by

Winding down at the end of the week

It’s Friday as I write this (and as I intend to publish it), and I do not expect to work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis*.  There had been some sort of slight possibility of doing something with my youngest one of these weekends, but I’m not sure if that is ever going to pan out.  There certainly hasn’t been any finalization of anything, nor really any tentativization (which is probably not a legitimate word).  I guess I’ll find out.

I don’t like to try to push things from my end, because I don’t want to elicit any sense of obligation or guilt in my child.  While I definitely want to spend time with them (with both of them, ideally, but that’s another matter), it would be horrifying to discover that such time was spent only because of a sense of remorse and duty, not because they wanted to spend time with me.

Then again, I have a hard time imagining that anyone ever wants to spend time with me, at least not anymore.  In the past, I would say that I used to be at least some degree of “fun” as a person with whom to hang out.  But I don’t know that I am capable of being that way anymore‒actually, based on many people who have spent time with me perforce, I think it’s pretty clear that I am not pleasant company.  Maybe I never really was.  Maybe most people just put up with me in the past.

Given such facts, on my current weekends off, such as this coming weekend, I basically just spend time by myself.  That’s good for getting rest from the effort of interpersonal relations, and it also lets me rest my back some, but I do feel quite isolated and gloomy and, yes, lonely.

Waah.  Poor baby.

I’m running out of interesting YouTube videos to watch, despite there being many billions of such videos available.  I do enjoy going for walks when I’m able, usually, and they are good for me overall.  Except, right now, at this time of year, the heat index gets well above 100 Fahrenheit here starting quite early in the morning, meaning my body’s cooling mechanisms cannot adequately function to maintain a healthy temperature, so I’m in danger of heat stroke if I push much at all.

It turns taking a long walk into a possibly suicidal gesture (even potentially a deliberate one).  That’s a bit fascinating, because they can’t Baker Act you for taking a walk, at least not readily.  But overheating and dehydration can put one at risk for kidney stones, and that is something well worth avoiding, believe me.  Well, you don’t have to believe me, but if you end up having kidney stones yourself, I’d be willing to bet that you would agree.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m trying to discuss.  My mental health has not been good lately, even for me.   By which I mean it isn’t just not good on average, which is true, but that it’s worse than my typical, average, poor state.  I don’t know if that’s obvious to people around me‒as far as I can tell, no one can ever see when I feel truly horrible‒but I can certainly tell, even if no one else can.

Oh!  This brings up a personal pet peeve of mine (I guess all “pet peeves” are personal, but you probably get what I mean):  I despise the recent tendency to use the term “mental health” as a euphemism for mental illness, as in “that person suffered from mental health”.

I don’t understand what people think they are accomplishing‒or avoiding‒by attempting such linguistic gymnastics, but it’s maddeningly absurd and idiotic.  “Health” and “illness” are antonyms, dammit.  One doesn’t suffer from mental health (though I have seen that exact expression used unironically), one suffers due to a relative lack thereof.  It’s as if you said someone went bankrupt from a surfeit of goods and money.

I don’t know why people feel that avoiding words that describe unpleasant things will make those things somehow less difficult, but it doesn’t work, as far as I can see.  It just obfuscates the issues and makes it more difficult to improve things.  You can’t get your mechanic to look at the part of your car that’s having trouble just by saying that your car is really driving lately.  That may not be the best absurd parallel, but that’s okay; the thing itself is so stupid and absurd and insane that it stands alone.

You don’t say of someone who is dying of metastatic cancer that they are suffering from physical health.  They are suffering from a terrible illness.

Likewise, depression (and its various related issues), chronic or otherwise, is a mental illness, and it has mortality rates comparable to many cancers, and worse than some.  There is also much more stigma associated with it than with such ailments as cancer, which doesn’t help.  I’m not sure what can be done about all that.

One thing I can say is that my mental health is poor.  That’s nothing new overall, obviously, but it gets just more and more tedious all the time, even as it continues to have its usual effects.  It becomes harder and harder to see any point in trying to fight it.  What would I gain?  What do I have to which to look forward in my life?

Nothing.  I anticipate no new revelations or relationships or creations or friendships or companionship (redundant list entries, I know).  I anticipate no new accomplishments.  I expect only gradual and rather pathetic decay and dissolution, unless I’m lucky enough to have something take me out more precipitously, or to arrange some such thing for myself.

Well, whatever.  Sorry.  I hope you have a good weekend.

*Barring the unforeseen.

by

‘Tis all men’s office to speak patience to those that blog under the load of sorrow

Hello and good morning.

I’m back on the smartphone again today, so hopefully I can at least avoid going on and on and on like I did yesterday.  That ought to be easy enough, but apparently, it is not.  I don’t know why I get so “talkative” here all the time, but it doesn’t seem to be because I have anything important to say.

As I’ve noted before, typing on a QWERTY keyboard feels almost more natural than speaking to me (and I do it far more often now) but that’s definitely not true for using the smartphone, and it probably never will be.

For one thing, I haven’t stopped having arthralgia/tendinopathy in and around the bases of my thumbs related to such use.  It’s not severe discomfort, certainly not compared to my chronic pain, but it is there and it is annoying.  It seems, however, to interfere with playing guitar more than with using my smartphone (or anyone else’s, I would guess).

Yesterday, I wasn’t sure I wanted to play any, so I figured I’d give fate a hand in things.  I carry four dollar coins with me every day‒two Susan B. Anthonys and two Sacagaweas‒and I use them to help make decisions when I feel no particular pull in a given direction.  I also use them to clarify my own inclinations:  if I get a result and dislike it, I know that I really want to do the alternate thing.  I’m told that my son has adopted this sort of habit as well.

