úterý 29. března 2022

Steve Koonin responds to an article in SciAm

This text was posted on The Reference Frame on June 3rd, 2021, and censored through a Google AdSense request on March 29th, 2022. The Disqus discussion thread is available.

SciAm rejected to publish the following response by Dr S. Koonin
Koonin responds to a Scientific American article by Oreskes et al.

Scientific American has published a criticism of me and my recent book, Unsettled. Most of that article’s 1,000 words are scurrilous ad hominem and guilt-by-association aspersions from the twelve co-authors. Only three scientific criticisms are buried within their spluttering; here is my response to each them.

Creatures behind Malone's Twitter ban deserve the most stringent punishment

This text was originally posted on December 30th, 2021, and censored on The Reference Frame by a Google AdSense request on March 29th, 2022. The Disqus discussion thread is available.

In the morning, I was totally shocked (and I am still immensely angry, four hours later) when I learned that Twitter banned the main co-inventor of mRNA vaccine technology that runs the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, aside from others, Robert Malone MD. An account with more than 500,000 followers disappeared in a split second.

I just can't fathom how the aßholes behind such bans psychologically operate. They must know very well that relatively to Dr Malone, they are just worthless stinky piles of šit who know absolutely nothing about vaccines. But the immense fanatical group think in their corrupt environment somewhat manages to persuade them that they have the right to dictate who is "right" about the vaccination campaign and rob this important scientist from the right to speak on the very subject he founded. They must believe that it's just fine what they are doing and they will not be held responsible and executed. I beg to differ.

Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff (1949-2021/2022)

This blog post was censored by a Google AdSense request on March 29th, 2022, and originally posted on The Reference Frame on January 3rd, 2022. The Disqus discussion thread is available.

My sister in the French Riviera just informed me about doubly sad news. Both Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff died of Covid at Parisian "Georges-Pompidou" ICUs; see some French Google News. I think that among victims of the disease, they were closest to me personally (although I am uncertain about the cause of one death of a much older man).

These faces of popular science shows on French TV screens (most famously, Temps X in 1979-1985) had a genuine passion for science and obtained PhDs in theoretical physics. While I wouldn't see their dissertation as a fully meaningful foundation for further exciting research, I think that the papers were at least comparable with the average work that can earn PhDs. Or, I can't resist to make the comparison, with Pierfrancesco's recent paper. But their combination of the concepts was much more passionate and mathematically artistic (and spending more energy with mathematically nontrivial structures and patterns including quantum groups and the KMS state). Their writing was a piece of art that greatly resembled real papers about similar topics and with similarly many equations.

The term "Bogdanov affair" was invented to claim that they have staged a Sokal-like hoax; that was clearly nonsense, they genuinely and obviously believed their work to have been great science. With my roughly neutral approach (combined with some self-evidently positive underlying emotions), I was sufficiently unusual and they liked it. They also helped me to publish a popular book about theoretical physics that discussed many "regular" topics but that has used some of the concepts (and combinations) from their papers as a launchpad.

pondělí 28. března 2022

Global warming: Nobel Prize in Physics has become a joke, too

This text was posted on The Reference Frame on October 5th, 2021, and censored by a Google AdSense request in March 2022. Death to totalitarian lying ecoterrorists.
The Disqus discussion is here.



Yesterday, Scandinavian officials announced that the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to some folks who discovered the receptors of temperature and touch which sounds like interesting biophysics (in fact, a better candidate for a physics prize than what we discuss below). However, minutes ago, a new shock awaited us, especially 1/2 of the announcement is utterly shocking.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
Giorgio Parisi got one-half
for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales
which is acceptable although I would obviously vote No. Giorgio Parisi has been a top notch particle physicist who has worked on QCD, partons, asymptotic freedom, Monte Carlo simulations, and even SUSY, and co-authored with men like Virasoro, to show that he has really been close to "my field" (his collaboration distance from me is 3, through Ferrara and Freedman). He increasingly focused on things like spin glasses, complexity, behavior of flocks of birds and planetary systems, and similar things.

