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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.

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“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”?

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“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.

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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.

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Sleep! Sleep like your life depended on it!

Well, it’s Friday, and it’s a slightly fun date to write out:  6-26-2026 or (slightly more fun) 6-26-26 or, in the European way, 26-6-2026 or 26-6-26 (which sounds a bit like a quarterback calling plays in American football, which is slightly ironic for the European format).

I’m writing this post on the lapcom, by the way, because I decided I didn’t want to let an entire week go by without using it, and it just feels better, more “natural” for me to write with it.

I wonder how many words I’ve written on this mini lapcom or one nearly identical to it.  Unanimity (books 1 and 2) was more than half a million words just by itself, and I don’t know how many words I’ve written in all my blog posts that I’ve done on one or another mini lapcom.  I suppose I could figure it out, but it seems like tedious work.  If anyone wants to check it for themselves, you can try, but don’t ask for access to my smartphone or lapcom.

I have a small bit of what is, for me, momentous news:  I slept almost five and a half hours last night!  That was more or less uninterrupted sleep, as far as I know.  If I woke up during the night, I don’t remember it, and I certainly needed to rush to the euphemism as if I had not gotten up during the night.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s the most sleep—certainly the longest uninterrupted sleep—that I’ve had in a long, long time without significant use of things that make me sleepy*, like Benadryl®.  However, though I have tried to use the aforementioned antihistamine on non-weekend days in the past, I’ve learned that it actually does me more harm than good the next day if I need to work.

The hangover/persistent effects of that stuff make me slow and stupid (even more so than usual!) and I don’t feel mentally very rested after it.  This makes sense, neurologically, given that sleep is not merely a lack of consciousness but a very involved, active, and utterly crucial** process we still understand only somewhat, and almost all sedatives disrupt it.

I have some hypotheses about why last night’s exceptional sleep happened.  Of course, it could well be just a random outlier—they happen if you wait long enough in pretty much all intrinsically variable systems that produce bell-curve distributions of outcomes—but there are a few contenders for possible, more causal, reasons.

I am always trying various things to see if they improve my health, my sleep, my pain, my mood, etc.  I don’t tend to be as scientific as I would prefer to be about such things, alas.  I tend to be in a constant state of low-level desperation (rather like the “low-flying panic attack” in Radiohead’s Burn the Witch), because I feel so uncomfortable in so many ways so much of the time, and so it’s all but impossible not to try as many things as one can try at any given time.

When you have a bad itch in the middle of your back that you cannot reach directly, and there is no one around to help, you can probably be pretty clever (and desperate) in how you’ll scratch that itch.  Well, itches are a kind of pain—they’re mediated similarly but not identically in the nervous system—they’re just a low-level kind.  That’s part of why scratching works to provide temporary relief:  the local receptors get drowned out by the surrounding inputs.

Now, if itching in your back can be so impossible to ignore that it drives you to scramble madly for a pencil or the corner of a wall or a tree trunk or whatever, no matter what you’re doing—and yet it can be countered by just locally running your fingernails over the surrounding area—well, just think how much more difficult it is to ignore a serious, deep and persistent pain, as well as general, persistent (largely social) anxiety, and depression.  Even when it’s been going on for years, for decades, the very hardware of your nervous system does not let you simply ignore it.

So, yeah, I’m cautiously glad about my night’s sleep.  I don’t want to get too excited.  It may not ever happen again.  What follows the vast majority of outliers in statistical distributions is a subsequent regression toward the mean.  This applies not just to good outliers but also to bad ones, though, so it’s not all bleak.

Anyway, maybe I’ll sleep well this weekend.  I’ll certainly sleep longer, because notwithstanding my above admissions about the drawbacks of antihistamines, it’s nice to be unconscious and physically resting for longer than usual, if the consequences are not significant.  So, long live diphenhydramine (so to speak).

I will not be working this weekend, so I don’t expect to produce another blog post before Monday.  I hope you all have a good weekend.

*It does make me sleepy—very much so.  I found that out the first time I had to take it in response to an attack of hives I got (apparently) from using Irish Spring™ soap.