Anyway, I flipped all four coins and got a unanimous set of heads*, so I played guitar and sang some.  I did it somewhat reluctantly, but when all four ladies agree, I find it hard to ignore them.

It wasn’t anything fancy, I just mainly went through a series of songs I know by heart, plus I think I played through Desperado using the pdf I have of a printout of the chords.  There were a lot of twinges in both thumbs/wrists while I was playing, though.  Still, I’ve come to realize that I have a decent repertoire of songs that I can do off the cuff, so if I needed to do some busking, I could probably do it.

I also recently realized that the Radiohead song(s) Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2) ends with the same chord on which their song Fake Plastic Trees begins.  That was too funny a coincidence (given the subject matter/titles of the songs, especially), so I’ve taken to playing them as one combined song, a sort of mini-medley.

Several days ago, I even tried taking a video of me playing and singing (not those songs), using the desktop’s camera, and I discovered something:  if I ever do want to record myself doing music again, then I need a new microphone, probably more than one.  The sound quality was terrible, full of clipping and distortion and such.  Also, I need a new face, but that’s a separate matter.

I have also been working on learning Bach’s Two Part Invention number 13 for the guitar (mainly the right hand part so far‒the left hand had to be restranscribed and brought up an octave and I don’t enjoy it quite as much).  This has long been one of my favorite piano pieces to play, though I am way too rusty to play it now on a keyboard.  I used to like it so much that, whenever I was antsy, I would find a surface with an edge and “play” that Bach piece.  I guess I have always been a “stimmer”.

Anyway, all this crap isn’t really here or there, it’s just silly trivia that I’m spouting in lieu of having anything substantive to say.  I’m sorry if it’s boring or all over the place.  My mind has not been doing well lately, in case you haven’t noticed (or just haven’t read my blog lately).

I was just thinking recently about whether it would be workable for me to start going back to writing fiction maybe say two or three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday for instance) and blogging only on the other days.  I don’t know if that would lose me readers on the blog or perhaps bring more people in, but it’s not as though I ever have more than a few dozen people coming to the blog in the first place.

Then again, no one’s exactly champing at the bit to read any of my fiction, either.  This is mainly just a self-indulgent, foolish exercise, a lab sample of concentrated futility.  Come to think of it, that could actually be said about pretty much my entire life since roughly 2013 (at the latest).  Trying to find any meaningfulness in my life since then is like wandering through the ruins of an ancient Egyptian city, looking for a 7-11.

Anyway, that’s enough of my stupidity for now.  Not that my stupidity will stop, but at least I won’t spew any more of it on you for the moment.  I hope you have a day that improves after you finish reading this; it’s unlikely to be much worse, right?

TTFN

*This is not terribly improbable; it will happen in one out of 2 to the 4th, or 1 in 16, runs of four coin flips.

by

“With the lights out, it’s less dangerous”

Well, I’m writing today on the lapcom, not for any particular specific reason, but just because, as of yesterday afternoon when I was preparing to leave the office, the various strengths (or magnitudes) and directions of the vectors in my brain came together and produced enough impetus for me to pack and then carry the lapcom with me.  After that, there’s much less of an energy barrier in the way of actually writing using the lapcom in the morning.  If I have it with me, I prefer to write using the lapcom rather than the smartphone.

As for the subject/topic of this blog post, well…I don’t know.  I have no idea what to write or what to say, other than to say whatever comes out of my (figurative) mouth here.  I don’t know what I’m going to write ahead of the actual writing any more than you know what my next word will be before you read it.

I guess that’s how conversation happens in real life as well.  People (at least, neurotypical people) don’t tend to script their conversations.  They just start talking, and the process of talking is identical with (or at least part of) the process of forming the ideas in the first place.

You don’t think about that to say before you think and say it, nor do your think about what to think about and say before you think about thinking about and saying things.  One cannot in any literal sense fully plan ahead what one says or thinks, because it would imply an infinite regress.

No, most of the time, expressing one’s thoughts is the first circumstance in which one formulates those thoughts (though of course it might well not be the first time one has had the same or similar ones).  Ideas, and even memories, do not exist fully formed within the brain, as if on some SSD drive; they must be reformed every time they are brought up.

This is part of why memory in humans is so malleable.  All memories bring out not just information from the past, but also color it with whatever information is leading to the memory being recalled at a particular moment.  This feeds back on and can alter the memory over time.

The things that happen with neural nets/deep learning systems/LLMs is teaching us at least some things about how thoughts and minds work in non-linear ways, though it’s important not to draw too many or too literal parallels to actual brains.  For one thing, brains are vastly more efficient than any kind of software/hardware we have.

Though your brain is certainly the most energy-hungry portion of your body, using about 20% of all the calories you burn, this still is only about 20 watts or so.  That’s less than your typical lapcom uses, and far, far less than any LLM or similar system uses.

The brain is also more complex on many levels.  Synapses are not simple binary switches, like transistors; they are more or less continuously variable in the amount of neurotransmitter they release into a synapse, and the number of receptors in the receiving synapse, and the degree to which activation (or inhibition) of those receptors affects the functions of the postsynaptic neuron and how that interacts with other inputs and the basic metabolism and chemistry of the next level of nerve cells.

Those functions are also affected by hormones of various kinds, from peptides to steroid hormones to things like histamine and glutamate that are neurotransmitters and hormones and (some of them) even amino acids.

Then, of course, there are the inputs from the many and various “glial” cells, which are not neurons, but which “support” neurons in the brain, and which (among other things) create the myelin sheaths that allow nerve transmission to happen much more quickly in “white matter”, and so on.  These things can alter and tweak the “weights” in any particular neuron “node” in ways that are more complicated than the nodes and weights in neural nets.

