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I almost forgot to put a title here again

I’m writing this blog post on my smartphone, as I did yesterday’s post, and in contrast to the posts from Monday through Wednesday.  I haven’t yet received any direct feedback on whether there’s a difference for the reader or what it might be, but the numbers seem to indicate that the phone-written posts are more popular than the lapcom-written ones.

This could, however, be mere statistical fluctuation, having no relation to whether readers find one or the other type of post better.  Quite possibly, most readers wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other without being told, even if the lives of their dearest loved ones were on the line.

Such is the difficulty with finding truly dispositive evidence in ordinary life.  But that’s not to say it can’t be done.  One just has to try very hard to be clear-headed and objective.  And I don’t mean “try to try” to be clear-headed, not just to be able to say “I tried to be clear-headed”, but actually to act with the true intent to be clear-headed.

Of course, the human senses and human brains gather a tremendous amount of information every waking moment, checking it against their hitherto-built model of reality, seeing if things meet expectations according to that model, and trying to improve that model, that map, of reality.  Mind you, there’s way more info in most places than anyone can take in.  That’s okay, for the most part.  Most of that detailed information is irrelevant to the life and reproduction of a far-flung African ape*.

Speaking of updating one’s models of reality, I just yesterday came across a video/written course on tensors (for physicists and would-be physicists).  The professor’s approach seems like it’s going to be a good one, so I’m planning on trying to go through the course.

I want to learn well about tensors (about which my understanding is not yet fully clear, though I get the gist of the basics) not just for my own curiosity‒which drives me, in principle, to want to try to understand everything in the universe‒but also because I will need skill in using them and manipulating them if I am to solve my longstanding point of curiosity in Special/General Relativity.

I have a specific question about what the theories predict would happen in specific circumstances, and I have not been able to find anyone who reliably answers it.  Really, no one has answered it at all, which is not too surprising, since it is fairly esoteric.

We’ll see whether I can commit to the bit.  I have a hard time maintaining focus on things for too long at once.  I dearly love to learn about new things and to develop new skills, especially in the sciences‒well, also in the arts‒but it seems that after (far too short) a time I get distracted by another interesting thing.  Either that or I just get mentally fatigued and need to distract myself, usually either with music or something funny.

I suppose that’s not really that unusual.  But lordy, it’s frustrating.  I wish I could actually want to do what I want to want to do.  Maybe I will be able to do so someday.  Maybe I will be able to devise or find more direct control of the regions of my brain which govern attention, focus, and drive.

Of course, we do have some somewhat direct ways to affect those brain regions.  The most widely used of these ways is caffeine.  The majority of people in the world use some form of caffeine on a regular basis.  At least, that was so the last time I looked.

Of course, there are other such tools, some more powerful in some ways than caffeine, but they come with their own sets of difficulties:  these include the amphetamines and related compounds and cocaine.  They can be useful in certain circumstances, but are difficult to use well, without significantly detrimental overall outcomes.

It would be easier if we could directly stimulate (and suppress) specific areas and processes of our brains at will.  Of course, the technology to do such things exists, more or less, in raw form.  One can stimulate the brain with implanted electrodes, or one can manipulate it more indirectly via externally applied electric and magnetic fields.

This has been done, of course, if only fairly crudely.  The technology I describe in Unanimity is (mostly) very real.  Is that what makes it scaaaary?

Probably not.

Okay, that’s enough for today, and for this week as well, since I am not working tomorrow (barring the truly very much unforeseen).  I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.  Have a good meal or two while you’re at it.  Though, possibly, that’s implicit in most concepts of good days and good weekends, come to think of it.

Oh, well.  Have good ones nevertheless.

*That refers to humans, in case it’s not clear.

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However, but a folly blogged with wit, or else a wit by folly vanquished

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and today I am writing this post on my smartphone.  That’s partly due to the fact that I was feeling very enervated by the end of the day yesterday and didn’t feel like carrying even that little bit of extra weight that is my lapcom.  Also, on the previous three days, during which I wrote the posts on said lapcom, I saw some of the lowest readerships and “likes” that I have had in quite some time.

Now, correlation does not necessarily imply causation (though Judea Pearl has done nice work on how one can more truly discern causality from statistics).  But it really doesn’t much matter if I get that causality exactly right.  Odds are that it was just a statistical fluke or some such thing.  But it sure feels like negative feedback.

Of course, this is all rather pointless no matter what.  Mind you, that’s a fairly useless assessment, since everything is pointless as far as anyone can tell.  I make that statement without real fear of contradiction.  Though, if anyone has any actual argument against it, I’m open to listening.  But bring something original and well thought-out, something that’s been subject to scrutiny and potential disconfirmation, something with arguments strong enough to convince an intelligent but disinterested extraterrestrial*, or don’t expect me to give you much attention.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’m writing this on my smartphone.  If any of you notice any discernible difference in the character and quality of my posts using the two different tools, please let me know.  I recognize, of course, that such an evaluation is highly subjective, but I’m not trying to get rigorous feedback; I’m just trying to get a sense of things, because I really don’t tend to have any idea how I come across to people.  I mean, even if they do tell me, I can’t feel sure that they’re telling the truth, but at least it is some data that I can use to update my priors, however weakly.

And yet, again, none of it really matters, and I have a good chance of screwing everything up even if I get it right at baseline.  I know I shouldn’t feel too bad about that.  There are almost always more ways to get something “wrong” than there are to get it “right”, and it can be difficult to tell them apart ahead of time.  Thus the old saying that the gates of Heaven and the gates of Hell are adjacent, identical, and unmarked**.

