dysthymia

by

Should you give a fig about a freight train’s Newtons?

It’s Saturday, April 25th, in 2026 AD/CE.  There are only 7 shopping months until Newtonmas (Other holidays are available).

Anyway, I’m very groggy and tired today, though at least I am (for the moment) in slightly less pain than yesterday.  It still sucks, but now it’s more of a neutron star kind of sucking rather than a full scale black hole.

Not that either of those two stellar remnants can be said to “suck” in any atypical way, with respect to gravity.  It is true that the gravitation at the surface of a neutron star is extremely high (to say nothing of the “surface” of a black hole).  But that’s just because everything is so compact, and you can get much closer to the center of gravity than you would be able to do with more spread-out astronomical bodies made of more typical matter.

But, to reiterate a perhaps overused example, if the sun were suddenly (and without any other phenomena that would complicate the picture) to collapse* into a neutron star or even a black hole of the same mass, the Earth’s orbit would not change at all.

There’s no special “supergravity” or whatever some people imagine there might be due to black holes or neutron stars.  It’s just ordinary gravity with a large mass in a small region.  From farther away than the former surface of whatever collapsed into it, the gravity of a neutron star or a black hole is literally indistinguishable from that of the celestial object that became the black hole or neutron star (if it did not lose any mass in its collapse to the latter state, which in reality they almost always do).

How the hell did I get on that subject?  I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see it while editing.

I’m a little out of it this morning, because I took half a Benadryl last night in addition to my other, more typical stuff.  I don’t usually take Benadryl on a work night, but groggy and unpleasant quasi-consciousness that at least helps me to be unconscious is better than not being able even to get to sleep or stay that way for long and being groggy because of that rather than the side effects of an antihistamine.

Something like that, anyway; I’m not sure I made that very clear.

I’ve just now become briefly distracted because a redirected freight train just went by on the track in front of me (going south on the usually-northbound side of the tracks, something for which there were no doubt legitimate reasons, but which still feels quite wrong).  This happens occasionally, and I’m sure the process that leads up to it is somewhat interesting, at least from a certain point of view.

It’s definitely an event that happens only because something has gone wrong somewhere.  The tracks for commuter trains, like the course over which they run, are not really meant for heavy freight trains, so they can’t let them use them very often.  And it was heavy, I’m sure of that. There were numerous tank cars and box cars and all sorts of similar cars carrying potentially heavy stuff.  Even the train’s whistle as it approached was a different, lower pitched sound and had a more somber timbre (sombre timber?) than the usual Tri rail whistle.

I already was pretty sure it wasn’t a regular train when the nearby gates went down to stop traffic, because there’s no scheduled Tri rail train going in either direction at even close to that time on a Saturday.  If it were a behind-schedule train, it would have to have been the first train of the day going south, and it would be quite off its schedule indeed.  Trains only come every hour on the weekend.

I almost wrote “every hour on the hour” there, just for the “sound” of it, but of course it’s not feasible to have a commuter train arrive every hour on the hour at every train station unless the stations are an hour’s traveling distance apart.  That would be one hell of a commute, and not in a good way.

Anyway, I think that’s enough nonsense for today.  I still don’t feel good.  My legs and hips are still channeling low-level but constant DC current (or so it feels), and I am having more and more trouble seeing any point to continuing to try to style my way though all this.  It’s been more than 20 years and things are not improving overall.

It would be more tolerable if I had other people and reasons and points in my daily life, but I don’t, not really.  The comments here below this blog constitute the majority of my socialization, not counting work interactions (which are a different kind of thing, though related).

I’m so bloody tired.

Anyway, have a good weekend if you can.  For goodness sake, cherish the people you love and who love you, especially if you’re lucky enough to be with them every day.  And remember, when in doubt, don’t ask yourself “What would Newton do?”.  Unless you’re a scientist, that is, in which case, yeah, Newton was a decent role model.

Otherwise, he was a terribly unpleasant, vindictive, and spiteful man (and here I thought it impossible for me to admire him more than I already did).  He is reported to have laughed only once in his life, when someone asked him what was the point of studying Euclid.

I sympathize with Newton there.  That is an idiotic question for anyone who is stuck living in and making their way through three-dimensional, locally Euclidean space.

Mind you, when things like black holes and neutron stars are involved, you need to go beyond Euclid, but you can’t readily go beyond Euclid if you’ve never gotten to Euclid***.

*There’s no known process by which this could happen, by the way, so don’t worry about it.  Also, you don’t need to worry about encountering spherical cows or frictionless surfaces**.

**Though I’ve long thought that “Frictionless Cows” might be a good name for a band.

***You don’t need to read Euclid’s actual book to study Euclidean geometry, any more than you need to read Newton’s Principia Mathematica to learn Newtonian physics.  But it’s worth giving them each a tip of the hat in passing, at least, for they are among humanity’s greatest works.

by

“I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of…”

In case anyone feels bereft, I apologize for not doing a blog post yesterday.

Of course, the odds of someone feeling seriously let down by the fact that I didn’t write a post for one day seem vanishingly small.  Nevertheless, it is a physical possibility, so presumably, depending on to what degree the various multiverses exist and to what degree possible things all happen “somewhere”, I’ll act as if someone in some bizarre verse would give a shit whether I am even alive or dead, let alone whether I miss a blog post for a day.

Oh, by the way, the reason I didn’t do a blog post yesterday was because my chronic pain has been so severe and worsening this week‒with relatively atypical symptoms, too‒that on Wednesday night I had a truly hideous night, despite doing all that I could to assuage my pain, and so yesterday I did not go to work.  Therefore, I did not write a blog post.

