Technocracy

You may or may not be aware that I am a technocrat. The technocratic movement was started in the US and Canada during the great depression and is still alive today. At its most basic level technocracy seeks to greatly increase the efficiency of resource use (from about 20% today to a target of around 60%). This would effectively triple our available resources. Technocracy advocates a governmental or organizational system where decision makers are selected based upon how highly knowledgeable or skilled they are, rather than how much political capital they hold.
The other key difference between modern technocracy and our current societal structure is that technocrats seek to replace the 'price system' with an energy exchange system. This would eliminate the need for 'artificial scarcity' in order for the market to grow and also free up the huge resource expenditure currently directed towards moving money around (banking, economics, commerce).
The founder of Technocracy Inc. (a technocratic education group in North America) is credited with the quotation below, having been asked if his views contradicted human nature:

"Did you have to change human nature," he asked, "in order to keep passengers from standing on car platforms?"
"They put up signs first," he continued, "prohibiting the dangerous practice, but the passengers still crowded the platform. Then they got ordinances passed, and the platform remained as crowded as before. Policemen, legislators, public service commissions all took a hand but to no effect; then the problem was put up to an engineer."
"The engineers solved it easily. They built cars that didn't have platforms."

This is a great quote and a perfect example of how technical processes could be used in government.
If you are interested in finding out more about the technocratic movement the try:
http://www.technocracy.org/ or Wikipedia.

Oskar's Utopia

I've decided that a new country should be formed. I'd like everyone volunteering to join it to gather together their torches and pitchforks and meet me outside parliament house at a later disclosed time (attendants will be looked upon favorably by the new government).
Before you all volunteer, I'd like you to consider the nature of the country you'll be joining.
I have decided that the democratic system is slow and inefficient, so it will be scrapped and replaced with a benevolent dictator (me).
While I will have power of vito, the day to day running of the country will be conducted by the government (half appointed by me and half elected by the people).
We will be founding a city in East Gipsland which will have a consistent population of 500,000 (regulated by laws which prevent you from having children before your parents have died).
The 500,000 will be made up of the greatest scientific, political and social thinkers, as well as artists, engineers and government loyalists.
We will generate our wealth by being the major provider of skills, technology and knowledge to the world.
Approximately 70% of GNI will be controlled by the government, which will provide free education, health services, transport, utilities and housing.
The government's priority will be to maintain the infrastructure required to provide the skills and services that will be the focus of our nation's power.
I don't plan on keeping a standing defence force, because I believe that a near monopoly on skills and technology will provide sufficient diplomatic power to avoid open conflict. If necessary the armed police will be able to step in and defend the city against ground attack, while automated air and sea defences will provide additional security.
While the population will be free to hold whatever beliefs they wish, religious indoctrination of a minor will be illegal.
So as to increase government efficiency, only 10 members will make up the government. 7 of 10 will be required to pass a bill (5 with my backing).
I hope to attract talented and bright people from all around the world, with the promise of funding and resources for their work.
So there's my Utopia, maybe it will become a reality one day. For now I'm content to strive for it within the current system and learn what I can.

Equations that look like names

During one of the many Methods exams I've been going over, I came across an equation that looked a bit like my name. I then went and rewrote it so that it looked more like my name. I then thought about what it meant in mathematical terms and came up with a situation for which it is true.
Those of you familiar with calculus will appreciate the fact that the integral of a line allong the x axis is the same line (in this case k(r)=0). Those of you who are not familiar with calculus will note that the final line of the mathematical statement looks a bit like my name.
Some of you may also notice that for the first time I have included a picture in a post. This, as well as the stylish new header, is an attempt to drag my blog into the 21st century (I'm keeping the colour scheme and wallpaper though).
If anyone has come up with or would like to come up with an equation that resembles their name then let me know. I'll do my best to help, though I'm no professional.

Physicist in "Phocus": Tesla

This is the beginning of a new recurring segment, in which I will bring to your attention a famous physicist. It will include what they did in terms of physics, inventions, applications and interesting things about their life.
Tesla has got to be one of my favorite physicists, not for his work, but for his attitudes and peculiarities.

