The Differences

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).

Blowing up a house, to get rid of an infestation of cockroaches is not a real solution to the problem. Too many people on this planet don't seem to understand why it's such a bad thing. That's probably why there are more problems getting created than there are getting solved.

Countries should be forced to always live by their own rules. They should not be allowed to do to someone else's civilians what they cannot do to their own. Any technique that a country uses to get its way, should be one that is used equally internally and externally . All they need to to comply with this, is to be honest and document what they've done, and what they are planning to do. Just paperwork, how hard can that be?

Mankind iterates its knowledge. Somewhere, in some dark and dank corner of the web sits the answers to most of our problems. It's just that with all the noise out there, it's unlikely that we'll be able to recognize them in time.