Biology

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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.

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In nature’s infinite blog of secrecy a little I can read.

Hello and good morning.

I may be brief today*, because I am mentally fairly exhausted.  Yesterday was a bad day for me, pain-wise and mood-wise.  I’ve had large amounts of more than one kind of pain medicine on board, and I felt…well, I felt somewhat less pain in some places, but I’ve started to get some broader symptoms that I sometimes get when I’m taking too many NSAIDs for too long.

My thumbs and my knees and ankles and such are actually feeling wobbly and unstable as well as being generally a bit puffy and plenty sore.  This isn’t really like an inflammatory kind of swelling; that would indeed be a failure of the Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug(s) I take, would it not?  No, this feels more like a sense of having excess fluid in each joint, as well as in between them, and less tautness, less stability, and somewhat ironically, more pain, albeit of a slightly different character that usual.  It’s quite frustrating.

Also, my back and hips and shoulders don’t feel much, if any, better than usual.

I’ve been wondering lately if I might have some form of relatively mild hypermobility syndrome, which often goes along with ASD it seems (some of the causative genes are probably the same, or at least tend to travel together through the genome).

I have long had certain slightly atypical flexibility issues or attributes**.  For instance, I’ve always been able, with a bit of a pull, to put one or the other of my feet behind my head from a seated position.  I can also scratch pretty much any part of my own back, and I have always been able to do this, though I sometimes need to pull one arm a bit with the other.  Also, I have a hard time holding my head straight upright for very long at a time; it’s uncomfortable, and I need to lean it to one side or another pretty much constantly.  Maybe that’s just a weird habit, I don’t know.

Of course, hypermobility can be associated with various kinds of chronic pain, and can certainly make other things worse.  Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be cured, any more than autism can be cured (or any more than having a particular color of eyes or hair can be cured, though they can be masked, as by dyes or contact lenses).

I am far from sure about this tentative self-diagnosis, and I’m always leery of “second year med student syndrome”, but I think I am being reasonably objective here.  Genetic testing would be required to confirm something like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, but I don’t meet the criteria for full-blown EDS***, and less full-blown syndromes may not easily (nor cheaply) be testable, or testable at all.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter much.  I do not expect my baseline previous health to be recoverable in any reasonable sense.  This is one reason I’m not too terribly worried about things like heart disease and infections and so on.  Why would I want to live a longer life of the kind I now live?  It’s like asking someone if they want the massive street construction project on their block, that’s slowing traffic and making terrible noise all day and into most nights, to be extended‒not by the workers doing more improvement, but just by working more slowly and being less efficient.

At least yesterday, in between doing payroll, processing deals on an unusually busy day, and trying to discourage my body from committing war crimes against itself, I remembered and indulged in a resource I haven’t used in a while:  I got on bioarXiv and skimmed through the abstracts of some of the more recently uploaded papers in general biology, neuroscience, genetics, molecular biology, and such like.  It can be kind of fun.

I don’t enjoy it as much as I do going to the original arXiv (hosted at my alma mater), which deals in physics, mathematics, computer science and the like.  But the bio site requires less mental effort and is simpler in many ways.  This is at least partly due to the fact that I am an MD, and I got my degree from one of the more research-oriented medical schools (we were required to do a publishable medical science research project as part of our degree) so the terminology is more or less at my fingertips.  This probably would apply even more at medrXiv, at which I spend less time than the latter two.

ArXiv, the physics/maths/CS site, has oodles of interesting articles always up‒I have, for instance, downloaded a PDF of a paper by David Deutsch from there‒but most require more mental effort than on the other sites, because I don’t have as good a handle on some of the jargon, and I often need to review the mathematics involved, or more often try to absorb it for the first time.  Still, it’s very cool, though it’s a real embarrassment of riches; it’s like being in the biggest candy store in the world,  but having only three dollars to your name, and having to choose what to buy with it.

The potential opportunity costs are staggering, but I guess that’s a good problem to have.

