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While readers about my guitar playing (not so) gently weep

Well, I did do a little guitar playing and singing yesterday, as I said I intended to do.  At least that particular intention-paved road did not lead directly to Hell, at least not yet.  It may do so in the long run, but I doubt it.  If I go to Hell (figuratively speaking, since I don’t think there is any literal Hell), it’s unlikely to be because of playing music.

It’s interesting (to me) to note that, though I hadn’t played for quite a long time, my black Strat was perfectly in tune.  I did not have to adjust a single string.  I guess that’s partly because it’s been in an office that is kept basically at the same temperature all the time, every day.

I found it surprising, probably because I “grew up” playing the cello, which uses good old fashioned (literally) friction pegs.  Sometimes it seemed that you barely had to look at the peg box and the cello would go out of tune.  Certainly, moving the cello around had an effect; even minor little vibrations and shifts often tended to lead to slippage.  I don’t recall ever not needing to adjust the tuning before playing the cello.

A piano, of course, is at the other end of that spectrum.  A good piano can stay well tuned for years if in a good environment, at least in my experience.  Anyway, if your piano is out of tune a little, you mostly just play it anyway, because tuning a piano is a serious undertaking, usually requiring a professional.  Electronic keyboards, of course, do not tend to go out of tune.

So, yeah, I didn’t have to do any serious maintenance‒or even any frivolous maintenance‒before playing.  I did warm up my voice by talking like Mickey Mouse.  Actually, I did a little impromptu conversation between Mickey Mouse and Goofy, but Goofy was trying to imitate Mickey and Mickey was not amused.  It’s silly, but it seems to get my voice loosened‒or maybe tightened‒up.  Go figure.

Anyway, I started with the Radiohead song Reckoner, which I like to play first a lot of the time.  It’s finger-picked, at least the way I play it, and the song is sung entirely in falsetto.  Though, Gnarls Barkley did a cover of it‒they apparently loved the album In Rainbows, from which this song comes, as did many other people, including me‒and I don’t think CeeLo Green had to sing falsetto.

It turns out that singing that whole falsetto song gets my voice nicely warmed up.  It also pushes me past any fear I might have of sounding silly.  Not that I ought to feel that presumably social anxiety, since I haven’t sung in front of anyone else in I don’t know how long.  But it’s difficult for me to get over the tension, because I have a seeming implicit belief that if I do something it must be perfect or else it’s shameful and even horrific.

This, from a person who thinks that “perfect” is almost always a nonsensical or at least nebulous concept.

After that song, as I often do, I next played and sang The Man Who Sold the World.  I do it more like the Nirvana version than the original David Bowie one, but it’s not without influences from Bowie, including singing “aahs” during the outro.

Then I played the lead guitar part for the Radiohead song Knives Out*.  I did not sing while playing that.  I can do it, but singing while playing lead tends to decrease the quality of the playing and of the singing, so I usually don’t try.  Mark Knopfler may make it look easy, but he’s Mark Knopfler.  Anyway, I sing better than he does.  So, there.

After that, I think I did Wish You Were Hear, then Lucky by Radiohead, then I finished with Nothing Compares 2U, my version of which draws more from Chris Cornell’s cover (below) than Sinead O’Conner’s cover and very little from the Prince original (though I always follow Prince’s admirably correct grammar by singing “I can see whomever I choose” instead of “I can see whoever I choose” like the others tend to do.

I’m slightly pleased to say that the only song for which I brought up any tabs or music to play was Knives Out.  I can more or less do that from memory if necessary, but weirdly enough, I often get messed up on the bridge‒you know, the part where there’s no singing, ever.  Weirdly enough, having sung and played at the same time seems to make it easier for me to remember both things than if I only played.

I’ve noticed (yesterday and previously) a curious and somewhat pleasing thing that happens when I’ve taken a break from playing and then pick it up again:  I often feel that I am playing, at least in some aspects, better than I did when I was playing more regularly.  Has anyone else had that experience?

Singing does not work that way.  Singing is a physical, bodily skill that requires specific kinds of muscle tone and control in the vocal cords, and one does tend to experience a bit of atrophy in those areas with disuse.  They also can get physically sore if you use them too much after a hiatus.  It’s quite a curious experience, having sore muscles in your windpipe and in surrounding areas.

Anyway, that’s my report.  I apologize if it’s boring‒it seems almost certain that it will be to anyone but me‒but I had to write about something.  In any case, I hope you all have a good day.  Here’s Chris Cornell’s amazing live performance of Nothing Compares 2U.

*Yes, the movie by that name, starring Daniel Craig, was named after the song, just as its sequel, Glass Onion, was named after the Beatles song.  I have to forgive the writer/director, Rian Johnson, for any missteps he made on The Last Jedi, because when you share musical taste with someone, it’s hard to feel too badly toward them.  Anyway, Last Jedi wasn’t really that bad, despite much moaning by Star Wars fans, including me, and parts of it were honestly brilliant.  At least it didn’t have to resort to “Somehow, Palpatine returned!” as retconning exposition.

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“But we don’t reckon time the same way, do we, Clarice?”

Well, ten-six, good buddy, it’s the sixth of October, and we’re already almost a fifth of the way through the month.  It’s curious how, while one is trying to get through things that one must do, one feels real sympathy with Gandalf’s line, “each day was as long as a life-age of the Earth”, and yet the overall passage of days, weeks, and months rockets on so quickly that one is almost unable to keep up.

Pink Floyd really was/were* insightful in their song Time.  And consider how young they were when they did it!  Roger Waters‒arguably the greatest lyricist since, I don’t know, W. S. Gilbert‒was only 29 when he wrote it, and he worried he was getting on in years, I guess.  Poor child, if only he knew.

