The plot makes a lot of sense. Antonio Banderas is a private detective who is hired by a Russian boxer and criminal to find his missing girlfriend, a stripper called Lexie who is also carbon-enhanced by $30 million in diamonds. He chooses the most sensible strategy to solve this puzzle: he must first find the Higgs boson.
The film directors have also understood what billions of viewers in the world are actually aroused by. During some boring and unexciting portions of the film, e.g. sex, the characters are made to discuss physics of neutrons which makes it much more thrilling.
Fine. So how does he find the Higgs boson? He must locate the most sensible place where the God particle may be produced by high-energy collisions. Where is the place? Obviously, it's in the basement owned by a billionaire who has built a private superconducting collider under his villa in the New Mexico desert. He employs a physicist who knows all about particle physics and spiritism.
See the key scene at IO9 where Banderas visits the haunted house with the superconducting supercollider and they just sketch the ideal channels where the cross section for the Higgs boson production could be high enough while they estimate the lifetime of the scalar particle. By the way, a nice by-product of the calculation is that the rich guy also plans to recreate the Big Bang and end the world as we know it. :-)
One thing to appreciate about the $17 million noir flick is the degree of realism. Finally, a movie has faithfully described the world of real private detectives whose actual methodology is based on the search for the mechanisms of the electroweak symmetry breaking. Based on the generally low rating, it seems that the critics have also understood that it's about particle physics.
Chemistry and Precalculus: new Wolfram Alpha iOS apps
See Wolfram Alpha blog to see what these two apps may do for your or your kids' courses at school. They're pretty clever apps.
Spice videos in Osama's collection
A large collection of modern porn videos was found in Osama bin Laden's villa.
Technical problems
Blogger.com has performed a maintenance on Wednesday 5/11, 10:00-10:40 pm PDF, see status.blogger.com. However, they made a mistake; I experienced intermitent problems with logging in as well partial or complete disappearance of the "profile" widget. Consequently, blogger.com went to a read-only mode. Bloggers such as your humble correspondent couldn't add new posts or edit the old ones. In the process of fixing the bug, Blogger.com engineers decided to use a "system restore" which means that they - temporarily - erased all posts added after 3:37 pm Prague Summers Time on Wednesday.
That affected 3 new posts on this blog. You may see the compassion - even Google's own official blogs such as Google Chrome Releases have been affected. In this particular case, a new blog entry about the latest stable Chrome version, 11.0.696.68, disappeared as well. Slow comments have been inaccessible across the blogspot.com domain, too.
Blogger.com had the lowest downtime among the major blogging platforms in 2010. I am afraid that after this huge downtime, it will no longer be the case. Still, this form of downtime was pretty user-friendly - a vast majority of the blog posts remained accessible. However, to make things worse for the company, Google's YouTube began to generate somewhat frequent "500 internal server errors" again. What are you up to, Mark Zuckerberg? ;-)
Ice-hockey
Sweden were the stronger team during the semifinals and they became the first team in the world that managed to beat Czechia, so they will play the final match.
Most of us wouldn't count CBS as one of those, well, fair and balanced TV stations. But CBS isn't far from the standardized average and Katie Couric has surely brought a human face to CBS, hasn't she? Look e.g. at this 44-minute interview with Glenn Beck:
However, Katie Couric decided to leave and, possibly, look for a higher-dimensional format of storytelling because she is not one of the crackpots who doubt string/M-theory in 10 or 11 dimensions and 3 (2+1) is really too much smaller than 10 or 11.
What will happen to CBS?
She is going to be replaced by Scott Pelley who recently presented a report on global warming in "60 minutes" in which he completely denied the very existence of global warming skeptics.
CBS News asked him why he did so. He answered that by this point, striving for balance in journalism has become irresponsible because it's equivalent to the invitation of the Holocaust deniers. Well, it's equivalent to inviting a Jew to the newsroom, too. Something that a politically correct macho of Pelley's caliber would never do.
Well, I just found out that the "Holocaust" show occurred in 2006 or so...
Given his being a climate skeptic, Glenn Beck may probably forget about another appearance on CBS. ;-)
Pelley considers Ahmadinejad to be a moral role model. So you can see that the climate deniers are not quite the same as Holocaust deniers for Pelley: Holocaust deniers such as Ahmadinejad are OK. Well, more than OK, they're his idols.
On Thursday, April 7th, 2011, CBS will air another, 04x20 episode of The Big Bang Theory. It's called "The Herb Garden Germination." Amy and Sheldon will try to spread rumors and Howard will act to upgrade his relationship with Bernadette.
He will be reading excerpts from his new book, probably The Hidden Reality about the multiverse, while Sheldon Cooper will display another level of his striking overlap with your humble correspondent. Sheldon will be explaining that it is nonsense to try to teach physics to the general population.
Well, I have of course spent lots of time by popularization of science among the broader public - including the Czech translation of The Elegant Universe - and other books I authored etc. But the reality has taught me that Sheldon is right. It is nonsense to teach advanced physics to the broad public.
The public can never appreciate the concepts and inner workings of quantum physics, string theory, or anything else that actually requires a technical mastery of the subject. As a result, the interest of an outsider always converges from the actual physics that makes sense and that has very strict rules to some superficial, and almost universally wrong, issues that are attractive for the laymen because of pre-existing reasons.
In other words, it's throwing pearls to the swines.
Even when a layman manages to parrot some correct insights about science that he or she has learned from a popular book or presentation, it cannot be classified as an actual, lasting knowledge. The first pseudoscientific book or presentation that the very same layman encounters is able to immediately "neutralize" the previously acquired knowledge - because it was not a real knowledge. It was just a temporary state of parroting someone else.