Speaking of reviewing mathematics, I found a nice little YouTube channel by a woman from MIT who does good reviews of basic integration and more advanced techniques like integration by parts and trig substitutions and such like.  I find her stuff much less sleep-inducing than the videos on 3Blue1Brown, though Grant has oodles of great videos, well-produced and in-depth but clear, about many topics in mathematics.  Unfortunately, his voice is if anything too calm for me, and his animations, though superb, are if anything too smooth.

I think, also, that I learn better by seeing someone writing the stuff out‒possibly this engages my mirror neurons and thus makes more of my whole brain focused on what’s happening.

Incidentally, the lady mentioned above is not officially affiliated with MIT, she just went there.  But you can actually “attend” lecture courses in various subjects in Physics, in Mathematics, in Economics, in Computer Science, and so on, from MIT at their YouTube channel.  It’s truly remarkable, and if you’re just after learning the stuff but aren’t seeking an Official Piece of Paper™, it’s a tremendous resource!  Stanford also has similar online lecture courses, as I think does CalTech.

I’m pretty sure Harvard does this also, but there’s no need for any of you to go slumming there.  Why not just watch Baby Shark or something‒and Gangnam Style is actually pretty enjoyable.  I know, I know, Steven Pinker is at Harvard, and he’s one of the most enjoyable (and thought-provoking) public thinkers in the world, but I don’t think he gives any of their online lectures.

Although, given the notorious grade inflation known to be rampant at Harvard, you might just get an official “A” from them simply by clicking on one of their videos.

Okay, I’m at the stage of taking cheap shots at Harvard (they do not deserve such disrespect, even though there really is a problem with grade inflation), so I’ll call this post to a close.  I hope you’re all having a better week, year, decade, and life than I am having.  Though, really, if you’re not reading preprint scientific papers for free online, how good can your life be?

TTFN

*I was not.  Perhaps this is analogous to the situation that led to the famous quote about not having time enough to write a short letter‒only in this case, it is not time but mental energy that limits my concision.

**Some of these things are slightly curtailed now because I am too plump, but that’s a different issue.

***No, I do not refer to Ross Perot’s old company, Electronic Data Systems.

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Try not to let the wrong kind of strangers depend on your kindness

I don’t have anything planned to “talk” about today, unlike yesterday, which makes this a much more typical‒though possibly less auspicious‒beginning for a blog post.

In any case, I feel the pressure to keep writing, because this is my only real contact with the outside world in which I share anything like my real, deeper thoughts and so on.  When I bring such matters up at work, people tend to laugh a bit‒I can be relatively funny when I try‒but otherwise they tend to look a bit confused or just awkward.

I don’t know whether any of the people from back home, who might occasionally have encountered my blog via Facebook or Threads, will ever happen to come read it here.  That’s one reason I always tried to encourage people to interact with the blog in the comments section below, rather than in the posts on social media.  That way they are more sure to be able to keep getting the posts.

But I haven’t received any comments from any of them here since the Meta-based platforms kicked me off for no reason I can discern.  I suppose it’s a lesson of sorts, not to place any reliance upon third party businesses that don’t even have an arguable fiduciary duty to me, since I am not their customer but their product (as are you, if you use them).

They clearly don’t feel any significant moral or ethical obligations toward the people who use their platforms.  You should all remember that fact if the time comes where you have them in any sense at your advantage.  Don’t be kind to them.  To be kind to them is to insult those who do show signs of ethics and morality and good will, to those who deserve (whatever that might mean) and will appreciate kindness.

Whom do you think ought to be most rewarded by your good will?  Which form of being do you want to encourage?

Of course, kindness being what it is (if it is authentic kindness, rather than someone just being “nice” or being “charming” as tactics for advancing their own interests) the tendency is to be kind to all comers.  I get that, and I applaud it.

But the kindness of those who are truly kind‒or at least their ability to enact it‒is finite, as is their personal time and energy.

If one had unlimited strength and energy and time, one could simply be kind to everyone, and it would almost certainly make the world a better place overall, by most reasonable definitions.  For kindness may not have the same immense R0 value, the same easy transmissibility as do malice and contempt and rudeness and anger, but when it takes hold, it can be much more persistent, and can change (for the better) the kind individual as well as those around them.

