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Smartphones, foolish humans, and vanishingly small giant numbers

Well, I’m writing this post on my smartphone today, not on the lapcom.

I’m okay with the term “smartphone”, unlike the term “laptop”.  It’s reasonably accurate, after all.  Especially compared to the phones with which I grew up, it is a very smart phone indeed.  I remember being quite excited when we got our first push-button phone, let alone one with “call waiting”.

Heck, this phone is very smart even relative to the first and second full-on desktop computers I “owned”*.  Those were an Apple II+™ and a Macintosh SE®, respectively.  Yes, I used to love Apple©.

Today is a big day in American** politics.  It’s the day of the midterm elections.  Of course, I cannot participate in that process, since the State of Florida disenfranchised everyone who had ever been convicted of a felony, even if it was the result of a coercive plea-bargain, even after they have served their sentences.

Of course, in a referendum, the people of Florida voted to amend the Florida constitution to correct that injustice and grant ex-cons the “right” to vote.

And then, instantly, the bottom feeders in the Florida legislature‒to a good first approximation, all of them are bottom feeders‒attached a bunch of legal hoops to jump through before someone could regain that “right”, hoops which many people, including me, find just not workable.

The people doing this disenfranchising almost certainly did so deliberately to influence elections, since the demographics of people who have actually been convicted of felonies tend to be quite different from those of people who can afford to pay for an adequate defense.

Anyway, let me not get going on that subject too much, except to say that I consider it a severe divergence from the spirit of the United States as represented in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Florida isn’t the only state that misses the point of the US, but they are among the most prominent and the most mentally deficient.

Oh, well.  What are you gonna do?  Any place where people can unironically use such phrases as “requesting the restoration of one’s rights” is a place of sophistry‒if even that‒not of actual rationality.  I say this because actual rights cannot be taken away nor returned.  They can be violated, of course, and sometimes this violation can be necessary and even morally right***, but they cannot be removed or restored by the action of some group of one’s fellow flesh-and-bloodlings.  Such things as those are better referred to as privileges.  George Carlin had a pretty good routine about that.

Anyway, again, I am not going to get into too much of the specifics of politics.  I think politics is important, in a relative sense, but only to humans and their chattel and to those within their sphere**** of influence.

But humans’ attitude toward such politics is often very melodramatic and even tragi-comic.  They seem to think that what happens to be happening right here and right now is the most consequential thing in the universe, ever (and not merely in a mindfulness sort of way).  It’s a frankly absurd, almost hilarious, solipsistic anthropocentrism:  what humans are doing right here and right now is the most important set of facts in all the universe, ever.

Alas, humans and human civilization and even all life on Earth from its beginning up to now***** are not merely cosmically tiny, not merely negligible, but to a very good****** approximation, they are nonexistent.  That’s not an insult, necessarily; after all, on the scale of infinity, even the largest number you can name is unreasonably close to zero.  Compared to infinity, everything finite is a rounding error on nonexistence, whether it’s one or pi or Graham’s Number or Tree(3) or anything else.

Kansas (the band, not the state) was being generous and a bit indulgent when they sang “all we are is dust in the wind”.

Dust in the wind?  Are you joking?  What in the world gave you the hubris to entertain the ridiculous, megalomaniacal delusion that you (or anyone or everyone around you) are as significant as dust in the wind?

With that cheerful thought, I’ll wrap this up.  Just reassure yourself that, not only is it true that in a hundred years no one will care; for almost everything, in a hundred seconds no one will care.

Have a good day anyway, despite all that.  It’s certainly possible.

*My Dad actually owned that first one, but he was not a computer hog.

**By which I mean “United Statesian” politics, but there really isn’t a good name for citizens of the United States that doesn’t require multiple words.  But, of course, every citizen of Mexico and of Canada and of El Salvador and of Brazil and of Chile, and so on‒everyone in North and South America‒can be legitimately called American.  I wonder how many of the ignoramuses who cheered for “Gulf of America” and “Lake America” actually realize that.

***For instance, we (officially) hold it to be self-evident that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable, and apply at the very least to all humans.  And yet, if someone is a true danger to others, all of whom have the same rights, and if that person cannot be convinced not to harm other people, it may be necessary to violate that person’s rights‒for instance by imprisoning them, or even by killing them if they are an immediate threat to others and there is no workable alternative.  It may be truly necessary and the best possible course of action, given specific circumstances, but I maintain it is still a violation of rights.  It may merely be the smallest set of such violations available and within the power of any group of mere humans.  But if one were omnipotent and omniscient, then one could merely adjust the settings of the dangerous person to keep them from being a danger to others and then allowing them to live and pursue their own relatively non-pathological happiness freely after that.

****I think it’s fair to use the term “sphere” here, because even though the dimensionality of that sphere is probably much greater than three, mathematically that’s fine.  There are four-spheres and twelve-spheres and so on.  A sphere is simply that collection of points, all of which are equidistant from some chosen center point.  Mathematically, a circle (for instance) is just a “two-sphere”, a sphere in two dimensions.  And I suppose any two points on a line could be said to constitute a one-sphere.  I don’t think it’s possible to have fractal spheres, i.e., a sphere in non-integer dimensions, but if I’m wrong, I would sincerely love to be corrected and educated by any mathematicians out there.

*****The future could in principle break this pattern, but I’m not holding my breath.

******How good an approximation?  Better than the most precise estimate that you’ve ever encountered or imagined encountering in your day-to-day life, even if your work involves measuring the magnetic moment of electrons.  99 and 44/100ths percent pure is galactically farther away from accurate compared to how closely all life ever on Earth approximates zero.  I think I get into that in the following video.

 

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Walking in the rain and writing using the lapcom…but not at the same time

I think this may end up being my last lapcom blog post for a while.

As you may have guessed from the fact that I just said that—it is, after all, the logical implication—I am writing this post on my lapcom, which I remembered to bring back to the house on Friday.  Bully for me, right?

Unfortunately, so far it hasn’t made much, if any, difference in the arthropathy—or at least arthralgia—in the bases of my thumbs.  I think just taking extra doses of NSAIDs beyond my usual seems to do as good a job on my thumbs as decreasing my use of the smartphone, and it’s not as annoying to have to carry.

