Biology

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Migraines, after-effects, lesser evils, and greater goods

I’m a bit wiped out this morning, so I may only write briefly.  For those of you who may not know it, I developed a migraine headache yesterday.  It started with the surprisingly rapid onset of a “classic” migraine aura, which is to say a deficit in one’s visual field, marked by apparent, weirdly twinkling, almost rainbow-like lights.  It is not as lovely to see as one might suspect if one has not had it.  This first time it happened to me, way back in my early teens (while I was caddying), I worried maybe my retina had become detached.  Weirdly, this concern did not lead me to panic, nor to seek help, nor even to stop in the middle of that golf round‒work is work, after all.

The classic migraine, which is what this migraine with twinkling lights is called, seems to begin with a rapid, spreading depolarization of cells in the brain cortex, particularly (in this case) in the occipital lobe (thus the visual aura, because that is the region of the vision centers of the brain).  It spreads from there, and as part of its spread it seems to lead to vascular swelling and pressure in the meninges, which causes some of the pain.

The science has probably improved since the last time I studied it, so some of this description may be inaccurate.

In any case, as soon as I realized what was happening, I took steps to head things off.  Although I had taken a naproxen that morning, I popped three ibuprofen right away.  After a few minutes, as the aura progressed, I added two acetaminophen (extra strength) as well.  This was probably not ideal for my body‒kidneys, liver, and to a lesser extent, stomach come to mind‒but I didn’t really hesitate, because I have experience with migraines, and not just with treating them.  I also made sure to drink lots of water.

Anyway, I did get some dull pain (as well as just dull dullness) centering loosely on the left side of my head, but the Motrin™ and Tylenol® seemed to have done their work well, since I took them so quickly.  I did have pain, but it was not nearly as severe as it usually is, though I took one more ibuprofen a bit later when it seemed to be increasing.

With migraines, though, the pain is more an effect than a primary part of the process.  In a way‒and only in a way‒a migraine is a bit like a slow-moving seizure.  As such, it tends to cause quite a lot of fatigue in one’s central nervous system, and I certainly felt that yesterday and continue to feel the after-effects today.  For instance, I am making many more typos than I usually make right now.

I do seem to have slept slightly more than usual last night.  Tiring one’s nervous system by internally, directly causing the hyperactive discharge of whole populations of neurons seems to lead to slightly deeper sleep, no doubt because for the nervous system, it is something of an emergency and it must be cleaned up.  Trust me when I say, while the slightly longer sleep is nice as far as it goes, it is not worth it.

Even though I was able to prevent the worst of my migraine pain, the other effects were still quite palpable and unpleasant, and their after-effects remain.  They aren’t good.

This is not to say there aren’t many, many worse things in the world, and certainly when one has only two choices, one should choose the least bad of the two.  For instance, I would choose many migraines over a kidney stone.  The lesser of two evils is, mathematically, the greater of two goods.

If this fact is confusing‒I don’t know why it should be, but apparently it is, and that confusion has been consequential on large scales‒think of the old grade-school level number line, centered at zero.  If you have two negative numbers, such as negative two and negative twelve, you can certainly say that they are both negative.  But that’s a function of where you put the origin (where the zero is), which you can shift and put anywhere else, given the infinity of the number line and its inherent symmetry.

But even if you move the origin 100 places to the left, so that you now have 98 and 88 instead of -2 and -12, the distance between the two numbers, and their mutual relationship based on that, is unchanged.  One of the numbers is still less negative than the other.  And if that number measures the usefulness or the desirability of something, and if one has only the two choices, then one should pick the less negative one, which is by mathematical definition the more positive one.

A billion is less negative than a million.  And negative a million is less negative than negative a billion.

I’m not sure how I got from migraines to here, but that’s okay.  I’m sure it will make at least some sense during the edit.

Anyway, I hope that my mental fog will clear a bit today.  It would be nice to be able to sleep better without requiring general neurological, pathological exhaustion.  But then again, many things would be nice that are simply not so.  By which I mean they aren’t real, that they don’t exist, that they aren’t the case, not “many things would be nice that are simply not nice”, which wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

If wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in horse shit.  And then we’d probably wish for it to go away, which would just produce more horse shit.  Alas.

I hope you all have a good day.

[PS:  I tried to do a brief audio recording on the way to the office from the train, while walking, because a thought had occurred to me and an occurrence had gotten me thinking, and I also wanted to “experiment” to see how well I’d be able to compensate for the noise of traffic and (to a lesser extent) wind.  It was unfortunately something of a disaster, and to correct it all would have required many hours of audio manipulation that may be beyond my skill.  So I just deleted it.  But I thought I would at least mention it.]

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Who hast not in thy blogs an eye discerning thine honor from thy suffering

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 13th of August.  Somehow, “Thursday the 13th” feels less punchy, less interesting, than “Friday the 13th”, but I strongly suspect this is just a cultural artifact of, originally, the day being considered by some to be unlucky, and then of course of the very successful and long-running series of slasher/horror films bearing that title, which took root from that superstition.

This sort of thing can be called more sharply to attention by comparing differences in cultures that do not have very strong shared histories*.  For instance, in the US (and the UK, I believe), ghost stories are generally most associated with mid-autumn, especially around Halloween time.  Whereas, in Japan, telling ghost stories is more associated with the summertime, especially the latter part of it.

I don’t know why that’s the case in Japan, but there are surely causes.  There are causes for all things at some level (probably even of causality itself, though we’re getting into uncharted territory with that speculation).  But, contrary to popular opinion. there are not always reasons.  I actually despise the notion so many people espouse, that “everything happens for a reason”.

Of course, if by “reason” you mean what I would call “cause”, then I cannot quibble with you without engaging in rank hypocrisy, which I try not to do.  But what most people seem to mean by reason in this case has to do with telos, with “purpose”, with “goals”.  In other words, they imagine some personal explanation for things, some willed intention, somewhere.

