Author: Robert Elessar

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“Debating Apes” might be a good name for a band

Well, here’s another blog post, the third of the week.  It’s  11-11 today, written in the way the date is ordered in America.  On the other hand, in the European date ordering, the numbers would be switched, and it would instead be “11-11”.  Weird, huh?

For some people, the date ordering really seems to matter.  Some of them get snarky and heated, almost self-righteous online.  I’ve seen people make what they think are convincing arguments about why their particular date ordering system is the correct one, as though it were something objective and absolute that must be utterly and inescapably obvious to anyone with a minimum level of intelligence.  And, of course, those who prefer the other way will occasionally perform the same rhetorical dance to promote their side of things.

The funny thing is, both of them will often present interesting and even persuasive arguments.  This doesn’t tend‒in these exchanges, anyway‒to be an “Is not!” “Is too!”  “Is NOT!” “Is TOO!” type of clash.  These are people who have spent a certain amount of time really thinking about the issue.

But, of course, that thought, while admirable as far as it goes, tends not to be reasoning in search of an ever closer approach to truth and knowledge.  Rather, it tends to be self-serving and one-sided‒the work of lawyers, not scientists.

Neither side convinces the other, since neither is open to being convinced.  They are not seeking the truth, or to improve their understanding of a complicated issue*, they are seeking to score points, as it were.  This is primate dominance hierarchy competition; this is metaphorical feces throwing**.

And this, as I think I’ve written here before, is why I dislike the formal debate format.  Like the courtroom pantomime we act out in so many places every day, it is purported to be a means by which to seek truth, or at least to improve understanding, to test ideas against one another and see which come out intact.  But what it really entails is a competition between opposing would-be-dominant apes.  It is no more an intellectual endeavor intended to increase knowledge and arrive at greater understanding than is the clash of two rutting bucks.

Perhaps‒sometimes‒if there is a wide enough audience who are relatively ignorant (no insult) of the subject, such a debate may indeed give some people new and useful information, and one side or the other may even persuade them.

But such knowledge-seeking people do not require debates to learn.  Those who seek to understand a thing better‒really to understand it, not just to get simplistic answers that will allow them to stop thinking about the subject‒find many ways to take in knowledge, and a debate format may not be a particularly efficient one.

In a formal debate, arguments are couched in clever (i.e., manipulative) rhetoric rather than clear propositions with nuance and caveats.  This can make them entertaining as sporting matches, but it soils the potential for logic and reason.  Reality, on the other hand, is nuance incarnate.

It really ought to be thought to be full of caveats as well.  There should be caveat emptor warning signs posted everywhere.  Reality is, as far as we can tell, absolutely consistent internally; that does not prevent life from being full of deception, because deception can be a powerful tool for both predators and prey, in literal and metaphorical senses.

Since I just made the point about caveats, I’ll finish up with another point that has occurred to me more than once recently:  Many people watching horror movies and reacting to them, in real life or in YouTube videos or whatever, will bemoan the reckless behaviors of characters on screen, behaviors that end up getting the characters killed.  But then, sometimes, the viewers shake their heads and say something along the lines of “Well, they don’t know they’re in a horror movie, do they?”

Here’s the thing:  We are all, always, in a horror movie.  Horror movies can and do have other plots going on a lot of the time‒there can be romance and comedy and friendship and even politics and more prosaic crime and so on‒but the darkness is always coming for the characters, in whatever form it takes.

And the same is true for all of us.  The outer/inner/final darkness is stalking not just all humans, not just all life, but all things, and as far as anyone knows, there is no way to avoid it forever.

The Devourer, the Destroyer, will catch you and consume you sooner or later.  It may be swift and mostly painless, or it may be slow and agonizing‒or, I guess, it may be slow and mostly painless or swift and agonizing‒but it will happen.  According to the very best knowledge we have there is no way to get away from it.  For it is the very fact that entropy tends to increase that also drives and allows for life to exist in the first place.  “Death” makes life possible.

“Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes,” as Buck Murdock said.

Still, there’s no reason you can’t enjoy the movie while it lasts, as much as you’re able.  So, I’ll close by embedding two videos which deal with this subject rather brilliantly, and wish you a good day.

 

*And let’s face it, most issues on which people disagree are complicated.  There are few people who dispute whether 2 + 2 = 3 + 1 = 4, at least if they know what the symbols mean.

**A great many behaviors of humans in the world can be explained with a bit of applied primatology, from “Karen” type behavior and road rage to people’s dating strategies and relationship tendencies and office politics and politics in general and so on.  Indeed, I’ve seen a video in which one speaker told the interviewer that, in the run-up to Taco Piggy’s first Presidential election in 2016, the primatologists were the ones who thought it all too likely that the result would be what it turned out to be.  This fact does not surprise me.  Then again, it supports my general point of view, so I would find it convincing, wouldn’t I?

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Hail Sagan!

Well, it’s the second day of the work week now, and I’m writing my second blog post of the week, which I guess makes sense.  At least they line up ordinally and such like.  It’s not important, though, not even on most small scales.

I suppose I could probably imagine a scale or unit of measurement on which it would be at least relatively important.  For instance, it may be very important compared to the meandering of a single grain of dust on the surface of Mars in one of its very fast (and yet not very forceful*) winds, blown from one spot to settle in a new one three meters from where it had lain for 100 years‒Martian years‒and there remain for another 100 years before being moved again, in a new direction.  Call it the Martian Dust-mote’s Walk if you will.

On a cosmic scale, though, it’s all pretty much equally negligible, as is most everything else other than the cosmos itself.

Speaking of the cosmos, it turns out that yesterday was Carl Sagan Day (i.e., Carl Sagan’s birthday) and I didn’t even know it when I wrote my post.  I suppose that also doesn’t really matter, but it’s nice to remember Professor Sagan.  Though, it is bittersweet to remember him, since he died far too early.