I guess you can probably tell that I am particularly directionless in writing this blog post today, even for me.  Unlike earlier this week and some of last week, when I had some thoughts that wanted to get out so much that I made audio recordings***, today I find no burning thoughts to share or even to spray out into the world and see if they land anywhere.  I am simply writing out of habit, and I am not terribly enthusiastic about it‒other than the low-level recognition that this is nearly my only way of connecting daily with anyone in the outer world.

Or, maybe I should say that I am trying to connect with the inner world.  It’s not so much that I am hemmed in someplace.  I am more like a creature caught in the space between universes, like the Other, the Ill Will, in The Chasm and the Collision (though my intentions are much better than its intentions).  I have other antagonists in other currently-in-progress stories that are similar but on a smaller scale, but I won’t get into that too much, because it might accidentally give some spoilers‒just in case I ever finish and publish those stories.

Okay, well, this has been a truly pointless blog post, but I think I’ve written enough for today.  I hope you all are doing well by any reasonable measure of wellness.  I will probably write another post tomorrow.

TTFN

*Or changeling, or Nexus 13, or mutant, or whatever might best describe me metaphorically.

**Though this seems like an assholish kind of way for any supposedly benevolent deity to set things up.

***I am curious about the sound quality between the two recent recordings.  The first was made using a USB condenser mic, and the one I shared yesterday was spoken into the recording function of my smartphone and then sent over via Google Drive, downloaded, edited on Audacity, and then exported as an MP3 file (the latter step was also done to the 1st recording, but I recorded it onto Audacity directly in the first place).  If anyone has listened to both, could you please let me know?

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I forgot to give this a title at first

This is another lapcom post.  That’s three in a row!

It’s Wednesday now, though why today is named after the “Allfather” is far from clear to me.  Maybe because it’s the “middle” of the week, and Odin (AKA Wodin  AKA Wotan, etc.) supports the weight of time or some such.  I don’t know.  That sort of sounds good, at least.

Anyway, of course, I’m going to work.  It’s payroll day, and the boss should be back from a brief vacation.  It’s remarkable to me how often some people take vacations and so forth.  I’m not against vacations, don’t get me wrong.  But it’s quite annoying when someone takes a vacation while everyone else is working after having asked us to work on days when other people are taking a day off (e.g., Memorial Day).

It doesn’t really matter, I guess.  I have nothing to do on days off, let alone during any prolonged vacation, anyway.  I certainly have no one with whom to spend my time off, whatever it may be, except in rare snippets.

I don’t know.  I suppose some people out there might think I ought to do something about that, but the fact is, I don’t feel good about myself, whatever that might mean, and it is hard to try to inflict myself upon other people; this blog alone already feels presumptuous and probably annoying.

It is a persistent aspect of my experience of myself and the world that I feel strong self-disgust and self-contempt.  This is quite contrary to the concept of “self-compassion” often touted in discussions of getting an autism diagnosis as an adult and learning about it and some of why your experience in life has been the way it has been.

Getting diagnosed and learning more hasn’t given me any more generous attitude toward myself, at least not so far.  Maybe if there were more resources and support available, I might be doing better with it*.

I have also read suggestions about finding discussion or support groups or online meetups or even in person meetups.  This seems a slightly contradictory suggestion for people who are, as part of the very description of the disorder, socially troubled.  I even get tense whenever new people come to work in the office, until I get used to them.  I certainly don’t see myself trying to interact with groups of strangers, even if they are neurodivergent.

I had a little bit of connection on Instagram with some sort-of communities.  At least, there were other people there with some degree of similar experiences, though interaction was minimal and artificial.  Anyway, Meta arbitrarily kicked me off their platforms without telling me why, so fuck them to death.

I used to be better at this socialization sort of thing.  I probably would be better at a lot of it if not for chronic pain, but it’s rather futile to dwell on that very much.  In this, I try to follow the recommendations of the Stoics.  But sometimes I dwell on it, nevertheless.  Sue me, Marcus Aurelius.

Anyway, I don’t think I have anything productive to discuss today—not that yesterday’s weird, meandering post, which ended up focusing on prime factorizations somehow, was productive—and I don’t know that anything is likely to spill out of me at this point that’s going to be of any use to anyone, even for entertainment.  Sorry.

I did a brief audio recording yesterday about something that was nagging me relating to Sean Carroll’s answer to a listener question on his Mindscape podcast.  He does an “Ask Me Anything” podcast every month; it’s usually more than 3 hours long and is a real treasure trove of thoughts and insights about many things, since he’s a smart guy and a professional physicist and philosopher.  I was somewhat disappointed and therefore annoyed by his mentioning of Sam Harris and free will, because he somewhat misrepresented the arguments Sam has made.  I also thought he didn’t quite give adequate serious thought to the existential threat posed by AGI, though he certainly recognizes many potential drawbacks.

Anyway, I just recorded aloud my thoughts in response.  They may or may not be coherent to anyone else, let alone be very interesting.  Nevertheless, I’ll include the recording below.  I think it’s about ten minutes long.

In the past, I’ve been known to turn these audio recordings into “videos” to be posted on YouTube, but I don’t know how many people, if any, ever watch any of them.  But if any of you, listening to these audio files, think I should make them into “videos” too, please let me know.

I did get at least one person replying to a comment I made on another site that they miss my YouTube channel.  That surprised me.  It still exists, of course, but I haven’t added to it in a long time.

Maybe I will.  But it’s so hard to summon the will to do very much.  Maybe my will can become stronger, I don’t know.  Much of my effort and energy in that area is spent just getting through the day while dealing with pain and being alone and anxiety/stress and depression, frankly.