The negative contagions‒malice, anger, contempt, and so on‒tend to be self-corrosive and destructive, in addition to being highly transmissible.  They are like the “Spanish” flu, or even like a highly virulent form of measles:  readily transmitted but terribly damaging (and often fatal) to those they infect.

Kindness is more like‒I hope you’ll pardon the seemingly negative comparison‒HIV or HTLV-1.  It can intercalate (or, to be technical with respect to the mentioned retroviruses, reverse transcribe) itself into the very DNA of those who “catch” it, changing them slowly and gradually but profoundly and‒unlike those two viruses I mentioned‒almost always for the better.  And true kindness can be very difficult to “cure”, thank goodness.

But it is a finite thing, and there are always those who will make use of the kindness‒even just the implicit kindness‒of others for their own ends, without rewarding anyone but themselves any more than they must, least of all those who are unselfishly kind to them.

In any ecosystem, if there is “free energy” floating around, then sooner or later some organism is going to develop the ability to exploit it.  And the exploiters can then readily grow and mutate and can even become pernicious or overt predators and parasites.  In this, they can be like the fungi that had been breaking down dead matter, but which went on to develop the capacity to infect living bodies and even to manipulate some of them to encourage the fungus’s spread.

None of this requires conscious intent (there certainly is no such thing evident in fungi, for instance).  It does not require foresight or planning.  Ideas and strategies and ways of being simply develop and mutate and “try out” various seemingly available niches, never knowing ahead of time which ways of doing and being will succeed.  It’s just that those organisms (or companies, etc.) who happen to stumble upon a useful and “profitable” way of doing things will happen to survive and grow and, relatively speaking, to thrive.

So, don’t give too much credit or admiration to the Zuckerbergs and the Musks and the Bezoses, nor to any of the others of their ilk, and certainly not to those who inherit success, like children born with an infection passed on by the mother* in utero.  Their success is stochastic, and was certainly not thanks to any particular prescience or cleverness on their part.

They are no more inherently impressive than any of the thousands and even millions who tried to do similar things and failed.  They simply happened to stumble upon a strategy that, in the local circumstances in which they found themselves, happened to work.  And once a degree of success happens, it tends to be self reinforcing, ceteris paribus.

This is to no credit of the viruses and parasites in and of themselves.  It is simply the way of economies and ecologies, no matter what such organisms may tell themselves to justify their actions to themselves and to assuage whatever rudimentary consciences they may possess.

Don’t waste your admiration, and certainly not your kindness, on those who happened to be in the right part of some particular phase space at the right time, through no virtue of their own, unless you would also feel fine giving that admiration and kindness to the many variants of influenza and coronaviruses and poxviruses and liver flukes and malaria protozoans and so on that spread and consume and have their various effects on the lives and bodies of other organisms.

And certainly don’t trust them to be kind to you or to anyone else.

*This is where my analogy with HIV falls short, but of course it was inevitably going to do, since HIV is pathogenic, whereas kindness does not tend to be so, nor does inherited wealth (except perhaps in more subtle ways).  Perhaps one might think of kindness as like the first archaea that “infected” another type or archaea and became, in the fullness of time, our mitochondria.  Okay, I’m pushing my analogies here, I know.

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Brownian motion, eat your heart out

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday.

Ummm…

I’m not sure what to say now.  I have probably already used all the potential plays on words based on the fact that Tuesday sounds like “twos-day” or similar.  I suppose I could invoke something like a “too’s” day, suggesting the notion that this is too many days in the work week already, or that there are too many weeks, or other similar ideas.  But that doesn’t seem too clever, let alone funny.  It’s certainly neither insightful nor thought-provoking.

So, I’ll leave that be for now.

I was thinking this morning about the time when I used to write my fiction in the morning, back before I did this blog every day (it used to be something I did only on Thursdays, partly in homage to DentArthurDent).  One of the things that made that process perhaps a bit more streamlined‒or less clunky or however you want to characterize it‒than this blog was that I was either editing or I was writing first draft stuff, but I wasn’t publishing what I wrote every day.  So, I would either write my four pages (roughly) of new stuff or edit for a certain period of time, and then I would just save my work (in two places) and then close the lapcom and get on with something else‒often working on music or summat.