I feel that we could have benefited from his intellect and insight and compassion and optimism‒his wisdom‒over the past few decades since he died.  Sagan succumbed to myelodysplasia when he was 62, with his mental capacity as fully intact as his illness would allow.  He was a serious scientist, a brilliant teacher, and a leader by example.

When I think of some of the prominent old bastards who have lived on and on despite their detriment to the world‒like Rupert Murdoch and Mitch McConnell, to say nothing of Taco Piggy‒while Carl Sagan died so young, it really makes me astonished that anyone believes in any manner of “natural justice”.

John Lennon is supposed to have said, “It’ll all be all right in the end.  If it’s not all right, it’s not the end”, or words to that effect.  However, he is also reputed to have said that life is what happens while you’re making other plans.  The latter seems to apply more to his own story than the former, I fear, for he was stolen from the world far younger and far earlier even than Carl Sagan’s myelodysplasia took him.  And in Lennon’s case, I do think the word “stolen” applies unequivocally.

Don’t even ask what I imagine doing to the man who killed John Lennon.  I’ll just say that I would use all of my medical knowledge and skill and every available resource to keep him alive and begging for death for as long as physically possible.

I’ll admit that would probably not be in the spirit of John Lennon, but I do not feel obliged to follow the spirit of John Lennon.  I love his music, and I rue the fact that we (and he) lost out on potential decades of even more of that beautiful music.  But John Lennon is not my spiritual guru; I don’t necessarily feel beholden to whatever moral philosophy he might have preferred***.

My spiritual guru would be more like Hannibal Lecter, to be honest.  Not that I share his proclivities or even a curiosity about eating humans; I don’t think I’d be able to get past how unhealthy and virus-laden most humans are, to be honest.  I suppose I might eat someone if it were absolutely necessary to survive (and if my survival was relatively worth the effort overall), but I would want them cooked thoroughly.  I mean, well done, cooked enough to kill anything short of the most extreme of extremophiles.

But would I be willing to use Hannibal Lecter style methods on the man who murdered John Lennon?  Absolutely.  If anything, I think Lecter’s way is too kind and gentle for that particular purulent exudate.

Okay, well, on that charming and upbeat note, I’ll call this post to a close, since there’s no sign of me going anywhere more positive.  I will say, though, that whenever it’s doable, whenever you can act on it without net negative consequences, follow the teachings (and the example) of Carl Sagan, not of Hannibal Lecter.  It’s probably not a great idea to be too influenced by me, either.

*Martian winds are known to be fast relative to our typical winds, and so people here on Earth often imagine incredibly forceful gales that would lift and buffet and possibly wreck even heavy spaceships.  This shows up in movies sometimes.  But the Martian winds, while fast, pack little punch; the Martian atmosphere is much less dense than that of Earth‒about 1 to 1.5% as dense‒so its winds are not intimidating.  That low density is part of why Martian winds can be so fast, despite relatively low impetus.  The uneven solar heating of Mars, the driver of winds there** as it drives winds on Earth, is not terribly extreme.  Not only is Mars’s cross-sectional area much smaller than that of Earth but also Mars is significantly farther away from the sun, and the strength of the sunlight falls off as the square of the distance from the sun.  So, since Mars is about one and a half times as far from the sun as is Earth, the intensity of the sunlight is 1/2.25, or 4/9 as much, as it is here.

**On planets like Jupiter, which is even farther from the sun, winds are driven mainly by the planet’s intense internal heat and its very rapid rotation (despite having ten times the diameter of Earth, it has a 10-hour day).  Now those are winds that could carry you to Oz and back.

***And he might not have minded my attitude.  After all, in the version of Revolution that’s on the White Album (which I think is the earliest version, but I’m far from sure) he sings, “But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out…in.”  Maybe he was conflicted.  Or maybe he recognized how non-unitary human morality and even identity is.  I don’t know.

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What should I headline this post? Oh, wait…

Well, it’s Monday again already, and it is the ninth.  By that I don’t mean that it’s Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, though “The Ninth” is how Alex referred to that piece of music in A Clockwork Orange.  It’s just the ninth of November, which really ought to be 9/9/2026 not 11/9/2026 as it is (in the US, anyway).  As far as I know, there is nothing auspicious or particularly interesting about this date.  It’s just the start of another “work week”, after the last one ended (for me) less than 48 hours ago.

Speaking of A Clockwork Orange, I remember that, for quite a long time, I thought the title referred to the gears and springs and dials of some actual clock, all of which mechanisms were painted orange.  I guess maybe if I had lived in Britain, I might have been aware of the phrase “as mad as a clockwork orange”, which refers to the fruit orange.

It would be a bit silly to have an orange with clockwork in it, since oranges have no moving parts (not counting seeds, which must move in some senses if and when they germinate).  Still, it doesn’t seem that crazy‒I can imagine works of art that represent an orange with clockwork inside, or music boxes…or even clocks that have been made to look like oranges.

You probably wouldn’t want to eat any of those, however.  Still, if you did try to eat one, I imagine it would simply be a case of mistaken identity.  You thought it was a real orange, and you thought it looked delicious.  Of course, why you would try to eat it without peeling it is a mystery.  Maybe the facsimile was made to look at least partly peeled.  Presumably, in any case, you would figure out your mistake rather quickly.

If you really did intend to eat a fake orange, I’m not sure what to say.  Thankfully, none of this has anything to do with the real world; it’s all just stuff that popped into my head as I wrote.  I don’t have any particular reason for writing about it, but (as always) there are surely causes.

Anyway, it’s the start of a new work week, and for the first three days of it, my coworker with whom I share some duties is going to be away visiting relatives.  So, it’s going to be a fairly high-stress week, and I am not anticipating it with joy.

Of course, it’s nothing like as stressful as a typical week during residency or medical practice, but those were stressful because they involved stuff that mattered, at least relatively.  Did it wear me down and sometimes out?  You bet it did.  But it was nevertheless a job where one could make a difference for many people in real and positive ways.

