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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.

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I had a headline in mind, but it would have been gross

Well, today I am writing on my smartphone because I simply, and stupidly, forgot to bring my lapcom yesterday.  I don’t always know where my mind is, to tip a hat to the Pixies, but it often seems not to be with me.

Of course, that’s a figure of speech.  I know that my mind is me, whatever that ultimately means, so I am never anywhere without my mind, anymore than a square can be said to exist even if all its sides are removed‒really, even if one side is removed (though in that case, it can be implied, somewhat like the famous square illusion made of four incomplete circles).

Anyway, I’m going to keep it short today, partly because I’m feeling somewhat queasy, and that takes away a lot of one’s energy‒at least, it takes away a lot of this one’s energy.  I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up or anything; it’s not that bad currently.  I just feel a little like my upper GI tract is not happy with me.  Perhaps it’s a bit like a frowning parent:  not angry, just disappointed.

It’s not a great way to start a day, but there are many worse ones, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.  I will complain‒I am complaining‒but I shouldn’t.

Here’s a peculiar question that occurred to me after writing that last sentence:  are there cases where one shouldn’t do something, but one ought to do it (or vice versa)?  Or are those two words such nearly complete synonyms that such a thing would be contradictory?  One can speak a contradiction, or write it, etc., but one cannot actually bring one into being.  “Talk is cheap, mother fucker,” DMX said.  Reality, on the other hand, has a huge cover charge at the door and you have to pay à la carte for what you get.

This reminds me (I’m not sure why) of a brief, mainly inconsequential writing error I found yesterday in an article related to the new Spider-Man movie.  They used “i.e.” when they were providing an example and should have used “e.g.”.  I know it’s a minor error, but come on, they went through this difference in Get Shorty, for crying out loud (the movie, at least; I don’t remember if it was in the book).

Anyway, it’s not a very auspicious day, for me or for the world, so I’m going to try not to drag this on.  I don’t feel very well, physically or mentally, and what’s more, I don’t expect to feel well, physically or mentally, in the future.

That doesn’t quite reach the level at which I expect not to feel well, physically or mentally.  It’s a subtle difference in wording, but conceptually the states are quite distinct.  One can vaguely not expect that things will necessarily be good, perhaps based on past experience, but not really be inclined one way or the other, or one can frankly expect that things will be bad.

Of course, in the end, no one here gets out alive, but even that isn’t necessarily a bad thing (nor is it necessarily a good thing).  It’s just the way reality appears to be, as best we can tell right now, no matter what anyone claims based on “belief” and “faith” and centuries old to millennia old hearsay (also known as religious writings).

A delusion embraced by millions or billions or even quadrillions of people is still a delusion.  You don’t make dog shit into fillet mignon just by telling yourself and others repeatedly that it is, and if you eat it, that’s on you.  Don’t try to feed it to me, especially not by force.

Of course, you can sort of turn excrement into steak, such as by using it to fertilize grassland on which cattle will graze before eventually being eaten.  But the fact that nature allows this particular remarkable transformation does not mean (for example) that a cracker becomes the body of an ancient rabbi, or that some wine becomes his blood, just because someone said something in Latin near it.

All the pseudo magical crap distracts from the actual good messages that can be found (occasionally, here and there) in religions and ideologies.  People don’t want to have to do the work of really turning crap into burgers, though, because that involves actual farming, which is hard and the results are not guaranteed.

Of course, one can consider or imagine oneself more or less guaranteed to get certain outcomes from religious practices, but the actual outcomes are almost certainly going to be largely the opposite of what people want and tell themselves they will get.

Humans can be very stupid a lot of the time.  But they can also be brilliant, even the most unassuming and humble of them.  Like Ultron said, they’re grotesque and yet lovely.  Like him, I’m often torn between reveling in the human works of art and science and engineering and exploration and so on, and doing my best to wipe every last one of them from the face of the universe.

Unfortunately, right now my tummy is too icky for me to put much energy into either one.

I hope you have a good day.

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“…would you like to see me try?”

Here we go again.  It’s the start of another “work week”, and unfortunately, I am writing this on my smartphone.  I just didn’t feel like bringing the lapcom back with me on Friday, because I had some other items in my backpack that already made it a bit heavy.  It shouldn’t have daunted me‒it wasn’t really very heavy‒but it did.

