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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.

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I have rather blogged as mine own jealous curiosity than as a very pretence and purpose of unkindness.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 2nd of April in 2026 AD/CE, the 1st Thursday in April this year.  It has to be the first one.  Any date that is the 7th or lower has to be the first whatever day in a given month.

That’s probably fairly obvious, but I think it can be useful to review‒from time to time‒the patterns of things that are “obvious”.  It’s not likely that one will discover that these seemingly obvious things are oversimplified and not so obvious after all, but at least one will gain a slightly deeper feel for the things, rather than simply going through life with a bunch of predigested “facts” which one has never examined seriously.

That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  I don’t know if it’s deep or anything, but it’s at least a good-sounding excuse for me to overthink and overanalyze things as I am prone to do by nature.

I still have no indication that my Meta-based accounts are anything but permanently disabled.  Then again, I probably wouldn’t expect to have such an indication, since I haven’t even tried to use them.  I very quickly uninstalled the Meta-based apps I had on my phone (Threads and Instagram‒I did not have the Facebook app, because when I tried installing it once, it rapidly became very annoying, and I uninstalled it forthwith).

I miss some of the interactions on Threads a bit, but although I enjoyed following the exploits of some other people on there, no one actually paid any attention to me.  Even when I shared or posted words of distress and self-destructive feelings, almost no one even saw them, let alone providing any kind of support.

Not that this is an unusual situation, of course.  It certainly wasn’t unique to Threads, nor to Instagram*.  It’s not as though anyone on Bluesky or Substack has expressed any concern for my wellbeing.  So, I shouldn’t unfairly vilify the Z(f)uckerverse.  It is what it is.

But I came up with the term “metaverse” (dammit!) years and years ago, intending to use it to refer to the broader, connected reality of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, as well as other works of my fiction, going all the way back to Ends of the Maelstrom, the first sci-fi/fantasy (or any genre) novel I ever finished.

That novel, all handwritten, is now lost, of course, along with all but a smattering of everything I ever had up to 2012.  So, the loss of, for instance, Facebook, is really just more of the same, and not even very much of that.  What’s Facebook compared to the cello I’d had since high school, or the piano (an unused one they’d had for many years) I’d been given by my in-laws when I graduated medical school, or the thousands of books and comic books I’d accumulated since I was very young?

Okay, so, if it’s so relatively minor, this debacle regarding Facebook et al, why am I harping on about it?

Well, it has only been three or four days.  I’m sure I’ll get bored of it soon.  But I still hold a deep grudge against the Zuckster for “stealing” that term from me, though I do recognize that I had no actual, reasonable, proprietary right to it.  It’s just frustrating, and he is the source of that frustration, however unintentional it was with respect to me.

I don’t really hold too much against him for the foibles of his social media, and only feel slightly ill-used for having been kicked off them.  I can use my time in better ways.

However, I did not open Brilliant or Babbel yesterday, despite my wish to get more use out of them.  I didn’t even get on Arxiv to see what’s going on in physics/math/computer science papers lately, which can often be intriguing.  I once found a paper by David Deutsch on there, and I could even follow it, more or less, though the mathematical formalism was a bit outside my expertise.

No, I’m afraid I have not yet been able to turn my mind toward more long-term-interesting and beneficial matters.  But my life isn’t over yet, at least not as I write this.  I suppose, depending upon when you read this, my life may be over.  Indeed, I aspire to have the sort of durability in my writing such that, eventually, more people will have read my work after my death than before.  I would, in fact, prefer it to be orders of magnitude more.

I won’t be around to know it, of course, but no one ever is.  That doesn’t mean that hopes for things to happen after one has died are necessarily irrational.  We just need to recognize that it’s not our future selves that we’re actually serving.  We are serving the image of our future selves that we have in the present.  But that’s all we ever really do.  Despite the words of Ted Stryker in Airplane II (see 1:19) the future never arrives; everything is always the present.

TTFN

*Which, to be fair to it, has delivered several times a pop-up screen saying that “someone thinks you might need some help” or something, and gave me links to support ideas and the suicide crisis line.  Mind you, they were links to things I’ve tried before, multiple times**, and none have been terribly helpful, but at least Instagram’s “heart” was in the right place.

**Of course, even something that has never happened could technically be said to have happened “multiple times”; it’s simply that the multiple is zero, and anything but a gleeb*** multiplied by zero gives you zero.  But that’s not the spirit of the expression.

***A gleeb is a number (or concept, I suppose) that I invented long ago.  A gleeb multiplied by zero equals one.  I worked through some of the algebra of it while I was “up the road” and it’s rather interesting.  For instance, a gleeb taken to any positive power is still just a gleeb.