Even when someone could not be saved, it was possible to make their last hours as good as it was possible for them to be.  I cared about doing the job, and I also had a family I was helping support and who mentally supported me (even when they didn’t know it).

Now there’s basically nothing.  I work to get enough money to stay alive so that I can continue working, but I make no contribution to anything or anyone.  And I certainly have no one waiting for me at the house.  But the prospect of trying to change all that is more horrifying even than continuing it.  There have simply been too many disappointments and abject failures in the past.  The juice does not seem to be worth the squeeze (to return to orangey metaphors).

Okay, well, there’s nothing new in that region of idea space, is there?  I might as well drop the subject.  Of course, that raises* the question of what subject to pick up.  Perhaps I should not pick up any subject at all.  I’ve already written nearly 700 words of nonsense as it is.

I guess I’ll round this out with a thought that has occurred to me recently on more than one occasion (and may well have occurred to you):  at least some of the negative phenomena such as road rage and “karens” and online rudeness that we face in the modern world may be affected by how much caffeine (and other stimulants) people need to take into their bodies every day, just to be able to squeeze ourselves through the gauntlets we’ve created for ourselves.

The fact that so many of us also eat lots of refined carbs that play havoc with blood sugar probably doesn’t help, either.  I say this as someone who has been drinking coffee for as long as I can remember and presumably eating lots of carbs for even longer (I was told at a young age that I had a “sweet tooth”; I always wondered which one it was):  we should reexamine and rethink all this.

But I guess that we should always examine and reexamine and think and rethink things, even if we end up leaving things as they are.  A deliberate decision not to change is probably preferable to simply giving in to metaphorical inertia.

All right, well, that’ll do humans**.  That’ll do.  I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*It does not “beg” the question, by the way.  To beg a question means almost the opposite of raising a question.  It means to move forward past the question as if it had been addressed and answered satisfactorily or was known to be known, as it were‒as if everyone had already agreed upon it, though of course they have not.  This is one of those manipulative rhetorical tricks that avoids actual reasoned argument, and I despise it.

**Humans have sometimes been known‒in certain cannibalistic societies‒as “long pigs” or “long pork”.  Thus the Babe reference.

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Was anyone paging Doctor Nemo?

Okay, here I am, and here you all are.  It’s Saturday, and I’m getting ready to go to work, and I’m writing another blog post.  Isn’t it exciting?

Well, no.  No, it’s not exciting.  Nothing is exciting, at least not for me.  The wind is well and truly out of my sails.  The sea is becalmed, but not in a nice, pleasant way such as might bode well for a bit of snorkeling (or whatever else for which a calm sea in decent locales might be good).  No, it’s more like being in a sailboat (with no backup motor, nor even any oars) on a windless day (and week and month and year) at Point Nemo*.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Point Nemo is a spot in the south Pacific that is the remotest location on Earth‒meaning it is the place that is farthest away from any and all human habitation and from other humans.  It’s not really in the major shipping lanes, either, as far as I know.  Why would it be?  Shipping happens from one human place to another human place, so it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that such routes will pass through the most remote place on Earth.  You don’t go from Spain to Morocco via the Sahara Desert.

It’s said that, at the right time, if you are at point Nemo, you are closer to the astronauts in the ISS than you are to any humans on the surface of the Earth.

I’ll admit that, at times, being so isolated sounds enticing.  But it’s one thing to be isolated by choice, because one needs a break, or one wishes to do some meditation, some soul-searching, some introspection.  That can be healthy, beneficial, ego syntonic in the right circumstances.

It’s another thing to be stranded in Point Nemo by oneself, having formerly had traveling companions.  Perhaps you had been part of a flotilla or even an armada, but gradually, everyone else had to go to other destinations, along other routes, because that was just what they had to do.  But you got turned around, your Sat-Nav failed, as did the LORAN, and the skies were cloudy so you couldn’t see the stars to navigate, until it was too late.

Then, the skies cleared and the wind calmed and all rain stopped, and now you can see where you are:  the remotest spot on the planet.  And you’re running out of supplies, including fresh water, you have no fishing gear, and it’s more likely that you’ll encounter a deorbiting satellite than another ship or boat (many space agencies deliberately deorbit retired satellites so that they fall on Point Nemo since that’s where it’s least likely that they will cause any trouble).

I’m sure Point Nemo has its charms.  On a clear night, the stars must appear more beautiful and vivid there than nearly anywhere else on Earth, with no interference from the lights of human habitations.

In an analogous sense, I’ve probably read and thought about various things on my own that I would not have read and thought about if I had human interactions (outside work), and that’s…nice, I guess?  But one can only survive so long without supplies.

The question then can become, does one simply wait until one succumbs to thirst or hunger, perhaps hoping that one might win the metaphorical lottery and have some vessel happen nearby enough that one is noticed and rescued?  Or does one, perhaps, decide to go for a long, one-way swim?

Oy, what a strained metaphor.  Sorry about that.

Anyway, today I’ll work, and some other people will come to the office, but not everyone.  And then I’ll go back to the house, and I’ll take some OTC stuff to help me sleep longer, if not better, and then tomorrow I’ll do my laundry and then walk to the bank and then just…kill time until Monday morning, when it will be time to go back to the office.  And then the same will happen Tuesday and Wednesday and so on and on, until something or someone** kills me.

Maybe I should just knock a hole in the hull of my boat.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend.

*Nemo means “no one” in Latin (“not man”, or “not human”).  This was the source of the name for Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

**Technically, every someone is a something, but we usually tend to keep the ideas separate, presumably because of some sense of agency in the someones.  Also, for some reason (or at least by some cause) a lot of people seem to feel insulted if they are referred to as things, though there is nothing inherently insulting in that fact.  People are stupid, sometimes; or as Marullus referred to them in Julius Caesar, “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!”  See?  Things.

