A proposal to the country that hates young people

This is a engllisth translation of an article published from a Greek journalist, Stelios Kouloglou. The original article can be found in:

http://tvxs.gr/news/ομάδα-tvxs/μια-πρόταση-στη-χώρα-που-μισούσε-τους-νέους-του-σ-κούλογλου


Some years now, I am trying to understand why this country doesn' care for the younger generations. In the past, the age of those in power gave an easy answer: for example, when in 1990 Xenofon Zolotas became prime minister, he was *only* 86 years old. The rest partners in this little group (K. Mitsotakis, Ch.
Florakis, A. Papandreou) were more or less at the same age. The same yar Konstantinos Karamanlis was elected for second time as President of the Greek Republic in the age of 83. Those "youngsters" had of course no communication with young people. In 2004 though the 48 year old Kostas
Karamanlis (nephiew of the other guy) became one of the youngest prime ministers in the history of Greece. What is more, Th. Roussopoulos, the real prime minister working in the back stages was even younger. Nonetheless, it was as if Souflias (another very old politician) was in power.

The problem of the 700E Generation - G700 (it's a new term refering to all those young people that work for 700E month salary, with no security and working unpaid overtimes) was in its peak when these guys
came in power, however the governemtn didn't even want to hear about this thing. In the conversations that I had in 2008 with the managers of ERT (greek public television), I was asked not to air a documentary show for the G700 people. I insisted, something must be said, a cry of anguish: if the situation doesn't get better, the best minds, the youth that gives life to a country would flee abroad. The answer, more or less was: let  them leave, here they are making trouble anyways.

According to some calculations, 850.000 Greek young people chose the last decade to stay abroad, where the studied, than come back to Greece. In practice, this country undergoes an unprecedented mutation: it exports all the smart brains and imports immigrants, who even though it's not their fault, they haven't graduated from the best universities.

Many people expected that the new government by Papandreou would improve things. Given the close relationship of the new prime minister with internet and new technologies (K. Karamanlis coulnd't tell the difference between sms and blogs) and given the very many young ministers, there was the impression
that young people would now stand the centre of the attention. And they are standing indeed, but in front of the fire squad.

The consequences to the new generations from the therapy that the International Monetary Fund and Ms. Merkel demanded are giving us goosebumps: The unemployment rates will reach 30% in the young population, who will be forced to accept only work in internships, having even lower salaries - 600E per month.

Even worse are the pension schemes: in order for the young people to get a pension over than 1000E per month, their average income for all their years  working will have to be over than 1400E per month (notice the difference 600E - 1400E) and at the same time to have at least 35 years of (full) employment in
public records. In practice, there won't be an pension, especially for those working in "flexible" jobs (part time jobs) : in order for a young guy/girl to have that many regiestered years of employment, s/he will have to reach 75-80 years old. Probably, the money will serve as funeral costs.

In all these, we shouldn't add also the heavy inheritance: debt, the destroyed health insurance system, the country's face abroad, which they will have to confront with all these guys that are going to have carreers abroad. What is the young generations fault, so as to pay such a heavy price for old
generations' sins and mistakes. I don't know what makes old people in Greece sacrifice that easily the youngsters. But only in war times there is such a thing.

P.S. The current governement will definitely answer that they couldn't do it differently. There is at least one proposal coming from the past, that can at least ease the situation, even though in a different field: as young people, we often didn't have enough money for vacation, we had though the opportunity of free camping, which is now prohibited by law. Shounld't they at least make free camping legal, as a gesture of good will?

Is time an illusion?

This is my real first post in my blog and I am rather happy for it. At the beginning, I didn't know whether I want to start writing. I don't like writing anyways that much, it's too inaccurate. As my dear friend Thanassis said a couple of days ago, our thoughts, the essence of our very being, lies in a space of practically infinite dimensionality. Words are just another form of dimensionality reduction, a lossy compression, and a bad one in general. Let alone, that a new person has to unfold the reduced dimensions to his/her own infinite brain space.

