Biology

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Is there something here for you to like and share?  If you could read my mind, you might find no surprises breaking me down.

It’s Friday the 13th today, which feels like a slight leftover bonus from the Halloween season.  Now, just imagine you lived on one of the zillions of Elm Streets there are in the US:  you’d have three slasher franchises rolling through your days in quick succession.

Well, I guess if you live on Elm Street, that one isn’t rolling through; it’s actually sitting there and gathering moss, if anything.

Speaking of that saying, have you ever wondered if Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and their bandmates ever went into the woods and collected some of the green, fluffy stuff that grows on the damp surfaces of rocks and (proverbially though not factually) only the south sides of trees?  They could have done a photo shoot and turned the best picture into an album cover.  Or maybe just a joke promotional thing, perhaps with a caption that read, “Who says we gather no moss?”

I know, that’s stupid, but it’s not as though rock bands have not done far stupider things for publicity, or just as jokes.

I know that it does not matter at all, of course, and I don’t just mean in the whole “nothing really matters, anyone can see” sense that I often espouse.  I mean that this is a more or less willfully frivolous notion, just a silly thought that I’m entertaining on Friday morning, because I have nothing of actual importance with which to occupy my mind.  At least, there’s nothing of actual importance to which I have the “energy” or the “will” or the “strength” to turn my mind.

I want to say that it’s a bit frustrating.  And I can say it, of course.  It’s only words, and they have no magic that forces themselves always and only to be true.  Would that it were, sometimes.

But really, it’s not actually frustrating, or if it is, it’s at such a low level that I don’t recognize it.  I am, however. notoriously (and even clinically) rather in the dark about my own emotions a lot of the time‒the official term is alexithymia, and I had it pointed out to me by a mental health professional as early as the late mid-nineties.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make.  Probably none.

Anyway, I am not working tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, and so I will not be writing a blog post.  Though, if the first thing changes, the second thing will probably also change.  So, it’s okay to check tomorrow just in case, since the odds are very small but not zero, and checking if I have written a post will probably take very little time and energy.

Of course, you should treat the situation like a badly broken barometer:  no pressure.  Do what you like.

I haven’t played guitar since the last time I mentioned it here, sometime last week, I think.  That’s a bit frustrating, but my thumb bases are still giving me some trouble.  I’m trying to rest them as much as I can, and my interventions (including the application of topical lidocaine* cream) may be doing some good , but I still am a bit hesitant about playing.

I rarely sing lately, since there are vanishingly few places I can feel I will not be heard.  I sometimes envy narcissists and egotists and diva types who not only welcome but enjoy attention paid to them.  However, they tend to have their own insecurities.  And the need for an audience may in principle be more difficult to fulfill than the anxious desire to avoid direct scrutiny, since it requires the existence of an audience that is actually interested in watching.

I may try to play this weekend, but I only have the SG out at the house, and it has a fat neck that probably won’t help my soreness.  I would prefer to play my red Strat (built by my former housemate), but it has a broken string, and replacing strings on a Strat is a pain in the effing arse.

Of course, I also have my “Les Paul” style guitar, another one my former housemate built, which is probably the finest sounding instrument of any kind that I have played‒most of the playing in my song Like and Share and my cover of Something was done on that guitar.  But it weighs about 8,000 kgs, so my shoulder tends to get tired and even sore if I play it for long.

On the other hand, the black Strat that I keep at the office has a nice sound, too, albeit not quite as nice as the “Les Paul”.  It’s a bit warmer than the red Strat’s sound (which has an almost country twang).  I used the black Strat in my “covers” of If You Could Read My Mind, and No Surprises, for instance.  I also used it on the solo in Breaking Me Down, but the red Strat did the rest.

Okay, well, I’ve punished you all enough with my tortured plays on words and other weird jokes this week, I think.  Actually, since you didn’t do anything wrong to deserve what’s happened, it’s not really punishment, is it?  It’s just torment.  It would be sadism if I relished your discomfort, but I don’t relish it.  I don’t even salt and pepper it or apply mustard or mayo or ketchup.

And with that thoroughly idiotic joke‒perhaps the most idiotic one today‒I wish you a good weekend, and I will be on my way.

*You might think that lidocaine is just numbing the sensation, when it works, and that this is not addressing the underlying problem.  It’s an understandable and far from foolish thought.  However, the situation is more complicated than you might imagine.  Many of the inflammatory cytokines and related compounds in local regions where one has pain are released and/or enhanced and encouraged by the local activation of pain signals in the nerves.  So, inflammation can be triggered and enacted (if you will) by local inflammatory processes, but pain signals of various kinds reinforce that inflammation at some level.  It may not be a knock-down, drag out kind of intervention, but it has uses.

