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“You know the day destroys the night. Night divides the day.”

It’s Friday again.  But it’s not just any Friday‒it’s the Vernal Equinox, the day when the line between the Earth and the Sun is orthogonal to the line of the axis of the Earth, and so the day and the night will be (effectively) of equal length.  This is more fun in some ways than the solstices, because it’s the same for everyone, northern and southern hemispheres.

Of course, in the north it’s officially the Vernal Equinox, heralding the beginning of spring, whereas in the south it heralds the beginning of autumn.  I don’t know, however, if it is officially called the Autumnal Equinox in the south.  Probably it is.  After all, I’m sure they have their “official” winter solstice on what is “our” summer solstice and vice versa.  It would be a bit perverse for them to do otherwise.

It’s somewhat interesting to note, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson has pointed out with some ardor, that since, for instance, winter officially begins on the “shortest”* day of the year, the days actually get longer and longer through the winter (and the opposite happens in summer), until finally, on the Vernal Equinox, they break even with it and then daytime passes the night.

I wonder what Zeno would say about that race.

On a different topic, it’s quite rainy here this morning, and it’s a rather chilly rain, which is mildly unusual for south Florida.  It occurred to me, seeing just how sloppy it is here at the train station, that I hope it will not be so rainy at my destination.  What’s interesting about that is that it may not be rainy at all there, at work.  And yet, it could still be raining heavily down here in Hollywood.

In the modern world, weather can seem to change much more rapidly than it really does because we travel through the weather, whereas throughout all of our ancestral time we would merely have seen the weather passing over us.  It can give a somewhat misleading impression of how quickly the weather changes, even in Florida, where it can be raining on one side of a street and dry on the other**.

I recall when visiting my grandparents as a child, that there were times we would all be going somewhere in the car, and as we went along it would start to rain heavily, all of a sudden‒and then, just as suddenly, as we went along, it would stop.  And then it would suddenly start again, and then stop again, and so on.

But even in south Florida (or, well, west central Florida back then) the weather doesn’t change like that if you’re sitting still.  It changes quite rapidly compared to many other places, but not the way it seems to do when one is traveling in a modern vehicle.

For some reason, I feel as though there’s an analogy or insight available here with respect to special and possibly general relativity, but I don’t feel like trying to explore it right now.

I did bring my hardcover copy of General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum, which is part of Leonard Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum series, with me when I left the office yesterday, thinking I might read it while on the train last night.  I did not read it.  There are too many distractions, it seems, for me to be able simply to flip my attention into focus on that, however much I really am interested in it.  It’s frustrating.

I have read part of it, mind you, as well as parts of the other Theoretical Minimum series.  I have all of them in both physical copies and on Kindle, so really, I didn’t need to bring the physical book.  But it is a lovely hardcover edition, and I hoped that might make me more likely to read it, since reading a nice hardcover is much more pleasant than reading a Kindle book on one’s phone, though that can still be fun.

I also entertain the admittedly absurd fantasy that I might be reading the hardcover copy on the train some day and some other, like-minded person (preferably an attractive woman) might notice and be interested because she is into the subject as well, and so on.

This is particularly silly as pipe dreams go, because even if such an absurd event happened, I would definitely screw the whole thing up.  I tend to be quite terse when strangers try to speak with me, even if they are beautiful women.

Looking back on my life, I’m sure that there have been several occasions in which someone was expressing interest in me, but I didn’t get it or got too anxious and froze up.  Sometimes I figured it out soon after, and sometimes it took longer.  There are probably some cases that I never noticed at all, even in hindsight.

Of course, I was married for fifteen years, during some of which I was in medical practice, and so such interactions would have had a different character.  There were sometimes more flagrant and obvious “advances” in that time, because, well…doctor.  But I never had any inclination to pursue them, even when I recognized them; I’m not the kind to want to cheat on a partner.  Hell, I’m not even the kind to seek a new partner two decades after my wife divorced me (though I briefly tried a little).

I wouldn’t mind a nice relationship, but I know that I am difficult to handle in many ways (I try not to be, but I am weird, and not in some charmingly popular manner), and in certain senses, my standards are high, or at least they are fairly strict.  For instance, someone who doesn’t read for pleasure is unlikely to be terribly interesting to me.  It’s not impossible; there are other ways for people to be interesting and smart.  But not liking to read would definitely be an entry for the “con” column, not the “pro” one.

I don’t know what I’m doing, going on about such nonsense.  I am not going to have any more romantic relationships in my life.  I am going to die alone, as is only appropriate and to be expected for something like me.  And while I won’t say “it can’t happen soon enough for my taste”***, I do really feel impatient for it.  I wouldn’t say I am “eager” for it, because that’s a positive feeling.  I am just quietly desperate for it, like someone trying to find an exit from a (slowly) burning building.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you have a good one, and that you have a good weekend as well.  Yes, I mean you.

As for me, well, I am to be working tomorrow as far as I know, so I will be writing a blog post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen.

*Of course, this is a bit of a misleading characterization.  The day is the length that it is‒roughly 24 hours‒and does not change very quickly, for which fact we should all be grateful.  It’s just the length of time in a given day during which the sun is above the horizon (so to speak) that varies.

**This is not an exaggeration.  I have seen it myself on many occasions.  It seemed to happen more frequently in the area where my grandparents used to live (Spring Hill, north of Tampa) than it does down here‒or maybe I noticed it more because I was a kid‒but it is very real and quite impressive when it happens.

***Except to say that I won’t be saying it.

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Who calls me “villain”? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my blog and blows it in my face?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.

I had to check the date on my phone a few times in a row to confirm that, yes, not only is it really Thursday, but it is also the 19th of March (in 2026 AD/CE).

It’s not that I thought I must have gotten the day and date wrong.  I keep track of these things and recheck these things all the time, often coming from different directions; I usually have at least a couple of methods by which I am able to reconstruct what day it currently is.  But I always feel‒a bit more strongly than is warranted‒that not only could I be wrong in principle (as is always the case) but that I am not likely to be right.

A similar thing occurs when I do the mental addition to update the various totals on “the board” when people get deals at work.  Intellectually, I know that I’m good at it, and that I’m rarely incorrect.  But “emotionally”, I don’t feel like I’m right.