And of course, the scale is daunting.  You have about a hundred billion neurons in your brain (give or take), and each one has connections with 1,000 to 10,000 other neurons, making the total number of synaptic connections in the brain on the order of a hundred trillion to a quadrillion.

Just imagine if every star in the Milky Way galaxy had some kind of hyperspace links to 1,000 to 10,000 other stars.  That would be a complex galactic network.  The brain is this scale of network.  And the synapses, again, are not binary switches like transistors, but are more or less continuously variable within a given range.  Likewise, the impulses traveling down an axon, though binary in a sense (each nerve impulse either happens or does not), actually vary continuously, because it’s the rate of impulses arriving that affects the release of neurotransmitters.  But it’s not the only thing that affects it.

Anyway, this is all interesting stuff, I guess.  Learning about neural nets is fascinating, and is yet another use of linear algebra, matrices and the like (which are also good for General Relativity).  And learning about how gradient descent works in machine learning and so on is interesting and thought-provoking (an amusing coincidence, not an irony).

I’m reading some things about this and trying to pick up on it, just for general understanding.  I doubt that I’ll ever do anything with any of it other than maybe “talk” about it here (which is nearly the only place I talk about much of anything).  But at least it’s interesting.

It’s futile, of course.  But nearly everything I do or have done is or has been futile.  And that’s not just on a cosmic scale, but on a human, day-to-day, interpersonal scale.  Almost all my efforts are either wasted or fully counter-productive.  This is the outcome of something like me trying to do and be good as much as he can; it just tends to be pointless or worse.

None of it matters, though.

Anyway, as often happens with the lapcom, I’ve written too much of nothing today, and that’s irritating to me.  I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to my readers.  At least, the rest of your day will probably be less annoying by comparison with this post, right?

Right?

I guess maybe it doesn’t really work that way.  It’s all just irritating, isn’t it?  It’s irritating that I don’t catch a terminal illness, some kind of deadly but not-too-quick infection or cancer or something.  It would be good to be able to have people know that I was dying, so that if anyone out there is mad enough to want to see me or greet me or say goodbye to me before I die, they could.  I think I would appreciate that.

Odds are, though, I’ll just disappear and be gone someday, perhaps very soon, and almost no one in the world will notice.  Those who do notice will only do so vaguely, because there is practically no one to whom my life is integral or even very strongly connected.  I’m just background static for the most part.  When I go, it will just be good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.  There’s really no sensibly available better alternative of which I am able to avail myself.

As Kurt Cobain sang, “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”  He had some good ideas, did Cobain-sensei, and he carried them out.

by

What do you call an infinite number of finite and separate beings? Maybe just “reality”.

I don’t really have much to say today.  Not that such a thing usually prevents me from running off at the keyboard (or the smartphone in this case) for stupid lengths on any given day.  But I think it may do so today, because my energy is flagging, and it’s only just very early in the morning.

I suppose today’s date is mildly entertaining:  it’s 7-7-2026, and that is the same in either the USian or the European way of ordering the day and the month.  But that’s pretty unremarkable.  Any day of a month in which the ordinal* number for the day is the same as the ordinal number for the month will produce this.  There are, thus, 12 such days every year, and they are the same days every year.  So, they are not very exciting.

I guess it would have been better back in 2007 (07-07-07), or even better, in 1977 (7-7-77).  But then it would only be fun if you drop the two digits for the century (i.e., 20… or 19…).  It’s not great, is it?

I don’t know.  What should I talk about, here with my shouting into the void and gazing into the abyss and jumping into the conclusion?

That latter expression almost sounds like a euphemism for dying, doesn’t it?  Is it like skipping to the end of a mystery novel?  Probably not, because I’m very close to being certain that, unlike the end of a mystery novel, nothing will be revealed when one dies.

By that, I don’t mean that the truth will be revealed and it will be that there is nothing.  It’s more subtle than that.  I mean nothing of any kind will be revealed to you, because that to which the revelation might occur is what will cease entirely‒in a way, that happens every moment, but not in quite the same way as it will (I suspect) at the time of death.

Of course, I could be wrong about this, in principle.  But I am not “agnostic” in the usual sense of simply not having any inkling one way or another about a question.  I think there are good, strong reasons‒based on all we know of physics and biology and mathematics, and on how many different mythologies there are about “life after death” and how much they stink of desperate human fear and wish-fulfillment, how anthropocentric they are, when clearly the universe is not anthropocentric‒to think that death is simply the dissolution of the four-dimensional pattern that was a person, a sort of re-annihilation of “virtual particles” back to the vacuum state of the quantum field.

In a spatially infinite universe (or in some other version of a multiverse) it seems to be that there will exist other versions of you, both identical ones and nearly-identical ones, as well as quite different ones, including ones that inexplicably have all the memories of being other versions of you.  But they will not literally have been you, and there will be a much higher proportion of “you” that will have random memories of every possible kind of nonsense.

Of course, none of these versions of you can violate the laws of physics**.

And they aren’t really you, are they?  If they were, you might be experiencing everything any version of you is experiencing now, and you are not.  There are strong impediments to such a simultaneous experience of infinite lives, not the least of which is the relativistic impossibility of information traveling at infinite speed, as well as the incoherence of the concept of “simultaneity” for objects with spatial separation (if this is not obvious, I encourage you to look into special relativity).

So, yeah.  You are the state of your being right now, and that state is always changing (not randomly, though a lot of it does seem to be stochastic).  There is not a much better description of “you” for accuracy, though there can be more precise and thorough descriptions of the details.

There could be a billion or a googol or Tree-3 number of “identical” copies of you, but each one would be just a separate “you”, no more a literal part of your being than would be your former womb-mate if you were one of a pair of identical twins.

