We con the world: the flotilla speaks

Several readers have pointed out this cute video:



A million of visits in two days is not bad.

By the way, at a dinner in Cambridge, MA, Martin Luther King rebuked a student who spoke against Israel: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism." Shortly afterwards, King was murdered.

Back to the song. Of course, I had also loved the Bush parody of the same song and found it cutely pro-Bush even though it was probably not the creators' intent. ;-)

Dennis Gabor: 110th birthday

Today's Google logo

Gábor Dénes was born into a Jewish family in Budapest on June 5th, 1900 which makes it easier to calculate his age at various moments. ;-) In the World War I, he already served with the Hungarian artillery.

Of course, they lost but he didn't mind, unlike the current Hungarians who just declared the anniversary of the Trianon treaty an eternal national day of mourning. Czechs and Slovaks also lost but they became victors by creating Czechoslovakia. The Hungarians didn't have this option because it's much harder for the Hungarian freedom warriors to declare independence from the Hungarian expansive imperial bastards, especially if they're the same men. ;-)

If you follow Central European politics, you must know that Hungary also established a new law allowing ethnic Hungarians in any country to acquire the Hungarian (and dual) citizenship. Slovakia's speedy Parliament neutralized this Hungarian law on the very same day by another bill that removes the Slovak citizenship from anyone who would dare to accept the Hungarian offer and forces him or her to pay a fine. :-)

CP-violation and our origins

I was honored to be invited to an event with some exceptionally distinguished and intellectually independent participants whose names and whereabouts probably shouldn't occur here before I ask anyone for permission. So unless I miss my flight or something like that, you won't "see" me at least until Friday.



But before I leave, let me mostly agree with Sean Carroll:

Marketing CP-violation (Cosmic Variance)

To summarize, I do agree with him that it is unfortunate to use titles such as A new clue to explain existence for articles about experiments that study technical issues of the CP-violation. Dennis Overbye of The New York Times is arguably among the best U.S. newspaper journalists who write about science but yes, I do think that the meme shown especially in the titles - and, to a lesser extent, in the bodies of such articles - is misleading.

However, Overbye is very far from being the first one who has use the theme.

Google searches finally respect the law of gravity

Calling it a cover-up would be far too dramatic. But for years, Internet users were satisfied with a search engine, Google, that - much like the Standard Model - was neglecting one of the four fundamental forces of Nature: gravity. But they were aware of a dark cloud looming on a distant horizon.



Finally, Google managed to incorporate the laws of gravity into its Internet search engine. All objects should be accelerated by the Earth's gravitational field in the same way. The Internet searches are no exception. Today, Google has become consistent with the equivalence principle. Try it:

Google Gravity (click, info)

The new unified search engine works. You should actually enter a query, e.g. best physics blog, into the well-behaving box and check that all the hits behave in agreement with the equivalence principle, too. If a nitpicker complains that there are too many objects at the bottom of the screen, he can always drag the object to the top with the left mouse button pressed. Gravity and free fall don't kill you: it's only the f-word collision with the Earth that does.

I am sure you will find the new search engine very handy! ;-)

Via Mushfiq

Vladimir Arnold (1937-2010)

Sadly, Vladimir Arnold died in France yesterday, at the age of 72. As of 2009, he was actually the #1 most cited Russian scientist.

See Russia Today.

He was born in 1937 and he was provided with the standard fair Soviet quality technical education. In 1957, he solved the Hilbert 13th problem about some solutions to 7th order algebraic equations. At that time, he began to focus on symplectic geometry and topology - the science of the (classical) phase space, so to say.

In that context, he studied singularities, catastrophe theory, and co-fathered the KAM (Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser) theorem about the stability of integrable Hamiltonian systems: yes, small perturbations preserve quasiperiodic oscillations.

Asymptotic darkness vs safety and non-heterotic F-theory

F-theory models without heterotic crutches

I will mention two hep-th preprints today. The first one is

A Note on G-Fluxes for F-theory Model Building.

Joe Marsano, Natalia Saulina, and Sakura Schafer-Nameki start with a nice explanation of the role of the heterotic duals in F-theory model building. The GUT group in F-theory models is localized near singular cycles where K3-like singularities develop.

Bigger, better, faster: gluinos at the LHC

The Symmetry Magazine and SLAC Today printed an article by Eder Izaguirre and Jay Wacker, two SLAC physicists, who rightfully worship the discovery potential of the LHC.

The experts will recognize the popular text as an advertisement for their preprint with Michael Manhart,

Bigger, Better, Faster, More at the LHC

which explains that it is much easier for the LHC to find a new colored particle such as the gluino than for the Tevatron - with the 1 inverse femtobarn expected by the end of 2011 (or with less) - essentially because the new particles may have a higher energy and can be more easily distinguished from the Standard Model background.

On the picture, Dr Manhattan is realizing the plan of the SLAC physicists and is working to isolate the gluino. ;-) Click the picture for more information.

SNarXiv.ORG

One year ago, we were intrigued by viXra.org, Phil Gibbs' competitor to arXiv.org with no censorship or other quality requirements, for that matter. Unfortunately, the server hasn't attracted too many researchers and many people dare to think that the quality doesn't quite compete with that of arXiv.org, if you allow me to be unusually polite for a while.

