Likely: latest Atlantic hurricane-free date at least since 1941

Originally posted on September 4th. Now, 5 days later, it seems that no currently active systems will grow to a hurricane so the records will be broken – a new record at least since 1941, indeed.Remotely related: Henrik Svensmark et al. have a new paper (press release) on cosmoclimatology in PLA, experimentally arguing that the UV rays increase the aerosol production from ozone, sulfur dioxide, vapor by the same factor even for nuclei above 50 nm...

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Democrats of Europe, wake up!

Daniel Cohn-Bendit is a notorious Franco-German leftist. In 1968, he would be a fighter at the barricades of Paris; his nickname has been Danny the Red (Dany le Rouge) ever since. In the 1970s, he would "love" children in an "anti-authoritarian kindergarten" which is why he also fought for the sex with the children to be legalized in the 1980s. Germany's Green Party recently made a huge U-turn and it now seems to claim that it was "unacceptable" to demand the legalization of peadophilia.In a normal society, such a man would probably oscillate in...

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Confusions about the relationships of special relativity and general relativity

Sabine Hossenfelder wrote about the confusions surrounding the relationship of Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity and Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity. Edward Pig Measure is one of the laymen who are somewhat confused; many others are vastly more confused.First of all, I find it very important that all the discussions on the two blogs above are about physics topics that have been settled for 100 years, about the high-school...

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Yo-yo banned in Syria

Blamed for drought by MuslimsBEIRUT (Syria), [date]. Drought and severe cold is disastrously affecting the cattle in Syria, and the Muslim chiefs at Damascus have attributed the wrath of the heavens to the recent introduction of the yo-yo.They say that while the people are praying for rain to come down from above the yo-yo goes down, and before reaching the ground springs up through the subtle pull of the string.The chiefs interviewed the Prime Minister,...

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Snowden: Internet encryption useless against eyes in NSA, GCHQ

Both HTTPS, SSL, and VoIP only good against little fishEdward Snowden has provided The New York Times and The Guardian and others with some eye-catching revelations:N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web (NYT)NSA and GCHQ unlock privacy and security on the internet (Guardian)The two U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies "are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet...

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A universal derivation of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy from topology change, ER-EPR

I have been intrigued by topology change in quantum gravity, especially its Euclidean version, for 15 years or so. Since the beginning, I liked a sketch of a derivation (that I invented) of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a black hole that was based on a wormhole connecting two tips of the Euclidean black hole in the \(rt_E\) plane.Ignore the wormhole-related captions.Before the ER-EPR correspondence, I would interpret the two planes on the picture...

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Nathaniel Craig's State of the SUSY Union address

I have known Nathaniel Craig since he was a brilliant Harvard undergraduate who was attending graduate courses – at least my string theory course (I believe he was the best student in the room). This young Gentleman has written 37 papers or preprints (if you subtract some namesakes) and the last one among them is sufficiently pedagogic for you to be interested in it:The State of Supersymmetry after Run I of the LHCThese 71 pages are based on his...

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Did soot melt glaciers in the 19th century?

Media including NBC focused our attention to a paper in PNAS,End of the Little Ice Age in the Alps forced by industrial black carbonby Thomas Painter and 5 co-authors from Caltech, Michigan, Innsbruck, Davis, and Boulder. The claim is easy: the post-little-ice-age melting of glaciers in the 19th century started well before CO2 could possibly matter which is inconvenient so a different explanation has to be found. The explanation is dirty snow from...

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16 out of half a billion: elite Calabi-Yau manifolds with a fundamental group

Heterotic phenomenology seems to converge to an excitingly sparse shortlist of candidatesHeterotic compactifications represent a convincing – if not the most convincing – class of superstring vacua that seem to pass the "first great exam" for producing a theory of everything. A week ago, I discussed \(\ZZ_8\) orbifolds but now we return to smooth Calabi-Yau manifolds, the nice creatures you know from the popular books and from the girl who has a...

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Lev Pontryagin: 105th anniversary

Lev Semenovič Pontryagin was born in Moscow, Russian Empire, on September 3th, 1908, i.e. 105 years ago, and died in May 80 years later, about 25+ years ago.Interestingly and sadly enough, a primus stove explosion made him legally blind at the age of 14. That didn't prevent him from becoming a top mathematician. On the other hand, it didn't stop him from being a jerk of a sort, either. In 1936, he warned the Soviet officials that the mathematics...

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The 50 to 1 project

Topher (*1982) is the commercial brand of an Australian host and filmmaker who had 6 siblings, was educated at home, and decided that movies – and later movies about political issues etc. – were his real passion. Using some "amateurish" money, including some funds from Lord Monckton – as I understand it – he shot a series of interviews with skeptics called The 50 to 1 ProjectThanks to Anthony W. and Honza U. for leading me to watch some of the videos....

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