Reality can be disappointing, though that’s really only if you think you have any right to expect it to be otherwise than it is.  And you don’t have any such right.

Have a good day if you can.

*I think it’s ordinal, not cardinal, in this case, but I’m not too sure.  I’ll look it up.

**I truly despise expressions, usually found in clickbait headlines, such as “this or that finding breaks physics” or “this shouldn’t happen, according to physics”.  No.  Nothing breaks physics.  Nothing that happens “should not” happen according to physics, because physics is what describes what is out there in reality.  If something seems to defy physics, that just shows that we don’t understand physics well enough.  Such things are not generally frightening or worrisome to physicists (and other scientists); these things get them motivated, for they reveal places where we can learn new things about the universe.  Scientists, ceteris paribus, love finding things no one understands.  Science knows it doesn’t know everything***, and what’s more, science kind of loves that it doesn’t know everything.  That’s part of the excitement, the challenge, the possibility of growth.

***If it thought it knew everything, it would cease.

by

Imagine whatever headline you want; I don’t care

Welcome to the Monday of the first full week of July in 2026 CE (or AD if you must).  I hope that those of you in the USA had a nice Independence Day weekend.  There are no more significant holidays (that I recall) until at least September, now.

I didn’t do anything to celebrate the holiday‒unless you count trying to burn some kudzu‒because holiday celebrations generally involve other people, family and friends and such like, and I did not have any such group with whom to celebrate.

It’s probably just as well for such groups that I am not a part of them; I’m a serious downer and an unpleasant person* to be around for very long.  This used not to be the case; in my default or older settings, I’m naturally more hyper and sometimes rather silly (that too can be irritating, I fear).  Since my chronic pain began, however, I have become a much grumpier, angrier, more irritable person.  Things that I would have laughed off in the past, or about which I would have been more “philosophical”, easily get my ire up, even tiny little, minor, innocent things.

Using the seven dwarfs as personal descriptions, I spend most of my time these days Grumpy, rarely if ever Happy, frequently Dopey, quite Bashful almost always, from time to time Sneezy, not Sleepy nearly as often as I would prefer.  But I’m always Doc.  Take that for what it’s worth, which is probably nothing.

Anyway, yeah, I didn’t do anything pleasant on Saturday, nor much on Sunday, though at least I did talk on the phone to my sister.

I toyed with the notion of “celebrating” the 4th by making my way to the front of the Palm Beach County courthouse and making a fireworks display in the style of Thích Quảng Đức.  However, it was not only a Saturday, but it was a federal holiday; no one would have been there.  Also, I don’t know that I would have the courage to go through with it.

I need to do something though.  I cannot keep doing what I’m doing.  But I don’t see many options which I’m capable of embracing, given my dearth of personal energy and motivation.

I’m sorry I’m not being more positive or interesting, or at least quirky and strange in a less negative way, today.  Actually, I don’t really know if I’m ever interesting.  But, anyway, I just don’t have the energy right now to pretend not to be depressed, like I often do.  Maybe I’ve been pretending all my life that way**.  They do talk a lot about “masking” in neurodivergent people, and it has struck me as a very accurate and apposite notion since the first time I encountered it.

But, of course, there’s not necessarily any identity underneath such masks.  There’s certainly nothing very consistent, since “who we are” at any given moment or stage of our lives is but a three-dimensional slice of what is actually a four-dimensional being.

In case that sounds weird, I just mean that who we are at any given moment is true for just a point in time, a snapshot of a being that has not only spatial extent but also has a beginning and an end in time and which changes with every moment of that time, taking in and losing particles, maintaining that roughly constant but always altering configuration from frame to frame of of the movie that is a person’s life.

So, a question like “Who am I, really?” is perhaps best answered by saying, “I am the being who is asking that question.”  There is probably no deeper answer, at least not any much more specific one.  There is no “character description” in some Platonic realm that lays out who we really are, or if there is, I’ve encountered not the slightest intimation of it, and I would be very surprised if it existed.

Anyway, enough gobbledegook.  I’m just tired already, and it’s only the very beginning of Monday morning.  I’m so very tired.  I really ought to go before I spoil the party, to paraphrase a good Beatles song (see below).  I fear that I will just be a black cloud for everyone around me today, and probably in general.

I can’t even seem to find a book I can stick with reading right now; I shuffled through several different genres, let alone books, in my Kindle library a few dozen times in recent days, weeks, whatever, trying to find something interesting.  But after a brief time reading each thing I lose momentum and interest.  Even The Noonday Demon, a well-written book about depression, loses me after a bit.  Even Physics isn’t interesting to me, and that’s a bad sign.  Ditto for music, or movies (or shows) or what have you.

Everything is just a drizzly, insipid gray‒metaphorically, and sometimes also literally.  And I sometimes don’t have the energy to keep pretending that I can see anything else.

Like Ed Deepneau said in Stephen King’s Insomnia, “…sometimes the world is full of colors…but now all the colors are turning black.”

Enough, this has gone on too long already.  I apologize.  I hope you have a good day and a good week and a good remainder of your lives.

*More than one person has told me this, and they did not compare notes.

**Probably not.  It would be very bizarre indeed to be born depressed, though the tendency thereto can certainly be congenital, much like both forms of ASD that I have/had.

by

“…deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Well, first of all, happy Independence Eve to all my fellow USians out there.  I’m greeting you today because I will not be writing a blog post tomorrow, since I will not be working tomorrow, barring the unforeseen (exclusis improvisis one might say in Latin).

I suppose I could pre-write a post for tomorrow and schedule it to be published in the morning, but that would require a fair bit of extra work, and I barely have the energy to survive to the end of any given day as it is.

As for tomorrow’s holiday, I think it is important for US citizens (“Americans”) to remember what tomorrow represents: the signing (and publication) of the Declaration of Independence, asserting the end of British rule in the colonies and the formation of a new, independent nation.

