Author: Robert Elessar

by

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over the hill; those wounds run…pretty deep.”

It’s the penultimate day of July in 2025, and I can’t honestly say I’ll be sad to see the month go‒nor the year, nor the life, for that matter.

The word “penultimate” does make me wonder if any stationery company ever marketed a writing implement as the “Pen Ultimate”.  If so, I’ve not heard of it.  I guess it’s not a terrific marketing idea, just a mildly amusing play on words.

Anyway, it’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day‒because presumably once one passes the midpoint of the week, one finds it easier to coast through the rest of the week, as if one had reached the top of some hill (or hump) and was now loping, or perhaps sledding or skiing or snowboarding, down the other side.

Of course, that metaphor presumes there’s something akin to gravity applicable here, which is the force that makes it hard to go up a hill and easier to go down it.  But there is no such force applicable to time (though time is affected by gravity).

As far as I can see, no matter what you do, the days of the week proceed at the same monotonous rate, whether one puts any effort into it or not.  Time passes at the same rate (ignoring tiiiiiiiny adjustments for relative speeds and altitudes) for the most active athlete or business tycoon or person in the grip of mania as it does for someone idle or even someone in a coma.  And even if one can slow down one’s time relative to others‒for instance by going some substantial portion of the speed of light relative to them or by going into an area of strong gravity‒one’s own “proper time”, the time one experiences, will still be the same*.

One might effectively travel into the future of the people one left behind on one’s high-speed voyage, but one will also skip and miss all those years that one is “away”, and there’s no way to get that time back.  The nature of causality appears to preclude it.

So, yeah, the concept of hump day is purely psychological, and like so much of human psychology, it is stupid.  I wish I could say that my impression of such things has become less negative as my own proper time has passed, but alas, the young provide no more basis for hope with their presumed energy and creativity than the older ones do with their presumed greater experience and knowledge.

Almost all humans are really quite pathetic and come despair-inducingly far from achieving anything like their potential in wisdom or intelligence or creativity.  They mostly just bounce around like air molecules in a closed chamber, achieving maximal local entropy.

And don’t delude yourself that any other creatures on the planet are any “better” than humans.  Even the relatively smart ones like chimpanzees and porpoises and cephalopods and corvids tend to be often vicious, selfish, and violent.  That’s not all they are, of course, but it’s plenty.  They’re certainly not pure or innocent or fundamentally beneficent creatures.

Neither are dogs or cats or other mammals, or reptiles of any kind, nor fishes, nor birds, nor arthropods, nor annelids, nor protozoa, and so on.  Nothing in the world is inherently beneficent.  Even plants fight and harm and kill each other; trees waste their resources by growing taller to outcompete each other for sunlight, when if they all stayed shorter, at some uniform height, they would all be better off.

And fungi eat everyone, using other life forms for their resources and sometimes for locomotion, and they wage constant war with bacteria and so on.

There’s no good reason to expect any form of alien intelligence to be any better, nor AI either.  No matter how much smarter one being is than another, the most powerful defining factor of each is its limits.  Every finite thing is equally far from infinity.

Unfortunately, beneficence overall is not really an evolutionarily stable strategy.  Even if all beings in a given ecosystem were mutually benevolent, all it would take would be for one mutant to instantiate a degree of selfishness and ruthlessness and it would have a tremendous advantage over its kindly brethren, and its genes would spread and become more and more prevalent.

Of course, universal malevolence and selfishness are not stable, either.  That’s a recipe for overall destruction, as much as anything else is.  Prey are necessary for a predator to survive.  As Porter said in Payback about nice guys:  You’ve gotta have somebody to take advantage of.  The food web has to have a base somewhere.

It seems to me that there will never be any system that doesn’t have some such mixture of predators and prey‒even metaphorically within species and societies.  Of course, it makes sense to prevent and mitigate the depredations of the assholes and, if possible, to discourage them from existing at all.  That’s better for everyone.  But as with the trees**, it doesn’t happen on its own, and it is not self-sustaining.  The price of such freedom really is constant vigilance, and unerring vigilance of that kind is probably impossible in principle.

I’m not really trying to come to some point here.  Mostly I’m just expressing my frustration and despair and cynicism/nihilism.  There is not only horror in the world, but horror is always there and almost certainly always will be, at least until the ultimate (but at least peaceful) horror of universal heat death (or whatever) brings about the elimination of all experience of any kind in the universe.

The only enduring peace and freedom may be simple nonexistence.  But then there’s that damn Poincaré Recurrence!

Ah, well.  Have a day.  You can call it a hump day if it amuses you.  I don’t know why I care.

*And, of course, if one is traveling at a substantial portion of the speed of light, if one doesn’t have adequate shielding, one’s lifespan is liable to be shortened significantly due to exposure to induced cosmic rays:  When you travel at a very high speed through the elementary particles of open space, the elementary particles of open space travel at a very high speed through you.

**Think about it:  those beautiful California redwood trees are possibly the greatest, most glacially persistent testament to the “dog eat dog” nature of the non-human world; a centuries-long spectacle of cutthroat one-upsmanship, each tree fighting maniacally to outcompete the others for sunlight.  They are beautiful, of course, but so is a raging fire.

by

This tue, tue sullied (or solid) day

Tuesday or not Tuesday?  That is the question.  And the answer, for today at least, is that today is Tuesday.