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Who knows what evil lurks in the ears of men?

Well, it’s Friday again at last, and of course, I’m writing another edition of my daily blog post.  I will also be writing one tomorrow, since I will work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.  I’m writing this on the desktop computer in the office, because I slept in the office last night‒I was on the phone with my sister until it was…well, not impossible to go back to the house, but pointless.

I feel I might have slept better here in the office than I would have back at the house.  Admittedly, that’s not a very high bar, and we’re doing hurdles, not the limbo, so a non-high bar makes things easy.  The air conditioning is not only somewhat better at the office, it’s not noisy, since it’s a rooftop unit.  The one at the house is definitely just a room unit, and it makes significant noise, as does the floor fan with which I supplement its effects.

Of course, during the day, the office is noisy with the stupid background music that’s constantly playing, nominally so the salespeople don’t get distracted by other salespeople’s conversations, but I think that’s dubious.  Possibly, it makes it harder to hear exactly what they’re saying, but I’m not always even sure of that.

I’ve worked in many places, from golf courses to laboratories to factory floors to big ships and, of course, doctors’ offices and hospitals.  I’ve never been in any previous job where people thought that they needed to have noise in the background to be able to work.

Almost anyone, I suspect, would find significantly loud music actually distracting from any job that requires mental effort.  I certainly do.  It’s so much easier for me to accomplish tasks here in the office when no one else is here and there’s no frikking overhead noise.

Although, it is sometimes harder to ignore my tinnitus‒in both ears, but much worse in my right ear‒when I’m in a quiet room, but for the most part I can at least not pay attention to it.  When other things are quieter and there is less chaos and irritation around me, chronic pains like tinnitus (yes, I think it qualifies as a kind of pain, though it’s nothing at all compared to my back and joint pains) are easier to keep in perspective.

It’s interesting that my right ear‒the dexter one, if you will‒is quite a bit worse than my left, or sinister one.  If I were inclined to find meaning in such things, which I am not‒I merely find them interesting and amusing‒I might think it said something about the progression of my moral nature, with the right or good side of me diminished and in constant pain and noise, while the left, sinister, dark side of me has remained acute, and indeed has become relatively dominant.

Maybe that would be a fun idea for a short story:  A guy loses the hearing in his right ear and suddenly finds that, with his left ear, he can hear all sorts of things with dark and evil implications.  Maybe he even starts hearing some of the dark thoughts people have around him.  Maybe he starts gathering and taking advantage of these secrets and other evil facts for his own ends, and so becomes more and more sinister himself.

It being a short story, one could just end it there, with evil ascendant and the protagonist looking forward to a life of malign but profitable activity that takes advantage of his ability.  Or perhaps we could do an O. Henry, Twilight Zone kind of entry and have the man suddenly start to lose the hearing in his left ear as well, all sound now subsumed by tinnitus that he cannot ignore, until finally he breaks and screams and…I don’t know, throws himself out of a high window to his death.

The story could be called simply Auris Sinistra, which is Latin for “left ear”, a fact which is probably obvious.  Or maybe it could even be Auris Mea Sinistra, or “My Left Ear”, though that might sound (ha ha) like it’s trying to be a parody of My Left Foot, which is definitely a different kind of story.

I considered Auris Mea Sinistra Mala, “My Evil Left Ear”, but that feels clunky and is a bit redundant.  It also rather ruins the play on the word sinister, which has come to mean evil or malign, thanks to the idiotic historical bigotry against left handed people, but which originally just meant “left” as opposed to “right”.  And of course, “right” became somewhat synonymous with “good” for related reasons.

These are all fossilized remnants of the magical thinking and foolishness of humans over time.  I wish I could say we had left all such things behind, but I cannot.  Well, I could say it, of course; in a sense, I just did.  But I would not be telling the truth, even though I know what the truth is.  Doing that would be wrong.  It would be dishonest.  It would be unkind.  It would be malevolent.  You might even say that it would be…

…nefarious.

Anyway, Spero vobis omnibus diem bonum fore.  I don’t know for sure that the grammar there is correct, but it’s what Google Translate gave me.  It certainly seems okay based on my Latin knowledge, such as it is.  That’s no quod erat demonstrandum, of course, but it works for me.  At least, it does so when there isn’t too much noise.

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It is an heretic that makes the fire, not she which blogs in ‘t.

Hello and good morning.  I hope you all (or “y’all”) are having an excellent set of coterminous, parallel days.

Of course, the day proper, that passage of time between one midnight and the next (in your time zone) is just one day, in that prosaic sense, no matter how many people it carries along through time with it.  On the other hand, from a certain point of view, each person goes through a separate (but parallel) individual day, which no one else experiences in exactly the same way.

It’s a bit like comparing the spacetime interval between two points (events) in spacetime‒a measure on which every observer will agree, if they are measuring it correctly‒and the “proper” time and individual spacetime path followed by a traveler through spacetime, such as we all are.

Or, to put it perhaps more prosaically:  One can get from the base of a hill/mountain to its summit by hiking, by ATVing, by mountain biking, by donkey, by free solo climbing, by being brought to the peak by helicopter, etc.  There is only one summit, and its absolute distance from the base (assuming one common starting point) is a fixed fact.  But each person’s experience in going from one to the other will be different, each path of slightly different length, taking different amounts of time, with different sights and sounds and smells along the way.

Such is life.  Such is reality.  There are many possible paths to any given destination.  Likewise, there are many different destinations from any given starting point.  I guess these are some reasons why it’s usually best not to get too hung up on trying to go as straight as possible toward your goal.

If you look only into the distance, you will fail to see the possible obstacles in your path (until they make themselves unmissable) and so will fail to steer around them.  Likewise, you may fail to notice an alternative path that will lead you to an alternative, better destination than the one you had in mind.

Look at me, talking as if I were wise.  Well, I suppose I do have some wisdom, and at least when one shares what seem like good ideas with other people, one can get different perspectives that might improve one’s own understanding.