Oh, well, enough moaning.  My apologies.  I’ll try to make tomorrow’s post better, assuming I do one.  I hope you all have an excellent day by your own standards.

*I am diagnosed as Level 2, which is supposed to mean “requiring moderate support”, rather than level 1, which says someone only needs minimal support or some such.  So I’m not even expected to be able to make it very well on my own.

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Drop and give me twenty! (The prime factors of twenty, I mean)

It’s another lapcom blog post today, for the second day in a row.  Huzzah!

That doesn’t really count as any kind of streak—though no doubt WordPress will send me an automatically-generated “You’re on a streak!” message, since that’s apparently something that encourages people to keep using the site regularly.

I guess it would be nice if I were going for some kind of personal record—if I were trying to write as many days in a row as possible, for instance—to be aware of how many I had done without having to keep track of it myself.  And, I guess, if you’re recording streaks, you have to start somewhere, and the smallest possible streak is two.  You don’t really want to count one as a streak, because then everything is a streak and it loses much of its meaning.

This is somewhat analogous to the reason that 1 is not considered a prime number, though you cannot deny (correctly, anyway) that it is divisible without reminder only by one and itself (which is also one).  But for mathematical purposes dealing with primes, this would be a rather useless add-on to the set.

It would also make deciding the number of prime factors of a number pointless, instead of being specific and fixed for each number.  As it is, without one counted as a prime, it is specific and fixed.  For instance, the prime factors of 36 are 2, 2, 3, 3.  But if 1 were considered a prime, you could have 1, 2, 2, 3, 3 or 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, with any arbitrary number of 1s, because every 1 would not change the final product of those primes.  You could have an endless string of ones if you wanted.  And so, the number of prime factors of any given number would be up for grabs, whereas right now it’s fixed.

I know, I know, it’s not terribly important in day to day life for you to think about such things.  Some people are disdainful of even learning about such things unless they have a direct impact on their lives in a clear and obvious and simpleminded way (emphasis on the “simpleminded” there).

There are people who make jokes about the fact that they learned the Pythagorean theorem and don’t use it, or that they know how to do square roots but don’t really need them, or learned the quadratic equation and haven’t used it since that class in high school (or college, maybe).

Such people perhaps think that the point of doing push-ups or bench presses or squats or lat pull-downs is to get really good at doing push-ups or bench presses or squats or lat pull-downs.  They may imagine that the reason to do toe touches is to get really good at touching your toes, and if you’re not going to try to do that, then don’t do toe-touches.  These people probably think that everyone who jogs regularly is doing it so they can get better and better at jogging.

I think you probably see my point, but I’ll make it explicitly.  The purpose for all that physical exercise is not to get good at doing calisthenics (or whatever), not for the vast majority of people.  It’s to be comes stronger, fitter, more flexible, to develop better endurance, so that you will have those capacities to bring to bear on any other task in life.  In many, many matters, being physically fit will make a person more effective.  Sometimes it can even save someone’s life.

Likewise for doing things like math.  Some people will go on to be mathematicians, of course, or to become physicists, who use mathematics regularly in their work.  But everyone can strengthen their brains (far more than they can strengthen their muscles, which have a hard ceiling on improvement).  They can improve their ability to think logically and systematically, to recognize patterns and to be able to manipulate them in their heads, by practicing and understanding mathematics.

Understanding percentages will make it immediately clear, for instance, that something cannot sensibly be reduced in price by 600%.  Understanding probabilities can help one recognize why one should not invest in the lottery (unless you’re the one running it, in which case, by all means—if it doesn’t trouble your conscience).  And one should not blindly trust the representations of, say, managers of mutual funds and the like.  Even though what they happen to tell you may be real data, omission can be just as misleading as straightforward lies.  You also need to know what they have left out.

If they tell you their fund increased in value ten days in a row, implying thereby that you should want to invest in it, you need to think about (for instance) just how many funds they have.  How many funds are they picking from and for how long?  If they have a thousand funds, assuming equal chances of gains or losses, you should expect on average for one of them to go up for ten days in a row in any ten day period.  But the next ten days, it would be a different, random one that goes up*.  Or, if you can pick any ten days out of a given year, you can probably find somewhere where there’s a ten-day streak, or nearly so, even if you only have a few funds.

I have not done the math to figure that last bit out specifically, but it directly relates to the probability that you will have a string of ten heads in a row somewhere if you flip a coin 365 times.  That goes back to basic probability.

It can serve you well to study some micro- and macroeconomics.  It can also do you good to study a bit of basic chemistry and biology; you wouldn’t even have to have any more advanced medical knowledge than high-school level to know that while injecting enough bleach will kill COVID, it will also kill you, and so will not be a much better therapy than setting yourself on fire or detonating yourself with TNT.

I made a meme about a similar idea that I sent to a friend who was all too easily persuaded by conspiracy theories about various “natural” substance being able to kill cancer but that “Big Pharma” didn’t want you to know about them.  Actual knowledge of how cancer works and how lab tests in vitro work would have protected him from such claims, but I took a slight shortcut to hammer the point home.  Here it is:

Anyway, that’s already a lot for today.  I tend to write faster with the lapcom, and so I tend to write more.  I hope it’s not too irritating.

I hope that about myself and the things I do quite often, but I’m afraid I still end up being irritating more often than not.  My apologies.  I also hope you have a good day.

*Again, all this assumes about a 50/50 chance of going up or down.  Considering how many regulatory and other factors are in place to encourage markets to go up, it’s probably skewed slightly toward gains**, and this will increase the chance of ten-day streaks of gains.