Anyway, I’m hoping to keep this post brief, since there’s really not much to say and not much going on and my thumb bases have by no means recovered to a normal baseline.  I am also sweating a strangely large amount this morning considering that I am currently sitting still.  It’s not even really that hot in here.

It’s too much to hope, probably, that this sweatiness presages some acute, life-ending illness, but I guess some day that will happen.  When it does, I’ll likely end up as one of those dead bodies that’s only found because of the smell of rot that develops.  It’s not as though anyone would be seriously affected if I just stopped being around, so no one would miss me very quickly.

I mean, okay, the people at the office would probably wonder, because it’s not like me even to be late (at all) to work, let alone not to show up without some kind of notice.  In addition, my absence would make things at least temporarily inconvenient.

Mind you, I live in a house that has another family living in the other section, and they would probably notice pretty quickly if I died.  Their dogs would, anyway, though I don’t know if they would “say” anything about it.

I’d rather die out on the road, walking as if I were intending to reach some destination.  But we only get limited input into how we end up dying.  Even if you take the matter fully into your own hands, you’re not guaranteed that it will work out the way you’d prefer‒this fact has stayed my own hand on more than one occasion.  Life is complicated, and even the process of leaving it can be hard to predict.

Speaking of walking, I did a decent amount of it this weekend.  On Saturday, I walked just shy of eight miles, and yesterday I walked about five miles.  That’s not too bad.  And thanks to some precautions I took, it hasn’t so far led to any serious pain exacerbations, nor to any knee or ankle issues (of significance).  That’s something, at least.

I did not get anything else significant done this weekend, of course.  I did not write any fiction, and I did not play any music or do any singing, nor did I draw or paint or study physics or mathematics or any other science.  I basically just vegged out.  Probably that was part of what allowed me to have the energy to do my walking, but it is a bit disappointing to me, though probably not to anyone else.

I’m rereading Stephen King’s book On Writing, hoping that maybe I’ll get some inspiration to write some more fiction, because it has worked to help my enthusiasm for writing in the past.  And, admittedly, it does make me feel a little wistful dreaminess about, say, Outlaw’s Mind, or my planned Changeling in a Shadow World, or even HELIOS.  But it’s not enough to get me to work on any of them.  More’s the pity.

I think I might take a break from reading soon, too.  Every time I finish one book, I have a terrible time mustering interest in another one.  I can read even without such interest, of course‒it’s a powerfully ingrained habit that I have had effectively all my life‒but it feels very dreary to have to force myself to read, and to go through Amazon trying to find books that grab my interest, only to find that they all seem dreadfully boring.

Remind you of anything?  Maybe the blog you’re reading now?  It’s hard for me to avoid dreariness here.  To paraphrase The Wall, disc 1, side B, 4th song from the end:  Day after day, life turns grey, like the skin of a dying man.

I’m really tired, and it’s only just now the very beginning of the week.  Maybe by tomorrow I’ll feel better.  I doubt it.  There’s no good reason to suspect or expect that I will, other than perhaps the natural cyclicity of things.  Thank goodness for the complex numbers, which make dealing rigorously with rotations and cycles much easier than they would be otherwise, and in which to multiply by i is to apply a rotation of 90 degrees (or pi over 2 radians) counterclockwise.

On that circular note (ha ha) I will draw today’s post to a close.  I hope you all have a good day, and hopefully a good week, even if I do succumb to something and am never heard from again.  No sane person would make their happiness dependent upon, or even merely linked to, me or my happiness, as experience has demonstrated.

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Cats, raccoons, spiders, furniture…sometimes even humans

It’s Friday, now, and I’m writing what should be the final blog post of the week, since exclusis improvisis I will not be working tomorrow—which usually means that I will not write a blog post tomorrow.

I am writing this post today on my lapcom, again.  That’s because I am still at the office from yesterday; I did not go back to the house last night.  I had called my sister on the phone after work, in the office, and by the time we were done, it was quite late.  It was too late for the train, so I would have needed to get an Uber back to the house, which would have been expensive, and by the time I got there, I would basically just need to go to bed and then get up and come back in.

What a waste that would have been.

Of course, the neighborhood (nayborhood?) cats will have had another evening and morning without food, but they are stray cats, after all.  They can handle themselves pretty well.  Actually, maybe this hiatus will discourage the stupid little family of raccoons that keeps coming in and eating the cat food after the cats have the eaten their initial amount.