**How crucial?  As far as we can tell, every animal with a nervous system needs to sleep a significant portion of its time.  This includes aquatic and marine mammals and reptiles, a fact that engenders some amazing adaptive creativity, such as creatures sleeping in one half of their brains at a time.  Evolution may be the true blind, idiot god, but it has a lot of time (much of it in parallel to itself) to explore innovation-space, and it does produce some amazing things.  But it does not seem able to select for simply not sleeping in any creature.  But sleep makes an animal vulnerable, tremendously so.  So, it must be really crucial—life and death crucial—for there to be no yet-discovered alternative.

 

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Cool it with a baboon’s blog, then the charm is firm and good

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 25th of June.  This means we are at the more or less exact temporal antipode of Christmas, which was six months ago and will be six months from now.  Does that imply that we might all be feeling the “anti-Christmas spirit”?

Maybe the cycle acts something like a half-integer spin quantum entity, such as electron, and it takes two full rotations to bring it back to its initial state.  Or, rather, it could be like a spin 2 particle (e.g., the hypothetical graviton), rotating ½ times and being the same as where it started.

No, I guess it really seems like just a spin 1 particle, where half a rotation leaves it 180 degrees (or pi radians) different.  So:  Merry Anti-Christmas (you filthy animals).

I know, that’s rather silly.  But that’s okay, so was Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Mind you, they were much funnier than I am.  That’s no real shame on me, though.  It’s rather like saying that the Beatles were much better song-writers overall than I am.  It’s true, but it’s also true of nearly everyone else in the world (that the Beatles were better song-writers than they are, or that Monty Python was funnier than they are, not that they are funnier or better song-writers than I am).

I’m also not as accomplished a scientist as Newton or Darwin or Einstein or as good a mathematician as Noether or Ramanujan or Euler.  This is nothing about which I (or you) should feel ashamed.  These are among the finest minds the world has yet produced.

On the other hand, none of them has a publication credit in the scientific journal Mycoses, do they?  No, they do not.  But I do.

Also, I have literally and directly saved people’s lives and helped ease and even prevent their suffering, whereas I don’t know that any of the above people ever did that, not directly* anyway.  So, neener neener neener!

Oh, by the way‒or by the by, or by Grabthar’s** hammer and by the suns of Worvan‒I have written all my posts this week so far on the smartphone, not on the lapcom.  And I am trying very hard to avoid writing too long a post.  I have seen that I can really write a lot with either the lapcom or the smartphone, though it’s easier in a sense to do so on the lapcom; it’s also easier and quicker for me to lose track of how much I have written thereon.

Oh, and another “by the fill-in-the-blank”:  I wanted to point out that yesterday’s voice recording thing was recorded using my smartphone, not any kind of fancy mic (those are fancy mics on smartphones, really, but not in a pertinent way), so unfortunately, it’s hard to keep breath sounds out of it.  And the tunnel kind of sound is probably because I (injudiciously, it seems) added a wee bit of reverb in post, to try to counter the flatness produced by the “noise reduction” function.  Sorry about that.

I tried a goofy little thing on the phone yesterday (speaking of such things) where I took a brief video, but with a thin cloth over the camera, so it was a video that was really just audio, but in principle it could have been uploaded without trouble directly to YouTube, etc., but no one would need to see me.

I don’t really like my face, so I don’t like to have to see it, let alone to inflict it on the world.  If you look at my relatively sparse YouTube videos, you’ll see that even when my face is shown, I usually try to cover it at least partially.

The exceptions, I guess, are the music-playing videos, but in those it just wouldn’t make as much sense to cover my face, since my singing would probably suffer.  Though, who knows, maybe I could become famous as a performer who always wears a mask and sunglasses.  M F Doom wore a mask.  Daft Punk wore their weird space uniforms.

This subject calls to mind the fact that yesterday evening I received a package from my sister.  It contained, among other things, some old stuff of mine, including a big print of my high school senior picture, which I didn’t know still existed.  I didn’t think to get a picture or a scan of it before writing this, but maybe I’ll do so later, so you can see it and I can learn if you agree that I resemble a certain character (not the hero) from a very popular movie franchise.

Anyway, as one of the spirits summoned by the three wyrd sisters said in Macbeth, “Dismiss me.  Enough.”

Tyler:  This conversation…

Narrator:  This conversation…

Tyler:  …is over.

Narrator:  …is over.

TTFN

*Of course, their various contributions have shaped all of modern science, and thus technology, and have thus indirectly saved many lives and relieved much suffering, far more than my little, localized efforts have done.  Still, let me throw myself a bone, okay?