As Forrest Gump said, though, stupid is as stupid does.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, in other words.  One may have terrific innate ability, one may have a capacity for greatness such as would stagger the most phlegmatic observer, but if one wastes one’s life in predictably destructive and self-destructive pursuits, bringing little but misery to oneself and others before dying in a gutter, one hardly merits the term “genius”, except perhaps if it is being used ironically.

Of course, all of our journeys finally end in the same place, unless there is some loophole to bypass the second law of thermodynamics*, so it’s probably worthwhile just trying to get the most you can out of whatever path you happen to take.  And if doing so were entirely and readily in our own power, then having a good life would be so common as to be trivial.

Alas, evolution has no clear tendency or basis to select for creatures readily able to have a “good” life; it just tends to create situations in which the things that replicate best (in whatever the local circumstances) replicate most.  This requires no intention on the part of evolution‒which is good, because it shows no signs of having intention, nor is there any reason to suspect that it has any.  It’s simply what actually happens when things are left to themselves.  That which replicates best and most often comes to dominate over things that do so less well and less often.  The rest, as Hillel said, is commentary.

Okay, anyway, that’s a lot of water drawn from the stream of my consciousness.  I make no guarantees that drinking from it will not poison you.  But I can honestly say that I do not intend to poison you; I am merely expressing my thoughts as they happen, speaking my mind as it were.

In other news, today is Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, commemorating the failure of Guy Fawkes to blow up the houses of Parliament on “this day” way back in 1605 (Julian calendar).  Of course, many modern people, especially those outside of the UK, know of Guy Fawkes mainly thanks to the excellent graphic novel (and movie) V for Vendetta**.

But in that work, we are given a different perspective on the Guy and his like than is central to “Bonfire Night”, and we see how one person’s “terrorist” can be another person’s legitimate “freedom fighter”.  Not all terrorists, of course, are real-life analogues of V.  Many, perhaps most (including the original Guy Fawkes, probably) are self-important, self-righteous dogmatists who want to try to force their ways onto others or to eliminate those they see as evil or inferior.

Oh well, whatever.  Happy Guy Fawkes Day, wherever you are.

TTFN

*Such luminaries as Einstein and Eddington, as well as countless other thinkers besides, consider this the law of nature that is least likely ever to be overthrown.  This is partly because it is based, ultimately, on basic probability, on mathematics, and is not dependent upon the specific trivia of nature in any given universe, e.g., the fine structure constant, the gravitational constant, the speed of light/causality, the mass ratio of the electron to the proton, etc.  Probability and statistics apply to essentially all sufficiently complex systems.

**And, to a lesser extent, from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories, in which Dumbledore has a phoenix named Fawkes (a nod to the fact that Guys Fawkes Day is celebrated with bonfires in which effigies of Fawkes are burned, as was the original man).  Rowling tends not to explain her jokes‒a very refreshing habit in an author‒she just puts them there for those to see who are able.

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Happy birthday, Mom

It’s Wednesday, November 4th‒my Mother’s birthday, as you might have guessed from the headline.  She would have turned 85 today, unless I’m miscalculating, misremembering, doing both, or am making some other unknown error type thrown into that mix.

I miss her; she was a good mother.  But she wasn’t terribly good at taking care of herself, health-wise, at least not for her own sake.  I suppose that’s an attribute that I’ve inherited, in a probably more purified form.  Either that or it’s simply a fact that culture‒probably quite by accident‒arranged for support structures for her, and for my Dad, in the form of each other and of nearby family, which I lack.  For instance, neither my parents nor my grandparents (to the best of my knowledge) ever got divorced.

I don’t think either my Mom or my Dad would even have considered divorce.  It wasn’t an option for them to break up with their chosen life partner; it just wasn’t in their nature, as far as I can see (also, they didn’t want to do so).  I don’t think it’s in my nature, either.

How’s that, you ask?  I’m divorced; how can I be a “mate for life” kind of animal?  It’s not a contradiction.  It’s simply a fact that I was divorced.  Divorce happened to me.  This is deliberate passive construction.  I would never have seriously considered divorcing my wife, nor cheating on her.  It’s not the way my operating system works.  But in the same fashion, I would not consider trying to hinder my wife from splitting away and trying to achieve her happiness if she could.  If she was unhappy with me, it would hardly be an act of love to try to keep her against her better judgment.

I could try to persuade her, of course, and I did try.  But you can probably imagine how poorly I did that.  I am not good at advertising or promoting myself.  I’m not even a fan of myself (though I do like my writing and my drawing and my music well enough).  Anyway, she went on and did her thing and continues to do it, and as far as I can tell, she is doing well.  I cannot think that’s a bad thing.

On the other hand, I am not the sort to try to find someone else and “start again” or whatever.  It had never been my dream or expectation to fall in love and start a family in the first place; it just happened, and that was great.  But that’s that.

Anyway, it’s now today, as it always seems to be.  I am not in the best of moods, not even for me.  And I am lonely, of course.  But I continue to trudge along, because that’s what I think I am supposed to do.  I continue to have all my chronic pain issues, obviously, but I’m sure they’re almost as unpleasant to read about as to experience‒not quite, of course, I’m as sure of that as I can be, but I am similarly sure it can be quite unpleasant to read about them.

Still, that’s me as well, it seems:  unpleasant.  I have it on good authority that I am an unpleasant person, and it’s not just on my own (though I concur).

I guess “authority” doesn’t really apply here, does it?  First of all, unpleasantness is a subjective assessment, not a fundamental attribute of a thing itself.  Different people find different things pleasant and unpleasant.  Oh, of course, there are things and people that would be found unpleasant (or pleasant) by a majority of people, but it’s hard to consider it likely that anyone or anything will be universally loved or universally hated.

