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Physicists attacked for endangering the planet, for being less alarmist than the climate change cranks

Tommaso Dorigo of CMS discusses a new bizarre proposal to establish a U.S. commission that would evaluate the risks that the RHIC experiment will destroy our blue, not green planet:

New U.S. Science Commission Should Look At Experiment’s Risk Of Destroying The Earth

One of the two authors of the proposal in International Business Times above (a news outlet that is being cited by TRF positively in a vast majority of cases, but not this one!) is a law professor and the other one is an emeritus law professor. Recall that the destruction of the Earth by an accelerator "will" look like this:



Dorigo mentions several other scenarios by which the mad scientists called "physicists" plan to destroy the Earth and every molecule of it.




The production of a hungry black hole that swallows the Earth is the most popular scenario. But at New Island's RHIC experiment, people prefer to talk about the strangelets. A strangelet is a hypothetical macroscopically large nucleus that doesn't contain just up-quarks and down-quarks as the usual nuclei do (it's the two quarks in the protons and neutrons); about 1/3 of its mass is composed of the strange-quarks.

This mutated composition may make it energetically favorable for the strangelets to grow indefinitely and eat the surrounding atoms along the way (the hadrons containing strange-quarks are clearly not favored if the hadrons are small enough: a strange-quark adds something like \(150\MeV\) to the rest energy). The final product wouldn't differ from the Earth-mass black hole mass as far as the practical implications go.




Like in other cases, there exist numerous arguments indicating that the threat is de facto non-existent. I recommend you e.g. the 2000 analysis of the RHIC cataclysms written by 4 authors including my Twitter follower and Nobel prize winner Frank Wilczek.

The "we are safe" arguments are diverse and exist at many levels. Much like in the black hole case, the arguments that are most comprehensible and least dependent on "impenetrably deep theory" are arguments that de facto say that "it would have already happened if it could happen now" and that promote this proposition to some quantitative, empirically rooted reasoning. If strangelets could be created by such "not so unusual" collisions, we would already be observing strangelets around us, like one that would have eaten the Moon, and so on. Because the celestial bodies haven't been eaten yet, despite the collisions with the high-energy cosmic rays, it either means that the strangelets are not created at all; or they are created and stop growing once they reach a particular, macroscopic size (the maximum size has to be large enough to pose a threat for the Earth; but small enough not to contradict the observations – i.e. smaller than the Moon). The latter assumption is fine-tuned, unnatural, and therefore unlikely.

It's a very interesting theoretical question whether strangelets exist or may exist somewhere in the Universe – whether the nuclear matter energetically prefers this setup with many strange quarks. If it does, the strangelets may exist in the Universe. They may even be responsible for some dark matter or all dark matter. The evidence is mixed on that question; Edward Witten and Arnold Bodmer would present some initial evidence supporting the answer "Yes" while Robert Jaffe and Ed Farhi coined the "strangelet" trademark. However, the question about the "in principle" existence of a strangelet is an entirely different question from the question whether strangelets may be produced in collisions on man-made accelerators which would pose a threat for the life on Earth.

The previous sentence about the difference is completely analogous to the difference between the claim "the greenhouse effect exists as a matter of physics principle" and the claim "emissions of greenhouse gases represent a threat for the Earth". The probabilities of the "more ambitious", dangerous statements are lower than the probabilities of the first statements by many orders of magnitude (perhaps dozens of orders of magnitude). The laymen – and even some people who shouldn't belong among the laymen but they do – are often extremely sloppy when they hear a buzzword, like a "black hole" or a "strangelet" or the "greenhouse effect" and they are intrigued by the "potential dangerous real-life implications" of the concept which completely prevents them from seeing that the concept itself is a neutral concept in science that is almost certainly safe for us even if it exists.

Indeed, the probability that a strangelet will consume the nuclei on Earth is as ludicrously tiny as the probability that the CO2 emissions will lead to the extinction of life on Earth before 2100. Someone could say that the probability of the "strangelet Armageddon" is even tinier, perhaps much tinier, but I don't really agree. Both probabilities are tiny. In the strangelet case, we are talking about a "more extreme kind of destruction" which makes it less likely but we are also actually playing with some more extreme and potentially "less tested" forms of matter when we collide nuclei at high energies which adds "some" uncertainty. In the case of the climate, we know very well that a warming by several degrees, even if it were caused by the CO2 emissions, wouldn't threaten the life because those things have occurred many times in the Earth's history.

(By the way, do you know that the mankind went nearly extinct 100,000 years ago? Only about 5,000-10,000 people were alive on Earth; they could be comfortably seated in the Shayba Arena in Sochi. You could think that the cold weather during the ice age was the reason. Or drought. But the likely reason was a sequence of pandemics that destroyed almost all humans except for a few mutated ones whose new gene didn't allow Escherichia coli and Streptococcus type B to bind to sugars that the extinct humans were producing – causing bad diarrhea and children's meningitis. Due to the near extinction, the mankind lost the ability to synthetize these sugars on the surface of cells but we gained the survival. I wouldn't be surprised if I were possessing the extinct gene again. Infections are still vastly more likely to kill the mankind than any other threat that has become popular.)

Now, when it comes to similar "wars about the panic", people may obviously err in both directions. They may waste lots of resources due to silly, unjustified fears; in principle, they may also underestimate real threats and pay dearly. Needless to say, these two classes of errors are often linked to each other; when you overestimate some threat, you are likely to overlook many threats that are more real and more important. There is no universal recipe to avoid such errors. Democracy isn't a universal cure that would produce flawless policies. Mindless listening to a group of experts or a commission or a single anointed expert isn't a flawless solution, either. No individual is infallible; no group is infallible, either. Quite generally, it is true that the more stupid the people in charge are, the more stupid the policies codified by them will be in average. When it comes to the physics of strange-quarks, the two lawyers are clearly dumb as a doorknob, perhaps more so than your janitor.

The guys who propose the new "RHIC cataclysm commission" conjecture that the physicists are in a clash of interest:

But after public concerns subsided, critics emerged, assailing the risk-assessment method as flawed. Dr. Rees wrote that theorists “seemed to have aimed to reassure the public … rather than to make an objective analysis.”

...

Richard Posner noted [...] that the scientists on the Brookhaven risk-assessment team were either planning to participate in RHIC experiments or had a deep interest in the RHIC’s data.