I don’t really have to carry NSAIDs, actually.  I keep plenty of them at the house and at work.  This is not a luxury; it is a relative necessity.  By which I mean, while it’s not true that I would die without them, I would want to die even more than I usually do if I were not to have them available.

So, in a sense, I suppose going without them increases my risk of dying.  But then again, using them at maximum dose on a regular basis has its own risks, including to my kidneys and stomach (other things as well, but those are the main ones).

Of course, I take things to protect my stomach (and try to drink plenty of water to ease my kidneys as much as possible), but that decrease in stomach acid probably affects the absorption of a number of minerals, such as iron.  And so, I supplement those.  And so the cycle goes on, even without anyone pedaling it.

Sorry to mix that metaphor, or whatever the proper term is for what I just did.  I was unable to resist, and I didn’t see any strong reason to try to do so.

Anyway, though I can definitely write more quickly and more easily with the lapcom, I’m not convinced that it makes for better blog posts.  In fact, I get the impression that last week’s posts weren’t very well received.  Certainly, the numbers weren’t very good.  And, of course, when I go on too long, I irritate myself, as well.

That doesn’t just apply to blog writing; I have already irritated myself powerfully by “going on” as long as I have.

I did get some exercise this weekend.  I walked about four and a half miles on Saturday morning, and then on Sunday I walked a bit over five miles (not in the morning).  It was raining more or less constantly on Sunday, but I opted not to use an umbrella.  Instead, I donned a rain jacket that I had from when I used to ride my scooter* and walked in the rain.  Its hood was annoying, so after less than a block I gave up and just left it down.  It’s Florida, after all; the rain wasn’t cold in the slightest.  Honestly, I could barely tell that my head was wet, even when the rain was coming down hard.

That’s actually mildly disappointing.  I was vaguely hoping, or maybe wondering, if I might catch pneumonia, like the old cliché warnings warned about getting caught in the rain.  Of course, pneumonia isn’t caused by rain, or by any other way of getting wet.  Pneumonia is caused by bacteria mostly, occasionally by viruses, and rarely by fungi.  There is also a thing called chemical or aspiration pneumonitis, but that’s not an infection.

But getting very cold in the rain—since water is able to draw heat from the body far more effectively than air is**—can indeed use up one’s reserves of energy and make one more vulnerable to infections.  This is probably where the old wives’ tale notion arose.  But it’s just not cold in south Florida at this time of year.

Anyway, my walks didn’t end up putting me at death’s door, more’s the pity.  If anything, they have probably taken me farther away from it, at least for the moment.  That’s okay, I guess.  I mean, it’s annoying, it’s irritating, but I like to walk, and it’s nice to feel able to walk, especially given my chronic pain.  So, I’ll put up with it.

Speaking of something being irritating and annoying, I have noticed something recently—it was surely always there, though I never really paid attention to the fact—but many times when I feel that I hate something or someone (briefly) or am very angry at some situation, it’s not really a moral issue in any sense, though the feeling of anger is very often of a “self-righteous” character.  Rather, it is just annoyance, just distraction.

I can feel something very akin to pure hatred at a fly going past my head and meandering around a room in which I am sitting or standing, and I doubt that I’m alone in this.  Yet…it’s just a fly.  It’s noisy, it’s potentially dirty, it sometimes lands on one’s food, but it does essentially no actual harm and isn’t really capable of doing it***.  It’s just annoying.  It’s just irritating.  And yet, the sheer malice of the response one often feels can be staggering.

I think this is actually not much different, albeit coming from the other end of things, from how people react to people with whom they disagree, or even sometimes to the habits of a significant other that start off feeling benign and even endearing but which can become like a pebble in one’s shoe over time.  I think we overreact.  I think we give too much emotional weight to those irritations, and they then compound and develop into real animosity.  It would be better if we could keep them in perspective, if we could be mindful but not judgmental.

If you want to hate flies though, I’m fine with that.  Just try not to hate other members of your own species; they’re just as clueless as you are.  And also, try to have a good day.

*You can’t exactly use an umbrella while riding a scooter, or while riding a bike, for that matter.

**This is why being in air at seventy degrees Fahrenheit can feel pleasant, while being in water that’s the same temperature can feel quite cold.

***Mosquitoes are another matter.  They can carry diseases that still kill millions of people.

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Devil’s Night take the hindmost. Set course for Halloween. Engage.

Well, I am not writing this post on my lapcom today, but it’s not because I didn’t bring it with me when I went back to the house yesterday evening.  It’s because I didn’t go back to the house yesterday evening.

I called my sister after work yesterday, and we stayed on the phone for a couple of hours.  By the time we were done, it was one of those situations where I would just go back to the house, try to get to sleep quickly and stay asleep for a little bit, and then get back up and come into the office.  Even if I had wanted to expedite that process with an Uber or two, it wouldn’t have appreciably changed things, and it would have been expensive.  So, I ended up sleeping on the floor of the office again.

It’s not bad.  In many ways, it’s a far, far better environment in which to sleep and even to be awake than the room in which I “live”.  It is indeed a far better resting place‒maybe not than I have ever known, but than the alternative I have available.

So, it’s Friday, the 30th of October, and instead of the lapcom, I am writing this on the desktop* computer.

I will not be writing a post tomorrow‒which will be Halloween‒since I don’t work tomorrow (exclusis improvisis).  It’s a minor shame, since Halloween has long been my favorite holiday, but it’s not as though I am actually going to do anything for Halloween, anyway, except to give you the following message.

The office isn’t decorated, alas.  We used to do stuff like that, and we even did little dress-up parties, which were a bit of fun.  I like the idea of wearing costumes.  They’re quite freeing in their way.

Oddly, I’ve never actually wanted to be anyone but myself.  It’s a contradiction in terms, for one thing.  If I am someone else, then I am not myself, and I cannot experience being someone else while still being myself.

However, one can use costumes (and acting) to pretend to be someone else‒a very different idea‒and thus allow the expression of things that might not have come out otherwise.  One can even express thoughts and feelings that would not exist otherwise.

Because it’s not as though the emotions and thoughts that we have are pre-programmed; they are generated by brain processes as things go on, even as our memories are recreated rather than called up from storage every time one remembers.

Memory is an active construction.  This is part of why memories are relatively malleable.  You cannot “gaslight” a desktop computer.  It has all its files and information stored, with various documentation about time of updates, prior changes, earlier versions and so on.  It’s not going to be fooled.  And it’s likely to trust its own memory above whatever you try to tell it.