Honestly, my pain is not much better today, if at all, but I did at least lie around most of the time yesterday, so there was a modicum of physical rest.

It’s terribly frustrating.  I do many things to try to moderate and improve or even resolve my chronic pain, and sometimes it seems to be improving thanks to certain attempted interventions‒this was the case recently, for a very short time‒and then BAM, it comes crashing back into my temporary optimism, sometimes making things worse than before.  For instance, recently, in addition to my usual pain, I’ve felt as though I have electricity running through the entire lower half of my body.

It’s not electricity such that one twitches and spasms‒not often or much, anyway‒but more like a globalized version of the feeling you get in your tongue if you place both poles of a nine volt battery against it, but less pleasant.

So, yeah, that’s not been fun.  And, of course, it still feels as though my upper and lower halves are nearly severed, held together merely by a thread (or perhaps a cable) made of broken bits of bone, frayed connective tissue, and above all, lots and lots of nerves (heavy on the nociceptors, not so good on the proprioceptors and the motor control units).

That sucks, obviously.  It’s also very discouraging, and it really doesn’t help my depression and my urge for self-obliteration.  If I could use my pain somehow to connect to and obtain power through, for instance, the dark side of the Force, as Darth Vader supposedly did in the Star Wars universe, that might at least entail some compensation.  It might even make the process worthwhile, depending on whether the dark side can actually be used to accomplish beneficial things*.

Alas, this real world does not seem to have such characteristics, and based upon our understanding of how that world works, at the deepest levels and at its many intermediate levels, we would not reasonably expect it to have them.  In the real world, pain is useful in and of itself in that it serves as an alarm signal.  But the purpose of an alarm is, in part, to encourage action that makes the alarm cease.

One does not imagine that having a fire alarm in one’s kitchen or living room or bedroom (or all of them) that is stuck on and wails constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, etc., would make a house better to occupy or improve its resale value.  Indeed, one might be inclined simply to move out of that house, even if it is not sold, if nothing can be done to stop the alarm.

I want to move out of this house a lot of the time, especially at frustrating and rotten times like this one.  I don’t have any other house waiting for me, as far as I know.  That’s not really a problem, though.  I just want, as the song says, no alarms and no surprises.  Please.

 

So, that’s about it for the last 36 hours or so.  I’ve been trying to rest my body and do interventions to decrease my pain, but there has been only very limited success.

I also haven’t been playing or singing any music recently, and even my reading has been falling off.  It gets ever harder and harder for me to distract myself, and many of such distractions seem not to be distracting anymore.

I’m so tired of all of this.  It hurts.

Anyway, I’m supposed to be working tomorrow, so I guess I’ll write another post then.  I’ll try to do a better job of hiding my feelings and darkness and whatnot, as I’ve been doing for the most part, lately (I think you can agree that I’ve succeeded to at least some degree).

It doesn’t change my own experience, but at least it can make yours better than it might have been otherwise.  The cliché says that misery loves company, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with me.  I find it much better if at least other people are doing okay, and if I can contribute to that, that’s a good thing.

Honestly, it’s hard for me to see myself doing any good for anyone in the world anymore, but I suppose I used to do so.  I think those days are long gone, though.

I hope you all have a good day.

*And why should it not?  The “good” and “evil” of power is dependent upon what is done with it, after all.  So, unless that power inevitably makes one want to do wholly destructive things, which doesn’t seem quite to be the case in the Star Wars universe, then the dark side is just one means of using the Force.  And we know that light side users can do bad things.

by

We have met the cosmic horror, and…

Well, here I go again (on my own, like the song says) writing another blog post.  As for why I am doing so, well, there is surely a set of causes‒potentially tracing all the way back to the Big Bang, or at least the period just during and/or after inflation, assuming that happened, which seems more likely than not‒there may not be any good reason for it.

Oh, of course, I could come up with reasons.  I could “justify” myself.  Indeed, there is reason (har) to think that justification and persuasion to bolster one’s status and identity in a tribe against others with opposed motives may have been one of the driving forces behind the development of the human reasoning capacity.  This is apart from, and perhaps almost orthogonal to, the basic power of reasoning to understand and thus best navigate the territory of reality.

Once it got started, reasoning would have accelerated thanks to biological arms races between those competing for survival and reproduction, and then it would have turned out serendipitously to have been more broadly and powerfully useful than merely for securing status and food and mates.

Imagine if the peacock’s tail had turned out not only to be ostentatious and beautiful and sexy (to peahens, anyway) but tremendously useful and broadly powerful, especially once it reached a certain level.  Imagine if the peacock’s tail had allowed peacocks to build skyscrapers and boats and trains and planes and cars, if peacocks’ tails helped peacocks build a global civilization, quite apart from their ability to secure one’s status and acquire good mates.

That’s quite possibly more or less what happened with human brains.

Of course, like the peacock’s tail, the human brain is not without its drawbacks.  I suspect that things like depression and anxiety, and perhaps even neurodivergence, are simply potential (and statistically inevitable) outcomes for a brain that has grown powerful enough to assess the world deeply and uncover the almost Lovecraftian terror of our tiny little existence when placed against the scope and scale of the cosmos.

I say “Lovecraftian”, but even with Lovecraft, though the beings in the mythos are thoroughly inhuman and incomprehensible‒unsane, as I like to say‒they are still beings.  The true cosmic horror is surely that beings of any kind are almost nonexistent; indeed, to a very good approximation, they are nonexistent.