Their point is that one can't believe the RHIC physicists' testimony because these physicists are among the people for whom the production of new RHIC data is more important than the secondary question whether the Earth is destroyed or not. ;-)

That could sound as a joke but we may check whether this assumption about particle physicists' thinking is realistic by investigating the views of a particular particle physicist. What about Tommaso Dorigo himself? Does he care whether the Earth is destroyed or not?

One last thought: regardless of the evidently significant disappointment of losing our entire planet, mankind, and our artistic heritage (where else in the Universe is there a Chopin, or a Mozart ? Alas, I fear we will never know, strangelets or not), I fail to be seized by the fear of dying a much premature death by being turned into strange matter, as I know that I would be going down with absolutely everybody and everything else. Am I the only one feeling unconcerned?

He's not concerned at all so the lawyers' worries seem to be fully justified.

Tommaso Dorigo is unconcerned for the very same reason that we would discuss just a few hours ago. I wrote that left-wingers want to make the Earth a sh*ttier place to live. SteveBrooklineMA has corrected me. What they really like about it is that the world will be an equally sh*tty place for everyone, and that's a good thing because equality is the most precious value they struggle to achieve.

You may notice that Tommaso Dorigo's thinking exactly agrees with Steve's template. Tommaso doesn't care whether the Earth is gonna be destroyed because everyone and everything would be going down with him, in a nicely egalitarian way! (I have actually heard an almost identical answer from Nathan Seiberg during a formal theoretical seminar where he was asked whether SUSY would be doomed. He answered something like this: "If SUSY is shown inconsistent, I will go down but I will take many people with me!" Equality seems to be really important for the left-wingers.)

So it seems that Yes, you must create a commission asking "are these mad scientists going to destroy the Earth" for every experiment whose team is composed of mad left-wingers like Tommaso Dorigo. But I would still like to inform the lawyers who wrote the idiotic article in The International Business Times that several sane, competent, conservative members of an experiment who consider the cataclysm scares to be silly and who can present the evidence are pretty much enough to eliminate worries.

Conservative physicists generally care whether the Earth is going to be destroyed – its destruction would be a bad thing whether or not it would be done in a nice, egalitarian way! And we are generally not too impressed by the argument that the strangeletization of the Earth would be painless; there's nothing wrong with pain because pain is just a useful signal that sometimes helps us to avoid some real threats. So just investigate whether there are at least some conservative physicists at RHIC and if the answer is Yes, just splash your weird proposal for the cataclysm commission into the toilet where it belongs. Thank you very much.

Galileo Galilei, the father of science, the scientific method, physics, modern physics, and astronomy, among other things (including 2 daughters and 1 son, all of them out of wedlock), was born on February 15th (unadjusted Julian calender i.e. Old Style), 1564 in Pisa, a town in the Duchy of Florence.

That's exactly 450 years ago today. Congratulations, Galileo!

See National Geographic for some fresh out-of-TRF article on Galileo.

His father Vincenzo Galilei was an achieved lutenist (like an obsolete guitar player) and music theorist and the family was doing fine. Nevertheless, this father needed lots of money for some dowries and extra expenses required by Galileo's younger brother Michelagnolo Galilei (another lutenist, one who never earn any real bucks with his music). Despite the relative wealth and fame, one could say that Galileo (who became a lutenist himself) needed extra income and many of his early inventions were actually motivated by the thirst for extra money.

Despite his prestigious background, I would count him as a self-made man who shared many of the typical character features with great folks who come from poor families.




When he was in his late 20s and early 30s, he would study why the pendulum had a constant period and how it depended on the length/geometry. He created a thermoscope (a father of the thermometer), studied hydrostatic balance, and was hired as the boss of the maths department in Pisa, before he moved to Padua to teach mechanics, geometry, and astronomy. He would study the acceleration by freely falling objects from the tower of Pisa. Does the velocity increase by the same amount per unit time or unit length? He was able to settle this question in the scientific way. Yes, it's per unit time.

He wrote not only Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems but also other masterpieces of the polemical literature. At some moment, he would become a staunch heliocentrist who wasn't afraid to point out that the Pope was an idiot. Some people tried to resist this insight; see Galileo as the tragic hero for comments about the trial as well as Galileo vs Benedict XVI.




Dozens of other blog entries about Galileo have been written, too.

Some of his testing questions that helped him to understand early physics better were concerned with the tides (it was in the pre-Newtonian era so there were still some major technical mistakes in his answers: for example, he couldn't understand why the tides have two periods per day and not just one); the 1604 Kepler's supernova (he could show that it was a distant star – no parallax – which contradicted some bizarre Aristotelian dogmas about the immutability of the heaven – the heaven is defined as the things that are "infinitely far" and those should never explode); the Milky Way (he appreciated it's there and what it is probably made of); and observations of other planets and their moons, some of which he observed for the first time with his telescope that was one of the first good ones. He was not necessarily the guy who invented telescopes with all of their know-how but much like great IT industrialists today, he knew how to put these ideas floating around to work.

Aside from the telescope, he invented a geometrical and military compass and lots of various gadgets for sea navigation etc.



Galileo's battle for the heavens, 1:49:00. I hope that some readers will find the time to watch it! I have watched it. Galileo's daugher Maria Celeste and her relationship to her father is given a lot of time. A tragic story. Even though it could have been realistic, I found the actor starring as a senile, old, ill, unintelligible Galileo annoying and excessive; he actually wrote the most accurate works as a very old man. For the last 4 minutes, see the Italian version.

There's way too much to say about Galileo Galilei so I gave up any plans to be comprehensive at the very beginning. But I want to say the following thing. Galileo Galilei wasn't infallible and his comments about particular questions in physics and astronomy weren't always 100% right. However, he was right about the key things and more importantly, he pioneered the very scientific method that allows us to be increasingly right and accurate. In a sense, the scientific method mimics Galileo's own life. It isn't producing flawless results from the very beginning; it is a process to gradually eliminate the flawed hypotheses and – with the help of observations and experiments – converge closer to the correct ones. This methodology to learn about the truth was revolutionary and, to a large extent, new – even though it looks obvious to us today. By finding this method, he established a new religion of a sort, one that actually works in its goal to make progress.

The reason why he couldn't get as far as Isaac Newton almost a century later was that unlike Newton, Galileo was no ingenious mathematician. His knowledge of maths was "standard" at most and he didn't make any major breakthroughs in maths. And this does slow down everyone who would like to become a revolutionary in physics. In maths, Galileo became famous for childish insights of recreational mathematics such as the observation that the set of perfect squares has the same number of elements as the set of integers, despite their being subsets of one another ("Galileo's paradox"). That's too little relatively to, say, Calculus.