I feel slightly that way, myself.  I think I would probably be somewhat difficult to gaslight, because I trust my own memory more than I trust that of other people with whom I interact.  I know that it’s better than average.

And if someone wants to convince me that I’m incorrect about something, then I’m all for it‒I don’t want to be wrong any longer than I have to be‒but they’re going to need evidence and arguments**.

Try to think about what you would need to do to convince an intelligent but disinterested*** extraterrestrial who understood English at least as well as you do and was perfectly capable of following your reasoning and examining your evidence.  If you could convince such a being, you will probably convince me.

But if your attempts to persuade involve mere rhetoric, emotional language, conscious or unconscious manipulation based on typical primate reactions and emotions, then…well, you may make me feel uncomfortable, but I hope you won’t convince me.

Or, rather, I hope you won’t make me believe, because conviction in my mind is different than mere belief.  As my old, altered X-files poster says, “I don’t want to believe.  I want to be convinced by evidence and argument.”

Returning in closing to the matter of the date:  in addition to it being the day before Halloween, it is also what we used to call Devil’s Night back where I grew up (in the Detroit area), a curious kind of All Hallows’ Eve eve.  Now, it wasn’t as bad as is made out in, for instance, The Crow, but vandalism and especially fire-setting did happen.

I understand it’s no longer as big a problem nowadays, which is probably good.  Also, there just aren’t nearly as many people in Detroit anymore, so even if the rate per person of fire-setting stayed the same, the rate of actual fires would go down by the same fraction as did the population.

I don’t know that this is why things have changed.  It may just be a cultural shift.  The better angels of my nature are pleased and encouraged by this fact.  But there’s a not-so-tiny part of me that laments it.  Sometimes, that part of me just wants to watch everything burn‒or, really, to be the one burning it.

Don’t worry, I have no arson-related plans, whether for tonight or any other time.  Indeed, I have no plans of any kind.  Not really.  I have thoughts, I have possibilities, like the ones about which I wrote yesterday.  But I have no target, I have no direction (other than the inevitable one).  I’m not even really “chaos surfing”, as I like to call it.  I’m just sitting in one of those inflated inner-tube type things, floating along, letting the current take me where it will.

Most of the time, it’s not going anywhere, good or bad.

Anyway, I hope you all have a safe and reasonably uneventful “Devils’ Night” and a safe and fun Halloween tomorrow, if you celebrate it.  Either way, have a good weekend.

Oh, yeah, and…rest in peace, Patrick Stewart.  That’s all I have to say about that.

*A desk is a thing that has a top, sides, front, back, and even a bottom and an underneath region which are not necessarily exactly identical.  It can be perfectly sensible to speak of something being on the desk top, and so the term “desktop computer” is a sensible one.  A lap, on the other hand, very much is the top of one’s thighs (or crossed legs) when one is seated; it has only a top.  It is only a top.  So, I use the term lapcom, since “laptop” is redundant.  Now, if we had a term specifically for the top of a desk, and which only referred to that region‒maybe the fleeb, to make things a bit silly‒then it would make no sense to call something a “fleebtop” computer.  One might as well just shorten it to “fleebcom”.

**Not people aggressively talking at each other with raised voices and such like, but rather “a set of premises or reasons put forward to support, prove, or persuade someone of a specific conclusion or point of view” as per Google’s AI search thingy.

***Meaning impartial, unbiased.  Not uninterested.  Trying to convince an uninterested person is generally just a waste of effort.  They don’t care.  I am often that way, myself, depending on the subject.

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And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the 4th day in a row, I’m writing this on my lapcom.  Well, actually, I can’t be writing this—i.e., this blog post—for the 4th day in a row, lapcom or otherwise.  I am writing a blog post, and that is something I am doing on the lapcom for the 4th day in a row.  Sorry if that was confusing*.

It seems, as with yesterday’s date, that I haven’t written a post using the lapcom on the 29th of October since 2022, which feels like an inordinate amount of time.  That means I’ve been writing on the smartphone since then, barring those October 29ths that were on Sundays or non-working Saturdays.  No wonder my thumb bases have become progressively sorer.  I’m surprised they have given me more trouble than they have.

Well, I’m not actually surprised.  There’s no metaphorical gasping jolt.  It’s just that it’s not what I would have expected if I had thought about the situation ahead of time.  Of course, I don’t think I did think about the situation ahead of time; I certainly don’t recall thinking about it ahead of time.  If I had recalled such a thing, I probably wouldn’t have been even figuratively surprised.

Anyway, I ordered a couple of thumb/wrist braces that came up when I searched for such devices to counter the arthropathy associated with writing on the smartphone.  There’s even an official name for the problem.  It’s something pithy but obvious like “texter’s thumb”, though I don’t believe that is the actual standard term being used, and I can’t be arsed to look up the real one.

In any case, the braces should be arriving today.  They were the highest rated ones on Amazon, at least the highest rated ones that could arrive quickly.  We’ll see if they provide any help and if so how much.

In other news:  after talking about the subject yesterday, I decided I would reread what I’d written so far on Outlaw’s Mind, specifically the version in which I chopped off the old original “cold open”.  I had uploaded a copy of it (so far) onto Google Drive, so I’ve been able to read it on my phone, and I have to admit, it flows quite nicely.  I like it so far.

There are a few things here and there that will need tweaking to get it into shape and to eliminate the relics of the former thought process behind the story, but they’re pretty minor.  I may also read The Dark Fairy and the Desperado after that.  Who knows?  I might even reread Extra Body, which is an actually completed story, though it has not been extensively edited.

All of you can read the stories as far as they have gone, here on my blog.  If you are so inclined and want to give me feedback on of which one you might want to read more if you were given the choice, I would be interested to hear.  I’m not making any promises, but maybe if I enjoy a story (so far) and you guys are interested, that might spur me to action.

It would be interesting to see if I could write a serialized story and post it here on my site.  That might be worthy of Patreon or Ko-fi or what have you.  But I don’t know if I could successfully do that in an ongoing fashion—it would involved editing each “chapter” as I went along, with no ability to go back and fix missteps in the story.

