Porcelain Unicorn

A genuinely touching mini-movie.




This story has won a 2010 short film award. The dialogue, "What is that? It's a unicorn. I've never seen one up close before. Beautiful. Get away, get away. I'm sorry," was pre-determined for all 600 contestants.

The people's runner up was Baby Time which is somewhat less serious. ;-)

Thanks to Gene, porcelainunicorn.com

Movie: Antonio Banderas looks for the Higgs boson

"The Big Bang", a 2011 movie, is coming to the U.S. movie theaters today.



See Wikipedia, review in The New York Times, IMDB, and Google News.





Spoiler alert: don't read the text below

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.

Back from AFO 2011

Some comments about the contest and the movies have been added

Hi! Sorry for the week of absence. I am back from AFO 2011, International Festival of Science Documentary Films, in the historical Moravian city of Olomouc - where I was a Czech jury member. They kindly picked me "because they didn't understand a word in my 2009 stringy lecture after 'The Elegant Universe' but they liked it".



It's been a great experience and I've met lots of fascinating and fun people and participated in many social interactions.

I only had my iPod Touch with me, avoided computers, and suffered from a limited Wi-Fi access. So you may imagine that the amount of unsolved tasks on the Internet that are waiting for me right now is immense. ;-)




In the context of the festival, I have watched several dozens of Czech as well as international documentaries and I actually plan to write something about them - and about various stories - although it is impossible to cover the gigabytes of impressions and data that are flowing through my skull. You really can't expect this blog to be a mirror of my life, especially not in the weeks when my life is dominated by offline processes. ;-)

This blog entry is likely to be updated but right now I am overloaded, sorry.

Some non-AFO news

I am aware that the XENON100 experiment has claimed that dark matter can't be detected even with 5 times higher sensitivity than what was previously available.

Also, D0 seems to shockingly contain a similar 150-GeV bump (see page 108) like CDF although they haven't published a separate analysis of it.

Israel approved its CERN membership today, so the process of entry is probably completed now!

A new skeptical book about the climate, "Climate Coup" edited by Patrick Michaels, has been released: buy via amazon.com.

Coral reefs, one of the main emotional symbols of the climate catastrophicism, defied predictions of a 40% drop and stayed pretty much constant in the last decade. And I don't even have to tell you what happened with the prediction of 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

On Monday, Wal-Mart will announce it's going "back to basics" which means that it will eliminate the focus on biofood, green products, Priuses, and similar stuff. People often ask how the companies could have made more profit with all this hot air. The answer is that they were not making profit: Wal-Mart was losing for years. It just hasn't paid any attention to this fact.

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Back to the film festival: jury, winners

There were three juries: about 6 local students in a student jury, about 5 international film professionals in the international jury, and 4 Czech people in our Czech jury. In the latter group, your humble correspondent was joined by Mr Martin Uhlíř, a journalist from Respekt, a serious social magazine; by Prof Miloň Potměšil, a local expert in special pedagogics who has also spent some time in the Greater Boston; and Dr Alice Červinková, a top Czech feminist. I kid you not. ;-)

Of course, we didn't really fight. However, I think that the festival was ultimately totally un-ideological - especially when it comes to global warming (which was largely absent) as well as feminism (which didn't have any monopoly to interpret various social gender-related issues). That was very refreshing.

The (numerous) viewers as well as our Czech jury chose "Save Edwards", about a family with a kid who suffers from the Edwards Syndrome (they rejected abortion despite general expectations that it's the only possible answer to the genetic test), to be the winner of the Czech contest.

The student jury chose its winner, "Chernobyl, a natural history?", a French 90-minute document about the ability of Nature to adapt to seemingly unfavorable conditions (especially wild life in Chernobyl). It was also the international document that attracted the highest number of viewers - the very big hall was overflooding, the demand exceeded the supply of chairs by a factor of two or so (the Fukushima echoes played a role again).

Note that this Czech students' winner essentially carries a pro-industrial message. That deeply contrasts with the international jury's choice: "Plug and Pray". In that document, an old guy (Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT) who has worked in IT for decades (and invented "ELIZA" in 1966) reveals how he hates it and that artificial intelligence and robotics bring nothing to the mankind, a point that Ray Kurzweil, the other main protagonist, doesn't really disprove. The difference in "political correctness" between the Czechs and non-Czechs is striking even though one could say that 1/2 of our jury was politically correct, too. ;-)

The non-statutory prize of the Universe magazine - which was delivered by me because the editor was giving a lecture about photography and journalism in Prague - was given to "My Great Grandfather Chingis Khan" about the genetic composition of the Czech nation and the way how different sorts of bloods were combining and are combining. The editor who chose this winner appreciated that it fights against racism. A similar non-statutory prize of the History and the Present magazine was given to "I haven't harmed anyone" about the collaborators with the communist secret agency.