No one can be an “authority” on what the “best” dessert is, for instance.  They can be a relative authority on what their favorite dessert is, but even that is something that can change from moment to moment, let alone across one’s lifetime.  And one can probably only speculate, at best, about why one prefers a particular dessert to another, or why that preference changes.

As for favorite deserts, well, I suspect most people wouldn’t have a preformed opinion if you asked them.  With desserts they might, since food and food preferences are discussed and considered relatively often in a typical modern life.  But deserts?  I think even those who dwell in deserts rarely bother assessing their favorites.

My own favorite desert‒a determination I’m considering for the first time now, as far as I can recall‒would probably be the Atacama Desert in South America.  I like it because in and near it, there in the Andes, are some major telescopes/observatories which take advantage of the high altitudes and very dry air to get exceptionally good “seeing”.

That’s been a peculiar stream of thought, hasn’t it?  I guess that’s fine.  I have nothing better to do, in any case.  I’m having a hard time even finding any books interesting.  And all of the billions of videos available through YouTube seem boring after ever-shortening periods of time.

I really should just get in the habit of meditating more.  If it gets me too depressed, well, maybe I could at least be as (ironically) cool as that famous monk who immolated himself in protest back in the day; through the whole process, he was remarkably still.  He may have died, but it was a triumph.  To paraphrase The Old Man and the Sea, he was destroyed, but he was not defeated.

I’m already defeated, of course, so I have one less thing about which to worry.  I might as well be destroyed at this point, right?

Anyway, it doesn’t matter.  I hope you all have a good day, individually and collectively.

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Smartphones, foolish humans, and vanishingly small giant numbers

Well, I’m writing this post on my smartphone today, not on the lapcom.

I’m okay with the term “smartphone”, unlike the term “laptop”.  It’s reasonably accurate, after all.  Especially compared to the phones with which I grew up, it is a very smart phone indeed.  I remember being quite excited when we got our first push-button phone, let alone one with “call waiting”.

Heck, this phone is very smart even relative to the first and second full-on desktop computers I “owned”*.  Those were an Apple II+™ and a Macintosh SE®, respectively.  Yes, I used to love Apple©.

Today is a big day in American** politics.  It’s the day of the midterm elections.  Of course, I cannot participate in that process, since the State of Florida disenfranchised everyone who had ever been convicted of a felony, even if it was the result of a coercive plea-bargain, even after they have served their sentences.

Of course, in a referendum, the people of Florida voted to amend the Florida constitution to correct that injustice and grant ex-cons the “right” to vote.

And then, instantly, the bottom feeders in the Florida legislature‒to a good first approximation, all of them are bottom feeders‒attached a bunch of legal hoops to jump through before someone could regain that “right”, hoops which many people, including me, find just not workable.

The people doing this disenfranchising almost certainly did so deliberately to influence elections, since the demographics of people who have actually been convicted of felonies tend to be quite different from those of people who can afford to pay for an adequate defense.

Anyway, let me not get going on that subject too much, except to say that I consider it a severe divergence from the spirit of the United States as represented in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Florida isn’t the only state that misses the point of the US, but they are among the most prominent and the most mentally deficient.

Oh, well.  What are you gonna do?  Any place where people can unironically use such phrases as “requesting the restoration of one’s rights” is a place of sophistry‒if even that‒not of actual rationality.  I say this because actual rights cannot be taken away nor returned.  They can be violated, of course, and sometimes this violation can be necessary and even morally right***, but they cannot be removed or restored by the action of some group of one’s fellow flesh-and-bloodlings.  Such things as those are better referred to as privileges.  George Carlin had a pretty good routine about that.

Anyway, again, I am not going to get into too much of the specifics of politics.  I think politics is important, in a relative sense, but only to humans and their chattel and to those within their sphere**** of influence.

But humans’ attitude toward such politics is often very melodramatic and even tragi-comic.  They seem to think that what happens to be happening right here and right now is the most consequential thing in the universe, ever (and not merely in a mindfulness sort of way).  It’s a frankly absurd, almost hilarious, solipsistic anthropocentrism:  what humans are doing right here and right now is the most important set of facts in all the universe, ever.

Alas, humans and human civilization and even all life on Earth from its beginning up to now***** are not merely cosmically tiny, not merely negligible, but to a very good****** approximation, they are nonexistent.  That’s not an insult, necessarily; after all, on the scale of infinity, even the largest number you can name is unreasonably close to zero.  Compared to infinity, everything finite is a rounding error on nonexistence, whether it’s one or pi or Graham’s Number or Tree(3) or anything else.

Kansas (the band, not the state) was being generous and a bit indulgent when they sang “all we are is dust in the wind”.

Dust in the wind?  Are you joking?  What in the world gave you the hubris to entertain the ridiculous, megalomaniacal delusion that you (or anyone or everyone around you) are as significant as dust in the wind?

With that cheerful thought, I’ll wrap this up.  Just reassure yourself that, not only is it true that in a hundred years no one will care; for almost everything, in a hundred seconds no one will care.

Have a good day anyway, despite all that.  It’s certainly possible.

*My Dad actually owned that first one, but he was not a computer hog.

**By which I mean “United Statesian” politics, but there really isn’t a good name for citizens of the United States that doesn’t require multiple words.  But, of course, every citizen of Mexico and of Canada and of El Salvador and of Brazil and of Chile, and so on‒everyone in North and South America‒can be legitimately called American.  I wonder how many of the ignoramuses who cheered for “Gulf of America” and “Lake America” actually realize that.

***For instance, we (officially) hold it to be self-evident that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable, and apply at the very least to all humans.  And yet, if someone is a true danger to others, all of whom have the same rights, and if that person cannot be convinced not to harm other people, it may be necessary to violate that person’s rights‒for instance by imprisoning them, or even by killing them if they are an immediate threat to others and there is no workable alternative.  It may be truly necessary and the best possible course of action, given specific circumstances, but I maintain it is still a violation of rights.  It may merely be the smallest set of such violations available and within the power of any group of mere humans.  But if one were omnipotent and omniscient, then one could merely adjust the settings of the dangerous person to keep them from being a danger to others and then allowing them to live and pursue their own relatively non-pathological happiness freely after that.