It's actually more likely than not than a non-expert will worship the most incorrect ideas about physics and spit on the most valuable ones. It is kind of inevitable. And I am not talking just about the thousands of brainwashed and aggressive imbeciles who gather on blogs of Fecers Shmoits and read books by Pees Swolins and similar hacks who are much closer to an average chimp than to an average string theorist. They're just a diluted version of the way how pretty much every uninformed layman thinks.
I believe that it may be refreshing to admit that all the interest and excitement about advanced physics concepts displayed from the people who manifestly misunderstand the internal logic of the physical theories is fake. After all, a vast majority of the owners of Hawking's Brief History of Time has never read the book. It is a dishonest game for people to pretend that they are something else than what they are.
In my opinion, it would be healthier if the public stopped influencing things it can't understand and it can't possibly be interested in: the proliferation of postmodern pseudoscientists of the Swolin kind or the global warming alarmists is, to a large extent, a result of the interactions with the extra-scientific portions of the population. Quite universally, these interactions have contaminated science because they bring criteria that have nothing to do with the scientific ones.
I am not saying that the number of people who are educated in physics should be left dropping: quite on the contrary. But what I think should be avoided is the informal promotion of people who don't understand physics as "honorary physicists" just because they display some (usually fake) interest in the discipline and/or because they're found important by someone for totally unscientific reasons.
In my opinion, Penny was the main hero of the yesterday's episode of The Big Bang Theory, 04x19 "Zarnecki Incursion".
Sheldon's World of Warcraft is hacked and everything, including all the gold and the battle ostrich, is stolen. Police turns out to be useless, despite Sheldon's hysteria.
...spoilers continue below...
All the boys are helping Sheldon. It turns out that Priya, Leonard's new girlfriend, has no empathy for Leonard's computer games hobby. This fact makes Priya much less suitable as a girlfriend relatively to Penny, a cured online game addict.
Howard finds out that the hacker is Todd Zarnecki, so all of them ultimately go to Carlsbad, CA to force him to return all the stolen stuff. Instead, a mean and fat Zarnecki - a Michael Moore lookalike - steals Sheldon's klingon batliff as well.
Fortunately, Leonard's car has a mechanical problem while they're on their way back. They decide to call Penny - not Priya - to pick them. Penny is clearly pleased to find out that she's closer to the boys' hearts.
When Penny learns that they didn't manage to get Sheldon's stolen virtual goods back, she decides to show them how a quest is commonly completed in Nebraska. They return to Carlsbad, CA and Michael Moore's lookalike opens the door again.
He's being an arrogant jerk again but Penny informs him that he can finally taste girl's punch in his special parts. She kicks him into his balls - LOL, Penny's kick into Michael Moore's balls was the peak of the episode for me - and "we" succeeded, Sheldon exclaims! :-)
After a painful and silent walk on the staircase with Priya, Penny finds out that Amy was right when she has logically deduced that Penny must have a desire to fling her poop at Priya.
Penny has learned a lot and, as far as I can say, she has the natural right to possess or reject the likes of Leonard. In this season, Kaley Cuoco spent much more time with the other girls. See what Cuoco has to say about this transformation of the character.
The intersection is almost non-existent. Both fields require an ego but the movie industry is all about the ephemeral values such as fame and superficial impressions on other people while science is focused on the lasting values, deep and objective core of the existence, and, in most cases, research in solitude.
However, as a high school student, Oscar-winning Natalie Portman made it to the semifinals of the Intel Competition. It was a populist low-brow science project about getting energy out of waste but it's still much more impressive than what 95% of her colleagues may offer.
If you want to find an even more impressive science background of the movie stars, forget about Spock. Leonard Nimoy has had nothing to do with science before he pretended to be one; it was all about arts.
However, if you want to find a real scientist with a doctor degree, you may check Amy Farrah Fowler, Sheldon Cooper's videochat girlfriend from The Big Bang Theory. You know that Amy is a neurobiologist on the show. What about Mayim Bialik, the actress who stars as Amy?
Well, it turns out that she has a PhD from neurobiology! ;-)
Angier mentions an article in The Onion where, among other people, Brian Greene complains that he is fed up with the media because they distract him from serious work. I am mostly convinced that this could appear outside The Onion, too: he must feel this way although he must like his second art of bringing string theory to the stupid people, too.
The Big Bang Theory is always a lot of intelligent fun but the newest episode 04x15, The Benefactor Factor, was also addressing a serious topic, namely the funding of science.
The president of the university met the boys in the cafeteria and he told them about a fundraising party. Sheldon reacted in a way that explains why I identify with him so much: he won't be affected by down-to-Earth drivers such as finances in his quest to see the face of God.
So only the three boys went to the fancy party. When they met an arrogant but powerful woman, Howard had to disappear after she attacked him for his not being a doctor; Leonard began to stutter about a coffee machine; and Rajesh who can't speak to women had to escape, too. The lady later revealed that she enjoys giving a hard time to smart people - one of the things that wealthy bitches such as herself enjoy to do. Very true.
Meanwhile, Sheldon had a video call with his friend, Amy, who told him some cold facts about the real world. Until his mind is uploaded to a safe spaceship, he will have to depend on other members of the human species. After all, her own lab is funded by a Middle East dilettante, a prince who is technically her fiancé.
Moreover, she tells Sheldon that his friends are not capable to make a good job in defending the funding of physics. So the money could go to the geology department - the "dirt people", as Sheldon calls them - or something even worse: they could even end up in the humanities.
Now, Sheldon is as much horrified as your humble correspondent by the horror of the millions of dollars that flow to the gender studies and similar ultrasoft disciplines.