Still, he was a brilliant child.

Time can feel very flexible and stretchable and squeezable, because the clock rate of our processors (aka brains) varies somewhat.  Maybe someone should study the subjective topology of time, how the experience can be fascinatingly inconsistent, even within the same person, within the same day, and yet the overall thing is fundamentally unchanged‒it has, you might say, the same, unchanging number of holes.

It’s an important thing to recall:  our subjective experience of time can be highly variable intrapersonally and interpersonally, but that’s just a perception.  Time itself is progressing as it always does‒which may well be “not at all” from a 4+ dimensional viewpoint.  Yes, relativity says that time “passes” at differing rates in different situations.  That difference is the main producer of what we experience as gravity, here on Earth.  But the space-time interval between any two events will be the same no matter who is measuring it, like the speed of light itself.

Many things in the universe, in life, are like this.  For instance, we know that our basic color perception, with the semi-arbitrary delineation of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet**, is born of our way of seeing:  with three kinds of cone cells, each of which responds maximally to a certain set of wavelengths, and the measuring and balancing of the degrees of activation of these kinds of cells.  From 3 not-completely-independent measurement types, one can construct an astonishing array of shades as it were.

But the fundamental nature of the electromagnetic spectrum has no inherent blue or red or yellow.  It’s just a long stretch of continuously variable frequencies.

A threefold variable system is also used in describing quark and gluon interactions in quantum chromodynamics.  The guy who does the Highly Entropic Mind YouTube channel did a great video on (the mathematics of) quantum chromodynamics that gets into some of that, and I recommend it if you’ve ever been curious about such things.  I’ll embed it here.

Anyway, our 3-photoreceptor visual system is why any humanly perceived color can be “produced” digitally by using only three different pixels, the RGB (red, green, and blue) ones, and why printers can print (pretty much) any humanly perceived color using CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).

But some alien race that perceives light using different specific means, even if they see the same visible spectrum, might think our various electronic and printed imagery, even our paintings, look very little like the things they are supposed to represent.  Probably there are even other terrestrial creatures who would think so; eyes have evolved independently dozens of times on Earth.  They are not all exactly the same, and vertebrate eyes are not necessarily the best ones.

Man, I’m all over the place this morning.  I’m so effing tired‒so tired that I’m not bothering to use profanity!‒that I don’t know if I’m making sense.  My sleep last night was particularly bad.

Have you ever been so fatigued from chronic sleeplessness that you honestly wished you would get hit by a (car or similar) just so you could get a break?  Even if the break is in your bones, even if it kills you, because at least you could rest in some sense.  If this is what Brahma feels like when dreaming the universe, it’s no wonder it has to dissolve it all into a dreamless sleep once every few hundred billion years, or however that legend/myth goes.

As for me and my house, I would really like to be able to rest so I can feel refreshed again someday, after what feels like many life ages of the Earth.  So far, though, I have not yet found the method for doing so.

Maybe music will help.  Today, I’m going to try to commit to playing guitar for at least a few minutes this morning.  It’s a shame not to do it for so long, and not just because my calluses are softening.  Maybe I’ll even sing (I have a hard time not singing when playing, honestly).

I hope you all (or “y’all”, a very sensible and useful contraction) are better rested than I am.  Cat forbid that any more people feel this way than necessary.

*This depends on whether you’re using the British plural form‒since it’s a band with multiple people in it‒or the American singular, since a band counts as a single unit despite being composed of multiple subunits, much as anything bigger than an elementary particle is.  It gives a new meaning or implication to e pluribus unum, doesn’t it?

**According to what I’ve read, Newton just threw in “indigo”, which does not actually constitute a separate kind of color like the other six, because he had a mystical notion about the number 7.  He was not alone in that, of course, but his influence was tremendous, so even when he had no real scientific reason for the divisions, his combination has persisted in the public consciousness for more than 300 years.

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Monday morning meandering moaning

Well, it’s the start of a new work week, which means it’s the end of a weekend off, at least for me.  I’m sure many people are on various different schedules, but this one (Monday through Friday working and Saturday and Sunday off) is still probably the modal one, if I had to guess.  Though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the situation has more than one mode, or perhaps one mode but a very broadly tapering and irregular slope for the rest of the schedules.

Anyway, it was just now the weekend, and I did not work during that time‒not in the sense of “employment for compensation”, anyway.  I did do some walking, though.  On Saturday, when it was overcast (and looked like it was going to rain, but never did), I walked a bit over 6 miles, umbrella in hand but forlornly unused the whole time.  On Sunday, when it was appropriately (not ironically) sunny, I walked just about 4 miles.  That’s still not too bad, but it was a bit more unpleasant because of the heat.

I guess I like walking in cloudy, gloomy weather (and at night) more than when it’s bright and sunny.  Of course, bright and sunny days in autumn‒real autumn, not this Florida bullshit‒can be delightful things in which to walk around, when the sky looks like a giant, freshly and expertly painted watercolor.  Even bright winter days (again, do not count south Florida, there is no winter here) can be truly uplifting and enjoyable.  At least, they are if you’re wrapped up warm.

Other than the walking, though, my weekend was completely without substance.  I did not read anything new (and precious little old), I did not watch any sports/games or regular TV of any kind‒no, not even any football.  I think the only person with whom I spoke, other than a delivery person, was an older guy whose phone had died and asked me the time while I was walking on Saturday.

