I did not have nearly as good a sleep last night as I did the previous two nights. I don’t know if that means I’m getting worse—with respect to my current respiratory illness—or that I’m getting better. I certainly don’t feel better, and indeed, I am wearing a mask today because I’m coughing quite a bit still, and there’s no need to spread illness to other people in a petty way.
It would be one thing if I were doing it on purpose; I can imagine myself doing that in certain circumstances. There are occasions in which I feel that there are simply too many humans for anyone’s good, including their own. This has nothing to do with any silly, movie-Thanos concept of environmental correction or anything stupid like that. It’s much more a spiteful, hateful, vindictive kind of thought, rather like the way one feels when one steps on a cockroach that has wandered into the kitchen when one was trying to have a nice meal or snack.
One is not really expecting to make any overall global gains by doing this, and one certainly doesn’t consider oneself to be aiding the cockroach population’s well-being by doing so. Nevertheless, it is momentarily satisfying to act on that feeling of disgust and revulsion and just to crush out of existence that little, annoying thing that bothers you. There’s no need to dress it up and give oneself “excuses”. This is just how living things sometimes behave.
Incidentally, I actually think roaches are quite impressive creatures in all their many species. They are obviously extremely adaptable, their “design” is simple and consistent, and in one form or another they have been on this planet for about three hundred million years. Some of them can even have a kind of sleek aesthetic appeal, when they’re not encroaching (no pun intended) upon my personal environment. Nevertheless, if they intrude on my living space, I will kill them.
I’m working tomorrow, so I’ll be writing another post tomorrow, unless the unexpected occurs in some fashion. Perhaps some giant cockroach will step on me, or my illness will progress significantly, and I simply will not be able to go to work. Maybe I’ll die. But unless something drastic happens, I’ll be going to work. If I were to switch weekends, it would mean that I would have to work the next two weekends in a row, and I really, really, really don’t want to do that.
I wish I had just left on September 23rd, like I’d hoped to do. If I had done that, I would almost certainly been most of the way to my destination by now. That would be 48 days at this point, and even at a very modest walking rate, I could have gone a thousand miles in that time. I would have been able to see the changing colors of the leaves of deciduous trees in person again.
Or I would be dead, of course, in which case I would be at my destination, albeit in a different sense. That was one possible point of the venture. Now, even if I were to leave today, I probably would already have missed most of the changing leaves by the time I reached an environment in which they actually change. Instead I’m stuck here, where it’s still muggy at five o’clock in the morning.
I was thinking yesterday of trying out live-streaming to YouTube, so I opened up the app on my phone to look into the process. But, apparently, to live-stream from one’s phone, one has to have at least 50 YouTube followers. YouTube suggested that I make and share some “shorts” to grow my audience—apparently because that tends to grow one’s audience—but when I started practicing a bit of video, I was reminded of the fact that I do not like my face. That partly informed my decision to wear a mask today (though not as much as did my cough). A mask and glasses improve my visage, and frankly, they feel more like me than does my actual face anymore.
So, I may soon be doing YouTube “shorts” and similar things, and if I do, I’ll possibly embed them here. I’m not the hugest fan of such things, but at least they don’t hide or disguise the fact that they’re made on phone cameras.
It would be nice to get to the point where I could live-stream things onto YouTube from my phone, because there are things I sometimes consider doing that might be worthy of live-streaming—though the terminology could become amusingly ironic. But, of course, one doesn’t need 50 followers or more to live-stream from a computer, and I do have a portable laptop computer. I’m writing this blog post using it, and I have been using it for such writing all week.
Technically, the computer needs to have a Wi-Fi connection of some variety to be able to upload, but my smartphone can be used as a mobile hotspot. I’ve tried it before, and it’s been quite effective. The phone gets literally hot before too long—the processing of information does produce waste heat and increase local entropy, after all—but that wouldn’t be too big a concern.
Anyway, further bulletins about all that as events warrant.
In the meantime, I hope most of you don’t have to work tomorrow, and that you have families and/or friends with whom you can spend the weekend doing things that are at least somewhat enjoyable. I’m unlikely to be lucky enough to be gone or incapacitated or otherwise prevented from doing whatever it is I do by tomorrow, but over a long enough time, even the vanishingly improbable becomes almost inevitable.
For instance, if you had a 1% chance of being struck by lightning in any given day*, your chance of being hit by lightning by tomorrow would be, of course, 1%. After a week, though, your chances of being hit on some day would be about 6.79%**. After 30 days, your likelihood of having been struck by lightning at least once*** would be 26.03%.
After 100 days, your odds of having been hit by lightning would not be 100%, of course, but they would be high: about 63.40%, if my calculations are correct. And after a full (non-leap) year, your chances of having been hit by lightning would be…97.45%.
They never will truly reach 100%, no matter how long you try—that’s just the way probability works.
It’s a bit like trying to get a massive particle to go the speed of light. No matter how small the mass, even though you can get closer and closer, to reach the speed of light would require infinite energy. This is related to the fact that the ratio of 1 over the square root of (1 minus (the square of the velocity of the particle over the square of the speed of light)) goes to infinity as the velocity goes to c, the speed of light.
That’s not why probabilities never reach 100%, but it is mathematically reminiscent. One has to wait an infinite time for a low probability event to become, effectively, certain. But for practical purposes, it can quickly become so likely as to make other considerations irrelevant.
And now, I’m at the station before my destination—not metaphorically, alas, but literally. So I’ll sign off for today. I hope you have a good one.
*Because, apparently, you live in a ridiculously lightning-prone area and enjoy playing golf in thunderstorms using iron golf clubs.
**NOT 7%. Odds of independently occurring, repeated chances do not add in a simple way. If they did, then after 101 days, one would have 101% chance of having something happen, which makes no sense mathematically or logically.
***And when it happens once, you’re unlikely to get a chance to go for a second hit, so I’m leaving that possibility out of the equation.
Robert Elessar 