment (freedom fighter)
• Wizbang (Bush should listen to Klaus)
• Dakota Voice (a bit of sanity survived)
• Conservation Bastion (gem)
• Jeremy Hatfield (thought-provoking)
  
• Brian in Seattle (this is brilliant)
• Josh Martin (right on point)
• Cassandra 2004 (quote of the day)
• John Lott (VK sets the record straight)
• Canis Libertas (Czechs are lucky bastards)
• South Child (intelligent leader exists)
• Jason Hayes (Amen to that)
  

and more than 2,500 other world's leading pundits including Brit Hume at FoxNews who read two quotes of Klaus and Lindzen (wait for 1 minute). The debate is over, global warming is crap. Even Al Gore now agrees with Klaus and your humble correspondent that the G8 climate deal is a disgrace. And that's the memo. :-)

Stem cell research vetoes and the willful ignorance of conservatives

DarkSyde:

=========

In the wake of Bush's rejection of the stem cell bill, it's important to acknowledge there are loyal conservatives who are well informed, who do employ critical analysis, and who unsurprisingly come to the obvious conclusion that the President's veto and his rationale for it makes no sense. For the dwindling remainder who still cling desperately to Bush’s nonsense, you'll see several interlocking themes crop up: transparent hypocrisy, blatant, comical, and seemingly willful ignorance, misrepresentation of alternatives, almost pathological cruelty, and blind, partisan hatred. Here’s one of the better written examples which utilizes some of those tactics:

Redstate -- Since the Democrat Congress did not heed the president’s veto warning when it passed its legislation, the president will now show them how stem cell research can be conducted without destroying embryos and without creating human life for the purpose of harvesting its parts.

This poster neglected to stress that the material was created by In Vitro Fertilization Clinics for the express purpose of treating infertility and ultimately going to be discarded. He chose instead to state it would be 'created for the purpose of harvesting its parts,' and clearly left the impression that Bush prevented that from happening. In fact, part B (1) of the SCREA states, "The stem cells were derived from human embryos that have been donated from in vitro fertilization clinics, were created for the purposes of fertility treatment, and were in excess of the clinical need of the individuals seeking such treatment."

We can perhaps forgive those conservatives who don't know better, and who inherently trust that their more informed comrades will provide them with sound information and honest assessment. But unless the RS author and others like him are sloppy or ignorant to a point that defies plausibility, they know exactly what they're doing. They are intentionally deceiving their readers to excuse one of the many unpopular and inexcusable failures of George Bush, with no thought for those they're potentially condemning to a lifetime of misery or death, and they deserve every bit of scorn that comes their way because of it.

==========

I'm 48 years old, with a type II diabetes diagnosis now three and one-half years old, so I have a little self-interest in seeing medical science make some advancements in these arenas. And on the day that Michael Moore's SiCKO is slated for sneak preview, let me say that one of the things corporate medicine is very good at is maximizing their profit opportunities. And with the explosion of diabetes in the United States, even among children, corporate medicine is highly motivated to develop the latest treatments.

Here in Houston -- indeed, less than five minutes away from where I sit typing -- is one of the finest medical centers in the world, with world-renowned experts hard at work researching and devising treatments, battling and even curing the most insidious diseases known to man.

But they remain hamstrung by the religious and moral zealots still clinging to control in our government.

The same question asked of those who ignited a civil war in the Middle East over a series of lies can be posed to those who would thwart the doctors trying to defeat cancer, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes:

How many more people have to die before you extremists will get the hell out of the way?

Saturday Postpourri

Indian reservations will get FEMA trailers

As many as 30,000 have a new, untreatable form of tuberculosis

Precedents start falling under Roberts-led Supreme Court

Ashcroft contradicts Gonzales, saying top administration officials fought over wiretapping

Tony Soprano didn't just get whacked, he got a funeral

Border fence's proposed route cuts South Texas university in half

McAllen chamber president calls for wall around D.C.

Requested delay in Houston smog cleanup would extend non-compliance again from regulations first proposed in 1975

Moving Victorian houses: in progress

Update 06/23



Click the picture to see a slideshow with 53 photographs (MSIE preferred)

Mass Ave - a long road that goes to $+\infty$ (Atlantic ocean) in the East and $-\infty(0.6-0.8i)$ in the West has decided to reduce its carbon footprint. So they have built a Victorian house in the middle of the road. It's actually a great idea. Drivers may get discouraged and take a different route which will lower the CO2 emissions near the Harvard Law School which is a good thing, as consensus of scientists thinks. Amen.