While the lady bitch is torturing the three guys, Sheldon arrives at the fundraiser. He tells the important people that he won't touch their hands and transfer their germs: instead, he honestly tells them that he has come only for their money. ;-)
On the following day, the president of the university calls Sheldon and gives him an incoherent message whether he wanted Sheldon to attend or not. Of course, Sheldon can't understand those things. I can't understand them, either. The money is the main point of similar fundraisers and everyone knows that. However, almost everyone got used to an amazing degree of hypocrisy so everyone denies the previous sentence - and the more hypocrisy one exposes, the better. Such things bother me as much as they bother Sheldon. At the end of the call, Sheldon encourages the president to organize his thoughts a little bit and try to call Sheldon later.
The rich bitch calls Sheldon and tells Leonard that he will be sent a car for a dinner. Leonard feels somewhat uncomfortable in the car. The rich bitch, who inherited her wealth from her husband, explains that she was dating a smart guy in the college who didn't have the money. That makes Leonard ask about the money for the physics department and she says that she will bring the idea to the next level - which means to kiss Leonard penetratingly.
So the trade is for the department to receive millions for a cryogenic centrifugal pump while Leonard would have sex with her - a thing that disgusts Leonard while Howard is jealous. :-) The lady wants to see Leonard again. So Sheldon tries to find out what Leonard should wear; the expert is Penny who knows something about trading sexual favors for material gains. :-)
Leonard doesn't want to sleep with her while Sheldon tells him that it may be Leonard's only chance to make a real contribution to science. :-) Fortunately, the lady tells Leonard that she's giving the money to the physics department regardless of the development of her romantic relationship with Leonard.
However, it turns out that she is also able to convince Leonard to change his mind: you know, she's that good. The following scenes have to be skipped on TRF which is more decent than CBS - where they were skipped, too. "Good morning, slut," is what Penny rightfully tells Leonard in the morning. Sheldon is proud about Leonard who is ashamed. Leonard reveals that she paid first and Sheldon admits that Leonard is a talented soldier of science. There are lots of other rich ladies around and we need a new linear particle accelerator. :-)
The president makes Leonard a hero of the cafeteria. Leonard objects that he didn't do it for the money. The president says that it's a good idea for Leonard to think in this way; the president himself knows quite something about it. Well, in this respect, he is surely not exceptional among the university presidents.
As you can see, she picked her universal science expert, namely Dr Michio Kaku, a co-father of string field theory. :-)
I think he is very entertaining. Even if his science has flaws, which is likely, he could be hired for similar jobs but there should be some real experts who pre-check what he is going to say. Nevertheless, his comments overlap with science, at least at some popular level, but volcanologist Erik Klemetti was driven up the wall.
Kaku's message is pretty simple: the big volcano erupts once in 600,000 years or so, it's about the right time for it to erupt again, plus (not minus) 100,000 years, and when it does, the U.S. as we know it will be destroyed: 100 miles around the epicenter will be killed and 500 miles will be lethally contaminated by ash etc. (the latter is probably nonsense). He says that volcano monitoring is black magic so we have no idea when it erupts. When it does, you should run.
A similar eruption contributed to the K-T demise of dinosaurs, he says. (In combination with an asteroid impact, he says: I personally don't believe that such rare events are often "double whammies" - in my opinion, it's more natural to have one true cause.)
Well, I have no doubt that Kaku's knowledge about the volcanoes is tiny in comparison with Klemetti's knowledge. At the same moment, I think that Klemetti didn't do a good job in explaining what's wrong with Kaku's claims. You can't just make a list and say that everything in it is wrong, Dr Klemetti.
In particular, it's obvious that Klemetti is primarily upset by the comment that volcano monitoring is "black magic" because this proposition undermines the respectability of the discipline. However, could Dr Klemetti please explain what can actually be predicted, how much time in advance it can be predicted, and what evidence do we have that these predictions will be valid?
The phrase "very sophisticated monitoring" with a broken link (that would answer the questions anyway) simply can't replace either of these answers that people like me are waiting for. In this sense, Kaku's summary, despite the sensationalism I am fully aware of, was more convincing for me than Dr Klemetti's page.
It's plausible that Dr Klemetti can BigThink, as the website indicates, but he should also learn how to use his BigMouth because the BigThink remained largely invisible.
Last week, the BBC TV aired another one-hour program from its Horizon collection, What is reality?. It's a brand new show - one that already carries the year 2011. Here it is:
You will meet people such as Lenny Susskind, Seth Lloyd, Frank Wilczek, Anton Zeilinger, Max Tegmark, and others. Frank Wilczek plays with fruits on his cottage while the Tevatron is celebrated for its discovery of the top quark.
I like the mysterious voice of the narrator. But lots of bullshit scenes - like meaningless discussions about, well, "what is reality" - get boring very quickly. Zeilinger explains the double-slit experiment - well, not too much - and Lloyd says things about quantum computing - well, not too many.
Susskind discusses the information loss paradox and shows the house where Hawking shocked him by (not ultimately correct) claims that the information was lost. The holographic principle is explained by a moving but fake three-dimensional blonde lady. They also use Susskind and his clone and one of them is holographic. No one understands it, they claim.
Craig Hogan shows his holometer. An extensive apparatus given the fact that these self-described "holographic" effects he conjectured clearly don't exist. Max Tegmark says a lot of things I agree with to the extent that they look totally vacuous to me. Unless he thinks he is saying something more than that in which case it's wrong. ;-)
They return to the TeV physics, mention the LHC but remain the Tevatron fans. The Higgs boson is mentioned but not explained. Wilczek, Susskind, and others are led to say vague things about the reality instead. Well, I think that these programs have become much less demanding - but it's also true that the British audience has grown much more ignorant when it comes to physical sciences in the last 20-30 years. It's a nation in decline, and it's not the only one.
Via Phil Gibbs who also says something about the content
Everyone in the Czech Republic knows Chuck Norris. In the 1980s, most Norris movies were actually smuggled into the country but he has already been well-known at that time. "Walker, Texas Ranger" was also among the first typical Western TV shows (thanks Mike) officially broadcast after the fall of communism.