In some senses, this can at least be morally reassuring.  If we do go and spread out through the universe‒or even just the galaxy or even just our local family of stars‒and there are indeed no other life forms, then at least we need not worry about violating implicit rights.  Uninhabited asteroids (for instance) don’t have goals or wishes and, as far as we can tell, they cannot suffer.

Of course, we may have aesthetic concerns about such things, but aesthetics are not as urgent as ethics.  And, of course, we will still have moral/ethical concerns toward each other; that almost goes without saying.

Whether or not we will exist long enough for the ethics (or lack thereof) of changing the state of uninhabited other places in the galaxy to be pertinent is quite uncertain.  I see nothing in the laws of physics that makes it impossible, so in that sense, I am optimistic.  But I see nothing in the laws of physics, nor more specifically in human nature, that makes it certain or even likely that we will survive to spread out from our native planet to any significant degree.  And I see nothing in the laws of nature that seems to imply that, if we don’t succeed and spread through the cosmos, anyone else will do so, or indeed that anyone else even exists.

Don’t get me wrong; physics clearly and undeniably allows life to exist, and it allows (human-like) intelligence and civilization to exist.  But those are two different scales of allowance.

The molecules and principles of life as we know it, with long-chain molecules capable of carrying information and of replicating themselves, leading to “competition” and “improvement” and increasing complexity and so on, seem so straightforward as to be happening potentially (but far from certainly) in a good many places in the universe.  This is straightforward enough.  The equivalents of viruses and prokaryotes may exist in many regions.  It’s even possible that there may be such life in other places in our solar system (Europa and Enceladus being possible contenders).

But multicellular, “eukaryotic” life, seems likely to be much rarer.  Basic life started on Earth, as far as we can see, very shortly after the Earth formed and cooled enough for complex molecules to endure (nearly 4 billion years ago).  Eukaryotes, especially multicellular ones, didn’t really arrive until about 500 million years ago.  So, seven eighths into the time of life on Earth, it was basically just “bacteria” and some viruses.

Then, for significant, interpersonal, symbolic and technological intelligence to develop took another…well, basically another 500 million years.  And as far as we can tell, it’s only happened once.

That doesn’t give us a good, clear picture of how rare or common such a thing is‒one is a difficult number of experimental subjects from which to draw too many conclusions‒but it’s possible that the existence of technologically intelligent life is so rare as to occur only once per, on average, every chunk of spacetime as large as our visible universe.  It could even be rarer than that.

In an infinite cosmos, of course, even such exceedingly rare events would happen an infinite number of times (so to speak).  But that doesn’t necessarily make things less lonesome.  If you have an infinite number of decks of cards (with no jokers), all thoroughly shuffled together, there are literally just as many Aces of Spades as there are red-suited cards in total (ℵ₀, the “smallest” infinity).  Nevertheless, if you draw cards randomly, you will only get an Ace of Spades one twenty-sixth as often as you will get a red-suited card.

Similarly, there are as many whole multiples of a trillion as there are integers in general (again, ℵ₀), but if you pick a random integer, you’re still only going to pull such a multiple one out of a trillion times (on average).

So, maybe the takeaway is that the real cosmic horror may be that we are the only entities haunting the abyss, and there are no (other) mad idiot gods bubbling away at the center of celestial existence.  Maybe it’s just us.  And if our lights go out, then nobody is home.

It’s worth considering, not least because it has every chance of being true, whether literally or just practically.  For if the nearest other technological life form is in another galactic cluster, for instance, then we are, for all reasonable purposes, alone in the universe.

by

It’s the end of the week, but weakness persists

It’s Friday again, at last, and this is indeed the final day of the work week for me.  I am not expected to work tomorrow, and I think that even if they decided they were going to hold the office open tomorrow, I would not go in.  I am too tired and dispirited to once again throw myself into the gears of the machine just because other people want me to do it*.  Honestly, I feel it’s more likely that I’ll throw myself into real machinery than that I will go to work tomorrow.

Speaking of such throwing, as I was leaving the train yesterday evening, I found myself looking under the engine, seeing where the wheels meet the tracks, and wondering if I would have the guts just to lay my head across the track‒my neck, really‒and let myself be run over.  It would be a quick death, I suspect.

I don’t think I have the guts, though, not right now.  Also, it would be rude to screw up people’s commutes.  But it does carry a weird kind of perverse attraction.

Nothing else of interest is happening, really.  Well, perhaps one might concede that there are many interesting things happening, in the sense of the old curse, “may you live in interesting times”.  Unfortunately, even those types of interesting things that are happening are so…well, almost so trite, so pathetic, so contemptible, so predictable, so “been done already”.  None of the weird, would-be interesting, things that are happening are impressive in any sense.

Okay, well, I’ll concede the relative interest and impressiveness of the Artemis II trip around the Moon recently.  It would be more interesting if it hadn’t been something we’d done literally before I was born (3 months before, to the date, for Apollo 11’s landing), using computer systems that were‒to use the most conservative definition‒28 iterations of Moore’s Law ago.  So, literally, by more (ha) than one measure of that “law”, we are at least 2 to the 28th times as advanced, computationally, as we were when we first went to the moon.  That’s conservative, because I’ve heard descriptions of Moore’s Law that put the doubling time at 18 months, in which case there would be about 37 doubling times since then.