Oh, and on my Sunday walk, I passed by a guy who might have been homeless‒perhaps he was just odd‒who held his arms out wide as I came nearer, as if looking for a hug.  I don’t think he was actually looking for a hug, though.  It was probably a gesture intended to intimidate, perhaps so I wouldn’t try to steal his stuff or something.

Anyway, I don’t give a shit about those kinds of things, so I just nodded, said, “What’s up?” and walked on.  He said nothing.  I suppose he could even have been a figment of my imagination, but that seems unlikely.

I didn’t speak at all otherwise.  Well, no, that’s probably not quite accurate.  I probably spoke “to” some of the reactors on some YouTube videos.  These are pretty much the closest thing I have to friends with whom I do things.  It’s rather pathetic.

I didn’t even watch many new videos, and I certainly didn’t watch any that were informative or useful or even interesting in any deep, novel sense.  Of course, if something catches one’s attention, it is “interesting” per se*.  But it’s not necessarily a durable kind of interest.  If you see movement out of the corner of your eye, you turn to look, but if it’s just a rustling of a curtain (purple or otherwise) or if when you turn to look it’s gone, as happened in Comfortably Numb, then that interest is basically spent.

I did notice, just this morning‒while I was pretending to try to be able to go back to sleep right up until it was time for me just to get up‒a video titled “There is no hard problem of consciousness”.  Now that seems at least somewhat interesting, and it’s a statement with which I’m inclined to agree, but I am curious to hear what this person’s arguments are, though I have not yet watched it.

Usually‒almost always‒such videos are rather disappointing; they just rehash basic ideas that I’ve dealt with long ago.  But sometimes someone says something actually thought-provoking.  Anyway, it’s nice to know that people are at least thinking about such questions (I think, again, that our culture’s mental health might be better if instead of going to therapists so often we sometimes went to philosophers instead).

I, on the other hand, have been having more and more difficulty finding any depth or interest.  I must have watched dozens (literally) of reactions to the Avengers: Doomsday “special look” trailer, because that actually got me excited.  Doom is my favorite villain, after all, and it looks as though the MCU might actually be doing him justice.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t come out until December, and I’m losing interest already.

Like the Pink Floyd song says**, “Nothing is very much fun anymore”.  I haven’t played any music on any instrument in weeks now, and I sang for all of two minutes or so while watching somebody react to Baker Street.

I think I might try to do a personal “try not to laugh” challenge today.  I think I tend to joke too much and make light of things to much, probably as a defense mechanism, but it’s a bit of a distraction.  Maybe I would be able to do more if I took things more seriously.

I don’t know.  Maybe I won’t even make it through the first work conversation without joking.  I certainly can’t seem to write a blog post without some kind of joke in it.  But it would be nice not to feel anything much at all:  No fear, no regret, no pain, and no joy or hope or optimism.  What’s that Vulcan practice on Star Trek?  Kolinahr?  Something like that.

I suppose it doesn’t matter.  It’s all fiction, anyway.  Meanwhile, I hope you all have very good, real-world days*** today.

*Is that the correct usage of “per se”?  Somehow it looks not-quite-right to me, but I am far from sure why that’s the case.

**One of My Turns, this time.

***I’m conflicted about whether that should be singular or plural.  There are arguments for both choices, or should I say, for each choice.

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Don’t bug me with your sophisticated Halloween ideas; it’s too rainy for that

There are only 29 shopping days until Halloween, so you might as well start preparing your costumes and decorations early…if you call this early.  I don’t recommend getting your candy this early, though.  It’s all too easy to succumb to the temptation to eat it early, and that candy ends up in various places in your body‒however, it tends not to go where you would like it to go.

Anyway, it’s Friday and (as the preceding paragraph implies) it’s the 2nd day of October‒October 2nd, you might be tempted to call it if you were hopelessly naïve*.

It’s now been raining here in south Florida for the entire month of October, so far.  That’s not saying a lot, of course (day-wise), since it’s only the 2nd day of October, as I said.  Rain-wise, however, it has most assuredly been a lot.  I’m actually mildly surprised that there’s not more flooding than there is, though there is some flooding.  Considering that most of the state is barely above water in the first place, flooding is practically the default setting.

Speaking of the physical nature of the state (Florida) and things to which it lends itself, I saw a white SUV yesterday going along that bore various illustrations and logos centered around “The Bug Lady”.  I think there was a dot TV thing there as well, and most amusingly and coolly, under the passenger side window was stenciled the word “Entomologist”.

How cool is that?  Presumably this person is an educator of some variety.  Possibly she has a YouTube or Instagram or TikTok channel, or maybe all three, or maybe only two of the three, or maybe others in addition or instead.  But I think it’s pretty neat for someone to go around in a vehicle that advertises that one is an entomologist and an unabashed “bug lady”.

South Florida must be one of the best places in the continental US to find and study insects and other land arthropods.  There are over a million described insect species in the three meter by three meter area right outside my door alone!

Okay, that last bit was (slightly) exaggerated, but there are a lot of them.  I wonder how the total biomass of arthropods in Florida compares to the biomass of humans in Florida.  I doubt that it’s greater, but the size of its fractional comparison might be impressive.  And, of course, before the modern era, there were almost no humans living in Florida, so the arthropods were the long-term champions.  It’s not a naturally human-oriented habitat.

It is, however, very good for creatures that eat arthropods, creatures like reptiles and amphibians and the occasional mammal that eats such things preferentially.  For instance, I think I remember that opossums eat a fair number of insects and arachnids, such as ticks, and are actually quite useful to humans and do us no harm.  They’re even relatively resistant to rabies because of their relatively low body temperature!