Although Galileo's contributions had to look formidable even during his lifetime, he was often harassed for having contradicted some dogmas, stereotypes, and the authority of the lesser minds. He was tried as a possible heretic and the verdict was a life in (home) prison. He was arguably lucky not to be executed. Centuries later, the Catholic Church and others were gradually rehabilitating him.



Indigo Girls: Galileo. Warning: the song isn't necessarily historically and scientifically accurate.

While Galileo played a key role in the birth of science (or modern science) or physics as we know it and even though he was clearly versatile and extremely skillful and smart in many different ways, I would say that the bulk of these achievements depended on his unusual courage, self-confidence, political influence, and his ability to provoke rather than his being one of the smartest men of all time. In particular, the very fact that he could get away with this self-evident heresy (according to the traditions at that time) was very important for the Western civilization that could suddenly notice that some important ideas may arise from corners that aren't fully endorsed by the church's group think. This "relative victory of a heretic" brought lots of meritocracy – desire to find independent-of-religion, new methods to judge the validity of claims – into the smart folks' thinking. Don't get me wrong: he was extremely intelligent. But the intelligence was nowhere near Newton's. But that doesn't matter for us; he has still done amazing, unprecedented things and it was up to him how to achieve those things.

Deja vu doesn't necessarily prove that you live in the Matrix.

NewsBusters, WUWT, Climate Depot, and other skeptical websites have been mocking Michio Kaku's CBS shtick:



Kaku has "explained" the snowy Northeast and Midwest and the relatively dry Californian weather in recent months as the result of the same cause, the "instability of historic proportions" that affects the polar vortex. He could have added the floods in the U.K. as a consequence, too – so that his fairy-tale would become even more global. ;-)

The climate skeptics are making fun of the string field theorist's new book about futurism and the mind. Kaku seems to be keen on telepathy and ESP, according to some sources, which is insane.




But I must say that his musings on the polar vortex look at least slightly more sensible than most other phenomena routinely attributed to the "climate change" by the man-made global warming cultists. At the end, I think that the effect is too small and most of the measurable quantities cancel – or at least they are not making any things worse – but his "theory" has a point.




Recall that a polar vortex is a persistent large-scale cyclone located near the North Pole (and another one near the South Pole). You must realize that it's normal for the pressure near the poles to be lower; see the current wind and pressure map near the North Pole.



Now the question is how clear, sharp, and straight the boundaries of the polar vortex are and how close to the pole the center of the polar vortex may be – and how these questions depend on the polar-equatorial temperature difference. I think that if we assumed some overall warming, the rate of the warming would indeed be faster near the poles because of the extra strong positive feedbacks such as the ice-albedo effect (in the tropics, the negative feedbacks may dominate). In the case of the North Pole, this evolution is being observed; in the Antarctica, the warming of the pole is not seen. So the empirical evidence that could back the paradigm is mixed.

But let's just assume that the Northern polar-equatorial temperature difference is decreasing with time, whatever the reason is. What the consequences would be?

The primary consequence of such a drop is the expected decrease of overall temperature variations – although the effect may be too small to be measured. It's easy to see why: if the interval of temperatures achieved on the Earth is shrinking, so are the intervals that one may achieve at any place of the globe. You should realize that much of the extremely warm/cool weather in your town is due to the winds going from the tropics/pole, respectively, so if the difference between the pole and the tropics shrinks, so do the temperature variations induced by Southern and Northern winds.

The overall storminess is expected to decrease, too. That's because much of the storminess is fed by the temperature gradients. The polar-equatorial difference is a major source of the gradients so if this source goes down, so should the storms. Again, the effect may exist just in principle and it may be undetectable when the actual temperature changes are substituted.



But another expected effect resulting from the smaller polar-equatorial differences is pretty much what Kaku mentioned. The polar vortex "sits" near the North Pole because it's a bottom of a bucket. When the temperature differences go down, the bucket becomes shallower, so it is easier for the water to spill from the bucket. So the jet streams – winds that pretty much move along the boundary of the polar vortex in our case, to simplify the discussion – have a smaller reason to follow the parallels of latitude. Latitude's importance for determining the temperature decreases, so the trajectories of the jet streams may become more chaotic.

Just to be sure, jet streams are always meandering – meanders are the wiggles similar to those on the rivers – but I do agree that if the polar-equatorial temperature difference goes down, one should expect the amplitudes of these meanders to increase. So the winds of the type we know from the Arctic are more likely to get further to the South, and vice versa: the "out of the polar vortex" weather may sometimes get into the Arctic. I believe that with the observed changes of the polar-equatorial differences, the effect is still pretty small and, when the noise is taken into account, it is probably unobservable (especially because the Arctic weather itself is getting less extreme). But I do agree that in principle, Kaku has a point.

My order-of-magnitude estimate of the effect. If the polar-equatorial temperature difference drops from 39 °C to 36 °C, for example, by less than 10 percent, the typical distance from the North Pole where the jet stream "often" reaches could grow by 10 percent, too – from 3000 km to 3,300 km, for example. So potentially, some of the more Arctic weather in a thin strip of America could be largely attributed to the wider meanders.

Completely different questions are: What is the reason that the pole-equatorial difference is shrinking (on the Northern Hemisphere) if it is? Why the Southern Hemisphere doesn't seem to follow the trend? And if these changes are occurring, are they good or bad for the mankind and for individual regions, ecosystems, and economies?

I would like to stress that the polar-equatorial temperature difference is independent from or orthogonal to the global mean temperature, in the sense of the spherical harmonic's being orthogonal (I mean \(Y_{00}(\vartheta,\varphi)\) and \(Y_{20}(\vartheta,\varphi)\) in this case), and this polar-equatorial temperature difference is arguably more important than the global mean temperature. During many geological eras, it has changed by dozens of degrees (recall palm trees in the Antarctica). Ask Richard Lindzen, he will tell you why the difference has been more important for the character of the climate on much of the Earth than the global mean temperature. So it is highly contrived to blame "global warming" (and/or CO2) for the changes of the temperature differences.

Second, whatever the cause is, if the effect is happening, the consequences are probably small and probably as beneficial as harmful. The net benefits may be very small and of uncertain sign. This adds up to the clear positive benefits of the expected lower overall storminess which seems to be the primary consequence. So it is completely irrational to start to panic as if something bad were happening. Even if the climate is changing in this way, it doesn't follow that there is any bad news going on. The climate is always changing. Changes are always good for someone and bad for someone else.