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April, come she has. No contradictions allowed.

Well, it’s the first of April, so‒April Fools!  Except that, given that it is April Fools’ (Fool’s?) Day, to say April Fools about the fact that it is April 1st would be contradictory.  It’s rather like the self-paradoxical statement:  “This sentence is a lie”.  Because if that sentence is a lie, then it is not a lie, but that would mean that it is a lie, but that would mean that it isn’t, and so on.

Of course, one can write paradoxical things down any time one wishes.  That doesn’t constrain or harm actual reality in any way whatsoever.  Words‒and written language especially‒are the single greatest human invention, but they are not literally magical.  No matter how much hatred you try to put behind it, or what manner of “wand” you use, shouting Avada kedavra will never kill anyone or anything*.

And while we can imagine that the world would be much more polite if words could directly cause things to manifest‒including paradoxes‒I think we can all feel pretty glad that people can’t kill us just by telling us to drop dead.

So, make up all the paradoxical sentences that you might like; no actual paradoxes can exist.  If you come to a point of cognitive dissonance, you should probably focus on the fact of that discomfort and try to sort it out.  People can “believe” two or more contradictory things (sometimes before breakfast) but they cannot be right about more than one (though they can be wrong about all of them).

Anyway, enough of that nonsense.  It’s mildly engaging, but not terribly durable as a topic, or so it seems to me at this moment.

I am still (as far as I know) unable to use any of Fuckerberg’s apps, and to be honest, I haven’t even tried since before the last time I wrote about it.  It’s annoying, to some degree, to lose access to some entertainment, but it’s not as though I had any right to their use.  I was not the customer, I was the product, as is the case with all of you, too, if you use your social media for free.  Facebook et al sell advertisers access to and information about you.

Now, if I had been kicked off some service for which I had paid and for which I was paying, then I would have a beef**.

Speaking of paid services, what I really should do‒what I want to crave doing‒is to spend those moments that I would spend looking at funny reels on Instagram or whatever doing stuff on Brilliant dot org.  I pay for that service, and it is very good.  I also have a lifetime subscription to Babbel, which I obtained to try to encourage myself to learn more languages (duh!).

So, at some level, at the frontal lobe level, I want to use those sites and their services, to hone and increase my skills.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have contracted the services.  But in any given moment, the activation energy required to begin using them is higher than that for doing other, less beneficial things.

But maybe now that will be a bit different.  Maybe now that differential, that equilibrium, will shift.  I mean, it’s almost certain that it has shifted, or has begun to shift.  It’s all but impossible for one to remove a large factor from a situation that is in dynamic near-equilibrium and to have that near-equilibrium remain unchanged.

I hope that I shall be able to make use of this to improve my mind‒at least to improve my abilities, if not the overall nature of the thing.  At least it would be good if I get some more such use in.

I will miss the sort-of-social-circles one can have and the connection with old friends and distant family members on social media, however tenuous and removed and even occasionally illusory it might be.

I don’t socialize in real life, other than at work during the working day, and that’s a limited thing.  So I feel a little worried about being more disconnected from larger society.  We all know what happened to Melkor when he spent too much time in the Void, away from his brethren, and started to develop thoughts…unlike theirs.

Well, maybe we don’t all know, but read The Silmarillion if you wish to learn more.  It’s really good.

I guess I always have this blog and those who follow it, at least (and that’s no small thing).  I am concerned that some people who only see the blog via Facebook or Threads might not get to interact with it now.  But they are all hereby encouraged to leave a comment or two below.  I welcome them.  Seriously.

That’s all I have to say about that for right now.  I hope you all have an excellent day.

*Unless maybe you swallow a small insect or similar when you open your mouth.  I don’t think that’s how people imagine “the killing curse” working however.

**I’ve been aware of and have occasionally used this expression for as long as I can remember, but it does sound very weird if you listen to it as if from an outsider’s perspective.  “Wait.  You have a…beef?  You have a beef?  What the hell are you talking about?”

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I Meta traveler from an antique land…

I brought the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday, but I’m writing this on my smartphone even so.  Part of the reason for that is that the way I have to sit in the train to use the lapcom can sometimes put tension on my hips and back and knees, and I’m already having a particularly bad 36 hours (so far) with my chronic pain.  This is on top of being still sick and then also having had all of my “Meta™” based accounts‒Facebook, Instagram, Threads‒permanently disabled.

Yes, that’s right, I did the little appeal button thing and in very short order (a time so short that we know that no sentient being was involved in the entire process) it was denied and my accounts were permanently disabled.  I did put in a request for a downloadable file with all my info but that hasn’t worked so far‒the only link I received requires me to access my no-longer-existing account to get my data.