In this present time, when the extremes of both ends of the political spectrum show all too clear leanings toward authoritarianism, it’s worth rereading the Declaration of Independence in full, including the list of grievances.  I will link to it as part of this post.  It’s not very long, really‒the main text contains only 1320 words, barely longer than yesterday’s blog post‒and it’s worth rereading at least once a year (as is the Constitution).

It’s not that there’s anything astonishingly ingenious about those documents, let alone “divine” in character, though they are well thought out and nicely expressed.  It’s the notions they convey that matter, among which (implicitly) is:  human “authority” is almost always a misnomer.

Stephen King has authority over the universes of his books, because he actually authored them.  Ditto for me regarding my universes.  But the real world is under no one’s authority, since as far as we can tell, it has no author, and no one understands it completely.

There is such a thing as expertise‒it varies quite a bit in its quality, but experts do exist and it tends to be worthwhile to listen to them within their areas of knowledge.  But experts are fallible, and those who would take part in “running” the various governments are extremely fallible, since it is an area of poorly developed science.

It’s worthwhile to remember and emphasize this fact, because naked house apes are prone to be swayed by primate dominance hierarchical urges, just as much as Vervet monkeys and chimpanzees and baboons are.  And since these proclivities are more or less instinctive, they don’t feel like mere thoughts.  They feel like perceptions.  They feel like direct experiences of the nature of reality.

They are experiences of some aspects of reality, of course, but they are frequently misleading ones.  It’s worthwhile remembering that politics, especially politics with authoritarian leanings*, tends to attract those who want to have power for its own sake, for their own sake‒not only those who really want to look out for the people and institutions of their particular nation‒though often they will pretend, even to themselves, that they are seeking some “greater good”.

But if there is such a greater good, and if the glaringly mediocre minds that claim such things can understand it, then that notion can be carefully communicated, and if it truly is good and great, then that should be clear and convincing to any honest and intelligent interlocutor.

Admittedly, there may be many biases that prevent every living hominid from accepting even the clearest bodies of evidence and argument; there are people who claim to believe the Earth is flat, after all, and that is not very bright.  But one should at least find a tendency toward confluence of judgment among those who live by the intellect, such as philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, physicists, engineers, etc.  When ideas are tested honestly and rigorously against reality, they tend to converge over time, because as far as anyone can tell, reality is at root unitary.

But those who seek political power are not generally drawn from fields that encourage and focus on rationalism, empiricism, and fallibilism.  And though I do not doubt that many people go into politics hoping to do actual good and to be of service, there are also very many who crave power over others, for whatever reasons, or even without reasons.  Such people do not tend to be our best and brightest, for as someone once wrote, “power lust is a weed that grows only in an untended mind”**.

This is why checks and balances and votes that include inputs from many (potentially all) people in a society, as well as frequent changes of office, are useful.  Weird shit, being unconstrained by reality, tends to be all over the place, ceteris paribus, compared to more grounded, realistic shit.  So, hopefully, in most cases, the overall mean or median or mode of good ideas is going to tend to be more reality based.

It’s not perfect, and we can certainly strive to improve it.  We can seek increased and better education, and encourage ourselves to seek to understand reality and to traffic in rigorous and self improving ideas to make it ever better.  But a crucial point is that there is no human authority over the world, and the sorts of people who would arrogate to themselves such power are not among the best and brightest.

As the old song says, “He can’t even run his own life, be damned if he’ll run mine.”

Anyway, Happy Independence Eve, again, and have a happy Independence Day tomorrow if you are in the US and celebrate it.  Don’t be put off by the lamentable state of current politics.  The ideas in the Declaration of Independence are still worth celebrating.

*e.g., the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

**Yes, I know who said it.  But though I do like to give credit for well-turned phrases, it’s often the case that naked house apes will either latch onto or dismiss out of hand ideas solely based upon who said them, not on the quality of the ideas.  This is not rational, but it is horribly typical.  I’ve written about this before, this problem of attribution.  So, since it’s the message that matters, not who said it, I will sometimes refrain from revealing a quotation’s source, with implicit apologies to such sources.

by

While the orchestra blogs fitfully the music of the spheres*

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (thus my standard “hello and good morning” salutation) and it is the 2nd day of July in 2026 AD/CE.

I don’t really expect that those reading this on the day are going to be unaware of the day and the date.  If they are unaware and yet are reading this online, then their unawareness must surely be willful or at least willing, for the day and date tend to be plastered all over most of our devices.  But in case someone reads this in the future‒even rather far into the future‒I figured I might give a bit of temporal context.

Admittedly, I don’t deal much with current affairs and politics and scandal and the like here, because I consider almost all such matters to be flashes in the pan, or stutters and sputters in the pan‒or even just flash powder that got drenched and then washed away in a dreary rain.

It’s almost all trivial, and almost all of it is so eye-rollingly repetitious, and much of the importance people attach to it is laughable.  The political concerns of a given modern human are no more important than the particular political concerns of a villager somewhere in the far-flung reaches of the Roman Empire…or the Phoenician empire, or the kingdom of Sumer or what have you.

All this local political turmoil, while not unimportant on a local level, is still vanishingly small and unnoticeably brief on any kind of even human historical scale, let alone something less anthropocentric.

Now, I want to be clear:  there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking part in local politics (local in space, local in time, etc.).  It makes sense to deal with one’s immediate concerns, as it does to try to secure one’s next meal.  That’s how you continue on to the following meal, after all.  As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “My favorite breath is whichever one gets me to the next one.”

But one should keep one’s next breath in perspective.  Your personal shortness of breath does not per se endanger the respiration of your office, your town, your region, your country, or the world.  It’s just you.