Even after I check my numbers 3 different ways using Excel (there are 3 totals that should match, and if they do, it’s much more unlikely that I’m wrong), I don’t feel like I’m sure that it’s right, even though intellectually, it’s all but a certainty.  I mean, this is mathematics here, one of the few areas in which we can obtain answers with logical certainty.  And I’m pretty good at it.

I even occasionally deliberately say to myself, after confirming in those 3 ways that I got all the mental arithmetic correct, “Yes!  I am the king!”  It’s an attempt to feel good about myself in a slightly silly way, which is the only way I allow myself to feel good about myself.  But it doesn’t work much, if at all.  It feels like what it is:  a scripted, fictional remark.

This may be part of the problem I have long had with self-affirmation, autosuggestion type things.  If I say good things to myself about myself, I don’t believe them.  in fact, I feel very squirmy and uncomfortable inside when I try to say good things about myself, or to tell myself that I like or love myself.  It’s as though I’m committing some grotesque violation of ordinary decency.

I don’t feel as though I’ve done something truly horrible mind you; I don’t feel as though I’ve harmed some helpless person or otherwise victimized the innocent.  It’s more akin to sticking one’s bare hands into a big bowl full of maggots.  I just feel that I’m disgusting and pathetic and that I make myself more so by saying things that sound as though I’m pretending I’m not disgusting and pathetic.

I recognize these as emotions that are not good guides to the empirical world; intellectually, I can handle them, assess them, recognize their irrationality, and call the judgment made.  But I have not yet been able to shake those feelings, and they are not fun.

I cannot convince myself, down to my bones, that 2 plus 2 equals 4…at least not when I’m doing the figuring.  I know I’m right in a logical sense.  I’ve perceived no reason to doubt my answer, other than the stupid fact that I am the one making it.  But I cannot seem to shake‒or I have not yet been able to do so‒the idea that I may very well have the whole thing fundamentally wrong, and that this is not just a remote, theoretical possibility.

It’s quite frustrating.  I might even say that it’s maddening, except that it seems to be the madness, itself.  It doesn’t matter how well I know and understand something intellectually, how much I know, empirically, that I’m right about something.  Somehow, I always just seem to feel that I, in and of myself, am wrong.  And so must be most of the things I do, unless I am ridiculously careful and check and recheck and triple check* everything.  And even then, I just reduce my anxiety about things a bit.

I have real sympathy for Hamlet, who didn’t want to take vengeance upon his uncle for the murder of his father without being able to convince himself beyond all reasonable doubt that he was not being misled by the apparent ghost of his father.  It makes sense to “have grounds more relative than this” when it comes to killing the king of Denmark, even if you’re the prince.  You don’t want to kill someone in the name of justice or revenge unless you’re really darned sure that they deserve it, otherwise you are committing an irrevocable crime.

Doing arithmetic, on the other hand, is rarely so consequential**.  Neither is failing to turn off a bedside lamp before leaving my room in the morning.  Nor is even the possibility of having failed to lock one of my locks when leaving the house.

But these things often lead me to feel that squirmy misgiving, almost a kind of deep formication.  It’s very annoying.

Oh, I’m also never quite sure‒emotionally‒that no one is going to push me off the platform onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train at the station***, so I’m always glancing around to make sure no one’s right behind me or coming too close, and if they are, I pay significant attention to them, preparing to dodge or fight back if attacked.

You’d think, given how often I think about the benefits of being dead, that I would be less worried about being randomly murdered at the train station.  But there’s something infuriating about the prospect that someone else could choose to kill me.  That would really tick me off (so to speak).

Anyway, it’s weird, and it’s quite frustrating.  It’s also exhausting.

They say there shall be no rest for the wicked.  I know that’s just part of a prophecy, and therefore bullshit, but in the real world, there shall often be no rest for those who feel that they are wicked.  The actual wicked, of course, probably often sleep the deep, deep sleep of the innocent (as Radiohead sang), because they do not see themselves as wicked.

They probably see themselves as perfectly fine, even great.  Some of them even seem to imagine that they are the greatest (whatever) of all time, and they often suffer no serious consequences for that intellectual failure.

Justice is not a natural force, unfortunately (despite all the bullshit, misguided, popular talk about “karma”); it’s something that has to be forced, if you will, that has to be constructed.  And the people who are most careful about trying to get things right are generally the sorts of people less likely to want to be “in charge” of things.

“And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their courses turn awry / And lose the name of Action.”

TTFN

*Not to be confused with Triple Sec or whatever that liqueur is.  I’ve often wondered if there was ever a Double Sec or even a Mono Sec/Uni Sec.  Probably not.  I suspect the true etymology is based on something that does not mean “threefold” in any sense.  But I could be wrong about this.

**Even the failure of that Climate Orbiter that famously broke up in the atmosphere of Mars was due not to an arithmetic error, but an error of units:  One group involved in the project was using metric units, the other was using so-called imperial units, and nobody seems to have checked.  I cannot imagine what I would have felt if I had made that error.  Seppuku would probably feel too generous.

***This occurred to me because, as I was writing, I was on the train platform getting ready to board the oncoming train and I experienced that minor paranoia, as I nearly always do.

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Is it small talk if you discuss the weather despite being alone?

Well, I brought the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday evening, but nevertheless I am writing this post on my smartphone.  Why?  Because the lapcom is more inefficient to get out of my bag and put back in my bag, and the smartphone is much easier to unsheathe and restow‒it just sits in my front pocket when not in use.  I can also use it to check the temperature, which is a bit chilly this morning even here in south Florida.  I’m sure that it’s quite a bit worse for regions north of us that have been hit by the wave of unpleasant recent weather.

I don’t find it unpleasant for it to get a bit cool down here‒55 degrees Fahrenheit* with a bit of overcast and some rain feels like autumn up north where I grew up, and that was always my favorite season.  It’s usually rather easy to adjust by wearing more clothes and moving around a bit if one feels chilly.