Selling

Today I learned that at craigslist, bikes are much more hot than furniture. With 7 excited potential buyers in 1 hour, I should have started with a double price for the bike. ;-) The buyers were nice people but the Boston area is Boston area. The buyer of the kitchen table was a girl who studies environmental policies at Tufts and the buyer of the bike was a student activist of the Democrat Party from BU. :-)

Original text 06/16

These guys across the street have a much more straightforward approach to moving than your humble correspondent.



The Ukrainian House (see the picture), the Baker House, and the carriage house will be moved from the Harvard Law School area - where they want to build the Northwest Corner - to another street one block to the North - where they needed to demolish a part of the North Hall dormitories. The houses will be transferred on the wheels.

It's impressive but it's nothing like the Church of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary (built 1517-1532) in Most, a Czech city, that was transported by 841.1 meters within 28 days by Czechoslovak engineers from Škoda Pilsen and Průmstav Pardubice, heroes of socialism, in 1975.

The speed was about 1-3 centimeters a minute and the whole operation gave communist Czechoslovakia a lot of new dirty brown coal to burn. The coal contains a lot of uranium so when you burn it, you release more radioactivity than any nuclear power plant except for Chernobyl ever can.



The building was mentioned in Guinness book of records as the heaviest building ever moved on wheels.

EU: voting rights & Polish population

Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski - on picture with his brother Lech, the president, both obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics - argued that the number of Poles would be 66 million instead of 38 million today if Germany didn't initiate the Second World War. He suggested that this fact should perhaps be taken into account when the new voting rights of the EU are being calculated. Let me say a few things about it:

• Strictly speaking, his calculation may be rather accurate and he can hardly be blamed for not saying the truth.
  
• It is dangerous to revive the past. Many extremely bad things have happened in the past and we shouldn't repeat them. The cleanest way not to repeat them is to avoid similar kinds of disputes and to accept the status quo as legitimate initial conditions for the future, ignoring the complicated history that have led to the status quo in the past, a history that is open to many potentially contradictory interpretations. Attempts to compensate for events that occurred 60 years ago or more may be seen as attempts to revenge and they won't lead to good outcomes.
  
• Polish war casualties of 5 million have been huge, if counted relatively to the net population: 18.5 percent. Such high casualties often lead to a different kind of thinking. I feel that e.g. 350,000 Czechoslovak casualties which were about 2% don't give the Czechs and Slovaks the credentials to speak about the same situation. Because history is important, we shouldn't forget that Poland was one of the main victims of the war. I think we should always allow the Poles to express somewhat more emotional reactions than what we expect from others. This special treatment of the Poles should only exist at the moral level and shouldn't be incorporated into new laws.
  
• Dead people and people who were never born - like the children of the dead people who didn't have children when they died ;-) - can't have voting rights. No one knows how they would actually vote. Maybe, if Germans hadn't killed them, they would be so grateful that they would vote for whatever the German chancellor wants. Sorry for a stupid joke. ;-)
  
• The proposed modifications of the voting rights represent a significant change of the mechanisms how the European Union works. It is somewhat conceivable that various referenda should be repeated because the previous ones decided about the membership in a different union, under different rules and circumstances.
• Voting strength that is proportional to the population can clearly be used collectively by big nations to negatively influence smaller nations and it shouldn't be surprising if some smaller nations dislike such a change.
• If the voting rules include a proportional system together with a system where every member country has the same power, it will diminish the influence of the medium nations. In the votes where every country matters, tiny nations such as Luxembourg can easily and naturally join the powers.

In the list above, you will find several good reasons why Poland could veto the agreement about the new voting system. I would personally have a good understanding for such a decision: they certainly have a right to do it. They should also realize that such a veto would make many other people upset. They shouldn't be surprised that Merkel tries to find an agreement without Poland which is effectively an attempt to eliminate Poland from the EU under certain circumstances (if its position continues to be inconvenient). So far, the German plan to screw Poland was rejected by Britain & France: similarities with 1939 are purely coincidental.

Nevertheless, Poland may want to think whether Putin will be more fair than the EU once Poland outside the EU appears in his sphere of influence again. I certainly don't think that exit from the EU would be a disaster for Poland but my guess is that the net result would still be negative for that country.



You can also see that the Poles will probably be unhappy when the Czechs betray them even though they still believe in unity. Unfortunately, Czechs can't use similar population and related arguments for similar goals and it is more likely that Czechia will quite the extreme Polish game.

What is the optimal voting system in a diverse union?

Of course, if the European Union were uniform and if it were in equilibrium where all parts constantly interact with each other, the proportional voting system would be the most natural and fair system you can imagine. However, the union is not uniform and its parts are largely decoupled, as far as many types of interactions go. There exists a huge percentage of questions where the nationality is the most important factor that decides about the opinions of the citizens about such questions. This fact makes the situation and optimal voting rules subtle. I think it is clear that if there are questions in which the European Union is in full consensus, the policies may be adopted. Any other decision where consensus doesn't exist should be made with extreme caution.