Two months ago, T-Mobile Czech Republic, a Germany-based top cell-phone-service and satellite TV provider, ran a series of commercials that became hugely popular - millions of views at YouTube which is not bad for a commercial in a country of 10 million.
Norris was paid about $400,000 for the ads. His Czech colleague, actor Mr Valouch whom you will see, has received a free cell phone and became a new life-long Chuck Norris fan. ;-) While T-Mobile was most successful in the Christmas time, its competitors had creative ads, too. Vodafone has shot a few ads with Christmas trees that call each other while O2 has created origami paper cell phones.
The hostess says "Master!?" However, he refuses to kill the carp. What happens afterwards could be misinterpreted: Chuck Norris didn't faint; he just showed the floor who the boss was. ;-)
At the end of the ad, the husband of the hostess summarizes the situation: "Yup, yup: anyone may be sharp (tough) on TV." T-Mobile satellite TV offers a genuinely sharp image.
The comments under the YouTube video are funny - lots of new Chuck Norris facts are included.
"Hedgaaar - huh - huh. Mr Norris, now I will show you something." [Boom.] Chuck Norris doesn't spare anyone. T-Mobile will give you a free LCD TV after you purchase its three services.
"Sir, could you please take a photograph of us? It's the first time when my son bruslí [= is skating]." - "Bruce Lee? No. Chuck Norris." Chuck Norris won't give you everything for free. T-Mobile will give you a free digital frame if you buy one service.
"Look you, you will be impressed." - Chuck Norris won't give you anything for free. T-Mobile will give you a stylish netbook if you purchase two services.
Empower yourself at this time of advent. Buy prepaid credits at least for $20 and you will gain an advantage for every weekend. This Saturday and Sunday, the calls are free.
"Elia, forgive me." T-Mobile's satellite TV is wishing you truly powerful stories. [Onion.]
"Look, Ms Zuzana Noris[ová]. Isn't she a relative of yours?" - T-Mobile's satellite TV wishes you a star entertainment.
"Oh, I see, you are in Čakovice [Chuckville], Chuck (a neighborhood of Prague). I thought you got lost." Chuck Norris can never get lost. For the rest of us, T-Mobile brings a free Nokia phone with navigation forever for free.
"And just to be sure, where do you know him from?" - "Do you mean Norris? I thought that it was you who knew him."
"You must be impressed, Mr Norris, how many TV channels we have. News, sport, nature, nature, nature, nature, nature... If you were bored, I can switch the channel... I hope he's just sleeping." - That's too much to bear even for Chuck Norris. New T-Mobile satellite TV brings you hundreds of TV channels.
Knock, knock, knock. "Is everything alright, Mr Norris?" - "What's going on?" - "Mr Norris is having a bath." - "So I guess that the carp won't be too happy about that."
You may also play a special T-Mobile Flash game where you have to defeat Chuck Norris by your muscles, lasers, and arrow keys. At the beginning, Chuck Norris speaks in Czech with the Oklahoman accent or at least it's supposed to be this way haha. ;-)
I have always considered Brian Cox, ATLAS experimental physicist and rock musician, to be a problem-free shallow promoter of science who doesn't teach you much but whose boyish looks at least give science an O.K. image in the U.K. and beyond. See e.g. Cox's interview with Leonard Susskind on string theory.
However, the statement that he has never made me angry ceased to be true today.
The playlist above - 15+15+10 minutes - shows The Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture from 1st of December, 2010, as aired on BBC2. Most of it is the same relatively problem-free, superficial babbling about some philosophy of science and the basics of physics that can't irritate (or enrich) anyone and that Brian Cox is known for.
However, I knew it couldn't have been an unproblematic lecture because it has made Martin Durkin, the film director who created the excellent The Great Global Warming Swindle, so upset that he wrote a text creatively called Big Daft Cox. :-) I received a copy of the article from Willie Soon; the essay may soon appear on James Delingpole's blog.
Finally, the explanation why Durkin got so upset became apparent to me at 3:45 of the second part of the playlist when Cox began to talk about climate change. This portion of the lecture began with the dramatic music theme from TGGWS.
At the beginning, I thought that Durkin has overreacted. However, after I have seen the whole lecture, I think that Durkin's "big daft cox" is simply an immensely accurate description of Brian Cox. I subscribe to it completely. Well, except for Durkin's point that the rock musician may look like a rebel to some people. I have always considered Cox a "good boy" who is controlled by the closest person who shows him a carrot or a whip.
To make things worse, right after the TGGWS discussion, Cox showed some totally atrocious mindless emotional fearmongering appeals to fake authorities - containing no actual scientific facts at all - by a total jerk from another film. Cox has claimed that the second movie, and not the first one, is more rigorously obeying the principles of scientific objectivity. Holy cattle.
You know, I've never known what Cox was thinking about the AGW business - and he probably didn't know it himself. Paradoxically enough, I considered him mildly on the positive side of the issue since September 2008 - the day when the LHC was activated - when he collided with Sir David King on TV (see also this blog). King, a totally unhinged AGW fearmonger, said that all the money and the scientific talent should exclusively only flow to disciplines like climate change - because the planet is going to die soon - and not to curiosity-driven research while Cox disagreed.
I don't know whether "they" have just ordered Cox to undo his sin - his disagreement with King - or whether he did it himself. But he did it, anyway. What he has been feeding the viewers during the Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture was totally disgraceful and I included this puppet among the unacceptable haters of genuine science.
While Cox has mentioned Richard Feynman a couple of times in his lecture, he has totally rejected all fundamental values of science that Feynman has always symbolized and defended. Instead, Cox has adopted the totalitarian ideology of the ideologically-driven environmentalist obedience and described the struggle between "the scientific consensus" which worships the "peer review" on one side and "the contrarians" (WTF?) on the other side while TV, in his opinion, is obliged to support "the scientific consensus".