Nikola Tesla was born a subject of the Austrian Empire in 1856 and studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz. After a few engineering jobs in Europe, Tesla traveled to the US where he worked for Edison Machine Works, but quit when he felt Edison had cheated him. Edison's response to Tesla when he claimed he had been promised $50,000 for some work he did was "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor".
He ended up digging trenches for Edison's telegraph wires for some years, after which he set up his own company and began experimenting with high voltage and alternating current electrical devices.
He developed the AC motor, the systems which we still use to transmit AC electricity, the Tesla coil (a high voltage device for creating 'artificial lightning') and many other ingenious electrical devices and theories.
During world war one Tesla lost much of his funding due to the collapse of his European patents and started to exhibit many of the odd behaviors which characterised him in his later life.
He became obsessed with the number three, and would only stay in hotel rooms that were multiples of three. He became physically revolted by jewelry and human hair other than his own and developed an unhealthy fondness of pigeons.
Tesla's was the only negative opinion printed about Edison after his death in 1931:

He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene ... His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense.


Tesla died alone aged 86 in 1943. He had been celibate all his life so had no children or family in America. The US government immediately seized all his property, fearing that some of his documents might contain plans for his 'death ray' he had unsuccessfully promoted to the US army years earlier. Many conspiracies surround the missing plans for the 'death ray', some claiming it involved a cheap clean source of power which the US government overlooked.
Though he was critical of almost every other major physicist and inventor of the time and quite probably became insane, Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest minds of 19th century physics.

Queensland and working

My family have decided to desert me and go off gallivanting around the country (just the gold coast actually). I decided to stay home and study for my approaching end of year exams. I don't particularly like the gold coast anyway. I will be taking a private holiday early next year up to Cairns on which I intend to see more interesting geographical formations than my family would consent to.
This is not the point of this post. The point is that my exams are coming up. I am in the lucky position of having done four unit 3/4 exams before, so have an idea of what to expect. Still I'm getting nervous at the prospect of putting all the knowledge of English I have gained over my thirteen years of official education onto paper in two hours. I was hoping that would be the last marked essay I would ever have to complete, but Melbourne Uni's 'new generation' degrees force me to do humanities for 1/4 of my course (should give me a break from solid physics and maths though).
I'll now give a brief overview of my 3/4 subjects and how I think I'll do in them:

Physics: Best subject, best teacher, best SAC results and I can't stop going over it in my head if I try. (should be all right).

Chemistry: Hope to get an A, easy and unnecessarily obvious until you have to answer questions about it.

Biology: I've actually completed this subjects and done quite well. A, A, A+.

Maths Methods: I'm worried about this one the most. I understand maths easily and am able to demonstrate understanding in class well, but this does not always translate into good SAC marks and I'll need to pull off a good exam result if I want to get the aprox 35 (raw) mark I'm aiming for.


Further Maths: Yawn, I could have aced this in year 9, let's hope I remember the work from back then.
English Language: This one will make or break me, one of my biggest advantages in competing with others wanting to get into the kind of course I am aiming for is my ability to hold my own in this subject. My SACs average about 87% which is better than I've done in English in other years so let's hope I can get that A+ level that I got in my essays and avoid the low A's I got for the tests.

To summarise: If all else fails I'll send you a postcard from Vic Uni.

Physics Songs

I was recently made aware of a rap song about the Large Hadron Collider. After listening to it I looked up some other physics songs and found a great website: www.physicssongs.org .
Some of the songs are a bit lousy, but most of them are very clever, entertaining and (most importantly) educational. Lots of them also have free recordings downloadable online.
My favorites include 'Kronecker delta functions', 'Energy eigenstates' and 'Snell's law'.
I found a section of a song, 'Hail chemistry' by Tom Lehrer, particularly funny, so have included the lyrics below. I hope I haven't turned anyone away by the extreme nerdiness of this post, but this website really made my weekend (that last clause probably didn't help).