Moreover, there should exist effective mechanisms that allow various kinds of decisions to be moved from Brussels back to the national capitals or regions, not just in the opposite direction. Why? Because there are many cases in which it is better to decide about various things locally. The situation in which everything is decided in Brussels is simply not the optimum even though some people implicitly assume that it is. The policies must work in such a way that the optimum may be found regardless of the relative location of the status quo and the optimum.

And that's the memo.



A possible distribution of votes in the new EU: 40% Germany, 60% Czechia - fair enough ;-)

Kay Bailey doesn't heart Dubya any more

Q. What's the difference between the senior senator from Texas and a washing machine?


A. A washing machine doesn't follow George W Bush around for weeks after he dumps a load in it.

And if the President had known that all it would take was a little immigration reform legislation for Senator Perjury Technicality to get off his bandwagon ...

... he would have proposed it sooner.

Financial Times: Klaus answers

The Financial Times' climate expert, Prof Václav Klaus, answers some of the questions that followed Klaus' article, "Freedom, not climate, is at risk":

Ask the Expert (Q & A)

If you don't have much time, here's my abstract of all answers where I tried to make them even more insightful and entertaining than they are:

1. Do you think that the correct economist's approach is to follow hysterical recommendations of IPCC and others who replace cost-benefit analyses by "precautionary principle"?

   No.

2. Imagine that AGW is real anyway, what should we do?

   A detailed analysis shows that the answer is Nothing.

3. How can one predict climate if it's impossible to predict weather?

   That's my point. After having read hundreds of books and articles, especially the human influence seems uncalculable to me.

4. Why do you disbelieve the science and why freedom is at risk if the consensus is supported by capitalism-loving governments of EU and U.K.?

   Science is not the same as national scientific establishments. EU and U.K. elites only support market as the #1 force at a different planet. Moreover, market doesn't belong to policymakers.

5. What the costs of a 50% reduction will be for Czechia?

   I admit I don't know but costs will be not only financial and costs shouldn't be calculated for 2050 because we don't know prices etc.

6. Environmentalists demand responsibility which should be a conservative value but it's not: what happened?

   They don't have any copyright on responsibility, a standard part of human behavior. They only invented a non-existing "damage" and I won't pay for it. Saying that pro-capitalists want to dump waste is like the commie propaganda.

7. Czechia is a victim of powers' environmental decisions, what to do?

   Blaming powers is fashionable but incorrect and wrong & environmentalist tendencies exist in countries of all sizes.

8. Do environmentalist really work on global socialism?

   My experience and oversensitivity says Yes: the arguments seem too similar.

9. Global warming is like avian flu, driven by trillionaires who want global power, do you agree?

   I don't think environmentalism is driven by power-thirsty trillionaires but rather by incapable people, and they only want a global government, not global constructive activities.

10. I agree with you but the left vs right flavor is confusing, what to do?

    I don't believe that the left vs right debates are over. Freedom is a right-wing value but environmentalism has unfortunately swallowed some self-described right-wingers, too.

11. What do organizations and politicians gain if they jump on the bandwagon?

    Power to manipulate, organize, regulate.

12. Is it still freedom when the powerful of the world impose the new climate on others?

    There's no conspiracy to change the climate and the human-climate link can't be taken for granted.

13. How can rational libertarians save our culture from environmentalists?

    Classical liberals should stop being a silent majority.

14. Why do so many people believe in junk science?

    Some people have the same reasons as UFO & witch believers. Others believe in their special abilities to control the rest of us. A third group has a financial interest. My opinions are normal: I don't understand why people think that I am courageous.

15. Does wasting energy strengthen freedom?

    Be fair: attacking environmentalism is different from attacking Nature. Saving energy is rational and a decision about it is naturally made by free individuals. Your statements about the U.S. encouraging wasteful policies are ludicrous.

16. Small temperature changes have led to huge problems: how much more do you have to see (numbers)?

    Read Singer & Avery and Michaels' books. Just one number: the very debatable IPCC predicts 14-43 cm for the 21st century sea level rise. Not scary to me.

17. You criticize Stern for talking about future but you do it, too.

    I criticize Stern for particular errors - choosing a funnily low discount rate - not for aprioristic opinions.

18. There's huge evidence that Man is ruining the planet. What do you have to see more to lead the counter-attack against Man?

    The problem is that I don't see convincing evidence for the damage caused e.g. by AGW. Skiing and warm evenings are still very pleasant. And environment in Czechia is much better than when collective actions were taken: because of freedom.

And that's the memo.

