Knud Rasmussen pictures: Greenland is melting less quickly than 80 years ago

Knud Rasmussen (1879-1933) was a Danish polar explorer and the father of Eskimology. By an accident, 80-year-old pictures of the Greenland taken during his expeditions were just found in a Danish basement:

Daily Mail, TG Daily, Nature, Live Science, Newswise, Science Codex

The pre-satellite pictures of ice shelves are rare. One may evaluate them in various ways.

For example, 55% of the retreating glaciers were retreating at a faster rate 80 years than in recent years. On the other hand, the average rate of retreat (in meters per year) is higher today than it used to be because there are some isolated very quickly retreating glaciers today.



So whether the retreat of Greenland's glaciers was faster 80 years ago than today may depend on the detailed specification of the "contest". However, one thing is clear.

Why \(\NNN=8\) supergravity is probably divergent at 7 loops

Arguments in favor of finiteness are much more sloppy

I have been discussing the maximally supersymmetric supergravity and its conjectured perturbative finiteness many times on this blog. But the immediate reason for a new entry is the following paper by my ex-adviser Tom Banks,

Arguments Against a Finite \(\NNN=8\) Supergravity

In this text, I want to review the \(\NNN=8\) supergravity in \(d=4\), its field content and "other objects content", the arguments that have been raised for its perturbative finiteness, the explicit 7-loop counterterm that is allowed by all the symmetries, and the argument why its coefficient is probably nonzero.

Indus Valley Civilization destroyed by SUVs 3,000+ years ago

Lots of media including Fox News have written about the Harappan culture, also known as the Indus Valley Civilization:

4,000 years ago, climate change caused massive civilization collapse

The news describe the opinions published in a new paper, "Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization", in PNAS.



The paper argues that the decline of the majestic civilization that once included 10% of the world population – between 1900 BC and 1000 BC – was caused by... climate change, of course.

3(+1) new papers on stop squarks (and staus)

On Monday, American particle phenomenologists celebrated the Stop Squark Memorial Day.

Their publication of three extremely similar papers on the search for light stop squarks could be viewed as circumstantial evidence for some extra common cause behind all these papers such as the LHC stop squark rumors.



At any rate, we have these three similar new hep-ph papers on the stops (plus one inequivalent paper that talks about stops and especially staus in the context of the Higgs diphoton decays):

Stops and MET: the shape of things to come (Fermilab/Madison)

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(Light) Stop Signs (Harvard)

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Searching for Direct Stop Production in Hadronic Top Data at the LHC (Maryland/MIT)

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Light Stau Phenomenology and the Higgs γγ Rate (Illinois)

The last paper differs from the first three; it suggests that the superpartner of the tau lepton could be as light as 100 GeV and with a high enough tan beta, the light stau could be relevant for the explanation of the enhanced rate by which the 125 GeV Higgs boson at the LHC decays to a photon pair.

The first three papers mostly discuss the question whether the LHC may discover or rule out stop squarks whose masses are very close to the top quark mass during the 2012 run. If you read the papers, you will notice that the three teams knew about each other so they may have synchronized their submissions to occur on the same Memorial Day weekend.

Nature Climate Change: climate fear decreases with science literacy

Fox News has just reviewed the content of an article in Nature Climate Change:

Global warming skeptics as knowledgeable about science as climate change believers, study says (Fox)

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The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks (Nature)

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Google News

Dan Kahan and 6 co-authors were testing the science comprehension thesis (SCT) claiming that the people who are not worried about "climate change" are less knowledgeable about science. They gave a science quiz to 1,540 Americans who were also measured when it comes to the degree of their climate hysteria.

What are the results?

Dripping crucifix vs Indian heretic

Bombay is a city with some of the best string theorists in the world (or at least the best ones among those who aren't affiliated with the most prominent U.S. schools) – and maybe the highest theoretical physics production per dollar in the world.



There are many crazy things going on in the Western countries but it's plausible that things may be even crazier in the third world, if you allow me to use this term, and perhaps even in India, a country trying to get rid of the third-world label (although, historically, India was obviously the main condensation core of what became known as the third world).

Hinduism is the main religion in India but various other religions – and Christianity is an important one – are allowed to control their respective subenviroments in this heavily multicultural society.

Yesterday, AFP told us that a

dripping crucifix sparks Indian blasphemy row.

See also Courier Mail.

What happened? Well, some tears appeared on the sculpture of Mr Jesus Christ above. What's the right explanation? The scientific consensus was speaking a clear language. About 97%-98% of the experts on the streets of this suburb of Bombay determined that it had to be a divine sign from God: Jesus Christ is crying.

Electric shocks under high voltage power lines

Yesterday, I experienced something that I've gone through many times in my life and probably regularly (at several "best points"): when I ride my mountain bike which has a hole in the seat and a metal right underneath (which may probably be in contact with my slightly wet shorts), I am terrified by an electric shock – some tingling comparable to a dozen of stinging ants attacking a square decimeter of my skin – for a second when I am crossing some high voltage power lines – maybe 400 kV or so – perpendicularly.

