Author: Robert Elessar

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When will the system crash?

Well, it’s another Monday‒the second one in December of 2024*‒and I decided I’d write a little Monday morning blog post.

I’m writing this on my phone today.  I wrote last Thursday’s blog post on my miniature laptop computer, and it got too long and only a few people apparently read it‒or, well, only a few people went to the page.  I can’t tell if they’ve actually read the thing.  The only real way to tell if someone reads something is if they make a comment that clearly responds to the substance of the post.

It’s rather appalling how rarely people read at all anymore.  The odds of someone both liking and actually sharing any of my blog posts are absolutely miniscule.  I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, since I wrote an actual song called “Like and Share” about some evils of the social media landscape.  But the evils I was decrying really focused around the people who curate their online presence to seem as though they and their lives are “perfect” while having who knows how many skeletons in their closets, and the other people who, through comparing themselves to the false images of people online, come to hate themselves and their own lives.

I would love it if people shared my blogs or even my songs or my books (well…the links to my books), but I guess the way one grows one’s audience and gets spread and “retweeted” and so on is by sharing politically charged content with some particular stance.  The more vituperative and divisive and snide, the more likely a thing is to be noticed and shared.  Of course, that’s not going to guarantee spread, but it seems to be an almost necessary thing.

The fact that my primary medium is writing doesn’t help.  With that in mind, I made a little vertical video yesterday, intended primarily for Instagram because “Why not?”, and I shared it there and on YouTube and Facebook and even Threads and X and Bluesky just because, again, why not?

I’m terribly frustrated.  Maybe I should take some controversial stance.  Maybe I should say outrageous and hateful things.  It wouldn’t be that hard.  I hate nearly everything in the whole stupid world.  The problem is that my hatred is equal opportunity.  I find the left and the right to be equally sub moronic, though the malady presents slightly differently in the two political directions.

Maybe I should start promoting an all-out war between neurodivergent people and the NT’s, sort of like Magneto against the humans.  Humans screw everything up.  Many if not most of the positive advances in civilization came from people who were probably “neurodivergent”.  The normies just take advantage of those advances and drive the world into the abyss.

Maybe I should start brainstorming and propounding the benefits of initiating a planet-destroying catastrophe.  I mean, it would be easy enough (in principle) to arrange for various asteroids to end up hitting the Earth; all one really needs is a space agency‒perhaps even a private one, a la SpaceX.  After that, Newtonian mechanics is enough to do the job, plus a little trial and error.

I don’t think it would be enough just to wipe out the human race or current civilization.  I’m thinking of complete sterilization.  None of the other life forms on this planet are any more benevolent or kind or positive than humans are; they’re just less competent.  Weirdly enough, humans appear to be by far the most compassionate, the kindest, the most “life-affirming” species on the planet.  All those that seem kinder or less damaging are simply less powerful.  Even things like lichen and bacteria and archaea have caused massive, even global, catastrophes in the past.

The fact that humans, of all things, are the kindest species on the planet is surely the strongest argument that can be made that life on this planet‒and perhaps all life in the universe‒is simply a huge mistake, and one that ought to be rectified.

I’m pretty sure my own life is a huge mistake, with the exception of my kids.  Certainly everything since about 2012, and possibly somewhat earlier, has been one giant error message written across the monitor of my existence.  I should just power down everything; not restart it, just shut it off and throw it in the trash.

Any thoughts?  “Like” and “share” if you feel the urge.

*Geez, that means the year is almost over again, and I’m still here, like a bad outbreak of herpes.

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O Caesar! These blogs are beyond all use…

Hello, and yes, good morning.  It’s the 1st Thursday of December in 2024, and so it is time for another edition of my weekly blog post.

I’m writing this on my miniature laptop* on the way in to the office, because I figured it would be a shame to let the device go to waste.  I haven’t used it at all since the last blog post I wrote on it, which would have been…looks like it was November 20, 2024.

Other than the little post I wrote on Monday—which I wrote on my smartphone—I haven’t written anything this week.  I haven’t played any music this week, by which I mean neither have I played it on a device for me to hear, nor have I played the guitar or the keyboard, though I guess I’ve tapped drumbeats on walls and desktops and door jambs and the like from time to time.

I am reading a Japanese light novel series, one that I’ve chosen because the characters are at least reasonably likeable, the story is more or less upbeat and decently written and translated, and there are enough volumes out to keep me busy for a week or two.

I haven’t read any science or math or philosophy in quite a while.  I certainly haven’t written on any books of my own.  I haven’t even watched any science-related videos, to be honest.  The only math I’ve done was when I saw a Facebook post of a sign in Taiwan or China that had an infinite series in sigma form written on it.  I thought I recognized the series, but I wasn’t at all sure, so I worked out the first seven or so terms and summed them up, and it became clear that this was the series that summed to Pi.  It was indicating, apparently, that there were 3.14 kilometers left in what I think was a marathon route.

You wouldn’t see a sign like that in the USA.  Though we have some truly brilliant people in mathematics and science and whatnot, they are a rarefied bunch, and the vast majority of the population is borderline mathematically illiterate, and some of them are stupid enough to be proud of that fact.

I did have one slightly interesting occurrence yesterday—from my point of view.  I was scrolling through “reels” on Facebook and saw one with a woman sitting in a room and giving a sort of strained, tiny smile, and the caption read something like, “I guess the fact that it’s holiday decorations that are hanging now, and not yourself, makes it a successful year.”  That’s not quite right; it was better written, but that was the gist.