Superspinars

Eric Gimon and Petr Hořava point out an interesting tension between different notions of extremality bounds for black holes. For charged rotating black holes, supersymmetry implies the BPS bound for the mass $M$, namely

$Q^2 \leq M^2$

in some natural units. It is absolutely impossible to violate this bound. However, general relativity implies a stronger bound that also includes the angular momentum $a$ in addition to the charge $Q$:

$Q^2 + a^2 \leq M^2$

One can also calculate the efficiency of energy transfer from accreting matter to radiation. She gets 6% for the Schwarzschild black hole, 42% for an extremal Kerr black hole, and Gimon & Hořava argue that string theory can get up to the 100% efficiency with configurations that obey the BPS bound but not the stronger black hole bound. These configurations would surpass the general relativistic Kerr limitations. They encourage astronomers to look for such efficient objects and realize a new way to prove string theory.

My personal guess based on our work on the weak gravity conjecture is that the black hole bound is also satisfied in string theory for localized macroscopic objects, up to small corrections. This belief of mine is supported by the observation that Gimon & Hořava don't have any explicit solution for their "superspinar". Of course, superspinars may fail to be associated with a classical solution but I personally find such a belief unnatural: a classical approximation should become valid for any kind of a large enough object.

And that's the memo.

Update: Later I realized that when we relax the black hole condition, we can easily find systems with greater angular momentum than allowed by the mass - for example the Solar System where the distant planets have "J" increasing with the radius "r".

Kronberg: "A Hispanic with charisma (and money) will transform Texas politics"

Last week I attended a town hall forum with the editor of Quorum Report, Harvey Kronberg, sponsored by my previous state representative and my current one. Truth to tell, I went mostly to see and hear them. I respect what Kronberg does, I just think there are a few of us New Media types -- such as Charles and Vince -- who do what he does better and without the annoying $300 subscription.

Let me first say that I left with a tremendously increased respect for Kronberg, who after 18 years of following the Lege is probably better connected than anyone. Better than Burka, better than Selby, better than Radcliffe. What I never really got from him before were the insights from all of that history. Most of you know I'm a history buff; "lessons/doomed to repeat" and all that.

In an evening filled with one cogent analysis after another -- at one point I saw even Rep. Cohen taking notes -- the one that kept my ears ringing a week later is the one in the headline. But I'll come back to it in a moment.

Kronberg doesn't get back to Houston all that often apparently, and speaks to the public even less frequently, but the Kaplan Theatre at the Jewish Community Center in Meyerland holds a special place for him. He grew up in Houston, went to Bellaire High School, and his first summer job was as a projectionist "up there", as he pointed to the booth over our heads. He also noted that he was perhaps the only journalist who is also a "practicing capitalist" -- as the owner of two flag and flagpole businesses, in Austin (where he lives) and Houston -- so he knows about the challenges of making payroll, meeting the onerous small business regulations, and so on. This appears to give him, in his media role, the philosophical ability to cross seamlessly from one side of the aisle to the other, keeping amiable acquaintance with both D's and R's while at the same time buffing his non-partisan credentials.

The first observation I noted was that redistricting marginalizes the general election voter. Every two years the voters get to choose their representative, and every ten years (or less) the representatives choose their voters. With the inherently polarizing nature of the redistricting/gerrymandering sausage-making, the end result is that a successful politician is compelled to accede to the wishes of his district's most active voters, i.e. his or her "base", also known as the Democratic and Republican primary voters. These people are not renowned to be moderate or centrist. In fact, quite the opposite. Because the districts have been specifically populated to elect and re-elect a Democrat or a Republican, then the real electoral challenge comes -- you guessed it -- in the primary. Thus, in November many contests between the parties are viewed as no contest.

What kind of politician does this produce? The kind viewed as "extreme" -- by both ends of the political spectrum.

The second observation Kronberg made was of the Republican Party at large, not just in Texas -- the social, libertarian, and economic wings of the GOP are splintering, and thus their dominance of government is coming to an end.

He's dead solid perfect in this analysis. Just look at how the xenophobic crackers, the base of the party for too long now, are abandoning Bush and the rest of the Republicans who are pushing for the compromise Senate legislation on immigration.

One of this coffin's final nails will be driven in 2008 by a neoconservative third-party presidential challenge from the likes of Tom Tancrazy or another of that ilk. And the popularity of Ron Paul's quixotic bid among a Kucinich-sized segment of Republicans points out how, *ahem*, "diverse" the GOP is suddenly becoming.

The announcement yesterday of Michael Bloomberg's resignation from the Republican Party -- meant to fuel his own political ambition -- is an example of the moderate conservatives getting out from under the GOP's tent. (I predict we will very shortly see a similar announcement from Joe Lieberman. The only difference is that he stopped being a Democrat years before Bloomberg did.)