This is no doubt related to religion‒sometimes it is caused by it, sometimes it probably contributes to causing it, and sometimes it may merely be parallel‒but that doesn’t make it any better.  Deep down, below the façade of piety and orthodoxy, this type of thought seems just to be a kind of self-consolation, like sucking one’s thumb to soothe oneself.

I cannot in good conscience fault all types of self-soothing behavior.  I probably have dozens of what are now called “stims” that I do just to have stuff to do with my hands and feet (and brain, etc.), especially when I feel tense.  But I don’t take them as some hint about the ontology of reality.  I take them as things done by a nervous system trying to cope with a world for which it is perforce imperfectly adapted.

They’re not terrible things, by any means.  Some of them are even kind of cool (I can roll coins across the backs of my fingers, for instance).  But it would be silly of me to imagine or to assume them to have any deeper or broader significance.

What’s the big deal?  Why not let people console themselves with the notion that everything happens for a reason, though it may be an “ineffable” one?  What’s the harm?

Well, there’s always my general recognition that when one fights reality, one always loses.  The course of reality is strict and surrounded by impassable walls; if you don’t maintain your local parallel course to that of reality, sooner or later you will collide with those walls, and it is you who will break, while they will show not so much as a scuff mark.  

If it’s just you who suffers the consequences of this crash, that’s sad but not tragic.  But you may not be the only casualty of your poor steering, and it’s the innocent victims I lament far more than the idiots who drove themselves willfully (or at least willingly) into ruin.

But more specifically, saying that everything happens for “a reason” is a moral “get out of jail free” card.  It lets people look at cases of even terrible suffering and shrug and imagine that the suffering is there for “a reason” and so is “okay”, like Mother Theresa wallowing in the misery of the sick and dying poor as a way to get closer to Jesus.  This sort of thing is easiest when one is not suffering personally.

Now, there is often not much one can do to change a particular case of suffering, but I don’t think that makes it worthwhile to allow oneself to be delusional about it.  It’s better to admit that some entirely unnecessary suffering happens and that it sucks, because that leaves the option open of actually doing something to correct or prevent it, at some point.

It’s better than dismissing it (or worse, embracing it) because of delusions about “God’s plan”, or “karma”, or some Marxist delusion about an inevitable course of history, or any other magical thinking idea, all of which seem to center on an implicit notion of humans being (at least part of) the “purpose” of the cosmos.

Purpose is an invention, something that came into existence in human (and possibly other) brains.  If things in the universe are to be purposeful, it will be up to those who believe in that purpose to make it happen.  This is harder than just imagining that such a purpose is already there, but it actually has the potential to turn out to be made true, at least eventually.

And maybe, here and there, from time to time, when the wind is fair and the stars are right, if one sees suffering but doesn’t imagine that the suffering serves some “greater good”, one might just occasionally take action to relieve it rather than simply to slap on one’s epistemological blinders and go on one’s way.

TTFN

*This is rather akin to finding what processes are biologically fundamental, or at least old, by comparing genomes of organisms that are quite distant relatives**.

**One cannot compare truly unrelated organisms, because on this planet, there are no such things.  All life clearly shows the imprint of common ancestry.  To pick a frequently used example, most of your genes are shared (roughly) with bananas, and far more with banana slugs.

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I buprofen, you buprofen, we all buprofen…

I feel that there’s something important about today’s date* (it’s August 7th in 2026 CE, but the year is not what feels familiar, it is the day and the month).  It’s not coming to me yet, but I think it will.  If it doesn’t, I guess I can always look it up, but that would be a shame to have to resort to that.

Please don’t think I have anything against looking things up; that would be quite untrue!  I’m a huge fan of looking things up, especially in ways that can lead one to learn about unexpected things while seeking the answer to one’s initial questions.  This is one of my big problems with LLM-assisted searches; they don’t tend to lead you to unexpected and tangential knowledge, or even to see a nearby entry in an encyclopedia that’s on a different but interesting subject.

But if I already “know” something, and sense that I know it, I feel that it’s a shame not to exercise my powers of recall.  We shall try to do that today.  Or, well, I will try to do that.  Y’all can do what you please.

It’s a weird morning for me, and if I seem stranger than usual or more incoherent (or less) than usual, try not to be alarmed.  Something rather remarkable happened to me last night:  I slept nearly six hours without any (remembered) awakenings.  I may even have slept slightly longer.

This did not just happen, though.  There was a series of circumstances that‒I strongly suspect‒led to this outcome.

Yesterday morning, I felt so crummy right from the start of the day that I took a CBD/Delta-9 gummy** first thing in the morning.  It made me groggy to some degree but at least it suppressed some tension.

Then, of course, I took some Tylenol and some aspirin in reasonable amounts, and they did whatever they do for me, which isn’t terribly much, but there it is.  Anyway, I felt kind of crappy and sleepy and low-energy and just miserable, even for me.

I also wasn’t sure that the curtailment of NSAIDs had actually been making any difference in the symptoms (signs, really) that had led me to stop them.  Anyway, I have a bottle of Ibuprofen (actually, I have two) at the office, and I finally gave in to pain and general stiffness and soreness and mental fatigue and just took three of them.

Not long after, I found myself getting pleasant chills all over my body, as well as a general feeling of relative euphoria, and I realized that it was the Ibuprofen fighting my inflammation‒or whatever specifically was having the effect I was experiencing‒and making me feel physically alive and rather well for the first time in a while.

Unfortunately, ibuprofen doesn’t last as long as naproxen.  I took another dose (of 2 tablets this time) later in the day, and then two just before I went to bed last night.  I can only conclude (provisionally) that it was at least part of what led to my relatively sound sleep.

This is, of course, immense, but it is also ever so slightly worrisome.