I’m sure there’s some legal process through which one could go if one wanted truly to fight the thing.  Lawsuits could be filed.  Or, what would be more satisfying, Luca Brasi could be sent to visit.  But though vengeance is always attractive, I don’t have the energy even to fantasize about it right now.

Honestly, I’ve lost everything I literally, physically had more than once* in the past 20 years.  This virtual stuff is chicken shit.

I enjoyed the sites mentioned, of course.  It was fun watching cosplayers and seeing funny memes and the various video rants on Instagram.  Facebook was nice for seeing what people from my past are doing and keeping in vague contact with them.  Threads was actually, literally useful for my mental health on at least one occasion.

But beyond the basic, straightforward bit, I’m sure as gravity not going to fight to try to keep them in my life.  If they want me gone then I want to be gone even more.  Actually, no, that isn’t really how I feel, that’s merely a bit of rhetoric.  I just don’t see those things as part of my identity, so while their loss is a disappointment, that’s one of the fundamental features of life:  it is inherently unsatisfactory.  I don’t see how it could be otherwise.

It is curious that only the Meta® platforms gave me grief.  I still have Bluesky, and The Website Formerly Known as Twitter, and Substack, and of course, here (WordPress).  You would think that the people at Meta℠ wanted to promote their competitors.

Or, perhaps, someone in other venues is hacking existing Meta©-based accounts, posting flagrantly inappropriate things, and getting all sorts of people kicked off those accounts so they’ll be forced to use one (or more) of the others.  It’s diabolical!

Not really, of course.  It’s actually more pathetic than anything else.  Or it would be, if it were happening, which I doubt it is.  Still, humans compete over sillier/stupider things than that in order to jockey for position in their particular baboon flange.  It would take a lot for them to shock me.

Given that I am, perforce, not using Instagram, maybe I should try TikTok, what do you think?

Not likely.  I’ve never felt seriously interested in that venue, though I gather it has similarities with Instagram.  It just feels like “more of the same”.  And I have some things in common with the “antagonist” of my short story Penal Colony, in that social media can be briefly engaging for me, but I get tired of it pretty quickly.

I use YouTube a lot, but that’s because it has actual, full-scale content, educational or entertaining or both, requiring an actual attention span.  I’ve learned a lot via YouTube, and I’ve had a lot of laughs, sometimes both at the same time.  But eventually, even I can only rewatch the same videos so many more times.  The same is true even for books, though, so no shade to YouTube there.

Substack, of course, has actual scholarly articles and discussions from serious thinkers of various stripes.  I’ve mentioned occasionally the possibility of either moving my blog there or maybe just reposting some posts there.  But that’s a lot of work, and I’m lazy (or, well, the vector magnitude of my interest is not as great as the vector magnitude of the anticipated irritation of the process).

Who knows, maybe this will be a beneficial occurrence?  Then again, almost anything can be seen as beneficial depending on what measure of beneficence one uses.  As the saying goes, “it’s an ill wind that blows no man any good”.  Something has to be very, very bad indeed in order for no one and nothing at any level to benefit from it.

There are many paths to pretty much any destination, and the quality of one’s own path, judged retrospectively, is a measure that is heavily subject to cognitive biases.  This in itself can be useful, though it isn’t always so.

Anyway, for now, don’t look for me on Facebook or Threads or Instagram.  I’ll share these posts via Bluesky and Substack and X, but you can always find them here where you are now.  If you want to “message” me, well, the comments below are always open (within reason).

I hope you have a good day.

*Really, more than twice, depending on how completely and irrevocably lost one requires everything to be to count is a member of that set.

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My Meta-based accounts have been suspended

This is just a very brief follow-up post to note to those following that my Instagram account has been deleted due to supposed violations of “community standards”, though I’m dipped if I know how that could be.  I hardly post anything “new” to Instagram; I share other peoples’ stuff a fair amount and I comment occasionally, and I look at other accounts, but I don’t know what I might have done to violate such supposed “Standards”.  Also, my Facebook and Threads accounts are “suspended” because of the association, but I have no information on what the basis for this is.  If any of you know how to contact actual humans through meta and/or Facebook or what have you, I would be delighted to know.

If I cannot sort this out, I may need to make a new Facebook account and consider a new possible Instagram account, but though I enjoy scrolling through it, I have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing.  Still, that’s right now.  I may change my mind over time (see my post from this morning).

I’m feeling quite frustrated and stressed out.  It’s not quite as bad as being arrested and charged and threatened with long prison time to get me to accept a plea deal for shorter prison time, but it definitely calls up emotions and stress related to that truly horrible series of events that is still crippling my life.

I’m very tired of all this.  But I have no other regular, frequent connections except through those venues and this one, to some extent.