**As evidence, if one had invested in a simple index fund without any significant churning (I think that’s the term) over the last several decades, one would have made around about 10% a year.  That’s roughly twice the rate of inflation, so there is still a real, adjusted net gain.  Given compounding, if you invested $1 in, say, 1990 with that return, you would now have, let’s see…$30.91.  If you invested a million, you’d now have $30.9 million.  Higher rates of return than this will tend to involve higher risk.

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“Please could you stop the noise, I’m trying to get some rest…”

I’m writing this blog post on my mini lapcom today.  It’s the first time I’ve written one on the lapcom in over a month—since May 1st, in fact.  I’m not entirely sure why I decided to bring the lapcom with me when I left the office on Saturday, but bring it with me I did.  I think partly I just wanted to spare my thumbs, which are not as bad as they were, but are still quite sore a lot of the time when and after I write.

Also—and this is stupid—I wonder if people who see me writing my posts on my smartphone imagine that I’m just playing some game or scrolling through one of the social media all the while.  It certainly shouldn’t matter to me whether anyone thinks that, but I’m a somewhat mature-looking man (so to speak) and I don’t want to set a bad example.  I also don’t want to leave my lapcom feeling too lonely and neglected for too long.

I know, that’s very silly.  I have no reason to suspect that my lapcom experiences anything at all—it’s not that kind of computer and it’s not running any of that kind of programming (largely because no one knows how to write such a program).  But still, I often feel a weird, imaginary empathy for things that I know pretty well don’t have any qualia, as the philosophers of mind call it.

I even used to feel bad if I accidentally mistreated one of my stuffed animals when I was little, such as by sitting on it or something.  I guess that’s not really that unusual for a young child, is it?  Still, I have retained something of that all my life.

Don’t even get me started on actual other people’s feelings.  Those are cacophonic!  That’s part of why being around a lot of people is just a bit overwhelming.

Of course, real, physical noise also is irritating, especially something like background music when you’re trying to work.  That’s one thing that’s annoying at the office.  There is constant overhead music playing, just to keep people from overhearing each other on the phone and becoming distracted.  But to me it’s like listening to the sounds of the world beyond the gateway in Event Horizon, or the noises in that recovered record they deciphered.  Ugh.  I’ve sometimes thought of just playing construction noises for them so they can see what it feels like to me.

Oh, I also brought the lapcom in case I felt the urge to write some fiction.  But that’s a pipe dream, I suspect.  Also, I don’t see how I could manage the time to write fiction and still do my daily blog.  There are only so many spoons (as they say) that I can bring to bear on anything at any time, and the supply is largely used up just grinding through days in pain and whatnot, to say nothing of the sensory and social stresses that also accumulate.

Even so, I honestly feel quite sad being alone a lot of the time, though I do my best to distract myself.  I would like to have good friends, someone to hang out with and so on, but unfortunately, the sorts of people at work, while perfectly nice and tolerable people, are not really the kinds of people I think I could hang out with much.  I don’t think anyone in the office, including the boss, reads more than a book a year or so.  I think I would have a hard time being a close friend of someone who doesn’t really read, at least at this point in my life.

And that’s also something that I would definitely find a deal-breaker in any kind of “significant other” kind of relationship.  Obviously such a thing would be nice, but again, I don’t think I could be very close to someone who didn’t read a reasonably significant amount.

All this is moot, of course.  Most of these possibilities and wishes are irrelevant, because no one really wants to be friends with me, let alone any kind of romantic thingy.  I don’t blame them.  Why would they want to do or be such a thing?

Even when I’m at the office, I’m basically alone.  I mean, I have a few “work friends”, of course, some of whom are quite good work friends.  But we do not ever do anything together outside of work.  I probably wouldn’t be able to have fun doing such a thing, even if anyone wanted to do it; we tend to have office holiday dinner parties of sorts at restaurants around Christmas/New Years time, and those get me so stressed out that I have to start drinking as soon as I arrive.  It’s not good.

Anyway, that’s over 700 words already, and I’ve just been moaning the whole time.  I apologize.  But I do spend a good deal of my time hating the world, hating my life, and especially hating myself.  Of course, the “hating the world” part is really projection—I hate the world because I hate my life and myself.

It’s a low-flying, subacute kind of hate, though, nothing florid.  I don’t spend as much time deliberately damaging myself as I used to, unless you count all the OTC meds I take for pain.  But, of course, those aren’t intended as self harm; quite the opposite.  But I have no doubt they are doing their thing on my kidneys and stomach and liver and so on.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  The universe was not made for me, and it was certainly not made by me.  It never promised but one thing, so to speak.

All right, that’s enough of me bringing you guys down—and on a Monday morning of all things, when you probably want something to boost your spirits.  So here, if you have spirits that need boosting, wait till they’re haunting you and feeling miserable and come out with, “Don’t feel too bad.  If you need a boost, well…here, use this, it’s my stepladder.”  Then, put on a wistful expression and add, “I never knew my real ladder.  And my mother left us before I was even born.”

Ba-dump-bump.

That ought to make them glad to be dead.

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That blog is our last hope!

Told you, I did.  Reckless am I.  Now, matters are worse:  I’m writing a blog post on a Saturday, because I am going to the office to work today.  I didn’t truly promise, but I did say it was likely.

Speaking of speaking like Yoda (see the opening sentence) I did a little, very brief, voice recording yesterday, as a whimsically silly set of questions arose in my head‒there is nowhere else my questions can arise arise, after all‒regarding an aspect of the Star Wars universe, and I decided to record them.