On the other hand, there’s not much to do about the heat and humidity other than to stay inside air conditioned buildings.  That isn’t very much fun, unfortunately, especially when one lives in a state that is touted for its beautiful and interesting nature.  After a point, though, one can take off as many clothes as one likes, but one will not get cooler; one will only be at risk for sunburn in rather uncomfortable places.

The worst part, though, is the humidity.  Yes, humans developed in sub-Saharan Africa, so we’re built well for endurance in hot environments (humans have more sweat glands per square inch of skin than any other animal).  But humidity is another matter.  Humidity is almost like an electronic counter measure to sweat’s ability to cool the body.  Sweat works by evaporative cooling; like blowing on soup, taking away the warmest liquid molecules lowers the average temperature of those remaining, and so on.

But evaporation depends at least partially on the differential in concentration between the liquid and the gas “above” it.  If the air is already saturated (or nearly so) with water vapor, there is going to be significantly less tendency for net evaporation to occur, and thus there will be less cooling.

This is why the reassuring and somewhat comical statement, “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat” is actually pertinent and indeed positive.  If the air is dry, and if they have adequate water, humans can tolerate surprisingly intense heat.  But when it’s humid, things don’t work nearly as well.

Also, when it tends to be humid and rainy a lot, one finds fungi and algae and the like growing on almost every immobile surface, as well as on some that are mobile, such as human intertriginous areas.

Anyway, to make a long diatribe slightly longer by summarizing it, I don’t mind cooler weather, but humidity is very annoying when it’s warm.

As for other matters, well, the holiday is over from yesterday, and I did not get to eat any corned beef and cabbage.  That’s a bit disappointing.  The next major holiday (which is coming soon) is the Passover/Easter holiday.  There’s no particular food related to these holidays that I like, though, nor really much of anything else come to think of it.

I did get into the St. Patrick’s Day spirit by drawing a shamrock yesterday, then scanning it and coloring it and fiddling with it a bit between other things at work.  Here, this is how it’s turned out so far:

It’s nothing terribly impressive, but it’s at least one very tiny, mild, creative act.  Not that writing this blog isn’t creative, but it’s not as creative as writing fiction, or not creative in the same way.  And drawing a picture is closer to writing a story than to writing a blog post.  Though I have to admit, at first glance drawing and writing would seem to be somewhat too different to compare.  And yet, I think I’m not the only person who has a deep, intuitive feeling that they are part of a strong, self-similar group.

It’s quite curious.  I wonder if such seemingly odd combinations are common among intelligent life forms.  Of course, if this planet is the only place in the universe on which intelligent life exists, then it’s a universal attribute of such life, if we count only creatures that use languages and create and use artifacts.

Well, this has been a weirdly inconstant blog post, especially for a relatively short one.  It’s not just meandering around among topics, it’s ricocheting.  I would prefer to meander; ricocheting seems like it would be very bad for my chronic back and joint pain.

*If it were 55 degrees Celsius, it would not be chilly at all.  Indeed, many people would be dying around here from the heat.  If it were 55 Kelvin, then, yeah, that would definitely be chilly.  Not that anyone would feel it, because we would all be dead if it were that cold.

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“Silence will fall”

Oh, right, today is Saint Patrick’s Day, a holiday celebrated more intensely (but far less religiously, I suspect) in the US than in Ireland.  It’s a holiday in which everyone here is said to be a little bit Irish.  I am largely Irish, in fact (by ancestry), so I feel no need to put on an act.  I also am not going to wear green today‒it’s been a long time since I’ve worn anything but black‒and I don’t recommend pinching me, or the only green you’ll have to be concerned about will be whether that will be the color of your rotting corpse or just the color of the bile leaking from your perforated gall bladder.

I certainly don’t expect to drink any beer or stout or even Irish whiskey today.  I do like corned beef and cabbage, and there’s a restaurant near work that makes a great meal of that, but they will probably be a bit oversubscribed today, and I really hate having to jockey with other people for such things.  I would rather go without.

I guess I’ll see what happens.  Getting corned beef from the restaurant is the sort of thing that’s enticing from a (temporal) distance, but the closer one gets, the more it loses its charm and feels not at all worth the effort.

There is an astonishing number of such things.  So many things are so much better in the anticipation than in the experience.  Even James Bond, in the Ian Fleming novels, noted that his favorite drink of the day was the one he had in his head before the first actual one*.

So, the anticipation is better than the payoff in many cases, which goes right along with my recognition that pleasure and joy cannot ever be durable outcomes, biologically speaking.  It’s not an evolutionarily stable strategy.

One might imagine that one could build up one’s anticipation of a thing, but then trick oneself and not give oneself the reward in the end, but the anticipation modules only really become active if you believe that they will be satisfied.

Failure to get the reward after anticipation can be more unpleasant than never anticipating it, as I think most people would agree.  And then, of course, after repeated disappointments, one stops anticipating, so one loses even that positive aspect of the situation.  “Edging”, as they call it, is only reliably pleasurable because of the knowledge that eventually there will be release.

Okay, that’s enough vaguely risqué crap.  I guess it may be better than dealing with all my dark stuff, which I have been withholding deliberately and consciously of late, since it just seems to make people uncomfortable but doesn’t engender any useful ideas or beneficial interactions or anything remotely resembling help.

So, apart from minor stuff like this, I’m going to just hold the negative thoughts back from sharing, and when I break, that will be it.  Like Keyzer Soze ( “And then, like that [fwoof]…he’s gone!”) you’ll probably never hear from me again. 

That will probably not be today, by the way, just in case you’re worried.  If someone thought some crisis were imminent today they might panic and actually, accidentally do something.  But of course, that’s a horrible way to approach matters, only intervening in a panic when catastrophe is right in front of one, at the very last moment‒when success is least likely‒when intervening earlier might actually have a decent chance of producing a good outcome.

It seems so intuitive.  If you’re trying to go somewhere, the sooner you realize you’re headed in the wrong direction and correct your course, the easier it will be to get where you want to go.  It’s easier to steer the future in the direction you hope to reach if you start the steering early (if you do it intelligently, anyway‒randomly twirling the steering wheel will almost certainly be worse for you the sooner you start doing it).

As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  Sometimes the disparity is far more stark even than that.  Sometimes, without prevention, the possibility of a cure is moot, because a lost patient cannot be treated, let alone cured.