**I initially wrote, going from memory, “by Frothgar’s hammer”, but then I realized that was a slightly bastardized name from Beowulf, i.e., Hrothgar, the Danish “king” whom Beowulf rescues from the depredations of Grendel, not the line from Galaxy Quest.

 

[Aside:  it would be cool if someone made a simulated spin-½ coin, with inertial sensors within and LCD faces, so that it could start, say, at heads, flip once and be intermediate, flip twice and be tails, flip three times and be oppositely intermediate, and flip a fourth time to come back to heads!]

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AI as detrimental enchancement

This is that audio I mentioned this morning (and yesterday morning).  I didn’t do a LOT of editing, just truncated the silences, reduced noise, and added a bit of reverb since after all the noise reduction it felt a bit dead.  I honestly don’t remember exactly what I said, though I remember the gist, and I don’t know whether I was coherent.  This is a bit of an experiment, just uploading without listening.  Enjoy.  Or don’t, if it’s not enjoyable, I won’t try to dictate your reaction.

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This is today’s blog post.  There are many others like it, but this one is today’s.

I have no real idea what to write about, so I just picked an opening line (which has now become the first sentence of the headline) and then waited to see what would happen.  That led me to think of a series of lines from a movie showing men in boot camp or basic training.  It was not, I think, the chant from Full Metal Jacket that came to my mind; I think that one went, “This is my rifle, this is my gun.  This one’s for killing.  This one’s for fun.”  The latter is somewhat funny, but the one I recall was much more serious about the subject, i.e., “This is my rifle.  There are many others like it, but this one is mine.”

It was something like that, anyway.  If anyone reading recognizes the line (or the correct line, as the case may be) please do chime in in the comments below.  Or, if you can recall any related, interesting, and similar quotes, that would be welcome, too.  Heck, just feel free to make a comment about whatever.

Parenthetical:  the thing that bothered me most about Full Metal Jacket was probably that they called their drill sergeant “sir”.  You don’t call NCOs “sir”, they work for a living!  Forrest Gump got that right.

As you can probably tell, this post is very much stream of consciousness style, probably more so than most.  Of course, that’s the way my blog posts almost always manifest themselves.  In fact “stream of consciousness” sometimes seems entirely too tame a term in general.  I think it’s usually much more of a serious river of consciousness, one that runs deep, and which is cloudy with silt and other contaminants, with way more going on below the surface than can be discerned from above and outside‒or even from the privileged place of being that surface layer consciousness.

I was tempted just now to refer to someone swimming on the surface as representing the person whose consciousness is described by the river.  But that’s not a good metaphor for consciousness, because it implies that consciousness is somehow separate from the flow of the rest of the mind‒only watching the game, controlling it*, as it were‒when in fact a person’s consciousness is that surface, that visible, barely more than two-dimensional, portion of the top of a river that dwarfs the Mississippi or the Nile or the Amazon or the River effing Styx.

Or, to use Sam Harris’s storm metaphor from his excellent book Free Will, “You are not controlling the storm, and you are you lost in it.  You are the storm.” (Emphasis added).

Back to the river analogy.

The river of consciousness is not always smoothly flowing, as I think you would agree. There are places where it goes into one of those river-lakes where the flow can be very slow.  But then there are also terrifying rapids, where all is turbulent and chaotic and perilous for anyone trying to ride it out (my readers may be able to sympathize) as well as for the mind itself.  There may even be waterfalls, though I’m not sure what situation that would metaphorically describe‒perhaps a mental breakdown?  Oh, well, metaphors (like similes) are always imperfect.  The only thing exactly like a thing is the thing itself.

I guess that’s pretty obvious.

Drat!  I realized while writing this that I forgot to share audio that I mentioned earlier this week.  I’ve set it to auto-publish today, so I don’t have to worry about that same thing happening again, but I am not going to do it at the same time as this post.  I don’t want to oversaturate the “market” for my thoughts, such as it is.

I just now erased a pointless digression about floods and a river again, relating to the immediately preceding sentence.  I really do seem to go all over the place, don’t I?  I guess that’s just one of those things that happens with some people.

I don’t mean to imply thereby that it is an unsolvable mystery.  There is an underlying causality, a system of interactions, that properly explains everything that happens regarding such streams of consciousness, but it is so involved that‒even if we can ignore quantum mechanics at the level of neural interactions, which we probably can do‒we are a loooong way from understanding it fully.