Abortion, taxes, property taxes at the state level -- all issues that the social or libertarian or economic zealots feel strongly about, but their respective counterparts grimace in distaste over. That spells doom for the legislative coalition that Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed and Newt Gingrich cobbled together almost twenty years ago.

(Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.)

The remaining observations I scribbled down were more Texas-centric but no less accurate: that members in both chambers pushed back successfully against their leadership. Lt. Gov. Dewhurst stepped into a big pile of his own dookie when his office released the letter that was hyper-critical of the Senate's efforts to throttle the voter ID bill. Kronberg noted something that he found to be one of the most profound developments in his tenure of covering the Lege, and that was the Senate's virtual unseating of its leader for a two-week period following the dustup.

Senators, Kronberg noted, operate almost as chief executives of their regions. They have, for example, a near-gubernatorial power to veto the governor's appointments of people -- judges, state commissions, etc. -- who happen to reside within their district's boundaries. Dewhurst, after all those years presiding over the Senate, simply forgot or perhaps ignored the fact that he serves as their leader at their pleasure. And they pointedly reminded him of that fact.

Speaker Craddick's self-inflicted troubles are already well-documented, of course.

One other politically astute thing Kronberg pointed out was the percentage of voters within a statehouse district who opposed Proposition 2 -- the one banning gay marriage, in 2005, which passed with 76% of the statewide vote -- might indicate a district that could be ready to flip from red to blue ... if that percentage was somewhat closer to 50%.

And finally, to the Q&A:

-- Kronberg anticipates a special legislative session over property taxes. And after that, perhaps one on Voter ID.

-- Harvey does not agree with me that Hillary Clinton is bad for Texas Democrats down the ballot in 2008. He says, and I quote as nearly verbatim as possible, that "there are already too many districts voting R at the top and D down-ballot" for this to be a problem.

-- And to the headline, as well as to both the voter ID and the immigration brouhaha, Kronberg noted that he was puzzled by the conservative hysteria over both issues. "Texas Latinos who are legal now and don't vote make up more than 50% of the state's population. The numbers are huge in west Texas." With that comment I suddenly flashed on my experience in Plainview -- hardly "west" Texas, between Lubbock and Amarillo -- as a Junior Achievement counselor at the high school there, and a remark made by one of the school's administrators: that over 50% of the children in grades K-12 were Hispanic. This was in 1988.

Texas, you may recall, became a majority-minority state in 2004.

The Hispanic vote, statewide and nationwide, is apparently waiting to be motivated by the right candidate -- probably irrespective of party affiliation. They will be an electoral tsunami, completely altering the political landscape, once the tide finally reaches the shore. Who will be the candidate that does this? Will it be Bill Richardson?

Or Rick Noriega, perhaps?

And starring Hillary Clinton as Tony Soprano

"Sheer brilliance"? Gee, I suppose -- if handing your opponents a loaded shotgun falls in the same category:

Hillary walks into the Mount Kisco diner in Westchester, N.Y., and takes a seat. Seconds later in comes Bill, dressed in a short-sleeved, untucked shirt. "No onion rings?" Bill asks when he sees that his wife has ordered a bowl of carrots. "I'm looking out for you," replies Hillary, who peruses the diner's jukebox selections, the same tunes voted on by her campaign supporters. Tina Turner's "The Best." KT Tunstall's "Suddenly I See." Smash Mouth's "I'm a Believer." Bill says he thinks Smash Mouth will win. "We'll see," Hillary says.

Then the camera fades to black.

You don't suppose this is the end for her campaign, do you?

Naaahh. We couldn't be so lucky.

Clinton's camp is pushing hard for video cred, and yesterday's effort is proof. Forget that the self-inflicted analogy -- the Clintons as the Sopranos -- might be too irresistible for her detractors.

Guilty, Your Honor.

And for hard-core fans, the video might bring to mind the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In the show's third season, Carmela, wife of the philandering Tony, talks about her admiration for how Hillary handled her marital woes. "She's a role model for all of us," Carmela tells her gussied-up gal pals.

Another association the junior senator from New York couldn't have missed.

"It shows that Hillary Clinton is very adeptly using the Internet to humanize herself."

As if the Clintons haven't been "humanized" enough as it is.

"Yet the jury's out on whether everybody finds it charming that they're self-effacing or that they are in fact drawing a parallel that is really ironic and not flattering regarding what's seen as the liabilities of the Clintons. That they're very aggressive in trying to scare away donors from other campaigns. The perception that they engage in strong-arm tactics. Still, you have to hand it to Hillary. You can't get more Joe Sixpack than Tony Soprano."

Then again, nothing is more anti-Tony Soprano than Celine Dion.

Bada bing.

