Month: August 2023

by

There is no gravity–the universe is just warped

Here I am again, at the train station, waiting for the train, writing a blog post on my smartphone.  I didn’t walk this time, because by yesterday afternoon, I was getting extra stiff and sore again, and that could well have been because I walked the 7 miles I walked yesterday in my hiking boots.  Ironically, they may well have been causing me more trouble when “hiking” longer distances.  It’s rather discouraging; I like those boots.

Today, I’m wearing the new shoes of my other type that were supposed to have arrived the day before but only got there yesterday during the day while I was at work.  I didn’t walk in them yet because I’m still in a bit of exacerbated pain.  I’ll physically rest for today, then walk again tomorrow.  The good thing is I seem to be mostly past any tendency to blister.  Thank goodness for small favors.

So, basically, the thing I look forward to‒practically the only thing‒is doing more walking.  I guess that’s a reasonably good thing as far as it goes; it’s better than looking forward only to one’s next martini or one’s next hit of heroin.  But it’s still pretty dissatisfying.  I really hate my life.  Everything stressed me out.  I’m tired.  I want simply to stop.

It doesn’t help that my coworker who shares some of my duties is still out of the office, though I don’t know if he will be out today (I hope not, since it’s payroll day).  What I mean is, he was out yesterday and Monday.  So, I got called in on Saturday and since then (actually, since Friday) have been doing more work than usual‒while in more pain than usual‒for the last 4 work days.  Even before that, I was already at the threshold of cashing it all in.  So, I’m not exactly working toward a more positive outlook.

There’s a defective announcement sign (that I wrote about the other day then deleted from the final draft of the day’s post) cycling away with a moderately distorted message obviously meant to be the same as all the other boards.  I recognize the similarity of its garbled stuff with the intended message.  If I knew the system and its programming, I could probably figure out what’s wrong and possibly even fix it.  But it will likely take the Tri Rail people a while to get to it.  Only yesterday did they apparently fix a malfunctioning check-in kiosk, the one I used to use regularly, that’s been just off, without power, for well over a month.

I guess all these things take effort and money, but it’s frustrating.  I look around at our society and see the deterioration of infrastructure, and the diminution of what little pride we seem to take in running things well.  Even with a reasonably well-rounded system like the Tri Rail, it seems the trains are late almost as often as they are on time.  And, indeed, my train was supposed to have arrived by now, but it has not, and there’s no sign of its light approaching.  On the tracking software website they offer, there’s not even any indication that the train is coming.

Okay, just now its light is becoming visible.  So it’s not too very late…only about 5 minutes.

I don’t understand how it happens that, when they make their own schedule, they can’t seem to keep to it even the majority of the time.  It’s like at work‒our hours have been the same for years, but people can’t seem to get them right.  Of course, it doesn’t help that the boss doesn’t enforce them, or apply any penalty for being late or for staying late.  I can’t understand it, and I don’t want to understand it.  Of course, everyone encounters unexpected things from time to time.  But if it happens regularly, frequently, then probably the person to whom it is happening is partly causing it.

I can’t, of course, hold it against my coworker that everyone in his household is sick‒including his one year old daughter.  It happens, and there is only so much people can do to avoid it.  But people who are late to work nearly every day are just getting up and/or leaving their houses too late.  The correction to this is obvious, and one should really be encouraged to enact it, rather than be indulged.

Oh, well, the world is shit, or at least the human world is.  And the average person is going to get more and more mentally lazy as LLMs and the like do more of their “thinking” for them.  I’m not convinced that these things in any sense actually think or create, but then again, there are plenty of humans who don’t convince me that they think.

I guess I can’t hold it against the computers.  They didn’t make themselves.  Neither did the humans, of course, but at least many of them have access to resources with which they could make themselves better.  The fact that, for the most part, they do not make themselves better I hold as a defect or failure on their part.

I can say what I want about them, in any case.  They don’t read, so they’re unlikely to ever encounter my criticism.

Well, that’s eight hundred plus words, now, so I’ll start drawing to a close.  I wish I could do that overall, honestly.  I wish I could just lay me down to sleep, as the old nursery rhyme prayer says.  And if I should die before I wake, well…that wouldn’t be so bad either.  It wouldn’t break my heart.  And I doubt it would break anyone else’s heart, though a handful of people might be temporarily slightly sad.  And people at work would be in a bit of extra stick for a while.  But for them, in that, I have only a little sympathy.

And the rest of the world can go to Hell, which is what it’s steadily doing to itself, anyway.

by

Bouncing tangents on walking, boots, pain, technology, science, politics, and probably other random stuff

Well, here I am again, writing this blog post at the train station after having walked here this morning.  I had intended to do this wearing a new pair of shoes of the same make and model (so to speak) as the pair I wore yesterday, but that pair, which was supposed to have been delivered yesterday evening, is instead delayed until this morning, after 8 am, which doesn’t do me any good whatsoever.  Anyway, it forced me to do an experiment walking in my boots this morning, which is what I did.