I didn’t really check my mic placement before I started, so after my quick edit in the form of doing “noise reduction” in Audacity and renormalizing the inherent volume, my voice sounds somewhat weird.  It’s a bit tinny or echoey or something along those lines.  Heck, maybe that’s just what my voice sounds like in real life these days.

That’s pretty unlikely, though.  I’ve heard recordings of my voice, often made by me, since I was quite young (remember those personal cassette recorders in the 70s?).  Still, I couldn’t say with 100% certainty that it isn’t the case.  Indeed, one can never say anything empirical with 100% certainty.

There is after all always the possibility (in principle) of something like Descartes’s imagined malevolent demon, tormenting a mind with entirely illusory experiences.  Anyone who thinks they know some aspect of external reality to 100% certainty is poorly calibrated, doesn’t understand probability, or they’re exaggerating and/or not really thinking about what they’re saying.

Of course, there are many things about which we are so close to 100% implicit certainty that we are willing to risk our lives, usually without even considering that we are taking that risk.  We’re pretty sure of gravity in general, but we implicitly trust the floor beneath us, even in very high buildings.  We’re also pretty sure we won’t die in a car accident on our way to…well, wherever we’re going.  And very nearly 100% of the time, we are correct.

But, of course, every now and then, someone does get killed in a car accident, sometimes on a very short trip, perhaps to the corner store to buy a lottery ticket.  It’s more likely than actually winning that lottery.

They used to say that the vast majority of car accidents happen within five miles of the home.  But don’t worry, once I heard that little bit of trivia, I moved the hell away from that place!

Ha ha.  I have to laugh at my own stupid jokes, otherwise, a lot of the time, no one would laugh at them.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, if you think about it‒though you are not required to do so, your thoughts being your own‒I have no real direction when it comes to this post, and no spontaneously forming topic seems to be appearing, unlike a few times earlier this week.  So, I’m just meandering about in blog post phase space.

That’s okay, though.  It’s Saturday, and I’ve been working all week, and this is my 6th blog post of the week.  WordPress will no doubt send me some automated congratulations on this, my latest “streak”.  They keep doing that, and I know it’s intended to make people feel good about their posting, but it’s just obviously automated and so is annoying.

Also, it sometimes even engages some pathological demand avoidance, arousing a twisted sort of “I’m not doing this for you” feeling that makes one‒well, it makes me‒less enthusiastic about blogging.  The programmed feedback subroutine in WordPress is not my target audience, so getting positive feedback from it doesn’t make me feel that I have accomplished something worthwhile.

Don’t mistake me.  I like getting the specific information, or at least having it available, but it doesn’t have to be accompanied by a cartoon party popper and a “Congratulations!”, as if I’d achieved some kind of merit-based award.  Is this part of the lamentable trend of grade inflation and giving everyone trophies just for participating?

I think some of the mindless, automated, misdirected feedback is part of why I don’t use Brilliant dot org more often*.  They have this “experience point award” thing for when you do problems and exercises and finish sub-courses.  That in itself is okay, because it’s not really too intrusive, and maybe it would be good if you could eventually exchange them for…something, I don’t know.

But instead, they put you in these “leagues” and show you how you compare to other people using the app that day.  That can be kind of annoying, because I don’t go to educational sites to be competitive, except with myself.  I don’t even like multiplayer online games.  And, the trouble is, I get briefly caught up in the league score, because I am intellectually competitive, but that in turn gets distracting and negative (not much, but it’s there) and it discourages me.

I don’t know what I would recommend be done instead; I haven’t really thought about it, I was just expressing a feeling I have about such things.  Maybe other people enjoy these sorts of feedback a lot, in which case, hey, keep it up.  The strength of such enjoyment is almost certainly far greater than my own minor annoyance.

Okay, that’s enough for now.  Below, I am embedding my weird little recording.  I hope you have a good day and a good weekend.

Really, I do hope it, for whatever that’s worth.

*It’s not the only reason nor the most powerful one.  Mainly it’s mental inertia of some kind.

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“And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word…”

Hello again.  It’s Friday now, as usually happens immediately after Thursday (but also six days before Thursday, though not the same Thursday it follows).  It’s all very reassuring, this regular, cyclical procession of the days of the week…

…isn’t it?

Well, maybe it would be if they weren’t just arbitrary day names following an arbitrary convention of numbers of days in a week, which number was mainly based on the number of “unfixed” astronomical objects visible to the naked eye:  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon.  Some of our modern English day names still refer to those objects, namely Sunday, Monday, and Saturday.  The other four, somehow, got saddled with references to Norse mythology.

I guess the Vikings really did have a significant impact on the British isles, didn’t they?

Anyway…

As I said, it’s Friday, and it’s the end of the typical, traditional work week, though I am working tomorrow, so I expect I’ll probably be writing another post.

It is interesting to think of what we mean by “tradition” and “traditional”, because not all traditions are of the same order by any means.  For instance, the “traditional” five-day work week is not really all that old.

Previously, people worked more days and longer hours per week (unless they had no need to work), but various workers’ rights movements over time got various laws passed and then new “traditions” began, and to some degree, people’s quality of life was somewhat protected.  Also, in the US, benefits like health insurance were tied to long-term employment by union contracts and sometimes by legislation.

Then, of course, we rebelled against being told that we could not work longer hours without special, extra compensation.  Why, that made our businesses less able to grind ahead and innovate and compete in global markets of various kinds (or so it was said).  We wouldn’t want that!  So, first salaried people were sort of exempted from the rules, and then that spread in various ways, as businesses and related enterprises tried to compete for more money, more resources, more power*.