Lidocaine is very interesting stuff, and its effects help demonstrate how broadly some seemingly very specific biochemistry applies throughout the natural world.  For instance, if you inject lidocaine into a Venus Flytrap (probably the most famous carnivorous plant), its trapping mechanism, its “muscle contraction”, ceases to work until the lidocaine is cleared.  Think about that.  That means there is overlap between the signaling and “motor” pathways in dicotyledon plants and in modern mammals.  But our last common ancestor with these plants is estimated to have existed about one and a half billion years ago!  That’s certainly well after the appearance of eukaryotes, but right in the middle of the development of multicellular life.  I guess signaling pathways must have gotten their start around that time, and once established, some of them persisted through entire different kingdoms of life.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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Who knows what evil lurks in the ears of men?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…nefarious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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

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Reasons, causes, and linguistic evolution, among other things

Well, I forgot to bring the lapcom back from the office yet again yesterday evening.  And again, there was no actual reason for leaving it; I simply forgot.

Some might call that a “reason”, and they would certainly not be foolish, but I prefer to differentiate between “causes” and “reasons”.  Reasons involve‒as the term might suggest‒an actual thought process, whether clear or logical or rational or even unconscious, whereas a cause is simply an antecedent event or process operating according to the laws of physics, that leads to something happening.

The laws of physics are basically the root of everything (even though we don’t know them all) and so all things that happen have causes in this general sense.  But not everything happens for a reason (not as far as anyone can see, despite popular trite platitudes).  In fact, most things that happen do not happen for a reason.

I was going to say that reasons and causes are like squares and rectangles, but I don’t think that’s a stark enough simile.  Rather, reasons and causes are like squares and the general class of polygons (regular and irregular).  Every square is a polygon, but squares are a tiny, vanishingly small, miniscule, wee subset of the polygons (although both sets are infinite, one is a very small fraction of the other*).  So saying not every cause is a reason is an almost misleadingly understated claim.

I started reading a book called The Enigma of Reason which posits that reason‒the capacity to articulate why we do something or what we think should be done or to explain certain things‒was not born solely out of our capacity to make models of the world in our minds in order better to navigate*** it.  It was a social trait, evolved or developed after language developed, or perhaps as language developed, in order for us to be able to persuade our fellow Homo sapiens.

I haven’t finished the book, but it is an interesting and provocative thesis.  It certainly seems plausible, and it provides a potential reason (not just a cause) for reasoning itself.  How very “meta”.

Anyway, my point is that I had no reason to leave my lapcom at the office, I merely forgot it.  I need to try harder to remember and bring it, because my thumbs are not happy with me for all this phone typing, and they are being scrupulous about making sure I know how far they are from gruntlement.

Is that a word?  Google Docs seems to consider it one, because they have not underlined it, neither in blue nor in red.  Of course, one would expect that it would recognize it, since to be gruntled must be a thing that happens if one can be disgruntled.

Interestingly enough, one doesn’t encounter the words “nongruntled” or “ungruntled” or “agruntled”.  That’s the vicissitudes of linguistic evolution for you!

Likewise, of course, we do not use the word “nocent” anymore‒at least I’ve never heard anyone use it other than to explain this fact‒but we use the word “innocent” all the time.  From context, I’m sure you’ve recognized that “nocent” means, basically, “guilty”.  Why the root word went the way of the great white whale while the derivative word is alive and well and living in our heads rent free is just one of those more or less random things.  It has causes, without a doubt, but I suspect it does not have any true reasons.  I could be wrong, though.

It’s a bit like how there are oodles of Homo sapiens in the world today, but Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and other members of the genus Homo are all gone.  Humans do tend to carry a variable smattering of genes from Homo neanderthalensis, so one could say they are not fully extinct.  But the very fact that Neanderthals and “modern” humans could interbreed and produce fertile offspring should lead one to consider them members of the same species, according to the usual definitions thereof.

I believe many biologists have proposed a subtle renaming of Neanderthals, as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, indicating that they are a subspecies of humans.  I think this is the right thing to do for logical consistency within the naming systems and the “definitions” of species.

That reminds me:  I think I want to find a good freshman (university) Biology textbook (geared toward Biology majors) to read, just to bone up on my basic Bio.  My knowledge of the subject is very advanced in the realm that applies to humans, of course‒that’s part of being a medical doctor‒but it’s been a while since I reviewed the more general science in other than popular works by such worthies as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins.

I want to get more of the latest and deepest on the subject.  And good Biology textbooks are always a joy to read.  Also, they tend to have the loveliest photos and diagrams.