They are cute, of course, bordering on adorable—the raccoons, I mean, though so are the cats—but I do not buy cat food to feed to raccoons, who can do an even better job of taking care of themselves than cats can.  They just get annoying, and although I have learned that silly string and silly foam do kind of freak them out (fire doesn’t seem to, not when it’s just seen, and I don’t want actually to burn them) it’s not enough to discourage them for long*.

I will occasionally lob a coconut (there are scores of them on the ground) in the raccoons’ general direction, which does freak them out some, but it also freaks out some of the cats.  I have even more harmful means at my disposal, but I would have a hard time using them.

It can be quite inconvenient and irritating sometimes, how much I empathize with things like raccoons and opossums (and stray cats) and even with lizards and spiders**, and even with ants and stuffed animals and—occasionally–furniture.  Heck, when I’m in the right state of mind, I can even empathize with palmetto bugs.

But it’s not a deliberate kind of empathy.  It’s certainly not done consciously.  It’s not the kind of empathy termed “cognitive empathy”, in which one can sort of tease apart and understand how the emotions are unfolding in another person’s mind, without necessarily sharing those emotions***.  I can do that if and when I put my mind to it, at least to a point.  But my issue is the sort of automatic, emotional empathy, in which it’s almost possible to feel what the other being (or thing) is experiencing, or at least to imagine that one does.

I experience that with humans, too, at least to some degree.  Actually, it’s often rather overwhelming, especially if there are significant numbers of people around.  I don’t think that it’s a literal sense, like sight or hearing or smell or touch, but those mirror neurons—or whatever other functions in the brain turn other creature’s reactions into literal feelings in one’s own mind—seem to want to try to take in as much of everyone’s percussive passions as they can, and that process cannot readily be shut off, as it wasn’t consciously shut on.

This can be, and has been, useful, such as when dealing with patients one on one as a doctor.  One person at a time is just about manageable, though even that can wear you down when it’s many “one persons” throughout every day.

But still, it can be done.  However, being around many people, especially ones who are not necessarily regulating themselves much, can be damnably irritating and overwhelming.  It’s a bit like being at a rock concert in which every individual crowd member’s favorite band is playing at the same time, all different songs and genres and everything, and the members of the crowd are each and all trying to sing along with their band.

It’s not a pleasant situation, as I’m sure you would agree.  That’s at least part of why being in social gatherings can be quite daunting.  It probably also at least partly explains why things like arcades, which are certainly noisier than most parties, are not nearly as overwhelming as even a small party can be.  Plus, video games can be much more entertaining than trying to talk to various people you’ve only just met, who may or may not have any shared interests with you.

A key indicator or barometer or highlighter of the comparison between the two is the fact that, if you drink alcohol in an arcade, your performance on the games is likely to suffer.  On the other hand, alcohol is all but an absolute necessity at a party just filled with milling humans.

Why do humans insist upon repeatedly arranging activities for which even they, the arrangers, need pharmacotherapy (e.g., ethanol) to enjoy?  I would ask one, but I am almost sure that none of them would have a well thought out answer to the question.

Okay, well, don’t mind me, I’m in an atypical state, for me (which doesn’t necessarily mean that one has become more “typical”, as I discussed yesterday, using the entropy diagram).  I’ll draw this post to a close now, and I wish you all a very good weekend.  I will next return here neither before nor after Monday…

…yet again, exclusis improvisis.

*I’ve read somewhere recently that raccoons are starting to show signs of early pre-domestication toward humans, much as dogs probably did way back in the day.  Cats, on the other hand, mostly domesticated people.

**Okay, I could leave them out of this list.  I like spiders quite a bit, and I more or less always have, so I don’t feel bad about empathizing with them.  In fact, as I’ve said here before (I think) when I accidentally wreck a spider web because it’s too effective at not being seen, I tend to feel really bad.  That is, after all, their extended phenotype, as Richard Dawkins coined the term, and they put a lot of effort and literal bodily resources into it.

***Psychopaths are, apparently, often quite good at this.

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Blogger that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but I thank you

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (obviously) and I am writing this on…my lapcom!!  That’s right, I’m pleased to say that after all my discussion yesterday about trying to give my thumb bases a break, I maintained the impetus into the evening to bring the mini lapcom back with me, and I am now using it to write this post.