It is adequate to mention that most of these "explanations" are not really "explanations" at all. They are just rephrasing the problem and the data (snow here and there, no snow there, and so on) in different words (meander's shape having an extra wider wiggle etc.) – perhaps more specific words but still words that don't allow us to predict things. The cold or snowy weather in some parts of the U.S. may be partly attributed to the more wiggly meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves that get further away from the North Pole) but we still don't really know the cause of either and we can't predict what will happen with these quantities in the coming years or the distant future. Sometimes, the meanders are wider, sometimes they are narrower. They may get narrower in 30 years on the Northern Hemisphere but the effect may move to the Southern Hemisphere in 2073. Nobody knows. It's mostly a chaotic system controlled by its internal, largely unpredictable processes.

The dry weather in California and the snowy Northeast etc. may be "grouped" into the same story but their anticorrelation isn't a general rule. There are other stories that would describe very different combinations of the weather conditions in various regions of the globe. So if we draw, hype, and personify a "global picture" of the weather, we're not really explaining anything. We're just merging several previously independent pieces of data. It is utterly preposterous to say that there is a "big story" going on here. It's just some weather – a pretty random thing – at random places of the globe. Meanders and gradients have always existed and they were behind lots of harsh winters. People were not religiously obsessed with these phenomena and they were not attributing far-reaching consequences and interpretations to the effects that caused one kind of weather or another. By being less exposed to this scientific terminology without a scientific beef, they were paradoxically acting more rationally than many folks today including Michio Kaku.



Something off-topic, only linked by the Asian ancestry. Play the video above to see what you have to learn, dear Caucasian and African Ladies and Gentlemen, if we want to remain competitive with Asia. Good luck. ;-)

I would recommend to scrap the policy of regular, semi-mandatory mammography screening

Overscreening, overdiagnosing, and overtreatment are three of the chronic diseases of the modern healthcare systems. The New York Times brought to our focus the results of an extensive, 25-year-long survey involving 90,000 Canadian women whose results just appeared in the British Medical Journal.



The results seem to clearly show that the use of mammograms doesn't reduce the breast cancer death rate. It is not the first study with a similar outcome – see e.g. this mammogram study one year ago – but it's arguably the most extensive, empirically rooted one.




The numbers seem to speak a clear language. Those 90,000 women between 40 and 59 years of age were randomly divided to two groups of 45,000 women each. The first group received breast exams and mammograms; the second group only received breast exams.




During the quarter of a century, 3,250 women in the "with mammogram" group were diagnosed with breast cancer; the number was reduced to 3,133 women in the "without mammogram" group. The difference, 117, is almost exactly 2 standard deviations (two times the square root of 3,250) so one could say that with the mammograms, the detection rate is marginally higher – so that the difference may still be due to noise.

But what really matters is that 500 women (about 1%) died of breast cancer in the "with mammogram" group; the number of casualties in the "without mammograms" group is 505. Here, the standard deviation is the square root of 500 or so, or 22, and the difference is just 1/4 of a standard deviation. It is a pure noise, a statistical tie. The policy of random screening by mammograms hasn't detectably reduced the breast cancer death rate.

The paper mentions that this failure comes despite the fact that more women are dragged through the hassle of the cancer treatment – including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. The mammogram itself uses low-energy X-rays, too. It may be useful to know that mammography has a high, about 10% false negative rate (undetected cancer). The paper's data also imply some over-diagnosis (it's something else than a false positive; over-diagnosis counts cases of detected and real cancer but one that is "weak enough" and that would remain harmless enough for the rest of the life).

Now, there may be a signal. A more accurate measurement or survey could show that mammograms reduce the number of women by a small fraction of a percent. But even if it were the case, is an arbitrarily low reduction of the death rate a good justification for an expensive policy? I don't think so. The society is often held hostage to emotions and precautionary principle so that it becomes almost if not entirely politically incorrect to point out that someone (or a technology like mammogram) who is supposed to help isn't actually helping anything.

Some numbers.

In the U.S., about 2.6 million people die every year. That includes about 1.3 million women. Out of them, 40,000 women see breast cancer as the cause of the death. That's about 3% of the women who die. The comparison of the numbers 505 and 500 above suggests that the mammography screening is unlikely to reduce the breast cancer death rate by much more than 1% relatively – I mean 1% from 3%. Even if you ignore the probable fact that the difference between 500 and 505 was just noise, mammograms are saving at most 400 women a year or so; it is 3 parts per million from the set of the women who die on the same year.

You may translate this figure to an expected increase of the life expectancy. That quantity is likely to increase by something comparable to 3 parts per million of its current value which is 80 years for women, too. If you multiply "3 parts per million" by "80 years", you will get something like "2 hours".

Even if you assumed that the observed difference in the death rates between the "with mammogram" and "without mammogram" group were due to a signal, the signal is so weak that an average woman prolongs her life by something like 2 hours only. It's less than what she spends with the mammography screenings in her life. It's actually much less because a majority of women are getting a mammogram every year. Let me articulate this point once again:

By undergoing mammography screening, you may (statistically speaking) only prolong your life by a (much) shorter time than the time you spend with the mammography screening (plus waiting for the results in the hospital).

Is that a good investment of time then? And of course, it is not just time. A single mammogram costs something like $100 – that's what the uninsured women typically pay. If you get a mammogram annually for 30 years, it costs $3,000 per lifetime. Would you pay $3,000 for 2 hours of extra life that you would be obliged to spend in the hospital with annoying diagnostic devices (and possibly with much more annoying treatment)?

My answer would be a clear No. Just try to think how wonderfully you may improve your life for $3,000. And by the way, even if you added 2 hours for $3,000, the cost of your 80-year-long life would then be $1 billion. Try to inform your life insurance company.

Incidentally, the paper clarifies many subtle differences between various foggy claims that are being made. The refinements sometimes sound like black humor. For example, it is sometimes being said that women with breast cancer who undergo mammography live longer. It is true, in a sense, the paper confirms. However, what it means is that they live longer with cancer – more precisely, they live longer while knowing that they have cancer simply because they learn about it earlier. So their total lifetime is the same; just a higher fraction of their life is burdened by the disturbing knowledge.