Still…maybe that might be something I could do with my longstanding story idea Changeling in a Shadow World.  I’ve mentioned this story here on several occasions, but I don’t think I’ve said much more about it.  It’s a story that would run alongside and behind several other tales of mine, including such seemingly disparate ones as The Chasm and the Collision, Unanimity, The Vagabond, and even Outlaw’s Mind.

It also would tie back to Ends of the Maelstrom, the first novel I ever finished writing (in first draft).  It was all handwritten, single-spaced, with additional writing in the margins—the ones that I hadn’t chewed to bits already—and in the spaces above other print.  It was over 270 densely packed pages long (both sides).

In my mind, I’ve taken that story to be a kind of origin or backstory for some of the largest scale tendencies in the universes of my stories.  Of course, that physical book is long gone—lost with almost all the other property I used to own before I went “up the road”.  That, my piano, my cello, my books, and my comic book collection are probably the only things I really feel sad about losing.  I do feel a pang about some of my kids’ childhood toys that are lost, but they were in storage already, so probably they don’t miss them as much as I do.

Anyway, I don’t want to get all of your hopes up, and even more crucially, I don’t want to get my hopes up regarding getting back into writing fiction and maybe serializing something here on my website.  But at least I’m thinking of possible positive thoughts.

Maybe it’s just a mood swing, though.  That sort of thing makes me a bit nervous, especially since yesterday afternoon I felt absolutely dismal and willfully moribund, if you will.  I don’t know what’s behind such variations, though I have suspicions and speculations.

I think at least some of my increased ambition comes from the fact that I am writing on the lapcom now, and that feels so much more natural than the alternative.  On the other hand, perhaps I am only writing on the lapcom as a consequence of an upswing in some mood cycle that was already happening, and so the direction of forces is not the one way but the other.

This is the perennial conundrum of correlation versus causation.  It’s very important in scientific thinking and also in more general thinking.

Anyway, this has gotten pretty long today.  I think you can probably imagine how readily I used to write about 1,400 words per day, can’t you?

Speaking of days, I hope you have a good one.  I shall be writing another post tomorrow (exclusis improvisis), but I will not be writing one on Halloween, since I don’t work on Saturday.  Maybe I’ll discuss Halloween (and Devil’s Night) tomorrow.  But maybe I won’t.  We’ll all have to wait and see.

TTFN

*I suspect no one was actually confused, but I had to correct my own words’ literal interpretation, because it didn’t make sense…if taken literally.  Which, I suspect, is almost never done, except perhaps by other people with similar sensibilities to mine.

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My fiction writing, from up the road to down the tubes

I’m writing on the lapcom yet again, which entails a pretty long streak for me lately:  three times in a row, if I’m not mistaken.  Though, it looks like it’s been a particularly long time since I used the lapcom on the 28th of October—the most recent lapcom-saved blog post on the 28th goes back to 2022 (AD or CE).

It’s hard for me to credit that it’s been that long that I’ve written blog posts using my smartphone, but I suppose the state of my thumbs should convince me.  The MCP (metacarpal-phalangeal) joint and the CMC (carpo-metacarpal joint) are still quite angry on both thumbs.

Anyway, I hope my posts on the lapcom haven’t been too unwieldy for everyone who reads my blog.  I know that I tend to get carried away with myself.  Also, perhaps ironically, I tend to use up more time each morning writing this blog than I ever did on those hundreds of mornings when I was writing fiction, even though I wrote about 1400 words every day.

Part of the reason for that is that, unlike with blog posts, editing was completely separate from initial writing.  In other words, I did not try to edit/fix anything as I was going along in the first drafts, even when I reread the previous day’s stuff to get me rolling on the new day’s writing.  It was very much a process of “get the words out there ‘on paper’, and accept that they will be imperfect and improve them in the editing process”.

I think it worked well.  It was a practice I started while I was “up the road”, though at that time I definitely used real paper, obtained from commissary through the generosity of my parents.  I got up at lights on every morning—I’m usually awake then anyway, although it was around three or so—and started writing until I had completed three or more pages.  I generally wrote in cursive*, but sometimes I printed when I wanted a break.

It’s interesting to me that, with those handwritten stories—Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and Paradox City—a significant part of the editing process was the inevitable act of typing them into the computer.  It’s more or less impossible for me to do that without editing as I go, and that’s generally a good thing.  But it is cumbersome and time consuming.  And I don’t know that it produces better (or worse) material than when I write directly on the computer.

I cannot judge it objectively.  I like the above mentioned three stories, but I also like Son of Man, which was partly written on smartphone in work release and partly written directly onto a lapcom.  And I like the stories I’ve written since.

I even like my uncompleted stories, though they have fallen foul of a bad habit or tendency that has always caused me trouble:  I would start something new before finishing the previous thing.  I had blocked this habit starting while up the road by being ruthless and committing myself to finishing one book or story before starting any part of another.  If I had an idea for a story, I would simply jot it down for later.  And, of course, some of the jottings did produce stories, though such stories often take off and fly in unexpected directions (and for unexpected lengths) like Outlaw’s Mind.

I don’t know why I’m dwelling on this subject.  It’s not as though I am writing fiction now, anyway, any more than I am drawing or playing music (let alone composing it) or studying and practicing mathematics or physics.  I cannot seem to summon the energy to do any of these things, and even reading continues to be almost a chore.

Very few—and possibly none—of the things that made life enjoyable are working for me anymore.  And it’s not as though the outside world is very conducive to good thoughts.  Although, maybe I’m a poor judge of such things.

It would be nice, I often think, to go back to writing fiction (nearly) every day.  But, of course, given the constraints on my time, and the irritating need to work to keep myself alive, I would only be able to do that if I gave up on writing this blog.

It’s hard for me to imagine setting up a Patreon—or even just one of those Ko-fi accounts or whatever they are—and making enough income to be able to live and write full time.  I mean, even if everyone who reads my post every day gave me a dollar every day, I don’t think I could live on it.

I suppose, if I tried to do it full time, maybe I would do more interesting and gripping things, and maybe I would do a better job at marketing myself.  I don’t know; I’m not good at talking myself up, except in flagrant jest, where I’m pretending to be an egotistical megalomaniac.

And though I can admit that I have the capacity to do many things and do them pretty well, that is often something of a hinderance.  Whenever I’m doing mainly one thing, all the other things end up trying to draw me away.  And they often succeed.