Update: Firedoglake has a response to a truly unhinged right-wing reaction to the video.

Update II (6/21): Prairie Weather:

Maybe the "vast right-wing conspiracy" stuffed the electronic ballot box with votes for a tune by a French-Canadian diva most famous for presiding, musically speaking, over the sinking of the Titanic.

Tanmay Vachaspati: black stars & there are no black holes

A report on this blog about George Chapline's colloquium remains the #1 hit if you Google seach for black holes don't exist. It is a rather popular albeit untrue sentence that many users want to see. ;-) George is a friend of The Reference Frame but his black hole ideas unfortunately don't make any sense.



In the article under the previous link, we have explained that why the event horizon - a "red" hypersurface in space defined as the boundary separating a causally disconnected region of spacetime (the dark blue triangle, the interior of the black hole) - is created long before the black hole reaches equilibrium and long before it starts to evaporate.

In fact, the place where the horizon appears for the first time (the lower portion of the red line) looks completely ordinary and the people who live there don't have any tools to figure out whether they are already behind the horizon or not: they think that they are inside an ordinary star. If they had such tools, they would be extremely non-local, required superluminal propagation of signals, or a time machine. At that moment - when local physics still looks completely ordinary - it is already decided that the future curvature of spacetime creates a causally disconnected region because the evolution of spacetime according to Einstein's equations will inevitably lead to a spacetime whose causal diagram is depicted above: a spacetime with a causally disconnected black hole interior.

We can also prove that no plausible modification of Einstein's equations that keeps them consistent with observations can remove the conclusion about the creation of the event horizon.




This is a rather trivial conclusion of classical general relativity that most students with an A from general relativity will be able to make. It is extremely robust and whether or not we can test it "directly" is secondary. Equations of general relativity have been verified in other but related experiments and everything else we need a solid calculation that is actually more reliable than the experiments even though many people who are not quite sure about the consistency of mathematics and its relevance for the real world have irrational problems with this statement. ;-)

I always wonder whether the people who don't trust mathematical derivations believe that they would get killed if they jumped from a skyscraper. Have they ever experimentally tested this assertion?

New Scientist

Nude Socialist has just promoted a theory of Tanmay Vachaspati from Case Western Reserve University, Ohio. In his 2-page paper, he argues that black holes are never formed in the first place. Instead, the collapse stops in a stage that he calls a "black star" and he even proposes that a new, non-black-hole-like kind of collision of these black stars is responsible for gamma ray bursts.

Now, I find notion that quantum gravity regulates black holes as something that looks like a black hole but is microscopically just another "regular" object - something I called "not quite black holes" - to be a legitimate paradigm. But of course I know why all qualitative conclusions about black hole dynamics will continue to hold when the classical approximation of general relativity is valid i.e. whenever the black holes are large.

What we know today goes well beyond the classical approximation of black holes. We can calculate the entropy of large classes of black holes arbitrarily accurately, among other things. We simply know that these things are correct. It's a matter of doing the math right.

It is not hard to read the whole Vachaspati's paper and it obviously makes no sense. Does he assume some novel quantum gravity effects? No, he is just talking about classical general relativity. We can easily show that event horizons are inevitably formed in this picture. It is a straightforward exercise for those who know the technology. Of course, it is an uncertain, mysterious sea of dragons for those who don't.

We also observe (the effects of) black holes in telescopes - for example one at our galactic center whose mass counts in millions of solar masses - but I won't hide that the theoretical derivation of their existence from other experimentally known data seems even more robust than the direct observations to me (and others).

Vachaspati - whose list of former co-authors includes Mark Trodden and Lawrence Krauss, among others - rejects this result except that he doesn't seem to give a glimpse of an argument that the result should be different - except for saying other things that obviously don't occur such as a new kind of "pre-Hawking superfast radiation". Moreover, the only figure that is included in his short paper is a standard Penrose diagram for a Schwarzschild black hole. It doesn't look like he has gotten rid of the horizon. Quite on the contrary. It is quite nicely seen on the figure: it's the Northwestern diagonal line.

Nevertheless, this paper was accepted for Physical Review D which is why Nude Socialist happily describes it as science: certain papers are simply vastly more interesting for the journalists than others. Moreover, the Nude Socialist formulates the article in such a way that Vachaspati's weird paper must surely be very important and 't Hooft and Giddings are just frozen ultraconservative frogs who inhibit the "progress". Thousands of readers will buy it. New Scientist presents Vachaspati as a hero and for thousands of stupid readers, it's simply enough to become convinced.

Most articles about Vachaspati are located in Indian media which is no coincidence.