I don’t know when you’re reading this, though.  Odds are, if you aren’t reading this on the day I publish it, that you are not reading it on a Tuesday.  In fact, once we get out past the rest of this week* there should only be a roughly 1 in 7 chance that you are reading this on a Tuesday.

That’s probably pretty obvious, huh?  Still, it can be useful to be in the habit of thinking in terms of probability and statistics, since that’s the way nature sorts itself out, right on down to the level of quantum mechanics, to the best of our understanding.  If people had a better understanding of the nature of probability, many things in the world would run far better, or so I suspect.

I have written at least one previous post (on Iterations of Zero) about how I think probability and statistics should be emphasized far more in general math education at the secondary school level (even for non-college-prep students).

Imagine a world in which most people had grown up learning about the nature of probability with reasonable rigor.  There would be fewer headline-based scares about things that are unlikely enough to be irrelevant‒e.g., plane crashes‒and more appropriate understanding about things like vaccination and disease prevention of various kinds, among numerous other matters.

Imagine if the people of the world really understood the difference between absolute risk and relative risk, and if they grasped the difference between sensitivity and specificity for medical tests.  Heck, imagine if the public at large had a decent elementary grasp of Bayesian probability.  Bayes’s Theorem is not really all that difficult, when you get right down to it.  Veritasium did a nice video about it**.

Of course, as I’ve said before, if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horse shit, whereas that’s only figuratively the case as it is.  But it would be nice if politicians and other people with undue influence had to deal with a general public that was savvy about the legitimate use of statistics and why (and how) they are fundamental to a thorough understanding of the world itself.  It’s not an accident nor a mistake that Jaynes named his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

And science is not an esoteric thing.  It is not a high-falutin’ mode of thought that doesn’t pertain to the average person.  It comes from the Latin scire, meaning to know.  It is fundamental to the nature of our epistemology, to not just what we know about the world but how we come to know it, how complete and how incomplete is our understanding and what the nature of the world really is at deepest and broadest and finest and coarsest levels.

So, it’s fairly pertinent to everyone, really.  After all, if you want to win a game (or get your best score or whatever) you’re best off understanding the rules as well as you can.  A true novice is unlikely to win a game of chess, or of Go, or even of Mario Kart against someone who knows what they are doing.

Now, nature isn’t our adversary per se‒if it were, we would all be long gone‒but it “knows” its rules and always and only plays by those rules, by definition.  In fact, if you come upon a place where you think nature has broken its rules***, what’s really happened is that you’ve come to a place where you don’t understand the rules.  Nature cannot be “wrong”.  There is no such thing as the “supernatural” in reality, because anything that actually happens, that actually exists, is part of nature.

Even if you discovered that you were in a situation such as that described by Descartes or The Matrix, in which the reality you think you know is an illusion, that is simply a newly discovered fact about the nature of reality, and it raises**** the question of what is the nature of that illusion, what is behind it, and by what laws of physics do those entities operate?

So, anyway, it’s good to learn about how reality works if you want your best chance (never a guarantee) of doing what you want successfully and getting what you desire from life.  No one here gets out alive (at least it’s very unlikely) but you might as well make the game as rewarding as you can in the meantime.

*Which I suspect would be when most non-same-day readers would read this.

**He also did a really nice one about the logistic map and chaos and the Mandelbrot Set that will blow your mind if you haven’t thought about it before.

***I’m thinking of those stories with submoronic headlines such as “New discovery breaks physics!” which don’t make sense to anyone who knows anything, and which should embarrass those who write them.

****It does not beg the question.  To beg a question is not to raise the question, but rather to proceed as if it had already been asked and answered in a way that you’re presuming it to be answered.  It is a way of skirting fundamental issues and avoiding having to prove a case.  In other words, it is willfully or accidentally disingenuous.

by

Another eddy in the corrosive, chaotic cloud exuded by my mind

Well, it’s just another moronic Monday (with apologies to the Bangles).  I did not do any work on Native Alien this weekend.  To be fair, it’s basically complete with respect to chords and of course words and melody‒though I don’t preclude any modest changes along the way, and certainly I have not arranged it.  But I basically didn’t do anything useful or productive over the weekend, I just vegetated by myself.

I intended to do some biking; I went so far as to pump the tires up to their target pressure and everything.  But as often happens, I got anxious over getting on the bike to ride*.  I did some walking, at least; not very much, but at least I took some precautions that have mostly spared my knees and my ankle.

I mean to do a decent walk this evening and get that bit more of exercise in.  I’m trying to get healthier, but it’s hard to motivate myself when I don’t even want me to be healthy.  I don’t like myself.  Almost everything about me is frustrating or even infuriating.

But if walking can help me be slightly healthier, it may make me less annoying, in that I hopefully will feel less pain and irritation.  So, I don’t really care about my own well-being to any significant degree, but I want this stupid body to be as minimally uncomfortable as I can make it.

I’m supposed to start working this week on the lyrics to my next song, with the takeoff word “humility” this time.  I already have a few ideas, though I don’t know if they’ll be what shows up finally.  I also intend to do a quick, low quality “demo” of Native Alien that I may share here on this blog.  That way people can hear the tune I have in mind for it.