You see, I stopped using ibuprofen a while back when it seemed to start being associated with occasional palpitations (consistent with premature atrial contractions).  This was not at all certain.  They might have been related to something else I was taking or perhaps some interaction (the palpitations were real, in that they were not merely sensations but were associated with slightly irregular heartbeats; I checked my pulse).

But there are many other medications available, so I decided to switch to naproxen for regular use.  I usually didn’t take the maximum dose, because in my clinical experience, naproxen tends to be a bit more toxic than ibuprofen (possibly related to the latter’s relatively shorter duration of action).

So, anyway, yeah, I think that’s a big part of why I slept last night better than I’ve slept in a good while, or at least longer.  I don’t expect that to continue, necessarily (though I am unlikely to complain if it does).  After all, my rest has probably been quite a bit worse than usual these last ten days or so, because of the eliminated anti-inflammatory medications, so there’s some degree of making up for extra exhaustion, which temporarily overpowers whatever processes lead to my insomnia in the first place.

We’ll see, I guess.  Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.  If so, I’m sure I’ll let you all know.

In any case, I’m going to be paying attention to my liquid waste elimination systems, just to be sure I’m not experiencing major difficulties.  I’ll also keep a weather eye on my heart rhythm, but I need to try not to pay too much attention to it, since palpitations can be subjective.

Also, let’s be honest and clear, premature atrial contractions are generally benign, and are not associated with degeneration into worse rhythm disturbances.  I’m sure that I have some scar tissue in my heart‒I mean, I did have open heart surgery for crying out loud***‒and so I’m probably prone to some slight irritability in the conduction system from time to time.

I guess we’ll see what will happen.  I haven’t taken any ibuprofen yet today; despite the euphoria I felt yesterday, I don’t expect it to entail any addiction risk, because that “rush” was a rush of relief, not of intoxication.  But I need to be aware of the kidney and cardiac effects.  Of course, I also must keep protecting my stomach, but I’ve been doing that for a long time (and probably engendering some chronic issues related to the meds needed for it).

We’ll see how well I can engineer the workings of my body, I guess.  I’m pretty good at it, but the tools available are still blunt ones, and PPE for them is limited.  Hopefully, I will at least get a few night’s worth of relatively good sleep this weekend.

Speaking of which, I hope you all have a good day today and a good weekend, yourselves.  I expect I will next write a blog post Monday morning‒as always, exclusis improvisis.

*The more I think about it, the more I think that it might be the birthday of one of my best friends from when I grew up, named Andy Tabar.  If I were still allowed on Meta-related services, I could check, because I followed him on Facebook and Instagram, but alas that is no more.  If it is his birthday, and if any of my readers are in contact with him, please wish him Happy Birthday from me.  Thank you.

**Perfectly legal, OTC, hemp-derived.

***Actually, it was for an atrial septal defect, one that wasn’t discovered until I started working out for NROTC and running fairly long distances.

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Foundations tend to have a lot in common

Hey there, everybody.  I hereby wish you all a good Tuesday morning, by whatever criteria you might use to judge the goodness of a day of the week, which are not necessarily the ones I might use.  Different people can have quite different priorities.

Although, when you get down to it, such differences exist only in the periphery of our value judgments, and they can only become powerfully pertinent in a population the basic needs of which are by and large met.  For nearly all of us, nearly all of the fundamental requirements of a good day are going to be very similar, albeit generally unspoken (because they are so obvious, I guess).

For instance, most of us would like the day not to include any serious dangers to life and to health*.  Most people would prefer a day without serious illness, without significant pain, without acute fear.  Most of us would prefer a day on which we do not go (completely) hungry, except perhaps by deliberate choice.  Most of us would prefer to have access to adequate clean water, and to shelter from heat and cold and rain and so on.

I’m sure I could think of other things that lie at the base of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.  Up a level or so would be slightly more abstract desires that are nevertheless common to most humans.  These include being among peers that one likes, and who like one as well.  It includes, for many of us, the (unfulfilled?) desire to share one’s day with actual loved ones:  parents, siblings, children, partners, close friends, etc.

These are things that begin to be more unreliable in the modern world, despite the advances that make the basal needs less commonly thwarted.  Perhaps this is partly related to the fact that, in the ancestral world, one’s social group was very much essential to one’s basic needs.  Now that those basic needs are less frequently thwarted, it is possible for us to lose track of and allow to slip away those social connections upon which we evolved to depend.

Also, our societies no longer really have much built-in scaffolding around such needs.  This appears to be because there are few forces at work that reinforce that scaffolding, and so it slips into disrepair, to everyone’s cost.

To be clear, this is not the result of some conspiracy of evil-doing, selfish billionaires or government operatives or whatever other presumed enemy of the good one childishly imagines.  It is a result of stochastic, chaotic, complex forces in a civilization that is very far from any kind of stable equilibrium‒a civilization that has seen world-changing discoveries and innovations and ideas multiple times in nearly every decade, let alone over any person’s lifetime.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled system, but its existing patterns keep getting disrupted in multiple places, in multiple ways, all the time, and so it must recrystallize in some new, local frost-pattern‒one that will, in turn, most likely be disrupted again, and soon.  There’s way too much going on everywhere for any mere human or group of humans to have actual control over even their own personal circumstances for very long or very well.

Any external locus of goodness is going to be unreliable, not just in practice but in principle.  This is a fact that Siddhartha Gautama recognized many centuries ago, as did Lao Tzu (or whatever the proper name is), and the various stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome.  I suspect there were similar insights among thinkers in the ancient western hemisphere as well, but I don’t think we have access to good records of their specific thoughts, alas.

It’s questionable, of course, whether any internal locus of goodness can be reliable in any way, either, since we are no more the authors of our brains/minds than we are of the external world.  I can tell you plainly, and with very little fear of contradiction, that I am not the author of my mood disorder(s), and I am not the author of my ASD any more than I am of the septum pellucidum “cyst” in my brain or the hole that was in my heart.  Neither is anyone else.