I was happy to meet Ms Markéta Baňková who was reading from her "Magpie in the Land of Entropy"; I have acted as a sort of science adviser for her book of physics fables, an unexpected bestseller that just unsurprisingly won the Magnesia Litera contest for the best Czech books. Congratulations to her!

There were 13 other Czech competing documents but I will probably not translate my notes about all the contestants - it would be a kilobyte for each. And I liked lots of internation documents - about Lise Meitner; history of chemistry; movies and discussions about asexuality; Laughology - everything about the laughter (it's much older than humor; children don't have to learn it; there were pandemics of laughter in Africa; Inuits needed for survival; the most contagious laughter in the world is the winner because it sounds piggy); about suicides; about disappearing authentic playing by the children (and the consequences) whose time is increasingly masterminded by the parents, schools, and institutions and who are being monitored by GPS.

Next year, they will try to attract Brian Cox to Olomouc, among many other plans.

Meanwhile, there is an ongoing generic film festival "Finále" in my hometown of Pilsen and I have nothing to do with it. ;-)

Debbi: Touch the Sun

Just watching the Second Czecho Slovak Pop Idol. Shocked to hear that this song is not coming from abroad. This song has won the "Song of the Year" award - and appeared in a Metaxa ad.




Moreover, Debbi, the singer, is not only Czech but she was also the first eliminated girl during the First Czecho Slovak Pop Idol - and I even agreed that she had to go.

Well, more analytically, it still looks like it's the song - and, less so, the interpreter - that makes it OK. ;-)

As in the case of hundreds of important enough songs, you may also listen to "Touch the Sun" by your humble correspondent.

Václav Havel, the film director

Václav Havel (74), a playwright, a famous Czech dissident, and a former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, has become a film director, too.



I have only seen the theater version of "Leaving" so far - but the Czech movie theaters are presenting the first movie directed by Havel today. It is based on the same play.




An elite selection of Czech actors agreed to participate in the project because Havel is just a huge authority in these corners. On the other hand, the movie has already received extremely weak ratings - such as 27% on CSFD (Czech and Slovak Film Database).

As far as the trailer is representative of the movie, I find it visually attractive - it seems like fun - and I mostly liked the theater play, too. Of course, it's very hard to separate one's impressions from the general knowledge and experience with Havel as a politician and a human being. I am convinced that most of the ratings reflect the people's relationship to Havel. Moreover, there's no doubt that Havel's plays are not a material for mass culture.

In the movie, Chancellor Riegr is resigning from politics. He's deeply shaken although he tries to suggest otherwise. Most of the people around him have been glued to Riegr because of his power and the money - and they are disappearing accordingly

Natalie Portman, the scientist

Natalie Angier of the New York Times studied the overlap between the movie industry and science:

Natalie Portman, Oscar Winner, Was Also a Precocious Scientist

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.

As you know, e.g. the global warming hysteria is primarily endorsed by the Hollywood because Hollywood is primarily composed of high school dropouts.




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.

Nerdy girls need love too

Amy Lee Radigan (British Columbia) has recorded a song that became a kind of hit.



160,000 views in three weeks is not bad. Sheldon Cooper and sonic screwdriver are among the guys she has a crush on. ;-)




She's recording a CD that will be available in April via amyleeradigan.com.

Via Vancouver Sun

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Watson vs human in Jeopardy: tie



Humans are no longer needed for knowledge TV contests. IBM's artificially intelligent device, Watson, was as good as his better human opponent - despite the fact that Watson has made a mistake that would be silly if it were made by a human: repeating a wrong answer of his foe.

However, computers have clearly become good enough to, for example, write papers on loop quantum gravity. Apple whose products are made in China is already preparing a competing machine. Each iWatson will have a compressed Chinese worker in it. ;-)

Stephen Wolfram has explained differences between Watson and Wolfram|Alpha on his blog.

NYT: Skeptical playwright much better than the worriers

On Friday, Jeremy Lovell of ClimateWire wrote the following article for the New York Times:

Climate Change Skeptics Out-Dramatize Believers in London

During the last month, two plays hit the stages of London theaters: "Greenland" was created by a committee of four worriers (using the words of The Independent) while "The Heretic", written by the playwright Richard Bean, presented the skeptical viewpoint.