For those of you for whom exponentials don’t carry quite the visceral impact they ought to carry, 2 to the 28th power is 268,435,456.  So, by more conservative, every-two-year characterizations of Moore’s Law, our current computational powers are more than 268 million times what they were in 1969.  By less conservative estimates they are 137,438,953,472 times, so more than 137 billion times as advanced.

To be fair, it’s just computer tech that has advanced like that.  The process of engineering rockets hasn’t improved to the same degree, because that’s a large-scale engineering thing, and is more constrained by the rate at which one can directly interrogate nature and build and test technology.  Still, we went from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about two thirds of a century, but in the more than half a century since, we’ve certainly not extended that streak much.

Okay, to be fair, we got pretty good at sending out space probes and such.  Even then, though, our most distant and still most impressive probes were launched in the late seventies.  There have been some quite impressive things since, and I intend no shade to be thrown at them.  That Pluto thing was very impressive, as are almost all of the Mars missions and the probes sent to other planets (on the other hand, the ISS isn’t that much more impressive than Skylab was).

The things that have improved significantly have largely done so solely because the increased capacity of computers has assisted in modeling and, well, computing things.  So, rocket science has improved to the degree that computer science has improved, divided by the fraction of that improvement that cannot make a difference in how well rockets can be made.  Something like that, anyway.

Yeah, rocket science hasn’t advanced much in my lifetime.  Brain surgery has done a bit better, but not as much better as one might have reasonably expected.

Then again, we’ve certainly improved our ability to make memes and now AI images and videos to make fun of people and express our own loyalties or outrages.  Yes, in a real sense, many of our greatest advances in recent decades have been improvements in our ability to hurl feces at each other like the monkeys we all are.  We appear to be more engaged by such shit-flinging even then we are by sex, which seems mind-boggling.

I say “we” but that broad description does not apply to everyone.  Some people are still more interested in sex.  At first glance, that would seem to be the more evolutionarily stable of the approaches, but it’s an empirical question, so we can really just wait and see which, if either, of the two tendencies prevails in the long run.

To paraphrase Dave Barry, I myself plan to be dead.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say for this week.  I don’t mean to make a post tomorrow, but of course, as always, that is barring the unforeseen.

I hope you have a good weekend.

*Okay, to be fair, that’s not really the reason.  I do it because I get paid.

by

Still queasy after all these years

Okay, well, it may not have been going on for years, but I am feeling queasy again this morning.

It’s Tuesday now, and for the first time in what feels like a long time, I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  I’m doing this partly because my thumbs, despite attempts at good care by me, are feeling quite sore and stiff*.  When I take enough NSAIDs (usually naproxen) to keep them calmed down, then my hands and probably some other parts of my body eventually get swollen and feel…inarticulate, I guess might be the right word.

I worry that this means the NSAIDs are doing a number on my kidneys, along with other parts of my body.  I know that, at baseline, my kidneys appear to be functioning fine—when I went into the hospital with my kidney stone last year, of course I had lots of blood (and urine) tests.  But I don’t want to roll the dice on them too much.  Because if I ever do have kidney failure, there’s no way I’m going to be dialyzed.

That’s not because I have anything against dialysis, but because I know I will not be able to afford it; I don’t have insurance, of course, and also, I don’t have any kind of support if I were to undergo dialysis, which usually must be done two to three times a week.  I just don’t see that all happening.

Anyway, there’s no immediate danger there, as long as I don’t take too many things that are going to box my kidneys.  It seems likely that something else will take me down before they go.

Speaking of ill health, I had a rough day at the office yesterday.  I was fighting a sinus headache on the left side (of my head, that is; I did not have a headache all along the left side of my body) all day, and it was really uncomfortable.  I think I was fighting off a local, bacterial infection.  Thankfully, decongestants and such all took care of it, and the problem appears to be resolved, or mostly so, today.  What regional lymphadenopathy I had is all but completely gone.

The irritation caused by that process seemed to trigger an exacerbation of tinnitus, but that might have been a coincidence, since it was acting up in my right ear, not my left.  To be fair, my right ear is where the tinnitus is worst and so is my hearing.  This asymmetry can be quite disorienting (or, as the Brits would say, disorientating), especially when one is in a room in which overhead music is playing and a large number of people are all on the phone at the same time.

Well, I say “large”—it’s really about a dozen.  But it’s a smallish office, so that number of people can make it feel packed.  And the noise is problematic for me at the best of times.  Among other things, I have a hard time telling where any particular voice or noise arises, because my one ear is nearly useless.

Wow, this is really lame and boring, isn’t it?  I’m sorry.  At least I’m not talking to you about my mental health problems anymore, right?  They haven’t stopped or diminished in any way; quite the contrary.  But I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear about them, and certainly, no one can do anything about them (least of all me, it seems).  Mostly, even the people who want to help just respond with clichés and homilies and so on.  That sort of stuff just makes me feel worse, if anything, because it’s so disappointing.

As for other things, let’s see…no, I don’t think I have anything exciting on which to report.  I did just have a bit of a fudge-up on my MS Word as I’ve been typing; somehow the striking out and red-lining of new words and erased previous ones got activated.  I don’t know how that activation took place, but it was not what I wanted.  I was, at least, able to stop it.

It’s very irritating.  It’s one of those things that arises, I suspect, because Word is trying to keep up with the web-based word processors, but I don’t want it to do that.  And, to be fair, it might just have been me accidentally hitting some shortcut on the keyboard.  In any case, I want Word to be the same reliable word processor it’s been for such a long time.