Okay, that’s enough mindless philosophy**.  I doubt that I’ve said anything particularly useful or even interesting.  For that I apologize; I’m not at my best, I fear.  I mean that not just in the trivial sense, that one is surely only at one’s overall “best” on very rare occasions throughout one’s so-called life.

I am still off NSAIDs, though at least my concerns that prompted that moratorium appear to be improving.  But I am quite stiff and sore, obviously.  My sleep has, if anything, been somewhat worse than usual.  I have not read any books, fiction or otherwise, in over a week.  I also haven’t done any exercises on Brilliant dot org in well over a week.

I played guitar a little on Sunday (and sang) but considering the noise in my room, with fan and air-conditioning going, and with my cheap little practice amp, it was a bit unsatisfying.  I played my Gibson SG (special edition, I think this one is called, with three pickups and so on).  It’s nice, but I think I like the Strats and the Les Paul style guitar a bit more (though the SG is beautifully lightweight).

I often think I’d like to have a telecaster, because some of the people whom I’ve heard playing them get some quite interesting sounds.  But that’s an idle sort of notion; it’s not really important.

Anyway, that’s it for me for today, at least‒though I admit, with some regret, that I will probably be back tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.  

I again wish you all the best of days, as measured from the base to the summit of Maslow’s pyramid.  If anyone deserves it, you do.

*Although people delude themselves about such dangers when it comes to, for instance, driving.

**“Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!”

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It is a far, far better thing I did than anything I did that was far, far worse

Heavy sigh.  Here we go again.

It’s Monday.  I am heading in to the office very early because I hardly slept last night and don’t feel that I could sleep.

As you probably guessed‒if you thought about it at all, which may be unlikely‒I did not work this weekend.  Instead, I finally got to hang out with my youngest, and we went to a big arcade kind of place whose name I forget, where we played a lot of crane grab style games.  Then we ate at Sbarro and wandered around the mall for a bit before seeking out a comic book store I had recently found out about.

So, all in all, it was one of the best days in more than thirteen years.

Unfortunately, it can be rather dispiriting to return to my illusory life after enjoying most of a day with my child.  Not that I’m complaining about spending that time; I most certainly am not!  But apparently this is one of those ASD* things that happens, when even very positive and uplifting interactions take a toll, especially if they involve a lot of noise and people and such.

Though I must say, in the comic book store, I felt almost instantly at home, and didn’t feel any of my usual awkwardness in asking if they had anything related to the role-playing game Gamma World.  These were my people, after all.  And it was a good comic store, not one that overly caters to “normies”.  Though I daresay all were surely welcome there.

Anyway, the usual friendless and familyless (that’s not really a word…might “afamilial” be better?  Apparently not, based on Google Docs’s reaction to it) days of my peudo-life from day to day don’t seem even as good as usual after such a day.  Also, I think I’m fighting a mild cold, which probably is something that happens fairly easily after playing games that many other people have played.

Though, come to think of it, I don’t remember that being a big deal back in the day when arcades were much more common.  At least I never remember tending to get sick after going to one.  But honestly, I did not go to them very often, so my sample size is very small.

I suspect I am often low-grade inoculated by very small doses of many pathogenic viruses because (among other stims) I bite my nails almost constantly.  I used to bite them more, and even picked at the skin around the base of my thumbnails until it peeled off a long way; my thumbs would sometimes bleed from the picking and get quite inflamed and irritated.  Occasionally, that still happens, but I am able to resist picking at the skin so much.  I have other things that I can do with my fidgeting fingers that are less painful.

Anyway, the nail biting may help prime my immune system against a lot of things.  I occasionally wonder whether it’s a trait or tendency that has been‒or can be‒selected for by evolution.  If it does happen to give one’s immune system a leg up, it would make sense for those with the tendency to have selective advantages.

This may also relate to the tendency of very small children to put a lot of things in their mouths.  I don’t mean to suggest that habit developed because it was good for exposing the immune system to very small doses of things.  I suspect it has more to do with the mouth being highly sensitive and having multiple modalities and more dexterity at an early age than the hands, and so it is a useful primary means of exploring much of the world for an infant.

Still, I think the immune priming is a useful side-effect.  Also, the modern tendency for people to be hyper-fastidious about not allowing their young children to touch things and taste things and expose themselves to tiny amounts of pathogens probably contributes to the surge in (hitherto almost unheard-of) allergies to rather ordinary things in the latter few decades.

I’m going to draw to a close now, because I’m having trouble focusing on my screen.  I don’t think it’s anything related to a sudden worsening of my vision, and I am wearing reading glasses.  It’s more as if my ciliary muscles are just tired, and they don’t want to do the work to make my lenses (the ones in my eyes) focus.

It is what it is.  Hopefully they will recover a bit of their endurance soon.  In the meantime, I hope you all have as good a day and week as you possibly can (which, as I’ve pointed out previously, you will, because whatever happens, once it has happened, is immutable, and was inevitable, and so you have the best‒and worst‒days you could have, every single day).

Dickens wasn’t just playing around with words in the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, I guess.  No, he was writing floridly because he got paid by the word.  But that’s another story.

*I will indulge in a little sophomoric (and accidental) humor here:  because the S and the D are so close together, especially on the smartphone, I at first wrote “one of those ASS things”.

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“A distant ship smoke on the horizon”

Well, it’s here at last:  the final day of June in 2026 AD/CE.  You might say it’s the hospice day for the first half of this year.  Let us try to make its passing as peaceful and comfortable as we can.  I recommend high doses of opioids.

I’m kidding.  I don’t actually recommend such a thing unless one is in severe pain that’s simply not responding to anything else, or unless all the other stuff is simply too toxic.

That’s a big part of the conundrum of opioids.  All the other types of pain medications‒aspirin, other NSAIDs, acetaminophen, lidocaine injections, steroid injections and so on‒have significant systemic toxicities, even at relatively moderate doses.  They affect the stomach, the kidneys, the liver, the local tissues, the endocrine system, etc.  Quite often, one cannot adequately control significant pain for long using them without causing actual, serious, perilous damage to some of the most essential parts of the body.