So, yeah, there are a fair few lizards and their relatives in south Florida, and that is one pretty cool thing about the state.  I wonder if, somewhere out there, there’s an SUV with “Snake lady” or “Lizard Lady” on the side, with the word “Herpetologist” under the passenger side window.  If so, I wonder if she’s single.

Now that I think about it, there are some fish that tend to eat insects that come near the surface of the water, and there is quite a lot of water surface around here (see above).   Also, dragonflies and their kin do quite well here, though technically they are also arthropods.  Still, they’re the good kinds of arthropods, the ones that eat the pests, and they and their ilk do well.  As evidence:  ordinary houseflies seem far less common around here than they ever did up north during the summertime.

Oh, and how could I forget spiders?  We’ve got some really cool spiders around here.  None of them are terribly big, alas, but some of them are quite remarkable, and they’re all pretty cool.

Though, when I accidentally walk through a nascent spider web because‒by nature‒they are often hard to see, I get a double shot of irritation.  First, I feel sad and somewhat guilty for having wrecked something some poor spider put its blood, sweat, and tears (or at least its silk) into.  Though, it’s an operational hazard for the spiders, since they want (so to speak) for their webs to be hard to see and thus hard to avoid.  But big clumsy things that are not potential prey can also have a hard time seeing and avoiding them.

I guess that’s the cost of doing business for spiders.  Maybe they can do a tax write-off with Mother Nature.

But the other problem with spider webs is that once you get them on you, it can be maddening to try to get them completely off, and despite being very fine and light, they are still quite palpable.  And I think I wrote here once about the time I accidentally walked through a spider web and got some in my eye.  I developed a mild case of irritant conjunctivitis from that, which lasted the rest of that day.

I don’t hold it against that particular spider nor against spiders in general.  After all, it was just doing what it does, and it was surely far more inconvenienced, both relatively and absolutely, than I was.  Imagine a giant tripping on your house and caving in an entire side of it.  Maybe the giant hurts its foot in the process, but you have to rebuild a substantial part of your house!

Okay, well, that’s enough for today, and for this week.  It’s Friday, and I do not work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so don’t expect a blog post from me before Monday.

I mean, well…you can expect one if that’s the way you roll, but your expectations are almost certain to be incorrect.  Why do that to yourself?  Instead, just try your best to have a good weekend.

*You would also be correct, in this case, but it’s not naïveté that makes you correct, that’s just a coincidence.  To be naïve is often to be at a higher risk of being incorrect.  It’s not always the case, however.  Sometimes when people become more “sophisticated”, it leads them to sophistry more than to philosophy**.

**Did you notice how “sophisticated”, “sophistry”, and “philosophy” are all related words, bearing the root sophia***, which is Greek for wisdom.  Philosophy, for instance, means “love of wisdom”.

***I recommend against looking into what the literal meaning of Sophia Vergara would be.

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The color of the blog doth come and go, between his purpose and his conscience

Hello and good morning.

It’s the first day of October, but I have very little to say about that other than what I’ve already said recently:  It’s my “official” favorite month, but right now that’s about as impressive as saying it’s…I don’t know, my least disliked form of terminal cancer or something along those lines.

Anyway, it’s a new month, and I guess those of you who have survived to see it can feel good about that, if that’s something you think is good (by whatever criteria you use to mean “good” regarding such things).  For my part, I’m not so sure, but if you’ve been reading this nonsense for any length of time, you probably don’t find that admission surprising.

I really feel wiped out, honestly, almost as if I’m out of breath while just sitting here and writing.  It’s not necessarily purely subjective‒my pulse ox is only about 94 to 95 percent right now, which is a tiny bit low, but it is early in the day.

What, you’re surprised that I have a personal pulse oximeter?  Don’t be.  It’s entirely predictable, given my background and how inexpensive such things have become.  Actually, I have two of them:  one at the house, one at work.

I’m somewhat weirdly hopeful, or perhaps wishful, that this slightly low oxygen saturation is the harbinger of a steady, progressive, terminal illness‒a slow-moving pneumonia or tuberculosis or lung cancer or something, even COPD.  I’m just exhausted with this living crap, and there are only a very few things that make it in any way worthwhile to me.

I’m so tired.  I just woke up‒or at least, I just got up‒about an hour ago, and I’m as tired as if it were already the end of a long, labor-intensive day.  Of course, I’ve been awake on and off for hours already, but that’s unfortunately nothing new.

I really want to be able to rest.  Of course, the famous saying is that there shall be no rest for the wicked, and perhaps I am just wicked.  But perhaps if the wicked were able to rest‒truly to rest‒they would be less prone to be wicked.  I don’t know.  I’m just spouting a bit of nonsense right now, don’t take the specifics too seriously.  I haven’t really given any thought prior to this moment about the possibility that “wickedness” can be at least partially a product of fatigue.

Of course, it does make some sense.  We know what impulse control, mainly through the actions of parts of the frontal lobes, is subject to fatigue.  We know that people are more prone to, say, break their diets or pick up cigarettes again at the end of a long, hard day.  Conscience may make cowards of us all, but conscience itself has only so much charge in its batteries.

Fortunately, the frontal lobes don’t get fatigued in isolation, so by the time one’s impulse control is lagging, one’s impulse creation is also a bit on the slow side.  The brain, like the body, is at least prone to getting tired all at roughly the same time.

I’m sorry.  Everything that crosses my mind right now is just turning into meditations on being tired.  I am tired.  I am sleepy.  I am exhausted.  I am fatigued.  I am run down.  I am worn out.