Scientic pragmatism and rap dialogue: Juliet Stevenson as Dr Diane Cassell and Johnny Flynn as student Ben in The Heretic at the Royal Court. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

The New York Times actually chose the skeptical play to be a clear winner. While "Greenland" is described as a naive propaganda that licks the buttocks of the environmental establishment so thoroughly that even the most hardcore alarmists feel the need to vomit while watching the play (they didn't use exactly the same words, but they meant the same thing), "The Heretic" is a deep psychological probe into the life of an honest geodynamics lecturer Diane Cassell who is a "scientist and therefore doesn't believe in anything" and who becomes increasingly ostracized by her less ethical colleagues for claiming the obvious, namely that there's no proof of man-made climate change.




While the worriers' propaganda piece criticized the United Nations for not becoming an alarmist organization on steroids while in Copenhagen, "The Heretic" focused on the misconduct of the IPCC. At any rate, it's one of the first cases when a liberal paper such as the New York Times admits that skeptics actually offer a more intelligent material than the worriers.

In the past, you could see many left-wing writers who admitted that the skeptics were (and almost universally are) better debaters etc. But this comparison was always presented with a dismissive tone, one that attempted to suggest that the skeptics were better liars. This tone is now gone. The skeptics simply did a better job in analyzing a problem that divides the contemporary society, NYT admits.

The Guardian has also posted a (mixed) review of The Heretic, praising especially the first half, and criticizing especially the second one (that made the play 3 hour long, that's really a lot).



Company in "Greenland". The Wall Street Journal also thinks it is a garbage of arts: click the picture.

See 15+ other reviews of The Heretic and a similar number of reviews of Greenland, the failed warmist committee's propaganda piece.

The Benefactor Factor

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.

Mystery of Mona Lisa's intelligent smile unmasked

AFP and many others have just announced the newly discovered answer to the old and well-known question:

Where does the mysterious intelligence residing in Mona Lisa's smile come from?

Thousands of women have been painted but none of them comes so many standard deviation from the average. Where did her special smile originate?

The answer by Silvano Vinceti, the boss of Italian national heritage committee, is as simple as ingenious answers often like to be: Mona Lisa was actually a man. ;-) It's not hard to see that Vinceti is almost certainly right:



This is Salai as John the Baptist. Salai was a nickname of gay Leonardo da Vinci's gay lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti.

His similarity to Ms Mona Lisa is hard to hide:



Besides the similar mouths and noses, Vincetti also points out that the eyes of Mona Lisa hide two letters, "L" and "S" which stand for "Leonardo" and "Salai" - a statement rejected by the officials in Louvre that possesses the picture of Mr Mona Lisa. ;-)

(I saw it two years ago, Louvre is amazing.)




The traditional "identity" attributed to Ms Mona Lisa is Lisa del Giocondo. Caprotti himself - Mr Mona Lisa - painted the only other portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. It's called Monna Vanna:



Unless Caprotti was a very unrealistic painter, Monna Vanna seems to be much less similar to Mona Lisa than Caprotti himself. Monna Vanna has much sharper nose than Mona Lisa, to mention one difference, and her shoulders and bicepses actually look more masculine than those of Caprotti (or Mona Lisa, for that matter).

To be even more accurate, I am convinced that Monna Vanna has a much higher protein-to-fat ratio than Mona Lisa or Caprotti. :-)

What do you think?

Chuck Norris in Czech commercials

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. ;-)

Chuck Norris recently protested against climate treaties as a method to enslave America and create a world government.

See also Wall Street Journal



Chuck Norris holding a large, traditional Czech carp (WSJ blogs)

Merry Christmas

New articles are being posted below this one, so don't stop reading...



Merry Christmas to the TRF community!

Needless to say, I am not wishing any good Christmas to the environmentalists because it would be insulting for them. According to environmentalists, Everything that is wrong with humanity [...] is summed up in Christmas. Among other things, it is a turkey genocide day, we heard from Ethanol Greenfart, before he recycled his granny and wrote a book about it. ;-)




Yes, I mean a White Christmas. In 2010, global warming caused exactly the same winter as we have always been used to. So enjoy it. ;-)

Czech verses to memorize the periodic table

I wonder whether the English counterparts of the verses below exist. But we have a whole sophisticated system to remember the whole periodic table.