On the other hand, opioids work.  They directly hit the pain centers/processors, and they actually can relieve pain, even very severe pain.  But they don’t just relieve physical pain.

Somewhat ironically, that’s one of the big drawbacks.  Though they do not cause systemic or organ toxicity, and they will not trigger diabetes, and they will not cause you ulcers (though they may well constipate you), they can affect your behavior and even your character.  Their relief of psychical pain‒sometimes the only such relief some people have felt in a long, long time‒is like their relief of more visceral pain:  it doesn’t actually correct any underlying disorders.

Well, I suppose if the disorder is simply a neurological misfiring such as that which leads to chronic pain, you could say they do at least act on the area that is dysfunctional.  But they don’t cure it.  They almost never correct even neuropathic pain; they simply squelch the alarm for a bit.  And the successful squelching of the alarms tends to require increasing doses, and can lead to dependence and various other issues.

So, there are no very good, relatively simple corrections for significant pain.  This is probably not a surprise, if you think about it.  In some form, at least, pain is among the oldest things in nature and among the most crucial (ha ha)* functions of nervous systems‒and even things that aren’t quite nervous systems, like the internal communication systems in hydra and jellyfish or the analogous systems of plants.

Living bodies don’t readily give up on pain, and they have good reasons.  Pleasure is nice, and is useful, of course, but it’s like having a pretty picture on your wall or having nice, scented candles in your living room or what have you.  No matter how pretty your decorations, you want to have your fire alarms in good working order.  You want them sensitive enough to go off even in situations without real fires‒the classic case of burnt toast, say‒rather than take the chance that they will not to go off in the case of a real fire.  The first error causes annoyance, perhaps requiring you to wave towels at the sensors and open a lot of windows and so on.  The second error can lead to your house burning down, perhaps with you in it.

Of course, these weighted preferences are not absolute.  If one’s smoke alarms were always going off‒or even going off a significant fraction of the time‒one might very well want to wipe out the whole system, to pull all the plugs, to remove all the batteries,  to flip all the breakers to “off”.  Or, indeed, one might simply want to abandon the house entirely, if there were no way to get the alarms to shut the f*ck up.  One might even be tempted to burn the stupid place down, just as a form of petty revenge against it.

There’s a metaphor in all this, I would imagine.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to discern it.  I won’t say it’s particularly clever, but it’s not terrible, and it works pretty well.  Anyway, I’ve dealt with this subject before, many times, I’m sure.  It’s fairly tedious, but it does seem to stick in my mind for some inexplicable reason.  I don’t, however, know how to solve the associated problems.

Ah, well.  There are some things humans aren’t meant to know.

Ha ha ha ha!  Sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight “face” while writing something so very stupid.  Humans aren’t “meant” to know (or not to know) anything, anymore than any particular foodstuff “belongs” on a pizza.  People can try to learn and understand anything, even everything, and ultimately, in the long run, as far as I can tell, the more one knows and understands, the better.

If you want to do your best in a game, you would do well to learn the rules as well as you can.  Because, to quote an old car commercial, in real life there is no reset button.  You are the avatar and you are the player, and when you get blasted into nothingness by the depredations of the game’s limitless antagonists, then for the character and for the player, the game is done.  There is no respawning, there are no experience points, there is no starting again at the last save point.

Game over.

*I say “ha ha” because the word “crucial”, related to the Latin for cross (apparently evolving into its modern usage from a metaphor for arriving at a crossroads), is also related to the word “excruciating” which derives from the Latin use of torturing as if crucifying someone.  And that, of course, relates pretty clearly to the topic of pain.

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Cosmic. Way out. I can relate.

Well, here we are beginning another Monday, and I’m writing this post—again—on the mini lapcom.

I say “again” not because I am writing this very post for a second (or more) time, nor because the last post I did was written on the lapcom, because it was not.  I mean “again” in the sense that last Monday I wrote my blog post on the lapcom.  I also did so on Tuesday and on Wednesday last week, but I cannot yet say that I will do so tomorrow and the next day.  I won’t even say “barring the unforeseen”, because I can rather easily imagine, and therefore foresee, situations in which I will not write those blog posts on the lapcom.

Of course, I also cannot predict whether, like last week, I will write Thursday’s and Friday’s posts on the smartphone.  It’s not that unlikely, but I don’t know ahead of time whether I will write them on the smartphone or the lapcom.  I could make predictions, but I think anything deviating terribly far from 50/50 would probably be very much a rectally sourced prediction.

I will say, though, that if I do write blog posts the rest of the days this week—which will include Saturday, alas—I will almost certainly write them either on the lapcom or the smartphone.  How’s that for a bold prediction?  It’s not a certainty, of course, but then again, pretty much nothing is.  It’s getting into the high 90 percentiles though, I’d guess.  I’m not skilled enough at probability/decision theory to get much finer in my estimation than that.

Anyway, that was about 250 words of utterly pointless drivel, wasn’t it?  It’s quite odd how much and how quickly I can write about more or less nothing of significance.  Mind you, from a certain point of view, nothing is really of significance.  Also nothing is of significance.  I mean two different things by those two different uses of the same words.

The first means that there is almost nothing in the universe that, in itself, is significant (cosmically speaking, of course—on different scales, significance has different requirements).  No individual, localized thing or fact can matter much on the largest scales.  On the other hand, nothing—the vacuum, absence, whatever you want to call it—is significant.  This partly refers to the fact that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerated rate, and this seems to be due to the vacuum energy, the energy of “empty” space.  A uniform energy density in space creates a negative pressure, which creates “negative gravity” in a sense, and that drives an expansion of spacetime.

The nature of this vacuum energy, or cosmological constant, is definitely significant in that it will determine, almost solely as far as we can tell, the future fate of the universe.