He has learned to never trust experts. He has said very many other things against the notion that science can be determined by the "consensus" but I will choose the story about the Emperor's nose from Judging Books By Their Covers in Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman. He served as a member of a committee that was choosing the textbooks - and was the only person who did so carefully.
This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China's nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China's nose is, and you average it. And that would be very "accurate" because you averaged so many people. But it's no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don't improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.
Yes, indeed: instead of the length of the nose, you may substitute the climate sensitivity, too.
One more story about the averaging of many not-the-best people's opinions, from the very same chapter:
The man who replaced me on the commission said, "That book was approved by sixty-five engineers at the Such-and-such Aircraft Company!"
I didn't doubt that the company had some pretty good engineers, but to take sixty-five engineers is to take a wide range of ability - and to necessarily include some pretty poor guys! It was once again the problem of averaging the length of the emperor's nose, or the ratings on a book with nothing between the covers. It would have been far better to have the company decide who their better engineers were, and to have them look at the book. I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys - but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
Most readers who are the IPCC members must be specifically told the surprising peer-reviewed insight that 2,500 is even greater a number than 65. :-)
Cox, the first key insight that there is a complete consensus about among the scientists is that the consensus doesn't decide anything in science. Whoever disagrees with this principle is simply not a scientist. Even in the most optimistic situation, peer review is just a method to improve the average quality, not a guarantee for the truth. The success rate of peer review primarily depends on the quality of the "peers". Moreover, Durkin's movie hasn't really contradicted any prevailing peer-reviewed facts: instead, it has uncovered many facts that are simply inconvenient for many people.
So all your ideas about the obligation of people - whether they're scientists or TV folks - to pay attention to the consensus is simply an oxymoron from the scientific viewpoint and an Orwellian political ambition from the political viewpoint.
Cox, you may have been a puppet in some OK TV shows that people liked for superficial reasons but you didn't do 10% of what Martin Durkin has done to explain some nontrivial scientific facts to the public. So you have just missed your chance to shut up. Cox, you are a despicable big daft cox, indeed. ;-)
And that's the memo.
BTW I managed to watch Martin Durkin's new documentary film, Britain's Trillion Pound Horror, aired on Channel 4 on November 11th, about the insanely skyrocketing public debt of the U.K. Their government now spends more than all individuals and companies combined. The trillions of pounds that are flying in the movie are just breathtaking. The film perfectly explains how the money is being borrowed from the children and how the emerging socialist government steals money from the productive sector of the economy and, obviously with losses, spends the money on less productive or unproductive things.
Some irony
Vicky Pope of the U.K. Met Office wanted to go to Cancún and fight against this Earth that is way too warm for her. Fortunately, as The Guardian reveals, she got caught in the brutal British cold snap. Snow made her stuck at the airport. ;-)
Central European alarmist Alexander Ač is fighting a cold (in his throat) in Czechia and Slovakia where temperatures often reached -20 °C.
It's hilariously entertaining and most of the people who fight against global warming in various ways - by stones in their pocket indulgences, and walking along one-choice spiral "labyrinths", among others - are just unbelievable. I can't believe that there are so many people who are so stupid and so easily robbed of their money.
If you have 55 minutes, here is a new program about cosmology that the BBC aired a week ago or so:
The playlist has 6 parts
Well, yes: I hate it. It has nothing to do with the scientific discipline that I could recognize. This program is about a chaotic mixture of largely unsubstantiated ideas about quantum cosmology - but not only about quantum cosmology.
The program doesn't make any distinction between cosmological insights and hypotheses that only depend on classical physics and those that depend on quantum gravity; it doesn't distinguish weird quasi-religious speculations from theories backed by the scientific evidence (and the number of insights that belong to the latter category and that are shown in the program is very limited, indeed).
It's a huge degeneration from programs such as What Einstein never knew (PBS 1985). The new program is a typical example of the postmodern "science" - or consensus "science". In this framework, everyone can offer his speculations, no checks are ever made (or imposed) to eliminate the wrong ideas, and the conclusion is whatever the majority of these people (which is inevitably dominated by cranks) happen to agree about. This is the kind of stuff I have always fought against.
This attitude to science is realistically represented by the "referendum" that Lee Smolin organizes at the Perimeter Institute. "How many of you think that there was something before the Big Bang?" Everyone raises his hand. Who doesn't, is quickly detonated. You know, how many silly people at an institute controlled by cranks raise their hand is absolutely irrelevant. What matters is that there's no proper scientific evidence of a pre-Big-Bang evolution of the Universe.
If I return to the appraisal of the program: any program that shows Lee Smolin but fails to explain why he is a full-fledged crackpot is simply a piece of anti-scientific propaganda. Any program that discusses the cyclic Universes but fails to explain that the technically rooted people have very good reasons to think that unlike inflation, the cyclic models are not backed by any real evidence, is a commercial for nonsense.
It's bad if a program discusses ideas of Roger Penrose but fails to explain that they have nothing to do with proper quantum gravity - primarily because Roger Penrose doesn't understand quantum mechanics. A program that doesn't explain that pre-Big-Bang models only make a scientific sense if the hypothetical prehistory allows us to calculate something about our Universe - and this still seems pretty hard - is deliberately misleading the viewers. And a program that displays a Laura Houghton whom I have never heard of as the representative of string cosmology is a politically correct propaganda display. And who is Param Singh?
But the key reason why I dislike the program is not the excess of the worthless gibberish - nonsensical theories and overly speculative hypotheses about questions that simply can't be reliably answered yet; the key reason is the absence of the actual valuable and solid insights. There have been many - even in the most recent years - but the popular programs and the media in general haven't yet noticed. And they can't distinguish science from conveniently vague babbling, anyway.