If anyone has any helpful information, I would welcome it.

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“We would zig-zag our way through the boredom and pain”

It’s Monday again; indeed, it is the last Monday in March in 2026 (AD/CE), for whatever that’s worth.  This Monday shall never come again.

Then again, of course, no Monday shall ever come again.  Such is the nature of time.  This is one of the facts that makes senseless the expression “That’s a [measure of time] I’m not gonna get back”.  Well, duh!  You never get any of your experienced amounts of time back.  That’s the nature of time, and the nature of its directionality, dependent upon the second law of thermodynamics.

Even if one could rewind time, one would not “get a moment back” the way people talk about it.  If, like the events of a movie or other video story, one could rewind life, it would not be you (the self who spoke of getting the moment back) who would experience the events anew.  It would just be a return to an earlier state, in which you would again be experiencing all the same events, not merely as if for the first time, but actually for the first time.  The posterior events would be erased for you as you traveled back.

It’s not like playing a video game where you can “regenerate” at your most recent save point, but you can remember what happened to your character before it “died” so that you can learn from your mistakes.  There is no one playing your character (i.e., you) and able to learn from a repeated past.  You are not the player of the game, you are the character.  You are part of the game.  You are part of the movie, not watching it from outside.  If it resets, you reset; if it rewinds, you rewind, and all memory of any events that happened disappear along with the future.

Whether or not you will repeat the same events, like the characters of a movie/show, or if you may do something different, like a video game character, is less clear, but it doesn’t much matter.  You are still going through each moment once, effectively, and you can only learn from mistakes to affect your behavior in the future.  If your mistake kills you, you’re just dead.

Even if time were a closed loop‒if the future of the universe wraps around and becomes “the past” again, forming a closed and fixed structure, as appears to be possible in principle according to General Relativity‒you won’t get to experience it as happening again.  Each time, you will experience reality for the first time.

Just as there is no fixed self looking out from behind your mind, there is no external rememberer hovering over your reality, able to experience your experiences for the first time but as if not for the first time.  You are a phenomenon within reality, not a sojourner through reality that accumulates knowledge that could be used in reliving the past, but better.

If you could rewind yourself except for your mind, somehow retaining your memory of “the future”, that would not be truly returning to the past.  Rather, it becomes the next set of events in your future.  This demands an answer to the question of how it could be possible for you to become your earlier self and yet remember your later self, since your memories are functions of your brain.

This is what makes things like Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia or brain damage so tragic‒they literally are injuries to what makes us ourselves.  If you lose all memories of your past, then in a very real sense, the person you were is already dead.

Of course, even in healthy states, without brain damage, your past self is still “dead” with every new moment that arrives.  Every time you sleep and then wake up, it may as well be that you have died and then been recreated in the morning, just with implanted memories from the previous person, the one who died.  There would be no way for you to know if there is no difference in your brain and the rest of your body.  Indeed, it’s in principle possible that this actually happens with each passing moment, or even each passing Planck time.

Only the past can be remembered.  Only the future, even in principle, can be planned and affected.  And only the ever-moving present can be experienced.  There is, of course, a continuity that is required for us to have any sense of a unified personhood at all, but as Sam Harris has pointed out (more than once) your memories of your past are merely thoughts in your mind in the present moment, as are your plans for the future.

So it really can make sense to “get over yourself”, in more than one way.  It’s worth recognizing that you’re mortal and‒whatever you may believe‒as far as we know, death is the end, and all that you were will be gone after that.  But it’s also worth recognizing that, in a nontrivial sense, each day all that you were the day before is already gone.

Still, though you are only existing for any given present moment, memory at least allows for us to learn and hopefully do better in the future than we would have if we didn’t have memory.  That’s why memory is a trait that gets selected for and is evolutionarily stable:  because its presence makes creatures with that trait or attribute more likely to survive and reproduce than those that do not have it, ceteris paribus.

As with most such subject-specific blog posts, I could go on and on about this.  A thousand (or, well, a lot of) other thoughts arise that could be expressed as I write what I do write.  But I have finite space and finite time (even if spacetime is infinite) in which to write this post, so I’ll stop here for the moment.

Welcome to the new week.  I hope it’s a good one for you.  Heck, I hope it’s a good one for everyone, even “bad” people (with the caveat that, “a good one” entails such people becoming better than they presently are).

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Sometimes drunkards walk to interesting places

Well, well, as the oil tycoon said*.  It’s Saturday now and I am actually writing a blog post, as I expected I would.  It’s been three weeks since the most recent prior Saturday morning post (not counting my “non-post” from last week).  But today, this weekend, I am going to work, and so I am writing a post.

I hope you’re proud of yourself.