Translations of the Czech verses into English are attached. Unfortunately, they are not excessively useful to memorize the elements unless you know the Czech language. But I hope that some readers will appreciate how realistic and witty the little stories are.

Truth to be told, the Czech users also need to know a couple of English and German words - including "because", "air", and "lehrer" - to fully appreciate the product. :-)

Columns:

H Li Na K Rb Cs Fr

Helenku líbal na kolínku robustní cestář Frantík.
Helene was being kissed on her knee by the robust road-mender Francis.

Be Mg Ca Sr Ba Ra

Běžela Magda canyonem, srážela banány rádiem.
Magdalene was running through the canyon, she was knocking the bananas by her radio.

B Al Ga In Tl

(Doesn't need any Czech language.)
Bulgaria International.

C Si Ge Sn Pb

Co si, Gertrudo, snědla? Olovo.
What did you eat, Gertruda? Lead.

N P As Sb Bi

Náš pes asi sbaštil bizona.
Our dog has probably devoured a bison.

O S Se Te Po

Ó, slečno, sejměte tenkou ponožku (či podprsenku).
Oh, madam, remove your thin sock (or bra).

F Cl Br I At

Fluor, chlor, bróm, iod, astat
(No specific poems, easy to remember.)

He Ne Ar Kr Xe Rn

Helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, radon
(No specific poems, easy to remember.)

Rows of transition metals

Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Co Ni Cu Zn

Scandovali ti Václavové, ceří mnohé federální comitety ničemných čumilů zničili.
Shouting were those Václavs who have destroyed many federal committees of contemptible rubbernecks. (L.M., November 1989)

Y Zr Nb Mo Tc Ru Rh Pd Ag Cd

Yvona zradila nebeské mocnosti, ty co ruskou rudou hvězdou podráždily agresivního diplomata.
Yvonne has betrayed the celestial powers that have irritated an aggressive diplomat (CD) by a Russian red star. (L.M., November 1989)

Lanthanides

Ce Pr Nd Pm Sm Eu Gd Tb Dy Ho Er Tm Yb Lu

Celá Praha nadšeně pomohla smutnému Eulenšpíglovi, když ten blbec dýchal horký ér, tímto: ýbla lůžkem.
The whole city of Prague has happily helped the sad Eulenspiegel when the idiot was breathing hot air, by this: they moved his bed. (L.M., November 1989)




Actinides

Th Pa U Np Pu Am Cm Bk Cf Es Fm Md No Lr

Tohle, pane, umím napsat půlkou amerického computeru, bekause californské a estonské firmy modelují nové lehrery.
Sir, I can write this with one half of an American computer because Californian and Estonian firms are modeling new lehrers (teachers). (L.M., November 1989)

Modern superheavy elements

Rf Db Sg Bh Hs Mt Ds Rg Cn Uut Uuq Uup Uuh Uus Uuo

(No poems are available at this moment.)

The quality is guaranteed, I've remembered the poems for more than 20 years.

If you can fill gap in the English culture, you will surely offer your verses in the comments. ;-)

Neutralino Records at CERN publish Resonance

No, sorry, the LHC hasn't yet announced the discovery of a neutralino, the most likely "lightest supersymmetric particle" (LSP) that could constitute most of the dark matter.



The ATLAS Boogie (blues). The video may appear on the individual page only. Links to extra audio snippets are below.

Instead, the Neutralino Records is the trademark under which music DVDs and CDs recorded by the CERN physicists working for the ATLAS experiment are being released. So far, they have released Resonance, a double CD with 36 tracks in total, and a DVD:

ATLAS Resonance Music (main web page)

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CD 1 (country, pop, includes audio snippets)
CD 2 (classical music, includes audio snippets)

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DVD (with two trailers, lots of footage from CERN; the ATLAS Boogie is blues music about the Higgs etc. at ATLAS embedded above)

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Buy it from December 6th (on iTunes and elsewhere)

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Fundraising (happy kids)
contact (with a trailer with interviews)

When we talk about the symbols of the ATLAS' search for supersymmetry, here is George Redlinger:



He is a co-coordinator of the ATLAS supersymmetry group. Yes, his plate says "SUSY DM" - or "supersymmetric dark matter". ;-) See the Symmetry Magazine (copied from Brookhaven Today).

The anthem of ATLAS collisions

Go to the individual page of this blog entry or to YouTube if you see no video above.

