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A pox upon those who do not learn the history of science and medicine

Well, I’m back to writing on the smartphone today, with mixed feelings.  One of these feelings is the residual soreness in my thumbs, of course, but the day-long break did seem to help a little bit.  Mind you, some of that is probably in my head, for I don’t write on my smartphone on Sundays, and I also don’t write on non-working Saturdays.  So, if resting is enough, I should feel least sore on Mondays following one of my two-day weekends.  If that is the case‒if I am least sore in those instances‒I certainly haven’t noticed.

Actually, if it isn’t the case, I haven’t noticed either, but at least there it would make sense, since there is nothing to notice.  It can be much harder to notice things that are not so than to notice things that are so.  That’s part of why people don’t give credit to vaccination, for instance:  they can’t see the sickness and death that are prevented.  There’s no It’s A Wonderful Life revelation about all the lives that have been saved and‒perhaps more important*‒all the suffering that has been prevented.

There’s a similar, lesser-known preventative effect of proton pump inhibitors (e.g., omeprazole).  These medicines (and their somewhat weaker predecessors, the H2 blockers**) have prevented untold suffering and death related to gastritis and peptic ulcer disease and esophageal cancers, all of which used to be major contributors to premature death, especially in young men (if memory serves).  So, using these medicines is not necessarily an overindulgence in avoiding transient discomfort.  They are very real and powerful preventative interventions‒though, as with all such things, they do have some long term side-effects, and these must always be weighed against the benefits of taking them.

This is one of the reasons that educating people about history is so important.  If one is not aware of just how horrifying and heartbreaking the effects of smallpox were (for instance), one might think that the smallpox vaccine***** was just a sort of convenience, not a response to a low-flying, slow-moving, global catastrophe.

I suppose it was easier for Ben Franklin to recognize that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” because there were far fewer preventable ailments and fewer avoidable disasters back in his day.  Still, he was a very smart person; he might have recognized the nature of such things even if he had lived in our more comfortable times.

It is useful, and it may be more than just useful, for people to learn how things were before the arrival of so many powerful technologies and knowledge and social and biological insights.  For 300,000 years, humans existed without (for instance) the internet, and then, starting around 30 years ago, it was here (and widely available).

But that’s a full generation of people who have never known a world without the internet, despite the fact that by default the world has no internet.  It can be immensely useful for those people to learn about what things were like pre-internet, not only so they can truly appreciate this remarkable phenomenon, but also so they can recognize some of its detriments.

Likewise for planes and cars and televisions and even books and agriculture.  What was life like before these things?  What would life be like if they disappeared?  Are their benefits worth their costs?  How can those costs be mitigated, even if they are bearable (for why not make things as net-beneficial as possible?)?

I encourage everyone, myself included, to take these notions seriously, to think about the contrafactual cases, not to accept that things simply are the way they are, because for the most part, historically, they were not that way.  Even humanity itself is a latecomer.

I don’t know how I got onto those subjects, but I guess I’m thinking of health (and particularly of gastric health) more than typically in recent days.  I still don’t feel too well, but that’s nothing unusual for me.  It’s just annoying because it’s a new, or at least atypical, discomfort.

Oh, well.  This brings us back to my point that decreasing/preventing suffering is more important than “saving lives”, since all such saved lives are merely saved for later, if you will.  Death (it seems) cannot be forever avoided, but suffering, in principle, can be eased and even sometimes prevented.  Though, sometimes, the only practical way to stop certain kinds of suffering is to hasten the inevitable other phenomenon.

In any case, I’ll draw at least one instance of your suffering to an end now, by finishing this blog post.  I hope you have a very good day, by any reasonable measure of goodness that you might choose.

*Because death is, as far as anyone can tell, completely inevitable‒it’s a matter of when, not if‒whereas suffering is variable, and boy can it vary, from person to person, from moment to moment, from culture to culture, and so on.

**No, they don’t block molecular hydrogen***, though if one thought that, one could certainly be excused.  Rather, they block the so-called type 2 histamine receptor, the one that responds to stimulus (histamine) by making the stomach secrete more acid.

***Interestingly enough, the proton pump inhibitors do block hydrogen, but it’s not molecular hydrogen, it atomic hydrogen‒or well actually, it’s ionic (cationic, specifically) hydrogen, which is a naked proton, since a hydrogen nucleus is just a proton****, and is the key effective part of essentially all acids, at least regarding their acidity.

****Sorry about all the footnotes within footnotes, but it just occurred to me to wonder what it would be like to make a sample of an acid but with all the ordinary hydrogen atoms replaced with deuterium, so-called heavy hydrogen, which has a neutron in its nucleus as well as a proton.  How would this affect the properties of such an acid?  Of course those properties are almost entirely related to the valence electron or the lack thereof, but when a positive ion of a substance is just a naked nucleus, one cannot completely dismiss the impact of that nucleus’s structure.  So, I would love to see an entirely deuteric acid being put through its paces.  An acid made entirely with tritium (one proton, two neutrons) would be interesting as well, but even in my imagination, that’s asking for a lot of the very tiny amount of tritium in the world.

*****This is the original source of the word “vaccination” since being exposed to Vaccinia (related to cowpox) provided resistance to Variola (smallpox).

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Still queasy after all these years

Okay, well, it may not have been going on for years, but I am feeling queasy again this morning.