The power lines between villages called Druztová and Dolany in Greater Pilsen (approximately in the middle of this map) represent the most frequent place at which I have encountered the sensation. As far as I remember, I've never felt the effect with my "ordinary" tracking bike which has no hole in the seat (so the metal beneath the hole is isolated away).



Take the right mountain bike (a picture from Gross Arber, the highest peak of the Bohemian forest on the Bavarian side, where I rode some time ago). The detailed situation is described on the Physics Stack Exchange.

The sensation is always so strong and so unpleasant that I have never continued to do further experiments; thinking about the parts of the body that could have been burned had a higher priority. In my family environment (and among some real-life friends), I was told it was impossible for the normal people and the only explanation was that I was a homeopathic seer, diviner, and psychic – a witch of a sort. ;-)

Assassination of Heydrich 70 years ago: details could have been different

Exactly 70 years ago, on May 27th, 1942, Operation Anthropoid took place; see also BBC's article about the anniversary; Mr Alois Denemarek of those special units (who is still alive) remembers his friends.



This fencer, swimmer, violinist, tyrant, and an obsessed jerk spoke German, English, French, and Russian. That's too bad because a Czech leader should speak Czech. Also, it is not a good idea to be a vice-head of a terrorist organization, the SS.

The Czechoslovak government located in our temporary capital called London – due to some bureaucratic chaos in Prague of that time – sentenced a political crackpot, a key father of the Holocaust, and one of the most notorious leaders of the so-called Nazi Germany to death penalty for his role in the death of numerous Czech citizens, for his crimes against humanity, and his attempts to behave as a Czech political leader ("a protector") despite the obvious absence of any democratic mandate.

This execution was the only successful execution of a top Nazi apparatachik organized by a nation harassed by the Nazi regime. It helped us to increase our self-confidence because, let's admit, most Czechs were cowards and they were almost as compatible with the Nazi regimes as Danes, Dutchmen, and many others.

It wasn't logistically possible to hang him properly so we had to use some creativity to actually perform the execution of the "blonde beast". Trained agents equipped by the expertise of the British Special Operation Executive were sent from London and parachuted to Bohemia a few months before the operation.

Krugman: scientists should falsely predict alien invasion

...in order to increase the government spending...

Apparently, global warming hasn't worked as a tool to promote Krugman's left-wing agenda (and some agendas that are much worse than his).

So similar types are looking for a more "serious proposal" than the global warming and one of them thinks that the threat of a looming alien invasion is the answer!



See also a Summer 2011 monologue in which Krugman defends scientific lies as well as budget deficits, inflation, and various things that wars cause.

Imagine that: a Nobel prize winner for a social science openly calls for the creation of a whole new fraudulent scientific discipline with a "bunch of scientists" publishing papers about a non-existent alien threat – a movement that is politically motivated.

Is the "follow the money" argument correct?

In the climate science, the answer is Yes. Why?

I count arstechnica.com among the most thoughtful sources of science news for the most well-informed non-expert readers. However, what John Timmer wrote on Thursday (and what was mindlessly endorsed by Hank Campbell) simply looks unbelievable:

Accusations that climate science is money-driven reveal ignorance of how science is done (also at Wired)

Timmer primarily attempts to criticize the 2009 document by Joanne Nova (yup, it's 2012 now: it doesn't look like the likes of John Timmer are too up-to-date or fast when they try to follow what's going on):

Climate money: The climate industry: $79 billion so far – trillions to come (PDF, Jo Nova for SPPI, 2009)

The figure refers to the money spent by the U.S. government "directly" to combat "climate change". It seems obvious to me that the actual costs of the policies – including the indirect costs paid by private subjects (that were forced to do things inefficiently and buy more expensive equivalents of various products and energy) – is already counted in hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. (and almost certainly trillions of dollars globally).

But we want to talk about the effect of the smaller, more direct part of the money which is close to the core of this question: the effect of money on the researchers. Timmer thinks that there's almost none.

Iran, AGW: useless summits in Baghdad, Bonn

...and African migrants in Israel...

In recent days, two major cities starting with a "B" witnessed futile negotiations about important topics.

In Bonn, the ex-capital of West Germany, some bureaucrats were trying to prepare a post-Kyoto agreement to regulate the greenhouse gases that could be signed in Durban in December 2012. Surprisingly for them, they found out that:

Rich-poor divide reopens at UN climate talks

Some poor countries were promised by the environmentalist i.e. Marxist activists that they would be given piles of wealth after the civilized countries are deconstructed with the help of the global warming lies.

Suddenly, some Western negotiators realized at least the fact that whether or not it is a good idea to reduce the CO2 emissions, the CO2 emissions can't decrease if the developing countries will keep on developing: the CO2 production would simply shift to the currently developing world.

Of course, the poor folks just wanted the money and some of them wanted to damage the West: these were the only reasons why they would support the climate change hysteria a few years ago. They don't have the slightest interest in hurting themselves. So the talks can't lead anywhere.