Also, in his CCNET, Benny Peiser gave it a title "Black hole denier: another scientific consensus in trouble". Benny is a smart Gentleman but it would be dishonest not to say that his title is significantly less smart. If the real driving force of his climate skepticism were a general tendency to fight against anything that others think regardless of the existence of a rational reason, I couldn't agree with him.

Classical general relativity is a settled theory and it is extremely difficult and probably impossible to invent a description that would - at least barely - agree with the same experimental tests but that would be able to stop event horizons from forming. Also, quantum effects can be neglected in the case of large black holes and the alternative black hole physicists even seem to agree with this conclusion.

There is no scientific consensus about the existence of black holes. The people who understand general relativity and its justification know that black holes must exist while those who don't understand general relativity don't know whether there are black holes and most of them probably think that black holes don't exist, at least in the privacy of their homes. I guess that the second group includes a majority of the scientific community. This has nothing to do with consensus, it is about knowledge, talent, and expertise. So I would still prefer the adjective "ignorant" instead of "denier" for any person who studies gravitational physics but is unable to make this simple conclusion even in 2007. It would be foolish to demonize such people because ignorance is the primordial state of affairs.

And that's the memo.

CO2 emissions: China has surpassed U.S.

China has become the #1 producer of carbon dioxide already in 2006. Congratulations - because the CO2 emissions may be viewed as a very good measure of the industrial strength.

It shouldn't be shocking for those who knew that China's 2005 production of carbon dioxide was only 2% below the U.S. levels. Why? Well, it's because China's CO2 output grows by about 9 percent a year. It is no coincidence that the number equals the GDP growth. Together with restrictive measures in the developed world, this meant that the U.S. was already 8% below China in 2006.

Russia will cash in on 60 billion USD in 2008 for Kyoto machinations.

BBC will continue to cover climate skeptics.

Investor's Business Daily: Ban made Annan seem like a voice of reason. The daily uses Klaus' article in The Financial Times to argue that Ban is a high priest of the global warming religion. ;-) Incidentally, the title of Klaus' article, Freedom, not climate, is at risk, now has over 75 thousand Google hits and the number keeps on increasing.

Via Benny Peiser.

Carbon indulgences: price. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is 250 times smaller a problem than it was a year ago. In summer 2006, the price was minus 30 euro per ton. Yesterday, it closed at 0.12 euro per ton.

Speaking of people thinking about running for political office

... there's several places in the mainstream media (here's one -- scroll down to near the end -- here's another) where my good friend and birthday buddy Barbara Radnofsky is indicating that she might run for Texas Attorney General in 2010. I thought I'd ask my man David what he thought about that, so I e-mailed him the following questions:

Q: Barbara Radnofsky reports she is considering a run for attorney general of Texas in 2010. Are you going to campaign for that office as well -- or will you support her candidacy if you don't?

Q. On the assumption that you will run for AG, why should Democrats vote for you in a primary election (three years from now) instead of Radnofsky? What are the differences you would highlight between you?

And here's his response:

A. I would like to answer the two questions together if that's OK. Barbara is my friend. We both have our strengths and we both have our weaknesses. Any political race between us in a Democratic primary would be enjoyable for the two of us and would give Democratic voters a good choice between two good Democrats and two good lawyers. Beyond that, I really think it's too early to be talking about 2010. Talking about 2010 will distract our focus from the job we have to do in 2008. We have to carry our state in 2008 and that is where we need to be concentrating our attention.

As Charles Kuffner would say: make of that what you will. Or maybe "stay tuned". Or both.

Sean Carroll: a guide for crackpots

Even Sean Carroll may be right. He has written his

alternative science checklist.

I must agree with it. However, it seems unlikely that alternative scientists will suddenly follow Sean's recipe.



For example, the first commenter, Peter Fred, ignored the article. Instead, he proposed to replace dark matter by radial spreading of infrared luminosity, following the old-fashioned crackpot algorithms. Mark Trodden joked that Sean Carroll's revolutionary theory how to proceed was being ignored by the crackpot establishment and recommended him two simple steps how to be taken more seriously. ;-)

A few weeks ago, an alternative Iranian physicist came to my office and was explaining me that Dirac's paper on magnetic monopoles was mathematically inconsistent & light bending and general relativity were impossible, too. I was trying both to explain him these particular technical points as well as to give him a general "checklist" but it was probably a failure.




These people just can't concentrate on thinking. When you start to talk about the electromagnetic potential in the magnetic monopole background, he suddenly starts to talk about Lee Smolin who criticized string theory. It is impossible to explain him that his crackpot proposals about the magnetic monopoles and Lee Smolin's crackpot proposals about quantum gravity might be analogous at some spiritual level but they are separated by 70 years and there exists no logical connection between the two: if he sees a connection, he must be doing an error.