It’s Tuesday now, and for the first time in what feels like a long time, I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  I’m doing this partly because my thumbs, despite attempts at good care by me, are feeling quite sore and stiff*.  When I take enough NSAIDs (usually naproxen) to keep them calmed down, then my hands and probably some other parts of my body eventually get swollen and feel…inarticulate, I guess might be the right word.

I worry that this means the NSAIDs are doing a number on my kidneys, along with other parts of my body.  I know that, at baseline, my kidneys appear to be functioning fine—when I went into the hospital with my kidney stone last year, of course I had lots of blood (and urine) tests.  But I don’t want to roll the dice on them too much.  Because if I ever do have kidney failure, there’s no way I’m going to be dialyzed.

That’s not because I have anything against dialysis, but because I know I will not be able to afford it; I don’t have insurance, of course, and also, I don’t have any kind of support if I were to undergo dialysis, which usually must be done two to three times a week.  I just don’t see that all happening.

Anyway, there’s no immediate danger there, as long as I don’t take too many things that are going to box my kidneys.  It seems likely that something else will take me down before they go.

Speaking of ill health, I had a rough day at the office yesterday.  I was fighting a sinus headache on the left side (of my head, that is; I did not have a headache all along the left side of my body) all day, and it was really uncomfortable.  I think I was fighting off a local, bacterial infection.  Thankfully, decongestants and such all took care of it, and the problem appears to be resolved, or mostly so, today.  What regional lymphadenopathy I had is all but completely gone.

The irritation caused by that process seemed to trigger an exacerbation of tinnitus, but that might have been a coincidence, since it was acting up in my right ear, not my left.  To be fair, my right ear is where the tinnitus is worst and so is my hearing.  This asymmetry can be quite disorienting (or, as the Brits would say, disorientating), especially when one is in a room in which overhead music is playing and a large number of people are all on the phone at the same time.

Well, I say “large”—it’s really about a dozen.  But it’s a smallish office, so that number of people can make it feel packed.  And the noise is problematic for me at the best of times.  Among other things, I have a hard time telling where any particular voice or noise arises, because my one ear is nearly useless.

Wow, this is really lame and boring, isn’t it?  I’m sorry.  At least I’m not talking to you about my mental health problems anymore, right?  They haven’t stopped or diminished in any way; quite the contrary.  But I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear about them, and certainly, no one can do anything about them (least of all me, it seems).  Mostly, even the people who want to help just respond with clichés and homilies and so on.  That sort of stuff just makes me feel worse, if anything, because it’s so disappointing.

As for other things, let’s see…no, I don’t think I have anything exciting on which to report.  I did just have a bit of a fudge-up on my MS Word as I’ve been typing; somehow the striking out and red-lining of new words and erased previous ones got activated.  I don’t know how that activation took place, but it was not what I wanted.  I was, at least, able to stop it.

It’s very irritating.  It’s one of those things that arises, I suspect, because Word is trying to keep up with the web-based word processors, but I don’t want it to do that.  And, to be fair, it might just have been me accidentally hitting some shortcut on the keyboard.  In any case, I want Word to be the same reliable word processor it’s been for such a long time.

I want a word processor that doesn’t require me to have an internet connection to use it.  Fie upon the internet for ordinary, local tasks.  Why do people need web connections for games and for word processing and for all those little things that we used to do on our computers long before the internet/web became publicly available?

The internet requires many systems to be functional and operational to stay in business, and I’m not confident those things will remain so.  Huge server farms and various other tech matters use tremendous amount of energy and other resources (such as water for cooling), and sooner or later, if they are receiving those resources instead of humans, the humans are going to blow them up and/or burn them down, along with the companies and people who create them, and it will be deserved.

All this complex, manipulative technology is quite breakable, as are pretty much all things.  The underwater cables that carry the information of the internet between continents are also vulnerable.  Chip manufacturers, and particularly the machines that etch microchips, are particularly expensive and vulnerable.  Sources of rare Earth minerals are perhaps slightly less vulnerable, but it doesn’t take much to interfere with finely tuned infrastructure.

I’m frankly amazed that no one has done a Fight Club (specifically, a “Project Mayhem”) on the whole international set of communications hardware on which the internet is based.  Just screwing up heat exchangers would probably be enough to bring large portions of the cloud down semi-permanently.  And how many people have their important data backed up in hard copies anymore?

Do you want to stop the advent of artificial intelligence that might wipe out human civilization?  Wipe out the infrastructure of the companies that are working on it.  We know that it is always much easier to destroy than to create, but we definitely want to destroy a thing that will pull a “Project Genesis” on us and wipe us out to instantiate its own existence.  Throw some of those sabots into the machinery, if you’re worried.  The law is not going to protect you from the wealthy and powerful—or so it certainly seems, and it seems to be less likely to protect you with every passing moment—so why obey it?

Meh, I’m probably being too pessimistic.  Anyway, maybe it’ll be a good thing, from the cosmic point of view, if the human race and all other organic life on Earth is erased and replaced by electronic life.  It might even be a good thing for humans themselves.  There are certainly fates that are worse than death.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t think I’m making much sense.  I hope you all have a good day, despite having foolishly opened yourselves to my thoughts early in the morning.

*It’s also because I fear my typing skill has deteriorating due to lack of use, so I figured it would probably be good to get back into it a bit.

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Queasy does it

Ugh, it’s Monday again.  I’m very much not ready to start another work week.  I’ve felt a bit queasy and under the weather since yesterday afternoon‒probably due to some dietary indiscretion, I don’t know‒and just felt kind of icky.  I’m not nauseated at the moment, though, just kind of wiped.