Enough.  This, like everything else, is stupid.  Where is Sailor Saturn?  Let there be no alarms and no surprises.  Let there be silence.

*This is second-hand information.  I did not read it myself.  I have tried on more than one occasion to read a James Bond novel, but I could barely last a few pages.  Somehow, I found it utterly non-gripping.  I’m glad other people liked the books enough to make movies, because I really like some of the movies, but man, based on my sample, those books are dry.  Pussy Galore would be ashamed**.

**I know, that’s a rather raunchy and not very good joke.  Sorry.  Let’s pretend I’m already drunk from celebrating the holiday, and that’s why my judgment is impaired.  It’s not true, but the fact that it isn’t true doesn’t stop us from saying it, curiously enough.

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Meandering moody Monday musings

In case you were wondering if you might somehow have missed it:  no, I did not write a blog post on Saturday (the one just two days ago, I mean‒March 14th, 2026).  It turned out there were a number of people who would not be able to come in to the office, making it pointless (more or less) for the few who remained.  One of our best closers had to go out of state to a wedding, and another’s spouse was having medical issues, and so on.

As for me, I am always “available”.  This is one of the perks of having no life.  I have no spouse or significant other or physical friends or family fewer than hundreds to thousands of miles away.  So, I can dedicate the last calorie of energy, the last ounce of will, the bitter dregs of my spirit, to throwing my remnants onto the incineration heap of gainful employment.  Though I also reserve some energy to spend on twisted, tortured, melodramatic metaphors, as you can see.

Anyway, we rescheduled things, and we will be working this Saturday, i.e., the next one coming up in the current direction of time, so I expect I will be writing a post on that morning, five days from now‒unless I am lucky enough to get severely ill.

It seems that everyone keeps getting sick on and off around me, but I don’t catch nearly as many even potentially life-threatening infections as many other people do.  I guess that’s one of the side-effects of not really interacting with other people in person (or in other ways, for the most part).  The most I could catch here would be a computer virus.

Anyway, I know that’s probably not at all interesting, but I’m just the one writing it; you’re the one choosing to read it.  I’d prefer you to read my fiction, but I know that costs money.  It also doesn’t tend to come in relatively bite-sized chunks, as a daily blog tends to do.  Though, to be honest, I sometimes write rather big blog bites, and they probably taste a bit strange, as well.

I sometimes think about‒and sometimes write about‒setting up a Patreon, or maybe just doing something simpler like that “Ko-fi” thing, where people can do the equivalent of buying someone (e.g., me) a cup of coffee as a thanks for their work.  The problem is, I would feel awkward about asking my regular readers for money, though maybe that’s weird.

Also, then I would have to try to keep track of the whole thing, on top of the other things I have to do regarding work and commuting and chronic pain and so on.  I mean, I suppose if everyone who comes to read or see my blog every day bought me a cup of coffee each, every single day, I might be able to write full time, that might make it doable.

And, if wishes were horses, what would be the result?  It doesn’t matter, of course, because wishes are not horses; they’re not even the same kind of thing as horses.  Both words are nouns, but only one of them is a noun representing a physical object of some kind*.  Consider the reverse notion:  what would it mean for horses to be wishes?

If horses were wishes, then riders would be screwed (figuratively speaking).  Because wishes that are fulfilled destroy themselves in a sense‒they make themselves unnecessary‒and so an extant wish is one that is unfulfilled.

That’s all really stupid, isn’t it?  Sorry.

I’m still not sure what to write today.  This is a fairly amusing fact since, at this point, I’ve written over 600 words despite not knowing what I want to write.  It’s not very amusing, but it is rather pathetic in a not-quite-tragic way.

I occasionally, as I’ve mentioned recently, think about doing videos of some of my stuff to put up on YouTube and Instagram (I don’t use or have TikTok, though my published songs are available there, apparently).  These are places (and media) where, it seems, one can get significant spread of one’s work.

But whenever I do test videos of myself talking, I’m very displeased with having to see my face.  Of course, I’ve done several videos on YouTube of me playing music, but though I can feel at least tolerably well-disposed toward those because the focus is on the music, I nevertheless get embarrassed to see them.

And somehow, it seems to me that, with each new video, I get uglier.  I know, it’s unlikely that this perception is accurate in any objective way, since it honestly doesn’t make much sense, but I cannot seem to change my impression of myself.  I have tried wearing masks of one kind or another when doing videos, and that helps, but it’s a bit weird, probably.

Part of the problem is probably the perils of parallax:  when one is close in to the camera, as one tends to be with smartphone-based videos, the photons from one’s face come to the lens from relatively wide angles, making one’s face seem slightly wider than it actually is on the flat video sensor and the video.

Maybe that’s part of why my music-playing videos don’t bother me as much‒they were taken using a camera that was a good six feet away (or nearly) and so gave a much less distorted image.  This raises possible partial potential remedies** for my video issues.

All of this is probably just pipe dreaming, anyway.  I don’t have the mental energy and drive to get my bicycle tire repaired from last year, nor to pump up the tires on my other bike, nor to do much of anything except go through the pre-programmed motions of a very uninteresting and inconsequential and all but completely empty life.  But at least it can sometimes be distracting to pretend.

*Though, in a very real sense, a wish is something physical, because wishes occur as states in the nervous systems of (relatively) intelligent mammals, so they do occur as physical things.  But you still couldn’t put a saddle on one and ride it.

**I was unable to come up with a p-word that really worked here.  Oh, well.

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You’re so vain, you probably think that nothing matters

I was going to start by saying that I had probably written all I could about Friday the 13th and the fact that there are 2 in a row when non-leap year Februaries have Fridays the 13th, and that a first glance might lead one to think this should happen roughly every 7 years on average*.  However, as I noted last time I discussed this, because the leap year day is in February, we will not have the two-in-a-row Fridays the 13th (February and March) as often as we might otherwise; it will not happen every 7 years on average.

Then, this morning, after recalling that today was Friday the 13th, I ran through the next years’ Fridays in my head in the shower, and it occurred to me that the next Friday the 13th in February‒which will be in 6 years, as I noted in the past‒will not be followed by a Friday the 13th in March!  2032 (six years from now) will be a leap year, so there will be 29 days in February, so there will be no Friday the 13th in that March.