[Help!  I’m being attacked by that most dreadful, ferocious, frightening, and intimidating of dinosaurs:  Thesaurus rex.]

Ugh, I’m already running out of gas, today.  If I had a cocoon, I’d wrap up in it.  If I had a sensory deprivation chamber, I’d go lie down in it.

Actually, that last possibility sounds lovely.  I wish I had one of those.  I’ve looked around the area, but though apparently there used to be services that offered sensory deprivation chambers near where I live, none remain that are close enough to be useful to me.  It would be good, though, I think.

Some people are bothered by enclosed spaces, but it’s never been much of an issue for me.  I was quite happy to sleep in the little coffin beds in the Navy‒in fact, the night I slept in the pitch black silence in a submarine was one of the most pleasant sleeps I’ve had.  I tend to find MRIs relaxing, and when the noises come on, I pretend I’m watching a gangster movie.

Of course, context is crucial here.  I do not like being restrained or constrained by other people, and if someone tries to do such a thing to me, I am prone to do everything I can to hurt and/or kill them, and I will be very hard pressed to restrain myself.  In these cases, my frontal lobes don’t inhibit the impulses, they egg them on.

My frontal lobes don’t like being pushed around by other, entirely finite and fallible and flesh-and-blood mortals any more than the rest of me does.  Even lawful “authorities” are merely a matter of necessity, and they are certainly prone to error, like everyone else.  No one has true, inherent authority over someone else, though of necessity we can give some people power over others, because the alternatives are worse.

Anarchy is rarely an improvement over having a working government, for instance, but that doesn’t mean we should ever take our eyes off said government; it must always be held to task and kept from becoming too self-important and/or self-serving.

I will close with a quote from a Beatles song, and embed that song below, as a reminder to those who would arrogate authority to themselves:  “Can’t you see, you’re really only very small, and life goes on within you and without you.”

TTFN

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Maybe DON’T wake me up when September ends

I wish that I had brought the lapcom back with me to the house yesterday evening after work.  Alas, I did not, and so I am writing this post on the “smart”phone like some Zillennial.  It’s annoying.

Although, I want to be clear, putting the word “smart” in “scare quotes” as I did just now is merely rhetorical.  It’s snarkiness.  It is a true fact that modern cellular phones are indeed quite smart compared to all prior generations of phones.

They’re smart compared to most prior generations of home computers.  They’re smart compared to many prior iterations of the operating computers on board real space ships, for crying out loud.

And if rumors are correct, they’re smarter than our current strategic defense computers.  Though that could be false intelligence, just a negative rumor about the military, because such rumors are enticing and so spread easily.  I don’t know.

I’m just annoyed to be so susceptible to using the phone to write, simply because its presence is convenient, even though I very much prefer to write on the lapcom, or on any other real (as opposed to virtual) keyboard.

Of course, I use the phone for many other things that I previously would have done with something else.  Calculator functions are one of those things, and I have no complaints about being able to use the smartphone for them.

It’s quite convenient, though I can do relatively simple mental arithmetic pretty well without any calculator at all.  Still, it doesn’t take much for it just to make more sense to use a calculator, because the way it processes arithmetic is more direct and logical than repurposing a general biological intelligence to be able to do arithmetic via relatively elaborate algorithms.

You can use an LLM to multiply two three-digit numbers together, and it may even do better than most people would do at the task‒I don’t honestly know‒but it would be a waste of that machine’s capabilities, when you could just tap on your calculator app, or even just use an old-fashioned physical calculator.

You don’t use a VTOL fighter jet to go to the corner store for a candy bar, after all.  I mean, it would be pretty cool to see someone do it once, just for a stunt, but it’s not a sensible way to go for a snack.  Heck, it’s not really sensible to drive to the corner store, unless you have some physical infirmity that makes it necessary.  In general, walking is better.  You’ll not only get there nearly as fast as (and sometimes faster than) by driving, you’ll also be making yourself ever so slightly stronger and healthier because of the exercise.

A bicycle would probably also be a sensible way to go.  But it has the disadvantage that you need to park your bike and chain it up (unless you live somewhere far less petty-theft-prone than where I live), and in general bikes require more maintenance than feet do, or at least they require additional maintenance.

Anyway, I’ve had my troubles with bicycles, so I have a hard time talking them up, though I recognize that they have many advantages over motor vehicles and over plain ambulation.  My difficulty with bicycles is one of the many things about myself that frustrates me.  Still, there are many places that one can walk where bicycles or other wheeled vehicles are not going to work.  There are reasons why the Incas, for instance. didn’t really use any wheeled vehicles.

Well, enough of that weird little set of mutual tangents.  It’s the last day of September today, which means tomorrow will be the first day of October.  That’s just the way that works.  I’ve noted before, recently, that October is my favorite month, but the reasons for that favoritism have eroded over time.

Birthdays and holidays become just reminders of the fact that things are worse for me than they’ve ever been in the past; I have no one with whom to share any of them.  And the notion of changing leaves and bright autumn colors is just a cruel joke in south Florida, as is the notion of weather cool enough to require a windbreaker.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  I’m sick of all this bullshit, anyway.  I would say it’s a waste of my time, but my time is wasted no matter what I do, so that’s not a good point.  But it’s also a waste of mental energy and effort, for something that does almost nothing for anyone, if it does that much.

I need just to shut all this shit down, and I don’t just mean the blog.  I’ve been gradually phasing out most of the relatively productive and creative things I do, though that hasn’t been deliberate or conscious.  It’s just happened, like I’m petering out.

Of course, given that “peter” is a word derived from the Greek for rock*, saying I’m petering out could be construed as meaning that I’m rocking out (dude).  But, of course, I am doing no such thing.

