The Differences

The media has been reporting several incidences of large numbers of birds or fish dying all at the same time. My guess: atmospheric levels of toxic gas clouds, left over from this summer's volcano in Iceland, floating about or getting carried into the water because of rain. Just a guess ...

Knowledge follows paths, as each new person adds to it. Some paths lead to advanced understanding, some just lead back onto themselves. Knowing the complete space of knowledge from an invalid path is irrelevant, and possibly mis-leading. For once most people have framed their view of the world, they are stuck there forever. If that view is a step forward, then they to can move forward, but if that view is a backwards step of some kind, then that is were they end up. We cannot know, with any branch of knowledge, whether it leads forwards, or backwards. We can only guess, and infere that it has either open a few doors, or closed them. In that way, everything we learn is in some way is dangerous to our being, if we are more likely to be trapped by that knowledge. Fortunately, humans, many of them, are not necessarily stuck. It is a personal choice, one of freewill, to be able to question even our most dearly held assumptions. To some it comes easily, but it is available t...

Gravitational Ramblings I was never really interested in physics, preferring instead the more pure branches of mathematics. Given that, much of what I'll say in this little discussion is probably already out there or just total nonsense, still just in case it isn't, I figured I just write it down. You never know, it's a strange world. I was watching a newly published lecture series with the eminent Richard Feynman. He said a couple of things that I had already learned about gravity, but I found fascinating anyways. The first was that Copernicus found that the planets traveled in a ellipse, with the sun being in the focal point. Quite well, known, but the relevance of the sun's position never really dawned on me before. Another thing he talked about was the measurements for a system far away, but the star's position wasn't at the focal point in the ellipse, he pointed out that this was because we were viewing the system from an angle. The final bit that I found i...

Human-Oriented Dynamics To model our larger behavior as organizations, we need some irrationally motivated, inconsistent system, that in it's lack of completeness manages to predictably move around the same territory that we do. A system completely opposite in nature to a mathematically formal system, yet one sufficiently expressive enough to be able to draw conclusions from its changes in different states. People are neither logical nor rational, and when they operate in larger and larger groups, these inconsistencies manifest into larger patterns within the over-all interactions. The rules make no sense, yet they shouldn't make sense. These are a few basic principles (of an infinite number of them): The Opposition Principle: For anything that someone can do, someone else will attempt to do the opposite. The Path Principle: To force something along a prescribed path, there must be at least two balancing forces at work. The Ease Principle: People will always take the easiest...

Third-world democracies are often driven by large populations of un-educated voters, resulting in poorly chosen elected officials and mass amounts of corruption. A large stable middle-class tends to stabilize the voting, which indirectly stabilizes the country. Restricting the voters to something elite like 'land owners' defeats the fairness principles enshrined in democracies. A better approach is for the government to restrict voters based on education. To vote, one needs to pass a basic education. To make it fair, the government needs to offer that specific level (it need not be that high) to everyone, guaranteed, for free (and in night courses too). A better educated set of voters will make more balanced choices.

Simple answers to complex problems always make the problems worse. You cannot solve a complex problem with anything other than a complex solution; partially solving a problem is just adding to it. The solution must fully cover the problem, or the ignored attributes will cause major side-effects. A simple answer will work fine for a simple problem, but likely somebody has probably already solved that (since it's simple, and your unlikely to be first).