The next paired ones, then, will be a further 5 years after that, in 2037 (not a leap year).  It would have been 6 years later, but there are two leap years in that interval, 2032 and 2036, so the next one comes a year sooner than it would otherwise.

It occurred to me that, because of the frequency of leap years, which is almost twice that of the cycles of days of the week, the frequency of those paired dates may well be once every 11 years rather than every 7.  At least those are both prime numbers.  I’m not going to work out some exact formula right now, though.  It’s not really important.

Of course, one could say that nothing is truly important, and I am persuadable along those lines.

There is a Doctor Who Christmas Special (the one from series 5) in which the antagonist/guest protagonist (played by Michael Gambon!) describes a woman in a cryo chamber as “nobody important”, and the Doctor characteristically responds by saying, “Nobody important?  Blimey, that’s amazing.  You know, in 900 years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.”

This is typical Doctor, of course, but it raises the objection Dash (from The Incredibles) voiced when told that everyone is special:  Saying that everyone is important can be the same thing as saying no one is.

Of course, important is in the eye of the beholder.  But then again, the beholder is not important, either, except in its own subjective estimation and perhaps that of a few other, equally unimportant, owners of such eyes.

So, yeah, one could argue relative and subjective importance from local points of view, which is valid but more or less vacuous outside its small scale as far as I can see.  On a cosmic scale, it’s all just dust and shadows.  But you could also say that about the entirety of the cosmos itself.

I guess import has always been subjective, even though people are not inclined to see it that way.  But, of course, people are the products of their “local” forces, and they are not responsible for the laws of nature, nor for the things which have happened in the past that have affected them in the present (which could come under a certain interpretation of “the laws of nature” in and of itself).  I won’t get into all that now.

Going back to the shower, but on an entirely different subject, I was also thinking about the effects of diminishing amounts of shampoo in the bottle on the center of gravity of the bottle.  At the start, when it’s full, the center of gravity is roughly in the geometric center of volume of the whole thing.  But as one uses the shampoo, the center of gravity shifts lower and lower, since the air replacing shampoo in the upper part of the bottle is much less dense than the shampoo or the bottle.

But then, as one gets to the dregs, the smaller and smaller amount of shampoo in the bottle contributes less and less to the overall mass distribution of the bottle and its contents, and the center of mass begins to head back up.  Finally, when the bottle is “empty”, the center of gravity will have returned to almost the same place it was when the bottle was full.

All that’s fairly trivial, well-known stuff, I know.  But it got me to thinking about how much of the laws of physics, such as the laws of gravitation (Newtonian form), are solved using such concepts as the center of mass, which is really just a way of combining and averaging the effects of numerous tiny bits of gravitating material as if they were concentrated at one point.

Much of the mathematics of physics works this way, coarsely approximating the very fine details of reality in a way that provides reliable, reproducible guidelines and can produce testable predictions.

But the granularity of reality doesn’t actually ever go away, not at any level.  Even at the level of the quantum wavefunction of a single “particle”, the actual behavior of the thing as it interacts with things in the “larger” world is the summation of the effects of all the possible quantum states of the electron superposed upon each other and interacting with things‒everything‒which are also just collections of superpositions of quanta.  That superposition happening in a “space” that doesn’t directly coincide with the macroscopic space we experience, but whatever its dimensions are, they are real, because they have durable, reproducible effects.

Mathematics may be unreasonably effective in the physical sciences, as Eugene Wigner famously noted, but it seems not to be a refining of description but rather an averaging out, a glossing over, the inking of an underlying rough pencil drawing which nevertheless still constitutes the real, original picture.

It may be that, in a sense, all science is just various forms of statistical mechanics.  We know that, at larger scales, we definitely need the tools of probability and statistics to navigate as best we can the territory of reality.  And yet, we don’t teach this sort of stuff to most people, ever.  I wrote a post about this on Iterations of Zero, if I remember correctly.

I could go on about all this rather easily, I guess, but I am using my smartphone today, and my thumbs are getting sore.  That’s okay; yesterday’s post was probably way too long, anyway.

If I did a video of my thoughts on this I might be able to get into more detail, though it would probably be even more erratic and tangential than my writing.  Still, maybe it would be worth trying.

In the meantime, I’ll write at you again tomorrow.

*Go ahead, do a search on my blog page for Friday the 13th; I’m all but sure it will bring up the pertinent blog posts.

 

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In a better blog than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this post on my lapcom.  I feel as though I ought write these posts only on the computer (not that smartphones are not computers, but cut me a little slack on this, please), and I would be more inclined to do so if Microsoft would stop making Aptos the default font!!!!!

If I could go back in time and change something, that’s one of the things I would be inclined to change.  If I found that there was one person mainly responsible for this new font, well…I don’t know if I’d go all Terminator on them and kill that person’s mother before that person was born, or kill the person when that person was a child, but something needs to be done to erase the stain of this horrible font from existence.

Certainly, if I were given* absolute power over the world, from this moment forward, one of the petty things I would do (I would try to keep the petty things to a very bare minimum, trust me**) is to eliminate that font from any and all standard computer systems anywhere.  I would probably allow for individuals to select the font if they really like it, but would not let them use it on anything but internal work between people who also like the font.

Also, I would probably mark people who chose the font freely for a visit from my secret police.

I’m kidding.  I despise the very notion of thought crime, let alone aesthetic policing in private matters.  This is even though some people’s quality of thought sometimes feels like a crime against nature.  But, of course, there cannot actually be crimes against nature.  Nature does not punish one for disobedience to its laws.  It’s simply not possible to do anything but follow them.

That’s one reason why I truly despise headlines like “The new finding by Hubble that breaks physics!” and whatnot.  Not only are they plainly clickbait, they are stupid clickbait.  I don’t know for sure if it’s just the headline writer or the writer of whatever the attached article might be who makes the headline in specific instances, but in either case, when I see headlines like that, I think that whoever wrote it really, clearly doesn’t understand physics very well.  Nor do they the nature of scientific discovery and advancement.  Because of that, I am far less likely to read the attached article (or watch the video) or even click on its link.