No, I’m just winding down, I think.  It can’t happen too soon, can it?

*Thus Jesus’s famous play on words when he said to Peter, “Upon this rock I shall build my church” or whatever the specific wording was.

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I haven’t had a drink or two, but I don’t care

It’s Tuesday now, the 29th of September—the 2nd to last day of the month—and I am writing this post on my lapcom, for the second time in three days.  Well, okay, it’s four days if you count Sunday, but with respect to blog posts, I don’t count that.

It seems that the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom on the 29th of September was back in 2022, based on the saved files on the lapcom.

I know, I know, I need to slow down with all this craziness or some of you readers are going to have trouble with your blood pressure or asthma or generalized anxiety or what have you.  It’s all so very…exciting, isn’t it?  Sometimes you have to step back and take a slow breath, just to keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed.

Anyway, I’m writing this on the lapcom today because I slept in the office last night.  It wasn’t any bad thing, though, don’t worry about that.  I just stayed late in the office doing a Discord call with my youngest so we could watch a couple of episodes of Doctor Who together.  That’s definitely a good thing, at least from my point of view.

But it did get to be late enough that there was no real point in heading back to the house for the night just to come back here in the morning.  It’s expensive, relatively speaking, it’s time-consuming, and frankly there’s nothing very interesting about the house.  It’s only real benefit is the shower (but I’m pretty good at doing “bird baths” in the office bathroom).  It’s not particularly comfortable nor welcoming nor personal.  It certainly doesn’t feel like home to me.

I guess the cats will have to scrounge a bit for their food for the extra 24 hours, but they’re cats.  They’re good at stuff like that, believe me.  They’ll be fine.

So, yeah, anyway, I slept on the floor on the office again, using my hoody as a blanket and the backpack as a pillow, and it was fine.  I slept no worse than I usually do (though admittedly, I didn’t really sleep any better than usual, either).

And that’s about all that can be said about my life.  I go to work, I go back to the house, I write this blog on workdays, I watch YouTube videos which are becoming increasingly uninteresting on average (though there are intermittent ones that are good).  I’m reminded of the line from the Beatles song I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party:  “There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear.”

There really is nothing in my daily life that’s worth sticking around to experience.  Only things like watching Doctor Who with my youngest over Discord are of any real interest to me.

I suppose writing this blog is somewhat interesting.  Certainly, I keep doing it (so far).  I’m not sure whether that’s particularly good or not terribly good or what.  I suppose that depends very much on one’s criteria, doesn’t it?  After all, for something to be sensibly called “good”, one must first lay out one’s standards, because goodness very much depends on the purpose for which one is evaluating something.

A particular car may be a very good car, but might be lamentably bad at being a paperweight, and even worse at being a dining room centerpiece for a dinner party.  And someone can be quite a good doctor but a terrible administrator of a medical practice.  And of course, one can be a good singer-keyboardist but a terrible physicist.  Or one can be good at both, like Brian Cox (the physicist, not the actor).

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that goodness must be good according to some relatively objective and coherent measure, otherwise it’s just a vague adjective (or noun in the case of “goodness”).  As far as I’m aware, there’s no large-scale, global, ultimate measure of Goodness, despite what various religions and other dogmas might claim.

I’ve yet to encounter such a notion that’s even approaching coherence.  And goodness really ought to be coherent, if it’s claiming to be something universal and crucial.  But the real moral world is messy, even when compared to the world of myths and fairy tales, so there are no clear-cut absolute criteria.  Such things are just not terribly useful.

Maybe usefulness is the criterion that should be applied in the real world when speaking of goodness.  And usefulness implies a purpose, which implies some kind of criteria.  Maybe we would all be better off if we stopped worrying about Good and Evil with capital letters as if they were titles or offices or forces of nature.  The laws of physics themselves apply locally; maybe we’d be better off with a slightly utilitarian approach that evaluates goodness versus badness relating to the specific, local circumstances.

I don’t know, I haven’t thought all this through very carefully; I’m just thinking out loud as it were.  So don’t expect me to have arrived at some finished outcome, some theorem or system of thought.  I’m just spit balling as they say, or brainstorming, or…well, thinking out loud, like I said.  Though, of course, this is not literally out loud, unless you count the very faint sound of the keys being pressed as I type.

All right, that’s enough.  I’m tired, so I’m not going to push it too much to try to say anything profound.  I hope you all have a good day today, on this penultimate day in September of 2026 (AD or CE).  You might as well have a good day, by whatever criteria you measure such goodness, if you can.

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“When I try to get through on the telephone to you…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and as I foresaw and predicted, I am writing a blog post.  Yes, indeed, as Pink said, I’ve got electric light, and I’ve got second sight‒I’ve got amazing powers of observation.

It’s not all that impressive when you stop and think about the fact that I’m predicting (after foreseeing) my own actions, over which I presumably have some degree of control.  Such control is far from complete, but for stuff like this, it’s fairly effective.

I’m going to try to keep this post short today, mainly because I know people don’t seem to like it when I get too negative and depressed and morbid, but that’s very much how I feel this morning.  So, I can’t really express my feelings without bringing discomfort to my readers.  That feels churlish to me, and anyway, it doesn’t seem to do me or anyone else any good at all.

That’s no real surprise.  It doesn’t seem to be in my nature to do or to be good; it requires specific effort for me to do good in the world.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be my natural inclination.