I didn’t do any Brilliant stuff over the weekend, but that’s okay.  I do that in much the same way that I have my physics and calculus text books and so on:  to keep alive the pipe dream of actually getting to a level of expertise in the various subjects to be able to do something useful.  But I don’t think I really ever will do those things.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning just for the sake of understanding the world better.  Indeed, it’s a kind of hunger, a wish to take more and more of the universe into my mind, and thereby to “own” more of it, in the only sense that really works.  But it seems unlikely that I will ever find the time and/or the energy to achieve the level of expertise I would like to achieve in those various subjects.

Plus, honestly, my interest in one subject is constantly being derailed by something else, though it happens over relatively long time-scales.  That’s one of the reasons it was good for me to be enrolled in programmed curricula; I don’t have to worry as much about being distracted because I need to do certain things in a certain order at certain times.  Not that I can’t stay focused on something in which I’m interested; I can do that to a borderline psychotic level sometimes.  But I can’t readily choose which interest is going to grab me at a given moment.

Of course, most people don’t do what they want to do most of the time.  We all do what we must‒or else we die young, or suffer, or what have you; sometimes more than one bad outcome ensues.  Of course, even when we do what we must‒by whatever measure you want to determine that “mustness”‒we often accrue negative consequences.

I’ve tried very hard to do what I “must” throughout my life, for as long as I can remember.  I tried to live a clean life and to be productive and prosperous, to be useful to people who mattered to me and to innocent strangers and all that stuff.  I never knowingly or willingly, let alone willfully, committed crimes (other than minor speeding and so on), but I still ended up spending three years incarcerated and lost my medical license and much of what was left of my connection with my children, a good deal of which had already been hammered by my chronic pain problem and all the “fun” it gave me.

Also, of course, it turns out that all along I had ASD (of two varieties, the first having been fixed by open-heart surgery, and there may be some problem with that discovered a few years ago, but I’m not bothering looking into that, as there would be little point).  That doesn’t tend to have made things easier, I guess, though I have no direct point of comparison, since I have always been I.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, which probably means I’m not trying to make any point, I’m just meandering in my mind and sharing the dubious results with you, o injudicious reader.  Hopefully this isn’t too much of a bummer with which to start your work week.

But, hey, I’m not making you read this, am I?  If anything, I would advise against it, as I would advise pretty much anyone against wasting any time, effort, emotional investment, what have you, in me.  I’m a black cloud.  In the final analysis, I bring nothing but corrosion and discomfort and misery to those who spend too much time in my vicinity, literally or figuratively.

You should try to find something more pleasant if you can.

*I’ve only recently come to the (admittedly fairly obvious) conclusion that a big part of my anxiety about biking is because I have had at least two accidents on bicycles that hurt my shoulders‒a connective/soft tissue injury on the left that still causes my trouble, and a fractured scapula on the right (which healed very completely, as bones tend to do).

by

Neither jot nor tittle, but just a title

It is Friday.  Friday it is.  I do not, though, plan to eat any green eggs and ham, nor do I intend to train Jedi.  I merely like to fiddle around with words.  I have also even been known to write and speak about cellos and violins and violas and basses‒wording around with fiddles, that is.

Anyway, this should be the end of the work week for me, so don’t expect a blog post tomorrow.  I’m not saying that there definitely won’t be one; it’s an outcome with a low probability, but it’s not zero.  In principle, the probability of any physically possible event happening is never zero.  But the odds can be so vanishingly small as to be zero for all practical purposes.

For instance, it’s physically possible for the entire Earth (the Moon included) to quantum tunnel to the Andromeda Galaxy, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.  I suspect that the odds of it happening are so low that the time scale between now and the evaporation of the largest black holes due to Hawking radiation (roughly a googol* years) would not even begin to make it likely to happen, even if it weren’t for the fact that the Earth and the Moon will have been so dead and so disintegrated by then that even the memory of their memory’s memories would have been long since lost to any mind that might still exist at that time…probably.

So, you can treat that Earth-Moon Andromeda tunneling as “impossible” for all practical purposes, but in principle, it could happen…

…right…

…NOW!

Okay, well, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t happened.  The sky is too hazy for me to see if the stars have changed, but I don’t think they have.  It would be quite something to experience the local stars of a different galaxy, but of course, if we tunneled into Andromeda, we might be in a relative star desert, or we might be in a place with too many stars for our long-term safety.  Also, if our solar system’s net momentum persisted, we would be unlikely to arrive in any kind of stable orbit of the center of that galaxy.

And, of course, I did not say the sun would come with us‒that would make the whole thing even more vanishingly unlikely‒so we’d all freeze in fairly short order, apart from organisms that use geothermal sources as the base of their food chains and energy cycles.  Those might survive for eons.

Anyway, it’s vastly more likely that I’ll work and write a blog post tomorrow than that we will quantum tunnel to Andromeda**, but it is still a very small likelihood***.  It may be less than one percent, I don’t know.  But it’s quite unlikely.

So, though it might be worth a quick glance to check in come the morning, especially if you were going to do that sort of thing anyway, I would not go out of your way, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.  I don’t think even a sperm whale could hold its breath that long, and I think they have the longest breath-holding record of any mammal (if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know).

In other news‒not that I’ve really given you any news so far‒my keyboard arrived safe and sound (so to speak) yesterday afternoon, so hopefully this morning I’ll be able to finalize the chords to Native Alien.  Then, maybe this weekend, I’ll record a little guitar-chord and voice demo so I don’t lose track of the song.