Except, of course, plenty of other people and companies and countries were competing as well, so there was never any singular advantage that lasted for long; instead, like trees that evolved to grow taller and taller to compete with other trees for sunlight (while the other trees were subject to the same pressures), they raised the minimum requirement merely to stay alive, to which they were all subject, making life harder for each and every one of them, even the “winners”.

Such are natural equilibria.  Just because they become stable and persistent and “successful” doesn’t mean they are not immiserating for every organism in their structure.  And, of course, it is possible for such equilibria, as for species and for cells, to evolve to extinction.

Evolution by natural selection does not plan ahead, and it is neither benevolent nor malevolent, but it is instead entirely and completely uncaring**.

A somewhat parallel process happens in economies at various scales.  It’s not a perfect analogue, for there exists the capacity to learn from others’ practices without having to reinvent everything oneself, and one doesn’t have to wait for new generations to enact even small adjustments.  But it is still fundamentally a mindless process overall.

And, most pertinently, the mutual competition involved leads to higher and higher minimum requirements for success.  You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, of course, but even more subtly horrifying is the spike-ridden, trap-door-bearing, caustic and red hot floor.

I don’t know, maybe those metaphors don’t quite work.  I’m making these expressions up as I go along, as happens with all my blog posts.

I just wanted to remind everyone that nothing in the way the world is set up‒or, well, at least very few things‒is a necessity in anything but a highly local sense.  “Best practices” are not something inherent in nature; our financial and banking systems are not in any way equivalent to fundamental physics.  It’s all ad hoc, spontaneously self-assembled, no more inherently fundamental or necessary than is any one particular pattern of frost on a window pane.

So, don’t be fooled by the tendency to follow traditions, at least not blindly.  The oldest traditions humans have are only a few thousand years old, which is tiny compared to how long humans have existed.  And most traditions are far more recent.

Maybe your family has or had a tradition of getting together to watch The Ten Commandments every year around Passover/Easter.  But that tradition clearly cannot go back to before the movie was made, nor‒even more restrictive‒before televisions were available to most households.  That’s barely a few generations.

So, traditions are only as important as they are good and useful, though those measures depend very much on who is measuring and what the perceived use and good is from that person’s point of view.  That’s okay.  We don’t have any objective, external measures to use for such things.  They were invented by us, and for the most part, are only pertinent to us.

The universe doesn’t give the slightest f*ck.

Maybe, someday, the distant descendants of humans will gain so much knowledge and power that the universe will “notice” them.  I’m not going to hold my breath.

*The actual events involved in all this were far more involved than may seem implied by my summary, but I’m not trying to capture historical minutiae.  Rather, I’m trying to illustrate, to sketch, the general shape of the things that happened.

**This is not to be confused with saying that successful organisms are uncaring.  Caring, mutual support and protection, cooperation, love, can all be very successful survival attributes.  But that cooperation, that familial support, that maternal caring, that mutual love, as the case may be, does not exist just because it’s nice, or because it’s moral, or because it’s necessary; it exists because, for those organisms in those times and circumstances, it is successful, i.e., it tends to increase the odds of reproduction of the genes that engender that set of attributes.

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Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry, as, to behold desert a blogger born

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I don’t know what to write today.  I’m really, really mentally fatigued.  I feel as if I’ve been working for forty days straight instead of just four.

I guess that’s at least slightly biblical, if you care about such things.  You know, raining forty days (and forty nights) or wandering in the desert for forty days while occasionally getting tempted by the devil and whatnot.

It’s all rather silly, of course, but it is memorable.  Anyway, I write stories about supernatural entities attacking college towns or trapping the spirit of a dead addict in a train station or about whole universes potentially colliding or teenagers becoming demi-vampires.  I can hardly complain if other people’s stories aren’t realistic.  Though, at least I don’t claim, let alone believe, that mine really happened.

Anyway, I haven’t written any new fiction in quite a while, and that is severely demoralizing.  I also haven’t played my guitar or even listened to any music this week.

I have listened to/am listening to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast, because the first one of every month is his “Ask Me Anything” podcast, which lasts over 3 hours and is almost always very interesting.  If you like physics with a bit of philosophy thrown in, you might enjoy it.

Of course, what I should be doing‒or, rather, what I want to want fervently to be doing‒is reading Professor Carroll’s General Relativity textbook, Spacetime and Geometry, as well as other similar sources.  Or I want to wish to go on Brilliant dot org and work through their mathematics and physics and CS courses as completely as I can.  Or I want to yearn to get to work on the Babbel app, learning some German or some Russian or some French‒it doesn’t seem to have any Asian languages (last time I checked), so I can’t use it to bone up on my Japanese, nor to try to learn Cantonese or Mandarin or what have you.

But my mind is so tired.  I don’t even do any singing, let alone playing, like I said.

I know why I’m so tired, or at least, I know a big part of it:  chronic pain.  For just about a quarter of a century‒nearly half of my life‒I have been in pain every day, all day, except for those brief moments when I have had enough medications on board to do their own damage to my mind and my body (depending on which of the many medications it is that I’ve taken).

I’m also always grumpy nowadays, which is really disappointing.  This probably goes back to when my chronic pain really became chronic and exacerbated my depression and everything, but it’s become more persistent over time, and now it seems to be my default state.

The people who know me now just think of me as a grumpy and ornery person by nature; it’s even a bit of a joke, since I know that I am grumpy* and at least retain the capacity to be self-deprecating and not to hold it against people.

But that’s not the way I used to be!  That’s not who I was before my chronic pain started.  I did have trouble with depression (and I was, apparently, always autistic), and that probably sometimes made me irritable, but not like now.  I think‒I recall‒that I was usually a fairly upbeat and enthusiastic person, reasonably friendly and kind whenever I could be.