That’s okay.  It’s fair and reasonable for you to be concerned about things that affect your life directly.  But you should not expect others to be just as concerned about just the same things as those that concern you, nor should you consider it a moral failing if they are not.  If you think they ought to be concerned, then it’s incumbent upon you to use your reason‒not your emotions, they just won’t work‒to convince them.

Don’t behave like an adolescent who imagines that the world will end if they cannot see some particular show or play some particular game or attend some particular event.  Your emotions are salient and motivational only to you, at least directly, and they in and of themselves will influence only those who already care about your emotional state.

If you want to convince other, disinterested** people that something you find important should be important to them as well, merely weeping or wailing or shrieking at them is unlikely to persuade them (and will often do the opposite).  Your passion is persuasive mainly (or solely) to you.  You’re going to have to calm the eff down and explain things.

And you might fail to convince someone.  If so, the failure is on you.  Admittedly, it may not be solely on you; other people can be trapped in their own emotional cages just as you can be in yours.  You can only try.  And, if you want to be logically consistent, you should also listen to reasons other people might give for their own points of view.  You could be wrong, after all, hard though that may be to accept (especially about something about which you feel so strongly).

But there is no law of nature saying that people will definitely be persuaded even by the most rational and clear and complete arguments.  Sometimes you’re just banging your head against a brick wall.  It’s not a good state of things, but it’s just something that happens.

Of course, in the long run, nature itself will take care of those who are unreasonable and irrational‒and by “take care of”, I mean eliminating them.  Don’t get too smug about that.  To the degree that you are less than perfectly rational, you are at increased risk for nature “taking care of” you.

This is not to say that perfect rationality would protect you from every danger that might tend to “take care of you”.  Supernovas and meteors and earthquakes and the like do not respond even to your cleverest arguments.

That is to say, they don’t respond to them in the moment.  In the moment of a gigantic catastrophe, it’s too late to reason one’s way around it.  But being rational ahead of time can indeed affect how even the most calamitous disaster acts on you.  As I intimated yesterday, it’s conceivable that even the heat death of the universe (or the big crunch, etc., as the case may be) might be avoidable or at least endurable.

Maybe not.  But maybe so.  And the only way to know if it is amenable to intervention is to try to understand such things better and better all the time, to use the laws of nature to your advantage, for you cannot break or even bend those laws.  There is no lovely, tempting political corruption that can allow you to persuade the universe to waive the law of gravity just so that you don’t fall to your death after losing your grip on the edge of a cliff.  I’m sorry.

Except, I’m not really sorry.  You were under “constructive notice” of such things already‒a legal term meaning that you knew or should have known about the facts involved and so are responsible for what that knowledge entails.  Any genes that tend to make a human-sized organism less aware or less convinced about, say, the dangers associated with gravity are, ceteris paribus, less likely to persist throughout the generations than ones that give them real awareness of those dangers.

So, don’t casually walk along unstable cliff edges if you want to maximize your chances to continue living.  You may think you have “main character energy”, which sounds cool and all, but you’re only the main character of your own mind (if that).

To the universe, you are not even a paid extra.  You’re not even an offstage voice or a stage hand.  You’re at best a speck of dust somewhere on the rear-facing surface of some negligible bit of the backdrop, probably blocked by a curtain.  As Poe pointed out, the hero of the tragedy, Man, is the conqueror worm.

Which raises thoughts about that stupid social media based trend of asking, “Would you still love me if I were a worm?”

Well…maybe if you were a conqueror worm.

TTFN

*This is not a modified Shakespeare quote.  See if you can discern the source of the quote.

**Let alone uninterested.

by

“The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Welcome to July of 2026 (AD or CE) everyone.  Yes, since yesterday was the last day of June, then it must follow, as the day the previous day, that today is the 1st of July (given the specifications of “our” date-assigning system).

It’s payroll day today, of course, this being Wednesday.  I’m never too enthusiastic about such days.  I am, however, pleased to have learned that we, meaning those in my office, are not working this Saturday, it being Independence Day here in the US.  And we’re not working next Saturday, either, since it is a Saturday we would have had off, anyway.

That will be three Saturdays off in a row.  What will I do if I actually accrue a bit of rest and recover a bit of physiologic reserve?  Huh?  Have you ever thought about that?  Or are you too self-centered to be always and principally concerned about what is going on with me?

I’m kidding.  Even I don’t have much interest in my day to day life…or my life overall, now that you mention it.

Wait, you didn’t mention it; I mentioned it.  Then I projected my feelings onto you, whoever you may be that is reading this.  What pathetic, but very typical of human, behavior that is.

Obviously, I have nothing in mind about which to write today, despite having already written, let’s see…228 words.  I guess that’s not all that many words so far, is it?  Then again, it’s not very few words so far, either.

Speaking of “few” words, do please try to remember the difference between “fewer” and “less”.  If the referent of the adjective is something that comes in discrete, countable units, e.g., people or marbles or books, then the word to use is “fewer”, while if it is something that is continuous, such as some form of fluid or substance, e.g., water, air, sugar, then “less” is the word to use.  If you think* that it does not matter‒that it’s fine to say, “I have less friends than I used to have”**‒then try to realize that it’s just as bizarre as saying, “I’ve been drinking fewer water lately”, or “we only have a few sugar left in the sugar bowl”.

Even the Google Docs grammar checker balks at such uses of “few”, underlining them in blue as possibly incorrect, but it doesn’t highlight the “less friends” disgrace that precedes them.  This is what happens when these programs are “taught” their grammar simply through patterns of usage on‒of all the stupid things‒the internet, rather than by learning the logic behind grammar, and why it matters for clarity of communication.