Then, next week, I can start working on a song based on the trigger “humility”.  I still have no clear conscious notion of an idea for such a song, but I’m not worried about that.  I know I can produce something (not the Beatles song).

I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t need to produce anything great as far as lyrics go‒I think the lyrics I have for Native Alien, which I shared the other day, are okay but not terrific‒I just need to get some words down.  I can always edit and alter things as the process evolves, just as the first draft of a story (or to a lesser degree a blog post) is just the beginning.

I’m also continuing with the circuit course on Brilliant, and I’m alternating reading that book Vector and The Lord of the Rings (yet again) and my own book, The Chasm and the Collision (also yet again, though LotR still holds the 2nd place record for my number of reads, well ahead of CatC and only bested in number of readings by The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever).

All these are things that I can do alone, of course.  If there’s something to do that would require someone else’s participation, well, I’m shit out of luck.

I think that’s a phrase that applies fairly well to me, come to think of it.  And the word “alone” might as well have my picture next to it in the dictionary.  Though that might be confusing, since I can think of other words that would merit my picture even more than “alone” would‒words that would do their part to explicate just why I am alone, no doubt.

Batman knows I don’t want to hang around with me.

Anyway, I hope you all have a nice weekend, and if anything truly improbable happens to you, I hope it’s a very good improbable thing.

*That’s 10 to the 100th power, or a 1 followed by 100 zeros, in case you’ve forgotten whence the software company cribbed their name.

**Quantum tunneling is not rare on small enough scales, though.  It happens countless times every second in the heart of the sun, for instance.  If it did not, there would not be enough heat and pressure to overcome the coulomb barrier to fusion, and the sun would be some very large equivalent of a brown dwarf…or maybe it would contract more and get hot enough for fusion to take place without tunneling, but then I think the sun would be hotter and brighter and more short-lived, and I think it’s unlikely that the Earth would have produced any life, let alone humans.

***Think about it:  if you took something with odds of ten to the minus 120‒that’s 119 zeroes between the decimal point and the first non-zero digit‒and then made it a billion times more likely than it is, you’d still have odds of 10 to the negative 111th power, or 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001.  This is a good reminder that relative risk (or probability) is not the same as absolute risk (or probability).

by

I well believe thou wilt not blog what thou dost not know, and so far will I trust thee.

Hello and, of course, good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you may have savvily guessed‒you are a clever one‒from the fact that I started the post with a variation of “Hello and good morning”.  Also, you’ve probably seen that the title above is some modified Shakespearean quote, though as I write this, I have no idea what that quote will be, other than that it will, with very high probability, be a quote from Shakespeare.

Not much new has happened since yesterday’s post‒not for me, anyway.  There’s plenty of material out there for those who wish to comment on what’s happening in the naked house ape world (said apes sometimes imagine that their “world” is of cosmic importance, but it’s actually not even a flash in the pan as far as the universe is concerned) but I try to avoid commenting on such things here, except to note that, boy, humans can be remarkably stupid.

There was a recent-ish Doctor Who episode in which the bad guy made every human on Earth feel absolutely convinced that they were right, about whatever opinions they might hold.  Predictably, this led to global chaos and destruction.  But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do the opposite, or roughly so, to the whole of humanity?  I’m not talking about making people all believe they are wrong about everything; I don’t even know quite how that would manifest itself.  I just mean removing or strongly blunting the sense of feeling right about things.

It’s a reasonably well-attested fact* that people prone to depression, for instance, are not prone to rate their own skills and abilities as worse than they really are but instead are more realistic about them.  This is as opposed to the more “typical” people, not prone to depression, who overestimate their own capabilities, e.g., the notion that, say, ninety percent of people think their driving skills are above the median**.  So, though people who are prone to depression are, well, prone to depression, they are at least less prone to start wars and commit atrocities based on half-baked ideologies.

Oh, and by the way:  to a good first approximation, all ideologies are half-baked.  This isn’t to say that they all are completely wrong.  It’s merely to say that not one of them actually contains “everything you need to know about” whatever.  If they did, it would be painfully obvious to every intellectually honest person.  Intelligent, well-meaning, non-delusional people would be convinced by the ideas as soon as they understood them.  People prone to depression might find consolation and some degree of peace in them.  Atheists would be “converted”.

The notion that any self-contained set of ideas could hold the answers to “life, the universe, and everything” flies in the face of all logic (and few things are more annoying than flies in one’s face).  For crying out loud, it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages to explain rigorously the nature and implications of classical motion, as in Newton’s “laws”, with subsequent improvements by Laplace and Lagrange and Hamilton and so on, and all that is only an approximation, at macroscopic scales, to our best understanding (which is known to be incomplete) of the physical nature of reality.  And that’s not counting electrodynamics and gravity, let alone getting into the strong force and the weak force and so on.

It’s a distressing tendency, this human desire to feel right, to want to think that they know the answers and so don’t have to think about things anymore.  It leads to so much more of the trouble in the world than “simple” evil does.

Psychopaths, I suspect, do far less harm overall than people with normal moral capacities‒good people, so to speak‒who believe that they are right.  “For the greater good” is the kind of sophistry that can, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, fumigate any atrocity, including the slaughter of a continent.

Of course, Rand-sensei fell prey to her own self-created dogma and the personality cult that had grown up around her, leading her to get stuck in some quite dubious conclusions.  This is despite her commendable starting points (i.e., metaphysics:  objective reality, and epistemology:  rational thought).  If only she hadn’t been so dead-set against humility.