On that weird little tangent, I will come to a close.  I hope you all have a very good remainder of your weekend, and I will be back with another post on Monday…as always, exclusis improvisis.

*If this sounds odd, it’s because we’re talking about infinities, and they can feel quite strange.  But consider a simple infinite set:  the counting numbers, i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4…  There are a (countably**) infinite number of them, as is probably obvious.  Then consider the multiples of a million, i.e., 1 million,  2million, 3 million…  There are also an infinite number of these.  And yet each one is only one out of a million of the counting numbers.  They have the same cardinality, and yet the one is a “small” subset of the other.

**This is to differentiate them from the uncountably infinite sets of numbers, like the Real numbers and the Complex numbers.  You can’t finish counting the counting numbers in a finite time, but if you had an infinite amount of time, you could “finish”.  Whereas you can’t even really start counting the Real numbers, because from any point, there is no next real number, even if you have them in ascending numerical order, such as on a number line.  Between where you are starting and any arbitrarily close number you choose as your next number, there exists another uncountable infinity of Real numbers, every bit as “large” as the whole Real numbers themselves.  Mind boggled?  If not, I suspect you haven’t really thought about it carefully.

***Or geogate or astrogate it.  Most of us probably spend way more time geogating than actually navigating, since we’re on land much more than on the water.  And we spend very little, if any, time charting our way through space among the stars (astrogating), though we are always moving through space.

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I was “sic” in bed

Well, first of all, I’m sorry for not writing a post yesterday.  I was out sick from the office and from here.  I guess after Wednesday’s post that probably isn’t too surprising, at least in retrospect.  I was unusually tired for a reason, or at least by a cause‒because, you might say.

I’m feeling slightly better today, physically at least.  I have suspicions about what the problem has been, but they aren’t consistent; there is (or are) more than one of them competing for the net Bayesian probability total of 1, and there’s no strong claimant to a significant majority of my credence, so I’ll leave my guesses in my head for now.

Anyway, I mainly just laid around in my room Wednesday afternoon and night‒I left the office early on Wednesday‒and then all of yesterday and last night.  I don’t like spending so much time in my room, since it’s quite cluttered and disorderly (but I never have the energy to do anything about it) and it’s just a constant reminder of how pathetic and disgusting my life has become.  And, of course, when I’m sick I cannot even go for a walk.

If I had some major, life-threatening catastrophe at any time alone there, there would have been no one to help or rescue me.  I suppose that would be fine if I had something like a V-fib arrest; that’s a very fast death, and most people who die from it probably don’t experience anything at all when it happens, except maybe an initial palpitation if it starts out as V-tach.  If it were happening due to a heart attack, that would probably be painful, of course, but then again, in most heart attack situations, I could call 911 myself.

I occasionally think if I developed an acute respiratory arrest of some kind, such as pulmonary edema or bronchoconstriction or even just choking on something, that would probably be unpleasant, and I might not be able to call for help.  But though respiratory failure can be the single most frightening thing for a human, or someone with a human body, to experience (for good, sound biological reasons*) it doesn’t last long.  If you stop being able to breathe, you lose consciousness rather quickly, and then Bob’s your uncle and Sally’s your aunt and Jack’s a donut‒and they’re all at your funeral.

I actually think there would be few, if any, non-sibling people at any funeral for me.  If I’m wrong‒if there are people out there who would come to mourn and to eulogize*** me‒I wish they would just come out of the woodwork now and let me know and maybe come visit me (because I really don’t have the mental wherewithal to travel and visit myself, at least not now).  I’m very much alone and lonely, but I seem incapable of making any new friends or getting much else done that requires significant change or mental effort.  I guess that’s partly due to the ASD thing and partly due to my unique and bizarre set of personal experiences that have made me even odder than I was before.  I feel slightly orthogonal to the rest of society.

Anyway, dying of respiratory failure (of one kind or another) is not necessarily unpleasant.  The respiratory drive is not inversely proportional to the oxygen in one’s system (or if it is, it has a very tiny constant of proportion, probably less than .01, off the top of my head) but is instead proportional to the CO2 in one’s system…and that may be a non-linear, perhaps quadratic, association that increases more rapidly as the CO2 goes up.

If one were to suffocate or asphyxiate due to, say, a liquid nitrogen spill that fills a space with nitrogen and drives out all (or nearly all) oxygen, one would not tend to feel panicked or breathless.  The atmosphere we breathe is 80% nitrogen already, and it is essentially inert to us unless we go diving very deep underwater.  But one could still quite readily blow off just as much CO2 as ever in such a situation.  One would merely become lightheaded and pass out rather quickly and painlessly.  One might not even realize it was happening.