BaBar: 3.4-sigma excess in tau-nu decays of B

This is just a simple link with a comment. The BaBar collaboration located at SLAC just published a preprint

Evidence for an excess of \(B \to D({}^*) \tau \nu\) decays

in which it announced the measurement of the ratio of branching ratios of decays of mesons\[

{\mathcal R}(D({}^*)) = \frac{B(B\to D({}^*)\tau^- \bar \nu_\tau)}{B(B\to D({}^*)\ell^-\bar\nu_\ell)}

\] in 426 inverse femtobarns of their data where \(\ell=e\) or \(\mu\). You may see that they measure the decays of the \(B\)-mesons to \(D\)-mesons or their antiparticles which also include a charged lepton and the corresponding neutrino in the final state.

They want to know how many of these decays choose the \(\tau\) lepton and its neutrino from the choice of three possible generations.

Science on anti-GOP bias of the NAS

Science Insider has printed a courageous article about the left-wing bias of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences yesterday:

A Partisan Look at U.S. Science Policy

The academy invited the former and current science advisers to the U.S. presidents to a symposium. All of the attendants turned out to be Democrats who served for Democrats, starting from Frank Press who served for Jimmy Carter.

How is that possible? Haven't there been some Republican U.S. presidents after Carter, too?

Psychology of dark matter denial

Sean Carroll mentioned some developments concerning dark matter that have been discussed on this blog, too. His short text is another example of the fact that his comments are sometimes right, however rare these events may be.



A month ago, the media overhyped a paper by Chilean astronomers who claimed that their measurements show that there was no dark matter in the vicinity of the Solar System. However, Bovy and Tremaine showed that with a more realistic model for the velocities of the galaxies, the corrected method seems to yield a dark matter density that is fully compatible with the value obtained by more common methods.

Among the media, only Universe Today, Phys Org, and Nude Socialist mentioned the new article which arguably is – unlike the previous, overhyped one – correct. The ordinary non-scientific media remained silent. Theories that work are not too interesting for the journalists; they prefer to write about things that don't work, especially if these "don't work" claims are untrue.

These days, many people – or at least a sufficiently large number of loud people – are literally obsessed by attacks against some key theories contained in the very foundations of modern science. String theory may be just too mathematically abstract for a number of amazingly aggressive "critics" if I have to avoid the term "imbeciles". Quantum mechanics brought the most profound conceptual revolution in the history of physics.

South Dakota's LUX will join the dark matter wars

Many articles on this blog were dedicated to the war on the existence of dark matter.

Some research teams claim that they have already detected a proof of a dark matter particle, a WIMP, whose mass is of order 10 GeV. Other teams disagree equally vehemently.



The Homestake Mine

In the Fall, a new big player will enter this conflict; see a list of other participants. Its name is LUX: Large Underground Xenon detector. Phys.ORG just dedicated a fresh article to the experiment:

Lying in wait for WIMPs: Researchers seek to increase the sensitivity of Large Underground Xenon detector by orders of magnitude

But much of the data were already available to readers of the Symmetry Magazine in April 2012.

Sheldon Cooper's revenge to Stephen Hawking: Hawking made a boo boo

Yesterday, we discussed an interesting new paper by Hartle, Hawking, and Hertog. It claimed that because of some mysterious maths of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, a theory with a negative cosmological constant may accelerate the cosmic expansion just like as if it were a positive cosmological constant.

I said it couldn't be right: there had to be a sign error. But I didn't know where the error was. A reader named "test" or "HB" has quickly filled the gap. I just verified that HB's remark is right. So I will alert Jim Hartle – the only author whom I have talked to for a long enough time – and send him a link to this blog entry. I am sure he will be happy!

Euro, geuro, and Greece before grexit

The outcome of the recent elections in Greece was an unbelievable proof that Greece is a dying democracy, something I've been predicting for years.

The single largest party turned out to be New Democracy which, despite its attempts to right-wing image, one could recognize as a remote counterpart of some center-left parties in the rest of Europe. I actually consider New Democracy – which received about 19 percent – to be an extreme left-wing party, too. But the other parties are worse, much worse.



A one-geuro coin.

A collection of would-be far-right nuts is called Golden Dawn. They use a modified swastika (with some Greek explanations) as their symbol and their leader, an immature 55-year-old teenager, acts as if he were an Adolf Hitler and surrounds himself with skinhead bodyguards at all times. They're against immigration – and living in a virtual reality in which some modest immigration to Greece is Greece's most pressing problem.

But of course, the actual worst problem is the rise of the super insane bug-nutty batshit crazy infinitely far left-wing parties such as Syriza; the Papandreou dynasty that was "just" batshit crazy apparently wasn't crazy enough. Their young boss is a superstupid insane ultracommunist who wants to introduce a society in which everyone has everything he needs and only does what he wants to do. I have watched a few YouTube videos with Alexis Tsipras and I must say that in comparison with him, our insane social democratic jerk politicians are sensible moderate deep thinkers. This Marx who lost the last traces of realism got about 16 percent and it will be even worse. Check e.g. his address to the GDR communist "comrades".