Humility****, after all, is not really the belief that you are fundamentally worthless (though that may indeed be true on any sort of cosmic scale), but just the recognition that you are subject to error, like every finite being (and probably most “conceivable” infinite ones), and that, it being error, you will not necessarily know where it lies.  It is, after all, the place in which you are mistaken; if it were glaringly obvious, you might be expected to have noticed it already.  Being wrong feels the same as being right, at least until you realize that you are wrong.

There, I did some broad level commentary on the nature of at least some of the world’s problems.  Let this be my open warning against certainty, especially in the realm of morals, especially when you’re assessing other people.  If you ever find yourself in a situation in which you feel that the suffering and even death of other people is tolerable, or even desirable, in order to achieve some presumed better future world, you should stop and maybe induce a seizure so you can reset your brain.

On the other hand, if you just believe something so much that you’re willing to suffer and/or die yourself, and only yourself, well, that’s on you.  Knock yourself out.

TTFN

*I think this data has withstood the reproducibility crisis in psychology, but correct me if I’m wrong.

**I say median instead of “average” because the average is usually meant to refer to the arithmetic mean, but it is in principle entirely possible for ninety percent of people to be above the mean, but not for any more than fifty percent of people to be above the median, by definition***.

***This is one of those rare cases where it’s fully appropriate to say “by definition”, because it is not merely rhetoric but literally applies, the median being a mathematical term with rigorous meaning.

****I just recognized, while editing, that this is the subject/topic/trigger for what is to be my next song.

by

Progress and (good) regress reports

I’ll start with the good regress:  I’m feeling significantly closer to baseline pain levels today than I was the last few days‒at least so far, though the day has only just begun.  I suppose I could have just said that I feel “better” today, but I fear that could be construed as meaning that I feel “all better”, which is not true and hasn’t been true for many, many years.

Still, I would rather be at my current level of chronic pain than the pain I was in yesterday or the day before.  And it should probably go without saying that I would pick either state over the pain I had while my kidney stone was present (and the irritation from the ureteral stent over the subsequent two weeks was nearly as bad, largely because it persisted for those few weeks).

I didn’t get a lot of work done on Native Alien yesterday, though I did progress a little.  I also don’t have anything down regarding the new song-takeoff word “humility”.  I’m beginning to think that I should stick to a song every two weeks, because I just have too much else going on to be able to achieve a song a week.

I also think I may need to buy a new small keyboard (the piano kind, not the typing kind) to use at the office, because I really have a somewhat difficult time trying to work out chords for a tune when I’m trying to play the tune on the guitar and then to play the chords on the guitar and see how they sound together.  I can’t really do both at once on a guitar, but on a keyboard it’s a piece of piss (as Brits might say).  Also, singing while figuring out the chords is difficult because my pitch in singing can be influenced by the chord I’m playing, and I might mistakenly adjust the tune to the chords instead of the other way around, without realizing that I have done so.

So, we’ll see.  I may order a new, relatively small keyboard for the office.  It would need to be inexpensive, but that should be pretty doable*.

I have continued to do the Brilliant course on circuits, which remains quite basic.  It’s a far cry from when I started doing their course on linear algebra, which I had never formally studied.  Don’t get me wrong; that’s a very cool and good course, and it applies to things in which I’m very interested, such as General Relativity in particular, but I got distracted in the middle of it‒I think I should have started by reviewing the fundamentals first.

I am currently reading a book called Vector, which goes into the history and mathematical theory of vectors and tensors, via quaternions and so on, and that’s pretty cool.  I find that learning the history of science and mathematics really helps get the subjects into my head.

As for other matters, well, there’s not much else going on.  Today is payroll day at work, so it will be somewhat hectic, but there’s no holiday or anything to warp the schedule.  Hopefully that means everything will go pretty smoothly.  At least I won’t have to be in as much pain while doing it as I might be.

I’m trying very hard to get back into doing more regular exercise, but trying to avoid causing exacerbations to my chronic pain while doing so.  It’s a bit of a tightrope walk, so to speak.  If I screw up, while it doesn’t lead to me literally plummeting to my death, it can set me back and make me feel terribly discouraged.

I had intended to try to ride my bike to the train this morning, but starting yesterday afternoon it began to rain quite heavily all throughout the area, so I didn’t get a chance to pump up the tires and whatnot.  This morning it was not raining, but it is supposed to rain on and off throughout the day, so biking isn’t so attractive.  I guess I’ll just wait on that and do some extra walking if I can.

Sorry, I know this is probably really dull and uninspiring reading.  I don’t know what to say about that.  I just spew these blog posts out as they come, so I don’t claim much more responsibility for the quality of the content than you can claim while reading it.

I will keep you updated on progress on my song(s) and of course you will see my writing.  I suppose, if I should try to start writing fiction again, I’ll let you know about that, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen any time soon.  There’s too much other stuff going on, and I’d need to stop doing this blog every day but Thursday.  I doubt that anyone would actually feel bereft if I stopped writing, but I flatter and delude myself that maybe it would be so.

I hope once more that you all have a very good day, and I reiterate that, no matter what, you will have the best day you could possibly have.  Don’t let that stop you from trying to ensure that this particular best day is really a very, very good one.  You might as well try.