Then again, the argument could be made that, because I choose to try to do good (at least sometimes) that means I am good by nature.  After all, if one is simply inclined to do good, or at least to try to do good, then one will simply tend to do so.  That’s good, of course, and such people are welcome.  But it’s not that impressive.  Like a very tall person easily getting something down from a high shelf for a shorter compatriot, it’s good and helpful, but it’s not that impressive, and it’s certainly not heroic.

Whereas if a person has a tendency to be angry and to wish people ill and to become easily frustrated and to desire to lash out, but they don’t do those things because they feel it would be wrong…well, that’s got a certain degree of admirability, since it requires conscious effort to restrain one’s impulses.  I’m not saying that it’s particularly impressive; almost everyone restrains a great many impulses in order to exist in society.  But it is something that requires at least a modicum of effort.

Okay, well, enough of that nonsense.

The point is, I’m going to try not to dwell too much on my depression and self-destructive thoughts, because it doesn’t do anyone any good, including me.  I’ve yet to receive any significant help from anyone or anything because of it, and though certainly I receive some well-meaning suggestions or thoughts or what have you, most of them are things I’ve already considered or tried.

So, it’s not doing me any good, and it’s not doing anyone else any good, as far as I can tell.  I’m just getting steadily worse over time, though that may not be obvious from the outside.  But the fact that I neither do music nor write any fiction any more is telling.  In fact, I don’t really do anything creative or artistic or scientific or whatever.  I just exist most of the time.  And it’s hard to see why I bother.

Ah, well, it probably doesn’t help that I had a particularly poor night’s sleep last night, even for me.  I’m already mentally exhausted, and I’m just starting the work week.

I did get some decent walking in yesterday‒about five and a half miles total.  Fortunately, I’m not having any negative consequences from that so far, and I would have expected to have them by now if they were coming.

Of course, my various chronic problems continue, including my chronic pain, my chronic depression and I guess my ASD (it’s congenital, so I guess that makes it chronic, in a sense).

Anyway, again, enough of this.  Even though I said I would try not to do so, I am dwelling on negative things, not just in my head but here on my blog.  I can only apologize.  I guess that’s one of the dangers of “stream of consciousness” writing.

It doesn’t really matter.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  October starts this week already, and it’s normally my favorite month, but there’s nothing really to which I look forward this time around.  It’s just blah.

Meh, whataya gonna do?

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There are more things dreamt of in your philosophy…

Well, you can’t in good faith claim that I didn’t warn you.  I told you yesterday that I would likely be writing a blog post today, because I am working today, which I am.

I am writing this on my mini lapcom, because I happen already to be at the office, and the lapcom is at the office, and I might as well enjoy making use of it, right?  As I’ve often noted, it’s much easier for me to write on the lapcom than on the smartphone.  That often means that I write too much when I use the lapcom, but today I think it less likely than usual, since I’m already quite tired and my energy is not at its best.

As I noted, I’m already in the office this morning.  I spoke with my sister on the phone yesterday evening, from the office, starting nearly right after I finished work.  We spoke for quite a while, and by the time we hung up, it was rather late—not crazily so, but still, it made little sense to go all the way back to the house, to try to get to sleep, to try to stay asleep, then to get up and come to the office again.

It’s not as though I had anything to do at the house other than put out some food for the neighborhood cats, and they’ll be fine until this evening; cats are pretty durable and adaptable.

So, yeah, here I am in the morning in the office, having slept on the floor, using the hoody that I keep in my backpack as a blanket of sorts (and using the backpack as a pillow).  It was a surprisingly good sleep, all things considered, though I wouldn’t call it good overall on an objective level.  I think, relative to what many people do, my sleep was rather poor, but that’s the norm* for me, anyway.

I will not of course be working tomorrow, and I will therefore not be writing a blog post tomorrow, though I expect to write one on Monday (exclusis improvisis).  That time will take of itself, however.  There’s no need to dwell on it at the moment.

I’m not sure on what to dwell, however.  I guess I can note that it’s been 24 days since the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom, which I can tell because I save them by date.  That’s a fairly long stretch.  And yet, it’s so much easier and more natural, more pleasant, for me to write using the lapcom.

It feels like an extension of me, like something almost directly connected to my nervous system.  It feel much more a part of me than the phone does, a fact which may be slightly ironic.  After all, I have the phone with me most of the time, and I read books on it—that’s by far its greatest strength—and use it to check the weather, and to send texts that are related to work and other matters.  It’s also my alarm clock, and in a pinch I can use it for emails (though that’s never very wieldy compared to a lapcom or desktop computer).

Okay, whew, I’d better slow down and calm down, so I don’t overexcite all of you with this gripping blog post!  I would hate to cause someone to have an increased risk for a heart attack.

Well…there are people for whom I think a heart attack would be good, for everyone else if not for the one who has the infarction.  There simply are people who cause a great deal of harm and suffering to those around them; even if nonfatal, a heart attack would likely take the wind out of their sails as it were.

I’m sure you could all name political figures and business people and even entertainers—let alone people you know in your own life—who would benefit the world by being significantly sickened or weakened by a health crisis, or even killed by one.

It’s not evil to wish for the ill health of highly detrimental people, but it may not be great for your own psyche to dwell too much on such things.  This is partly because wishes don’t do anything in and of themselves, and also because such negative dwelling is almost certainly not good for your own mental health.

It’s better to approach things with a Stoic sort of attitude:  you cannot directly change other people, and you cannot change the laws of nature nor most of the circumstances therein, so dwelling on them (except when literally, practically useful) is only going to tend to be futile and frustrating.  Instead, work on making yourself better, on not letting things bother you that are deeply unimportant, and focus on those things over which you do have some control.  There are fewer of them than you might imagine.