Of course, the term “vacuum” may be somewhat misleading given its ordinary usage (quite apart from when one refers to the household appliance).  The vacuum is never really “empty” despite what the usual meaning of the word is.  It’s full of all sorts of quantum fields as well as the gravitational field that is spacetime itself.  The vacuum is just when these fields are in their lowest possible states/energy levels*.

There’s also the famous Higgs Field, which actually is one of the quantum fields, but it is interesting in that it is a scalar field, meaning that it has magnitude at every point but not direction (like a map demonstrating local temperatures on Earth’s surface, as opposed to one detailing the wind, which will have magnitude and direction).

If this seems a peculiar distinction to you, think of the electromagnetic field, which has both magnitude and direction at every point.  It’s actually a little more complex even than just that, because of course, electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the electromagnetic field, but each one of them is a vector field (with magnitude and direction) which interacts with the other, so the combination of them is something more involved.

Also, when energies are high enough (changing the way the Higgs field interacts with other fields), the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force turn out to be part of the same thing, called the electroweak force.  And, of course, there is the question of whether all the fields are really just aspects of some “higher” field or structure.

This would be some form of “unified field theory” (not to be confused with GUTs, or “grand unified theories”, which are less grand and less unified than unified field theories).  Of course, we don’t know that there is a unified field.  There may not be.  There may just be a minimum number of fields that cannot be further reduced.

If M-theory (AKA string theory) is correct, then yes, there is a unified form from which all fields derive their character thanks to the shapes and resonances of their vibrations in high-dimensional spaces.  On the other hand, other versions of quantum gravity such as “loop quantum gravity” leave gravity (AKA spacetime itself) as a separate kind of field, composed of tiny, tiny parts (the “loops”) knitted together.

At least some versions of this theory have been disconfirmed, however, because it predicts a very, very slight difference in the speed of travel of electromagnetic waves depending on wavelength, and light from extremely distant quasars has been tested and found to be uniform in arrival time (based on variability in the quasars and specific catastrophic events, if memory serves) from wavelength the wavelength, even to tiny parts in billions of light years traveled.

Okay, well, that’s surely enough trivia for anyone early on a Monday morning.  I wish I didn’t have to work today, but then again, I wish I didn’t feel like I have to do anything.  But I do feel that way.  I guess it’s probably better than being inert.  Without a goal or goals—terminal, instrumental, or otherwise—there is no action.

You can call it a “drive” instead of a “goal” if you prefer.  That may be a more accurate term, since nature doesn’t act in a teleological way (outside of thinking minds) but instead generates drives/urges/impulses, some of which lead to increased genetic reproduction and some of which lead in the other direction.  Over time, the former are the ones that tend to accumulate, for what are probably obvious reasons.

Enough.  I already said it was enough, didn’t I?  Anyway, I hope you all have a good day.  And remember, if you tend to come to this blog via other social media, you can subscribe to it using your email, and then you’ll get emails sharing every new post with you directly.

Take care.

*There is also a thing called a false vacuum.  Spacetime itself could be in such a state, if the vacuum energy is capable of tunneling to an even lower energy level than the one at which it currently resides.  This would not be a good thing for the current inhabitants of the universe, but at least they would never know it if the drop-down happened, because everything that currently exists would be erased at the speed of light.  The universe as a whole would even be affected, but it wouldn’t be endangered per se.

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“And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word…”

Hello again.  It’s Friday now, as usually happens immediately after Thursday (but also six days before Thursday, though not the same Thursday it follows).  It’s all very reassuring, this regular, cyclical procession of the days of the week…

…isn’t it?

Well, maybe it would be if they weren’t just arbitrary day names following an arbitrary convention of numbers of days in a week, which number was mainly based on the number of “unfixed” astronomical objects visible to the naked eye:  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon.  Some of our modern English day names still refer to those objects, namely Sunday, Monday, and Saturday.  The other four, somehow, got saddled with references to Norse mythology.

I guess the Vikings really did have a significant impact on the British isles, didn’t they?

Anyway…

As I said, it’s Friday, and it’s the end of the typical, traditional work week, though I am working tomorrow, so I expect I’ll probably be writing another post.

It is interesting to think of what we mean by “tradition” and “traditional”, because not all traditions are of the same order by any means.  For instance, the “traditional” five-day work week is not really all that old.

Previously, people worked more days and longer hours per week (unless they had no need to work), but various workers’ rights movements over time got various laws passed and then new “traditions” began, and to some degree, people’s quality of life was somewhat protected.  Also, in the US, benefits like health insurance were tied to long-term employment by union contracts and sometimes by legislation.

Then, of course, we rebelled against being told that we could not work longer hours without special, extra compensation.  Why, that made our businesses less able to grind ahead and innovate and compete in global markets of various kinds (or so it was said).  We wouldn’t want that!  So, first salaried people were sort of exempted from the rules, and then that spread in various ways, as businesses and related enterprises tried to compete for more money, more resources, more power*.

Except, of course, plenty of other people and companies and countries were competing as well, so there was never any singular advantage that lasted for long; instead, like trees that evolved to grow taller and taller to compete with other trees for sunlight (while the other trees were subject to the same pressures), they raised the minimum requirement merely to stay alive, to which they were all subject, making life harder for each and every one of them, even the “winners”.

Such are natural equilibria.  Just because they become stable and persistent and “successful” doesn’t mean they are not immiserating for every organism in their structure.  And, of course, it is possible for such equilibria, as for species and for cells, to evolve to extinction.

Evolution by natural selection does not plan ahead, and it is neither benevolent nor malevolent, but it is instead entirely and completely uncaring**.

A somewhat parallel process happens in economies at various scales.  It’s not a perfect analogue, for there exists the capacity to learn from others’ practices without having to reinvent everything oneself, and one doesn’t have to wait for new generations to enact even small adjustments.  But it is still fundamentally a mindless process overall.