There are arbitrary and unnecessary “rules” of grammar, of course, but they are fewer*** and farther between than you might expect.

I suppose it probably doesn’t matter, really, not on any kind of large scale.  Not unless it is possible‒allowed by nature, that is‒for humans or their descendants eventually to become cosmically important, to endure for eons, to engineer the shapes of galactic clusters and so on, and perhaps even to solve the problems of the “end” of the universe.

How’s that for a huge and noble quest:  to save the universe from the heat death/big crunch/big rip?  It’s crazily ambitious, but then again, only those who attempt the “impossible” can achieve the unbelievable.  I won’t say it’s the only way to make existence worthwhile‒such judgment is in the mind of each judge, and eternity is not a requirement to make a life a worthwhile thing (though the converse is also not necessarily true).

But for anything about any life to be remembered for any serious duration, then memory itself, conscious memory, must endure.  Simply stored records are not quite enough, not if one wants to leave anything behind that’s even as significant as “trunkless legs of stone” in the desert.

The universe itself seems unlikely to be finite in any larger sense‒the laws of nature that allowed our universe to exist at all seem likely to be, at some level, ever-present and “eternal” (though time is a function within the universe as we know it, so that “eternal” quality is not merely a function of time, but also of the very stuff of which space and time, and whatever else there may be, is made).

But one wants a universe where information from the past can persist, not merely be wiped away inevitably by the whips and scorns of time and big crunches and heat deaths.  If all one seeks is some time capsule that will never be opened, well, then you’re already making that, at least if the conservation of quantum information is correct, which most physicists who work in such areas seem to think it is.

Everything you are and do leaves evidence behind of itself and of you.  But so would a narrow, laser-based optical signal detailing all your thoughts‒something like a blog, say‒that you shine out into the widest void in space you can find, such that it will never so much as encounter a possible recipient before universal expansion has rendered such potential recipients too far away ever to be reached, even in principle.  Would that be satisfying?

I don’t know.  A lot of my writing hasn’t been too far from that situation.  But I do at least have readers here, whose minds become at least a little encoded (infected?) with the memes of my thoughts on a regular basis.  I can only apologize.

*And I use the word “think” here quite wrongly.

**No one should be surprised by your dearth of friends.

***See how weird it would be to think “they are less and farther between”?

by

“A distant ship smoke on the horizon”

Well, it’s here at last:  the final day of June in 2026 AD/CE.  You might say it’s the hospice day for the first half of this year.  Let us try to make its passing as peaceful and comfortable as we can.  I recommend high doses of opioids.

I’m kidding.  I don’t actually recommend such a thing unless one is in severe pain that’s simply not responding to anything else, or unless all the other stuff is simply too toxic.

That’s a big part of the conundrum of opioids.  All the other types of pain medications‒aspirin, other NSAIDs, acetaminophen, lidocaine injections, steroid injections and so on‒have significant systemic toxicities, even at relatively moderate doses.  They affect the stomach, the kidneys, the liver, the local tissues, the endocrine system, etc.  Quite often, one cannot adequately control significant pain for long using them without causing actual, serious, perilous damage to some of the most essential parts of the body.

On the other hand, opioids work.  They directly hit the pain centers/processors, and they actually can relieve pain, even very severe pain.  But they don’t just relieve physical pain.

Somewhat ironically, that’s one of the big drawbacks.  Though they do not cause systemic or organ toxicity, and they will not trigger diabetes, and they will not cause you ulcers (though they may well constipate you), they can affect your behavior and even your character.  Their relief of psychical pain‒sometimes the only such relief some people have felt in a long, long time‒is like their relief of more visceral pain:  it doesn’t actually correct any underlying disorders.

Well, I suppose if the disorder is simply a neurological misfiring such as that which leads to chronic pain, you could say they do at least act on the area that is dysfunctional.  But they don’t cure it.  They almost never correct even neuropathic pain; they simply squelch the alarm for a bit.  And the successful squelching of the alarms tends to require increasing doses, and can lead to dependence and various other issues.

So, there are no very good, relatively simple corrections for significant pain.  This is probably not a surprise, if you think about it.  In some form, at least, pain is among the oldest things in nature and among the most crucial (ha ha)* functions of nervous systems‒and even things that aren’t quite nervous systems, like the internal communication systems in hydra and jellyfish or the analogous systems of plants.

Living bodies don’t readily give up on pain, and they have good reasons.  Pleasure is nice, and is useful, of course, but it’s like having a pretty picture on your wall or having nice, scented candles in your living room or what have you.  No matter how pretty your decorations, you want to have your fire alarms in good working order.  You want them sensitive enough to go off even in situations without real fires‒the classic case of burnt toast, say‒rather than take the chance that they will not to go off in the case of a real fire.  The first error causes annoyance, perhaps requiring you to wave towels at the sensors and open a lot of windows and so on.  The second error can lead to your house burning down, perhaps with you in it.

Of course, these weighted preferences are not absolute.  If one’s smoke alarms were always going off‒or even going off a significant fraction of the time‒one might very well want to wipe out the whole system, to pull all the plugs, to remove all the batteries,  to flip all the breakers to “off”.  Or, indeed, one might simply want to abandon the house entirely, if there were no way to get the alarms to shut the f*ck up.  One might even be tempted to burn the stupid place down, just as a form of petty revenge against it.

There’s a metaphor in all this, I would imagine.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to discern it.  I won’t say it’s particularly clever, but it’s not terrible, and it works pretty well.  Anyway, I’ve dealt with this subject before, many times, I’m sure.  It’s fairly tedious, but it does seem to stick in my mind for some inexplicable reason.  I don’t, however, know how to solve the associated problems.

Ah, well.  There are some things humans aren’t meant to know.