I feel that the modern society is literally flooded with similar policies that were justified by pure emotions or the mindless precautionary principle. But if you think about them rationally, they are not bringing anything good to us. Mammograms look scientific but the assumption that their scientific basis automatically implies that they make a difference is believed as mindlessly as the belief in shamans in less advanced societies. Mammograms are just a tip of the Seiberg. Similar policies make people feel more anxious and add psychological problems in general, they are wasting their time, they cost something like $100 per mammogram - lots of money, they (I mean antibiotics that are overused) are making the bacteria more resistant and more dangerous in the future, and they bring virtually no improvement in the survival rate etc.

It seems to me that people think that "it must be possible to do something about the diseases" and "it's their duty to do so" and "it's the duty of others to morally support them in these policies". But it's a fact that even if you try hard and even if you use all the currently available technological know-how, you won't really reduce your risk of death to zero (or close to zero). Most of the people who were born are going to die on some day, anyway. Well, the truth is that all of them will but I didn't want to scare you by this revelation. If someone is eager to help (and be paid $100), it doesn't mean that he is really helping.

What I mean by the recommendation is that the providers of mammography and politicians shouldn't be allowed to claim that their method saves lives – or that it is a "must" for similar "reasons" – because this claim contradicts the evidence. Extensive, peer-reviewed, blah blah blah, scientific evidence.

CNN also wrote about some criticism targeting the study voiced by those who make living by mammography – billions of dollars per year industry. I find all the criticism to be indefensible malicious junk. Someone has done the most careful research involving 90,000 women for 25 years – and someone else may simply find the scientific results inconvenient. That's what's going on. The critics said that better-quality imagining devices and better professionals could have been used. Great but that would be biased. They have used the same kind of devices and professionals whom the typical women in the Western world get when they go to the annual mammography so any complaint is clearly indefensible. Moreover, if mammography were that helpful, it could be seen with the less-than-best devices, too. And despite the continuing improvements, the mammograms were in no way a "new technology" in the 1980s; mammography really began in 1895. Chances are that the death rate wouldn't drop even if everyone were undergoing the most advanced mammography. The critics also question the paper's comments on overdiagnosis. But they're very solid. In particular, it's very correct that the paper chose the actual number of casualties, and not "survival rate among the diagnosed ones", to be the quantity that matters. And there's no difference here. A higher (70% vs 63%) percentage of the "diagnosed ones" may survive in the mammography group but those 7% in the difference group would not be diagnosed and would not die (or face serious illness) if they didn't go to mammography. So this 7% group wasn't really helped in any way and it would be pure demagogy to count them as a victory for mammography. The defenders of the annual mammography have lots of vested interests – but those are among the holy cows whose motives and integrity cannot be questioned by the cowardly, hypocritical, PC media.

Australia's ABC quotes some oncologists who don't like that the study seems to imply that the very "finding the cancer early" doesn't reduce the mortality. And you know what? The study indeed seems to imply that – within their resolution. It's a dogma people want to believe that the early diagnosis is always great. But it isn't necessarily so. So minor/early stages of cancer may be present in random people. Many of them may be doing just fine with it for a century – the problem may never grow to proportions that matter. And those whose tumors are actually going to become dangerous, the early detection may be useless, too. Add the illness that may be added by the screening itself and by the unnecessary treatment and you must conclude that it's still totally plausible that the early detection makes things slightly worse, not better.

But again, even if the early detection does help in principle, we must still ask "how much it helps" and an actual empirical survey such as this one is extremely helpful if not necessary to answer the question. The answer seems to be "the help is negligible". Remarkably enough, Reuters only dedicates one paragraph (the last one) to the empirically unfounded criticism of the paper. On the contrary, KCCI offers a passionate testimony by Ms Mary Sievers who is convinced that she and her several relatives were saved by mammograms. Why is she so convinced that what the mammograms had found would have killed her? There's lots of religion-like faith in these matters.

Similar comments apply not only to healthcare; public safety is another example. A hurricane or any other natural catastrophe that destroys houses or human lives is terrible. People feel that they are "obliged" to fight against such catastrophes, at least by their way of talking or symbolically. But those things aren't really helping so any "feel good" feeling is utterly unjustifiable. You can't (detectably) reduce the hurricane rate by driving a Prius or not driving at all or by turning off the U.S. economy, for that matter. Hurricanes don't care about these matters and even if they do care, the dependence is so weak (similar to the reduction of the death rate with the help of mammograms) that it doesn't qualitatively change any particular story.

On Sunday, Peter F. would send me a link to an obnoxious anti-quantum tirade by Adrian Kent. Except for some random uncontroversial spam about the discovery of nuclei and other things, it's nothing else than another salvo saying that quantum mechanics has to collapse because it is not classical physics – it is refusing to fulfill the obligation to say what is happening during the experiment. Well, quantum mechanics answers this question completely clearly and unambiguously when it says that it is physically invalid to ask about the measurable quantities before they're measured – they just don't have any specific properties. I decided that Adrian Kent didn't offer anything new and I've explained why folks like him are cranks too many times and it didn't make any difference whatsoever. Let me promote something more sensible instead.

In 2008, quantum information experimenter Anton Zeilinger of Vienna won the Newton Medal (U.K.). He gave a talk:



The video has 68+ minute. In the beginning, the host mentions that when Slovakia joined the EU, they would send a quantum message to the Slovak colleagues that would say – if I include the text in between the quantum lines – "Haha, you're finally back in the Habsburg Empire, you Slowakische Untermenschen!" ;-)




Zeilinger begins with a discussion of the Heisenberg Microscope and the Schrödinger's Cat. The gedanken experiments continue with those that appeared in the Bohr-Einstein debates. Einstein said that "physics is about what is out there" while Bohr would say "physics is about what we can say".

Niels Bohr is presented as a great theoretical experimenter – he wouldn't forget to draw nuts and screws etc. in an experimental apparatus. ;-)




We learn about Zeilinger's ex-adviser who would start the field of neutron interferometry in 1974-1975. Recall that neutron interferometers are also enough to prove that the "entropic gravity" is a pile of crap. Zeilinger says that he's convinced that the size of the objects that can display interference is unlimited; it is only a question of the money and experience; carbon molecules have already been shown interfering. The experimental outcome is actually prettier than the theoretical prediction (due to the Casimir interaction). It confirms Feynman's quote

Yesterday's sensation is today's calibration, and tomorrow's background.

It's because the Casimir effect used to be a sensation, now it is a background.