*Addendum:  I looked on Amazon and there was a well-rated, small “beginners'” keyboard by Yamaha that can be delivered by tomorrow and was quite inexpensive, so…reader, I ordered it.

by

Some words about words to put to music and orthogonal pain

Well, it’s Tuesday, and here’s my blog post.  I’ve had a very rough day and night, I’m afraid.  Not just my back and hips and shoulders and so on, but as I told my boss when he asked me, “Every fucking thing hurts.”  I left the office about 45 minutes early, and got on the really crowded train that I would usually have avoided.  At least at the house I was able just to lay down, but I’d already taken a lot of (OTC) stuff to do what I could about my pain.  But it has certainly not gone completely away since yesterday; it hasn’t completely gone away for a couple of decades.  But it is still worse than usual.

In spite of the above difficulties, I did a little work on Native Alien yesterday morning.  For one thing, I retranscribed the melody onto real staff paper, because the crudely drawn staffs on which I had previously written it were very small and unwieldy.  Then I worked on the chords, confirming that, yes, the song (as I sang the melody when I made it up) is in the key of F major/D minor and indeed the initial chord should be D minor (this implies an overall minor key, but it is not dispositive).  I’m not sure of all the chords yet; I was in too much discomfort to keep working on it.

I also did my coin-flipping binary search for a new song topic/subject/trigger, and that trigger word is:  humility.

That could be quite an interesting take-off for a song idea.  It makes me think of Billy Joel’s song, Honesty.  Of course, I haven’t even begun writing down any lyrics yet, nor even really thinking of them, but I’m sure my subconscious mind is cranking away.  It always seems to be making progress; remember what I said yesterday about how, after a break, I sometimes come back better at something than I was before the break?

I may post here below the lyrics of Native Alien just for your perusal*, though not really for feedback unless you feel a burning need.  Here they are, in the first draft.  Bear in mind, there would/will likely be modifications to the wording in any final version that might one day come to exist of the song.

The planet Earth is beautiful

A gem in outer space

But I feel like a stranger here

As if I’m from some other place.

–

The humans are like aliens

They often make no sense

Their gives and takes and lies and fakes

Make me feel better on the fence.

–

Could I just be some kind of native alien,

Delivered by some ET stork that got its signals crossed?

Is it possible that I

don’t belong beneath this sky,

an entity who’s home but still is lost?

–

Do people that you meet seem strange

And even ones you know?

You study them to learn their ways

But it just leaves you in a daze

Unsure who’s really friend or foe.

–

Could you just be some kind of native alien

A seed that germinated here in unfamiliar soil?

Is it possible that you

Don’t belong beneath this sky so blue,

a mortal wrapped in some mistaken coil?

Again, I’ll remind anyone reading that A) this is the draft form, which may change, and B) the point of this exercise is just to write something, not to try to produce a masterpiece.

I know that not all of the lines quite scan, but that’s something that can be adjusted in the singing process.  Think of how Jimi Hendrix squeezed the words “Whatever it is, that girl put a spell on me” into the same musical phrase and length as “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky”.  I’m no Jimi, of course‒for one thing, I’m right-handed, so I don’t have to reverse-string my Strat‒but I do what I can.

I haven’t done any more thinking on my ideas of quantum wave-functions literally back-propagating through time and interfering retroactively with earlier parts of themselves and other waves to set up a potential cause for superdeterminism or something else.  For one thing, as I said, I need to seriously advance my mathematical prowess with QFT and such before I can determine if there’s any real potential to the idea.  Also, it’s hard to think about abstract, four-dimensional complex time stuff when you’re in a lot of pain.

I did log in to Brilliant dot org as I mentioned I intended to do yesterday, where I quickly saw that they had a new course on circuits, and I couldn’t resist getting started on that rather than working toward that other notion.  The basics so far are, well, really basic, but that’s okay.  It’s still better to do something like that in one’s spare time rather than participate in outrage on social media‒even though that outrage is often justified.

Oh, well.  I’m still tired.  I’ll try to work on the Native Alien tune a bit more and probably tweak the lyrics, but I’ll also try to come up with some words related to “humility”.  That could be fun, at least.

I hope you all have a very good, relatively pain-free day.

*It seems I have done so.

by

Chords in music and in time

It’s Monday again, the start of another work week‒that is, if your work week begins on Monday.  In the modern world‒and indeed, perhaps always‒there are many people whose work weeks start on days other than Monday.  I suspect, though, that the majority of people still work their week starting on Monday, at least in the West, though it may not be a large majority.  If anyone out there has easy access to any rigorous statistics on the matter, I would be interested to learn.  On the other hand, I’m not going to seek the information on my own, so it’s not a tragedy if no readers have it.  I like trivia, but this is definitely quite trivial, at least from my point of view.

I hope you all had a good weekend.  My own was not very interesting, and I felt tired, but then again, I did have a cold starting in the middle of last week, so I guess I was still recovering.  I feel as though that particular infirmity is reasonably well on its way.

I worked a little on the chords of last week’s song, Native Alien, though not very much.  At least at the house I have my keyboard, so I can play melody and chords at once to confirm which chords sound best to me.  Interestingly, it seems that the chord to start the song (at least the melody) will be a C major chord, which is the V chord of the key of F major (though if the song could be considered to be in D minor, it would be the VII chord).  This is not unusual, of course, nor particularly noteworthy.  It’s just interesting for me to recognize specific facts to which I didn’t pay attention when I wrote earlier songs, because I’ve thought more about music theory since then, probably because of the guitar.  It’s a curiosity for me.