I recall thinking, not entirely seriously, “That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t consider it a good result that I’m not the one hanging.  I even have two ropes already prepared for that possibility, but I don’t have any decorations or ornaments, and I have no one with whom to share the holiday season or anything anyway.”

I intended to write that (more or less) as a comment, which required going to the original post on Instagram; I was going to try to be at least a bit jokey about it, so as not to make the poster think was angry at her.  But when I got to the post, I saw that there were people who were complaining about it, saying that jokes about suicide were in bad taste or something, that they had lost relatives or friends or whatever to suicide, and such posts made them feel sad or something.  They had a long string of comments.

A few people wrote in response that such “jokes” or posts, even if seemingly morbid, were often a good way for people to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them, and knowing that other people feel that way and can speak about it was helpful.

But the Puritans were all too stuck in scolding mode.

I wanted to write more, but ended up just saying, “Surely no one has been forced to read this posting.”  The original poster, apparently, replied to my comment, saying that I was wrong, that she was sorry to have been insensitive to people, and wanted to try to be more careful in the future.  I had to bite my figurative tongue to keep from replying, “I was wrong?  You mean people were forced to read the post?”

And then I wanted to add something along the following lines:

“As someone who thinks about suicide daily, ever more so over time, and who feels the urge particularly strongly at this time of year, what with the waning sunlight and the holiday environment, it can be kind of nice to know that other people are thinking similarly, and are even able to be somewhat lighthearted about it–even going so far as to give a slight joke, to try to be positive.  I think all the people who are scolding and berating should be turning their scorn on themselves, if anything.  Maybe if they’d spent less time being so eager to shut other people down when talking about uncomfortable things, they might have encouraged a situation in which their own loved ones might have felt able to talk about their depression and despair.  Maybe these commenters are feeling defensive about the fact that, for all that they’re willing to berate strangers for talking about suicide (in a comparatively light hearted way) what they really need to do is berate themselves for not having done anything of significance to try to help their relatives or friends or acquaintances who were in such pain that they ended their lives.  Maybe if they tried to encourage a climate in which people felt able to talk about the despair that so many people experience—especially people who are “different”, who are, for instance, “neurodivergent” or who just feel weird and alien compared to everyone else on this waste of a planet—then fewer people would feel utterly alone and at a loss and with no apparent answer to their pain and loneliness other than destroying themselves.”

Of course, I didn’t leave that comment.  But it is terribly irritating that people go out of their way to comment negatively about someone who is trying to put out at least a slightly uplifting or relieving thought, but I doubt they went to any trouble at all to support their “loved ones” who were suffering.  Fuck all of them, I say, and in all the most inappropriate and uncomfortable orifices.  They’re making the world worse, not better, with their “Waah, look at how this all affects me, everyone, I don’t like to be reminded about sad things, because I did nothing to prevent or ameliorate the sadness, so now I want to make sure no one else admits that it exists”.

Well, the maker of that reel apologized, but I don’t think she should have, and I am certainly not doing so, though I restrained myself from hurling my ire at those people in the comments section, and only left my original one.  But if I could, I would like to give those people a brief taste of the despair and solitude and emptiness and pain that a person feels when they are severely depressed and suicidal but don’t have anyone they can really talk to about it, no support, since our society still doesn’t deal with mental health issues almost at all.

Even if I could do that, it probably wouldn’t help.  Once that temporary pain went away, those people would almost certainly go back to the way they were before.

That’s enough for now.  I’ve written too much, and the editing process is daunting.  I think I’m only going to give it two go-throughs before posting, instead of three.

I hope most of you—well, all of you—feel better than I do.  If I were convincingly told (by some being who could guarantee it) that by my death I could eliminate depression and despair in the world in everyone else, or even that I could just foster an environment in which people could be open about it and help could be provided at least to the same degree we provide it for heart disease and cancer and infectious disease, then that would be a pretty east decision.

But, of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there’s no reason to think it ever will.  That still doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, legitimate, valid reasons for a person like me to feel that he and everyone else would be better off—or at least no worse off—if I were dead already.

“Oh well, whatever.  Never mind.”

TTFN

*The miniature laptop is a computer.  The top of my own literal lap, though slightly reduced due to my paunch, in certainly not miniature.

**In English, of course—I’m not partaking of my old ambition to practice reading Japanese until I got truly good at it.  What’s the point?  They would never allow me in the country, anyway, thanks to my “criminal” record***.

***That’s actually kind of funny…what if nations didn’t allow President-elect Trump into their countries because of his felony record?  Of course, that’s not going to happen, it would be a diplomatic disaster.   Once again, the Donald shows that he can successfully be separated from the enforcement of the law, thus sending what ought to be a message to the American people:  Why should you bother obeying any inconvenient laws?  The President doesn’t!  Screw paying taxes or following through on contracts!  It’s every person for itself, in the most short-sighted, opportunistic, petty ways possible.

****Who would ever choose such a thing?  Its very nature is learned helplessness, self-hatred, emotional and physical pain that doesn’t seem to let up, that feels eternal when it’s happening.  It is a metaphorical and sometimes nearly literal version of Hell.

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The second of the “10th” that is the twelfth

It’s the first Monday of December in 2024‒December 2nd, specifically, meaning that the 1st fell on a Sunday, which means that there will be a Friday the 13th in this month*‒and I thought I would write a brief blog post for the day.  I don’t know if anyone was hoping for that, but it’s happening.