Nothing can break physics.  If you find something that seems to violate physics as you understand it, what you have found is not a violation of physics but rather a place where your understanding of physics is clearly incorrect.  This is far from a horrible thing.  This is how progress in physics (and in other sciences) is made:  by finding the places where our “understanding” doesn’t predict or describe what actually appears to be happening.  The world cannot be “wrong”, so our understanding of it must be, and will need to be revised.

That’s progress.

One should be hesitant to give too much “trust” to anyone who refuses to change their mind.  One of the best lines in a Doctor Who episode (not a truly great episode, maybe, but it has a wonderful speech by the Doctor) is after the Doctor has said to the “villain” (who goes by the human name Bonnie, though she is not human) “I just want you to think.  Do you know what thinking is?  It’s just a fancy word for changing your mind.”

Bonnie responds, “I will not change my mind.”

And the Doctor says, “Then you will die stupid.”***

This is simply true.  If you never learn that you were wrong about something, if you never update your credences or think about things in a new way, you will never learn anything new or develop any better understanding of the world than you did when you formed those credences.  Or, to paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, if no state of the world can change the state of your retina and how you perceive that state, that’s called being blind.

I like to refer to Yudkowsky-sensei a lot, but that’s because he has said a lot of bright and interesting things, and he has said them well.  It’s also nice to know that there are some highly intelligent and thoughtful people in the world—clearly there are, or humans would long since has gone the way of the trilobites—because the idiots and the assholes make so much noise.

The best evidence I see for the fact that most people are good or at least benign (overall) is that civilization still exists, and has done so for a long time.  It is far easier to destroy than to create or even to maintain; the second law of thermodynamics tells us that things will fall apart even if we do nothing at all to break them (it says that more or less, anyway—that’s a bit of a bastardization of the proper, mathematical law, but it is related and implicit).

The fact that civilization still exists—so far, at least—seems to indicate that there must be a lot of people working to maintain and sustain and improve it, because we can easily see how much how many people seem to be trying to make it crumble****.

Assholes tend to make a lot of noise in the world, but they’re pretty much all full of shit and “hot air”.  It’s worth it to keep this in mind, because there have always been plenty of such nether orifices out there, spewing their flatus everywhere like perverse crop-dusters.  But the evidence strongly suggests that they are not the norm; they are just the noisiest.

I suppose that’s a good moral of sorts on which to end this post:  Be willing, even eager, to change your mind when warranted, and try not to let the assholes make you think the world is no better than a camp latrine (even if you’re one of the assholes sometimes, which you are, since we all are, sometimes*****).

Though, to be fair, I am hardly the person to be giving that last piece of advice unironically.

TTFN

*If you must be given absolute power, do you actually then have absolute power?  This is similar to the old song that says “Don’t ever take away our freedom.”  If you have to beseech someone not to take away your freedom, you’re not free, and if you have to be given power, your power is clearly not absolute.

**Or don’t, if that’s not in your character.  I’ve often spoken implicitly against the concept of trust, stating that I don’t feel that I can actually, truly trust any living person.  It’s calculated risks all the way down, which is empirically true if nothing else.  So, I can hardly scold someone if they don’t “trust” me.  Go ahead, form your own conclusions.  I do exhort you, though, to be as rational as possible when you form them, with your conclusions drawn as a consequence of the evidence and argument, not with your evidence and argument being curated based on your knee-jerk or at least hasty “conclusion”.

***He then proceeds to lay out the alternatives; he’s not making a threat, he’s making a point.

****When you read that, did you immediately think of your own least favorite political or other public figure, or perhaps of the people you encounter who disagree with your politics or religion or dietary preference or what have you?  Be careful.  Us/them thinking is not usually conducive to formulating true and accurate pictures of reality (though it did inspire at least one beautiful song):

*****We’re also all deuterostomes (I’m assuming only humans are reading this).  Look it up.  It’s kind of funny.

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I had a good headline idea, but it slipped my mind

I was surprised by how much response I’ve received to yesterday’s blog (and that of the day before) as well as the number of comments.  It’s very gratifying, and I appreciate it very much.  Thank you.

As for today, well, I am really not sure what to write, because yesterday’s blog was‒from my viewpoint, anyway‒about as free-form and chaotic and tangential and stochastic (not to say redundant) as anything I’ve written.  But maybe that’s just the experience I had while writing it; maybe it doesn’t actually come across that way to the reader(s).  It’s difficult for me to know, because even more than reading, writing is a solitary thing.

That’s not to say that people can’t write together.  Back when I was a teenager, I co-wrote some partial stories with one of my best friends, and we did it sitting next to each other and talking things through aloud as we typed.  That was a pretty active and interactive collaboration.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we got very far with it.  We made much more progress writing silly computer programs in Basic on the Apple II+ my father had bought.  This was in the days before there were any ISPs as far as I know, though we did dial onto a couple of local “billboard” services from time to time with my dad’s old modem (I think it was 600 baud*, but it may be some even divisor or even a very small multiple of that number).

One time, I even had a conversation with a girl (!) who was helping run one of the billboards.  She was (supposedly) about my age, and obviously she was much more into computers than I was for the time.  There was never (in my regretful mind) any possibility of an ongoing interaction, let alone a physical meetup or anything, however.  Even then, though I was reasonably confident when within my local group of friends and teachers, I was painfully shy and awkward, and could never make conversation other than about specific topics.

Goal-directed interactions are okay, as they tend to flow naturally from the process involved.  This is why I’ve made nearly all my friends at school or at work.  Purely social interactions were never really an option for me, except with people I already knew quite well.  And having a successful romantic relationship was unfortunately not in the cards for me.

It still isn’t, as far as I can tell.  I suspect the problem is that there’s no other member of my true species on this planet.  I did come reasonably close, or so I thought for a long time, but I’ve been divorced now about five years longer than I was married, so I apparently wasn’t all that successful.

Okay, well, sorry about the weird, ancient info-dump.  It’s not nearly as cool as the data that’s coming in from the recently-activated Vera Rubin observatory.  That, at least, is the sort of thing that helps restore my faith in humanity.  Or, well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that it shifts my Bayesian credence slightly away from the “humans are without net redeeming value” end and toward the “humans may not be all that bad in the end” end.