I want a word processor that doesn’t require me to have an internet connection to use it.  Fie upon the internet for ordinary, local tasks.  Why do people need web connections for games and for word processing and for all those little things that we used to do on our computers long before the internet/web became publicly available?

The internet requires many systems to be functional and operational to stay in business, and I’m not confident those things will remain so.  Huge server farms and various other tech matters use tremendous amount of energy and other resources (such as water for cooling), and sooner or later, if they are receiving those resources instead of humans, the humans are going to blow them up and/or burn them down, along with the companies and people who create them, and it will be deserved.

All this complex, manipulative technology is quite breakable, as are pretty much all things.  The underwater cables that carry the information of the internet between continents are also vulnerable.  Chip manufacturers, and particularly the machines that etch microchips, are particularly expensive and vulnerable.  Sources of rare Earth minerals are perhaps slightly less vulnerable, but it doesn’t take much to interfere with finely tuned infrastructure.

I’m frankly amazed that no one has done a Fight Club (specifically, a “Project Mayhem”) on the whole international set of communications hardware on which the internet is based.  Just screwing up heat exchangers would probably be enough to bring large portions of the cloud down semi-permanently.  And how many people have their important data backed up in hard copies anymore?

Do you want to stop the advent of artificial intelligence that might wipe out human civilization?  Wipe out the infrastructure of the companies that are working on it.  We know that it is always much easier to destroy than to create, but we definitely want to destroy a thing that will pull a “Project Genesis” on us and wipe us out to instantiate its own existence.  Throw some of those sabots into the machinery, if you’re worried.  The law is not going to protect you from the wealthy and powerful—or so it certainly seems, and it seems to be less likely to protect you with every passing moment—so why obey it?

Meh, I’m probably being too pessimistic.  Anyway, maybe it’ll be a good thing, from the cosmic point of view, if the human race and all other organic life on Earth is erased and replaced by electronic life.  It might even be a good thing for humans themselves.  There are certainly fates that are worse than death.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t think I’m making much sense.  I hope you all have a good day, despite having foolishly opened yourselves to my thoughts early in the morning.

*It’s also because I fear my typing skill has deteriorating due to lack of use, so I figured it would probably be good to get back into it a bit.

by

Queasy does it

Ugh, it’s Monday again.  I’m very much not ready to start another work week.  I’ve felt a bit queasy and under the weather since yesterday afternoon‒probably due to some dietary indiscretion, I don’t know‒and just felt kind of icky.  I’m not nauseated at the moment, though, just kind of wiped.

I’m sure that’s how you were hoping to begin your week of reading blog posts:  with news of my upset stomach from yesterday.  One can imagine Tom Brokaw, or perhaps even Walter Cronkite, breathlessly delivering such a bulletin, am I right?  What would the banner headline in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal say about such a story?

Probably nothing, of course.  Imagine how slow and anti-interesting a news day would have to be for major news outlets to carry stories about my minor ailments.

Not to say that the ailments of certain people don’t get covered; they do, of course.  Sometimes this is just frivolous curiosity or even prurient interest, as in the case of “celebrities”.  Sometimes it really is important, as in the case of powerful individuals who carry great responsibilities.  In those cases, people can legitimately be concerned, especially if the responsibilities carried by these individuals are things only they can do.  That’s rare in the real world, but it can happen*.

Oy, sorry about the interruption there.  I had a little sneezing fit.  Oh, wait, you all didn’t experience that interruption; only I did.  How embarrassing.  I shouldn’t have said anything.  Well, it’s too late now.

Though, of course, it isn’t too late, not for me as I write it‒I could change it if I wanted to change it.  But by the time you read this, then, yes, it will be too late for me to change it.  I mean, I could edit the post after the fact‒I have that power‒but it wouldn’t affect those who had already read it.

I could conceivably affect your memory of what it had originally said if I changed it and then persistently repeated the lie that it had never been the way I originally posted it.  But even if I got everyone in the universe to believe the lie‒getting them all to care would be a big enough undertaking‒it would not change the fact of what had originally happened.

This underscores the true, fundamental powerlessness of lies.  Words can change what people “believe” in the short term, but talk is cheap (mother fucker).  No matter how much a person believes they can fly under their own power, if they step off the top of a tall building (on Earth, in normal gravity) they will plummet.

And they may believe, all the way down, that they are actually flying and that the falling is the illusion, but once they reach the bottom, everything with which they believe anything will, if the fall was far enough, be utterly broken, perhaps even scattered across the pavement.  All that they believed or remembered will be obliterated, in a very true sense of the word.

That’s one of the good, albeit sometimes frustrating, things about reality.  Whatever it is, it is, regardless of whether anyone believes it or even knows it, regardless of whether there even exists anyone who can know it.

How did I get there from having noted that I felt sick yesterday and don’t feel great today to be starting the week?  I’m sure it’ll be clear in the editing process.  But it is a fact that I got to this point, so it happened somehow.

I don’t really know what else to discuss.  Nothing of consequence happens in my life anymore, not even from the narrow, parochial point of view of my own mind.  At this stage, my life is of more or less of zero significance to anyone, including me, so I guess it doesn’t matter what I discuss.

I’m very tired, though, and it’s just the start of the day and the week.  I hope I get to feeling better as the week goes along, though the second law of thermodynamics seems to imply that such a thing is by no means guaranteed to happen, and indeed, in the long run, will definitely not happen.  At least, the tendency for entropy to increase is as definite as anything we know.