And, most pertinently, the mutual competition involved leads to higher and higher minimum requirements for success.  You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, of course, but even more subtly horrifying is the spike-ridden, trap-door-bearing, caustic and red hot floor.

I don’t know, maybe those metaphors don’t quite work.  I’m making these expressions up as I go along, as happens with all my blog posts.

I just wanted to remind everyone that nothing in the way the world is set up‒or, well, at least very few things‒is a necessity in anything but a highly local sense.  “Best practices” are not something inherent in nature; our financial and banking systems are not in any way equivalent to fundamental physics.  It’s all ad hoc, spontaneously self-assembled, no more inherently fundamental or necessary than is any one particular pattern of frost on a window pane.

So, don’t be fooled by the tendency to follow traditions, at least not blindly.  The oldest traditions humans have are only a few thousand years old, which is tiny compared to how long humans have existed.  And most traditions are far more recent.

Maybe your family has or had a tradition of getting together to watch The Ten Commandments every year around Passover/Easter.  But that tradition clearly cannot go back to before the movie was made, nor‒even more restrictive‒before televisions were available to most households.  That’s barely a few generations.

So, traditions are only as important as they are good and useful, though those measures depend very much on who is measuring and what the perceived use and good is from that person’s point of view.  That’s okay.  We don’t have any objective, external measures to use for such things.  They were invented by us, and for the most part, are only pertinent to us.

The universe doesn’t give the slightest f*ck.

Maybe, someday, the distant descendants of humans will gain so much knowledge and power that the universe will “notice” them.  I’m not going to hold my breath.

*The actual events involved in all this were far more involved than may seem implied by my summary, but I’m not trying to capture historical minutiae.  Rather, I’m trying to illustrate, to sketch, the general shape of the things that happened.

**This is not to be confused with saying that successful organisms are uncaring.  Caring, mutual support and protection, cooperation, love, can all be very successful survival attributes.  But that cooperation, that familial support, that maternal caring, that mutual love, as the case may be, does not exist just because it’s nice, or because it’s moral, or because it’s necessary; it exists because, for those organisms in those times and circumstances, it is successful, i.e., it tends to increase the odds of reproduction of the genes that engender that set of attributes.

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The footnote may make the best point in this post

Well, it’s the start of another work week, and it’s also the start of another month‒June, in case you don’t know.  I wouldn’t say it’s a “work month” since there are no real non-work months.  Though in some cultures, there is (or was) at least a part of this month when people took several days off.  The time around the summer solstice was, in some cultures, a festival time.  They even suspended the counting of the months at that point, to make up for the 5 days (6 on leap years) left after 12 thirty-day months.

Actually, I don’t know for sure if any real cultures did this, but the hobbits of the Shire, in Tolkien’s world, did something like this, and I have long thought that it seemed like a nice way to go.  However, apparently taking 5 days off completely in the middle of the year‒at the beginning of summer, though it’s sometimes called midsummer‒would fall afoul of commercial pressures, much as have most holidays in general in the modern world.

There is too great a perceived disadvantage to taking any time off when one’s competitors are working (and that perception is probably not entirely illusory).  So, one business working on the holidays is liable to spawn others who wish to compete.  Those that don’t may be less likely to survive ceteris paribus.

And the implementation of the decision to work on holidays is made by people in echelons so far removed from the consequences of overwork and the rat-race-ification of daily life that they feel no pressure not to grind their employees into dust; there are (so far) always more potential employees, and the stockholders only pay attention to the last three months if that when deciding how to tell the boards of directors to act.

It’s not so much that (as many young people seem to suspect) capitalism is an inherently evil system‒it is not.  It has indeed contributed greatly to the productivity and prosperity, to the physically good, that exists in the modern world.  But it is not a perfect system.  Or rather, it is a system that is useful for what it does, but it does not encompass or elicit or create all the good things that humans might need to prosper in any thoroughgoing way.  How could one expect it to do so?

Humans are displaced and distributed hunter-gatherers from sub-Saharan Africa; the “modern world” is an epiphenomenon that has developed and grown and is continuing to develop and grow and change, after have been created‒without any prior planning nor understanding of what it is or its implications‒by humans who were, as at all times, working almost entirely under the influence of local incentives and disincentives.

No one designed the world economy, nor any local economy, nor most of the other trappings of civilization.  I almost wanted to add “any more than any ant designs an ant hill”, but the human society/economy is far less a preplanned thing than is even the most haphazard ant hill or termite mound or beehive, for those structures are guided rather specifically by instincts selected and honed over countless generations and eons.

No human society has been in any kind of equilibrium anywhere near long enough for it to have had a very strong evolutionary impact on human attributes.  Some of the pre-civilization eras of humanity endured and were consistent enough to have impacts, certainly, but nothing in culture since the dawn of agriculture has stayed the same long enough for humans to adapt to it biologically in any significant way (though there are probably some effects).

I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make here, except perhaps to remind people that we should not expect pure capitalism and/or free markets alone to be perfectly conducive to every aspect of human thriving in and of itself.  It is useful and productive, far more so when dealing with primate hunter-gatherers than is any kind of pure socialism or communism, let alone any brand of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

But there are certainly socialistic things that can be added as tweaks, if you will, to a society that is productive of goods and services thanks to capitalism, to try to counteract the tendencies of unregulated capitalism to produce inadequate and counterproductive* equilibria as well as uncompensated externalities.

We shouldn’t expect society to be simple, nor for any one notion of things to be adequate to ensure or even encourage health and well-being and flourishing in the people in the society.  This all relates to my earlier point about how all ideologies are wrong.  There are unlikely to be any simple answers that describe and ensure beneficent and productive cultures.  Like a building that exists for decades or centuries while still being used, there is going to need to be constant maintenance and updating and sometimes even rebuilding of portions that are crumbling.

