Soldiers should be replaced with robots

Elon Musk along with some 100+ assistants – such as Lisa Randall, Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek, Max Tegmark, Noam Chomsky, Steve Wozniak – have sent an open letter to the United Nations

AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS: AN OPEN LETTER FROM AI & ROBOTICS RESEARCHERS

demanding a ban on the killer robots, machines that are controlled by autonomous programs capable of killing the people. This technology is bound to start an arms race – like the two previous revolutions, gunpowder and nuclear bombs – and that's bad for everyone.



Except that it's not bad.

Civilized countries deal with lots of trivial armed enemies such as Daesh which could be easily defeated but no one really wants to do that. Some of the people who could fight Daesh are actually its allies. But even among those who aren't the allies of Daesh, no one really wants to sacrifice the lives of our soldiers in order to kill some pretty much irrelevant savages and bigots. The value of a Western soldier is several million dollars while the Daesh warrior is cheaper by many orders of magnitude. You surely don't want to sacrifice your boys on the man-against-man basis.

Fraternal help 1968: an anniversary

Even the American Thinker noticed that exactly 49 years ago, early in the morning of August 21st, 1968, 200,000 troops from 5 countries of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia.



If you don't know much but you're slightly interested, I recommend you to watch this 48-minute (ex-Soviet Georgian!) video about the events. Just to be sure. Czechia and mostly Slovakia have been parts of the Western civilization – through the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian Empire - for some 1,000 years. This country that has belonged to Western Europe politically nevertheless fell into the Soviet sphere of influence after 1945, partly due to the betrayal by France and Britain in 1938, partly due to our gratitude to the Soviet army that sacrificed a lot of lives, and partly because of the unstoppable growth of the communist movement in much of Europe.

A funny Czech reaction to the anti-Confederate cultural genocide in the U.S.

Most Czech pundits and media are surprised by the neo-Marxist habit of tearing down of the Confederate statues in recent days. Iconoclasm is something that we remember well from the Nazi era and the communist era – and indeed, from the post-communist era, too. The far left is trying to rewrite the history and frame the U.S. president as a Ku-Klux-Klan boss of a sort and all these things are just bizarre.



Let me pick a text by George X. Doležal – who is paid for somewhat funny, somewhat provocative works in Reflex, a mainstream journal.

Let's tear down the statues of Charles IV!
George X. Doležal, August 20th (satire)

After a mass demolition of the statues of the national heroes from the Confederate era which took place in the U.S. in recent days, this remarkable neo-Marxist happening could become a European habit, too. At least the Czech Republic should get inspired by the U.S. authorities and start to remove the statues of the great Czechs who must be disavowed today, in the name of the political correctness.

Bank of Korea is taking over Bitcoin Cash

...at least, that's a result of your humble correspondent's inference...

Three weeks ago, I discussed the split of the Bitcoin to the new Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). For some time, the prices were around $4,000 and $300 or so, plus minus 30%.

But two days ago, BCH began to skyrocket. It reached $1,000 hours ago. The timing of this growth was attributed to the first 8 MB block mined by BCH (BTC only mines 1 MB blocks) and the fact that the BCH mining became more profitable than the BTC mining.

On Friday, the trading volumes of BCH actually trumped those of the "main" BTC Bitcoin, $4 billion to $3 billion a day. Moreover, it's been known that most of the BCH trade was the trade BCH against SKW, the South Korean won, and it occurred at Korean exchanges.

Religion of peace enriches Catalonia, Finland

With some compensation, Muslims should be banned from vans, knives in the public

Technical: I added two clever lines in a Disqus Javascript code which allowed me to redirect the whole blog to HTTPS without separating the discussions. Please let me know if you face any problems, broken widgets etc.

I am sure that many of you have undergone a similar emotional evolution as your humble correspondent. A few years ago, I would be shocked, deeply hurt when a terrorist attack took place. However, one simply gets used to any events that are occurring sufficiently frequently. What's new about the 2017 Barcelona attacks and the 2017 Turku attack is perhaps just the "new" European countries, namely Spain and Finland, respectively, but otherwise the sad events look like business-as-usual.