This blog is not as seamless to produce as writing fiction was day-to-day.  I have to edit every post and then post it and share it every day*.  That can involve a fair bit of extra time.  On the other hand, at least some people actually read this blog.  It’s not as good as my stories (in my judgment) but it comes in smaller chunks, which allows it to fit into the stunted attention span of the modern adult human.

I don’t refer just to the latter generations in that statement.  Attention span seems to be a bit like muscle tone; it’s not a fixed thing, it’s a neurological habit (or, well, its set-point is influenceable through neurological habit).  It can be made stronger with exercise, and a lack thereof will tend to lead it to atrophy**.  On average, I suspect that everyone’s attention span is not what it would have been in the past.

I don’t know what I’m trying to do or what point I’m trying to make right now, with this post.  It feels like it’s just all over the place, though perhaps that’s merely me projecting the experience of my own attention-fatigued state onto the experience of other people reading my blog.  I don’t know.

I’m having difficulty deciding what to write.  And yet, I’ve already written more than 500 words (counting footnotes).  I feel, as I said, very much all over the place, and pretty stressed out‒not by anything in particular, just as a kind of baseline.  I’m also tired, of course, since nothing about my insomnia or my chronic pain has changed.  And other than talking to people at work, this blog is the only social interaction I have during the week, so I guess I have some pent up conversational or interactional urge in me.

I do feed some neighborhood cats‒so that’s a bit of social interaction of a sort‒but the ones who seemed to like me and let me pet them and sometimes even sat on my lap are all long gone.  The ones who hang around now are just self-serving opportunists.  That’s not a surprise; they are cats.  They are all unabashed, self-serving opportunists.  It is, as they say, the nature of the beast.

They are not solely self-serving opportunists, of course.  But it is always at least part of their character.  Probably, it’s also always part of ours.

The world is complicated.  The fundamental building blocks are‒duh!‒fundamental, but if simple water molecules stacking together stochastically, following precise, local laws can produce all the variegations*** of frost on a window pane, think what the possibilities are for all of reality, with its Planck-scale interactions happening at astonishing rates and in inconceivable numbers.  The possibilities include all that is around you, but also (almost certainly) much, much more.

What if our reality were a simulation, but a fully simulated one, down to the quantum state.  Perhaps it could merely be simulated as those quantum states, with no eye to any larger patterns.  To calculate each next Planck time “frame” of that simulation could require a billion years of processing time in the simulators’ world, and so to them their simulation would plod at a ridiculously slow rate.  And yet, for us‒the simulated‒time would proceed as it always has and does, since our experience of time is internal to our universe and based on interaction rates within our universe.

Okay, that was a severe tangent, sorry.  I don’t know that it actually made sense relative to what I was trying to discuss (if such a thing really exists).  So, I think I’ll wrap this up for today.  I hope you all have a good one.

*I can no longer share it to Meta♣-based platforms, so a fair few people who occasionally stumbled upon it before (and people I knew from back in the day) won’t see it now.  That’s frustrating.  If anyone out there wants to share my posts to those platforms, I would be grateful.  I know it won’t reach the same specific people, but that’s okay.  I don’t have much choice, anyway.

**This is the general tendency of most biological traits or functions or attributes.  In the sieve of natural selection, if one wastes one’s energy and other resources maintaining functions at peak strength that are not actively used, one uses resources that could go to things that are actively useful, and resources are always finite.  Genes that tend to create bodies that tend to do such things will be less likely to get through the filter to the next generation.

***That’s not quite the right word, but it sounds so nice that I’m leaving it.

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O Caesar, these blogs are beyond all use and I do fear them

Hello and good morning.

I thought of a good opening sentence and line for this blog post today, but unfortunately, I thought of it at around one in the morning, during one of my earlier mid-night* awakenings.  These happen more or less every night, at various times.  Sometimes I will start** awake thinking I’ve badly overslept, only to find that I’ve been asleep for less than an hour.  Sometimes the opposite sort of thing happens.  Anyway, one of the hallmarks of things I think during those early midnight awakenings is that I don’t remember their specifics very well.