It’s relatively cool down here for south Florida; it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit when I left the house, which is, let’s see…(55-32) * 5/9, so 23 * 5/9, so 115/9, so just under 13 degrees Centigrade/Celsius.  That’s also about 286 Kelvin, but the Kelvin scale is a bit inconvenient for most day-to-day temperature readings.

I could’ve just looked all that up online, but I think it’s good for the mind, and for people in general, to know and remember (and apply) the conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit, even if only for the mental exercise.  If we turn everything over to apps and computers, then eventually no one (or at least very few people) will even remember what such things mean or where they come from, or why.

Anyway, it’s something with which to keep one’s mind occupied.

There’s not much for me to do or to say, anymore.  I’m just killing time while waiting for time to kill me, so to speak.  That’s all I see myself doing from now on.  I have no goals or hopes or dreams or anything.  I don’t expect that I’ll ever see my kids again, or that I’ll ever see any of my other family and/or friends, or that I’ll make any new friends, let alone any kind of “new family”.

I’m not cut out for meeting new people or making new friends on my own.  I never have been.  All my old friends were people I knew from school‒junior high, high school, university, medical school, residency, all that.  I’m basically alone, and I think I will be for the rest of my life‒which hopefully won’t be very long, because it’s really quite pointless and stupid, and I’m pointless and stupid, and so is the world as a whole.

Hopefully, some day soon I’ll be able to say to you all, “this is my last ever blog post”, because it will be one of my last ever anything.  I’m so tired, and I’m stressed, and I’m in pain, and I’m depressed, and I can’t sleep for shit, and above all, I’m alone.  I’m sick of just about everything that I do, and I’m very much sick of myself.

And, frankly, the world as a whole, the universe as a whole, is just irritating and stupid and such a waste of potential.  There’s no point to any of it, and it’s not even headed in any kind of positive direction.

As Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity”.  I suspect that’s just the nature of things, since passionate intensity tends to be the habit of those with a dogmatic turn of mind, and those tend to be the people who do the most damage, who commit the most destruction:  precisely the people who believe that they are right, that they know what’s morally right, and that belief gives them carte blanche to do what they claim to think is right and fumigates all their deeds from any possibility of wrongdoing (in their own heads, at least).

Dogmatic thinking tends to be profoundly dangerous and destructive.  “Certainty” kills.  That’s why I say, “Spay and neuter your dogmas.”  We don’t need or want them to spread and reproduce.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, enough for a lifetime, enough for eternity, whatever.  I hope you all have a pretty good week and month and so on, or even better than pretty good, if possible.

*If you stop and think about it, this will almost certainly be obvious, since the 2nd week of such a month will run, Sunday through Saturday on the 8th through the 14th, which means the 13th is a Friday.

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But can a short blog post be neverending?

It’s Tuesday morning, which is probably not neverending, because if it were, one would never even reach Tuesday afternoon, in which case it couldn’t be neverending, no matter what the Beatles say.

Although…if Tuesday afternoon never begins (because Tuesday morning is neverending) then Tuesday afternoon would also be neverending.  After all, according to the Oracle, everything that has a beginning has an end.  To which I tend to respond, “Yes, at the very least, if one reverses the direction in time in which one is considering a thing, then its beginning is an end.  QED.”

Enough.  I’m writing this post this morning because I have nothing better to do with my time‒or at least nothing better that I am capable of rousing the gumption to do.  I mean, I could always be on brilliant dot org, working on some mathematics or physics or computer science problems, or I could be writing a story‒you know, something productive.  But I don’t think that’s likely to happen.

This Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving.  You’re welcome.  So, only two more shopping days left.

It used to be that nearly everything was closed on major holidays like Thanksgiving.  And Thanksgiving is still maybe a more “closed for the holiday” holiday than even Christmas and New Year.  But there will always be stores open now‒at least a 7-11, a Wawa, or some other equivalent.  And working at those stores on that holiday will be people who don’t have plans to celebrate with anyone and/or who could really use the extra money so they work.

Anyway, I think it’s still the biggest family holiday in the US.  It’s certainly the time when people travel to visit other regions of the county and exchange viruses from those different regions with the greatest fervor.  This is part of why, in the US at least, there tends to be a big surge of respiratory infections early in December.

I don’t have statistics on that.  I just remember it being the case.  That’s clearly not a rigorous scientific conclusion, it’s my perception of the situation, possibly supported by the experience of other physicians, and possibly by some remembered textbook reference(s).  Anyway, that’s not significant evidence, not if one is trying to make a scientific evaluation.  But I still do think it’s the case, and I think that impression is based on good evidence that I have encountered in the past.

I really don’t have much else to say.  Even this nonsense is too much effort to continue for long.  But who knows, maybe a short blog post will be more popular.  In any case, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but I plan not to write a post on Thursday, so this may be my last chance to wish those of you who celebrate it a Happy Thanksgiving.

My wishes are never very effective, unfortunately.  Just look at my life.  But maybe they’ll work better for you than for me.

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Raveling down the knitted sleeve of care

Well, it’s Saturday morning, and I’m heading to the office‒way too early, because I still can’t get a good night’s sleep,  Even with recent interventions to try to help my pain and insomnia, it seems the sleep honeymoon phase might already be over.

I felt very much like the lone soldier in the jungle again last night, unable truly to rest and relax, primed at some pervasive level to jump up and react in case some threat developed.  This wouldn’t necessarily be a true external threat.  It might be some break in my routine, sleeping past my alarm*, realizing I had forgotten to set my alarm**, or there might be an intruder, some deliberate, secret assailant, come to attack me in my sleep***, or just a new flare-up of chronic pain developing.