And, of course, a mind can never fully “understand” itself, because it cannot perfectly model itself within itself (see Elessar’s Conjecture) except to the extent of simply being itself.  And simply being a mind clearly does not imply that one understands oneself.  In fact, it is, I suspect, an absolute, mathematical law that no mind can ever fully and completely understand itself.  Again, see Elessar’s Conjecture.

Okay, that’s enough of this for now.  I’m sure I could gabble on and on and on for hours‒and it’s not as though my thoughts stop meandering, like that restless wind inside a letterbox, after I stop writing.  But you all don’t need to deal with that.  How nice for you.

Seriously, though, I hope you all have a good day.

*To quote One Night in Bangkok, one of the most unpredictable hit songs ever, in my opinion.  I mean it’s a white guy rapping about a chess tournament in Thailand in a musical about chess, called…Chess.

[I thought of a very stupid and sophomoric joke, inspired by a typo I made while editing.  Mamifestation:  when breasts are suddenly and unexpectedly revealed.]

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Awe, for self-pity’s sake!

Well, it’s Tuesday, the 23rd of June in 2026, in case any of you aren’t aware of that fact (or if you’re reading this post later…but not earlier, because I strongly suspect that it’s impossible for you to read it earlier).  It’s the third day of summer and the third full day of what I rather jokingly refer to as “The Days of Awfulness” or even “The Days of Aw, Shit!”*.

The number of days in that stretch is not constant, because one of the bookends on them changes a bit every year.  My Days stretch between Father’s Day and the date of my wedding “anniversary”, on June 29th.  Heck, one of the regular readers here was at my wedding on that day.  How cool is that?  Anyway, those two days highlight and commemorate, or lament, or what have you the two greatest and most terrible of my personal failures, about the two things that have mattered most to me in all my life.  They weren’t my only failures, obviously enough.  But they were, have been, and are the most devastating and heartbreaking ones.

I shouldn’t dwell on them, I know.  It’s not healthy.  But my nervous system (i.e., me) is prone to latch onto numbers and dates and patterns and cycles and all that kind of stuff.  This is part of why I tend to be so skeptical and even sometimes disdainful of people’s tendency to feel significance in truly absurd notions, like the zodiac signs and imagined alien interlopers and other such things.  I recognize my own tendency to find and latch onto patterns even when they are only in my mind.

I’m fine with enjoying those patterns and even playing with them, in a sense, but I don’t want to attach some imagined significance to them.  Even Newton fell into that trap, though he had more of an excuse‒you can’t be the founder of mathematical physics and at the same time know all the stuff that will only be discovered by building on your insights.  That’s related to the whole “you can’t be reading my blog post before it was written” thing.

Anyway, I tend to feel pretty despondent around this time of year, because I cannot seem easily to stop thinking about those things at which I failed and which I lost.  I know it’s contrary to the recommendations of the Stoics and the Taoists and the Buddhists, but I’ve never sworn loyalty or fealty to any of those -isms, I just think some of their ideas are good (and some are not, though these three are way above average in terms of signal-to-noise ratio).

I do, however, have to call attention to the fact that I am having semi-regular interactions with my youngest child, starting since after I was hospitalized with my kidney stone.  We watch Doctor Who together over Discord™ and have gone to a couple of movies together, the most recent of which was Backrooms**.  So, that’s very good, indeed, and those moments are the happiest ones I’ve had in well over a decade.

Mind you, my son (my eldest) still won’t interact with me at all.  And I get it.  Though he knows (I hope) that I didn’t do anything willfully or even willingly that caused him (emotional) pain, he still felt the pain, and that’s a hard thing to get past, especially since it’s the more recent of things (see The Peak-End Rule).  Also, he’s got a stable and (presumably) comfortable and happy life, and disrupting it would be unpleasant and very stressful.

I cannot really blame anyone for not wanting me around.  I know I don’t, a lot of the time.  It’s been a bit of a tendency over my lifetime, for others and for me.  I feel like so many people who have been around me would readily sing along with a Beatles parody called Got to Get You Out of My Life.

Ugh.  Can self-hate and self-pity go together?  Apparently so, and it must be a nauseating spectacle for you to take in.  I apologize.  I guess it’s sort of akin to Gollum hating and loving the Ring, as he hated and loved himself.