I’m sure that’s how you were hoping to begin your week of reading blog posts:  with news of my upset stomach from yesterday.  One can imagine Tom Brokaw, or perhaps even Walter Cronkite, breathlessly delivering such a bulletin, am I right?  What would the banner headline in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal say about such a story?

Probably nothing, of course.  Imagine how slow and anti-interesting a news day would have to be for major news outlets to carry stories about my minor ailments.

Not to say that the ailments of certain people don’t get covered; they do, of course.  Sometimes this is just frivolous curiosity or even prurient interest, as in the case of “celebrities”.  Sometimes it really is important, as in the case of powerful individuals who carry great responsibilities.  In those cases, people can legitimately be concerned, especially if the responsibilities carried by these individuals are things only they can do.  That’s rare in the real world, but it can happen*.

Oy, sorry about the interruption there.  I had a little sneezing fit.  Oh, wait, you all didn’t experience that interruption; only I did.  How embarrassing.  I shouldn’t have said anything.  Well, it’s too late now.

Though, of course, it isn’t too late, not for me as I write it‒I could change it if I wanted to change it.  But by the time you read this, then, yes, it will be too late for me to change it.  I mean, I could edit the post after the fact‒I have that power‒but it wouldn’t affect those who had already read it.

I could conceivably affect your memory of what it had originally said if I changed it and then persistently repeated the lie that it had never been the way I originally posted it.  But even if I got everyone in the universe to believe the lie‒getting them all to care would be a big enough undertaking‒it would not change the fact of what had originally happened.

This underscores the true, fundamental powerlessness of lies.  Words can change what people “believe” in the short term, but talk is cheap (mother fucker).  No matter how much a person believes they can fly under their own power, if they step off the top of a tall building (on Earth, in normal gravity) they will plummet.

And they may believe, all the way down, that they are actually flying and that the falling is the illusion, but once they reach the bottom, everything with which they believe anything will, if the fall was far enough, be utterly broken, perhaps even scattered across the pavement.  All that they believed or remembered will be obliterated, in a very true sense of the word.

That’s one of the good, albeit sometimes frustrating, things about reality.  Whatever it is, it is, regardless of whether anyone believes it or even knows it, regardless of whether there even exists anyone who can know it.

How did I get there from having noted that I felt sick yesterday and don’t feel great today to be starting the week?  I’m sure it’ll be clear in the editing process.  But it is a fact that I got to this point, so it happened somehow.

I don’t really know what else to discuss.  Nothing of consequence happens in my life anymore, not even from the narrow, parochial point of view of my own mind.  At this stage, my life is of more or less of zero significance to anyone, including me, so I guess it doesn’t matter what I discuss.

I’m very tired, though, and it’s just the start of the day and the week.  I hope I get to feeling better as the week goes along, though the second law of thermodynamics seems to imply that such a thing is by no means guaranteed to happen, and indeed, in the long run, will definitely not happen.  At least, the tendency for entropy to increase is as definite as anything we know.

Clearly, though, huge regions of low entropy are possible; the universe as we know it “began” in such a state.  Mind you, we wouldn’t want to be suddenly transported to such a low entropy region of spacetime, as they are not readily amenable to life, which is dependent upon local gradients in free energy and entropy.  This is why life occurred in sort of the “middle state” of the universe, the mixing state, as when one sees the many swirling forms and patterns in one’s coffee cup as one is pouring in milk or cream, before the mixing finally becomes uniform.

Also, though quite uniform and low entropy, the Big Bang was also pretty darn hot, and I’m not speaking metaphorically.

If one could open a teeny, tiny wormhole back to some region of the early universe just after the Big Bang, one could conceivably obtain functionally limitless energy**.  But that would affect the subsequent evolution of the early universe, I suspect, though perhaps it could not possibly affect the universe in such a way as to prevent itself from being instantiated.  Or, well, maybe for that reason it cannot be instantiated.

I don’t know.  I’m tired.  You can probably tell.  Anyway, I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Though no examples spring to mind.  If you can think of one, please share it in the comments below.

**Though, would that outweigh the energy required to create and maintain the wormhole?  I have a strong intuition that it would not.

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This is a very catchy headline.

Good morning.  How’s that for optimism?  It’s 4-11 today, so perhaps I should try to give you some information.  You all remember the old information line, don’t you?  Four, one, one (in the US, anyway).  I think the toll-free/long distance version used to be 800-555-1212 or something like that.

I don’t know if those lines are active and maintained anymore.  I know I haven’t used either one for probably more than 2 decades‒by which I mean it’s been more than 2 decades since I used them.  I don’t mean to deny having used the line for a stretch as long as 2 decades.  I hope it goes without saying that I have never just stayed on the 411 line for decades at a time without stop.  That would be weird.

Speaking of weird, I want to apologize if yesterday’s post was too weird for anyone.  I don’t plan these in advance, as you may know, so they become a kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise.  Not that I didn’t find the stuff I wrote interesting; obviously I did at some level, because it’s certainly there in my head.

Of course, I do edit each post (three times) before posting, and yesterday I even did some relatively elaborate figuring (though the math was really just basic arithmetic, and I messed that up when working out the surface area of the Earth because when I squared the radius, I didn’t square the pi in the denominator of my expression for the radius).