I’ve probably already said more about this than was merited, but I’m rather pleased with myself.  That doesn’t happen all that often nowadays—me being pleased with myself, I mean—so I am trying to indulge it as much as I can, hopefully without overdoing it.

Let’s see, now, is there anything else to talk about today?  Hmm.  Nothing comes to mind right off the top of my head.  Perhaps I should just call it good and wish you all a good day and say “Ta ta for now” in abbreviated form.

But, no, I don’t think I’m going to do that.  Not having anything to say has rarely stopped me (or lots of other people, I suspect) from running off at the keyboard/mouth.  I don’t know if that’s healthy or good or not; probably there is no specific absolute “value” slot or slots in which to put that fact.

The goodness (or badness) of a thing is often largely dependent on that for which some particular person might use it, or the semi-arbitrary tastes of any given person.  But as for absolute goodness or badness, I’m not sure those concepts ever fully apply.

Even nuclear weapons can at least be argued to have had some modicum of benefit.  It’s an ill wind indeed, as they say, that blow no one any good.  There can be little doubt that the atomic bomb shortened the war in the Pacific in World War II, and that was good for Allied soldiers, though clearly not good for Japan, at least not in the short term.

Then, of course, there was the Cold War, which was terrifying and had the potential to send civilization back millennia or more.  Thankfully, it did not.  It’s a bet I wouldn’t encourage the world to make again—that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction would prevent most conventional wars that might otherwise have led to the death of many millions and the immiseration of millions more, albeit without destroying civilization in the process—but we got away with it that time (so far).

So, yeah, good and evil are largely viewpoint dependent, though they are not absolutely subjective.  I suspect there are quite a few things in the world, or in the potential of human behavior, about which if you surveyed many hundreds of thousands of people, the very large majority would agree on whether they were generally good or generally evil.  Child sex trafficking comes to mind as one of those more or less universal evil things, I suspect.  On the other hand, saving innocent children from violence or disease or catastrophe would probably pretty generally be considered good.

But of course, all this is very anthropocentric (or anthropoidocentric, maybe).  If you were to canvas the opinions (if they existed) of various sexually transmitted viruses and bacteria and protozoa, they would probably be in favor of all forms of sex trafficking, and of indiscriminate, unprotected sex in general.  It might be their equivalent of clear-cutting the Amazon rain forest to make room for non-native crops.

Blowflies would surely be quite satisfied, at least in the short term, if humans had massive, bloody wars that left bodies strewn, unburied, in the streets.  But humans—selfish bastards that they are—are unlikely to do such a thing just because it would be nice for the flies.  They might do it for other—arguably no better—reasons, but not for the flies.

Shakespeare said (or, well, Hamlet said*), “there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  And, of course, in Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place, and of itself, can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, though I may have left out some archaic contractions.

To be fair, we should expect Satan to say something like that, shouldn’t we?  And we should not give too much credence to his viewpoint.  Hamlet, on the other hand, is much more morally ambiguous than, say, the leader of the fallen angels, so it’s more convincing when he says his line during a semi-philosophical interaction with his two former friends.

Well, I feel that this has been a rather peculiar blog post, even for me.  I suppose one might expect that, if one normally wrote peculiar blog posts, one might expect that a “peculiar for me” blog post by such a person would be a “normal for someone else” blog post.  But that intuition is misleading and usually wrong.

There are many more ways to be “peculiar” than there are to be “normal” in most cases, so, like the phase space that can be used to diagram entropy, when things move from one spot semi-randomly to another, they are much more likely to become more peculiar than to revert to more normal.

The other way only works in strictly one-dimensional situations, though in those situations it is worth noting.  For it is a fact that, ceteris paribus, the lesser of two evils is the greater of the two goods, just as a less negative number is a more positive number, by mathematical definition.

On that, I’ll draw this lapcom blog post to a close, with a deep, sincere thank you for reading:

Thank you, deeply and sincerely, for reading.

TTFN

*You cannot assume that an author agrees with a point made by one of the characters in the author’s works.  This is true of many a celebrated quote.  The famous Oscar Wilde line “I can resist anything but temptation” is spoken by Dorian Gray, who is not a particularly good person, and probably does not represent Wilde’s considered ethical opinions.