Programs like this one inevitably contribute to the dropping trust in science among the laymen. As Randy at the viXra blog correctly said, the viewer will conclude that any idea - perhaps Genesis - makes as much sense. In science, if (as far as) you can't produce evidence supporting a statement XY, you should shut up about XY, otherwise you're not doing science. The blinding "diversity" of assorted and incommensurable ideas presented by the program simply cannot occur in science if it is done properly.
A music video about some serious recent scientific stuff. Don Garbutt has composed music for Juan Maldacena's 2005 popular article called "The Illusion of Gravity".
By the way, I hate what the other people say on the program, too. Michio Kaku discusses many kinds of "nothing". Fine except that these comments are redundant - and he didn't invent them. People have known for decades (or centuries) that the equations were always there and that the vacuum is just the absence of matter but it virtually contains all kinds of matter that can be created for a little while.
Andrei Linde is a completely serious physicist and he talks about inflation which is great. But he is led to say that the Big Bang is dead - because of inflation. Is that really necessary? Inflation is just another stage in the expansion of the Universe. The story conflates the evidence for inflation with the evidence against the Big Bang. These are completely different things and only the former exists. And when it comes to the bizarre anti-Big-Bang popular assertions, I honestly wouldn't recognize that they were meant to explain ordinary eternal inflation. Well, it surely wasn't.
Linde claims to have proved the relevance of the number 10^{10^{10^{10^7}}} or something like that from a silly recent paper of theirs. Holy cow, can't he really distinguish the things he co-discovered and that make sense from those that don't? If he can't, we should conclude that he co-discovered inflation just by accident.
Neil Turok is shown as criticizing Linde's models as going against the "tradition" - but this criticism is just a path to discuss even sillier models. Param Singh, an unknown name, says some OK yet uninspiring philosophical comments. But then he shows his own model - a trivial classical equation meant to support an ordinary "Big Bounce" scenario that "took several years to derive". Holy cow. What is it supposed to mean?
To make things worse, Mr Singh conclusion is that "the beginning was certainly not Big Bang." Why? "Because it is impossible, I don't believe it at all." What a remarkable argument. The program then switches to Lee Smolin. They mention that he is usually absent from his office - but give a positive spin about it.
Smolin says that the singularity "screams" that I am not the end. Well, it surely doesn't scream. There exists no logical argument of this kind. If he hears the singularity "screaming" in this way, he should buy some anti-hallucination drugs. Smolin may share the corridor with Singh or Linde but he's closer to Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, we hear. Wow. :-)
The usual story about the sex between Universes that are screwing the black holes of each other is presented. The TV folks repeatedly emphasize that the crackpot is a "professor".
Ten years ago, the pre-Big-Bang theories would only be discussed by "radicals", they say. But today it's nearly mainstream. Well, if you define "mainstream" by being backed by many people paid as physicists, and if you pay dozens or hundreds of crackpots as physicists in order to change physics, then the crackpot ideas will become "mainstream", indeed. But that doesn't mean that there is anything scientifically meaningful about them.
Neil Turok promotes some brane collisions in cosmology. They're bad models but they still used to be better than the garbage from others. Andrei Linde correctly says that the lifetime of those models is about 1 years and they keep on mutating them - so it's not a science that is converging to the truth. He's totally right but the same is true for many of his 10^10^10^7-like papers, too.
In this sense, I totally prefer the approach of Alan Guth who just doesn't add much nonsense to his publication record - not sure whether the Guth-Vanchurin "paradox" will be added. If you have nothing coherent to say, it's often better to be silent.
Neil Turok attacks inflation in a completely crazy new way. He claims that there are lots of puzzles and paradoxes etc. - nonsense - and that they can't explain what was before the inflationary era. Well, that's because inflation is not a theory of everything. Inflation is just an effective theory relevant for a particular time scale after the Big Bang. The same is true for the conventional Big Bang cosmology. The power laws that govern the expansion have only been valid from a moment in the past.
Turok praises himself for producing an alternative that may become better than inflation - something that is supported by nothing but aside from wishful thinking. Linde correctly said that their models survive at most for a year - which undermines their very basic ideas.
The narrator says that the very creators of the Big Bang start to abandon it. This reminds me of the creationist comments that a very old Charles Darwin denounced evolution. Yes, no, what of it? This clearly has no scientific value unless it comes with the genuine evidence. The TV people misunderstand the causal relationship in the sociology of science: people such as Einstein are famous because they have discovered something true and important. The TV people think that the causation goes in the opposite way: if someone is famous, what is says is true and important. ;-)
Roger Penrose offers some no-scale version of a cyclic model that makes no sense. The TV people call him a "recent pre-Big-Bang denier". Wow. This analogy probably works: they're creating a program to support the largely nonsensical idea of pre-Big-Bang cosmology with the same blinded prejudices as if they created another propaganda display about the "global climate disruption". It also shows who is the good guy and who is the "denier".
But such propaganda displays don't belong to science reporting - and surely not to science itself. (By the way, the "deniers" of the pre-Big-Bang cosmology are almost certainly still a majority, but the BBC folks have decided that they shouldn't be.)
The program continues with some pictures of astronomers - while they admit that the alternative theories have nothing to do with these observations. LIGO is mixed with some observations of non-randomness in the skies. These experiments are testing theories at completely different levels but they just mix them up. To fix this inconsistencies, they present LIGO as a detector of the Big Bang. Jesus Christ. The TV employee can't possibly understand what "10^{-18} meters" could mean. ;-)
Laura Mersini-Houghton is presented as the representative of all of string theory in quantum cosmology, with an infantile model of a Universe as a "wave" surrounded by "neighboring universes". The paper rightfully has about 10 citations only. It's just completely preposterous to include this nonsense into a BBC program - and to make things worse, as the only representative of string theory. Political correctness and her gender were clearly at play here. Needless to say, her work is both meaningless and unrelated to string theory, too.