Okay, well, that last sentence doesn’t really make sense in this context, but I felt the curious and rather inscrutable urge to write it, and there was no real downside to doing so, so I did.  These are the sorts of things that happen in biological, nonlinear, largely subconscious brains that are communicating using language (especially written language, in my case).

A truly efficient, direct, deliberately programmed AI (not a neural net style, LLM type of AI, but one whose algorithm is precise and understood) might not produce such erratic and seemingly peculiar thoughts.  But maybe it would.  Maybe one cannot have actual intelligence, with creativity and the like, without having a system that meanders a bit into the highly tangential.

I suspect this may be so, because in order to grow and gain new knowledge, to be creative, there has to be a capacity to embrace the unknown‒not in an H. P. Lovecraft sense, but more in a sense reminiscent of Michael Moorcock’s** character that strode into chaos and by interacting with it caused it to become a locally specific order***.

The potential paths into the future which one might, in principle, explore are functionally limitless, and may actually be infinite.  It’s not possible to evaluate them comprehensively through any kind of linear logic‒not in the time span available to the universe, anyway.  So, to work things better, there must be a bit of potential for “randomness”, for moving forward into a future that is one’s best guess, or into which one has narrowed down at least some of one’s choices.  Then one can find a “good enough” path or course of action, one which may produce insights and outcomes that were not, in practice, predictable by any finite mind.  (In a way this follows from the fact that, if you can precisely and specifically predict what insight you are going to have, then you have already had it.)

It’s a bit like evolution through natural selection, where the mutations are effectively random, but the survival of those “mutants” is not at all random, at least in the long run, on a large enough scale.  Still, there’s no pre-thinking involved, no teleology, merely “motion” that is constrained (by differential survival due to the facts of surrounding nature).

Even if one has a fairly specific goal, trying to plot out one’s way through the phase space of one’s potential future paths in a very specific and precise and preplanned course is unlikely to be doable.  It may not be preferable even if it were possible.

It may be analogous to trying to get from one location to another in, say, the same city, by following a direct, straight line from one spot to the other.  One probably won’t be able to make any progress at all for very long; buildings and streets and vehicles and the like are probably going to get in the way.  Heck, the very surface of the Earth could be an impediment to any truly straight path, since it is curved****, but we’ll stipulate that you can follow a geodesic (the shortest distance between points on a curved surface).

Anyway, if one precisely follows only a preset straight path, even if one can more or less achieve it, one misses out on many potentially beneficial but unpredictable paths.  Imagine one is heading to one’s usual, mediocre but tolerable, fast food restaurant for lunch, and one only goes straight there without even looking around.  One might well miss seeing all the many other available restaurants, some of which one may find preferable‒perhaps by a great margin‒to one’s “planned” place.

That’s a slightly tortured metaphor, and I apologize for that fact, but I hope you know what I mean.

It doesn’t do‒usually‒to try to make progress by a true random “drunkard’s” walk.  I don’t recall what particular power law the number of possible outcomes follows, but it grows very rapidly, perhaps exponentially, with each new step.  But if one keeps one’s long term goal generally in sight, and one heads in that general direction, adjusting for buildings and railroads and hills and lakes and so on, constantly assessing and, when necessary, adjusting one’s course, one can usually not only get to one’s destination rather well, but one can encounter new sights and new experiences along the way.

Some of these encounters might even make one decide to change one’s goal of travel, having found a better one (by whatever criteria) as one went along.  That’s not going to happen to someone who is dogmatically focused on only one path and only one goal.

Okay, well, that’s my rather stochastic blog post this Saturday.  I hope you are already having an excellent weekend, and that it continues to be excellent (or if it is not yet excellent, that it becomes so in short order).  Thank you for reading.

*To his son, Derrick.

**I don’t remember which character‒it’s not Elric‒or which story.  My apologies.

***Of course, as I think I’ve said before, order is not the opposite of chaos, but is rather a subset of it.

****It is.  Seriously.  There is no reasonable doubt about that fact, and it has been known to humans for at least 2200 years, since Eratosthenes calculated (correctly) the circumference of the Earth using distance along what was effectively a geodesic and the angles of two simultaneous shadows.

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Man doth not yield himself unto the angles save through the weakness of his feeble vectors

It’s Friday.  It must be, because yesterday was Thursday, and by the conventions of the modern English-speaking world, the day after Thursday is Friday.

We could have named the days differently, and if we had, then different days would follow other different days, but they would still proceed in a consistent order.  A day naming system that changes its order from day to day and week to week would not be useful at all.

Similarly, we could name the numerals and numbers differently‒the names we use are fairly arbitrary‒but that would not change the deep nature of arithmetic.  Whatever the equivalent of 2 + 2 might be, it would still equal the equivalent of 4.