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Reflecting on indirect, unconscious drawbacks and their impacts, and other weird thoughts

Well, there’s no lapcom here today, alas.  I just didn’t feel enough drive or urge or energy‒or perhaps impetus‒to bring it with me when I left the office.  Maybe I should say that the magnitude of the vector for taking the lapcom with me was overbalanced by the net vectors that summed up to pushing in the other direction in this (very) high dimensional phase space that is the description of the state of my nervous system and its effects on my activity.

You’ve heard of Hilbert Space*?  Well, you can call this “Robert Space” if you wish.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’m writing this on my smartphone today, and I’m already regretting it a bit.  The arthropathy in my thumbs is complaining rather vociferously (and quite metaphorically) just from the little writing I have so far undertaken.  So, hopefully, I will be able to keep this relatively short today.

That doesn’t always happen.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, sometimes when I get rolling in habitual behavior, I keep barreling through even when I can feel the negative effects already as I do it.

Conversely (or whatever the proper term is), it has occurred to me just in the last day or so**, that my thumb pain may be part of why I haven’t been playing guitar.  It’s not that, when I think of playing it, it occurs to me that my thumbs hurt and so I consciously choose not to do it after weighing the fun versus the pain.  If it were that conscious, I would (clearly) know it already.

But the thumb pain can make the process of playing less pleasant, and that can decrease the emotional reward and reinforcement I get from doing it, and so, in the fullness of time, make me less likely to do it in the future.  It’s sort of a very low-level application of the aversion training from A Clockwork Orange.

If so‒it’s strongly possible, but I cannot swear that it’s really, definitely the case‒that may mean that what I really ought to do to increase my playing is to try to increase the magnitude of that “take the lapcom home” vector.

But, of course, it’s not some axial vector, aligned along only one unit vector, with a cross-product (or outer product, I think, if memory serves) of zero.  And it’s not a fundamental vector, with only itself as its input, either.  It’s a vector that is, itself, the sum of many vector inputs (and heck, maybe some scalars, I don’t know, but I don’t think tensors would apply to this situation), some of which would probably surprise me.

Still, it might be worth a try.  It’s not as though the thumb arthropathy is something I like and want to keep.  So, if I can find ways to counter it, maybe I can see what effect that has on my tendency to play guitar, and thus, finally, on my tendency to sing.

I used to sing a lot, especially when I commuted by car and could play various CDs (but not treasury bonds, ba-dump-bump) and sing along but no one could hear me.

Even when driving my scooter*** to and from work, I had a Bluetooth enabled helmet, linked to my playlist on my phone.  When you sing inside a motorcycle helmet, in traffic, you don’t need to worry about being overheard.

Now I don’t commute that way, and since I have housemates, I don’t often feel comfortable just singing when I’m in my room.  But early morning in the office, when playing guitar, it can be good.  That is, as long as playing guitar is good, which is apparently not the case for now.

Oh, well, I guess I shouldn’t dwell on it.  Everything is futile, everything is imperfect, everything is chaotic, everything is entropic.  And to paraphrase the Stones, I’m neither waiting on a lady nor am I waiting on a friend.  I’m just waiting on the end.

Speaking of the end…

*Maybe you haven’t.  Let me know.

**You wouldn’t think it would take so long for this possibility to occur to me.  I mean, I’m reasonably bright, and the connection is not a distant or particularly occult one.  Unfortunately, you cannot choose to think of something before you have thought of it.  Likewise, you cannot choose not to think of something once you’re thinking it, but you can let such thoughts go and do your best not to identify with them.  Oh, and also, by the way, no one has ever been able to “unsee” anything, ever.  The expression is idiotic.  Also, there’s no hour (or other period of time) in your life that you’re going to get back.  Noting that fact about some specific, unpleasant hour just makes you sound semimoronic.

***I say “scooter” because I guess that’s the official term, but it was a 650 cc Honda Silverwing, so really it was a full-on motorcycle that just had continuously variable transmission.  I’ve always been clumsy with manual transmission vehicles.

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A belated first post of the work week

I hope nobody was worried about me yesterday when I didn’t write a post.  I was out sick.  I had some kind of gastrointestinal bug, or perhaps some type of bad reaction to something I ate.  I’m not sure.  Anyway, it was unpleasant, as such things tend to be.