It’s a longstanding frustration of mine that I know that if I were able to concentrate on one thing among my interests, I could probably have done something worth doing, something of significance—maybe even something great, if I were very, very lucky.  I think about how Feynman used to say that he wasn’t especially bright, he was just a guy who had very narrow interests, and so he was able to dedicate himself entirely to that pursuit.  I think it worked out pretty well for him.

I guess it all doesn’t matter much, if at all.  Given the state of my overall health, and my chronic pain, I doubt that I have time to make any major new contributions to much of anything, even if I were able to focus entirely on one pursuit, which I am not, at least not so far.

Whadaya gonna do?  Well, hopefully, what you’re going to do is have a good day.  I should be back tomorrow…exclusis improvisis.

*I like to joke that they only started calling script “cursive” after they tried to read mine and spent a lot of their time cursing.

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To be precise, you can’t be too precise

Well, here I am writing another post on the lapcom.  That’s two days in a row, which ties my recent record, I think.

Of course, it doesn’t come anywhere close to being the longest stretch on which I wrote fiction and/or blog posts on the lapcom (or, well, a lapcom).  That stretch was years long.  It took me more than a year just to complete the first draft of Unanimity.

That makes sense, of course, because it was about 550,000 words in first draft, and I write about 1400 words a day when writing first draft fiction.  That means, let’s see…392.8 days, roughly.  I say roughly because there are actually a lot of digits after that decimal place on the calculator.  But my estimates of total word number and the average amount I write per day are not precise enough to justify any greater carrying out of the digits.  The numerals are all just for show beyond a certain point.  They may seem to demonstrate greater precision of data, but they’re just bullshit.

In fact, if I were truly sticking to significant figures—as I should—I would just say that it took about 390 days (of writing) to finish the first draft of Unanimity.  Of course, given that I wrote only 5.5 days out of every 7 (with roughly every other Saturday off, I was writing five days in those weeks, six days in the others) then the total time outside writing-time would have been 7/5.5 x 390 = 496.36363… or, using significant figures, 500 days.

Now, I did not reduce that to one significant figure to keep with the 7, because the 7 is actually a defined, precise, exact, and correct number that doesn’t vary—the number of days in a week—and so it should not, if I am thinking about this correctly, affect the number of significant figures for better or for worse.  No, it merely is the case that if you reduce 496.363636… to two significant figures, those two digits are 5 and 0.

That was a weird little way for me to bring up the importance of the notion of significant figures in mathematics and especially in physics (and any other quantitative science that might randomly walk in).  They represent a deep aspect of reality, not merely an arbitrary aspect of mathematical formalism.  You cannot take two amounts about which you do not have very precise measures, mush them together, and come out with more precision on the other end.

Walking four steps forward with your eyes closed, turning as close to exactly 90 degrees to your right as you can make yourself do with your eyes closed, and walking another three steps in that direction, will take you some distance from your starting point.  But it will not be exactly five steps*—steps aren’t a precise or even consistent measure, nor is your ability to gauge a ninety degree turn.

This is something that always mildly irritates me when people talk about their blood pressure using more digits than are justified.  If someone says “my blood pressure was 127 over 83”, I just correct it in my head—and sometimes in person, if the person is in the right state of mind—to 130 over 80.  That’s not just rounding for convenience of record keeping, that’s actually as precisely as you can get the blood pressure, at least through anything other than an arterial catheter with a very high quality pressure probe.

First, the measuring instrument is imprecise.  This is traditionally the human ear, but even more purpose-designed sensors don’t do very much better.  They can’t.  The tissue between the cuff and vessel, and the vessels themselves, all have too many variables, and all this can affect the measured pressure.

In addition there is the fact that the blood pressure itself is not constant, even from peak to peak and trough to trough.  Each beat of the heart varies slightly in systolic and diastolic pressure, and the blood pressure is measured over many beats.  Even breathing affects blood pressure, with slight variations occurring between inspiration and exhalation**.

It can be important to keep this/these fact(s) in mind when dealing with and interacting with actual reality, rather than the mistaken or simply imprecise ideas of humans.  But even scientists explaining science professionally often seem to miss the boat on these matters.

For instance, one will sometimes encounter descriptions of the weirdness of quantum mechanics, especially the uncertainty principle, that contrast it with the way we’re allowed or able to be precise and exact about macroscopic measurements and interactions.  They also state that we can measure without disturbing the system, and point to this as being different from the quantum fuzziness.

But, no, we don’t measure macroscopic things precisely, and certainly not with anything like the sharpness of quantum mechanics.  If you were measuring the mass or the momentum of a car, for instance, your measurements will have errors that, on the scale of quantum mechanics, might as well be as large as a galaxy.  They don’t effect our measured outcomes because even those are terribly imprecise, and for practical purposes, being more precise is not useful—which is good for us, because there’s no real way to get that error down beyond a certain point.

And our observations of systems in the real world do affect them.  Light hitting the car you’re measuring, and maybe the radio waves from the radar gun you’re using to judge its speed, impart momentum to the car, just in very small amounts that are far too fine to be measured.  Similarly, the light you’re shining on the car, including the radar signal, delivers a bit of heat to the car, which increases its total mass ever so slightly, according to E = mc2.  But it’s a tiny amount, far too tiny to be measured by any instruments we have routinely available.

So, it’s not that the quantum world is fuzzy and the macroscopic world is not.  The macroscopic world is far fuzzier—it could hardly be otherwise, given that it’s made up of oodles of quanta—it’s just that we’re fuzzy too, since we’re also made of oodles of quanta.  And, of course, for most practical purposes, it doesn’t matter what the eighth (let alone the eightieth) decimal place is on the measure of the mass of a car moving relative to you with a certain velocity.

In case you can’t tell, this is something of a bugbear of mine.  I didn’t plan to write about it, but once I got going, it was hard to stop.  It irks me that even serious scientists, including theoretical physicists, miss the point of the distinction in measurement between the picoscopic*** and the simply “scopic***” scale.

I apologize for boring you with this, if it has bored you (if not, the apology would be pointless).  As you can see, I do tend to write more on the lapcom, because I can write much more easily and (for me) more naturally.

I hope you have a good day, in any case.  I’ll try to keep bringing the lapcom, but I’ll also try not to get too caught up in venting my mathematical/physics-related frustrations.  Exclusis improvisis, of course.