To try to cut myself some slack, it was early in the morning after all, and I was going more speedily than was probably advisable, since I only have a limited amount of time to do and post these things in the AM.  I suppose we all have a limited time every morning; if anyone out there has unlimited time in the morning, please let us know.  That would be a staggering phenomenon.

Of course, if time is continuous and infinitely divisible (our best understanding of the universe seems to say it is not, but that’s not absolutely certain) then one could, in a sense, have unlimited time, but only if one could speed up without limit, and we know you can’t do that.

Anyway…

I have been doing some exercises on Brilliant dot org this week‒at least one little set a day‒so that’s an accomplishment of sorts.  I’m in the midst of several courses, but lately I’ve mostly been doing the vectors course‒it’s really just a basic review for me so far, but reviewing is good, because I want to get on to linear algebra and tensors and matrices because there is a question in Special/General Relativity that I would like to solve for myself if I am ever able.  That’s probably a pipe dream, because my attention meanders to too many other things too often.

That’s why my former routine to write my fiction during my commute worked‒it wasn’t a debatable thing, it was just what I did every morning.  That worked pretty well, or, well, at least it was productive.  I don’t know if my stories are actually good to anyone else but me, and honestly, neither does anyone else, in general.  It’s possible (however unlikely) that my books and stories are the greatest works of literature ever produced on Earth, but since next to no one has ever read any of them, almost no one will ever know.

Of course, now I have this routine, which I guess one could continue to call productive.  It’s certainly productive of relatively frequent blog posts.  That plus about ten bucks’ll get you a descamisado coffee* at Starbucks®.  It’s not as though anyone is ever going to while away an afternoon reading my old blog posts, but it’s just conceivable that someone might read one of my novels or short stories some day when they are bored.

Oh, well, whataya gonna do?  I’m very tired and sapped of motivation to do much of anything.  I wish I could even imagine a positive future for me, but honestly, I don’t really imagine the future at all.  You might think that’s just good “mindfulness” or, well, a “living in the present moment” thing.  But I think it’s just the current set-point of that function in my brain, to no credit of my will.

Anyway, I’m tired, and not just of work or the blog.  I want to go to sleep, but that’s one of the most difficult things for me to do.

I hope all of you, at least, have a peaceful and good rest of your weekend, and a good rest of your life while you’re at it.  As long as I’m hoping, I might as well hope big, right?

*I’m pretty sure that’s not actually one of their drink names or sizes, but they do use such pretentious and absurd names for the sizes of their beverages that they should be ridiculed mercilessly until they go back to “small”, “medium”, and “large”.  Do coffee shops (or the equivalent) in other countries use slightly twisted versions of the English “small”, “medium”, and “large” to describe the sizes of their beverages?  Probably some of them do.  People are so stupid.

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It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s not even about everyone.

It’s Friday today (as I write this, anyway‒it may be another day entirely as you read it), and I am in the process of heading to work.  I will also be working tomorrow, barring (as ever) the unforeseen.  And that doesn’t just include the foreseen unforeseen; the unforeseen unforeseen (especially that one) can also change what happens tomorrow, in ways that we do not expect, more or less by definition.

Of course, the Tao te Ching advises us to act without expectation, and I suppose that’s pretty good advice.  The universe doesn’t make special deals, such that if you do some particular thing, it will definitely turn out the way you hope.  The universe does what it has always done, and you are not the subject or the object of its action‒you are just one of the innumerable things the universe does.  It did not have to ask your permission, and it will not apologize.  It also does not make exceptions, not as far as anyone can see.

 

Since the beginning

not one unusual thing

has ever happened*.

 

You can imagine and draw a map that looks any way you want, that contains fairy lands and misty mountains and roads that are shorter in one direction than another**, but if your map doesn’t match the actual territory, it’s not going to be useful for traveling through that territory safely and successfully (by whatever reasonable criteria you might judge success).  Likewise, blank spots on the map don’t imply blank spots in the territory, and writing “here be dragons” does not somehow conjure dragons into existence (alas).

Reality is that which actually exists, whether or not anyone “believes” it or “believes in it”, whether or not anyone has been, is now, or ever will be aware of it.  Heck, if eternal inflation and a consequent inflationary multiverse following (for instance) the string landscape are true, then the vast majority of the stuff of reality will never, ever be known, because most of it‒the ever-expanding inflaton field and those bubble universes where local laws are such that complexity cannot exist, as well as those huge stretches of even our universe that precede (or follow) any existence of life‒will never be accessible to conscious experience.

That’s okay.  Man is not the measure (nor the measurer) of all things.  Man is the measure of almost nothing.  Man‒indeed, all life of which we know‒is a tiny little epiphenomenon that exists in a tiny little sphere of nonzero thickness on and around the surface of the Earth.  I’ll try to remember to do the math comparing that volume to the volume of the visible universe and put it in a footnote below.  If it’s not there, I didn’t do it***.

One sometimes hears people say‒often they seem to be trying to make excuses for themselves to believe in some deity or other‒that the universe is exquisitely tuned for life, such that it requires explanation by some “supernatural” means.

When I hear or read such things, my reaction is, “What universe are you looking at?!?”  Almost no place in the universe can be survived by life as we know it, let alone produce it.  The fraction is so close to nonexistent that it is zero to a good first approximation, and a good second approximation, and a good third, and so on.

It may seem that time could possibly give us a bit more comfort than space does, since life on Earth has existed between roughly a fourth and a third of the time since our Big Bang.  But the future of this universe gives every indication of being without end, whereas conditions for large scale matter to exist‒as far as we can tell‒will not last long (not compared to infinity, which to be fair, nothing is, not even TREE(3) or Graham’s number or any other huge but finite numbers).