While Muslims represent about 4% of Spaniards, they are 8% in Catalonia. So it makes sense that the first attacks in Spain take place in Catalonia.

In downtown Turku – where most of Finland's Muslims live (so it makes sense, too; note that only 1% of Finns are Muslims) – one person died and six were injured after a person screamed Allahu akbar. In Barcelona, a white van rented by a man of Moroccan ancestry has driven on the sidewalk of La Rambla, a popular tourists' boulevard, and killed 14 people. A few hours later, five Muslims – some of them had fake explosive belts – had to be killed in Cambrills after their Audi A3 tried to overrun pedestrians as well.

Harlow, Ooguri: entanglement/AdS proof that there are no global symmetries in QG

Daniel Harlow wrote or co-wrote numerous interesting papers about quantum gravity, entanglement, locality, error code correction, weak gravity conjecture etc. within AdS/CFT.

John Preskill has tweeted about an interesting, soon-to-be-published result by Harlow and Hiroši Ooguri:

Ooguri and Harlow find that entanglement wedge reconstruction in AdS/CFT rules out global symmetry in the bulk gravity theory. #QIQG3 pic.twitter.com/RcVnMc7PJx

— John Preskill (@preskill) August 16, 2017

They seem to make some lore rigorous.

Bitcoin at $100,000 is possible

Bitcoin fans and owners will learn to bribe cryptocurrency critics

A theorist often lacks some genuine feelings associated with a certain real condition or activity. In particular, when you own a not quite negligible fraction of a Bitcoin, you may see how you actually want to behave and what many other owners of Bitcoins will do.

If you can afford to lose the value but you see the genuine chance for many doublings of the Bitcoin's value in the future, you are inclined to keep it – and not convert it to the real world currencies.

Bitcoin bouncing back fast from it technical correction: pic.twitter.com/6jG7FmXRq4

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) July 17, 2017

Exactly one month ago, on July 17th, BTCUSD bounced from lows around $1,800 and it went to $2,150 or so. Those values looked incredible but in the following month, as we can see today, the price has doubled again. Exactly. One Bitcoin is worth some $4,300 or CZK 96,000. You may watch the prices and capitalizations of top 1,000 cryptocurrencies (by capitalization) if you click at this sentence.

Czechs amazed by a PC lawsuit against a Czech Swedish writer

Czechia's economy grew by impressive 4.5% yoy and 2.3% qoq in Q2 of 2017, brutally beating estimates. Donald Trump made a speech about Charlottesville that has offended many – surely not me. Most importantly, I agree that both sides, "alt right" and "alt left", need to calm down in Virginia and elsewhere in the U.S. And yes, the removal of Confederate heroes' statues is bound to produce lots of understandable anger.

But I want to mention a seemingly irrelevant story about a lawsuit. Rossana Dinamarca is a Swedish student (a very old one for a student, she was born in 1974) who came to Sweden from Chile. She is a lawmaker for the Left Party which is, despite the impressively general name, a tiny communist party that has never made it to the Swedish government.



Swedish newspapers and their Czech counterparts such as iDNES and Echo24 informed us about a lawsuit that Dinamarca filed against Ms Kateřina Janouchová (picture above), a Prague-born writer (in Swedish).

A future proof of \(P=NP\) or \(P\neq NP\) may be far-reaching or not so much

A few days ago, Norbert Blum, a professor (and a chair) from Bonn, the ex-capital of West Germany (picture) whose publication record looks good released the preprint

A Solution of the P versus NP Problem

claiming to contain a proof that \(P\neq NP\).

John Baez and Alon Amit, a brilliant mathematician at Quora, have offered their opinions. The preprint isn't "self-evidently wrong" according to some basic "smell tests" that may be used to "sniff" for wrong proofs of this kind, Baez concluded. In fact, a bunch of computer scientists has so far reacted in the same way: it looks rather credible so far. So it's good enough news for Blum.

At the same moment, neither Baez nor Amit could tell us "I have found a clear mistake" or, on the contrary, "I have verified the proof and joined those who claim that a proof has been found". Francis Villatoro, Gary Knife, and Scott Aaronson claim to know about incorrect statements "proven" at places in Blum's proof, however, although they don't know where's the error in Blum's proof. Sadly for Scott Aaronson who offers you $200,000 if he is wrong, he was mindlessly building on a statement by Luca Trevinsan who has already renounced his own criticism (he misunderstood what Andreev's function was).