The credence is still quite low, though.  By which I mean I’m closer to the first end than the second most of the time.

Things might be a little bit better if the sort of people who do things like setting up the Vera Rubin telescope, and who set up and launched and now use the James Webb telescope, and the members of the former human genome project, and the people who study cognitive neuroscience, were the sort of people working in government, writing and administering laws.  Generally speaking, though, the first type of people don’t tend to want to do the governing nonsense, probably not least because a lot of that business is not about everyone trying to do the best they can for the people they represent.

The people who want to do astronomy and mathematics and biology and geology and neuroscience and meteorology and so on are probably some of the best people to do those things‒not just from their point of view but also from the viewpoint of civilizational benefit.  Unfortunately, many of the people who want to go into government and politics tend to be some of the worst people for those jobs, from the point of view of civilization.

I can’t say they are the worst possible group for the job.  The truly disaffected and uninterested or the misanthropic and nihilistic might well do a worse job even than the lot who do it now.  This is despite the fact that most of those latter people act on shallow and immediate self-interest.  Self-interest can do the job adequately when the incentives are structured such that one’s self-interest is served by serving the interests of the people of one’s community/city/nation/species.

Those incentives are very tricky to manage, unfortunately.  It would be much better if we could find people who had real enthusiasm and curiosity and an actually somewhat scientific approach to government.  If only we could find a group as committed to seeing a truly and objectively well-run society‒in which everyone was better off than they would have been in nearly any other‒as the group who set up the Vera Rubin observatory was committed to actually getting the observatory done so they and we could learn ever more about the universe on the largest scales, things might be quite a bit better than they are.  Maybe not, but my credence leans more toward the “maybe so” end.

Alas, politics and government were not born of human curiosity and creativity‒the things almost entirely unique to the species‒but of the old, stupid primate dominance hierarchy/mating drives, which are evolutionarily understandable, but which don’t make for pretty, let alone beneficial, government.  Think about it.  Would you want to put a bunch of self-serving apes doing the jobs of government?

Oh, wait!  That is the group doing the jobs of the government!  Of course, it’s also the group being governed.  Uh-oh.  This could be boding better**.

Not that being recognized as an ape is an insult per se; apes are all that we’ve had available, and they’re the best that’s come along so far.  Some of them are really not so bad.  Some of them figure out ways to launch immense telescopes into space, not so very long after one of them first created the telescope.  Some of them figure out ways to cure and even prevent unnecessary disease.  Some of them figure out ways to turn simple manipulations of base-two arithmetic into information processing that can be scaled up to any kind of logic and information that can be codified.

Some of them just write blogs and sometimes write stories and songs and such***.  But hopefully, that’s not too detrimental an endeavor.

*A baud is a bit per second being sent over the phone lines.  Not a meg, not a K, not even a byte, but rather a bit‒a binary digit, a one versus a zero, on or off.  If you listened to the sound of the modem, you could imagine you could almost hear the individual bits.

**Tip of the hat to Dave Barry’s “Mister Language Person”.

***Though I have done my very small part in advancing human scientific knowledge, in that I am a co-author and co-investigator on an actual published scientific paper.

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Give us this day our daily blog

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this on my mini lapcom.  I don’t know if I wrote any of my posts from last week on the lapcom*, but so far this week, this will represent 50 percent of the week’s posts so far.

Admittedly, that’s not saying much, and one cannot draw many conclusions from a two-item sample in which one is one way and one is another.  To presume that they will continue to occur in a 50/50 ratio would be a major statistical/probabilistic error.  At best, one can say that there are at least two ways in which my blogs can be written, since two have so far been sampled—and that is certainly true.

Anyway, speaking of twos, it’s Tuesday.  It’s the 10th of March, of course, and the second full weekday in Daylight Savings Time, or in non-Daylight Savings Time, whichever one it officially is now.  You can tell that I really don’t see the sense in the whole thing from the fact that I cannot even recall nor logically infer which of the two possibilities is correct.  When I am actually interested in something, I tend to try quickly to dispel any ambiguities in my understanding if I can.  With this, I really don’t care, because it’s all silly.

In fact, it’s so silly that I think that’s all that need be said about it.  On to better things, or at least to other things.  But, of course, the question now is:  What other things should I discuss**?  I don’t know, honestly.

I don’t know dishonestly, either, come to think of it.

Isn’t it weird how much of a habit it is to say things like, “honestly”, or “to tell the truth”, or “I swear”, or other similar words and phrases to try to emphasize the authenticity of our words?  But they don’t do anything at all to confirm our truthfulness; epistemologically, they’re almost without content.  If anything, the fact that we felt unsure enough to have to say we’re being honest might raise a so-called red flag in the mind of a given listener.

Does the fact that a person says “honestly” or “I’m not gonna lie to you” or any similar phrase actually provide any information about truthfulness, except for the fact that this person recognizes that truthfulness is valued, at least by the person to whom they are speaking?  It doesn’t really demonstrate truthfulness, I think that’s clear.

Some might be inclined to think that the words actually indicate falsity, but that’s not true, either (ha ha).  It may be the case, at times, that a person who is trying to deceive another may say “honestly” to reassure their interlocutor that their lies are true and also to relieve some of their own anxiety.  But people who are telling the truth may merely want to recognize and emphasize that fact, and so use the same phrases.  They may, for instance, realize that something true they are saying could seem improbable to some hearers.

If it were always a harbinger of a lie, then such a seeming reassurance would indeed be a reliable signal, but of the opposite state from that described in the message’s content.  People would very quickly stop using it—the honest ones wouldn’t want to use it, since it always implies dishonesty, and the dishonest ones wouldn’t use it because it would be a dead giveaway.

Somehow, seemingly at least partly because it is an ambiguous signal, it stays in our discourse and is used automatically, more for emphasis and for rhetoric than for its prima facie purpose.  I’m sure Steven Pinker could give a good explanation for why this is so, or at least part of an explanation.  I know he’s come out with a recent book about mutual implicit knowledge and its nature (and its implications), but I don’t have it yet, and I haven’t read it.