That which we call arroz, by any other name, would still be rice.

I am not using the lapcom today.  I felt a bit lazy yesterday afternoon, so I didn’t bring it with me (there was already cat food in my bag, so it was somewhat heavy).  Also, I am still sick, strictly speaking; in fact, I feel slightly worse this morning than I did yesterday morning.

But I do have some regret over not bringing the computer with me, because my thumbs are rather sore.  You might think that would be enough to motivate me to bring the lapcom with me every evening, but the person I am in the evening does not necessarily appreciate what things will be like for the person I am in the morning.

Intellectually, of course, I can know what the situation will be, and I do know it, at least implicitly.  But I cannot feel it in the moment; all I can feel is the resistance to bringing it at that moment, because the immediate extra weight feels much more salient than the discomfort I might feel the following morning.

This is natural, of course.  I suspect that you experience similar disparate and antithetical drives and resistances at different times, despite what you know in your “higher” brain.

This is one of the annoying things about the fact that there is no single, stable, consistent “self”, with a single terminal goal (to use some AI-related jargon), in the minds of humans and humanoids.  There is, instead, a fluid of vectors adding together in a high-dimensional phase space, with lengths and directions that change from moment to moment* in response to changing external facts and to feedback from its own internal states.

Willpower is a function of the brain.  It varies from person to person and from moment to moment.  It is also subject to fatigue.  This has been studied with a fair degree of rigor.  People who have recently been engaged in taxing mental tasks, like solving relatively challenging math problems or similar, are less able to resist (for instance) eating an offered cookie despite being on a diet or even being diabetic.

This stuff may be fairly obvious, but in any given moment, most of us are not mindful enough of our own internal states even to be aware of what might be our current relatively depleted will.

It’s analogous to a person who does strength training with free weights in a gym.  Imagine this person comes to the gym after a hard day that involved physical labor, perhaps more than they usually do.  Or perhaps the person is ill but feels they can tough things out.  In the worst situation, this can lead to catastrophic accidents with weights that are‒at that moment‒too heavy for the person to lift, even though at other times the person may have lifted them with relative ease.  At the very least, such a person is at risk of strain and injury that could impair their ability to exercise for some time.

The mind works much like this.  The brain is an organ, a physical, biological thing, and it is prone to illness and injury and fatigue, in addition to all the software-related weirdness it can instantiate (like having conflicting and/or illogical points of view about empirical facts, and various other forms of irrationality).

This is one reason it can be useful to engender strong habits, even ones that border on the dogmatic.  Because the brain works on habit‒it being simply unworkable to try to evaluate each and every situation de novo‒if one can set up good habits, they can protect one from some catastrophes.

For instance, one of the “dogmas” of gun safety is that one should treat every firearm as if it is loaded, even if one has literally just removed all of its bullets oneself, and one should therefore never point the gun at anything (or anyone) one is not prepared to shoot.  This can feel unreasonable, and in the short term, thinking only of that instance where one has just thoroughly unloaded and checked the weapon, it may seem strictly unnecessary.

But humans are not perfect reasoners‒I suspect that nothing is, and that perfect reasoning is impossible for any finite mind‒and when fatigued, they fall into more automatic behaviors rather than thinking everything through.  This is why it is good to train such automatic behavior to be what one wants it to be when one is able to think clearly.

So, treat every gun as if it is loaded.  Buckle your seat belt for even very short trips**.  Don’t keep sweets in your house if you’re diabetic.  If you’re trying to quit smoking, don’t hang out with people who are smoking and don’t go places where cigarettes are easy to get.  Ditto for other drugs of abuse.

Speaking of which, alcohol tends to screw all those things up.  One of the key effects of alcohol on human (and other animals’) nervous systems is to decrease or diminish what can reasonably be called willpower.  This is not its only deleterious effect.

Okay, well, my thumbs are a bit sore, so I’m going to bring this to a close for the day.  It probably goes without saying‒somewhat ironically‒that there is much more that I could write on this topic.  Perhaps I’ll return to it, and to other related subject matter, tomorrow.

There really should be a blog post tomorrow, given that the previous two Saturdays were surprisingly non-working days.  But, as with a coin flip (or nearly so), previous results don’t have any impact on where the outcome will land this time.

Either way, please try to have a good weekend.

*Lawfully, but in such a complex fashion that it is effectively almost a chaotic system.

**Unless you literally don’t mind the increased risk of injury or death.  It’s possible to be in such a self-destructive state***, but if you are going to accept that risk, try to make sure you really don’t care.  It’s easy enough to imagine one doesn’t mind getting injured or killed in a traffic accident, but when one is injured‒or killed‒it is too late to change one’s preferences, and the version of you who suffers injury may be quite put out with their previous self.  See above about the lapcom.