I had switched from my boots because I feared that they might have been responsible for last week’s rather extreme flare-up of my pain.  However, as I changed from them, I also changed chairs in my office.  That’s not a good way to do science, obviously:  varying two parameters at the same time.  It makes it hard to tell which one‒if either‒is having the dominant effect, if indeed there is one.  However, when dealing with severe exacerbations of already-maddening chronic pain, one can easily become impatient.

I’m not excusing it, but I am explaining it.

Anyway, I have come to the suspicion that, just maybe, it wasn’t the footwear at all but mainly the chair that was making things worse.  And now I’ve been forced into doing a better experiment.  If, after today, my pain gets significantly worse, that increases the credence that the boots are the problem.  However, if my pain level is stable‒and certainly yesterday’s walking didn’t seem to exacerbate it‒then maybe the boots aren’t causing any trouble.

I will say one thing about how quickly I’ve gotten into a state of readiness:  though I wore boots, which are heavier than the shoes I wore yesterday, I made slightly better time on my walk today.

Oh, I forgot to note that today is the first day of August‒named for Caesar Augustus (Née Octavian) who followed Julius Caesar (after whom July was named).  Welcome.  Summer is almost half over, at least by dates.  There’s nothing particularly interesting about the start of this month, other than rent and other bills being due, and the prospect of facing another long, dreary month with nothing interesting happening, other than bad things out in the world, which always seem to happen, anyway.

Of course, the US is more and more comically and tragically stupid than it used to be, but that’s been happening for a long time.  I remember when they canceled the Superconducting Supercollider in the late nineties, and I thought to myself, “That’s it, the United States’ days of being an intellectual and scientific and progress-oriented world leader are coming to an end.”

It wasn’t just my physics bias that led me to that conclusion, though that had its impact.  It was mainly the idea that, before, a large part of the ethos of the country seemed focused on constant improvement and leadership, in the sciences, in the arts, in technology, and in prosperity in general, including the traditional “American dream”.  But it turns out‒or so it seems‒that all of that seemingly intrinsic love of education and innovation and hard work was simply born of the post WWII era Cold War competition with the USSR.  We didn’t love these things for their own sake, not in general, not on average.  We just wanted to outcompete the “Godless Communists”.

Indeed, after the Soviet Union fell, the religious right poisoned the Republican Party more and more‒or so it seemed to me‒and turned their hostility inward on their own nation.  And some of the people on the left, without having to worry about being compared to the US’ enemies, became more leftish and pseudo-religious in their own Orwellian ideas.

Of course, most people were, and probably still are, much more centrist/moderate than you would guess, based on people in the news.  But now that we have no opponent against whom to unite, ideologically and physically, we can turn on ourselves more and more, and the most extreme voices aren’t curtailed out of the necessity of unity against a serious enemy.

China doesn’t present the same kind of opposition as the Soviets did, at least in our collective mind, probably because they’re far away and also they are our trading partners, and aren’t of European descent and are culturally different enough to avoid a metaphorical uncanny valley problem.  Also, they’ve not really openly declared any ideologically motivated intention to “take over the world” or to “bury the West”, at least not as far as I’ve heard.

That’s good, as far as it goes, of course.  The Cold War was dreadful;  I honestly grew up thinking that civilization was going to be destroyed by nuclear war at any moment.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I honestly and seriously thought about what we might do to survive after WWIII.  It wasn’t a joke.  And in my late teens, as part of a youth orchestra, I traveled to Lübeck, on the East/West German border, and got to see the fence line, the barbed wire, the mined “no man’s land” area and the machine-gun towers on the Eastern side‒not for keeping people out, but for preventing people from leaving.

That was pretty scary.

I don’t have high hopes for the future of the USA, but I don’t have high hopes for the rest of the world, either.  Our greater technology and abilities haven’t left the average person more respectful of science, because they don’t even understand the basics of the science that dominates almost every aspect of their lives.  Clarke’s Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but I wouldn’t have thought it would apply to the technology we have today.  Yet many people seem as incurious about real science‒and mathematics, and philosophy, and other fields of intellect‒as they would be about a world run by wizards.

There are flat-Earthers out there, for crying out loud, even though the refutations of that hypothesis are trivially easy to recognize, and many have been known for thousands of years!  There are people who have been so protected from deadly diseases by successful programs of vaccination (and sanitation and so on) that they actually think vaccines, and those who create them, are the enemy.

It really is depressing.  It’s like the fall of Camelot‒and I don’t refer to the JFK White House culture that people called Camelot, but the mythological Camelot related to the legend of King Arthur.  Though, come to think of it, RFK, Jr is a worthy spiritual heir of Mordred, in being the nephew of the man who declared the intention to have America land on the moon and yet who himself is now working toward the corruption and downfall of all for which his progenitors stood.

Oh, well.  I guess if the people in America and the rest of the world don’t wake up and drink some strong, black coffee and take responsibility for knowledge and growth and improvement, they will get what they deserve.  If they don’t change direction, they will end up where they’re going.  Unfortunately, they will take helpless innocents in vast numbers along with them.

Anyway, that’s my series of tangents for today, like a random plot of the scattering of elementary particles.  I hope it’s been worth your time.  Have a good day.