It’s not a great way to start a day or to continue a life.  As I said, I had some temporary improvement not in the quantity of my sleep but in the quality thereof‒I wasn’t sleeping more, but I felt as though I was sleeping better‒for the past week plus a day or so.  This is probably why I’ve had the energy to write some blog posts this week.  But last night felt just like one of my typical, paranoid, restless, angry “sleeps” from before.  I have not stopped my new intervention, but apparently it’s no longer addressing whatever the roots of my sleep issues are.

I suppose I shouldn’t draw too sweeping a conclusion so readily.  One night is not a pattern.  But it’s such a familiar experience, and after such a short semi-respite, that it’s almost worse than never having a respite at all.

For at least 15 years (at least), I’ve spent most of my days and nights alone in the wasteland‒not literally, of course, don’t be stupid.  I just mean that I’ve had the sense of being by myself‒even when in crowded places, such as malls or prison‒and with no real recourse to anyone to help me defend against potential enemies, physical or social or “spiritual”, real or even imagined, external and internal.

To be clear, I don’t feel that the world around me is generally hostile.  In some ways, that would be easier, although considerably less stable.  If I were literally being attacked, I could literally take arms against that sea of troubles and let slip the dogs of war, imitate the action of the tiger, throw my warlike shield before my body and lay on*, fighting against assailants until they were all beaten or until I was dead‒and damned be him that first cried, “Hold, enough!”

Almost certainly, the outcome would be my destruction, but we all have that coming, anyway.  Dying in battle against actual attackers isn’t the worst death I can imagine, if I’m honest (it’s not the best one, either, don’t mistake me…I am not a Klingon or a Sontaran, and I do not embrace the philosophies).

Alas, I will probably be taken down in the end just by the progressive deterioration of my body.  It would be nice to die in a way that is heroic or at least useful, but that’s unlikely to happen.

I’m frustrated and angry about many things this morning, and I’m sick of feeling this way so much of the time.  What is the point of this?  Unlike Camus, I don’t imagine Sisyphus is happy.

It would be one thing if he had people whose company he enjoyed with whom to spend his time while he kept pushing his boulder.  Or, if he really were achieving some result, something beneficial, something that improved the world beyond himself.  But just to keep grinding away at his absurd and pointless task, with no benefit, with no entertainment, with no inherent joy in the process…why bother with that?

At the very least, he could try to plot his escape and enact vengeance against those who sentenced him to this fate!  It might take a long time, but it’s not as though he has anything else to do.  Even though he was made to roll his rock as a punishment, any eternal punishment would always be immoral when brought in response to any finite deed in a finite lifetime.

Of course, no one has put me in my current state.  Well, okay, the government of Florida and of Palm Beach County certainly did their parts in carrying out significant injustice in my case, and those involved are probably worthy of retribution, but it’s all really just so haphazard and so much a part of an unplanned, inefficient, and fundamentally unjust system that it’s not even easy to know where to begin.  Probably, we just need another really big asteroid, or a nearby gamma ray burst, just to wipe the slate entirely clean.

I guess we’ll all see what happens.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good weekend, whether you want to do so or not.  So there.

*Ha ha, I don’t recall whether that has ever happened to me.

 **This has happened, but almost always in the middle of the night, when I awaken, realize with a feeling of severe tension that I forgot to set my alarm, quickly make sure to set it…and then just stay awake until it goes off or until just before it goes off.

***I keep various weapons next to me, within arm’s reach, when I sleep.

****Macduff

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Desperate but not undaunted

This may be short, but I thought I’d share a bit of info since I brought the general topic up earlier this week.  Just this morning, while I was getting ready for work (and indeed, just as I was about to brush my teeth) the idea for a story popped into my head.  This happens a fair amount, as I think I’ve said, with weird little scenarios triggered by something that’s been going through my mind or that I see, and they coalesce into the root of what might be a possible story.  Well, since I had spoken (so to speak, ha ha) with all of you about this earlier, I decided to pause my oral hygiene routine briefly and go write the story idea down in the notebook function of my smartphone.

I don’t want to overreact or to ask anyone to get their hopes up.  That latter bit would be utter hypocrisy.  It’s always difficult to say what will come of a story idea, or even the shape it will take‒just look at Outlaw’s Mind*, at how much it changed and improved (to me) from its simpler beginning.

I’m writing all this on my phone once again, by the way.  And the fact that I’ve written at least the roots of this story and most of this week’s posts on my phone leads me to toy with the idea of writing a next story wholly on the phone.  I know, I know, I’ve gone back and forth about hand-writing stories versus word processor/laptop computer versus phones, and I got all those notebooks and pens and everything, thinking that I’d write HELIOS in long hand, and now I’m thinking of the opposite.

This is an example of the workings of a desperate mind, one trying, scrambling, scrounging, looking for answers to getting back to writing, or music, or trying to help my chronic pain, or my insomnia, or my depression, and whether or not to pursue the possibility of an ASD diagnosis (not the heart kind‒I know I had that).  I’m trying to find something that has some meaning at all for my life to persist.

I guess that means I haven’t given up yet, but that’s more a matter of habit than anything else.  I am extremely stubborn, and I have trouble letting go of a process once it’s a habit.  Maybe that’s the ASD doing its thing, assuming it’s there.  Maybe I’m just dysfunctional and odd and alien.  I suppose those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Still, writing about this idea got me thinking of potential scenes and events for the story I mentioned above, so please forgive me if I space out a bit.  Just wait a moment or two; I’ll be back**.