By the time the last supermassive black holes finish evaporating due to Hawking radiation, which will be about a googol years, things will already have been impossible for any kind of life we would recognize for eons of eons.

Of course, it’s conceivable that life will grow to become cosmically important and able to engineer specific ways for the universe to avoid heat death (or whatever is coming), or to make new universes, or whatever.  But that’s a mightily narrow course for the future to thread.

And the time until a straightforward Poincaré recurrence of the current state of our universe makes a googol years seem unnoticeably teensy by comparison.

Anyway, the main point I’m making, if there is one, is that the universe neither promises nor owes you anything.  That doesn’t mean it’s not okay for things to be important to you.  You matter (on the scales we’ve been considering) nearly as much as the whole Andromeda galaxy.

It’s fine for you to try to make your life what you want it to be.  Why not?  There’s no one else who has any legitimate claim to it (not counting children, friends, etc., all of whom could be considered part of “what you want it to be”).  Just don’t expect other people, let alone the vastly bigger number of things that are not people, to be also trying to make your life the way you want it to be.

Okay, that’ll do, pig.  I’m tired (What else is new?).  I’ll most likely write a post tomorrow.  I hope you have a good day.

*I got this haiku from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationality: From AI to Zombies, though I am not sure if it originated with him.

**Actually, I’m not sure how you would draw that.

***I did it, though I initially made a mistake in calculating the surface area of the Earth, as you can see below if you look closely (I forgot to square pi in the denominator).  Anyway, assuming that the depth-to-height range of life on Earth is about 20 km, then the volume for life as we know it is about 1 x 10^19 cubic meters.  The volume of the visible universe on the other hand is 2.6 x 10^81 cubic meters (if my calculations are correct).  That means that the fraction of the universe that is, to our knowledge, amenable to life is 3.8 x 10^(-63), or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000038 of the volume of the universe.  By comparison, the fraction of your volume represented by one of your tens of trillions of cells is roughly 10^(-12), or .000000000001.  You lose thousands of cells every proverbial time you scratch your nose.  How much do you notice them?  How much less would the universe notice if it scratched all life off?

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Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft blogged without merit, and lost without deserving

Hello and good morning; it’s Thursday, the 9th.  By that I don’t mean, for instance, the 9th Symphony by Beethoven or the 9th rule of Fight Club.  No, it’s the 9th of April in 2026 AD/CE.

I’m not sure if any of you would have suspected anything like those first two possibilities, but just in case, I figured I would rule them out.

Now, before I forget:  if any of you use Facebook and/or Threads, and if you wouldn’t mind being associated (indirectly) with my work, would you mind sharing the links to my blog posts there from time to time?  I traditionally shared my posts on those venues after writing them, but obviously I cannot do that now.

It’s up to you, of course.  Like a badly broken barometer, there’s no pressure.

Okay, well, that ought to be out of the way for today.  But, well, it is an ongoing request, in that I request for it not just today, but any time you have the chance and feel so inclined.  I would greatly appreciate it.  If you do it, and you want to come here and let me know, by all means, do a bit of showing off.

Though I don’t know whether it could honestly, fairly be considered “showing off”, at least as things are right now.  Nevertheless, sometime in the future, I may become famous (or perhaps notorious) and it will be a mark of honor, or at least of interest, that you were one of the few dozen people who regularly followed my blog from way back when (i.e., now).

I don’t know what I might do that would lead to me being famous (or notorious), but considering some of the otherwise highly unimpressive people who are famous* (or notorious) I’d say I at least have a fair shot.

On to other matters that are randomly (or at least chaotically) bringing themselves to the front of my mind.

I saw the early express train go by the station this morning, only a short bit ago as I write this.  That train doesn’t stop at my station, but instead zooms by at nearly full speed.  It’s rather unusual to be so close to a fast moving train, and it really makes you feel how apparently tenuous the power of the train tracks is.  It really, really feels as though the train is not truly secure in its movement, but could instead slide off at any second, very easily, and cause a catastrophe.

Our intuitive feelings about such things are hard to ignore‒I half brace myself for a derailment almost every time such trains pass.  But the empirical, all but irrefutably powerful, fact remains that countless trains travel along tracks, some at quite high speeds, every day (but usually not twice on Sundays), and derailment is almost a non-occurrence.  Clearly, the physics and engineering principles at work here are doing their jobs very well.

It’s good, I think, to take a glance at these seemingly mundane (because we have become accustomed to them) things that happen around us and to contemplate either their solidity despite our misgivings and inability to internalize what’s happening, or the truly remarkable things happening underneath occurrences that may seem unremarkable.

This is one of the things I really like about the YouTube channel “The Slo Mo Guys”.  In their videos, one gets to see physical processes slowed down to astonishing degrees sometimes.  But even the more “run-of-the-mill” slow motion videos can let one appreciate the intricacy of so many things happening below the level of perception in ordinary phenomena.

Also, many of the things one can see in slomo remind me of how slowly the galaxies and clusters and stars within galaxies move from our point of view, whereas if seen from outside, by beings for whom a million years is like a second, they would seem much like the splashes of water from popping balloons (for instance) when we look at it as if through one of the Phantom™ high-speed cameras.

Okay, well, that was indeed a fairly stochastic blog post, wasn’t it?  I’ll call it good now‒at least in the sense that it is done, if not in the sense of quality.  Thank you in advance*** if you do share the links to the post on your social media.