Complexity-related ideas may be interesting but none of them is true Nobel Prize-level material – well, with this drop of the Nobel Prize, my assertion just became tautologically false.

sobota 19. února 2022

Nuclear energy is far from sufficient for carbon neutrality

Censored on The Reference Frame, too

While Czech PM Babiš spoke self-confidently here in Czechia, he didn't achieve much in Brussels.

He didn't really veto the insane EU gr@tin plans for carbon neutrality by 2050. Instead, along with Hungary, they agreed with these pledges – it was enough for the EU to promise that both Hungary and Czechia may maintain and expand nuclear power plants.



Meanwhile, Poland was granted an exemption from the carbon neutrality push. Good for them. It shows that they have better negotiators; but carbon neutrality at the national level would clearly be an even greater shock for Poland than for Czechia and Hungary. But now, Poland has a huge advantage relatively to everyone else. I think that we should officially donate the land beneath our coal power plants to Poland – and/or register our ČEZ power utility as a Polish company – so that these good old power plants may continue running without any harassment by the climate fearmongers.

úterý 13. dubna 2021

Virus, bacterium species have to fight for survival, too

...and almost all of them lose this battle...

I was immensely bothered by an anonymous user's comment under my analysis of the Czech population pyramid and Covid-19.
Traveller wrote: Any mention of "natural" herd immunity should have a mandatory disclaimer that, to date, the only ways humans have acquired herd immunity against any virus has been via vaccines.
The claim that this troll wants to make "mandatory" is dumb beyond imagination but at the same moment, you can detect quite some incredible amount of arrogance in the simple sentence. If she or he had tools to do so, any scientifically literate comments about viruses and bacteria would be banned. This is no funny business.



Joseph Stalin (right) de facto banned all of genetics in the Soviet Union (as a capitalist pseudoscience) and even Czechoslovakia, the place where Řehoř Mendel found the laws of genetics, was affected by this insane bastardization of life sciences. At least, Lysenkoism that was encouraged (Trofim Lysenko speaks on the photograph, far left) was a version of Lamarckism, a not too distant cousin of Darwin's correct theory. (Recall a funny question about virgins that the great physicist Lev Landau asked to Lysenko.) This troll would like to ban Darwin's evolution along with all the conceivable relatives and all of common sense in her or his country – and maybe globally. We simply mustn't allow the likes of Stalin to do things that he has done against the dignity, freedom, and survival of the people and the fundamental pillars of the civilization.

pátek 27. listopadu 2020

Mundia and Modia

Note Nov 27th, 2020: Amazingly, in the Stalinist campaign at the end of the Trump presidency, Google censored this December 22nd, 2018 blog post on my English blog. I try to post it here. Some 30+ comments are lost, too much work to move everything.

John has linked to a nice fresh Brian London's reading of the 2014 essay by David Boxenhorn, Mundia & Modia: The two worlds in which we live.



Czech Christmas Mass or "Hey Master", by the 18th century Czech rural teacher Jakub Jan Ryba [James John Fish]. Singing from 1966, animations based on pictures by the famous Josef Lada. The elaborate lyrics mostly describes the social reactions to the birth of the Savior – which apparently took place somewhere in the South Bohemian countryside, a healthy region full of milk etc. close to Austria whose dialect was used as the basis for standardized Czech. Those of you who only know "Good King Wenceslaus" should realize that this mass conveys something about the actual spirit of the country previously ruled by Duke Wenceslaus I – but later, in the 18th century.

Boxenhorn mostly invented new names for the world inhabited by the people who prefer the natural-science-based perspective on the world where the laws are fixed and the truth is independent of humans, Mundia, and the world whose behavior and beliefs are all about social dynamics, Modia. I don't know why these exact words were coined. And it takes some time to get used to them. But it might be a good idea to have such special words for the "worlds".