Ha ha ha ha!  Sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight “face” while writing something so very stupid.  Humans aren’t “meant” to know (or not to know) anything, anymore than any particular foodstuff “belongs” on a pizza.  People can try to learn and understand anything, even everything, and ultimately, in the long run, as far as I can tell, the more one knows and understands, the better.

If you want to do your best in a game, you would do well to learn the rules as well as you can.  Because, to quote an old car commercial, in real life there is no reset button.  You are the avatar and you are the player, and when you get blasted into nothingness by the depredations of the game’s limitless antagonists, then for the character and for the player, the game is done.  There is no respawning, there are no experience points, there is no starting again at the last save point.

Game over.

*I say “ha ha” because the word “crucial”, related to the Latin for cross (apparently evolving into its modern usage from a metaphor for arriving at a crossroads), is also related to the word “excruciating” which derives from the Latin use of torturing as if crucifying someone.  And that, of course, relates pretty clearly to the topic of pain.

by

Today is not the day to find out…something or other

It’s a new week, and soon it will be a new month.  Isn’t it exciting?  I know that I, at least, can barely contain myself‒and I try to do so using lead shielding and straitjackets and trenches filled with spikes and gasoline.

Of course, the ones I use are metaphorical and/or imaginary, so they only work‒if they work at all‒to contain metaphorical or imaginary things.  And though it is subjective, excitement is not imaginary or metaphorical.  Indeed, in some senses at least, it can be objective.  After all, one can measure heart rate, blood pressure, pupil dilation, circulating epinephrine and cortisol, and even brain and brainstem activity.  So, no, it’s not imaginary or metaphorical.

On the other hand, I’m not actually excited about the start of the week.  I’m a bit anxious/tense, because every interaction with other people and their world is stressful and feels unsafe.  But though that technically counts as “excitement” from a neurohumoral point of view, it’s not excitement like that expressed in the old song, I’m So Excited.

June 29th, which is today, is a prominent date for me.  It would have been my 35th wedding anniversary‒I mean, really, it still is my anniversary, but no one is celebrating it.  It’s weird to think that it’s been 35 years since I was married.  Soon it will have been two thirds of my life since then.  I’ve also been divorced longer than I was married, which is really weird to me, partly because the years since have felt distinctly less real than the years during or before.  You’d think I would be over it by now, but it seems to be otherwise.

Speaking of “the years during or before”, my sister recently sent me some old stuff that my Mom had apparently kept, and some of it is interesting and amusing, at least to me.  In addition to some paperwork and such, I received some bits of nostalgia, including a large print of my high school senior picture (from 1987), which I will share here:

I think you can all agree that, apparently, I was the type model for Draco Malfoy.  I’m not sure what to think about that.  He’s definitely not the type of “villainous” character I’ve ever admired (probably because he and his family are more realistic, banal bad people‒just bigoted, entitled assholes, not misguided geniuses or philosophically interesting nihilists or such like).  I certainly would never have written an edition of My Heroes Have Always Been Villains about Draco or even his father.

Speaking of villains and also of heroes, there was a 7 x 9 ish drawing pad there as well that must’ve been from no later than sixth grade.  In it were some very early, very crude comic book pages of Helios (among others), the superhero I made up that I’ve mentioned here before, and about which I started writing a novel, though I have not gotten far at all.  My attention seems more erratic than it used to be.

Also there are various drawings and designs of things like space ships and secret bases, and my attempts to work out how to make a tractor beam and powered armor and even my “Eu-ray”.  That, at least, was not a completely stupid notion, even if the name is stupid.  I remember learning about how CRTs worked and thinking, hey, if you had a bunch of those cathodes inside a chamber and channeled it with magnetic and electric fields, you could make a ray gun*.

In real life, it really would make a particle beam, though maintaining a vacuum within the device while projecting electrons out of it always seemed like it would be a bit of trouble.  I think I remember imagining that the electrostatic (or whatever) pressure within would ensure that nothing in the air would be able to sneak back.  Maybe there was also some kind of electronic valve thing, I think I thought about that.

That bit probably wouldn’t have worked, and even if it did, there’s no way it would have been a very useful weapon‒electrons cannot travel very far through the air, and certainly not very accurately‒though it might have been useful in particle physics.  There are much better accelerators now, though, for physics.  And it’s so far been hard to improve on things that hurl kinetic projectiles at high speeds if you’re looking for ranged weapons.

If only phasers (a la Star Trek) actually existed, but alas, they do not and almost certainly cannot.  But think about it:  if you shot yourself with a phaser on full power, there would be no chance of a failure leading to a crippling injury, leaving you in a worse state than before and making you a burden on those around you; you would be disintegrated, which also would nicely leave no mess for other people to clean up.

I wonder how one would play Russian Roulette with a phaser.

Anyway, that’s about all the personal news I have for this morning.  I hope you all feel better than I do today.  That’s not a low bar to clear.  Though, come to think of it, while a low bar is easier in hurdles, it’s actually quite difficult if you’re doing the limbo.  In this case, though, it’s like a steeplechase jump that’s a few inches off the ground, or even embedded in the surface like a tiny speed bump.

The point I’m making is that I don’t feel very well, mentally at least, and I am only at the office because the AC is partly down at the house, and it’s boiling out around here.  I have no desire to sweat myself into the risk of another kidney stone, so it’s better, in that sense, to be at the office.  Or to be nowhere.

*Why did my thoughts go straight to “ray gun”?  Well, I could make the excuse that I had read the term “electron gun” when learning about cathode ray tubes, and that had triggered the thought, but that wasn’t the real reason.  It just seems to be my nature to think of ways to make weapons or otherwise destructive things.  I’m not a very good person by nature, it seems.  I guess that’s part of why I have so many rules.