****I think it’s fair to use the term “sphere” here, because even though the dimensionality of that sphere is probably much greater than three, mathematically that’s fine.  There are four-spheres and twelve-spheres and so on.  A sphere is simply that collection of points, all of which are equidistant from some chosen center point.  Mathematically, a circle (for instance) is just a “two-sphere”, a sphere in two dimensions.  And I suppose any two points on a line could be said to constitute a one-sphere.  I don’t think it’s possible to have fractal spheres, i.e., a sphere in non-integer dimensions, but if I’m wrong, I would sincerely love to be corrected and educated by any mathematicians out there.

*****The future could in principle break this pattern, but I’m not holding my breath.

******How good an approximation?  Better than the most precise estimate that you’ve ever encountered or imagined encountering in your day-to-day life, even if your work involves measuring the magnetic moment of electrons.  99 and 44/100ths percent pure is galactically farther away from accurate compared to how closely all life ever on Earth approximates zero.  I think I get into that in the following video.

 

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Walking in the rain and writing using the lapcom…but not at the same time

I think this may end up being my last lapcom blog post for a while.

As you may have guessed from the fact that I just said that—it is, after all, the logical implication—I am writing this post on my lapcom, which I remembered to bring back to the house on Friday.  Bully for me, right?

Unfortunately, so far it hasn’t made much, if any, difference in the arthropathy—or at least arthralgia—in the bases of my thumbs.  I think just taking extra doses of NSAIDs beyond my usual seems to do as good a job on my thumbs as decreasing my use of the smartphone, and it’s not as annoying to have to carry.

I don’t really have to carry NSAIDs, actually.  I keep plenty of them at the house and at work.  This is not a luxury; it is a relative necessity.  By which I mean, while it’s not true that I would die without them, I would want to die even more than I usually do if I were not to have them available.

So, in a sense, I suppose going without them increases my risk of dying.  But then again, using them at maximum dose on a regular basis has its own risks, including to my kidneys and stomach (other things as well, but those are the main ones).

Of course, I take things to protect my stomach (and try to drink plenty of water to ease my kidneys as much as possible), but that decrease in stomach acid probably affects the absorption of a number of minerals, such as iron.  And so, I supplement those.  And so the cycle goes on, even without anyone pedaling it.

Sorry to mix that metaphor, or whatever the proper term is for what I just did.  I was unable to resist, and I didn’t see any strong reason to try to do so.

Anyway, though I can definitely write more quickly and more easily with the lapcom, I’m not convinced that it makes for better blog posts.  In fact, I get the impression that last week’s posts weren’t very well received.  Certainly, the numbers weren’t very good.  And, of course, when I go on too long, I irritate myself, as well.

That doesn’t just apply to blog writing; I have already irritated myself powerfully by “going on” as long as I have.

I did get some exercise this weekend.  I walked about four and a half miles on Saturday morning, and then on Sunday I walked a bit over five miles (not in the morning).  It was raining more or less constantly on Sunday, but I opted not to use an umbrella.  Instead, I donned a rain jacket that I had from when I used to ride my scooter* and walked in the rain.  Its hood was annoying, so after less than a block I gave up and just left it down.  It’s Florida, after all; the rain wasn’t cold in the slightest.  Honestly, I could barely tell that my head was wet, even when the rain was coming down hard.

That’s actually mildly disappointing.  I was vaguely hoping, or maybe wondering, if I might catch pneumonia, like the old cliché warnings warned about getting caught in the rain.  Of course, pneumonia isn’t caused by rain, or by any other way of getting wet.  Pneumonia is caused by bacteria mostly, occasionally by viruses, and rarely by fungi.  There is also a thing called chemical or aspiration pneumonitis, but that’s not an infection.

But getting very cold in the rain—since water is able to draw heat from the body far more effectively than air is**—can indeed use up one’s reserves of energy and make one more vulnerable to infections.  This is probably where the old wives’ tale notion arose.  But it’s just not cold in south Florida at this time of year.

Anyway, my walks didn’t end up putting me at death’s door, more’s the pity.  If anything, they have probably taken me farther away from it, at least for the moment.  That’s okay, I guess.  I mean, it’s annoying, it’s irritating, but I like to walk, and it’s nice to feel able to walk, especially given my chronic pain.  So, I’ll put up with it.

Speaking of something being irritating and annoying, I have noticed something recently—it was surely always there, though I never really paid attention to the fact—but many times when I feel that I hate something or someone (briefly) or am very angry at some situation, it’s not really a moral issue in any sense, though the feeling of anger is very often of a “self-righteous” character.  Rather, it is just annoyance, just distraction.

I can feel something very akin to pure hatred at a fly going past my head and meandering around a room in which I am sitting or standing, and I doubt that I’m alone in this.  Yet…it’s just a fly.  It’s noisy, it’s potentially dirty, it sometimes lands on one’s food, but it does essentially no actual harm and isn’t really capable of doing it***.  It’s just annoying.  It’s just irritating.  And yet, the sheer malice of the response one often feels can be staggering.

I think this is actually not much different, albeit coming from the other end of things, from how people react to people with whom they disagree, or even sometimes to the habits of a significant other that start off feeling benign and even endearing but which can become like a pebble in one’s shoe over time.  I think we overreact.  I think we give too much emotional weight to those irritations, and they then compound and develop into real animosity.  It would be better if we could keep them in perspective, if we could be mindful but not judgmental.

If you want to hate flies though, I’m fine with that.  Just try not to hate other members of your own species; they’re just as clueless as you are.  And also, try to have a good day.

*You can’t exactly use an umbrella while riding a scooter, or while riding a bike, for that matter.