At the end, Michio Kaku talks about the synthesis of Buddhism and Christianity. yes, there was a "let there be light moment", as in Genesis, and it happens all the time like in Buddhism, too. Holy cattle.
As a kid, I was never excessively influenced by the science reporting in the media. But many kids are heavily influenced. And I am sure that the people whose thinking is otherwise similar to mine would be totally repelled from science by similar programs.
Click the picture for the full 41-minute video as offered by the CATO Institute server.
Sean Hannity and his colleagues at Fox have have shot a program called The Green $windle. It mostly focuses on the politics and the history of the societal tumor we call environmentalism.
The program begins with The Silent Spring and The Population Bomb but it mentions the facts that and the reasons why the alarmist celebrities and institutions gradually became visible, credible, and powerful.
The second half of the video is dedicated to the ClimateGate and to the cap-and-trade policies and the grey carbon "economy" in general.
Steve Heston has just informed me about something that happened last week and that I have completely missed. Jim Parsons won an Emmy for the best lead actor in comedy series! No Bazinga here. Dr Sheldon Cooper for the win. ;-)
Here is his, somewhat uncharacteristically unscientific, acceptance speech:
I always feel a bit strange if I partly congratulate myself. But Parsons gave the role in The Big Bang Theory much more than just myself. ;-) So congratulations! This first Emmy for a string theorist is a hugely deserved award.
Those who watched a Czech public TV channel in the morning could have seen a nuclear explosion in the Krkonoše Mountains during an otherwise boring breakfast program that normally shows weather at different places, especially touristic targets in the mountains.
Who was behind it? No, it wasn't Putin. It was an artistic group called Ztohoven which means "away out of it" but it also sounds identical to the phrase "one hundred excrements". Most likely, Roman Týc was the main spiritual father. This time, they hacked a web camera. But they have already produced several practical jokes of this kind in the past, usually featuring a question mark that complains about the ability of media and commercials to manipulate people.
For example, ex-president Havel used to place a huge heartsuit at the Prague Castle. While some people thought that the Prague Castle became a whorehouse, Ztohoven hid one-half of it the heartsuit that it was changed into a question mark.
While the Czech TV wants to sue them, I tend to agree with some commenters that similar events are probably necessary to teach people how to doubt and rationally think about the news in the media.
And that's the memo.
Start Zwentendorf: nuclear power plants
Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech minister of foreign affairs, argued in an interview for Austrian press that attacks against the Czechs have become a national sport of Austria. He said that the people who protest the Czech nuclear power plant are morons and that Temelín is safer than many German nuclear power plants simply because it is newer.
Meanwhile, the Austrian "Stop Temelín" organization that has been organizing blockades of the borders has a new sister organization. It is called "Start Zwentendorf". :-) You can check that it is a sister organization by comparing its logo with the logo of the Austrian movement.
The Czech activists demand that the Austrian government protects the environment from pollutants produced by coal burning by a quick launch of the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant, 40 kilometers from the Czech border, which was terminated by 50.4 percent of the voters in a 1978 referendum. They will also be blocking the borders, using similar yellow costumes as their Austrian friends.
The treaty about the new plant should be signed in Melk, just like the treaties about Temelín, to make the place easier to memorize. Once Zwentendorf is running, the "Start Zwentendorf" movement will cease to exist and its agenda will be transferred to a new organization called "Start Zwentendorf block II". :-)
This humor is not new. A Czech anti-nuclear movement was emotionally called "Southern Bohemian Mothers": Temelín is located in Southern Bohemia. Another, pro-nuclear organization called "Southern Bohemian Daddies" was established soon afterwards. ;-)
The full AVI video (344 MB; 41:15 when played) is available at mirror 1, mirror 2. Please create your own mirrors if you offer to many others. Thanks to Frédéric...
Tonight, on May 2nd, at 7 pm, 9 pm, and midnight Eastern time, Glenn Beck will try to deflate the media hype about the global warming on CNN. He will look at the physical basis, proposed policies, as well as the somewhat Adolfian methods to impose the so-called "scientific consensus".
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.
Although I think that Martin Durkin's The Great Global Warming Swindle is more professional a piece of work, it is not the only documentary of its kind. In 2004, CBC (Canada) has produced a similar 45-minute-long film, and it has been available on YouTube for two weeks or so.
It discusses many topics that are not covered in the Swindle such as the hockey stick graph, from the viewpoint of Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas.
Figure 1: Do the polar bears really feel the heat?
Another movie about the same topic is Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: what you're not being told about the science of climate change. This program may also be found on YouTube and Google Video.
This show from February 2007 is kind of amusing. Larry King has invited Prof Richard Lindzen (MIT), Julian Morris, the boss of the IPN think tank, together with two representatives of the scientific consensus. The contrast between their approaches couldn't be more striking.
Lindzen analyzes the forces that actually drive various phenomena such as the Gulf stream (winds that are inseparable from the rotation of Earth and that dominate heat transport) or storms (the temperature difference between the equator and poles that is predicted to shrink). He views alarmism as a children's game in which children hidden in the dark closet are trying to scare each other as much as they can.
Julian Morris discusses the economic impact of various changes of the climate rationally, as an economist. He compares the wealth of the future generations in poor nations with the riches of the present generation in rich nations: the first group will be wealthier. He argues that they will have enough resources to adapt to any change except for a global collapse.
On the other hand, there is an "alternative scientist" named Bill Nye on the show who "calculates", among other things, that the textbook material Lindzen explains is superseded by "consensus scientists" whose voice is exactly 100,000 times more powerful. Not bad. Well, an encouraging first step for the alarmists would be to win at least one debate with the skeptics i.e. to get above 50%. :-)
Nye repeats some of the most meaningless alarmist news from tabloids, including the termination of the Gulf Stream (something that is clearly not happening, as observations show).