This is why you should never bring liquid nitrogen on an elevator if you can help it.

These characteristics make such asphyxiation or suffocation (whichever the “official” term is) a tempting form of “self-deletion” (as they euphemize the idea of suicide on social media because of stupid puritanical algorithms that confuse words with harm).  Weirdly enough, one alternative version of this is to use helium instead, which is just as inert to the human body as nitrogen, and which can be bought in home-sized canisters from party supply stores.

A few years ago, I bought some respiratory tubing, some gas flow regulators, non-rebreather masks, and two tanks of helium‒one at the office and one at the house.  I said they were for an experiment I had in mind, which was true in a sense.  As it turned out, though, correcting the mass-produced, party balloon-oriented regulators and jury-rigging the adapter and tubing to it was unreliable, and I wasn’t confident enough in it not failing to give it a real try, so I ended up giving both tanks away for people to use for kids’ parties.

It would work better with a tank of nitrogen, anyway, because the typical volume of such tanks is much greater and the industrial kinds of adaptors are easily connected.  Nitrogen is not available in party stores, but it can be obtained, usually for delivery, in welding supply centers and similar, or for cooking and coffee brewing (!) purposes and for filling tires with pure nitrogen, which apparently changes their dynamics slightly.

So, yeah, I’ve looked into this quite a bit, obviously.  And I still have the masks and the tubing and the adaptors (you can get them all from Amazon).  And, as with walking, the “authorities” can’t really be hypervigilant about nitrogen.

Anyway, that’s all been a somewhat morbid aside.  I will say that I feel intellectually uneasy about the whole asphyxiation method because if you screw up, you might live but be brain-damaged.  I dealt with that potential outcome in my story “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, which shows that this notion has been on my mind for quite a while.

I’ll leave the post off here, for now.  I am supposed to work tomorrow, so I should write a post then, exclusis improvisis.  But of course, the unforeseen happens somewhat frequently.

I hope you have a good day.

*Think about it:  one can live for weeks without food and days without water, but one can only survive for minutes without breathing.  Long before lack of oxygen kills one, the build up of CO2 leads to the accumulation of carbonic acid (H2CO3, the uncatalyzed reaction product of CO2 with water, H20), which leads to rapidly dropping pH.  This disrupts the function of nearly every enzyme in the body, all of which have evolved to operate in a narrow pH range around 7.4**.  The body maintains this pH wonderfully in most cases, mainly through the actions of the kidneys, but also using the respiratory tract (if your blood gets too acidic, you tend to hyperventilate, which blows off CO2 and thus reduces the concentration of carbonic acid, whereas if your blood gets too basic/alkaline, you tend to breathe much less leading to the opposite outcome).

**Drinking or eating specific foods or supplements to change the pH in your body is a fool’s errand, since if you have working kidneys they do a fiercely good job at maintaining things in a very narrow range all your life, despite woo woo “natural” health grifters’ claims.  And if you don’t have optimally working kidneys, eating or drinking things that even might affect the acidity/alkalinity of your blood is terribly dangerous.

***If I had to guess, I would say the literal meaning of the word “eulogy” comes from Latin for true or right speech/words.  Eu…logos.

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A belated first post of the work week

I hope nobody was worried about me yesterday when I didn’t write a post.  I was out sick.  I had some kind of gastrointestinal bug, or perhaps some type of bad reaction to something I ate.  I’m not sure.  Anyway, it was unpleasant, as such things tend to be.

I often find myself wishing, in such situations and even less severe ones, that I didn’t ever have to eat at all.  Of course, if you see me, you’d know that I’ve tended to err in the other direction, but I would very much like to lose my sense of hunger, or perhaps more my sense of pleasure in food.  My current life is almost completely devoid of any real, reliable joy of any kind, and I am chronically depressed, so I unfortunately tend to go for biologically reliable sources of “feeling good”, however minor and evanescent, such as eating.

I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have any kind of drug problem, since I’d probably be stuck going to that for my diminishing returns of transient joy.  I suspect many people with drug problems do just that.  Actually, I often kind of wish that I did have a drug problem, because then I would be (a) more likely to be thinner than I am, and (b) might die of a drug overdose, which is comparatively faster and less painful than dying of a food “overdose” over time.  It’s a moot point, though.  I’m not the sort of person who could really manage an illicit drug habit; I would find the whole process stressful and irritating.  I didn’t even like taking opioids legally when I was given them for my chronic pain.

Alcohol, which is legal, has many drawbacks, not the least being that beyond a certain point, it doesn’t really do anything for me and exacerbates my chronic pain.  It can be useful as a social lubricant, and in that it can be very useful, considering how socially awkward I am.