TTFN

*This is not meant to imply that all famous (or even notorious) people are unimpressive; that is not the case.  There are people who are famous for being exceptionally good at certain things, like sports or acting or singing or writing.  And there are also people who have done great work in science or technology or medicine and so on (No, starting a social media company in and of itself is not necessarily impressive, at least not to me, though there is no doubt that it requires certain skills…but when it comes to such a company’s success, as with so many things, a lot of it is luck**).  Many times fame is well and truly earned.  But many times it is not.

**I read a good book called Fooled by the Winners that addresses this issue as one of its main theses.  I think it would be good for everyone to think clearly and specifically about the way “survivor bias” misleads us and can give us a faulty notion of how aspects of the world work.

***I would/will also gladly thank you after the fact; don’t think that I’m prethanking in order not to have to say thank you later.

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Reality, calories, and joules, oh my!

I had a moment of idle curiosity this morning just before starting to write this.  I recalled the bit of trivia that the average human power output/consumption is something around 80 or 100 Watts.  I wasn’t sure which was more typical, but it doesn’t really matter; the numbers are well within the same order of magnitude, despite having nominally different numbers of digits.

Anyway, I decided to convert that into kilocalories* per day, just to confirm that the typically described numbers match up, because if they don’t, then something very strange is going on.

A Watt is a joule per second**, so to figure out how much energy output (in joules) there is in or from a human per day, you just multiply the watts times the number of seconds in a day (24 hours per day x 60 minutes per hour x 60 seconds per minute, or 86,400 seconds per day).  Multiply that by the above-noted wattage and you get between about 6 and 8 million joules per day.

Now, there are 4,184 joules per kilocalorie, so dividing that into the number of joules yields:  roughly between 1600 and 2000 kilocalories a day, which matches the data on basal metabolic rates.  Neat.

Of course, they must match up, otherwise there would clearly be some major logical inconsistencies in our understanding of such thermodynamicalish matters.  I don’t suspect that such a mismatch would have survived the scrutiny of scientists much longer than a snowball would last in a blast furnace; in other words, I consider textbook level physics to be pretty darn reliable.  Nevertheless, it is good occasionally to check even such basic things, just to confirm for yourself that your understanding of reality is internally consistent and consistent with that which is measured and described by other people.

This is not to say that I worry about whether my “reality” is significantly different than that of other people.  I don’t.  While I have no doubt that the specific details of my personal experience are unique, this is so only in rather trivial ways.

I’ve not encountered any occurrence or argument that made me doubt whether everyone around me is subject to the same laws of physics as those to which I am subject.  Of course, if tasked or merely bored, I can conceive of ways in which all that I think I know is illusory and/or delusional, as in the argument that precedes the cogito in Descartes’s most famous (non-mathematical) work.

With a bit of effort, one can almost always imagine ways in which the world could be deeply different than it seems.  I’ve been known to do that at length‒indeed, at book length‒myself.  But the fact that a thing can be imagined is not a reason, by itself, to promote a concept into “might actually be true” space.  Presumably, there are limitless such things that could be imagined, but almost by definition (at least as I am using the word) there is only one reality.

Reality, as far as I can see, cannot contradict itself; actual paradoxes cannot be instantiated.  I’d probably be prepared to bet my life on those propositions.  But even if reality could contradict itself, that would also be a fact about reality.  Whatever reality is, it is.

That’s trivial, of course, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded of the trivial things that one carries in one’s background knowledge but rarely considers or reconsiders‒things like the interchangeability of measures of energy and power and heat between different units.

With that full circle moment, I’m going to finish for today.  I’m still very tired, and I’m rather discouraged and despondent and probably other d-words as well.  This blog is all I really do, anymore, but my energy is lagging even for this.  At least I don’t need to do payroll today, since I had to get it done early yesterday…which fact I found out yesterday.

Oh, well.  Please do what you can to have a good day.  And remember, there is no do or do not.  There is only try.

*This is what we call “calories” when speaking of human energy intake and output, but a single “true” calorie is the amount of energy (heat) required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade (or, well, Kelvin if you want to be pedantish).  A kilocalorie, or what we commonly call a calorie, is enough to raise a kilogram of water 1 degree Kelvin.

**A joule being the unit of energy in “SI” units.  A joule (energy) is the integral of force with respect to distance, or a Newton-meter.  A Newton is the measure of force, and is a kilgram-meter/ second-squared.  So joules have the units kilogram-(meter squared)/second squared.  Watts (a measure of power, or energy per unit time) are joules per second, which fact gives us the fun, lovely phenomenon of having cubic seconds in the denominator of the equation!

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“I find myself growing fatigued, Doctor.”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Tuesday, and here I am writing another blog post.  Huzzah.

I’m rather tired today, which I guess shouldn’t be that surprising, given that I have chronic trouble sleeping.  Still, some days hit me worse than others, for reasons that are probably multifactorial and are certainly difficult to tease apart.  And today, so far, seems to be one of the “I feel more tired than usual by a noticeable margin” days.  You’ve probably all had such days, though you may not have used that specific term for them*.

There is some good news, news that in a way is not world news but is extraterrestrial news, at least temporarily:  the Artemis mission has flown ‘round the far side of the moon, and in so doing has brought humans farther away from Earth even than Apollo 13 did; this is now the farthest humans have ever been.