It is very obvious that Bill Nye's knowledge about these issues is equivalent to a very rough & incomplete reading of the summary of policymakers of the IPCC AR4 report (plus a few sentences from Al Gore's movie) which is itself already very naive and oversimplified. You can see how incredibly proud Nye is that he can pronounce "thermohaline" and how patiently he describes one of the most advanced parts of his knowledge, namely the motivation for the term "greenhouse gas", to the spectators for whom his superficial account is still too deep (Al Gore is showing the same patience - they're targeting people with IQ about 75.)
Heidi Cullen, if it's her, reminds me of some of those attractive but very limited women - poultry brains as we would call them - who would be enthusiastically parroting a standardized sequence of communist dogmas during the socialist era in Czechoslovakia. Cullen flatly states that Morris' analysis of priorities is just "false", without offering a glimpse of a justification of her statement. Unless you think that the general and silly religious comment "the environment is where we live so it must always be the #1 priority" is counted as a justification, of course.
If you listen to the show, Cullen and Nye have almost nothing to say besides childish prayers to the greatness of the IPCC Summary Holy Scripture and some confusion spread by certain journalists: it's literally about five ideological sentences that they are able to say about the climate. They're just copying this silliness from each other and there is no one among them who could explain others that the emperor is a socialist without clothes. Everyone talks about consensus but in this consensus, there is almost no one who has some idea what's actually going on - but surely, such a person must exist in between the 2499 other bureaucrats and scientists, must it not? 2499 is such a high number, almost like 10^{350}. With a high number, one doesn't need any arguments, they clearly seem to think. If we triple the funding for these people, this certainty will surely triple, too, won't it?
Incidentally, Mars warmed up by 0.65 degrees Celsius between 1975 and 2000, four times faster than Earth, see Nature or this blog.
How easy it is suddenly to construct models showing that the significant climate change on Mars is natural - as long as it is away from what they consider the center of the Cosmos, namely Earth, where even a much smaller warming surely can't be natural because this is where God, Gaia, and Al Gore have headquarters. ;-)
In fact, their model is 25 times better than needed because it predicts a 0.65 C warming of Mars per year, not per 25 years as observed. ;-) But it's hard to hide their satisfaction with their great work.
At the very end, Nye indirectly asks Lindzen whether he is a heretic i.e. whether he believes that the climate change and/or a two-Fahrenheit-degree change is not a problem. As Lindzen answers that it is not a problem, you can see Nye getting angry. These people are religious zealots.
And that's the memo.
Additional frequently visited climate articles on this weblog
The documentary is much better than I expected and I think that it looks much better than "Doomsday called off". The director of TGGWS and the boss of Wag TV, Martin Durkin, is a "right-wing Marxist" whose main motivation is to allow the third world to get richer. Well, I certainly agree that they have the right. There are some funny moments - for example Margaret Thatcher is painted as the ultimate mother of man-made global warming ;-) because of her complex strategy to promote nuclear energy but there seems to be a lot of good science in the documentary, too.
And there are some minor bugs - e.g. a wrong statement about the amount of CO2 produced by volcanoes. If you want to know which scientist is gonna complain that he has been misrepresented, it is Carl Wunsch. Well, just like in many similar cases, there are two Wunsches. One of them is a rational scientist who has contributed some of his technical knowledge to the documentary. The other Wunsch is controlled by his brainwashing movement and generates scientifically vacuous, alarmist, and unfriendly politicized misinterpretations of the documentary and his role in it on RealClimate.ORG.
If you kindly allow me to add one more minor criticism of Durkin's work, I also think that the self-confidence with which the solar / cosmic ray theory was promoted was a little bit too high. There are several high-profile skeptics I know - including myself - who have certain doubts about this theory. Nevertheless, some of the graphs in the documentary were new for me and quite impressive. I've checked that they can be found in serious scientific literature but still, one must be aware of a certain kind of cherry-picking that was needed to make the case for a new complete theory really strong.
The quality of tricks and dramatization is however very good - at least in the same league as Al Gore's movie.
Debate
Channel 4 wants to stay hot so they plan a TV debate about global warming for April. Ofcom has received 145 complaints from warming religious fanatics. ;-) Channel 4 has received 758 calls and e-mails that were mostly (6:1) in favor of the show.
Original text written on March 6th
On Thursday March 9th, 2007, at 9 pm, the British Channel 4 - not BBC - is going to air
revealing some basic facts about the greatest hoax every perpetrated on the civilized nations. The program is supposed to be full of experts. They will promote some of the theories about the influence of the Sun or the cosmic rays.
Another, more reliable insight that should be there is the explanation why we know almost for sure that in the correlation of CO2 and temperatures in the ice core records, temperature was the cause and the CO2 concentration was its consequence - even though many fraudsters find it very convenient to create the impression (or fog) that it could be the other way around.
There should be many scientists on the program. One of them is the first Canadian climatology PhD, Dr Timothy Ball, who appeared on Foxnews' Hannity & Colmes last night and did a great job: video.
These copies were removed one by one, after millions of viewers saw them.
Not directly related to the movie
On April 1st, I reorganized this page and put all things that are not directly related to the documentary here. The original text from March 6th, 2007, said:
In parts of Massachusetts, we have the coldest March day since 1950 while Sabine Hossenfelder's bike has re-emerged from a glacier because the temperature jumped above balmy -22 Celsius degrees in Waterloo, Canada and reached -19 degrees (although it feels like -27 Celsius degrees). Record cold temperatures are also in Ottawa, Canada, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, New York (where many schools are closed), West Virginia (where people are dying).
That's a good opportunity to remind everyone that most proponents of the global warming theory are crackpots.
Incidentally, Feynman at Caltech asks whether solar variability is behind the climate change in Advances of space research.
Back to the main topic...
And then I continued with the comments about the documentary.
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