Speaking of songs, today I plan to do another round of flipping coins to pick a basic topic, or subject, or trigger‒whatever might be the better term‒for another song (lyrics) for this week.  Of course, last week’s word, Earth, didn’t really become the subject of the song, just a takeoff point, but that’s fine.  The idea was just to give me some way to give myself a start.

In other news, I had a weird thought last night after watching one of Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest videos.  I wrote an email to myself about the thought so I wouldn’t forget it, and I’ll include that text here, so you‒yes, you‒can see what you think (I have edited this text for clarity and to correct typos):

“If the overall arrow of time is caused by the tendency toward increase in entropy from a lower to a higher entropy state (“Big Bang” to heat death, at the cosmic level), that could behave analogously to a current (like in the ocean, not a wire).  Meanwhile, locally*, we know that the laws of physics don’t appear to have any directionality time-wise.  So perhaps locally, matter and wave interferences in the sense of quantum wavefunctions can happen not just in space but in time itself and the future can feedback on the past, just not in such a large way that it would overwhelm the overall tendency (though maybe even that is not impossible).  The effect of such a temporally retrograde wave wouldn’t flow backwards so fast that it would override the current itself (probably).  However, that wave could still affect its predecessor, creating standing interference patterns in time and things along those lines that might be the source of so-called super determinism.  Think about this a little bit.”

That last injunction was intended for me, but if any of you want to think about it, you’re welcome to do so (it’s not as though I could stop you even if I wished to stop you, which I don’t).  Of course, if I’m going to really explore this notion, I’m going to need to bone up on my mathematical physics in a serious way, and it’s always hard to find the time.  That’s always been a bit of a weakness of mine:  I get very interested in something and develop skills in it because of my interest, then something else catches my attention, and soon all my energy goes there.  I don’t tend to forget the things I learned previously, at least, and sometimes when I return to them, I even find that I’m better than I was before (e.g., after not playing guitar for quite a while, when I picked it up again, certain songs or chords with which I had trouble before had become much easier).

Also, of course, the fact that I have to work for a living is another distraction.  I really do need some ultra-wealthy patron out there to provide me with living and intellectual resources so that I can devote my time to my wonderful pursuits without having to earn my living.  I also want world peace, world freedom…and a unicorn.

I guess in the meantime I should probably go back to using Brilliant dot org to spruce myself up in terms of mathematics and physics (and computer science in the meantime, why not?).  I have an annual subscription (supporting Sabine Hossenfelder, whom I mentioned earlier), so I might as well use it.  It’s a better use for my spare time than diddling around on social media.

Okay, well, I hope you all have a very good day, and that it is the beginning of a very good week for you.

*I’m using the colloquial meaning of “locally” her not the strict physics definition of locality.

by

Songs from a life less interesting*****

In case it wasn’t obvious, I did not go to work yesterday.  I have a head cold of some variety that seemed to begin in the afternoon on Wednesday‒maybe it started sooner than that, I’m not sure.  Anyway, I stayed at the house yesterday, trying to rest.  But I was pretty stuffed up, which I still am, and now my mouth is dry from (apparent) mouth-breathing when I slept.

Sorry, I know this is really dull material.  Such is life, I guess.  Or, at least, such is my life.  I suppose a dull life is better than many of the lives that would make for more interesting reading.  This was a point I first recall encountering in The Hobbit, when Bilbo remarked that his time in Rivendell would make boring reading, though it was wonderful to experience.

I think it is possible to have an exciting or at least interesting life that does not fall prey to the curse of “may you live in interesting times”.  I think it is possible to have a life that most people would find fascinating to hear about, and which is also quite fulfilling to experience.  But it does seem that this is a relatively small subset of available lives.

For the most part, humans seem to prefer stories about harrowing, horrific things.  This is not restricted to fiction, but is also part of why news media tend to focus on the more dire and terrifying news stories.

Of course, there are probably good, sound biological reasons for this.  As a matter of survival, it’s crucial to attend to danger and threat much more so than to pleasant, routine, comfortable things, because those creatures that don’t become extra alert and energetic when danger is present are less likely to leave offspring than are those that respond with arousal*.  So the fact that many of our favorite stories describe horrible things may be analogous to why so many of our snacks are very sweet and/or very salty:  a supranormal stimulus increases engagement powerfully, and can easily become habit-forming.

How in the world did I get on that subject?  I’m not sure.  I guess I could go back and reread this to find out, but I’ll be doing that when I edit it, anyway, so I’m not going to waste my time now.

In other news, I wrote a second verse for my “weekly” song on Wednesday afternoon, and even took a little notebook with me with the song paper in it, so I can continue the process wherever I might be.  Unfortunately, I did not work on it at all yesterday, but then again, I didn’t really work on anything yesterday.  I’ll try to write a chorus and then a third verse today.

I have to remind myself that I’m not trying to produce something superb, even assuming I could do that on command.  I’m just trying to produce something**.  So if it feels a little inane and contrived to me, well, that’s okay.  It’s just got to be some “song”.

I use quotes there because I am really starting with the poem, the lyrics, which is “usually” how I do things.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do lyrics and music within one week on the same song.  At least so far, that pace doesn’t seem to be in the process of being achieved, though I suppose I might finish the song and come up with a melody over the weekend.  Or maybe what I can do is make songs in a kind of assembly-line style:  lyrics this week, then next week, while coming up with lyrics for another song, do the melody for the first song.