Zeilinger explains that in that experiment, decoherence is suppressed because the molecules cool down by the emission of radiation more quickly than the time they need to decay. He defines decoherence as a flow of the information from the system to the environment. Elaborating on this line of reasoning, Zeilinger argues that decoherence may be suppressed to a non-problem even for viruses at room temperatures! Comparably large molecules have already been seen interfering.

His folks are adding small mechanical levers. Interference should be checkable for objects with \(10^{20}\) nucleons. There is no objective border between the classical realm and the quantum realm; the quantumness depends on the experiment. A joke about quantum cars follows.

At 21:45, the second part of the talk, about entanglement, begins.

Zeilinger says that the founding paper, one by Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, was published in PRL without a referee report! Later, PRL would start to send Einstein's papers to referees, so he would stop sending papers to that journal. ;-)

I would say that if Einstein were guaranteed to be smarter than the average referees, it would be an appropriate reaction to the humiliation by the "peer review". However, Einstein actually wasn't "generally superior" in QM issues in any sense so it was true that the peer review does help to increase the average quality of the published papers. The EPR paper would get about 3 citations per year up to the 1960s and then the anti-quantum movement really exploded, so the paper would get hundreds of citations per year ever since. Formally Einstein's most cited paper today (a really preposterous ranking).

Schrödinger would start to talk about entanglement in 1935, too.

Zeilinger says that various claims in the EPR paper are right or wrong depending on one's philosophy but the last sentence of the paper about the existence of the realist description of the experiment is definitely false.

A joke. Some people would tell Bohr to write papers more clearly. He answered: "Why should I write papers more clearly than I think?" And he had a point, Zeilinger says. At any rate, Bohr would say rather clearly that physics is about what can be said about the system, and what can be said depends on the full experimental setup. Bohr would also rather clearly say that quantum states are not real objects, they only exist in our mind. And reality may be different for different observers.

This was a Newton Lecture so Zeilinger had to say what Newton would say about this question. What he would say was written in his letter to Bentley, probably an ancestor of a carmaker. ;-) Newton found it inconceivable that inanimate matter affects inanimate matter at a distance without a messenger. Zeilinger says that Newton's claim was wrong as well. Well, I would be more ambiguous. Newton really defended locality, and he was right because entanglement isn't a "nonlocal influence". It's just a correlation. At any rate, it's silly to grade Newton in the quantum mechanics class – he had apparently no clue about the subject.

Zeilinger says that there's no mediator of the gravitational force. I disagree with that. The gravitational field, whether classical or quantum, is a mediator, and it also implies that the measurable influences are propagating at the speed of light, not the infinite speed.

In the 1960s, John Bell wrote a paper that was a useful footnote for the EPR paper. Quantum mechanics really does conflict with Einstein's local realism. There are sharper examples of the differences between local realism and quantum mechanics. Zeilinger praises Bell's paper on Bertlmann's socks. Bertlmann held the different-color socks to protest the world; he was still doing the thing at the time of the talk. In classical physics, the anticorrelation between the socks' color is trivial. Is that trivial in quantum mechanics? My answer is that the essence of the (anti)correlation in quantum mechanics is exactly the same – it follows from some correlated properties imprinted to the two subsystems in the common past, when they were in touch – and it is possible to guarantee such correlations in the sock-like way despite the fact that the individual color of the sock (its quantum counterpart) remains uncertain.

It just happened that the experiments with lasers became possibly at the same time when Bell wrote the paper. Zeilinger says it's a pity that no one has developed the school-friendly version of these laser experiments.

The term "qubit" was introduced by Schumacher: you may be dead and alive with different probability amplitudes. OK, to show that this is not a funeral joke, let me admit that his name was Benjamin Schumacher. Zeilinger would publish a picture of a nude fat Austrian porn model in Nature (to show some quantum cryptography); no one would protest because she wasn't a military symbol. ;-)

Quantum teleportation is dedicated some time. Zeilinger says that Bohr's non-realist position makes the very process of the teleportation a non-event. What you can say about the last system depends on what you've done with the middle system. For a strict Bohrian, there's just no problem here.

Entanglement at large distances. Thousands of kilometers, done. Measurements at spacelike seperations were just getting started.

At 51:00, Zeilinger is asking whether "locality" or "realism" is wrong.

This could have been a philosophical question, like the EPR original questions, but it was a damn tangible oncesince Tony Leggett's 2003 paper. Leggett's class of would-be promising "crypto-nonlocal" (CN) theories predict an inequality analogous to Bell's one but independent from that. Zeilinger falsified these non-local realist theories in 2007. He would like to decide about other classes defined by some appropriate properties.

At 58:40, Zeilinger praises the free-will theorem. After 1:00:00, he only mentions some directions in quantum computation. He picks Grover's algorithm to search in an unsorted database. You only need \(\sqrt{N}\) and not (the classical average result) \(N/2\) checks to find the person for a given telephone number with \(N\) entries.

Zeilinger predicted that quantum computers would become everyday life gadgets – which he believes especially because the decoherence problems may be overcome in his view.

He completes the story about the Moon. Einstein would ask Bohr: Do you really believe that the Moon is not there when nobody looks? It's much less well-known that Bohr would wisely reply: And can you prove the contrary to me? ;-) Physics is about what you can say. If you can't measure (or prove) something, it's not a part of facts of science.

As Zeilinger concluded in his meditations with his friend Dalai-Lama ;-), quantum mechanics is about what you can say about Nature, so the information is very important. In the beginning was the (Qu)Bit/Word. A quote by Newton who says that he is opening the secrets gradually. Finally, he encourages the young curious people.



The most famous former U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1989-1992 (and to Ghana) died. Here in Pilsen, we would know her from the celebrations of the liberation by the U.S. army. The 1934 movie above, Bright Eyes, shows that child stars are no invention of the recent decades. RIP, Shirley Temple Black.

Alex Wissner-Gross' thoughts are probably too good to be true

Óscar Gómez asked me about a 12-minute November 2013 TED talk by Alex Wissner-Gross. He would talk about an equation or principle that produces all intelligent behavior.



I know Alex very well. We would often talk about his great inventions at Harvard where he was a PhD student. Now, he has degrees from physics, computer science, nanoscience, electric engineering, and various fields like that, and is an ambitious inventor and entrepreneur. Now he's affiliated with some Harvard and MIT artificial-intelligence-related institutes.