It’s that or just knock the whole thing down‒but don’t expect to be able to build anything better from the wreckage.  The same forces and principles will apply to your new edifice as applied to the old one.

*They are counterproductive to the great majority of people in such cultures, at least.  There will often be individuals who do very well even while participating in the stagnation of such detrimental equilibria.  Someone who accumulates great wealth‒and, thanks to that wealth, can gain more, and so on, perhaps creating a monopoly‒might consider the system just peachy, at least for them.   But hoarded wealth does not do anything to contribute to an economy.  It’s like biological energy (calories) stored as nearly-impossible-to-mobilize fat.  Indeed, the stagnation of oligopolistic economies may have many similarities to someone who is obese and in a profound state of insulin resistance but with pathologically high insulin to compensate, so they cannot release their stored energy and feel miserable and constantly fatigued despite having plenty of calories in their bodies.

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The name IS bond…but a double-N is more stable than a double-O

Well, it’s Friday at last, and this time, I can actually be pleased, because I don’t have to work tomorrow.

I suppose I don’t have to work any day, in principle.  I don’t have to do anything, really, if you think about it, and neither do you.  As Louis CK pointed out, if you really don’t want to do something, you can always kill yourself.  You can only do that once, but you can do it.

That was stand up comedy, of course, so don’t take it too seriously.  It’s not as though self-destruction is the only option.  One could instead just destroy the people and things that are trying to make you do something.  It would be a bit more work (ironically), but it would probably be much more satisfying*.

And it might be less work than you would think.  Most things and beings are far more breakable than they appear‒the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is always on your side here.  And, to quote another joker (this time the Joker), “Everything burns.”

Actually, though, strictly speaking, if we’re thinking of chemical burning/oxidation such as what the Joker did to that very large stack of money, then it is not true that everything burns.  Actually, burning such as we have here on the surface of the Earth may be an extremely rare cosmic phenomenon.

It only happens here because there is so much free molecular oxygen‒it’s roughly 20% of the atmosphere (by molar concentration, I believe, not necessarily by mass, since oxygen is a heavier element than nitrogen‒each molecule of oxygen is about 8/7 as massive as each molecule of nitrogen).  The percentage of oxygen was even higher in the past for a while; that was the time when those “giant” insects lived.

But free molecular oxygen is not stable for the long term, not if there are other chemical elements nearby.

Nitrogen molecules are stable, of course (else it wouldn’t remain the majority of the atmosphere‒it would, at the very least, react with oxygen).  N2 is a triple-bonded gas molecule, with some of the strongest bonds in all of chemistry.  This is part of why so many explosives are made with nitrogen based compounds.  The separated nitrogen atoms within want to join together, and they do so with a tremendous snap, releasing a lot of energy in the process.

Think of ammonium nitrate:  NH4+ /  NO3–.  If that gets enough of a kick, those nitrogen atoms crash together violently.  Then, of course, the four hydrogen atoms bond with two of the oxygens, releasing more energy and making water.  The remaining oxygen atom probably bonds with whatever atom it next encounters, I would guess.  That’s what oxygen tends to do, unlike nitrogen, which likes** to bond with itself best.

And that is why chemical, oxygen-based fires may only exist on the surface of the Earth (and any other planet that might have evolved organisms whose metabolism releases oxygen as a byproduct).  Free oxygen tends to react with any of many, many other kinds of atoms, and those bonds tend to be very stable.  CO2, for instance, is highly stable, as are the various silicon oxides***.

Indeed, it apparently took eons for the cyanobacteria and archaea that photosynthesized on the early Earth to produce enough oxygen to become a significant part of the atmosphere, because first the free oxygen reacted with all sorts of exposed other elements, such as iron.  It seems that rust as a kind of iron “ore” may not be all that common in the universe either!  It’s prevalent on Earth because of the oxygen that floated around reacting with it for millions and millions of years.

So, anyway, what was I saying?  Oh, yeah:  instead of destroying yourself so you don’t have to work, you could instead destroy the place that wants to make you work.  On Earth, at least, pretty much everything that isn’t already an oxide (and so is, in a sense, ash) can burn, so the Joker’s claim is not entirely incorrect within the appropriate bailiwick.

Or, on the other hand, you could just…not go to work.  If your job is so repugnant to you, you could seek another job or another way of life, and you probably would not need to destroy or even harm anyone.

But that’s crazy talk; we’ll have no more of that!  This is a family blog‒it has a wife blog and two children blogs at home****.

I hope you have a good weekend.

*Actually, satisfaction is a term that probably doesn’t even apply to the dead, so almost everything would at least have a higher “absolute value” or “magnitude” of satisfaction than being dead would have.  The problem is when that vector of satisfaction is pointing in a negative direction‒then, in the number line sense, being dead would entail being more satisfied, or at least less unsatisfied.

**I’m being reckless by using anthropomorphic language here and elsewhere in this post.  There is no reason to suspect that nitrogen atoms actually like anything, nor do they appear to have any capacity to have preferences (panpsychism notwithstanding…and it is not withstanding as far as I can see).  I am speaking figuratively for the sake of being able to convey things concisely, but please don’t be misled by intentional-seeming language.  Perhaps it would be better to say that it “tends to” rather than “likes to”.  It would be more accurate, but I think most people don’t really feel how strong such tendencies can be.

***These are even more stable than the carbon oxides, and they tend to be solid at typical temperatures and pressures, which tips the scales away from the likelihood of silicon-based life.  Otherwise, chemically, silicon is much like carbon, in having 4 valence electrons, each taking up a “half” orbital, so in principle it could, like carbon, make huge, long, complicated molecules analogous to DNA.  But the solidity and density and lack of solubility it engenders would tend to get it the way.  Silicon is also a larger atom and the valence electrons are farther out from the nucleus, so the bonding strength between silicons is weaker, and they don’t form four-partner bonds as stably as carbon.

****To steal a joke from Dave Barry.