I have heard that most songwriters tend to do melodies first and then come up with lyrics.  That may be a true statistical statement, but I know it’s not the way everyone does it, because at least two of my favorites do otherwise.

We know, of course, that Elton John writes the music after Bernie Taupin writes the lyrics, by their own description of their songwriting process.  And, of course, many operas and musicals start with the libretto***, and the music is written afterward.  And Roger Waters, one of the best lyricists ever****, implies in The Wall that he writes his lyrics as poems, e.g., “I’ve got a little black book with my poems in…”, and also e.g., the scene in the movie where young Pink has his poem book, which contains the lyrics for the song Money, discovered by the oppressive teacher.

So, writing lyrics and then making a melody afterward wouldn’t put me in bad company (though I don’t know how the band Bad Company actually wrote their songs).

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Batman knows if I was even coherent.  I suppose the editing will make that somewhat clearer, but my mind might be fuzzy enough that I cannot even tell in the immediate editing period.  But you will know.  So, please, have patience with me.

And have a good day and a good weekend, also, if you’re able.

*There’s nothing sexy in this use of the word, just to be clear.  I’m not referring to creatures that get “turned on” by danger and threat; those types of creatures seem less likely to survive than their compatriots, ceteris paribus.

**Not the Beatles song.  I already did a cover of that, anyway.

***Italian for “little book”, in case that wasn’t obvious.

****As evidence:  He wrote almost all of the lyrics for Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall.

*****I feel like this could be a good album title.

by

“You’d say I’m puttin’ you on, but it’s no joke…”

I’m writing this on my smartphone today, a more or less deliberate choice, as much as anything we do is truly deliberate.  I was already very tired when I left work yesterday, but now it’s even worse, because I got very little sleep last night, even for me.  I’m quite worn out in general.  By rights, I ought to stay at the house, but Wednesday is payroll day, and anyway, I’m more comfortable at the office than I am in my room.  Or, at least, being at work is as good as my days get.

I may or may not go to work tomorrow depending on how I’m feeling.  Even if I go to work, I may or may not write a blog post.  I honestly barely have the gumption to write what I’m writing now.

I haven’t written any of the “Earth” song lyrics for my weekly (or whatever) song yet*, but I have been thinking about them and what approach to take.  I considered doing something that references the idea from Ann Rice’s vampire stories of going into the Earth to rest or escape, but I did a quick Google search and there are already several songs with the title Into the Earth (though I have no idea what the songs are about) which I guess isn’t surprising.  They were very popular books, and the notion of a vampire going “into the Earth” is evocative.

So, I’ll take another approach, perhaps discussing coming up from the Earth or some such.  We’ll see.  I guess I don’t really have to take it too seriously.

Boy, am I tired.  I was already worn out and stressed and tense at the end of the workday yesterday (there were reasons, but I won’t go into them), and now I feel worse.  A person really ought to feel better after having spent the evening and night in their private place in the house, but it’s not so with me in this case.  Honestly, I considered sending for an Uber and just going into the office at about 1:30 in the morning or so, but I decided that would seem too weird; I think the boss gets notifications when the alarm is turned on and when it is turned off.

I’ve been thinking back to when I had my kidney stone‒it’s only been two months‒and about how I sometimes wish it had been some more deadly affliction, or perhaps even that when they did the CT scan they might have found some lesion somewhere in my abdomen or pelvis that indicated some untreatable illness‒cancer or something similar.  Then everything would be taken out of my hands.  I could just find some doctor from whom I could get palliative care when necessary and then wait for the end.  I mean, in a way, that’s what I’m doing anyway‒it’s what everyone is doing‒but it’s vague and indefinite right now.

I’m sorry to be so morbid.  I know most people don’t like to think about death and dying, let alone to “speak” about it.  Then again, the Tao te Ching counsels us to embrace death with our whole being.  It’s pretty clear that it doesn’t mean that we should worship or love death, à la “we love death more than you love life”.  Quite the contrary.  I read it as saying that you will only be able to enjoy life fully and wisely if you internalize and accept the fact that you are going to die someday.

Once again, we find that Tyler Durden captured at least some ancient wisdom in his “teachings”.

Anyway, my own fanciful yearning for a terminal diagnosis has nothing to do with a healthy and wise attitude toward my own mortality.  No, my yearning is born of simple mental exhaustion, of chronic pain for more than two decades, of chronic insomnia for even longer than that, and of depression/dysthymia with concurrent “anxiety” that is only superseded in length by my recently diagnosed neurodevelopmental disorder, which is congenital.

Unfortunately, I see no evidence that any of these things is likely to go away‒especially the latter one‒and I’m just puttering around here in south Florida, accompanied by various arthropods and reptiles and fungi and humidity and rain and heat and one of the most idiotic state governments the nation has ever seen.  And I am just so very tired.

So, anyway, that’s that.  If I write a post tomorrow, it will be here, of course.  If I don’t, it won’t.  If that’s not clear to anyone, please let me know in the comments (I’m kidding, I know you all understand, though you should certainly feel free to leave comments).  If I make any progress on writing a song, I’ll let you know about that when it happens.

I hope you have a good day.

*Addendum:  Between rounds of editing this post, I came up with a possible first verse of a song.  I won’t share it right now, but it’s a start.