Your humble correspondent is proud to have been the community organizer who has convinced the Canadian musician Don Garbutt to compose the candidate anthem of the ATLAS collisions. It wasn't so hard to convince him. ;-)

However, if your music taste is as conservative as mine, you should listen to the clip about 10 times before you decide whether you love it or not. :-)




Yes, variations on the French and Swiss anthems appear in the composition, near the French-Swiss border. If you don't understand the words, the video says:

The ATLAS experiment, studying the LHC collisions at seven teraelectronvolts.

The [?] of the Standard Model for gauge fields, gluon fields [?], the Higgs, Yukawa couplings.

[Boom.]

Dark matter, neutralino, Higgs bosons, CP-violation, extra dimensions.

An exciting prospect. ;-)

The music features tracks individually imaged in "3-D Sound", using hrtf signal processing algorithms to simulate a "virtual surround" effect. Mr Garbutt had to dig up his old "Higgs Field" Logic session, to remix it minus the vocalizations. The 3-D is most evident in headphones. Maybe someday these animations will be output in 3-D, and then we will really be rocking!

I am not sure what happened with the contest trying to find the right sound for the LHC collisions that ATLAS organized some months ago. But if Don Garbutt could have been beaten by someone else, I would indeed love to hear the winner.

What I watched as a kid

When it comes to modern, classically sounding music that will always be connected with science in my ears, I can't fail to mention Vangelis' "To the Unknown Man" which was the theme music of "Wide Open the Windows of the Universe" (Okna vesmíru dokořán), a 1981 Czechoslovak popular program on astronomy and astrophysics that featured (and made famous) top Czech astrophysicist Dr Jiří Grygar who was also the main person behind the technical content.

The script for the program - about celestial bodies, cosmology, but also relativity in general etc. - was written by Dr Vladimír Železný, the founder and long-serving director of TV NOVA, the commercially most successful private TV station in the post-socialist Europe. As Dr Jiří Grygar told me three weeks ago, no person in the Czech TV industry has yet matched Železný's ability to become accurate about the science yet transform it into a mainstream piece of TV art.

The two Gentlemen ceased to be friends at some point because of some TV-related politics. It's sad, of course, because I have a respect for both of them.

Václav Havel: Leaving: pretty good

I just watched the Czech version of "Leaving" by Czech playwright Václav Havel who happened to be employed as the president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.



Four minutes from an English version

It's a play about a chancellor, Mr Wilhelm Rieger, who is just leaving his office. He is soon to be replaced by Mr Vlastimil Klein.




I was afraid that the play would be full of moralizing - and that one of the politicians would actually be Havel himself while the new one would be Klaus - as the similarity with the name "V. Klein" suggests - and he would be compared with the morally superior Havel character.

However, these worries turned out to be unjustified. The old politician, Mr Rieger, is almost nothing like Havel himself (at least I hope and think). He's a politician who didn't do anything besides politics in his life - so he's still full of political slogans. And as he's losing his villa, respect of the family and girlfriend, and collaborators, he clearly suffers.

Mr Klein himself, the new chancellor, plays a largely passive role in the play although his decisions reveal some kind of common corruption in politics. His friends are immediately cleaned of any wrongdoing, for example, while people on the other side are suddenly found to have crossed various boundaries. Who was at the top, quickly drops to the bottom, and vice versa.

At the very end, Havel decides not to terminate the play too early - which would resemble a play by Chekhov. Instead, the former fan of Mr Rieger, an attractive young female political scientist, becomes a fan of Mr Klein who informs us what Molotov told him on a cocktail party. :-)

The play was often interrupted by Havel's voice. Havel would share his experiences and difficulties from the moments when he was writing the play - e.g. problems with his memory about who has already left the scene. And the comments were pretty funny in most cases. For example, after 10 minutes or so, Havel announced that he had realized that nothing had happened so far but he wanted the viewers to be more grateful when the events pick up a little speed later. :-)

Of course, the question whether Havel would really be a good enough playwright who could feed himself if he were not a dissident and a top symbol of the fight against communism - and a president - is being often asked. And I tend to think that he would deserve to be a full-fledged respected playwright. I don't claim that he's among the best or brightest playwrights in the history but I do often find his works witty and pleasantly deep.

EMA: Hollywood hypocrites are saving the Earth

The Hollywood self-described "elite" are distributing the Ecoterrorist Media Awards (EMA) to each other. If your stomach is really strong, here is 18 minutes of some juicy stuff for you.



Please be careful when watching this video. If it makes you throw up, I apologize in advance. If you don't see any video, go to the individual page of this entry.