*Here I’m applying the geometry of the famous 3, 4, 5 right triangle, which can be perfectly precise as a mathematical ideal, but can never be perfectly produced in the real world.

**I wanted to write “inspiration and expiration”, which would be technically accurate, but the latter word carries connotations of finality that don’t tend to come with each breath.  Though, the dichotomy of inspiration and expiration sounds almost like a philosophical thought trigger:  when one ceases to be inspired, one merely expires, or something like that.

***Apparently, I just made those two words up (according to MS Word), but they weren’t made up out of whole cloth.  Their attributes follow, almost inevitably, from the logic and structure of the English language and the antecedent, accepted words.

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The responsibility of diffusion…or something like that

Well, it’s Monday, and finally I can honestly (and gladly) tell you that I am writing this post on my mini lapcom.  This is apparently the first ever time I’ve written a blog post on October 26th using the lapcom, because when I entered the date to start to save the file, once I got to “10-26” all the pop-ups below—suggestions about which file I might be looking to use—vanished.  But, of course, with each fewer digit before that 6, there were many (but a predictably diminishing number as the digits increased) suggestions on the list.

That reminds me, I just recently started looking informally at a phenomenon of diffusion in computer file names.  You see, at work, there is a large Excel file in which we (meaning I) record all the sales that we have made, and details about them and so on, including price, which of our people were involved, all that kind of stuff.  It’s fairly straightforward, and as it’s updated, I almost continuously save it as I go along, and it’s saved in the Google Drive folder that is on the desktop and doubled on the cloud file.

So far so boring, of course—and it may be no less so as I go on, I don’t know.  Now, my coworker also needs to use the information in that file, but we don’t want accidentally to have two people editing it at once, and using the online version is slower than having one opened on one’s own computer, which makes sense.  So we have a copy program of the original, which I update daily and email to the office email, from the office email (I sounds like I’m quoting the Gettysburg Address, but “for the office email” doesn’t make a lot of sense).

Anyway…

I recently (a few weeks ago) accidentally changed the name of the copy file when saving it, and so it was resaved as a new file with a slightly shorter (and less cluttered) name.  But the old file is still there.

Now, as a baseline, I sort the files in our “Drive” folder according to “most recently modified”.  So, files that are less used gradually get pushed farther down the list.  And the previous copy file will never be used again, exclusis improvisis.  It would even be sensible to delete it, but the amount of disc space available almost always exceeds the need when dealing with things that are as compact as Excel and Word files.  Compared to the most meager video file, for instance, they are tiny bits of memory.

So, I’m watching—not rigorously nor numerically—as the earlier file gradually diffuses its way down the list.  I suspect it will progress in a kind of logarithmic way, like the distance a “drunkard’s walk” takes one from the origin over time.  If I had thought to try to work out the math more rigorously, I could have done so from the beginning, but I didn’t think I would have the mental energy to do it, so I didn’t even start.  And now, it’s a rather moot point—though I guess I could restart the process with a new, slight alteration of the file.

The only reason I’m paying attention to it is that it makes me think about how so many things have processes that mirror each other or are analogous to each other*.  The bouncing of a spring and the swinging of a pendulum and the vibration of a quartz crystal and even the oscillations of the quantum wavefunction all have very similar mathematics, as do populations of animals in ecosystems and the like, as well as the length of daylight throughout the year.  They all ultimately relate to sines and cosines or a circle in the complex plane or what have you.  The mathematics of oscillations is always similar, sometimes nearly identical (and sometimes much less so, of course).

And then, of course, returning to the above, the whole nature of the “drunkard’s walk” and the random bouncing of atoms in a box and how that becomes diffusion thanks to the probabilistic nature of the movement, is all quite intriguing.  Sorry, I know I’m not being very precise in the way I’m saying things, here, but that’s partly because I don’t want to go on about this too much.  I’ve already written over 700 words, and I know that (because I write much more quickly and more easily with the lapcom) I tend to run off at the keyboard.

Given that fact, and with consideration for my readers, I’ll begin to wrap this up with just the hopeful thought that, maybe, my thumb arthropathy will settle down a bit from writing using the lapcom.  I really hope so, because I decided to pick up my guitar and play (not like yesterday) on Saturday morning, and it was…uncomfortable.  I’m a doctor, of course, so when I say “uncomfortable” in most contexts, it’s likely to mean “quite painful”.  And that it was.

That was part of what drove me to remember to bring the lapcom with me on Saturday.  I’m not just retrospectively guessing about subconscious thought processes, I’m relating conscious thought processes that I remember.  It’s nice when that happens, ceteris paribus, though pain makes such conscious choices more likely, I suppose.

Pain is a strong biological/neurological/psychological pressure and force for learning, after all, perhaps only exceeded by nausea.  And nausea could be considered a kind of pain, if you wanted to broaden that set, and it wouldn’t be an arbitrary or unreasonable addition.

With that, I’ll leave you all to it for the beginning of the week.  Hopefully, the fact that I remembered the lapcom and am using it bodes well for the rest of it.  At least, it’s a step in a good direction.  And may all your steps, in aggregate, lead you in a good direction as well.

*Phrases like that almost always make me think they should be written as, for instance, “each to other” but I know that’s not right, and here it doesn’t even really make sense.  It’s a quirk of my thinking about language and grammar, I suppose.

 

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Reasons, causes, and linguistic evolution, among other things

Well, I forgot to bring the lapcom back from the office yet again yesterday evening.  And again, there was no actual reason for leaving it; I simply forgot.

Some might call that a “reason”, and they would certainly not be foolish, but I prefer to differentiate between “causes” and “reasons”.  Reasons involve‒as the term might suggest‒an actual thought process, whether clear or logical or rational or even unconscious, whereas a cause is simply an antecedent event or process operating according to the laws of physics, that leads to something happening.

The laws of physics are basically the root of everything (even though we don’t know them all) and so all things that happen have causes in this general sense.  But not everything happens for a reason (not as far as anyone can see, despite popular trite platitudes).  In fact, most things that happen do not happen for a reason.

I was going to say that reasons and causes are like squares and rectangles, but I don’t think that’s a stark enough simile.  Rather, reasons and causes are like squares and the general class of polygons (regular and irregular).  Every square is a polygon, but squares are a tiny, vanishingly small, miniscule, wee subset of the polygons (although both sets are infinite, one is a very small fraction of the other*).  So saying not every cause is a reason is an almost misleadingly understated claim.