In other words, I don’t recall what the opening sentence that came to me was.  Given the nature of nocturnal, half-awake thoughts, it might well have been an idiotic starting sentence.  It might have been utter gibberish.  I might not even really have thought of any sentence at all; I might just have had one of those curious activations of certain brain modules without the usual stimulus (such as thinking of an actual sentence) that engenders them.

I suppose it’s somewhat similar to déjà vu, that free-floating feeling of familiarity and recollection that isn’t actually triggered by something familiar but by stochastic activation of areas of the brain that register familiarity and memory.

So, I might have had the feeling that I had just thought of a good sentence to start this blog post, but it was triggered by something that wasn’t related to any actual sentence.  Like Scrooge said to Marley’s ghost, “There’s more of gravy than grave about you.”

The quote was something close to that, anyway; I don’t feel like going to look it up and check.

All this highlights how important it can be not to trust your feelings.  As Radiohead sang, “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

Please don’t take this to mean that I think you should repress or ignore your feelings.  Feelings exist for good, sound, biological reasons.  But while they can be good sources of motivation‒indeed, one might argue that any motivation is a feeling‒emotions are unreliable guides for action, especially in the complex modern human world.  It is still certainly worth attending to them, however, rather than merely ignoring them or trying to push them down.

I think fear, in particular, is usually worth noticing and inspecting.  Just because you feel afraid doesn’t necessarily mean that there is some threat or danger nearby, even a merely social one, but nature has clearly arrived at the provisional conclusion that it’s better to be afraid of something that turns out not to be a danger than not to feel afraid of something that is a danger.

Of course, ideally, one would like to feel fear only for real dangers, and only to the degree that they are dangerous, and otherwise to feel fine.  It would similarly be nice to desire to eat and to enjoy eating only those foods that will be most healthy for us at that moment, at that time, and to desire only just as much as we need, and not to want those foods that will be bad for us in the short and long term.

Such perfect accuracy is not even close to being possible, not even for deliberately designed systems, let alone for evolved biological organisms.  And when survival and reproduction are the means by which genes go on into the future, it’s far better (up to a point) to make a type 1 error‒sensing or fearing nonexistent danger‒than a type 2 error‒not recognizing actual danger.

Modern society has discouraged us somewhat from listening to such fears, sometimes out of a desire to be polite, but again, though one should not take such fear, or other emotions, at simple face value, one should listen to them.  One should inspect the feeling and one’s surroundings and circumstances and try to discern why one feels that fear.

If it becomes clear after honest internal and external inquiry that it is a baseless anxiety, a fear without focus, then one can try to shrug to oneself and simply go about one’s business as best one can.  But if there’s a colorable explanation for your fear‒such as a possibly dangerous or certainly unknown person nearby during moments of potential vulnerability‒one should pay attention and act appropriately.  This is especially true for women (and girls), but it applies to men as well.  Gavin deBecker wrote a powerful book about this subject called The Gift of Fear, and I recommend it (this is one of those rare instances in which Oprah and I agree on a book recommendation).

Fear is not the mind killer.  Fear can be the mind sharpener.  The only people who don’t feel fear are fools and corpses.

On the other hand, to go back to the earlier point, emotions are still very blunt and fuzzy instruments, so don’t just let them push you around willy-nilly.  Just because you feel angry, for instance, doesn’t mean that anyone actually did anything to deserve it.  You might be hypoglycemic, you might have had too much caffeine, you might be in pain and/or have had chronic bad sleep***, you might be feeling residual emotional upheaval from something you saw on the news.

The feelings you have can be misleading, but they are not merely random nor are they completely irrelevant or unreliable.  Some of them are positive in and of themselves:  Joy and love are certainly worth not avoiding, for instance.

And middle-of-the-night feelings related to the nebulous impression that one has thought of a good start for a blog post can sometimes be without substance entirely.  And yet, even then, they might sometimes lead more or less directly to a blog post.

TTFN

*As opposed to “midnight”, which would usually mean 12 am.

**I.e., “a sudden, jerky motion, usually a response to some alarming and/or unexpected stimulus” not as in “begin”.

***This can happen, or so I’m led to understand.