Clearly, though, huge regions of low entropy are possible; the universe as we know it “began” in such a state.  Mind you, we wouldn’t want to be suddenly transported to such a low entropy region of spacetime, as they are not readily amenable to life, which is dependent upon local gradients in free energy and entropy.  This is why life occurred in sort of the “middle state” of the universe, the mixing state, as when one sees the many swirling forms and patterns in one’s coffee cup as one is pouring in milk or cream, before the mixing finally becomes uniform.

Also, though quite uniform and low entropy, the Big Bang was also pretty darn hot, and I’m not speaking metaphorically.

If one could open a teeny, tiny wormhole back to some region of the early universe just after the Big Bang, one could conceivably obtain functionally limitless energy**.  But that would affect the subsequent evolution of the early universe, I suspect, though perhaps it could not possibly affect the universe in such a way as to prevent itself from being instantiated.  Or, well, maybe for that reason it cannot be instantiated.

I don’t know.  I’m tired.  You can probably tell.  Anyway, I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Though no examples spring to mind.  If you can think of one, please share it in the comments below.

**Though, would that outweigh the energy required to create and maintain the wormhole?  I have a strong intuition that it would not.

by

This is a very catchy headline.

Good morning.  How’s that for optimism?  It’s 4-11 today, so perhaps I should try to give you some information.  You all remember the old information line, don’t you?  Four, one, one (in the US, anyway).  I think the toll-free/long distance version used to be 800-555-1212 or something like that.

I don’t know if those lines are active and maintained anymore.  I know I haven’t used either one for probably more than 2 decades‒by which I mean it’s been more than 2 decades since I used them.  I don’t mean to deny having used the line for a stretch as long as 2 decades.  I hope it goes without saying that I have never just stayed on the 411 line for decades at a time without stop.  That would be weird.

Speaking of weird, I want to apologize if yesterday’s post was too weird for anyone.  I don’t plan these in advance, as you may know, so they become a kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise.  Not that I didn’t find the stuff I wrote interesting; obviously I did at some level, because it’s certainly there in my head.

Of course, I do edit each post (three times) before posting, and yesterday I even did some relatively elaborate figuring (though the math was really just basic arithmetic, and I messed that up when working out the surface area of the Earth because when I squared the radius, I didn’t square the pi in the denominator of my expression for the radius).

To try to cut myself some slack, it was early in the morning after all, and I was going more speedily than was probably advisable, since I only have a limited amount of time to do and post these things in the AM.  I suppose we all have a limited time every morning; if anyone out there has unlimited time in the morning, please let us know.  That would be a staggering phenomenon.

Of course, if time is continuous and infinitely divisible (our best understanding of the universe seems to say it is not, but that’s not absolutely certain) then one could, in a sense, have unlimited time, but only if one could speed up without limit, and we know you can’t do that.

Anyway…

I have been doing some exercises on Brilliant dot org this week‒at least one little set a day‒so that’s an accomplishment of sorts.  I’m in the midst of several courses, but lately I’ve mostly been doing the vectors course‒it’s really just a basic review for me so far, but reviewing is good, because I want to get on to linear algebra and tensors and matrices because there is a question in Special/General Relativity that I would like to solve for myself if I am ever able.  That’s probably a pipe dream, because my attention meanders to too many other things too often.

That’s why my former routine to write my fiction during my commute worked‒it wasn’t a debatable thing, it was just what I did every morning.  That worked pretty well, or, well, at least it was productive.  I don’t know if my stories are actually good to anyone else but me, and honestly, neither does anyone else, in general.  It’s possible (however unlikely) that my books and stories are the greatest works of literature ever produced on Earth, but since next to no one has ever read any of them, almost no one will ever know.

Of course, now I have this routine, which I guess one could continue to call productive.  It’s certainly productive of relatively frequent blog posts.  That plus about ten bucks’ll get you a descamisado coffee* at Starbucks®.  It’s not as though anyone is ever going to while away an afternoon reading my old blog posts, but it’s just conceivable that someone might read one of my novels or short stories some day when they are bored.

Oh, well, whataya gonna do?  I’m very tired and sapped of motivation to do much of anything.  I wish I could even imagine a positive future for me, but honestly, I don’t really imagine the future at all.  You might think that’s just good “mindfulness” or, well, a “living in the present moment” thing.  But I think it’s just the current set-point of that function in my brain, to no credit of my will.

Anyway, I’m tired, and not just of work or the blog.  I want to go to sleep, but that’s one of the most difficult things for me to do.

I hope all of you, at least, have a peaceful and good rest of your weekend, and a good rest of your life while you’re at it.  As long as I’m hoping, I might as well hope big, right?

*I’m pretty sure that’s not actually one of their drink names or sizes, but they do use such pretentious and absurd names for the sizes of their beverages that they should be ridiculed mercilessly until they go back to “small”, “medium”, and “large”.  Do coffee shops (or the equivalent) in other countries use slightly twisted versions of the English “small”, “medium”, and “large” to describe the sizes of their beverages?  Probably some of them do.  People are so stupid.

by

Reality, calories, and joules, oh my!

I had a moment of idle curiosity this morning just before starting to write this.  I recalled the bit of trivia that the average human power output/consumption is something around 80 or 100 Watts.  I wasn’t sure which was more typical, but it doesn’t really matter; the numbers are well within the same order of magnitude, despite having nominally different numbers of digits.

Anyway, I decided to convert that into kilocalories* per day, just to confirm that the typically described numbers match up, because if they don’t, then something very strange is going on.