Needless to say, the abbreviation EMA was chosen to partially steal the fame of the Emmy: these green nuts are parasiting on the Emmy's achievements. They're parasiting on many other things, too.




The hypocrisy of these folks is just stunning, beyond any imagination. You hear them talking - for 18 minutes - how their children are trying to save water when they brush their teeth, and similar silly stuff.

But e.g. James Cameron apparently assumes that people won't be able to notice that he is using

3 houses in Malibu (24,000 sq ft in total - 10 times the average U.S. home), a 100-acre ranch in Santa Barbara, a JetRanger helicopter, three Harleys, a Corvette, a Ducati, a Ford GT, a collection of dirt bikes, a yacht, a Humvee firetruck, a fleet of submarines...

Nevertheless, he demands that people live with less - the same people who made him rich by watching his movies. This probably also (or primarily?) includes other rich people.

By the way, almost everyone who sees the "No Pressure" movie for the first time thinks that it had to be created by climate skeptics because it's such a painful caricature of the environmentalists' reasoning. I had thought so, too. A simple test of the data reveals that it is a real movie with the 10:10 campaign and Richard Curtis behind it.

However, in the case of the Avatar, even I still cannot believe that it was meant as a serious propaganda movie against the industry and capitalism - because if this were indeed the original purpose, then the movie had to be addressed to people whose IQ is around 75. As a propaganda display, it's just so incredibly naive...

There are blue savages and they are the nice people - the third world - and then there are the white people who are the nasty capitalists who try to hurt the blue people in order to gain profit. So the corporations that produce stuff are always evil and the savages are the saints. Yes, sure. Even when I was a boy in the kindergarten, I was mature enough not to buy a similar kind of stuff, from the communists or otherwise.

These people are also talking about the need to lower the world population. I apologize but it's not needed, and if it were needed, there would have to be at least some meritocracy in the process. If James Cameron et al. believe that the Earth is at existential risk because of the CO2 emissions, then any reasonable criterion would imply that James Cameron et al. would have to be among the first ones who would have to go.

If you agree that the notion that the CO2 is lethally risky is preposterous and a sign of the believer's hopelessly low IQ, then James Cameron should go because the mankind can't afford to have this stupid people in it. Even if you believed that the emissions were harmful, James Cameron has to go because he's among the top 0.01% of the people who would be most harmful.

There simply doesn't exist any justification of the need to lower the world population that would make the life of James Cameron sustainable. It's just amazing to think about the societal atmosphere that makes it natural for him to defend these inhuman concepts.

Via Willie Soon

Nobel prize in literature: top non-leftist Latin American writer

The 2010 Nobel prize in literature was given to

Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru, Wikipedia),

perhaps the globally most influential Latin American writer, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". He has written many essays, novels (comedies, historical novels, murder mysteries, political thrillers), and more.




What I find remarkable is that this native Peruvian writer could have been awarded despite his being right-wing these days. In the past, he would support Fidel Castro and similar stuff but he grew increasingly disenchanted which was moving him to the right side.

Llosa wrote e.g. The City and the Dogs and The Green House (no relationship to the greenhouse effect!) in the 1960s. In 1990, he was an unsuccessful presidential candidate against Fujimori. Llosa defended pro-free-market reforms.

It is surely a refreshing change after all those unknown writers who were awarded for being communists, feminists, and so on. One year is too little for me to consider the credibility of the Nobel prize in literature to be resuscitated but it is good sign, anyway.

Adventures in self-publishing an e-book novel

Guest post by Ann Houston

I'm a newbie to writing fiction. Having just completed my novel, Blind Tasting, six months ago, I immediately began pursuing traditional publication channels. I researched potential literary agents (ones who represented books in my genre) and I tailored query letters to those agents, steeling myself psychologically to receive dozens, maybe hundreds, of rejections in the hope of getting one or two offers of representation. I created a database of agencies and publishers and sent my email and snail mail query letters along with synopses and sample chapters -- according to each agent's preference. I was prepared to wait, hearing that it often took weeks, months, for agents to reply, given the volume of unsolicited work they receive.