I started reading a book called The Enigma of Reason which posits that reason‒the capacity to articulate why we do something or what we think should be done or to explain certain things‒was not born solely out of our capacity to make models of the world in our minds in order better to navigate*** it.  It was a social trait, evolved or developed after language developed, or perhaps as language developed, in order for us to be able to persuade our fellow Homo sapiens.

I haven’t finished the book, but it is an interesting and provocative thesis.  It certainly seems plausible, and it provides a potential reason (not just a cause) for reasoning itself.  How very “meta”.

Anyway, my point is that I had no reason to leave my lapcom at the office, I merely forgot it.  I need to try harder to remember and bring it, because my thumbs are not happy with me for all this phone typing, and they are being scrupulous about making sure I know how far they are from gruntlement.

Is that a word?  Google Docs seems to consider it one, because they have not underlined it, neither in blue nor in red.  Of course, one would expect that it would recognize it, since to be gruntled must be a thing that happens if one can be disgruntled.

Interestingly enough, one doesn’t encounter the words “nongruntled” or “ungruntled” or “agruntled”.  That’s the vicissitudes of linguistic evolution for you!

Likewise, of course, we do not use the word “nocent” anymore‒at least I’ve never heard anyone use it other than to explain this fact‒but we use the word “innocent” all the time.  From context, I’m sure you’ve recognized that “nocent” means, basically, “guilty”.  Why the root word went the way of the great white whale while the derivative word is alive and well and living in our heads rent free is just one of those more or less random things.  It has causes, without a doubt, but I suspect it does not have any true reasons.  I could be wrong, though.

It’s a bit like how there are oodles of Homo sapiens in the world today, but Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and other members of the genus Homo are all gone.  Humans do tend to carry a variable smattering of genes from Homo neanderthalensis, so one could say they are not fully extinct.  But the very fact that Neanderthals and “modern” humans could interbreed and produce fertile offspring should lead one to consider them members of the same species, according to the usual definitions thereof.

I believe many biologists have proposed a subtle renaming of Neanderthals, as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, indicating that they are a subspecies of humans.  I think this is the right thing to do for logical consistency within the naming systems and the “definitions” of species.

That reminds me:  I think I want to find a good freshman (university) Biology textbook (geared toward Biology majors) to read, just to bone up on my basic Bio.  My knowledge of the subject is very advanced in the realm that applies to humans, of course‒that’s part of being a medical doctor‒but it’s been a while since I reviewed the more general science in other than popular works by such worthies as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins.

I want to get more of the latest and deepest on the subject.  And good Biology textbooks are always a joy to read.  Also, they tend to have the loveliest photos and diagrams.

On that weird little tangent, I will come to a close.  I hope you all have a very good remainder of your weekend, and I will be back with another post on Monday…as always, exclusis improvisis.

*If this sounds odd, it’s because we’re talking about infinities, and they can feel quite strange.  But consider a simple infinite set:  the counting numbers, i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4…  There are a (countably**) infinite number of them, as is probably obvious.  Then consider the multiples of a million, i.e., 1 million,  2million, 3 million…  There are also an infinite number of these.  And yet each one is only one out of a million of the counting numbers.  They have the same cardinality, and yet the one is a “small” subset of the other.

**This is to differentiate them from the uncountably infinite sets of numbers, like the Real numbers and the Complex numbers.  You can’t finish counting the counting numbers in a finite time, but if you had an infinite amount of time, you could “finish”.  Whereas you can’t even really start counting the Real numbers, because from any point, there is no next real number, even if you have them in ascending numerical order, such as on a number line.  Between where you are starting and any arbitrarily close number you choose as your next number, there exists another uncountable infinity of Real numbers, every bit as “large” as the whole Real numbers themselves.  Mind boggled?  If not, I suspect you haven’t really thought about it carefully.

***Or geogate or astrogate it.  Most of us probably spend way more time geogating than actually navigating, since we’re on land much more than on the water.  And we spend very little, if any, time charting our way through space among the stars (astrogating), though we are always moving through space.

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I was “sic” in bed

Well, first of all, I’m sorry for not writing a post yesterday.  I was out sick from the office and from here.  I guess after Wednesday’s post that probably isn’t too surprising, at least in retrospect.  I was unusually tired for a reason, or at least by a cause‒because, you might say.

I’m feeling slightly better today, physically at least.  I have suspicions about what the problem has been, but they aren’t consistent; there is (or are) more than one of them competing for the net Bayesian probability total of 1, and there’s no strong claimant to a significant majority of my credence, so I’ll leave my guesses in my head for now.

Anyway, I mainly just laid around in my room Wednesday afternoon and night‒I left the office early on Wednesday‒and then all of yesterday and last night.  I don’t like spending so much time in my room, since it’s quite cluttered and disorderly (but I never have the energy to do anything about it) and it’s just a constant reminder of how pathetic and disgusting my life has become.  And, of course, when I’m sick I cannot even go for a walk.

If I had some major, life-threatening catastrophe at any time alone there, there would have been no one to help or rescue me.  I suppose that would be fine if I had something like a V-fib arrest; that’s a very fast death, and most people who die from it probably don’t experience anything at all when it happens, except maybe an initial palpitation if it starts out as V-tach.  If it were happening due to a heart attack, that would probably be painful, of course, but then again, in most heart attack situations, I could call 911 myself.

I occasionally think if I developed an acute respiratory arrest of some kind, such as pulmonary edema or bronchoconstriction or even just choking on something, that would probably be unpleasant, and I might not be able to call for help.  But though respiratory failure can be the single most frightening thing for a human, or someone with a human body, to experience (for good, sound biological reasons*) it doesn’t last long.  If you stop being able to breathe, you lose consciousness rather quickly, and then Bob’s your uncle and Sally’s your aunt and Jack’s a donut‒and they’re all at your funeral.

I actually think there would be few, if any, non-sibling people at any funeral for me.  If I’m wrong‒if there are people out there who would come to mourn and to eulogize*** me‒I wish they would just come out of the woodwork now and let me know and maybe come visit me (because I really don’t have the mental wherewithal to travel and visit myself, at least not now).  I’m very much alone and lonely, but I seem incapable of making any new friends or getting much else done that requires significant change or mental effort.  I guess that’s partly due to the ASD thing and partly due to my unique and bizarre set of personal experiences that have made me even odder than I was before.  I feel slightly orthogonal to the rest of society.