A Watt is a joule per second**, so to figure out how much energy output (in joules) there is in or from a human per day, you just multiply the watts times the number of seconds in a day (24 hours per day x 60 minutes per hour x 60 seconds per minute, or 86,400 seconds per day).  Multiply that by the above-noted wattage and you get between about 6 and 8 million joules per day.

Now, there are 4,184 joules per kilocalorie, so dividing that into the number of joules yields:  roughly between 1600 and 2000 kilocalories a day, which matches the data on basal metabolic rates.  Neat.

Of course, they must match up, otherwise there would clearly be some major logical inconsistencies in our understanding of such thermodynamicalish matters.  I don’t suspect that such a mismatch would have survived the scrutiny of scientists much longer than a snowball would last in a blast furnace; in other words, I consider textbook level physics to be pretty darn reliable.  Nevertheless, it is good occasionally to check even such basic things, just to confirm for yourself that your understanding of reality is internally consistent and consistent with that which is measured and described by other people.

This is not to say that I worry about whether my “reality” is significantly different than that of other people.  I don’t.  While I have no doubt that the specific details of my personal experience are unique, this is so only in rather trivial ways.

I’ve not encountered any occurrence or argument that made me doubt whether everyone around me is subject to the same laws of physics as those to which I am subject.  Of course, if tasked or merely bored, I can conceive of ways in which all that I think I know is illusory and/or delusional, as in the argument that precedes the cogito in Descartes’s most famous (non-mathematical) work.

With a bit of effort, one can almost always imagine ways in which the world could be deeply different than it seems.  I’ve been known to do that at length‒indeed, at book length‒myself.  But the fact that a thing can be imagined is not a reason, by itself, to promote a concept into “might actually be true” space.  Presumably, there are limitless such things that could be imagined, but almost by definition (at least as I am using the word) there is only one reality.

Reality, as far as I can see, cannot contradict itself; actual paradoxes cannot be instantiated.  I’d probably be prepared to bet my life on those propositions.  But even if reality could contradict itself, that would also be a fact about reality.  Whatever reality is, it is.

That’s trivial, of course, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded of the trivial things that one carries in one’s background knowledge but rarely considers or reconsiders‒things like the interchangeability of measures of energy and power and heat between different units.

With that full circle moment, I’m going to finish for today.  I’m still very tired, and I’m rather discouraged and despondent and probably other d-words as well.  This blog is all I really do, anymore, but my energy is lagging even for this.  At least I don’t need to do payroll today, since I had to get it done early yesterday…which fact I found out yesterday.

Oh, well.  Please do what you can to have a good day.  And remember, there is no do or do not.  There is only try.

*This is what we call “calories” when speaking of human energy intake and output, but a single “true” calorie is the amount of energy (heat) required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade (or, well, Kelvin if you want to be pedantish).  A kilocalorie, or what we commonly call a calorie, is enough to raise a kilogram of water 1 degree Kelvin.

**A joule being the unit of energy in “SI” units.  A joule (energy) is the integral of force with respect to distance, or a Newton-meter.  A Newton is the measure of force, and is a kilgram-meter/ second-squared.  So joules have the units kilogram-(meter squared)/second squared.  Watts (a measure of power, or energy per unit time) are joules per second, which fact gives us the fun, lovely phenomenon of having cubic seconds in the denominator of the equation!

by

“I find myself growing fatigued, Doctor.”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Tuesday, and here I am writing another blog post.  Huzzah.

I’m rather tired today, which I guess shouldn’t be that surprising, given that I have chronic trouble sleeping.  Still, some days hit me worse than others, for reasons that are probably multifactorial and are certainly difficult to tease apart.  And today, so far, seems to be one of the “I feel more tired than usual by a noticeable margin” days.  You’ve probably all had such days, though you may not have used that specific term for them*.

There is some good news, news that in a way is not world news but is extraterrestrial news, at least temporarily:  the Artemis mission has flown ‘round the far side of the moon, and in so doing has brought humans farther away from Earth even than Apollo 13 did; this is now the farthest humans have ever been.

It’s quite momentous, but the fact of this mission and its (so far) success, raises questions.  I suspect the answers to them are disappointingly trivial, however.  For instance, why was there such a delay in returning to the Moon after the last time in 1972?  The answer to that is at least somewhat clear when one poses the related question:  why did we work so hard to go to the Moon back in the late 60s/early 70s?

Of course, the main reasons were:  primate dominance/hierarchy drives, writ large across the planet.  The Apollo program was, in a barely metaphorical sense, the ultimate dick-measuring contest, and the USA won that one pretty clearly at the time (“Mine reaches all the way to the Moon and back, how ‘bout yours, motherf#cker?”).  The fact that the Soviet Union basically admitted defeat in that region in that round is but one piece among the mountains of evidence confirming that, yes Victoria, humans did indeed land on the Moon.

It wasn’t for purely scientific reasons, though.  In fact, the science at the time took a very distant, rear-facing-storage-area-of-the-station-wagon place compared to the politics that was in the driver’s seat.

Alas, human nature being what it seems to be, perhaps truly amazing innovation and advancement is simply much more likely to occur during conflict (literal and figurative).  Maybe even the Beatles, for instance, were so great at least partly because of the (usually friendly) competitiveness between John and Paul, and also George once he found his considerable mojo.  Ringo was the Samwise Gamgee/Bodhisattva of the group, which seems appropriate for a drummer.