Professor :
Still my advice is to learn some math.
You don't have a thing to lose if, God forbid, to switch to Chemistry you should choose.

Student:
But sir, I think you go too far:
We do not dare disown
Our noble sister science
Second only to our own

Hail Chemistry, sung by the whole cast.

Hail chemistry, we all adore
Each answer you're referred to for
Hail chemistry, our staunch ally
It's us, it's us, whom you're well thought of by.

(sung to the tune of 'Hail Poetry')

Today the LHC is switched on!

The Large Hadron Collider is to be switched on today. This is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in existence and has been years in the making. While it has many applications, the most exciting by far is the potential to discover the Higgs boson, the particle which defines the masses of all other particles. There will obviously be a gap between when they switch on the electromagnets and when they run the experiments that we've all been waiting for, but it certainly is an exciting prospect.
What I find really interesting is the way the line between energy and matter has become blurred as we have delved deeper into the nature of each.
The first major step was in Einstein showing that energy and matter were equatable. Next the discovery of light quanta or photons (packets of light energy which have momentum and behave like particles) Then the discovery of wavelike behaviors of particles, which had traditionally been confined to the realm of energy.
The standard model of particles predicts a carrier particle for each of the fundamental forces. If this is the case then it is possible to have very small particles that lack a Higgs boson so have no mass, has a wavelength, but are still essentially what we would call matter. This sounds to me very much like a photon which is definitely energy.

Too picky?

Anyone who knows me well will know that I am mildly obsessed with things being correct. I am constantly correcting peoples' grammar, pointing out continuity problems in movies, and am the one who is largely responsible for the frequent 'lack of citation' notes of Wikipedia. This always goes down well with other people who have these habits (I seem to get along awfully well with most teachers), but the majority of you who are normal seem to get annoyed with me.
Related habits I possess are suggesting alternate words to people who aren't obviously having trouble expressing themselves and answering questions directed at other people (because I am obviously better qualified to answer them than anyone I hang around with).
This might seem a bit far fetched to some, so I'll add and example. It is from a while back, but has stuck in my mind:

On my year 9 'nerd camp' (an overnight stay at Queenscliff with the two 'high achievers' classes) we watched the gripping film Anacondas II. In this film a crew of treasure hunters hired a steam boat to go up river to try to find the elixir of life. Later in the film when they had not changed direction they went over a waterfall. I immediately saw this and laughed, assuming it was a joke. Needless to say I received inquiring looks from those near me.

I did not sit down to watch the film intending on keeping an eye out for continuity errors, it is just something my mind does on its own.
If I am looking out for logical errors, particularly in writing, I can debunk most arguments quite easily.
My question to you readers is thins: Should I reveal what I notice to those around me or keep to myself?

Stamp Collecting or Physics

I read an interesting quote about science recently, by Ernest Rutherford (the kiwi physicist who demonstrated that matter is mostly empty space):

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."-Ernest Rutherford

Now while this might seem cruel and insulting to the many who associate whith other sciences, I think I can see what he's getting at.
All science can in theory be derrived from physics, but doing so is impracticle and oftem impossible given our limited knowledge about physics and our lack of enormous computational power. Imagine trying to predict, for example, the results of a psychological experiment knowing the exact state of every particle within the system the experiment takes place in.
This is of course impossible given the probabalistic nature of quantum physics, but even if it were possible it would be so difficult to know the nature of all the particles and then calculate their actions that it would certainly be beyond current human ability.
While this is true, we still go ahead and conduct psychological experiments, record them and manipulate them as independent entities from the physics on which they are ultimately based.
This is the kind of 'stamp collecting' I think Rutherford was talking about.
All sciences have the same relationship with physics, with the exception of perhaps chemistry which is so close to physics that it is usually a direct application rather than independently concluded.
Some would argue that physics itsself is only an aplication of mathematics, but I draw the line at physics seeing as it is the most pure science that directly relates to the world. While mathematics is the application of reason on reason, it could not be used to (in theory) arrive at anything about the experiencable world independently.