A week after sending off the first batch of queries I came across Smashwords, a recent online self-publishing service. I had been warned by those in the literary know to shun 'vanity presses' as exploitive dead-ends, but Smashwords didn't come across as a vanity press. Smashwords was inviting authors to retain most of the royalties for their self-published e-books and they were offering access to big e-book distributors (Sony, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Amazon (pending)). Acceptable works for self-publication included both long and short pieces, fiction and non-fiction covering most genres. Mark Coker, who founded Smashwords, sees huge potential for self-publishing digital material at this point in time, given the available reading platforms now in existence. Writers don't need the bankroll and the typesetting machinery to get their works to potential readers any longer, and thus they also don't need agents and traditional publishing houses. These professions are playing a smaller role as gatekeepers in deciding what the public gets to read. (Smashwords has published over 900,000,000 words to date, which is more than 12,000 titles of average 75,000 words in length. It's actually a much larger set of titles, because many works are short pieces.)

I then had an epiphany about my own novel: in the best-case scenario, (not to be counted on) my title would not appear in print via a traditional publisher for at least 24 months. Assuming an agent liked it, they would have to shop it to editors at publishing houses, which would add more months, and assuming someone bought it, the time to publication and distribution to retail bookstores would be more months. My novel is set in an ultra-contemporary time and place, and I worried that part of its intended appeal had an expiration date. In two years it might not create the same impression I was hoping for now.




Then and there I decided to go with Smashwords. It was a very smart and gratifying decision. It was also not without some hair-tearing and time commitment. For authors considering self-publishing, let me point out the major highlights of this experience in the hopes it will help your own effort be productive and successful. By the way, a month ago Amazon announced that, for the first time, it sold more e-books online than print books for a given reporting period -- 140 e-book units to 100 print-book units.

1) The most important point is that self-publishing technology is changing rapidly; in the five months I've been exposed to it things have changed in non-trivial ways, and they will likely keep changing. Changes are occurring in a) who the providers of self-publishing are, b) the distribution channels available to different self-publishing services, c) the input formats allowed for conversion to e-book outputs, d) the reading devices available for e-books, e) the style guides to follow when formatting your e-book for a given service, f) the royalties, pricing and copy-protection options available to authors, and g) the quality of available format-conversion programs and viewers.

2) The industry appears to be converging on one standard, ePub (Apple, Sony, and Barnes & Noble use this format), but Amazon (a huge player) uses mobi, and there are others. The most important point to remember about formatting an e-book is to forget about pages and think of a continuous flow of text whose appearance to some extent (font size, font styles) is under the control of the reader. Keeping your input formatting as simple as possible will result in fewer headaches and fewer surprises in how the output looks. This constraint poses more challenges for authors with technical books containing tables and charts; it's not so difficult for fiction writers. Style guides and user forums for e-book formatting are uneven in quality and coverage, but hopefully will improve in the future. If you are a computer-oriented geek, you may be used to online forums that provide clear and useful questions and answers; fiction writers as a group aren't as technically savvy and, unfortunately, there are a lot of confusing questions and answers posted on forums and websites, regarding specific formatting details and bug reports for various devices. You may have to sift through a lot to find useful information. Smashwords does provide a free on-line Style Guide which is quite helpful in understanding how to avoid ugly output and succeed in achieving attractive output for their conversion process. Smashwords accepts only Word docs as input format, and produces a variety of outputs, including ePub and mobi, PDF, html and others via their master converter -- which is named the Meatgrinder. (Boy, that name gave me pause :-) ) I found formatting for Amazon's Digital Text Platform more confusing -- Amazon has put a lot of effort into helping the big publishing houses get their authors' titles converted to e-books, and doesn't provide as much information to self-published authors. They do respond nicely to your email questions, however. I wanted exposure on Amazon and didn't want to wait for Smashwords 'pending approval' there. (Smashwords does not restrict you from pursuing any other publishing venues, by the way.) MobiPocket and Calibre are free programs that will help authors convert their input document into suitable mobi output for Amazon. I prefer Calibre, probably because it runs on the Mac as well as PC (MobiPocket is only for PC).