James Damore: aftermath

I find Edwin's ideas worth listening to (I am sure he is annoyed by calm comments about "worth" and "blah blah" and would prefer warmer ones, so yes, I love you, Edwin LOL) which is why I have watched this 80-minute video recommended by Edwin:



Prof Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux (both from Canada) are two main individualist YouTube pundits who have previously interviewed James Damore, the former $162,000-a-year Senior Google engineer who became a hero of freedom. So in this discussion, they talked to each other. They covered a lot of ground. You may see that their thinking and values are close enough to each other. But you may still see that they're individualist and they want similar audiences to dedicate time to their videos, so to some extent, this insightful debate still sounds like a competition of a sort.

Arctic mechanism: a derivation of the multiple point criticality principle?

One of the ideas I found irresistible in my research during the last 3 weeks was the multiple point criticality principle mentioned in a recent blog post about a Shiu-Hamada paper.



Froggatt's and Nielsen's and Donald Bennett's multiple point criticality principle says that the parameters of quantum field theory are chosen on the boundaries of a maximum number of phases – i.e. so that something maximally special seems to happen over there.

This principle is supported by a reasonably impressive prediction of the fine-structure constant, the top quark mass, the Higgs boson mass, and perhaps the neutrino masses and/or the cosmological constant related to them.

Czech trams in Pyongyang

Tough words directed against North Korea have been a pleasant distraction for Donald Trump because the negative attitudes towards North Korea seem to be uncontroversial in the U.S. and beyond. There's a problem: North Korea may hypothetically erase several cities from the map but no one seems to care.



Americans generally support a strike against North Korea. But do they know where the country is located? That's what the folks at the Hollywood Boulevard, a major avenue in L.A., were asked. The answers were all over the map, literally, but the consensus seems to be that North Korea is in Northeastern Canada. Prepare your bunkers, Mr Kim IV Trudeau!

GR=QM paper shows Susskind isn't a real co-father of ER=EPR

I have always appreciated that in comparison to other top physicists, Leonard Susskind was among those who deserved to be called heuristic thinkers, creative mavericks, talkers rather than calculators, and to a large extent, I have found this spirit inspiring. Susskind was always a role model for me. The number and diversity of ideas he helped to emerge from the darkness was amazing.

Of course, as the well-known lore says, physics depends on the delicate balance between the hot, bold, philosophical speculations on one side; and the cold, hard, boring facts on the other. When this balance is broken, physics degenerates either to philosophy or to botany (or stamp collecting). This lore is not meant to be an insult when it says that philosophy and botany are inferior because they self-evidently are inferior.

Well, the first outcome seems to be a good description of Susskind's new paper

Dear Qubitzers, GR=QM

The 15-page paper is free of equations, begins with "Dear Qubitzers" (a hybrid of quantum bit and kibitzers) and ends with "Best regards, Lenny".

Police finally asks lawmakers to enable prosecution of Babiš

Will he win the October elections while arrested?

Andrej Babiš, a Slovak billionaire, a former communist cadre, an ex-agent of the communist secret police, and the Czech finance minister up to Spring, was fired by the social democratic prime minister Sobotka a few months ago, in a series of events that looked like a farce mainly because Sobotka repeatedly changed his opinions how to deal with the problem named Babiš. The reasons were numerous.

At least at the level of economic morality that Babiš – and Sobotka – loudly demand from everyone else, there was no doubt that Babiš has done too many immoral things.



He has done lots of strange things to fool his former business partners, evade taxation of CZK 1 bonds by tricks with the rounding to the nearest integer etc. but the most famous wrongdoing is the subsidies for his Stork's Nest, a luxurious farm and rural tourist resort I saw a year ago. He temporarily moved the company owning the project to his relatives, they secured $2 million of EU subsidies that were meant to help small and medium businesses, and then Babiš – who owns a $3 billion company – restored the ownership of his Stork's Nest company.