That was kind of fun.  It could be an interesting story, this new idea.  We’ll see if anything happens with it.  I wouldn’t put serious money on the possibility, and I certainly don’t recommend holding your breath.  But if I were to write a novel or novella on the phone, the portability would be a big plus.

That reminds me of those old “palm pilot” things people used to have, the little personal data notebook digital things, with the plastic styluses.  Some people thought they were so cool using those things.  They were always so geeked out about them and seemed to look for excuses to get them out all the time.

Don’t get me wrong; if someone was just having a great time, enjoying using a brilliant piece of then-new technology, then have at them!  Enjoy!  Why not be happy with a new, useful tool, especially if it’s a cool tool?

At least some of the people who ostentatiously used the “personal data assistants”, though, were mainly status hungry.  I get it (though I may not grok it).  Humans in general tend to be status hungry; for ancestral humans, in-group status could have a big effect on reproductive opportunities (and even just basic survival chances), so any genes that pushed toward such behavior would tend, ceteris paribus, to be at an advantage, locally (i.e., in that particular gene pool).

But it is rather bizarre to watch from the outside, and instances of the phenomenon vary between the amusing and the contemptible, with many a superposition of the two.  It still happens today, of course.

Humans also haven’t shown any sign of ceasing to select status hungry people as the ones they follow, even though there are such obvious conflicts of interest and so much bias that makes such people unreliable in the long run.

Oh, well.  I guess it doesn’t matter, because in the truly long run there will be nothing but random elementary particles and forever-expanding spacetime, if the current understanding is correct.

Or, of course, there could be even worse alternatives.

There’s probably no possible horrible situation that couldn’t in principle be made even worse.  Even Sam Harris’s “worst possible misery for everyone” could be made even “worse” just by adding more people to the situation, each one of whom is in the worst possible misery they can be.

I suppose that fact implies the theoretical possibility of its opposite:  the best possible well-being for everyone.  Why does that feel so much more unrealistic?  Well, I could get into some of the potential reasons, many involving the biological necessity and crucial importance of fear and pain.  But that’s for another time, or you can read a bunch of my blog posts here and on Iterations of Zero.  I’m sure you can find my thoughts on the subject.

Aaaaand that’s enough meandering.  You all hopefully are going to have a good weekend.  I am tentatively scheduled to work tomorrow, but we shall see.

*Seriously, go take a look.  If you like it, why not buy some of my published stuff?  And then tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

**Ha ha.  That’s a trick.  You can’t tell when or for how long I spaced out while writing, unless I tell you, or put a space or row of asterisks in the body of the writing.  I could begin a sentence one day and finish it years later.  It’s a bit like listening to a studio recording that had overdubs and one person doing more than one part.  You hear it all at once, but that’s not how it came to be.

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If I could write the beauty of your blogs, and in fresh numbers number all your graces…

Hello.  Good morning.

Aaahhh, doesn’t that feel better?  Now I can use my standard Thursday blog post opening phrases, because today is, in fact, Thursday.  It’s the 21st of November, the third Thursday of the month, so in the USA you only have seven shopping days until Thanksgiving.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, since next Thursday is that holiday, I probably will not be writing a blog post then.  It is one holiday on which our office is always closed.  We will be open on so-called Black Friday, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll write a post on that day.

Of course, in principle, I cannot guarantee that I’ll write anything at all ever again after this post.  I may not even survive to post this entry*‒I am in the back seat of a Lyft, on the highway (I-95) of the East Coast of the US, so goodness knows there’s a non-zero chance of a fatal accident.  I would even wish for one, but I know such a thing would involve harm and possibly death to other, more innocent, people.

Also, of course, wishes don’t actually directly affect reality‒thank goodness.  Imagine if even one percent of wishes came true as wished.  The world would be thoroughgoing chaos…and not in a good way.  I tend to say of wishes that “If wishes were horses, then we’d all be hip deep in horse shit,” but it would be even more terrifying if wishes worked.

The “if‒then” character of the wishes saying (my version or the more SFW one that involves beggars riding) often makes me think of lines of computer code in some generic programming language, like:

If wishes==horses then execute beggars.ride

Or maybe 

If wishes==horses then horseshit_level = “hip deep”

I wonder what that would look like in machine language.  Or, I wonder what it would look like in straight binary.  Really, though, I know part of the answer to the latter piece of wondering:  it would look, to the naked eye, like a random string of ones and zeros, perhaps the tally of some very long record of flipping a coin and marking heads as 1 and tails as 0 (or vice versa).

Actually, of course, given a binary-based computer language, one can literally generate every possible computer program just by flipping an ever-increasing number of coins.  Or, to be honest, one can do it just by counting in binary:  0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000…

This is why, if memory serves, computer science people and information theory people say that every program can literally be assigned (and described by) a number.  You could express that number in base ten if you wanted, to make it a bit more compact and familiar to the typical human.  Or, if you want to be more efficient and make conversion easier, you can use hexadecimal.  This is easier because a base-sixteen number system is more directly and easily converted to and from binary, since 16 is a power of 2 (2 to the 4th).

Even the human genome, or any genome in fact, could be fairly readily expressed in binary.  The DNA code is a 4 character language, so it wouldn’t take too much work to make it binary, however you wanted to code it.  Then, each person’s genome would have a single, unique number.  That’s kind of interesting.