But alcohol doesn’t make me feel much euphoria past the initial relaxation stage, which is definitely pretty good for short times.  However, one trouble with alcohol is that it impairs one’s judgement—it certainly impairs mine—and so when one feels a little relief from anxiety and a consequent bit of euphoria because of it, one falls into the cliché, “if some is good, more must be better, and a lot more must be great”.  Most of you probably have direct or indirect experience with how that line of “thinking” turns out.

Now, I will say that I took one medication a few times, in medical circumstances, that could probably become a problem for me, and that was diazepam (brand name Valium®).  I’ve written before about how, when I was given diazepam, even though the circumstances were far from pleasant ones—wisdom teeth extraction in one case, and a heart catheterization in the other—I felt tremendous.  I felt normal, if you understand the sense of what I mean by that—and even if you don’t.

Anyway, that’s a prescription med, and I’m not really interested in taking it.  I know too much about how rapidly diminishing are its returns, and about its long-term effects on cognition, and worst, about how tolerance to it tends to lead to increased anxiety between doses, so it pretty quickly becomes counter-productive.

This leads me to wonder if it might be somewhat useful to people with chronic anxiety to take medications or similar that increase their anxiety, and to stay on them for a while, then to stop.  It wouldn’t address any underlying issues, of course, but not all such chronic states are due to Freudian-ish causes in experience and upbringing.  Some of them are genetic or at least congenital.  Sometimes, a person’s biology can just give them an anxiety set-point that is significantly higher than average.  Some other people, of course, will have the opposite.  And most people will be somewhere in between.

This is the nature of traits in populations of sexually reproducing species (e.g., humans):  there is variability in nearly every attribute, as genes get shuffled and reshuffled, paired up with different alleles and other genes in the genome, reacting in highly complex ways, and providing the broad variation on which natural selection does its ruthless work.

This is what is largely behind the famous phenomenon of the moths that changed coloration in industrial age England compared to their pre-industrial age colors, matching the new soot-encrusted bark of trees.  They did not develop the trait or attribute de novo; there was always a variability in that physical aspect (color).  But in different circumstances, different colors were more likely to survive to reproductive age, and so they began to predominate when a persistent change in circumstances happened.

The same sort of thing surely has happened with humans many times, over and over, as civilization changes, and our own effects feed back on our natures and alter their own causes.  If people could step out of their little, provincial world-views, this would likely be obvious to all but the most benighted of souls.

How did I get to this subject/topic*?  I don’t know, though maybe it will become obvious while I’m editing.  Anyway, I’m going to draw this to a close just with the revelation that I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  Was there any difference between its style and that of one written on the smartphone, now that I reveal the fact to you only at the end?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I truly hope you have a good day.  And I really wish I could actually hang out with some of you or with someone today with whom I could have a comfortable interaction.  But I am not good company anymore, if I ever was.  So I will probably, and appropriately, continue to be alone, and will die alone, and hopefully fairly soon.

*I never really have been able to discern a consistent and sensible difference between these two terms, but people often use them as if they are two different things, rather than simply synonyms.  Possibly that’s just a function of pretentiousness.  But maybe I’m just ignorant.

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A plague on both your houses…especially the one by the beach in Florida.

Look, I paraphrased Mercutio in two of my headlines over the last three days!

I’m writing this blog post‒wait for it!‒on the desktop computer at the office, because I slept at the office last night.  I had stayed after work to do a Discord meetup with my youngest to watch some Doctor Who.  We watched the first two of the “David Tennant specials”.  Those of you who are fans of Doctor Who will recognize that one of the episodes we watched was The Waters of Mars, which is among the best episodes of the show.

Anyway, after that, it was late enough that it made no sense to go all the way back to the house, since I was working in the morning (now today) and would just have to come right back.  The cats will be fine for 24 hours, and honestly, I feel rather pleased that the raccoons will not be able to come in and steal the “leftover” cat food.

Do raccoons deserve to eat any less than cats do?  Of course not.  But I don’t buy food to feed raccoons, I buy it to feed cats.  I wish I could take a cat in as a pet, but my allergies in general are already a pain in the ass‒well, more a pain in the head and chest, but that’s not the idiom‒just from living in Florida, where there is so much airborne life that if you stand still for too long, things will start to grow on you.

And I don’t figuratively mean by that that you’ll begin to become accustomed to them and might begin to like them.  I literally mean that you’ll begin to develop moss and algae and fungi and possibly even a lichen or two on your skin*.

If there ever is a cordyceps-style fungus that takes over human nervous systems the way some species hijack the nervous systems of various insects and other arthropods, it will probably start in someplace like south Florida.  Actually, maybe there already is such a fungus, but it’s not some rapidly growing, zombie-creating thing like in The Last of Us (or so I’m told).  Maybe it just makes people weird, particularly at the level of government.