**This is why being in air at seventy degrees Fahrenheit can feel pleasant, while being in water that’s the same temperature can feel quite cold.

***Mosquitoes are another matter.  They can carry diseases that still kill millions of people.

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Devil’s Night take the hindmost. Set course for Halloween. Engage.

Well, I am not writing this post on my lapcom today, but it’s not because I didn’t bring it with me when I went back to the house yesterday evening.  It’s because I didn’t go back to the house yesterday evening.

I called my sister after work yesterday, and we stayed on the phone for a couple of hours.  By the time we were done, it was one of those situations where I would just go back to the house, try to get to sleep quickly and stay asleep for a little bit, and then get back up and come into the office.  Even if I had wanted to expedite that process with an Uber or two, it wouldn’t have appreciably changed things, and it would have been expensive.  So, I ended up sleeping on the floor of the office again.

It’s not bad.  In many ways, it’s a far, far better environment in which to sleep and even to be awake than the room in which I “live”.  It is indeed a far better resting place‒maybe not than I have ever known, but than the alternative I have available.

So, it’s Friday, the 30th of October, and instead of the lapcom, I am writing this on the desktop* computer.

I will not be writing a post tomorrow‒which will be Halloween‒since I don’t work tomorrow (exclusis improvisis).  It’s a minor shame, since Halloween has long been my favorite holiday, but it’s not as though I am actually going to do anything for Halloween, anyway, except to give you the following message.

The office isn’t decorated, alas.  We used to do stuff like that, and we even did little dress-up parties, which were a bit of fun.  I like the idea of wearing costumes.  They’re quite freeing in their way.

Oddly, I’ve never actually wanted to be anyone but myself.  It’s a contradiction in terms, for one thing.  If I am someone else, then I am not myself, and I cannot experience being someone else while still being myself.

However, one can use costumes (and acting) to pretend to be someone else‒a very different idea‒and thus allow the expression of things that might not have come out otherwise.  One can even express thoughts and feelings that would not exist otherwise.

Because it’s not as though the emotions and thoughts that we have are pre-programmed; they are generated by brain processes as things go on, even as our memories are recreated rather than called up from storage every time one remembers.

Memory is an active construction.  This is part of why memories are relatively malleable.  You cannot “gaslight” a desktop computer.  It has all its files and information stored, with various documentation about time of updates, prior changes, earlier versions and so on.  It’s not going to be fooled.  And it’s likely to trust its own memory above whatever you try to tell it.

I feel slightly that way, myself.  I think I would probably be somewhat difficult to gaslight, because I trust my own memory more than I trust that of other people with whom I interact.  I know that it’s better than average.

And if someone wants to convince me that I’m incorrect about something, then I’m all for it‒I don’t want to be wrong any longer than I have to be‒but they’re going to need evidence and arguments**.

Try to think about what you would need to do to convince an intelligent but disinterested*** extraterrestrial who understood English at least as well as you do and was perfectly capable of following your reasoning and examining your evidence.  If you could convince such a being, you will probably convince me.

But if your attempts to persuade involve mere rhetoric, emotional language, conscious or unconscious manipulation based on typical primate reactions and emotions, then…well, you may make me feel uncomfortable, but I hope you won’t convince me.

Or, rather, I hope you won’t make me believe, because conviction in my mind is different than mere belief.  As my old, altered X-files poster says, “I don’t want to believe.  I want to be convinced by evidence and argument.”

Returning in closing to the matter of the date:  in addition to it being the day before Halloween, it is also what we used to call Devil’s Night back where I grew up (in the Detroit area), a curious kind of All Hallows’ Eve eve.  Now, it wasn’t as bad as is made out in, for instance, The Crow, but vandalism and especially fire-setting did happen.

I understand it’s no longer as big a problem nowadays, which is probably good.  Also, there just aren’t nearly as many people in Detroit anymore, so even if the rate per person of fire-setting stayed the same, the rate of actual fires would go down by the same fraction as did the population.

I don’t know that this is why things have changed.  It may just be a cultural shift.  The better angels of my nature are pleased and encouraged by this fact.  But there’s a not-so-tiny part of me that laments it.  Sometimes, that part of me just wants to watch everything burn‒or, really, to be the one burning it.

Don’t worry, I have no arson-related plans, whether for tonight or any other time.  Indeed, I have no plans of any kind.  Not really.  I have thoughts, I have possibilities, like the ones about which I wrote yesterday.  But I have no target, I have no direction (other than the inevitable one).  I’m not even really “chaos surfing”, as I like to call it.  I’m just sitting in one of those inflated inner-tube type things, floating along, letting the current take me where it will.

Most of the time, it’s not going anywhere, good or bad.

Anyway, I hope you all have a safe and reasonably uneventful “Devils’ Night” and a safe and fun Halloween tomorrow, if you celebrate it.  Either way, have a good weekend.

Oh, yeah, and…rest in peace, Patrick Stewart.  That’s all I have to say about that.

*A desk is a thing that has a top, sides, front, back, and even a bottom and an underneath region which are not necessarily exactly identical.  It can be perfectly sensible to speak of something being on the desk top, and so the term “desktop computer” is a sensible one.  A lap, on the other hand, very much is the top of one’s thighs (or crossed legs) when one is seated; it has only a top.  It is only a top.  So, I use the term lapcom, since “laptop” is redundant.  Now, if we had a term specifically for the top of a desk, and which only referred to that region‒maybe the fleeb, to make things a bit silly‒then it would make no sense to call something a “fleebtop” computer.  One might as well just shorten it to “fleebcom”.

**Not people aggressively talking at each other with raised voices and such like, but rather “a set of premises or reasons put forward to support, prove, or persuade someone of a specific conclusion or point of view” as per Google’s AI search thingy.

***Meaning impartial, unbiased.  Not uninterested.  Trying to convince an uninterested person is generally just a waste of effort.  They don’t care.  I am often that way, myself, depending on the subject.