It would be a bit unwieldy as an ID number, of course.  The human genome is roughly 3 billion nucleotides long, which means it would be roughly 6 billion binary digits (AKA bits).  And since every ten bits is roughly a thousand in base 10 (2^10 is 1024, which is very close to 10^3, aka 1000) then 6 billion bits should be roughly 2 billion decimal digits long (a bit less), which is much, much larger than the famously large number, a googol**.

It’s a big number.  This should give you at least some idea of just how unique each individual life form is at a fundamental level.  There are so many possible genomes that the expected time until the final heat death of the universe is unlikely to be long enough to have a randomly created duplication within the accessible cosmos.

Of course, within an infinite space‒which is the most probable truth about our universe as far as we can tell‒one will not only have every possible version that can exist, but will have infinite copies of every possible version.  Infinity makes things weird; I love it.

Of course, just as with the making of computer programs by simply counting in binary, the vast majority of genomes would not code for any lifeform in any kind of cellular environment, using any given kind of transcription code you might want (the one on Earth, found in essentially all creatures, uses three base pairs to code for a given amino acid in a protein, but that’s not all that DNA does).  Similarly, most of the counted up programs would not run on any given computer language platform, because they would not code for any coherent and consistent set of instructions.

But even so, you would still, eventually, get every possible working program, or every possible life form in any given biological system if you could just keep counting.

On related matters, there are things like the halting problem and so on, but we won’t get into that today, interesting though it may be (and is).

It’s quite fascinating, when one is dealing with information theory (and computer science) how quickly one encounters numbers so vast that they dwarf everything within the actual universe.

Mind you, the maximum possible information‒related to the entropy‒carried within any bounded 3-D region is constrained by the surface area (in square Planck lengths) of a black hole with that size event horizon.  For our universe, roughly 96 billion light years across, I think that’s something like 10 to the 124th bits, or at least it’s that many Planck areas.  That’s quite a bit*** smaller than the number of possible genomes, though I have a sinking feeling that I’m underestimating the number.

And information, at least when instantiated, has “mass” in a sense, and the upper limit of the amount of information in a region of spacetime is delineated by the Bekenstein entropy description.  So there’s only so many binary strings you can generate before you turn everything into a black hole.

Something like all that, anyway.

I may have been imprecise in some of what I said, but when you’re dealing with very large numbers, precision is only theoretically interesting.  For instance, we**** have found Pi to far more than the number of digits needed to calculate the circumference of the visible universe down to the Planck length.  It would require only about 40 digits of Pi to get to that precision to the size of a hydrogen atom, and those are only about 10^25 Planck lengths across, so we wouldn’t expect to need much more than 65 digits of Pi to get that precise, but let’s be generous and use 100 digits.

How many digits of Pi have actually been “discovered” by mathematicians?  Over 105 trillion digits.  Talk about angels dancing in the heads of pins!  It’s literally physically impossible, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, even to test whether that number precisely defines the ratio of any given circle to its diameter by measuring it.  One cannot, in principle, measure finely enough.

Still it just goes to show that mathematics is vastly larger in scope than any instantiated, superficial reality.  Information is deeper than one might think…so to speak.  But, then, so are minds themselves, vastly deeper.

As Idris/the TARDIS asked in Doctor Who, Series 6, episode 4, “Are all people like this?  So much bigger on the inside?”  Yes, Idris, I suspect they are, even those people we don’t like and feel the urge to denigrate.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve achieved nothing, really, other than write a Thursday blog post, but then again, that’s all I meant to do.  I hope you have among the better half of all the vast number of possible days available to you.

TTFN

*If you’re reading this, though, I clearly did survive.  I have mixed feelings about that.

**How much larger?  Soooo much larger that if you subtracted a googol of something from 10^1,800,000,000 of something, you would not change it to any extent measurable even by the most precise instruments humans have ever created.  And a googol is already something like 10 to the 19th times as large as the total estimated number of protons and neutrons in the accessible universe.

***No pun intended.

****Actually, I had nothing to do with it; it’s just the sort of “royal we”***** kind of thing everyone uses when discussing the accomplishments of humanity as a whole.

*****Not to be confused with royal wee.  That’s the sort of weird, niche thing one might find for sale in mason jars on the dark web.  Be careful if you’re into such things.  I wouldn’t buy it unless you’re sure of the source, so to speak.

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“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

And here…we…go, as the Joker said.

I’m writing something now on Wednesday on the way to work, in the back seat of a Lyft.  This time, I’m writing it on my little laptop computer, which has the disadvantage that its keys are not illuminated, and the back seat is dark, so I have to type by memory, to do my own bespoke version of touch-typing.  This isn’t too great of a burden, since I’ve been typing for more than 40 years*, but it does take away some degree of the advantage in speed that typing on a real keyboard otherwise gives me over the phone.

If I ever get another small laptop like this one, I mean to make sure that the keyboard lights up.  It’s just too useful.

Anyway, upon opening this laptop for the first time in a few weeks, I found that it was still at the point in Outlaw’s Mind where I had stopped when rereading through and further editing it.  It’s right after Timothy’s encounter with the policeman.  He’s about to be brought to the Vipassana Center, where things will begin to become stranger for him.

I really am more pleased with the nature of the story as it is than with the more straightforward idea that had sparked it initially and had been prefigured by the original opening, which I am removing.  Really, I have removed it, but it’s still there in my postings here on my blog, of course.  If I were ever to finish it and publish, I suppose I would take it down from here on my site, as would also be the case with Extra Body.

I doubt that any of that will ever happen, though.  I don’t have the impetus to do either thing, nor to start HELIOS, nor any of the oodles of other stories waiting in the back of my mind, some of which are already well-developed and involve an overall universe, linking to others in my stories’ omniverse.