That would make more sense than a fungus that makes people want to go around and, I don’t know, eat other people or try to infect them or something‒I haven’t played the game or seen the show or whatever, so I don’t know for sure what happens‒because fungi grow slowly.  Even ants can recognize the signs of an infected member of the colony and work aggressively to drive it out.  That doesn’t stop spores from spreading from the fruiting body that eventually grows out of the poor critter after it dies, and the spores get into the wind and go on.  But it does protect the ants locally.

Humans are rather cleverer about such things even than ants, believe it or not.  If there were a fungus that caused bizarre and violent changes in humans, and if it were significantly contagious, people would pretty quickly recognize the signs, once they saw what was happening.  Depending on how possible it was to cure, I think humans might well do more than just ostracize someone, at least if the disease was severely virulent, contagious, and madness-inducing.  They might just kill people who had the fungus and burn their bodies under high heat, or some similar process that prevents reproduction of the next round of spores.

The most successful pathogens among humans are ones that are not too dangerous (most of the time), not too obvious, and not too debilitating.  With the advent of any new pathogen, such as a new virus, the most rapidly or certainly lethal strains usually die out, or are selected out, relatively quickly, because if you’re a virus (for instance), you “want” your host to spread you before it dies, ideally for as long as possible, and they can’t tend to do that if they’re very sick or dead.

With a new disease, the tendency is for the most susceptible people and the most lethal pathogens to be selected out‒by each other, really‒early in the timeline of the spread.  That may be part of why the so-called Spanish Flu was so lethal in the early 20th century, killing tens of millions of people…and then became less dreadful over time, so now it’s just one of the strains of influenza that kills only (!) tens of thousands of people a year (in the US).

Maybe there’s a CNS pathogen that makes people get weirder over time and want to go south into subtropical, swampy, sunny and humid habitats, because‒I don’t know‒that’s where it needs to complete its lifecycle (or Peloton or whatever it uses for exercise, ha ha).  As Spock said, it would explain a great many things.

There’s so much I could go into about misunderstandings and misleading oversimplifications about pathogens and epidemiology to which even otherwise quite intelligent people fall prey (and then, alas, spread to others).  I could also discuss how various “ideologies” spread within and between human minds very much like mental viruses‒not exactly like, for instance, chronic hepatitides and HIV and HTLV and so on, but not all that different, either‒but there’s so much that could be said and, like the backrooms, I could just go on and on and on…

Even just sticking with more ordinarily biological pathogens, there’s so much misunderstanding out there; I have sympathy for some of it, but not for a lot of it.  But this is already a longish post.

I guess I will close with a minor public service statement:  Yersinia pestis‒the coccobacillus that causes “plague”, and about which there was some talk in the news after a woman in Russia in a plague research facility apparently died of an “unspecified pneumonia”‒has never been gone.  It’s not like smallpox.  It’s in the environment, it occasionally still infects people, and even more occasionally kills people‒probably fewer worldwide annually than the average flu deaths in the US, so, far from zero, but not exactly a major global public health crisis.

But plague, being a bacterial illness, is quite treatable by antibiotics!  And because it’s not everywhere all over the shop all the time, it doesn’t seem to be as prone to develop antibiotic resistance as quickly as the more common pathogens tend to do.

Certainly, if you start to develop bubos, you should get to the doctor/hospital, but it is not a death sentence.  You should pay more attention to newer viruses than to bacteria and fungi that have been around for a long time, and pay attention to older viruses (e.g., measles) that had been controlled by vaccines but for which that control is attenuating because people who don’t know their subject nevertheless feel free to pontificate about it and even to give advice to others.

You should probably stay away from Florida.

*This is an exaggeration to make a (slightly humorous?) point.

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‘Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a blog-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

Well, hello and good morning to you, too.  It’s Thursday, and so I have used a version of my “traditional” Thursday blog post opening, and I will use a traditional Thursday ending.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m glad that at least some people liked my rather atypical* blog post yesterday, in which I basically just described what I had played (and sung) the morning before.  Somewhat ironically, I did not play, nor did I sing, yesterday morning, and I don’t expect that I will do so today.  This is mainly, or at least pivotally, due to my chronic pain.

I don’t tend to talk that much about my chronic pain anymore, or at least not as often as I think I used to talk about it.  I don’t know, maybe I talk about it roughly just as much as I have all along, at least in the time since this stopped being a Thursday-only blog.  Still, it feels to me that I’ve been discussing it less, because I fear it’s not only boring for people but also depressing, and I am depressing enough without talking about pain.