Anyone reading who knew me in the past, feel free to disabuse me of that notion if it’s wrong.  In some weird way, it might be comforting to learn that I’ve always been just an asshole, I simply didn’t know it back then.

Oh, and teeth; I used to have great teeth.  I took good care of them, flossed all the time and everything.  I had dentists tell me that I was a very boring patient.  But various of the meds I’ve taken (and the mental states into which I’ve fallen, to say nothing of the state prisons into which I’ve fallen) since my chronic pain started have more than decimated my oral hygiene, despite regular, frequent brushing and flossing.

I am a shambles.  I’m a twisted wreck of what I used to be, with only just enough in common with that self to remind me of it.  Or so it seems to me.

I don’t think I’m going to last much longer.  I do not want to last much longer‒not like this.  Every day is a trial by endurance, like the stupid “touch the truck” thing, but as far as I can see, there’s no prize…not even a stupid truck.

It’s more like Space Invaders:  see how long you can keep shooting down all the things that are trying to destroy you, but as you succeed, the onslaught becomes more and more difficult, and it never lets up except for brief seconds when it’s about to send a new, harder wave at you.

And then, once you finally, inevitably fail, it’s just…game over.  It might as well not have happened.  Maybe you can put your initials up if you lasted unusually long (thereby scoring more points than others), but no one really cares, and your mark will be displaced very soon anyway.

It reminds me of the final words of my story Solitaire, which you can get as a stand-alone story or in Kindle format or hard cover in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Now that’s a story that’s not silly, but it is very dark and horrifying.  It’s also short, so if you’re interested, it won’t take much of your time.

Okay, well, that’s it for now.  Unless you’re lucky, I’ll write a post tomorrow and also on Saturday.

TTFN

*I sometimes say that I am an amalgam of the Seven Dwarves:  I’m occasionally happy, I am sometimes sneezy, I’m quite bashful in many situations, I’m frequently sleepy but rarely enough to stay asleep for long, I’m definitely often dopey, I’m usually grumpy…but I’m always Doc.

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Don’t rent a phase space in a detrimental State

First off, just to get it off my chest (and in case “they” are listening) I want to say that I hate Google’s latest iteration of the symbol for Google Drive.  Before, it looked like a 2-D representation of a three way analog of a sort of Mobius strip.  Now it looks like a poor attempt to draw that previous symbol by a somewhat challenged child who doesn’t understand proportions, let alone how to produce a facsimile of a 3-D shape on a 2-D surface.

No shade on such a child for not immediately and intuitively being able to apply techniques that took centuries for adult artists to discover.  But I do willingly throw shade at the adult graphic designers‒professional artists who have the shoulders of all those previous artists on which to stand‒who produced this new version of the symbol.  It certainly doesn’t look professional.

It seems that almost every time Google updates things for apparently aesthetic reasons, it makes them a bit less good than they were before.  This brings me back, as so many things do, to a point I often make, which could really be considered a theorem when you get down to it:  while all improvement is change, most change is not improvement.

Just look at any phase space representing possible states of reality that are good or bad or neutral from your point of view, and put the “origin” at where you are now.  If you pick any random direction to move in this phase space‒perhaps flipping a coin for each axis (or dimension) and either increasing or decreasing your coordinate in that axis by one unit vector based on the outcome of the coin flip‒and do this for all axes, and repeat if necessary, the odds of you getting anywhere you actually want to go are less than 50%*.  At least, this is so by any pre-chosen measure(s) of goodness that does not deliberately and flagrantly include most of the phase space.

So, this is my exhortation to Google and all other such similar companies, or companies that may face similar perceived pressures:  don’t just change things for the sake of “being a company that doesn’t appear to accept things as being good enough as they are”, especially if your desperate changes are just cosmetic crap.  Focus your energy on things that are “objectively” in need of improvement‒processing speed, ease of use, environmental impacts and other externalities, reliability of backups, security, that kind of hardnosed, practical stuff.

The merely cosmetic crap can be relegated to, I don’t know…the Met Gala or something along those lines, where people make new-looking stuff all over the place for the (apparent) sake of just trying to do something that looks different than anything anyone else is doing.  And, of course, almost everything one sees at such places veers between hilariously awful and just hideously awful.  That’s my judgment, anyway; it’s the only judgment I have available to use.

Okay, so that’s that off my chest.

Except, of course, that it isn’t really “off my chest”.  Unfortunately, human mental states don’t behave like fluids that build up in pressure and volume and then ease when expressed, as if the pressure has been reduced by allowing one to “vent”** it.  It was an old hypothesis (or set of hypotheses) that this was the way mental states work.  It was not a stupid notion at the time, not at all, but it turns out to have been wrong empirically.

Emotions, drives, things like that, are not some kind of metaphorical fluid, but are mental states, somewhat reminiscent of the states of a computer’s RAM (but not exactly like that).  Acting on such states, given the nature of reinforcement that happens in neural pathways, in individual neurons, and in modules of neurons, is if anything likely to reinforce the state on which you are acting.  So, if you feel angry, then venting your anger, acting on it even in a limited way, will not be likely to produce any form of “catharsis”, but will instead make you more likely to get into that state again in the future.

Neural pathways behave somewhat analogously to trails (paths) through a forest or similar place:  the more such paths are used, the clearer, more well-defined, and easier to use they become.

Think about it.  If catharsis were a real thing, a real, causal process, then every time you say or otherwise express the fact that you love someone, you would feel that love less, you would feel it has been released.  But that is not the way things tend to happen (thank goodness).