It’s quite momentous, but the fact of this mission and its (so far) success, raises questions.  I suspect the answers to them are disappointingly trivial, however.  For instance, why was there such a delay in returning to the Moon after the last time in 1972?  The answer to that is at least somewhat clear when one poses the related question:  why did we work so hard to go to the Moon back in the late 60s/early 70s?

Of course, the main reasons were:  primate dominance/hierarchy drives, writ large across the planet.  The Apollo program was, in a barely metaphorical sense, the ultimate dick-measuring contest, and the USA won that one pretty clearly at the time (“Mine reaches all the way to the Moon and back, how ‘bout yours, motherf#cker?”).  The fact that the Soviet Union basically admitted defeat in that region in that round is but one piece among the mountains of evidence confirming that, yes Victoria, humans did indeed land on the Moon.

It wasn’t for purely scientific reasons, though.  In fact, the science at the time took a very distant, rear-facing-storage-area-of-the-station-wagon place compared to the politics that was in the driver’s seat.

Alas, human nature being what it seems to be, perhaps truly amazing innovation and advancement is simply much more likely to occur during conflict (literal and figurative).  Maybe even the Beatles, for instance, were so great at least partly because of the (usually friendly) competitiveness between John and Paul, and also George once he found his considerable mojo.  Ringo was the Samwise Gamgee/Bodhisattva of the group, which seems appropriate for a drummer.

Humans presumably have always had the capacity to make the many scientific discoveries and technological advancements that have occurred in recent centuries.  But they needed to have an impetus before anyone would get anything done.  The two strongest inherent drives are survival and reproduction, and those drives interact and accumulate as humans gather in larger numbers, and they sublimate into national competitiveness‒for wealth and power, for luxury, for prestige, for all that nonsense.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could deliberately control our motivation?  We have crude means of affecting it already‒caffeine and various other stimulants‒but these are blunt yet jagged tools.  In principle, microelectrodes could be implanted into something like the nucleus accumbens or the reticular activating system or more well-chosen, finely tuned areas of the nervous system.  Then one could use a remote control to give oneself motivation when desired (?).  Presumably, other mental states could be manipulated, encouraged, discouraged, etc.  Just watch out that no one else gets their hands on your remote control!

Maybe it would be better to have a helmet with various directed electromagnets to stimulate specific brain regions at will.  This process is already in use in relatively simple form**, but it could be honed and made more precise and more powerful and useful.  It would be nice to be able to have large-scale motivation that didn’t require the tendency toward large-scale destruction.

It may be an inevitable challenge.  Powerful forces can inherently have very good and/or very bad effects depending on circumstances and, of course, depending on what one means by “good” and “bad”.

Not to say that we couldn’t rather easily be doing things better than we are.  We could.  But…it seems we aren’t sufficiently motivated to do so.

*If you did, that would be truly surprising.  It would be so surprising, in fact, that if you told me it was the case, I would more strongly suspect some manner of deception or illusion or delusion or cognitive bias than that it was actually true (this is reminiscent of Hume’s test for the veracity of supposed miracles).

**And is involved in the plot of my book(s) Unanimity, Books 1 and 2.

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Shall you this fond pageant see?

It’s Monday again.  It is as I write this, anyway.  Maybe it’s not Monday when you’re reading it.  Who knows, maybe you’re living at some point in the relatively far future in which the human race‒or their computer overlords‒has abolished Mondays because they are too unpleasant.

Of course, then you’d just move the problem to the next day, leading it to be the unpleasant beginning of the week, because it’s not what day it is that presents a problem, it is the function of the day, if you will.  In this case, that means the day serving as the beginning of the “work week”.  Still, even future humans might be foolish enough not to recognize that fact, based on my experience with past and present humans.

Actually, based on the nature of current “AI” and how it functions and is grown, I wouldn’t be much more surprised if they made the same mistake.  Careful, logical reasoning is not necessarily in the nature of so-called deep neural networks and the like.  Indeed, the ability to reason abstractly may have arisen in humans precisely because they needed to be able to convince their tribemates of various things, and also to avoid being taken in by a tribemate trying to convince them of something that was not in their best interests.  As with so many attributes of life, even the ability to reason was probably born of a kind of arms race.

Heavy sigh.  Ah, well, great things can arise even from inauspicious beginnings.

I started my post a little late this morning because I’ve been moving slowly, both mentally and physically.  I’m kind of wiped out, and I have been all weekend; I could hardly get anything done.  I guess this is one of those times when I ought to be grateful that there’s no one to nag me (or cajole me, or encourage me, or what have you).  Honestly though, having such a person around is underrated, I think.

I had a stretch starting about two weeks ago or so in which my back and joint pain seemed to have calmed down a lot, and mere moving didn’t even hurt.  As a consequence, my mood and optimism improved a bit, and I even started to feel like I might be able to like myself to some degree.

Ha ha ha!  Lord, what a fool this mortal be.

Starting when I got sick, which I think I have mentioned more than once, I got a re-flare of my pain, and it has come back with a vengeance.  During the course of the latter part of this last work week, I took a fair amount of extra pain medicine of various (legal) types (I don’t even know how one locates “street fentanyl” or the like, let alone how one could feel confident that it is what it claims to be) and maybe that’s what’s taking the wind out of my sails.  Certainly my kidneys and stomach and probably my liver are not terribly chuffed about the work they have to do dealing with lots of NSAIDs and Tylenol and CBD and topical lidocaine and menthol and all that stuff.