I guess it would be nice to continue with them.  It would be nice not to have to worry about so many little things day by day that drain my hit points and my spirit points.  If I were to win a large lottery payoff**, I guess I would use it to move back up north and just write full time.  I could even spend my spare time studying mathematics and physics and other sciences, if I had the energy.  Why not?

It’s darned unlikely that anything like that is going to happen, unfortunately.  I have no rich relatives or friends, and even if I did, it’s hard to see one of them wanting to support me while I’m writing.

I have so many story ideas in the back of my mind, written down in quick notes in my phone and other systems, or just swimming through my brain.  And I still think of new little ideas for self-contained stories (I hesitate to call them “short” given past experience) as I go along, but unlike before, I don’t jot them down anywhere.  That’s a huge surrender on my part, but I have to be realistic.

If the Everettian quantum multiverse exists, then it’s likely that in some proportion of the wave function I succeed at doing all these things.  Likewise, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, there are certainly a fraction of the infinite copies of me out there who will have some inordinate luck and go on writing.  However, these possibilities are no consolation, as I have no experience of what they experience anymore than of some small, furry thing from Alpha Centauri.

I guess that’s also a good thing, though, since there are certainly versions of my life that are much, much worse than this one.  I wouldn’t want to experience them.  But, of course, experiencing is one of the functions of the individual, separate identities, not of the conglomerate of those that share some common characteristics or past.  No one should expect to be able to experience both worlds that split after some quantum “measurement”.  It’s not logical.

Once their cells have split, identical twins are separate beings, individuals each in his or her own right, and there is no mingling or superposition of their experiences.  Thank goodness.  Because we are all descendants of an unbroken line of cellular ancestors, and have common past with every living thing on the planet (and a few orbiting in space).  Imagine if we somehow were able to experience every other living thing at some level.  It would be a bit like that weird Gaia planet in the later Foundation novels.

Anyway, while I can dream of having some benefactor or patron who takes care of my living logistics while I write, and maybe even who helps me market and promote my books and related items, I can also, any time I like, dream about having superpowers, or being universally loved, or some other such nonsense.

Such dreams are nice (as the Radiohead song admits), but reality is not obligated to make any of our dreams come true, good or bad.  It doesn’t even make some aggregated average of people’s dreams come true.  It just does what it does, and it is what it is, and we are merely one little, evanescent—although relatively interesting—corner of a universe that may be infinite in space and in time, and perhaps in other ways beyond those.

*Man, are my fingers tired.

**Difficult, since I don’t play.

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Two-day Tuesday posting streak

I was about to start this post with “hello and good morning”, but I decided it wouldn’t be quite right to start a post that way on a Tuesday.  And it is Tuesday morning as I am writing this, on my phone, while en route to work.

As was the case yesterday, I have no topic in mind to discuss, so in a sense, you’re again reading my thoughts as they happen.  Of course, I will edit them before posting‒editing is a very important part of my writing, and the fact that I know that I will be editing extensively (when I’m writing fiction, at least) helps give me the freedom just to write something.

It doesn’t really matter if what you first spew out onto the “page”* is terrible, since you’re going to go over and over it, anyway.  It’s like sketching; your first line can be crap, and so can your second and so on, but you’re going to bring them all together into your final line or curve over time.

I sometimes almost wish I were able to say, with near-sincerity, that even what I first “spew out” onto the page is exceptional, is brilliant, is the product of absolute genius.  I could even cite some evidence.  For instance, when I was in high school I won a national writing award (there were two winners per state‒I was a representative of the solid state) and that was judged using a combination of a pre-written story and an impromptu, hand-written essay.  Given the handicap always created by my atrocious handwriting**, what I wrote must have been quite good, but I have no memory of what the subject even was, let alone what I wrote.

In high school, I used to be able to pretend to be a rampant egotist.  I could pretend to think I was the greatest, the most brilliant, the most admirable, of anyone anywhere.  People took my antics quite well; I guess it was obvious that I was joking, and my pseudo-egotism was never about being better than any particular person or group of people.  It was my silly pretense that I thought that I was the most brilliant being anywhere, ever, and there was no shame in being beneath me, since everyone was beneath me.

I have no idea how much my peers even noticed this, to be honest, or how much any of them would remember.  Probably not very much.  I was probably not as noticeable as I might have thought I was.

In any case, I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but there was a kind of sick desperation in my act, in my outward persona.  I knew that I was smart, but I also knew I was pretty weird, and I at least didn’t want anyone to be mistaken about the fact that I was smart.  I remember a particular formative event in this arc:  I was on my way home from school (I think it was on the way home) in 9th grade, and a random other student some ways away looked at me and yelled, “Look at the reeetard!”***

Now, I don’t think he was even with anyone that he might’ve been trying to impress by being cruel, so it was just the expression of that innate urge to denigrate that humans often have.  I didn’t even feel angry at him‒I’ve never taken name-calling personally, as such, particularly not by strangers.  However, I was mortified by the possibility that such was the way people judged me when they saw me.  I certainly hadn’t ever cared much about my appearance or what have you, though hygiene was never a problem.  But I worried that I came across as atypical enough to seem…disabled in some way.

So, I guess that contributed to me trying to improve the impression I gave, overall, with respect to general ability and smarts, and so on.  I think I was probably pretty good at that kind of “masking”, especially since I included at least some of my weirdness in my outward persona, more or less deliberately; I didn’t think there was any way I could completely suppress the weirdness.  I also tried to be always polite, and that makes up for a lot in the world.  If written language is the lifeblood of civilization, then courtesy is the lubricant, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.