Humans presumably have always had the capacity to make the many scientific discoveries and technological advancements that have occurred in recent centuries.  But they needed to have an impetus before anyone would get anything done.  The two strongest inherent drives are survival and reproduction, and those drives interact and accumulate as humans gather in larger numbers, and they sublimate into national competitiveness‒for wealth and power, for luxury, for prestige, for all that nonsense.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could deliberately control our motivation?  We have crude means of affecting it already‒caffeine and various other stimulants‒but these are blunt yet jagged tools.  In principle, microelectrodes could be implanted into something like the nucleus accumbens or the reticular activating system or more well-chosen, finely tuned areas of the nervous system.  Then one could use a remote control to give oneself motivation when desired (?).  Presumably, other mental states could be manipulated, encouraged, discouraged, etc.  Just watch out that no one else gets their hands on your remote control!

Maybe it would be better to have a helmet with various directed electromagnets to stimulate specific brain regions at will.  This process is already in use in relatively simple form**, but it could be honed and made more precise and more powerful and useful.  It would be nice to be able to have large-scale motivation that didn’t require the tendency toward large-scale destruction.

It may be an inevitable challenge.  Powerful forces can inherently have very good and/or very bad effects depending on circumstances and, of course, depending on what one means by “good” and “bad”.

Not to say that we couldn’t rather easily be doing things better than we are.  We could.  But…it seems we aren’t sufficiently motivated to do so.

*If you did, that would be truly surprising.  It would be so surprising, in fact, that if you told me it was the case, I would more strongly suspect some manner of deception or illusion or delusion or cognitive bias than that it was actually true (this is reminiscent of Hume’s test for the veracity of supposed miracles).

**And is involved in the plot of my book(s) Unanimity, Books 1 and 2.

by

Shall you this fond pageant see?

It’s Monday again.  It is as I write this, anyway.  Maybe it’s not Monday when you’re reading it.  Who knows, maybe you’re living at some point in the relatively far future in which the human race‒or their computer overlords‒has abolished Mondays because they are too unpleasant.

Of course, then you’d just move the problem to the next day, leading it to be the unpleasant beginning of the week, because it’s not what day it is that presents a problem, it is the function of the day, if you will.  In this case, that means the day serving as the beginning of the “work week”.  Still, even future humans might be foolish enough not to recognize that fact, based on my experience with past and present humans.

Actually, based on the nature of current “AI” and how it functions and is grown, I wouldn’t be much more surprised if they made the same mistake.  Careful, logical reasoning is not necessarily in the nature of so-called deep neural networks and the like.  Indeed, the ability to reason abstractly may have arisen in humans precisely because they needed to be able to convince their tribemates of various things, and also to avoid being taken in by a tribemate trying to convince them of something that was not in their best interests.  As with so many attributes of life, even the ability to reason was probably born of a kind of arms race.

Heavy sigh.  Ah, well, great things can arise even from inauspicious beginnings.

I started my post a little late this morning because I’ve been moving slowly, both mentally and physically.  I’m kind of wiped out, and I have been all weekend; I could hardly get anything done.  I guess this is one of those times when I ought to be grateful that there’s no one to nag me (or cajole me, or encourage me, or what have you).  Honestly though, having such a person around is underrated, I think.

I had a stretch starting about two weeks ago or so in which my back and joint pain seemed to have calmed down a lot, and mere moving didn’t even hurt.  As a consequence, my mood and optimism improved a bit, and I even started to feel like I might be able to like myself to some degree.

Ha ha ha!  Lord, what a fool this mortal be.

Starting when I got sick, which I think I have mentioned more than once, I got a re-flare of my pain, and it has come back with a vengeance.  During the course of the latter part of this last work week, I took a fair amount of extra pain medicine of various (legal) types (I don’t even know how one locates “street fentanyl” or the like, let alone how one could feel confident that it is what it claims to be) and maybe that’s what’s taking the wind out of my sails.  Certainly my kidneys and stomach and probably my liver are not terribly chuffed about the work they have to do dealing with lots of NSAIDs and Tylenol and CBD and topical lidocaine and menthol and all that stuff.

Listless shrug.  It is what it is.  My flare is tapering a bit at this point, at least.  I don’t like to anticipate it getting better (nor it getting worse) but I try to be optimistic, at least for me.  It is simply true that my pain could get better and stay relatively good for a while (and it could go the other way), and I will only find out as it happens.

Whether or not all of you will find out depends very much on the degree to which I share it here.  Of course, no one who sees things only on any of the Meta-owned social media will find out, because (obviously enough) I’m not able to share anything there anymore.  Maybe the occasional (very) odd person might find my stuff via Bluesky and Substack and TWFKAT, but if so, it’s hard to tell.

Whatever the case with respect to those matters, I am still just kind of tired and mentally enervated, so I’m not feeling too enthusiastic here.  I don’t really have anything good or interesting to report.  Nothing is happening in my life other than the steady cranking of the entropy machine, doing what it does.

Sorry.  The pain is very discouraging.  When it ebbs, I can even start to feel like my old self again, the “me” from thirty or more years ago.  But though I keep trying new things and approaches, and sometimes I even get some good results, it doesn’t seem prone to ebb* for very long at a time.

Okay, well, let’s wrap this up.  I hope you all had a good holiday (or are having a good holiday) and that you and those you love are doing well.  Unless I’m lucky, I expect I’ll write a post tomorrow.

*The more often I say “ebb” the more it feels as though I’m saying the name of some character‒perhaps some mountain man‒from The Dukes of Hazzard or The Andy Griffith Show.