But my chronic pain has not diminished, though it is variable from day to day and moment to moment.  There are times when I feel that something I’m doing is making it improve, but it usually ends up just to have been a normal part of whatever complicated cycle the pain intensity and character undergoes.

There are cyclical and periodic phenomena at nearly all levels of the cosmos, it seems.  Biological processes, which often involve thermostat-style feedback controls, are far from being an exception.  So, chronic pain goes up and down‒in a complex pattern that has differing periods and amplitudes overlapping** each other‒in ways that can be particularly misleading if you’re also trying to reduce it by various means.  Also, the things you try, even if they don’t truly work, can nevertheless affect the periods and amplitudes of one’s pain cycles.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’ve been having a lot of pain over the last several days‒more than average, though I am almost never not in pain.  I have also been eating an unusual number of legal CBD/delta 9 gummies.  They don’t seem to make the pain go away, but they change how I respond to it a bit, decreasing the amount of spasm and disordered walking and posture and tension and grumpiness that I experience, at least a bit.

But they make me groggy, if that’s the right word.  They also make my time sense rather weird, though that’s rather interesting, since it calls attention to the subjectivity of the experience of time*** which I discussed the other day, I think.  They also engender some minor perceptual illusions, especially auditory ones, possibly because of my poor hearing, but that is also rather interesting.

So, they make my pain experience a bit less intense and maddening, and they make it feel less as though one or the other side of my body is being forcibly twisted and contorted as I move, which is often how this shit feels.  At least, they make that sensation less stressful, and they seem to decrease some of the muscle spasms.

They also make my mathematical figuring and other mental processes feel less reliable.  I already have a seemingly deficient sense of being right‒for instance, no matter how often my mental figuring of sales amounts and so on is shown to be correct, I never for a moment feel secure enough about it not to check a few times using the computer.

Even then, I feel somewhat worried and uncomfortable, but sooner or later, I have just to go on to the next thing, because I will never be able to convince myself that I am correct beyond even a reasonable doubt, let alone to mathematical certainty.  It’s like the classic OCD thing where one has to keep going back to the house to check that one hasn’t left the stove on even though one empirically knows they have, or things along those lines.

To be clear, the gummies don’t appear to affect the quality of my mental work‒as far as I can tell, I can do mental figuring and other, similar processes as quickly and as accurately with it as without it.  But it makes me feel less sure, if anything, than without it, though I guess it also makes me slightly less anxious about being wrong.

It also takes away some of my mental focus, and also generally makes me feel a bit less motivated.  Perhaps, if I were able fully to embrace that lack of motivation, I might eventually come out the other side of the phenomenon and have a new, purer kind of motivation, one not born of constant tension and anxiety (and even some paranoia).  But I don’t know how to accomplish that, and even if I did, my credence in the possibility of it working is not nearly high enough to make me willing to try it.

Anyway, so, these are some of my thoughts on why I didn’t play or sing yesterday, and why I almost certainly won’t play or sing today.  It’s also part of why I don’t write fiction or draw or paint, and also part of why I don’t finish teaching myself professional level general relativity and quantum mechanics.  Yes, my interests tend to go all over the place and get in each other’s way even when I am at my best.  But even I know that I could accomplish so much more, so many more interesting things, if I were not in significant pain every fucking day.

So, yeah.  I’m out of it more than usual, which I don’t like, since mental acuity is my primary strength, and the thing I like most about myself.  That may not be a high bar to clear, but still, it’s what I have.  And I’m enervated and discouraged, and I’m tired of bothering to do anything, but I can’t seem to convince myself that, no, the stove is not still on, it doesn’t need to keep being checked.

What a pain.

TTFN

*I’m not sure if there really is a typical blog post type for me, so maybe “atypical” isn’t a very useful adjective here.

**Fourier (I think he was the one) famously showed how any kind of waveform can be produced by the superposition of sine waves of various periods and amplitudes, and this insight has tremendous impact on the nature of quantum mechanics and its particular types of superpositions.  It’s also the deeper explanation of the Uncertainty Principle.

***This has no effect on actual time itself, of course, at least based on all the best information we have about such things.  It’s just a perfectly understandable product of the nature of a biological computer’s (multiple) means of keeping track of time and reporting on that process to the rest of that biological computer (i.e., the brain).  It’s simply not true that experience is reality.  One’s experience is part of reality, of course, and need not be treated dismissively, but while toilets are necessary in any office skyscraper, it would be absurd to say “toilets are skyscrapers”.  Unless, of course, one built a toilet 50 stories tall.  Even then, that’s just one edifice.  So one could say, “that toilet is a skyscraper” legitimately, but that doesn’t make it any more sensible to speak categorically about toilets being skyscrapers.