***e.g., Florida.

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Blog, we know what we are but know not what we may be.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and out of tradition I’ve started this blog with “Hello and good morning”, which you’ve already seen but might not have noticed.  Speaking of tradition, I’m also writing this post on my lapcom, partly for just a changeup, and partly because my thumb/wrist arthropathy has been acting up quite a bit, so I brought the lapcom back to the house with me on Tuesday evening.

Speaking of Tuesday evening going on to Thursday morning, I was out sick yesterday, and so I did not write a blog post.  I did work from “home” for a bit, because it was payroll day, and obviously I needed to get that done or else people won’t get paid.  But I wasn’t in any mood to write a blog post from the house.  I didn’t even have the energy to leave a little quasi-post like I did on last Saturday, just to let people know that I was not going to be writing the expected full post.

Honestly, I don’t feel terrific even today, but I do feel a bit better than I did yesterday, at least for the moment.  If human civilization were sane or even slightly reasonable, I would feel no qualms about taking a second day off, because no one else would expect otherwise.  But I cannot feel comfortable doing that, even if other people would not mind.  It’s a pathology, of course, but there it is.

Still, if I leave things at the office for too long, when I get back it becomes too stressful because there’s so much catch-up work to do (thank goodness, we got rid of all our mustard work long ago)*.  Luckily, I still have plenty of face masks available.  Indeed, I often consider trying to find a brand that I like and can wear every day, all day.

I’m not a fan of my face.  There are too many signs of the past 20 years or so on it.  It’s possible that these signs are things no one else would notice, but that hardly matters, because I am the one bothered by it, and I and the one stuck with this face.

It’s not an emergency.  I don’t feel like I must cover up my face, like Doctor Doom or the Phantom of the Opera or something.  It just annoys me.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish I looked like someone else, anymore than I wish I were someone else.

I can’t even see how that could work in principle.  If everything about me changed into someone else, I wouldn’t exist anymore, I would be someone else.  But that wouldn’t be me experiencing the process of being someone else; it would just be someone else.  Nothing of me would come along.

I guess I just would prefer it if I could be a better version of me.  I work on it, of course; I don’t just wish for it.  I’m always trying to improve in any way that I can.  And the good and bad thing about self-improvement is that there is no finish line.  One can always be better—by almost any criterion one might choose—than one currently is.

This is similar to—and may be related to—the nature of intelligence and ignorance.  Intelligence can increase without any known limit, in principle, but everyone is always infinitely ignorant and always will be.  There is always an uncountable infinity worth of potential information one could know but does not (just within, for instance, the digits of π alone, apart from the uncountably infinite other Real Numbers).

This is a blessing and a curse, as such things tend to be.  It is a curse in the sense that one can never know everything there is to know, and therefore, in principle, one cannot know that one knows the most important things to know.  On the other hand, it is a blessing to know that one can always become smarter, more knowledgeable, than one currently is.

You can’t keep building muscle indefinitely; you can’t run faster or swim faster or bike faster without limit.  New Olympic records are set by tiny, tiny margins.  But while there surely is a physical upper limit to possible human intelligence—based upon information theory, thermodynamics, neuroscience, general relativity and so on—as far as we can tell, no one has ever gotten close to that upper limit.  You can keep learning new things every day that you are alive**.

This is a notion I wish more teachers would explain to their students.  Yes, it’s true that different people have different aptitudes for different subjects.  But unless there is real and serious pathology, anyone can get to the goal in time.  Your fundamental limits are processing speed and memory.

If your onboard, RAM-style memory isn’t great (and no one’s is VERY great) then you can store things externally, using written language.  If your processing speed regarding, say, 17th century British literature, is slow, you may reasonably choose to do something else.  Had you but world enough and time, you could learn anything, but you don’t have world enough nor time.  In principle, though, you could learn it.

Motivation, drive, impulse is/are factors holding people back more than anything else, as far as I can see, and it’s perfectly understandable.  Thinking requires a lot of effort—fully 20% of our bodies’ calories are used by our brains***.  One wants to choose as wisely as one can just to what to apply that energy.

In principle, one cannot know for sure if one will make an optimal choice—that’s the whole “unknown unknowns” thing—but that’s part of the point of decision theory.  We have to make decisions with incomplete information, pretty much every single time.

That’s okay.  It’s much more fun to be surprised by the things one learns than just to have more of the same.  The most exciting non-personal moment in my lifetime so far was in 1998 when it first became clear that the universe was not merely going to keep expanding (rather than recollapsing) based on data in the supernova studies, but that the expansion of the universe was increasing in speed!  Literally, my picture of the whole universe changed, and it was amazing.  I cannot properly explain just how invigorating it was to learn about this.