Anyways, my first post will be related to time and whether it exists or not. I owe it to myself, as this topic was a hot one back in the days. I used to tease my friends(yes indeed, a very geeky kind of teasing) and tell them that there is no time. We used to discuss about these things with Mpampis, Manos, Jimmy -he was getting furious- and many others. Amongst others, there was one of the best professors that I had the pleasure to meet, Dr. Anastasios Delopoulos. The discussions were usually taking place under the infuence of the proper amount of alcohol, together with some delicacies that "Doksa"(Δόξα) and "Prigkipos"(Πρίγκηπος) had to offer in those cold evenings(well, now I am exaggerating a bit :P). Anyways, I owe it to myself, to my pals back in Greece and to the amazing time that we had discussing such geeky things.

I was intrigued to write about time as an illusion by an article that appears in the last issue (June 2010) of the "Scientific American". In this post, I will describe a bit my "theories", at least the ones that I had back then and were a mix of a little bit of everything. Without having study properly quantum-physics or quantum-mechanics, I am only using logic to analyze this topic. Therefore, I don't claim any scientific validity in what I am about to tell, for all that matters. Of course, at the end of the day, it might come that my argumentation and line of thοught is faulty. But then, what's wrong about being wrong? Let me be wrong. For all these reasons, this article is also labeled as pseudo-philosophy, or "ampelo-filosofia" as we call it in Greek (=wine-philosophy literally). Nonetheless, there will be a follow-up post after I read the article from Scientific American and I will comment on what I am writing here.

It has been proven that there is a quantum of time, the so called Planck time. Beyond this barrier, there is no point in measuring time. This made me think, what is time. We all consider time as a continuous variable. We can always say "Stop", and no matter what, the "time" we say stop makes sense. It's not a negative, it's not an imaginary number, it's always there, as if there is a universal clock ticking at all possible moments. Yet, there is a time quantum, there is a limit, so it's a discrete variable. What is it then?

One could say, that we consider time as continuous, but this is just due to our earthy, imperfect,  human sensors. It might be as well discrete, we just feel it continuous because the sampling ratio is just too frequent. Perhaps. Or perhaps, there is actually no time. Perhaps, what we feel as time is just change of static states. Note that this still feels like time, however it's one thing to say that we as matter live in this "time" jell and another to say that we artificially create that jell. What is true then?

I believe - it's not really a belief, merely a provocative and amusing statement that I like to discuss - that we are merely living in a space-continuum that has an energy value characterizing the current state. The spatial configuration as well as the matter distribution define that energy(in some manner). What we consider now as "time" is connected to the second law of thermodynamics. According to that law, entropy, which is proportional to the energy of the system, tends to increase in a system, no matter what. This second law forces the change of state. Time is just the second law of thermodynamics applied on universal scale, nothing more nothing less. Each new state is something like a frame in an MPEG video, only that this new frame has inherently bigger energy and thus entropy. To make it easier to understand what I mean, I include a figure showing that.

At this point, one might wonder if there is just only one new possible state - or "frame" - that deterministically and unavoidably emerges. Personally I believe not and I think this is the beauty of the whole approach. Apparently, there are infinite number of new options- just consider all the atoms of the universe, 1.5 × 10^82. Now imagine how many possible motions are there. So, given infinite number of new possible universe states of bigger entropy, there are infinite number of new outcomes. Which one should the universe "choose"? Probably this is nicely connected with the theory of the infinite universes. Each one of these new states "creates" a new universe. Most of these universes are rather short-living, they cannot survive for more than a few Planck time quanta. Also, most of the new states do not nicely succeed from the previous state, only a few ones that are still many can practically take place. It is a scientific fact that nature favors smoothness, therefore only these few states can practically occur (at least I haven't grew any third arm so far) or at least the improbable states can occur only very rarely. So, now that I am writing this post, it's highly probable to type the word "gargantuan", it's also very likely to go get some water, but is very unlikely to grow this third arm I was talking about and teleport to Mars. Our new diagram would look something like that:

All in all, this is what I think about time. I think time is just an illusion of changes of state. There are infinitely many possibilities, something which would explain the existence of infinite many universes.

I do not hope that anyone will read this post, but in that case, you deserve some congratulations for your patience. Also, a comment would be very welcome. Anyways, I will answer to this post with new data and ideas, after I read the article from the Scientific American.

My first message

Hey, I am new to the blogsphere, so this is a test message. I intend to write my opinions on things that go on around the world, as well as to discuss about my scientific interests(I am a PhD student in Computer Vision at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam).

So, see you later :)