Okay, well…I guess that’s what has come out of me today.  It feels even more disjointed and weird to me than yesterday’s writing, but what are you gonna do?  I’m just desperately trying to establish some kind of contact with the world of humans in some fashion, to try to suppress or diminish my depression and tension and the feeling of imminent and inescapable‒and ongoing, since it has certainly already begun‒disintegration.  So, you know, no big deal.

*Conjecture:  The “page ranking”, named after Larry Page, of Google, became so powerful a term in information space that the term itself back-propagated through time, and it thereby became the word to apply to a side of a sheet of paper, and related things (eventually including web pages) on which one might imprint information.  Thus, all pages are named after Larry Page, it’s just that some of them are named after him…before him.

**I’ve said it before, the horror of my handwriting is the reason they call it curse-ive.

***His term, not mine.  I’m just quoting, and I’ve never really used that even as a non-serious epithet between friends.  Intellectual disability, or really any kind of mental disability, has never been something I found very funny.

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Box open

I don’t know if I’m going to post this.

Of course, to a certain degree that’s true of anything I write.  There’s many a slip, as they* say, twixt dress and drawers.  One could begin writing and decide that what one was writing was crap and just delete it (fortunately, crap is my baseline, so if anything, I’m occasionally pleasantly surprised).

One could also lose the file.  This happened to me recently, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but probably had to do with poor network reception on the phone while in transit, and some flub that led to the post I had started not being saved on the phone.  That was frustrating, if slightly interesting; it’s been at least a few decades (I think) since I previously lost a document due to failure to save.  That used to be the nightmare scenario in college, but for as long as such an option has been available, I save at every full stop (well…nearly so).

Of course, one could even meet with misadventure between the time of beginning a post and when one intended to post it.  An accident, a major life event distraction, or even death could intervene.  Though, I can say with high confidence that, so far, I have not died without posting a particular bit of writing.

But none of these reasons is why I am not sure if I will post this, though some can never be ruled out ahead of time.  I simply have nothing in mind about which to write, so I don’t know if I’ll post whatever comes out.

This is very much stream-of-consciousness, but it is a stream of written consciousness, and the very act of expressing thoughts linguistically crystallizes them, changes their phase, perhaps reducing them in dimensionality–the expressed thought may merely be the circular shadow of the original thought’s sphere–and the degree to which they are smoothly continuous.  Though this writing is very much me and is true to my character and personality, this is not the way my thoughts are when I am not expressing them and/or interacting.

It’s a bit like that philosophy assignment Feynman talked about from his younger days, in which he tried to spend time being aware of his dreams and kept a journal about them.  He experienced various interesting things, but in the end, he correctly noted that he still didn’t know what went on in his dreams when he wasn’t paying attention to them.  And likewise we, even people who engage in deep and advanced mindfulness meditation, still know what our mind is like only when we are mindful of it.  We don’t know (for certain) what our minds are like when no one is looking**.

The point is, I have nothing really about which to write.  Which clearly does not stop me.  There are people who can speak at any time, despite having nothing interesting to force out of their mouths.  It seems that I, at least in some modes, am like this with the written word.

Mind you, I’m not good even at written conversations anymore, such as those in which one engages online.  I was very distressed and frustrated when PBS SpaceTime stopped doing answers to questions in the comments after ongoing videos, presumably because they had expanded their Patreon and got all that stuff done in the associated “Discord”.  I have never used a Discord (if that’s the proper way to say it) but I’ve used chat rooms and stuff in the past, to a limited degree.  I never had very much fun with them, not much more than I have fun having conversations with large groups of random strangers IRL****.  I did make a very good friend on a depression support chat group once, but I don’t think the group otherwise helped my depression.

So I don’t want to get involved in Discords and Patreon extras in order for the Spacetime guy to answer questions people have asked, or whatever, and so I stopped being a Patreon supporter for them, and I also don’t watch as many of their videos, or at least not as early or as eagerly.  I don’t seem to enjoy them nearly as much as I used to enjoy them.  But then again, that’s pretty much the case with everything.

Even interacting through the comments on blogs can be anxious.  I certainly rarely interact on other sites or blogs, fearful of annoying the hosts and other readers.  I’m almost always worried about a response  to a comment I make, bad or good.

And yet, I want to interact with people I like…and with people I think I might like and (even more rarely) people who might like me.  Yet, more and more, the possibility of interaction, even with people I already know, fills me with tension‒with I guess what must be called anxiety‒and I end up avoiding the possibilities.  And when someone replies to one of my comments, my first reaction is to feel a sense of dread, and I have to force myself even to look at the response.  I usually have to make myself wait, first to look at the response, and then, later, to respond to it, if such a response is appropriate.  It’s a bit maddening, and it’s certainly stupid.

So, I guess, today I just felt like communicating out into the world, even if only in one direction, and with nothing of real interest to say.  That’s that, that’s all it is, that’s all it’s about.

I don’t know if I will do this again tomorrow or not.  But in the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*Nanny Ogg says it, anyway.

**Please note:  This has nothing whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, the collapse of the wave function and so on***.

***Except to the extent that, as far as we know, everything has to do with quantum mechanics, of course.

****“In real life” in the speech of SMS acronyms, though it could also mean “I really looked” when one is trying to find something but hasn’t been able to locate it, and some other person is snidely wondering if one made more than a cursory search.