Look at me, being slightly positive in my blog.  I must be ill, huh?  Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Presumably, I’ll be writing another post tomorrow, but I never make an absolute guarantee.

TTFN

*Sorry, I know it’s a stupid joke, but I’m sick.  Please give me a break.

**And in a certain sense, you do this no matter what:  at the very least, you learn what it is to experience that day.

***Though there is reason to suspect that some politicians use a significantly smaller percentage, as do some of the people who vote for them.

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“Something knocked me out the trees – now I’m on my knees”

Okay.  So.  I don’t know what to write today, even more so than usual.

It’s Tuesday, of course.  Though I guess there’s really no “of course” about it; I mean, it could be any day in principle, but it happens to be Tuesday, and I’m up and about, going through various stages of heading to the office as I write this.

At the end of the work day, I will head back to the house and prepare to do it all over again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I won’t say “as needed”, because I think it’s probably rather nebulous just how necessary these daily repetitions really are.  Certainly neither the universe nor civilization depends upon me doing any of the things I do.

I suppose that “work” is weakly dependent upon me, in that if I suddenly just stopped coming, they would have to find someone else to do what I do, or divide things up among those already there or something.  That’s not such a big deal, of course.  It happens all the time.

There may be a few people who look forward to my blog every day, though it would be pretty arrogant to consider them “dependent” upon it.  I would much prefer for people to be “dependent” upon, or at least to look forward to, my fiction.  It would be easier to keep writing it if I thought more than one person would actually read my stories, and that maybe people would even tell me what they thought of them*.

I suppose that sort of thing might seem fairly trivial in the face of various events happening in the nation and the world, but on the other hand, those things are trivial in themselves.  There is certainly no good reason for any of them other than that human nature‒while possessing functionally limitless potential‒is almost always prone to default to the level of screaming monkeys.

Each political moment of the world feels so…well…momentous to the people going through it, but these kinds of things have arisen and passed away over and over throughout history.  Probably most such happenings are even outside of history, parallel to it if you will, because many of them are not even noticed beyond their immediate time and place, even by some of the people who experience them.

They are all rather laughable in their self-important yet ephemeral character.

I don’t know why I even notice, let alone care.  I guess maybe it’s because the human race does have such potential for greatness, for the creation of beauty‒by whatever criteria you might measure beauty‒and for making the world a place that’s better than it is in every reasonable way.  Yet, they do not have the intellectual and moral humility to realize how great they could make things.  Ironically, if people were able to stop thinking of everything as being about them, whoever they are, they could participate in a world that could easily be better not just for everyone else, but for them as well.

Of course, it’s honestly difficult not to knee jerk one’s responses to reality as if it were about oneself.  Meditation can help, if only by dissolving the “ego” and decreasing the tendency toward reflexive belief in the inner homunculus.

It would be nice if Earth had its own Surak who succeeded in convincing humanity that calmness, mindfulness, and rationality are not merely options but probably among the best ways to secure a beneficent future for Earth and life and intelligence.  That’s assuming that this is indeed true, which I strongly suspect it is, but do not know for certain.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if, instead of training our children to believe in the literal truth of fairy tales that are hundreds to thousands of years old (and benighted even for their times of origin), extorting their behavior and “belief” with threats of Hell (or the equivalent), we encouraged our children to be mindful, to be curious, to be patient, to recognize their fallibility, but at the same time, as part of that, to recognize their potential to do truly remarkable and wonderful things.

But left to their own devices‒as they all always are, since even the Powers That Be are just other naked house apes, not significantly different than themselves‒people tend to choose the monkey way.  Or, rather, they go that way by default, never recognizing that they have a choice.

Only if you recognize that you are a monkey can you really, deliberately choose to become something greater.

Only by recognizing your fallibility can you begin to succeed at deliberately chosen and often amazing things.

Only by recognizing that you are not special can you truly steer yourself toward doing things that are special.

Okay, all those “only” beginnings to the above homilies are presumptuous in the extreme, but they make for better quotables than more restrained language would provide.

I’m not a fan of rhetoric‒if you need clever wordplay to convince others of your points, perhaps your points aren’t all that good‒and one of the reasons I’m not a fan is that it is just so damn tempting.

Oh, well.  This is all stupid anyway.  Sorry.

*No trolling though.  I don’t mind reasonable criticism, especially if I find it convincing, but when people are assholes just for the “fun” of it, I see no problem with them being dealt with as one would a troll in an RPG or a book or a movie.  Imagine how much more pleasant the world would be if all people prone to trollish behavior were turned to stone, or barring that, turned to worm food and ash.