He asked me whether he should also see Cumrun and Nima and I told him that they probably wouldn't have time for him but he can always try: former countrymates may pay some special attention to him. After 10 seconds of a discussion with Cumrun, the alternative physicist got offended and started to scream that he was much smarter than Einstein and Dirac. That was enough for Cumrun to terminate the discussion. Cumrun left the office and he has only lost 30 seconds or so! The alternative physicist returned to my office to cry on my shoulder. ;-)

Nima spent 20 minutes with him, almost comparable to myself. He tried to be nice, just like me, but he found that our alternative colleague believes that all confirmations of Einstein's theories have always been conspiracies designed to support a popular figure. :-)

The Earth today stands in imminent peril

Global warming scientists will have to learn quantum gravity by the end of July. Why?

Well, it's because we can see that every day, their predictions get more catastrophic than the previous day by an order of magnitude. Roughly 35 orders of magnitude from the present numbers, you find the Planck scale.

Let me demonstrate this trend on two recent examples. On Saturday, the new boss of the United Nations whose name is Ban even though he is unfortunately not yet banned published an op-ed in the Washington Post that argued that

Global warming has caused the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

That's great and I am sure that many people will admire Ban's new clothes except that scientific papers agree with common sense and imply that there is no link between droughts in Africa on one side and increased CO2 in the atmosphere on the other side.




However, Larry has just pointed out that everything is much more serious today than it was on Saturday. A few hours ago, The Independent has proudly announced that

The Earth today stands in imminent peril.

A team of six people led by James Hansen - a world's leading expert in scientific reticence - has chastised the IPCC alarmists that they're not sufficiently alarmist. These six "better scientists" have decided that it is now necessary to break the scientific consensus because they have "calculated" that the civilization has lasted 12,007 years and these years have been unusually stable.

OK, I added 7.

But it can't continue like that, they say. A trigger mechanism based on a subtle interplay between trace gases including carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone, flipping albedo, and melting icecaps will surely kill us in a decade or two. We immediately need to extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. And so on, and so on.

The Earth is literally floating in front of our eyes as it evaporates.



Most Jehovah's Witnesses whom I have met at least admit that 1918 wasn't yet the year of the judgment day: see this table about the ultimate deadlines; yes, the current date is "imminent". Hansen et al. seem to be more difficult.

Also, you should note that any disagreement with the IPCC consensus of trillions of scientists is a deadly sin. Unless, of course, you are James Hansen who proposes much crazier scenarios than ever before.

You may ask: what journal is going to publish this hysterical and thoroughly irrational explosion of "gravest threats" equivalent to screams of a profoundly ill woman? Well, this question is unfortunately not a rhetorical one and it has an answer. The journal is called

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

Another journal controlled by profoundly alternative physicists. The 30-page-long article is called

Climate change and trace gases.

Read the half-a-page abstract. It is rather incredible. Focus on some topic. For example, consider the statement that most feedbacks are positive. Can you find evidence for this statement in the paper? What I find is their "thinking" that another naive theory can't explain some sharp features of the paleoclimate reconstructions which implies that whatever new statement they make must be correct. Cataclysmic changes thus follow. That's Hansen's "science".

If your data can be interpreted in a way that confirms your catastrophic beliefs, it's great. If your data can't do it, it's also great because it means that your previous theory was insufficient and your new theory must include some effects that are even more catastrophic than the previous effects. If a discrepancy of your old theory with the observations is visualized as a flu, Hansen's cure for flu is analogous to overriding the flu by an HIV virus that is even more powerful.

More quantitatively, Hansen's method is just like if you try to interpolate eleven points in a plane by a polynomial of tenth degree. What do you think will happen with this polynomial "y=f(x)" or "temperature=f(time)" for large values of "x" or "time"? Do you think that this algorithm proves that every function increases as a tenth power for large values of "x" or "time"? Has Hansen learned very basics of maths if he is unable to figure out that this curve-fitting is exactly what he's doing? Isn't he ready to understand that the right curve interpolating the points is not a polynomial and his original theory was completely wrong and couldn't be correctly used as a starting point, if I use my analogy?

The main problem with my analogy is that the functions that Hansen uses to interpolate the data are increasing not just polynomially but rather exponentially. ;-)

Back to quantum gravity

What does all this nonsense have to do with quantum gravity? Well, it is not hard to calculate that by next week, the climate "scientists" will predict a restoration of the electroweak symmetry caused by global warming and July will be dedicated to progress towards the Planck temperature. :-)

I wonder whether they will ultimately agree with quantum gravity researchers that the Planck temperature is the maximum temperature that is possible and July should thus be the last month of progress in this climate change "science". Basic laws of quantum gravity indeed imply that certain things such as warming can't continue indefinitely. I am afraid that this law will be too constraining for James Hansen.