Listless shrug.  It is what it is.  My flare is tapering a bit at this point, at least.  I don’t like to anticipate it getting better (nor it getting worse) but I try to be optimistic, at least for me.  It is simply true that my pain could get better and stay relatively good for a while (and it could go the other way), and I will only find out as it happens.

Whether or not all of you will find out depends very much on the degree to which I share it here.  Of course, no one who sees things only on any of the Meta-owned social media will find out, because (obviously enough) I’m not able to share anything there anymore.  Maybe the occasional (very) odd person might find my stuff via Bluesky and Substack and TWFKAT, but if so, it’s hard to tell.

Whatever the case with respect to those matters, I am still just kind of tired and mentally enervated, so I’m not feeling too enthusiastic here.  I don’t really have anything good or interesting to report.  Nothing is happening in my life other than the steady cranking of the entropy machine, doing what it does.

Sorry.  The pain is very discouraging.  When it ebbs, I can even start to feel like my old self again, the “me” from thirty or more years ago.  But though I keep trying new things and approaches, and sometimes I even get some good results, it doesn’t seem prone to ebb* for very long at a time.

Okay, well, let’s wrap this up.  I hope you all had a good holiday (or are having a good holiday) and that you and those you love are doing well.  Unless I’m lucky, I expect I’ll write a post tomorrow.

*The more often I say “ebb” the more it feels as though I’m saying the name of some character‒perhaps some mountain man‒from The Dukes of Hazzard or The Andy Griffith Show.

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The forecast calls for uncertainty

It’s Friday now (as I write this, anyway), and I think that I will have tomorrow off.  But, as some of you may have noticed, the specific plans about my work Saturdays are subject to rather erratic change.  It’s quite annoying; I don’t really like unexpected changes to plan.  I particularly don’t like them when I don’t agree with the reasoning behind them.

Of course, our two most consistently top salespeople at the office contracted when they came aboard not to work on any weekends.  And, as I said, they are consistently our best.  Could there be a causal connection between those facts?  Well, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, of course, but enough correlation should at least shift your credences.

Unfortunately, humans are not naturally good at probability and statistics.  This is part of why I think the subject(s) should be taught in standard education, starting quite early.  Though the subject(s) can be somewhat counterintuitive, the mathematics is not really all that rarefied or difficult, and probability and statistics apply to so much of the world.  On the smallest scales they seem to apply fundamentally.

Anyway, I didn’t come here today to discuss probability and statistics, though obviously I enjoy the subject(s).  So, then, what have I come here today to do or to discuss?  Well, now that I think about it…there is no particular subject.  I don’t know why that should surprise any regular reader, let alone me.

It will probably not surprise you that I have not started playing on Babbel or Brilliant yet.  I do at least look at the apps frequently throughout the day, considering using them and so on.  For whatever that’s worth.

I can allow myself some excuse with Babbel, since it’s difficult to practice a language in a busy office.  But there’s no such reason not to use Brilliant.  Its teaching and exercises are set up in nice, granular ways, so you can do one problem then get called away by work, or whatever, and then go back.

I even don’t mind the rather hokey “experience point” system they use to reward you when you get an answer right.  It’s kind of fun, but it’s not too involved or taken too seriously by the app makers (or so it seems, anyway).  And I definitely have learned new things on the app in the past, and honed and renewed prior skills as well.  So it’s not a waste of time by any means.

The same cannot be as confidently said* about the various apps/sites on which I no longer have accounts.

Of course, time passes‒or whatever it is that time really does‒no matter what we do, and sometimes “wasting” it can be a fulfilling choice.  If we are metaphorical virtual particles then we can behave like them from time to time, not just heading directly to the next interaction, but maybe throwing out an electron-positron pair and then reabsorbing them before they could be detected, or going around the universe and coming at the interaction from backwards in time and behind, as it were, just to show off a bit.

Not everything has to be useful, at least not in too narrow a sense.  Usefulness, like so many things, is in the eye of the beholder.  It is certainly not a universal, general attribute of reality.  So, while it may only rarely be wise to be counterproductive from one’s own point of view, there are times when it’s good‒maybe even useful, ironically‒not to worry about whether something has any point or not.

Yeah, I’m not terribly good at doing that, either.  I don’t know how much of that is due to culture/upbringing and how much of it is genetic or at least neurodevelopmental.  I’d guess it’s not too far from 50/50, but I would not be shocked to find the full truth surprising.

Regarding whether to worry about app usefulness or lack thereof and whether to spend time on the ones that I will have wished I spent time on, well, it’s been said that wisdom, at least a form of it, is the ability to follow your own advice (i.e., the advice you would give to someone else if they were in your circumstances).  I think most people would be able to recognize that, by that particular definition, we are all quite unwise, quite often.

Okay, well, I’ll start to wrap this up.  I really should not be working tomorrow, but if I do, I will almost certainly write a post.  It’s quite unlikely‒I would call it less than 20% likely‒that I will work, but we shall see.  You can check in if you’re “in the neighborhood”.  Don’t look for my posts to be shared on Facebook or Threads anymore, but I do share them on Substack and Bluesky and TWFKAT.  And you can always find them here, directly, and comment if you wish.

Have a good weekend in any case.  That’s an order!

*Well, it can be said, but talk is cheap mother f#cker.  Rather often, people say they are confident and act sure about situations or information that they cannot know with confidence.  I always consider this unwarranted confidence to be a “red flag”, a warning sign that this person’s judgment is unreliable.