What we know.

I've always been interested in knowing things. As a young child while others were being read nursery rhymes I preferred books on geology, biology and astronomy. As I progressed through primary school it became clear to me that my greatest skill was my ability to easily absorb and recall facts.
Entering high school I began to understand that application of knowledge is equally important in life and became quite proficient at this. I reached the age at which subject selection started and was never in any doubt that I would pick those subjects I had excelled at in the past (maths, science) and give up what I had always thought of as the useless 'fuzzy' subjects, where anyone with half a brain can bluff their way through (arts, humanities, social sciences to a lesser degree). Around year 10 I think we started to prove things in classes. We were introduced to new topics by being presented with old information and asked to draw conclusions. We were of course nudged along by our teachers, but it taught me another important lesson about information: Most of our information is based on previous information.
I became interested in philosophy about half way through year 11 and with the encouragement of likeminded friends decided to start a philosophy club at school. I loved the fact that I could be sure about the world through philosophy and science. Science provided a means for the world to work and philosophy confirmed it. Those of you who are well versed in philosophy will no doubt be laughing at the notion that a philosopher can be sure about the world, but I was yet to read anything in philosophy that I disagreed with.
Not long after the 'Clear Thinking' club had started up I experienced something of an existentialist crisis. I have never had a problem with lack of purpose to life. From about the age of six I have believed in a world without purpose and can remember giving and taking punches on the subject during playground arguments in primary school.
My trouble was that my beloved knowledge was thrown into doubt. I reached the conclusion that we cannot really know anything. All knowledge, I figured, was based on our observations, which can be flawed. After a few months of mental fiddling and desperate reading I changed my mind.
I was reading a philosophical essay when I came across something about Plato and his 'ideas'. It said he was fascinated by the way angles were thought of. They were perfect thoughts, but impossible to ever be perfect in reality (I know this is incorrect, Plato thought differently). This led me to think about mathematics.
I have personally never witnessed an imaginary or irrational number, but I do regular calculations involving them. Mathematics is universal, and does not change between languages or cultures. Many mathematical concepts have been independently arrived at by the mathematicians of Europe and the East. I concluded that mathematics is universal human reason. While it comes more easily to some than others, anyone with the time and inclination could potentially arrive at the same conclusions as me, even if they had not experienced the world as I have.
The next part of my justification I arrived at when reading a book dedicated to the famous brain in a jar dilemma. It reasoned that even if we are a brain in a jar or computer simulation, the reality we experience is no less real from our perspective. I thought of this in terms of our ability to deduce information form our surroundings. If I observe a sequence of events occurring regularly then even if I cannot say it is true for others it is true for me. My subjective truth, the one in which I currently reside, requires objective truths for it to work, so from my perspective truth is objective. I know this explanation leaves much to be desired, but I am simply recounting the way my mind works.
The information I hold so dear can exist for everyone (from my perspective) and be related to mathematics in the regular way we call science (In my mind the basis worldly knowledge). For this reason amongst others (such as enjoyment) I have moved toward the more mathematical of sciences (I intend on majoring in physics, not biochemistry as I wanted to in year 10) in order to stay closer to what is universally reasonable for humans.

Eigenstates of Oskar

Welcome to my blog "Eigenstates of Oskar". By now you will have read those words at least three times seeing as I named my first post after my blog. So what is this blog about? Well if you are the kind of person I am you'll either know the meaning of, or have looked up the meaning of eigenstates. For those of you who haven't I'll try to explain my title. In certain branches of advanced physics eigenstates can be thought of as possible paths for reality to take. All exist, but only one is manifested in the reality I am experiencing. In naming this I wanted to show that I am fairly 'into' physics. I also thought that seeing as blogs tend to be, in part, about peoples' lives and experiences the title was appropriate. In the future I will be posting about things that go on in my life, things I think about, Ideas in physics that my Physics teacher Ms Hutchins doesn't know and someone on the web might know and anything else I can think of. Now I'm off to bed.