I’ve read some of his other books and enjoyed them.  I seem to particularly enjoy his work as audiobooks.  I listened to The Better Angels of our Natures in audiobook format during my then-commute, using a Bluetooth enabled motorcycle helmet.  That book is almost 40 hours long on audio, but I was sad when it was over.  There was not one dull moment for me (of course, I was riding a very fast and non-armored conveyance at the time, so even if the book were to have become dull, there would have been other matters to keep me alert).

Okay, well, I’ve managed to meander about lexically—is that the proper term or not?—without any clear destination in mind, other than “at least 700 words”, and have written some vaguely coherent sentences about some distantly interrelated subjects.  I hope I have at least mildly entertained you, the reader.

I know, hopefully there is more than one of you, but only one of you can be reading this at one time in one place.  Now that’s a vaguely interesting thing to recognize:  reading is only ever a solitary process.  One can read alongside others, but one cannot share the process, even if several people are all listening to the same audiobook at once.  Reading does not add in parallel, only in series.

With that little tidbit that some of you will recognize and others will not, I’ll call this blog post to a close.  If there are no objections?  No further business?  Very well.  [Smacks the gavel on the table] This blog post is adjourned.

*I did not.

**Certainly not those round Frisbee® things they throw competitively in the Olympics.

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This is the blog this man’s soul tries

Well, in case some of you were starting to feel lighthearted and optimistic‒just a little more at ease with yourselves and the world after two whole days without reading my work‒here I am to write another blog post that will probably bring you down and make you inclined to wonder whether anything at all is really worth anything, or if you should just give it all up, especially the habit of reading this blog.

Congratulations.  It’s Monday again, the start of another work week.  Also, Daylight Savings Time has ended (or is it “begun”?) over this last weekend, so for a bit, a lot of people’s circadian rhythms are going to be slightly off.  That will contribute to an increased number of accidents, both minor and major.  There will also be increased rates of illness (again, both major and minor), and I believe there is even some evidence that men at least will suffer more heart attacks after the time changes.

And what are the other advantages of Daylight Savings Time?  I’m not aware of any actual other benefits.

Of course, like most of you, I’m starting my own work week today, and it’s going to be a long one; the office is scheduled to be open this Saturday.  By then, the shifted time measure will be mostly adjusted in everyone’s heads.  I’m speaking of things here in the US, of course; I honestly don’t know off the top of my head whether other cultures have adopted this weird custom.

Whence did it originate?  I’ve heard explanations and excuses at various times in my life, but they are not very convincing.  If you know‒with reasonably good credence‒please share that information in the comments below.  And like and share it if you’re so inclined, especially if you have a strong sense of irony.  Heck, like and share the song itself if you want to immerse yourself in a kind of meta-level irony, or something like that:

I don’t know what to discuss today, even more so than usual.  I’ve committed to trying not to dwell on, or at least to share, my negative thoughts and emotions and so on, since I’m sure they do very little other than make other people feel depressed (yes, certain kinds of mental illness can be rather contagious, in a sense at least).

I won’t say I would never wish depression on anyone; that’s ridiculous.  For instance, I would feel much safer in the world if this Presidential administration, and indeed most of its equivalents around the globe, suffered from enough depression to make them second-guess themselves and doubt themselves from time to time.  It almost ought to be a requirement for office that someone be prone to dysthymia at the very least, so they would feel less confident that their shit doesn’t stink, so to speak.

And no, I am not suggesting that the people of the world ought to put me in charge for the best chance to make the world better.  I used to dream of such things, and I had a very Sauron-like wish to control events in the world for the greater good.  It might still not be too horrible a notion.

But my inclination over time has become more negative, more Melkor/Morgoth like.  So if anyone is inclined to encourage and engender acts of chaos and destruction on a hitherto unseen scale, by all means, give me immense power.  I make no warranties or guarantees or even assurances that I will use such power wisely.

I’ll try, of course.  No one can be expected (fairly) to do anything more than that, no matter what Yoda said.

Goodness knows I’ve tried a lot, in a lot of ways, all throughout my life, literally for as long as I can remember.  By which I mean, I’ve tried to do my best to do good things and to be a good person‒a good friend, a good son, a good husband, a good father, a good doctor, all that.  You can probably tell by my current state‒solitary, lonely, divorced, professionally ostracized, in bad physical health, in horrible mental health, alone*‒how well I’ve done at all those things.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve tried hard.  I’m not one to big myself up very much, but I have worked hard all my life, trying to be a good son, a good friend, a good brother, a good husband, a good doctor, a good father.  Yet despite my sincere efforts and my reasonably high intelligence, here I am.

I suppose a lot of the disappointing outcome(s) is/are related to my ASD, both the heart-based one and the brain-based one, as well as my tendency (probably related to the preceding) to depression and some degree of low-grade paranoia.

By “low-grade” there, I mean that I don’t literally suspect that there are malicious forces plotting against me or trying to control me; I honestly don’t think highly enough of humans (or any other beings) to expect them to be capable of such things.  It would almost be reassuring if they were.

No, I mean I just have a general, global sense‒not just intellectually, but in my bones as it were, in my deep intuitions‒that I cannot rely upon anyone or upon anything, other than the laws of nature themselves (whatever their final version might be).  I don’t “trust” anyone or anything, including (one might even say “especially”) myself.  Everything is a calculated risk.

This is of course literally true for everyone, but I think most people hide from that fact most of the time, usually (but definitely not always) without terrible consequences.  I don’t know if that’s worse or better.  It may be more pleasant, but I suspect it’s misleading, and has been responsible for, or at least it has contributed to, many ills the human race has brought upon itself and upon others.

Whataya gonna do?  I guess you’re gonna do whatever you must, as they say, since it’s not as though you can do anything other than what you do once you’ve done it, and so it was all along what you were going to do, and so it was what you must do (or must have done).

I hope you have a good day and a good week.  I’ve tried to withhold my depression and negativity, with at least some degree of success‒trust me, I’ve withheld‒and I will continue to do so, because sharing it is pointless, and asking for help is laughable.

*Now, that phrase had some redundant notions, didn’t it?