I’m being fairly vague about that, I know, but I don’t know what the specific thoughts and feelings and focuses are that might be optimal for your life, and it would be foolish of me to pretend that I did know such things.  The onus is on you, unfortunately.  That wasn’t my decision, it’s just the way things are.

In closing, based on the preceding paragraphs, I’ll just note that I suspect that people in general, and younger people more specifically, would do better if instead of all the therapizing that’s being done nowadays, they did more philosophizing.  I think studying and discussing philosophy, especially things like Stoicism and Buddhism and maybe Taoism and Existentialism, would be far more conducive to mental health, and might even enhance mental strength in developing minds.

And all minds are developing, despite what you might think, for as long as the lights are on.  You might as well make the best you can of it, whatever “best” might mean in your case.

Have a good day and a good remainder of your weekend, please.

*Norm!!

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Birthdays, Holidays, Mythology, Vectors, Maxwell, and a Beatles song…

It’s Friday again, the 25th of September.  There are only three more shopping months until Newtonmas.

Yes, I know that it isn’t strictly accurate to celebrate Newton’s birth on “Christmas”, because Newton was born on December 25th according to the Julian calendar.  The Gregorian calendar had been invented already; England just hadn’t adopted it (partly because it was a Catholic invention).

But Newton’s birthday was a lot closer to December 25th than Jeshua bin Josephus’s was.  According to what I’ve read and heard from scholars who specialize in such things, the Nazarene was born sometime in the summer.  Oh, and also, there was no census requiring men to return to their towns of birth ever promulgated by Caesar Augustus, not according to any single official record of any kind.  The author of that gospel just threw that in to provide an excuse to have Jesus born in Bethlehem, so that his birth could comply with certain messianic prophecies.

Yes, the so-called fulfillment of prophecies that is used as “evidence” that Jesus was the messiah was added after the fact, by people who never knew Jesus, writing decades (or longer) after his death.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone, really.  Religions in general don’t tend to be very coherent and consistent; they just sort of happen by a kind of memetic evolution, and they are made of various hodgepodges of prior myths and folklore and post-hoc shoe-horning into supposed prophecies.  They bear no hallmarks of having actually been created and/or delivered by supernatural entities of any kind, let alone omniscient ones.

I certainly don’t think any deity is responsible for the fact that today is Friday, so I will not be thanking one, whether God or Brahma or Amaterasu or Quetzalcoatl or Odin or Jupiter* or Whatever.  Also, I am scheduled to work tomorrow, so this is not the end of my work week, anyway.

I’m relatively pleased to inform you that I’ve been reading a decent book for the past few days (not continuously, ha ha).  It’s called Vector, and it’s about (oddly enough) vectors‒the mathematical entities that have magnitude and direction, among other things.

It follows the lives and insights and advances of people like Hamilton, who brought us quaternions (which are very cool) among other vector insights, and various other people who developed the mathematics and science of vectors (we will be getting to tensors and so on before long).

Currently I’m in the midst of the discussion of Maxwell and his astounding development of the principles of electrodynamics, including his recognitions that electricity and magnetism would, if oscillating, produce a self-propagating wave that would travel at precisely the “speed of light”, by which he deduced that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave.  (This accomplishment is one of the most impressive in the history of science, and it is a tragic injustice that Maxwell’s name is not as well-known as those of Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Schrodinger and so on.)

Indeed, the very invariance of the speed of light as revealed by Maxwell’s equations was one of the things that led Einstein to postulate that the speed of light is an absolute constant in all reference frames, leading to Special Relativity (and eventually, even more impressively, to General Relativity, which will make use of and extend the vectors and tensors and matrices to which we’re gradually being introduced).

It’s very exciting.  Honest, it is.

And, of course, there’s the very cool fact that quaternions ended up being useful for describing the curious properties of particle “spin”, including the fact that, for spin ½ particles (which are “fermions”), if you want to rotate it and get back to the state in which you started, you have to rotate 720 degrees, not 360.

If this seems counterintuitive, just think about a Mobius** strip.  Are you thinking about it?  Good.  That should distract you nicely from trying to grasp the nature of fermion spin.

Kidding!  It helps to show you how the notion is not something deeply bizarre or seemingly nonphysical.  With a simple Mobius strip, going around 360 degrees will land you on the opposite side*** of the paper from the place where you started; you need another full trip around 360 degrees to return to where you began.

I’ve occasionally thought that it would be fun to set up an art gallery or other kind of museum with a single “circular” corridor that crosses over itself (by going up or down a level gradually) and that requires visitors to go around twice to get back to the entrance.  It wouldn’t really be difficult to pull off, and it would be much better (I think) than the Guggenheim layout.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to commission such a gallery, so I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Don’t let me down.

Okay, well, that’ll about do it for today.  I should be writing a post tomorrow, so if that’s something that pleases you, then you can safely and reasonably anticipate being pleased, exclusis improvisis.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*Though the planet Jupiter deserves some thanks for helping make life on Earth more possible and stable by sweeping up a lot of the stray space debris that might otherwise have slammed much more often, or much more persistently, into Earth.  But, being a planet, Jupiter doesn’t require thanks or praise to do what it does.  It just requires physics.

**He shows up in the book, too.

***Though the Mobius strip has only one side, really.  And a Klein bottle has a continuous, single surface encompassing its inner and outer aspects (i.e., the inside and outside are the same), and crosses through itself without breaking that surface.  At least, it does that in 4 spatial dimensions.  Our three dimensional Klein bottle models are shadows, if you will, of a true Klein bottle, much as a drawing of a Mobius strip is just a shadow of such a strip.