In fact, expressing emotions you do not feel can make you start to feel them over time.  This is how certain forms of brainwashing and indoctrination work (and it’s probably part of why professional actors so often seem to have such turbulent emotional lives).  Religions have relied upon this fact, sometimes rather openly, for millennia:  say the prayer, enact the ritual, profess the belief, even if you don’t really believe it, and over time, you may actually start to believe.

All right, well, that’s enough from me for today.  I don’t feel very well, either physically or mentally, but I’ll try not to express those facts too much, because I don’t want to reinforce them.  On the other hand, I’m not simply  going to try to change something without having a good reason for the change.  Goodness knows I’ve tried numerous things in many ways, and they have not taken me to regions of my personal phase space that I consider worth inhabiting.

Hopefully you are doing better.

*Unless you do a post-hoc redefining of “good” to include wherever you happen to end up.  But if you do that, then any and every change could be considered good‒even a change that wipes out you and all that for which you care.  Which, honestly, you will kind of deserve, if that word means anything, because you are being willfully irrational and intellectually dishonest.

**Thus the use of that very expression, “to vent”, regarding emotions‒because people wrongly think that things work that way.

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Your dates are numbered

Okay.  Well.  It’s Tuesday now, and it is the second day of June in 2026.  That’s a borderline almost mildly fun date to write out:  6-2-2026.  It has sixes and twos, mainly (though there is a zero in there, which I’m not sure my mind will let me discount despite its lack of any magnitude), and it is almost palindromically arranged when in the US format of date writing.  There are even three twos, which add up to six, and that might be cool…except for the fact that there are two sixes, so if we’re thinking that way, we would need six twos.  That would also be a more pleasing number of twos, given everything.  Unfortunately, I don’t know if there will ever be such a date.

Let’s see…2-22-2226 has six twos but only one 6, whereas 2-22-2266 has two sixes but only five twos.  I guess 2-22-22,266 will be good, but that is quite a long way in the future.  I doubt very much that I will be alive 20,000 plus years from now.  I’m not sure of 20,000 minutes!  Actually, again, let’s see…there are 24 x 60 minutes in a day, so that is 1440 minutes in a day, and so 20,000 minutes would be only around two weeks.  Okay, so I will probably still be alive in 20,000 minutes.

Let’s see (a third time)…20,000 hours would be about 833 days, so a bit over two years.  That’s quite a bit more doubtful than two weeks, but still not a crazy possibility.

As for 20,000 days, well that’s getting quite unlikely.  That’s just under 55 years, which would make me almost twice my current age.  Again, that’s quite unlikely, and I’m rather glad that it is.

20,000 weeks is not really worth considering.  If I were to live for centuries, it would only be because of astonishing medical advances* that presumably would have cured or at least ameliorated my many dysfunctions, so I would probably feel much happier than I do now or have felt for many, many years.

Speaking of many, many years, 20,000 months would obviously be well over a thousand years (20 being well over 12, as I’m sure is obvious).  If we’re going to consider that, then we have to invoke the same kinds of pseudo-miracles as we did for 20,000 weeks, we just need around four and a half times more of them, so to speak.

How the hell did I get onto this subject, or topic, or whatever it is?  Oh, right, I was noting the numerals in today’s date and how they came teasingly close to being fun, but don’t quite make it.

For those of you who might be puzzled by my use of the word “fun” when dealing with simply pointless patterns or lack thereof in things like dates, well…I like numbers.  It’s similar to the way I also like words.  I like words when they’re used to convey interesting information, and when they’re used to tell interesting stories, and when they’re combined and juxtaposed in beautiful and/or amusing ways to make poetry‒and I also sometimes like nonsensical wordplay and puns.

Also, of course, while “fun” may or may not have some manner of absolute scale, like temperature, nevertheless, as with temperature, our experience of fun is a relative one.  Tepid water can feel quite cool when you’re coming out of a sauna, but would feel nicely warm if you had just come inside to escape a bitter winter storm.

Fun can be similar.  So, if you’re used to having a goodly amount of fun in your life, then noting patterns and relations within ordinary “numbers”** can seem rather dull, even if you’re fond of numbers.

But if your life is as pathetic and irritating, on a day to day basis, as mine is, why then even simple, stupid, pointless things can seem somewhat positive.  The value of the function at that point is still well below the x-axis, but it’s not as far below, for that brief moment in which one notes an amusing numerical coincidence***.

That’s all theoretical today, though, because as I noted, today’s date doesn’t quite measure up.  It’s somewhat disappointing, but at least I was able to write an idiotic little blog post about it.

*I can, of course, think of various horror story scenarios in which someone could keep living for centuries and yet continue to deteriorate, but not be able to die.  These are probably quite a bit less likely even than the “medical advances” scenario.

**Why did I use the “scare quotes” there?  Because dates, even when expressed numerically, are not really numbers.  They are more of a code or a location marker, just a kind that uses numerals as its digits because they are memorable and at least correlate with some physical externalia.  “Phone numbers” are even less to be thought of as true numbers.  Their digits don’t even signify anything logically or arguably numerical.  “Phone address” would be a more accurate term.

***Yes, yes, I know, the specific placement of the x and y (and z, etc.) axes is arbitrary, so one can shift one’s target axis down‒lowering one’s expectations, perhaps‒and not need to change the shape of the function.  That may be true, but one does change the integral and the absolute value of the function, so it is not the same, unless one throws in a constant that exactly corrects for the shift in the axis.  In which case, what the hell are you doing wasting our time with this crap?