Some of his self-promoting paragraphs say that he's also trying to find a way "how to make people aware of climate change". That's of course distasteful, Alex. What about looking for a way to "make the people understand that the climate change activists are a dangerous terrorist pseudoscientific organization fighting a non-existing problem and trying to control the rest of the mankind"?




He starts with a quote – one he endorses and that was used to criticize the early computer scientists including Alan Turing – that asking whether a machine can be intelligent is as lame as asking whether a submarine may be swimming. I thought that he would discuss the intrinsic ill-definedness of the intelligence. What is intelligence? It depends, it has many layers and components, many manifestations etc., every definition will end up with slightly different results. And this ill-defined intelligence may exist to various degrees, too.




But Alex went exactly in the opposite direction. Intelligence is very well-defined and he may design a program (and claims to actually have designed a program called Entropica) that guarantees the pure intelligent behavior in every situation. The equation it follows is\[

F = T\cdot \nabla S_\tau

\] The intelligence is the force \(F\) that acts in the direction in the space of possible "actions" that tries to increase (or maximize) the number of options \(S_\tau\) (a quantity that Alex misleadingly interprets as the entropy) we will have at a future time \(\tau\). Here, \(T\) is an unspecified coefficient, much like \(\tau\) itself.

He marvelously claims that when this program is connected – in a way he doesn't specify – to the information about the stock prices, it starts to trade stocks and produce growing profits without being told about the "right goal". When it's connected to a small gadget that may balance on water, it starts to be balancing on water. It plays ping-pong and does lots of other things that look intelligent.

If true, it's amazing. But I just don't understand how the wonderful program could possibly work. In some sense, Alex with his inventor's mind is looking at things in some kind of a synthetic way. Quite generally, it seems to me that he is not decomposing the issues to the elementary building blocks at all.

First, he doesn't say what the timescale \(\tau\) is and what the coefficient \(T\) is. More importantly, the equation attempting to resemble classical physics is analogous to Newton's inverse square law \(F=Gm_1m_2/r^2\). But that law would be meaningless without some \(F=ma\) – a law that allows the force to be identified as the acceleration (second time derivative) of a coordinate. Concerning the "missing \(F=ma\) problem", let me assume that Alex claims that the intelligent behavior does include such a law. Perhaps, instead of a force, the force is linked to the first time derivative of coordinates? It should better be linked to something.

That's surely not where my problems end. As the letter \(S\) and his wording indicates, he wants to interpret the "future freedom" or the "future number of options" as some kind of entropy. But he clearly doesn't mean the full entropy – which is dominated by the entropy stored in atoms' chaotic thermal motion, even if we talk about the rather intelligent life on Earth. (A way to maximize the total entropy in the future is to burn lots of coal which may be intelligent but isn't automatically so because true intelligence has other, finer dimensions.) He must only mean some "part of entropy" carried by the relevant macroscopic degrees of freedom. But how does one precisely isolate them? Even if I know the exact description of a physical system (and most intelligent agents can't know it), it seems impossible to separate the relevant degrees of freedom.

To determine the right "intelligent behavior", the gadget must know how many "future options" different decisions right now produce. But the calculation of \(S_\tau\) for some future time \(\tau\) as a function of a decision at present is an example of a prediction. And the animals or machines simply cannot make predictions without intelligence, can they? So the definition is a circular one, kind of. I think that a major part of intelligence is something that allows people (or others) to invent the rules to predict the future. Much of their intelligent behavior follows from that. But this aspect is viewed as a "trivial input" that has to be calculated externally.

But the only way to correctly predict the future is to use some kind of the laws of physics or Nature. It's crazy to think that all intelligent subjects in the world are automatically equipped with the full knowledge of string theory. They don't really know almost anything about the future behavior of physical systems and their relationship to the past facts and they learn how to predict these things (except for things that are "hardwired to their brain", but these hardwired things are arguably straightforward and we may easily emulate them by computers; only the intelligence that one "adds" in his life is mysterious).

So most of the things are undefined in some way but the concept of intelligence as the "ability/desire to maximize the future freedom" is an attractive meme. I largely agree with it – I think that more intelligent people care about their freedom (multiplicity of options) more than the non-intelligent people, for example. But I don't believe it is a generally valid formula for intelligent behavior. And I think that in many cases when it is fine, it is vacuous.

By the previous sentences, I mean that in many cases, intelligent behavior is one that reduces the number of options or uncertainty about the future. Intelligence is needed for a NASA space probe to move to the right place where we want to have it. When we play chess, we want to reduce the freedom of the opponent. So these are examples how the "opposite law" sometimes seems more true than Alex's original law.

But I am really confused how his principle may produce the clever behavior e.g. in the case of the stock trading. What does it mean to maximize the future freedom? Even animals want to survive. Survival improves the future freedom because when you die at time \(\tau\), your option for times greater than \(\tau\) will be reduced to one option: lie in the grave, or be dispersed over India, or whatever is your preferred funeral format. So yes, the instinct to survive is a simple example of the desire to increase the number of future options.

Being rich also increases your freedom. You may choose any expensive hotel, send rockets to outer space, and so on, you may surely add 500 other things that you could do if you had a billion dollars. So it's sort of trivial that people want to have enough money when they trade stocks. But how does it tell the program to buy or sell stocks? The program must be equipped with the function \(S_\tau\) that calculates the freedom (or, well, money) at time \(\tau\), mustn't it? But that's probably impossible without predicting the future motion of the stocks. However, predicting the motion of stocks is the "bulk" of the problem we wanted solve in the first place. I can't see how Alex's equation has helped or may help to solve the problem. I would probably need to see more about Entropica's inner guts - but I am afraid that such a view into the interior would reveal that it doesn't really work as advertised.

Well, the very notion that the "most intelligent behavior" is objectively calculable sounds implausible to me, too. As I said, intelligence has many aspects and dimensions. But it also has many uses. I don't believe that science may really tell us what we should do. The issue is related to the claim that science cannot answer moral questions.

For the reasons above and others, I am skeptical. But even though I feel that despite his physics PhD, Alex's whole way of thinking is sort of incompatible with the theoretical physicist's understanding of the world as a consequence of impersonal laws of Nature (this perspective seemingly unavoidably renders most of the concepts interesting for the humans – such as intelligence – ill-defined), I still find some semi-mathematical principles like that applied to assorted philosophically appealing human concepts (intelligence, beauty, diverse, whatever) intriguing because I am sometimes worried that there could be an entirely different, yet scientifically robust, way to classify all events in our Universe. And even if the world is as sensible as I expect and none of these "laws" can be fundamentally true, I am still interested in possible applications of such paradigms because some of them could profoundly change the way how we live.