Anyway, dying of respiratory failure (of one kind or another) is not necessarily unpleasant.  The respiratory drive is not inversely proportional to the oxygen in one’s system (or if it is, it has a very tiny constant of proportion, probably less than .01, off the top of my head) but is instead proportional to the CO2 in one’s system…and that may be a non-linear, perhaps quadratic, association that increases more rapidly as the CO2 goes up.

If one were to suffocate or asphyxiate due to, say, a liquid nitrogen spill that fills a space with nitrogen and drives out all (or nearly all) oxygen, one would not tend to feel panicked or breathless.  The atmosphere we breathe is 80% nitrogen already, and it is essentially inert to us unless we go diving very deep underwater.  But one could still quite readily blow off just as much CO2 as ever in such a situation.  One would merely become lightheaded and pass out rather quickly and painlessly.  One might not even realize it was happening.

This is why you should never bring liquid nitrogen on an elevator if you can help it.

These characteristics make such asphyxiation or suffocation (whichever the “official” term is) a tempting form of “self-deletion” (as they euphemize the idea of suicide on social media because of stupid puritanical algorithms that confuse words with harm).  Weirdly enough, one alternative version of this is to use helium instead, which is just as inert to the human body as nitrogen, and which can be bought in home-sized canisters from party supply stores.

A few years ago, I bought some respiratory tubing, some gas flow regulators, non-rebreather masks, and two tanks of helium‒one at the office and one at the house.  I said they were for an experiment I had in mind, which was true in a sense.  As it turned out, though, correcting the mass-produced, party balloon-oriented regulators and jury-rigging the adapter and tubing to it was unreliable, and I wasn’t confident enough in it not failing to give it a real try, so I ended up giving both tanks away for people to use for kids’ parties.

It would work better with a tank of nitrogen, anyway, because the typical volume of such tanks is much greater and the industrial kinds of adaptors are easily connected.  Nitrogen is not available in party stores, but it can be obtained, usually for delivery, in welding supply centers and similar, or for cooking and coffee brewing (!) purposes and for filling tires with pure nitrogen, which apparently changes their dynamics slightly.

So, yeah, I’ve looked into this quite a bit, obviously.  And I still have the masks and the tubing and the adaptors (you can get them all from Amazon).  And, as with walking, the “authorities” can’t really be hypervigilant about nitrogen.

Anyway, that’s all been a somewhat morbid aside.  I will say that I feel intellectually uneasy about the whole asphyxiation method because if you screw up, you might live but be brain-damaged.  I dealt with that potential outcome in my story “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, which shows that this notion has been on my mind for quite a while.

I’ll leave the post off here, for now.  I am supposed to work tomorrow, so I should write a post then, exclusis improvisis.  But of course, the unforeseen happens somewhat frequently.

I hope you have a good day.

*Think about it:  one can live for weeks without food and days without water, but one can only survive for minutes without breathing.  Long before lack of oxygen kills one, the build up of CO2 leads to the accumulation of carbonic acid (H2CO3, the uncatalyzed reaction product of CO2 with water, H20), which leads to rapidly dropping pH.  This disrupts the function of nearly every enzyme in the body, all of which have evolved to operate in a narrow pH range around 7.4**.  The body maintains this pH wonderfully in most cases, mainly through the actions of the kidneys, but also using the respiratory tract (if your blood gets too acidic, you tend to hyperventilate, which blows off CO2 and thus reduces the concentration of carbonic acid, whereas if your blood gets too basic/alkaline, you tend to breathe much less leading to the opposite outcome).

**Drinking or eating specific foods or supplements to change the pH in your body is a fool’s errand, since if you have working kidneys they do a fiercely good job at maintaining things in a very narrow range all your life, despite woo woo “natural” health grifters’ claims.  And if you don’t have optimally working kidneys, eating or drinking things that even might affect the acidity/alkalinity of your blood is terribly dangerous.

***If I had to guess, I would say the literal meaning of the word “eulogy” comes from Latin for true or right speech/words.  Eu…logos.

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“You’d say I’m putting you on”

Well, I forgot to bring the lapcom again last night, so again, this is being written (by me) on my smartphone.  Hey, how was that for turning a bit of passive construction into a slightly comedic moment?  By which I mean the whole “being written” thing, not the fact that I forgot the effing lapcom again yesterday.

I suppose that could be comic in the right circumstances, but as it is, it’s just rather pathetic.  It certainly doesn’t rise to the level of tragedy.  It’s just very mildly pitiable, but not really in any dramatic way.

Enough of that.  In case you can’t tell, I really have no idea what to write today, even for me.  I’m also particularly tired (even for me).  If it were not Wednesday, I might not even go to the office today, but it is Wednesday, of course.  It’s Wednesday the 21st of October in 2026.  Perhaps it, or yesterday, will be a remarkable or auspicious day in the future*.  I won’t talk about why I might imagine it could be, though.  It’s a mystery, Charlie Brown.

So, yeah, I’m really tired today, even for me.  And I’m already running out of steam for this blog post.  Mind you, the footnote took a good bit of my energy, and probably has more substance than much of the rest of the stuff in the post.

You can’t see it (of course), but I’m making an absurd number of typos and so on today.  Some of that is just a function of using the smartphone, but it’s usually not nearly this bad.

I think I’m going to call it good with this for now.  I’m really tired (I originally wrote “rited” there, see what I mean?) and I’m not thinking or typing very clearly.  I feel as though I didn’t sleep, though I did sleep a bit, if only for me.  Maybe I slept too much (I doubt it).  Anyway, let’s call this done for today, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll be in better form.

I hope you are all well and continue to be well in this best (and worst) of all the possible worlds we can experience.

*By which I mean that in the future they may look back on the day(s) as having been auspicious.  Neither today nor yesterday can actually do anything in the future, for they are in the past (or present).  Some things can exist both in the past and the future, of course‒you and I for instance, at least in some sense‒but one cannot claim that a particular measure of time, specific to one time, can exist in the future.  It would be like saying the first centimeter in a meter stick is still present at the 47th centimeter.  It doesn’t make sense.  Centimeters and days are fungible in some senses, but not in this way.