Is there a variation of arXiv.org that would, on the contrary increase the quality? Can someone increase the sound of the content and the fame of the names of the authors? The answer is Yes. It's called:

SNarXiv.org (click)

The names and the abstract rock, don't they? If you want many more great papers of the same caliber, just press "reload". Just to be sure, you should check your sanity by playing a game where you're offered real titles and fake titles. Can you tell which one is which in much more than 50% of the cases? ;-)

The Arctic doesn't amplify global temperature swings

In the previous posting about the RSS AMSU temperatures from May 2010, I have made one obvious observation explicit. If you look at the

RSS monthly anomalies,

you will notice that the month-on-month variations of the temperatures in the first column with temperatures - namely the global mean temperature anomaly - are much smaller than the variations in the other columns, especially the fifth (Northern) and sixth (Southern) polar temperature columns.



It is often said that the temperature changes in the polar regions are more pronounced than they are in other regions. But is it true? I made a comment - a guess - that the main reason why the first column is changing much less violently is simply that it describes a larger area of the Earth's surface, namely almost the whole world, and the local fluctuations are therefore averaged out more accurately.

RSS AMSU: May 2010 cooler than May 1998

RSS AMSU (OK, I will be adding "a" for "advanced" before the "microwave sounding unit") has defended the title of the fastest source of the global monthly temperature data and their May figures are out:

Surface land & ocean v3.2 temps

With +0.588 °C of the global monthly anomaly which matches February 2010 and beats April 2010 but is smaller than January and March 2010, it was the second warmest May in the last 31 years after May 1998 when the anomaly was 0.668 °C, i.e. 0.08 °C warmer than this year.

Later, UAH AMSU reported qualitatively analogous results.



You may often hear that we're living in the hottest days, weeks, and months ever. But the RSS data contradict this claim. The first five months of 1998 and those of 2010 had these anomalies in °C:

Rachel Corrie: a suicide ship sent to defeat Israel

It's amazing to watch how many people - and (almost) whole nations - have lost their mind.

A few days ago, German President Horst Köhler suddenly resigned. The reason? He previously said an obvious fact in an interview, namely that soldiers are often sent to protect the trade and the economic interests of their homeland in general. He was criticized by some crazy people - and this criticism was enough for him to go. This top seat of the main European power is as stable as the Higgs at the SU(2) symmetric point.

But an even more amazing is the newest reincarnation of political correctness. The PC people compete who is the biggest hater of Israel and who is most eager to humiliate the Jews and their official institutions. At that point, this kind of PC becomes literally indistinguishable from ordinary Nazism as we knew it 70 years ago.

Several days after 9 haters of Israel had to be killed when they were trying to break the blockade of Gaza with their knives and sticks, there are clear signs that many people still don't understand that this is what has to happen to other people who attack the Israeli army with similar inappropriate weapons.

By the way, the aid from the flotilla has been sent to Gaza by Israel. Hamas has blocked it but it's a "detail" that you won't read in too many PC Nazi-like Western media.

The people who kind of support these provocations against the Israeli defense forces come from unexpected corners. They apparently include the Irish prime minister - "taoiseach" Brian Cowen who warned of the most serious consequences if the Irish ship is not allowed to break the existentially important Israeli law. Did he - with his army of 8,500 active men - just declare a war to Israel - with an army of 180,000 men - with no good reason?

In such situations, it's hard not to believe the jokes whose message is that the Irish are as dumb as a doorknob. He certainly is. The chairman of the Czech Senate, Mr Přemysl Sobotka, is just visiting Israel and he declared that the Turkish "humanitarian" ship was a planned provocation pretending to be an aid. That's obvious. The only question is what e.g. the Irish prime minister wants to gain by doing the same thing.

Fourth generation and scientific integrity

Nude Socialist has shown once again that the notion of scientific integrity means absolutely nothing for this magazine:

Matter: The next generation

Unfortunately, the fabrication of stories and distortion of the available evidence is being routinely applied not only to inferior scientific disciplines such as climate science.



In this case and many others, the most prestigious field of science, particle physics, became the victim. A writer called David Shiga decided that he would write an "exciting" story that there are probably four generations of quarks and leptons. So he has "improved" all the evidence to support such a story.

Let's look at the situation.

Al Gore, Tipper Gore separating

after 40 years of marriage...



Original w/ Czech subtitles...
Slovak 1995 edition...

It turned colder - that's where it (AGW) ends
So I told her we'd still be friends...

The separation was "a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration."

Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider confirmed the statement but declined to say whether she's gonna marry her boss and whether she wants to live with him in Nashville or Santa Barbara.

She recommended the Global Warming Menopause Song to those who ask too many questions about the event.

A generous hep-th Tuesday

On Tuesdays, the arXiv brings us papers that were submitted on Mondays - but also during the weekends. So the number of papers is higher than it is on the other days.

arXiv.org

The absolute number of interesting papers is higher, too. But I often have the feeling that even the percentage of the interesting papers is higher on Tuesdays. ;-) It would be interesting to evaluate this conjecture statistically. If that's true, a possible explanation could be that better physicists - or those who have just found something neat - often work during the weekends while the worse ones don't.

Today, there are 18 hep-th papers. About 16 of them are related to strings, supersymmetry, or extra dimensions compactified in the stringy way - well, mostly strings. Most of them are interesting and long, too. The average is close to 35 pages.

Phenomenology