People are complicated‒brains being the most complicated local things in the universe known by us (though that could soon change).  Internal contradictions don’t necessarily cause the program to freeze in people, like an old “return without gosub” error**, but there are consequences…probably.

Anyway, thank you for reading.  I forgot to publish the post I had prepared with that audio file I mentioned yesterday, so I’ll do that sometime today.  In the meantime, I hope you all have a good day, then double that, then double it again, and so on.

*This is a reference to or parody of the stretch of days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Jewish tradition, which are sometimes referred to as The Days of Awe.

**I highly recommend both the movie and the earlier YouTube channel series by Kane Parsons, the now-twenty-year-old (!) who directed the movie.

***I don’t know what more recent error messages are.  I haven’t done any real programming since college.

 

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Summertime, and the living is…

Well, it’s Monday‒one day after the Summer Solstice, and thus the 2nd day of official summer‒and here I am writing another blog post.

It’s funny how weird the perception of time can be.  Why, it seems like just yesterday that I was writing my abnormally long blog post from Saturday, when in fact it was a full two days ago.  Weird, huh?

All joking aside, it was quite a long post that I wrote on Saturday.  I wonder if anyone actually read the whole thing.  I mean, I read it, course; I wrote and then edited it, after all.  I don’t remember it all that well right now, but that’s because I wrote it down and I know where I can find it if I want to revisit it.

Working memory and narrative memory and all that are useful, powerful attributes of human minds, and my own copy of both of those systems is better than those of the majority of people I have encountered.  But I do still have fundamentally limited internal memory, so there’s no need to clutter my hard drive with the contents of all of my blog posts.  I know where I can find them, in general.

Though this triggers a thought that I’ve had before:  I was thinking of doing some audio recordings of me reading some of my blog posts and sharing the audio here and as videos on YouTube.  What do you think?  I would love to hear input from any long term (or short term) readers as to which posts they might nominate for such a treatment.

Oh, yeah, in the latter part of last week I did a voice recording, this time about AI as an attribute-weakener for humans.  It’s somewhat related to what I said recently about humans becoming‒in what is nearly the best case possible scenario‒the “pets” of future AI.  Anyway, it’s pretty short, so I’ll probably edit it rather quickly and share it here and maybe do a “video”.

The annoying thing is, it ought to be quick and easy to use Microsoft’s basic video editor just to add a picture to the audio for the video, but now they have it where you need to sign in to your Microsoft account to use the program.  That means mucking about with accounts on the work computer, and that’s stressful.  So, I don’t know.  I’ll try to think of some other solution.

Speaking of solutions and things not necessarily working the way they ought to work, my smartphone‒on which, by the way, I am writing this post‒is starting to be a bit laggy and somewhat herky-jerky* in its operations.  It may be that it just needs a restart‒I haven’t done that in a while, because it consistently slips my mind.

On the other hand, the phone has a finite time of operation, meaning it will eventually stop working, as will all things that are not constantly maintained (and even they will almost certainly all fail eventually).  At that point, I would need to get a new smartphone.

I really hoped not to need to do that ever again.  It’s such a pain.  I really hoped that I would not live long enough to need to get a new smartphone.  I had various intentions regarding that, but so far they have not yet come to fruition‒as witness, the fact that I am writing this blog post.

I’m certainly feeling much less verbose right now than I was on Saturday morning.  I don’t know what circumstances and local forces are behind that, but of course, I’m pretty darn sure that there are good explanations available.  It’s just hard to gather and trace all the innumerable threads of the web of causality even for the tiniest of behaviors in any given moment or event.  I’m no Laplace’s demon (nor is anyone or anything else, as far as I can see).  All I can say for sure is that all of those events lie in the past light cone of the event itself.

Okay, well, this is getting to feel tedious to me, though I don’t know how it is for you, so I’m going to wrap it up and leave this blog post near the left end of the bell curve for word length of posts, whereas Saturday’s was nearer the right end**.

I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the week.

*Please excuse the technical jargon.

**That tail of the curve can’t really go off toward infinity, even if a mathematical description of such a curve does, because I cannot actually write an infinite number of words…though I fear sometimes it might feel that way to my readers.  On the other end, the low end of the curve cannot get below zero, since a blog post with a negative number of words is like a house whose rooms have negative lengths and widths.