3) The effort required to market a self-published work cannot be over-emphasized. I completely neglected marketing efforts of my novel prior to publishing it -- a big mistake according to the e-book marketing gurus. If you want to make a splash when the book goes public, you must already have laid publicity groundwork. Social media can provide efficient ways to market the work: write a blog, have a presence on Twitter and Facebook and link your author profile to these and other similar social media sites. What e-books need most, however, are reviews -- word-of-mouth is what sells books, and nowadays, online reader reviews (e.g., reviews on Amazon) are what creates buzz for an e-book, or printed book, for that matter. Authors of e-books need to find their piece of the 'long tail'; in traditional publishing I read that 7 percent of the titles account for 93 percent of the sales, and 85 percent of all titles never sell more than 1000 copies. There are only a very few super hits. Most authors need to find their niche -- it's probably easier now than ever to do this, via social media and all the resources the Internet makes available, but it does take time and energy. Authors of e-books must be prepared to put in some hours to help potentially interested readers find their works. But, it's pretty exciting to see your book's cover appear at a major distribution site like Amazon, Apple or Barnes & Noble, and see a review, and that you have actually sold copies of your work! I was deep into this process, and about to upload a revised version of the novel, when I finally received replies to my first batch of queries to literary agents. They were all rejections, all nicely worded and they all encouraged me to continue to seek representation out there in literary-agent land. But, they came to me months after I'd sent them, and served as a vivid reminder of how slow old publishing moves compared to digital self-publishing.

-A.C. Houston
~ author of Blind Tasting ~

http://www.blindtastingthenovel.com
http://wordtravelstheblog.com

---

(Thanks, Ann! The URLs and images added by L.M. - Ann is too modest to include them herself.)

The Social Network: a nasty movie about Facebook and Harvard

From October 1st, the first viewers will watch a new movie called "The Social Network" about the birth of Facebook. The trailer above is enough to understand that its main founder, Mark Zuckerberg, will be presented as a jerk. In particular, the statement that he was dreaming about joining the "final clubs" is almost certainly a malicious lie.




He would study at Harvard in 2003 when the Facebook was getting born. At 1:04 of the trailer above, you may see the actual old website of the Elliot House - where your humble correspondent would have two nice lunches and one fancy dinner every week in 2001-2004 because it hosted (and hosts) the headquarters of the Society of Fellows. However, Zuckerberg lived in Suite H33 of the adjacent Kirkland House - that's exactly where the murder of Justin Cosby took place.

Of course, at that time, I didn't know the name of Mark Zuckerberg, whom I probably had to physically meet many times, and if I had known it, I had immediately forgotten it. :-)

At 1:36 of the trailer, you may see the door of Maxwell-Dworkin, a key computer science building at Harvard that is physically connected to the physics department where I worked. I guess (but I am not sure) that the building in the movie is not the actual Maxwell-Dworkin Hall: much of the movie was being shot at Johns Hopkins, pretending to be Harvard.

Zuckerberg whose wealth representing about 24% of Facebook may be worth $4 billion or so was the main driver behind the creation of Facebook. While I don't want to overestimate how difficult it was to start and expand this project, it was a damn obviously viable project.

After all, most people - unfortunately - don't use the Internet to submit and read the latest preprints on physics. And most Internet users don't even follow The Reference Frame. ;-) They want to waste their time by doing the same social bullshitting that they do in the real life, too. Like, hehe, hihi, picture, it sucks - that's the kind of activity that rules the world. :-)

Because of these inherent limitations of most people, Facebook - that brought the old concept of a social network to the level of the state-of-the-art standards on the web - obviously had to become successful. Zuckerberg had to be stubborn if he wanted the website - originally bringing the web social life to the Harvard students - to ultimately emerge as an important part of the Internet. But it had to work.

He's rich enough that I would recommend him to hire his own movie team to shoot a movie that will celebrate him and trash the critics. That may be the most effective way to deal with the jealous zeros who are behind "The Social Network". ;-)

Even in the negative painting of the movie, I would probably sympathize with Zuckerberg in most cases. The lady in the committee at the end of the trailer clearly had no clue about the real world. While not being an example of a truly scholarly piece of work, Facebook was another invention that showed that Harvard mattered. They displayed a lack of contact with the reality when they were talking to the emerging billionaire as if they were talking to a 5-year-old boy who just stole a chocolate.

And her "I don't understand" is quite typical. When someone says "I don't understand" as a reply to a very clear sentence that preceded and that has a point, to say the least, then she is just damn stupid, and "Which part?" is just the most polite yet sensible reaction one can add. ;-)

Also, Facebook represents an inherent threat for the people's privacy. Obviously, their unmasked privacy is what drives the whole website. So this concept of an unmasked privacy is the main reason why people go there: it's a key that unlocks the gates to the users' satisfaction and the owners' financial heaven; the same key obviously unlocks the hell, too. ;-)

They must deal with these issues all the time. But just because the treatment of privacy isn't perfect on the real Facebook doesn't imply that the website should be viewed as a net liability. Obviously, it's not. It's worth $15 billion or so. And this money is not stolen - this value reflects the difference between the people's actual satisfaction and their dissatisfaction with the website's services.