This is not about buildings and plumbing.

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“But we don’t reckon time the same way, do we, Clarice?”

Well, ten-six, good buddy, it’s the sixth of October, and we’re already almost a fifth of the way through the month.  It’s curious how, while one is trying to get through things that one must do, one feels real sympathy with Gandalf’s line, “each day was as long as a life-age of the Earth”, and yet the overall passage of days, weeks, and months rockets on so quickly that one is almost unable to keep up.

Pink Floyd really was/were* insightful in their song Time.  And consider how young they were when they did it!  Roger Waters‒arguably the greatest lyricist since, I don’t know, W. S. Gilbert‒was only 29 when he wrote it, and he worried he was getting on in years, I guess.  Poor child, if only he knew.

Still, he was a brilliant child.

Time can feel very flexible and stretchable and squeezable, because the clock rate of our processors (aka brains) varies somewhat.  Maybe someone should study the subjective topology of time, how the experience can be fascinatingly inconsistent, even within the same person, within the same day, and yet the overall thing is fundamentally unchanged‒it has, you might say, the same, unchanging number of holes.

It’s an important thing to recall:  our subjective experience of time can be highly variable intrapersonally and interpersonally, but that’s just a perception.  Time itself is progressing as it always does‒which may well be “not at all” from a 4+ dimensional viewpoint.  Yes, relativity says that time “passes” at differing rates in different situations.  That difference is the main producer of what we experience as gravity, here on Earth.  But the space-time interval between any two events will be the same no matter who is measuring it, like the speed of light itself.

Many things in the universe, in life, are like this.  For instance, we know that our basic color perception, with the semi-arbitrary delineation of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet**, is born of our way of seeing:  with three kinds of cone cells, each of which responds maximally to a certain set of wavelengths, and the measuring and balancing of the degrees of activation of these kinds of cells.  From 3 not-completely-independent measurement types, one can construct an astonishing array of shades as it were.

But the fundamental nature of the electromagnetic spectrum has no inherent blue or red or yellow.  It’s just a long stretch of continuously variable frequencies.

A threefold variable system is also used in describing quark and gluon interactions in quantum chromodynamics.  The guy who does the Highly Entropic Mind YouTube channel did a great video on (the mathematics of) quantum chromodynamics that gets into some of that, and I recommend it if you’ve ever been curious about such things.  I’ll embed it here.

Anyway, our 3-photoreceptor visual system is why any humanly perceived color can be “produced” digitally by using only three different pixels, the RGB (red, green, and blue) ones, and why printers can print (pretty much) any humanly perceived color using CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).

But some alien race that perceives light using different specific means, even if they see the same visible spectrum, might think our various electronic and printed imagery, even our paintings, look very little like the things they are supposed to represent.  Probably there are even other terrestrial creatures who would think so; eyes have evolved independently dozens of times on Earth.  They are not all exactly the same, and vertebrate eyes are not necessarily the best ones.

Man, I’m all over the place this morning.  I’m so effing tired‒so tired that I’m not bothering to use profanity!‒that I don’t know if I’m making sense.  My sleep last night was particularly bad.

Have you ever been so fatigued from chronic sleeplessness that you honestly wished you would get hit by a (car or similar) just so you could get a break?  Even if the break is in your bones, even if it kills you, because at least you could rest in some sense.  If this is what Brahma feels like when dreaming the universe, it’s no wonder it has to dissolve it all into a dreamless sleep once every few hundred billion years, or however that legend/myth goes.

As for me and my house, I would really like to be able to rest so I can feel refreshed again someday, after what feels like many life ages of the Earth.  So far, though, I have not yet found the method for doing so.

Maybe music will help.  Today, I’m going to try to commit to playing guitar for at least a few minutes this morning.  It’s a shame not to do it for so long, and not just because my calluses are softening.  Maybe I’ll even sing (I have a hard time not singing when playing, honestly).

I hope you all (or “y’all”, a very sensible and useful contraction) are better rested than I am.  Cat forbid that any more people feel this way than necessary.

*This depends on whether you’re using the British plural form‒since it’s a band with multiple people in it‒or the American singular, since a band counts as a single unit despite being composed of multiple subunits, much as anything bigger than an elementary particle is.  It gives a new meaning or implication to e pluribus unum, doesn’t it?

**According to what I’ve read, Newton just threw in “indigo”, which does not actually constitute a separate kind of color like the other six, because he had a mystical notion about the number 7.  He was not alone in that, of course, but his influence was tremendous, so even when he had no real scientific reason for the divisions, his combination has persisted in the public consciousness for more than 300 years.