I often find myself wishing, in such situations and even less severe ones, that I didn’t ever have to eat at all.  Of course, if you see me, you’d know that I’ve tended to err in the other direction, but I would very much like to lose my sense of hunger, or perhaps more my sense of pleasure in food.  My current life is almost completely devoid of any real, reliable joy of any kind, and I am chronically depressed, so I unfortunately tend to go for biologically reliable sources of “feeling good”, however minor and evanescent, such as eating.

I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have any kind of drug problem, since I’d probably be stuck going to that for my diminishing returns of transient joy.  I suspect many people with drug problems do just that.  Actually, I often kind of wish that I did have a drug problem, because then I would be (a) more likely to be thinner than I am, and (b) might die of a drug overdose, which is comparatively faster and less painful than dying of a food “overdose” over time.  It’s a moot point, though.  I’m not the sort of person who could really manage an illicit drug habit; I would find the whole process stressful and irritating.  I didn’t even like taking opioids legally when I was given them for my chronic pain.

Alcohol, which is legal, has many drawbacks, not the least being that beyond a certain point, it doesn’t really do anything for me and exacerbates my chronic pain.  It can be useful as a social lubricant, and in that it can be very useful, considering how socially awkward I am.

But alcohol doesn’t make me feel much euphoria past the initial relaxation stage, which is definitely pretty good for short times.  However, one trouble with alcohol is that it impairs one’s judgement—it certainly impairs mine—and so when one feels a little relief from anxiety and a consequent bit of euphoria because of it, one falls into the cliché, “if some is good, more must be better, and a lot more must be great”.  Most of you probably have direct or indirect experience with how that line of “thinking” turns out.

Now, I will say that I took one medication a few times, in medical circumstances, that could probably become a problem for me, and that was diazepam (brand name Valium®).  I’ve written before about how, when I was given diazepam, even though the circumstances were far from pleasant ones—wisdom teeth extraction in one case, and a heart catheterization in the other—I felt tremendous.  I felt normal, if you understand the sense of what I mean by that—and even if you don’t.

Anyway, that’s a prescription med, and I’m not really interested in taking it.  I know too much about how rapidly diminishing are its returns, and about its long-term effects on cognition, and worst, about how tolerance to it tends to lead to increased anxiety between doses, so it pretty quickly becomes counter-productive.

This leads me to wonder if it might be somewhat useful to people with chronic anxiety to take medications or similar that increase their anxiety, and to stay on them for a while, then to stop.  It wouldn’t address any underlying issues, of course, but not all such chronic states are due to Freudian-ish causes in experience and upbringing.  Some of them are genetic or at least congenital.  Sometimes, a person’s biology can just give them an anxiety set-point that is significantly higher than average.  Some other people, of course, will have the opposite.  And most people will be somewhere in between.

This is the nature of traits in populations of sexually reproducing species (e.g., humans):  there is variability in nearly every attribute, as genes get shuffled and reshuffled, paired up with different alleles and other genes in the genome, reacting in highly complex ways, and providing the broad variation on which natural selection does its ruthless work.

This is what is largely behind the famous phenomenon of the moths that changed coloration in industrial age England compared to their pre-industrial age colors, matching the new soot-encrusted bark of trees.  They did not develop the trait or attribute de novo; there was always a variability in that physical aspect (color).  But in different circumstances, different colors were more likely to survive to reproductive age, and so they began to predominate when a persistent change in circumstances happened.

The same sort of thing surely has happened with humans many times, over and over, as civilization changes, and our own effects feed back on our natures and alter their own causes.  If people could step out of their little, provincial world-views, this would likely be obvious to all but the most benighted of souls.

How did I get to this subject/topic*?  I don’t know, though maybe it will become obvious while I’m editing.  Anyway, I’m going to draw this to a close just with the revelation that I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  Was there any difference between its style and that of one written on the smartphone, now that I reveal the fact to you only at the end?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I truly hope you have a good day.  And I really wish I could actually hang out with some of you or with someone today with whom I could have a comfortable interaction.  But I am not good company anymore, if I ever was.  So I will probably, and appropriately, continue to be alone, and will die alone, and hopefully fairly soon.

*I never really have been able to discern a consistent and sensible difference between these two terms, but people often use them as if they are two different things, rather than simply synonyms.  Possibly that’s just a function of pretentiousness.  But maybe I’m just ignorant.