Science shows that the opposite of the feminist claims is true



In the famous Czech cartoon for kids, Mr Mach and Ms Šebestová (right) found a torn off telephone receiver. Comrade teacher Ms Kadrnošková (pink skirt) tends to treat Mr Horáček and Mr Pažout as two ultimate losers although they may be smarter than Ms Šebestová and she just dislikes their rebellious character. Episodes at YouTube.

Czech news server iDNES.cz discusses a pair of new sociological papers about the favoritism in education:

Czech teachers disciminate against boys. A new study debunks the feminists.

Dr/Mr Petr Matějů, the currently most cited Czech sociologist and the dean of a Faculty of Social Studies, along with Dr/Ms Natalie Simonová, another sociologist (who is as pretty as her namesake with an extra diacritical sign, a model), wrote a paper to be printed in the March 2014 issue of Orbis Scholae (The Eye/Circle/World of Schools) titled

Who is disciminated against at school: boys or girls?

An extended international version written along with the Prague-based U.S. sociologist Michael L. Smith will appear in the upcoming issue of The British Journal of Sociology of Education.

Their research has analyzed the decade-old exams and grades from 2003 of 2,598 nineth-graders (*1987). The data included the reading and mathematical abilities in the international research tests PISA (where favoritism isn't possible), along with the grades from the normal school process where favoritism is possible. They were interested in various correlations of these numbers with the schookids' sex, socio-economic, cultural, and family background, and the kids' further plans.




Dr Matějů says that because of a growing avalanche of international research papers, he was ready to find out that the boys are discriminated against. But he didn't expect the differences to be so spectacular.




The favoritism aiding girls was found in every individual kind of test.

Even though boys' more objective PISA exams showed better scores than the girls' in all respects, girls are 2 times more likely to get a "1" in mathematics (an "A", from a 1-5 scale) than boys. In the Czech language, the chance of the girls' to get a "1" is a staggering 5 times higher than the boys' odds, despite the better boys' objective results.

The authors conclude that the discrimination against girls at schools is self-evidently a feminist myth. They have pointed out the absence of actual evidence in some other papers claiming to study the same questions, including one paper by Ms Lucie Jarkovská and Ms Kateřina Lišková called Gender Aspects of the Czech School Education System. The latter paper admitted that girls are the benefactors of favoritism when it comes to grades but it has also claimed – without any actual evidence – that the teachers like to question the girls' abilities.

Ms Jarkovská, the feminist, emitted lots of incomprehensible fog in order to try to diminish the impact of the new studies. "Unlike these authors, we don't view this as a fight – to find out who is worse off." It's too bad because exactly this "fight" question was claimed to be the topic of their very paper, too. Ms Jarkovská says that one must also judge the actual impact of the grades on the future success in education, the feeling of satisfaction, and later better income. Clearly, they haven't done any actual research on any of these things but they love to spread the answers supporting their preconceived ideology, anyway.

Drs Matějů and Simonová have found out that both sex and the social background of the schookid have a profound impact on the decisions about the further studies. The daughter of college-educated parents has many times higher chances to study a gymnasium (intellectuals' high school) followed by a college than the son of parents with apprenticeship.

"These biases have apparently been operating in our society for quite some time, and unless the situation will change, we may expect a further deterioration of the boys' ideas about the success in life – and this deterioration unavoidably evolves into the emergence of problem-riddled behavior, including violence and crime," Dr Matějů said. He would be a deputy minister of education for universities some years ago.

The reasons behind the favoritism is only discussed marginally by the paper. They speculate that a possible explanation is that the teachers give better grades to more disciplined, obedient, polite schoolkids – which tend to be girls.

Another possible explanation is the significant overrepresentation of women among teachers. If this turned out to be the actual cause, the society should work hard to increase the percentage of men among the teachers – in the analogous way in which it is sometimes being tried to increase the percentage of women in the STEM fields (well, I would add: it would actually be possible to increase the number of men among teachers while it is not possible to markedly increase the women in STEM fields). They also recommend various unspecified improvements of the education methods that would allow everyone to choose the specialization according to his or her interests rather than gender stereotypes.

They were asked how can the better girls' grades be reconciled with their lower average income. They answered that due to the discrimination against boys at schools, boys are forced to work harder which is something they later find helpful when they work. Well, I don't believe this explanation much, but let me not turn this news story into my essay.

Ms/Dr Jarkovská, the co-author of the older feminist study, mentioned many likely teachers' stereotypes. The assumption is that due to their later puberty, the boys are believed to be likely to catch up with the girls later. Teachers sometimes tend to prefer schoolkids who have been already "boxed" as the earners of the best grades "1". She also says that while the girls get many more "one's", their value is often devalued – teachers think that they resulted from memorization, not intellect and ingenuity. I actually think that these explanatory comments by the feminist are right (and so is the teachers' belief, in most cases). Teachers may give better grades to the girls but they also know it's happening, so they're largely remove this bias back when they see the grades (given by their colleague) as an input.



The x-axis shows the grade group (1 is best, 5 is worst), and gymnasiums (left half) and specialized expertise high schools (right half). The y-axis shows the average score of the sex-schooltype-grade bin for boys (dark blue) and girls (light blue). You may see that the boys' (impersonal) scores are always significantly higher. In fact, the boys' score would earn them a grade better by one whole degree (–1) if they were graded according to girls' standards.

Czech media have repeatedly discussed analogous conclusions of more "industrial" surveys of this kind. For example, in Spring 2012, we were told about 2005 tests by an institution named Scio that also showed that boys with the same grades had significantly higher scores in impersonal tests than girls who would receive the same grades from the (biased) teachers. See the graph above.

The discussion thread under the new newspaper article is highly civilized, partly because of the fact that virtually all readers seem to think that the papers confirm their experience which many of them describe in some detail. The votes under the comments sometime indicate the dominance of anti-feminist readers by the 60-1 or 30-0 ratio. It is still sort of staggering to remember that I was treated like a Nazi boss – or as a Jew in Auschwitz – for the very same common-sense views and knowledge. The only feminist-like assertion I could find in the discussion was one by a man that "girls probably need more motivation". A female reader quickly corrects the man by pointing out that the truth is exactly the opposite. It's the girls who are easier to be motivated – programmed to do something – while boys tend to preserve their own character and priorities and are sometimes notoriously hard to motivate.