Health

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Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and blog will have his day.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the last day of April in 2026.  Tomorrow we meet a new month, same (more or less) as the old month.

I’m very tired, despite the fact that it’s the first thing (or nearly so) in the morning.  Of course, morning doesn’t necessarily mean you got any rest last night, not if you’ve got chronic pain and chronic insomnia.

The latter problem started for me several years or more before the former.  It has not escaped my consideration that my insomnia may have contributed to my chronic pain.  I am, after all, a trained physician and scientist with a fervent desire to understand…well, everything, ultimately.  So, I know a lot about both chronic pain and insomnia since in addition to my education and my curiosity, I actually am afflicted with the two things.

Don’t get me started on depression.

Actually, it’s a bit too late for that.  I am feeling the gravity well dip of worsening dysthymia that seems to be heading toward a full depressive episode, though predicting these things is unreliable.  But this morning, I felt I didn’t even want to sit up in bed (well, in futon) let alone get up and do anything at all.

That’s unusual for me.  Usually even when I’m in a bad way, the stress‒the anxiety, I guess‒associated with possibly not doing what I’m “supposed” to do, of letting people down, is too strong to let me just lie around, even though I am frequently exhausted (in the figurative sense, at least).  But today, even that almost didn’t show up, not enough to do what it usually does.  It was only really my sense of routine, of habit, that gave me the energy to get moving.

It helped that I wanted to feed the cats, but I know that they can handle themselves, at least for a few hours.  Still, it’s a positive.  I even did five pull-ups, which is not as many as I usually do, but at least I didn’t just not do them at all.

I often wish I could hibernate, or perhaps more precisely, to have a long sleep such as what some bears do during cold months.  I don’t want to go into true suspended animation, because that really doesn’t do anything for you except to let you skip forward in time.  Any period of true oblivion, however long it is, feels instantaneous from the inside.

If you pause a game, for instance, you can (in principle) come back a year later and pick it back up, and for the character, no time has passed at all.  If you were to experience things from their point of view, you would experience an uninterrupted flow of time.

What if you pause the game but never restart it?  Then the character’s experience just stops.  It’s a kind of death, of course, but it’s not a death caused by anything within that game universe.  It’s just, in a sense, that universe coming to an end.  No wailing, no moaning, no gnashing of teeth.

If you stop playing a Blu-ray in the middle of a movie, and then you break the Blu-ray disc, the characters don’t “die”, but for the purposes of that iteration of that movie, they might as well have died.  They certainly cannot continue to perform their parts.

It’s a bit like what it would be like for our universe to undergo vacuum collapse.  The wavefront of collapse would progress at essentially the speed of light.  Everything you know‒everything you are‒would cease to be at all, and it would happen far too quickly for you to experience the process.  The stuff with which you experience things would be deleted before it could begin to experience its own erasure.

It doesn’t seem like a bad way for an individual to die, but it seems a shame to lose everything in a whole universe.  Also, it’s just kind of daunting to think that everything in existence would get wiped out and turned into a hot soup of elementary fields and their “particles”, much like what happened near the beginning of “our” universe when the inflaton field (if inflation happened) collapsed.  It feels worse in some ways than other manners of death because there is literally nothing you can do to avoid it or to flee it or even to know that it’s happening.

It’s deucedly unlikely, though, so don’t fret about it.  And, anyway, if it happens, there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

That’s enough for now.  I won’t get into the news of me falling out of my seat yesterday afternoon (really, it sort of rolled out from under me as I was trying to sit down, but I ended up on the floor on my back no matter how one characterizes it) except to say that it happened, and that I have worsened stiffness today at least partly because of it.

I hope you all have good days.

TTFN

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What should I title this post?

Well.  Wednesday.  Okay.  What in the world should I write today?

I don’t know.  I have very little energy at the moment; I feel quite exhausted.  That’s not terribly atypical for me, but it feels worse than usual.  However, since I don’t have any kind of objective, consistent gauge of precisely how exhausted I am (or feel) and certainly have no records of the past gauge readings to which to compare things, I don’t know for sure how my current state compares to my typical state.

 Nor do I know what the distribution of such states is.  Is it a smooth “bell” curve, a Gaussian distribution?  Is it bimodal?  Is it trimodal?  Is it some more weirdly shaped curve, like a function in several different exponential orders of a variable or in more than one variable?  That last one seems most likely.

I guess the specifics don’t really matter, though it would be at least interesting to have an objective, graphical measure of things.

Anyway, I’m tired, my pain continues (as always) and the present “flare” has not significantly died down.  And, unfortunately, there’s nothing in my life to provide any counterbalance to the horrible stuff.

Well, okay, that’s not entirely true, and I should try to avoid being overdramatic.  There are clearly some good things in my life, and particularly, some very good people.  But they are few and far between (in time and space) and/or far away.  I sometimes interacted with some of them through Facebook or Instagram, but I’ve been kicked off those platforms, as you know, for no particular reason I can discern.

Well, it’s their platform, they own it, and I wasn’t paying, so I guess they have the right to do as they please.  But I do hope they all crash and burn and suffer and then cease to exist (I mean Meta/Fuckerberg* and his cronies, not the people with whom I had nominal, distant connections).

I’ve been fairly grumpy lately, as you can probably tell.  Nearly everyone and everything pisses me off at least a little (and I don’t exclude myself from that “everyone”).  This is one of the things that can happen when you’re in pain a lot.  If you also have social difficulties and insomnia and the like, they can contribute, too.  Anxiety really doesn’t help, though its outcome depends upon how one experiences anxiety and how one reacts to it.

This is one of the things that gets me irritated at Yoda™ and the fact that people think his character is very wise, when he really isn’t.  I feel that fact should be called out more often than it is, lest the impressionable populace, particularly young people, get exposed to his trite homilies and think them words by which to live.

For instance, the whole stupid “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering” shit he pulled on the child Anakin in Episode 1 pissed me off and continues to do so.  He seems to imply that fear => anger => hate => suffering as a mathematical theorem, some kind of Jedi syllogism**, which is not necessarily true in any simplistic kind of sense.

It would have been much more useful for him to say “Fear can lead to anger, anger can lead to hate.  Hate itself is a form of suffering, and it’s a contagious one with many potential side effects, so you should learn, not to repress your fear or to deny it, nor to be ashamed of it, but to recognize it, to understand it, and to use it when it is useful rather than allow it to rule you, as it does if you merely give in to it but also if you refuse to let yourself feel it.”

If the Jedi had a sensible approach to such things, I think Anakin would never have fallen to “the dark side”.  That term itself‒the dark side‒betrays bigotry and judgmentalism and arrogance and narrow-mindedness.  Anytime someone defines their side as the light side and their opponents’ as the dark side, you’re in the presence of people who may well be capable of committing self-righteous atrocities, on whatever scale they think serves the “light”, the “good”.

Ironically (perhaps), the attitude toward fear held by the League of Shadows in Batman Begins is healthier than that of the Jedi in at least the prequels of Star Wars***.  They encourage you to embrace your fear, to become it.  They recognize its power, and try to harness it rather than flee from it in the rather ironic fear of fear that the Jedi have.

They have a lot of stupid ideas in the League, of course, including their simple-minded and illogical notions of justice.  And even their ideas about fear are not ideal, just in case you think I endorse them.

But fear, along with pain, boredom, dissatisfaction, and so on, are things that exist and persist because they are useful (at least enough to make them evolutionarily stable).  But they are only so in specific times, places, and situations.  If you have a good reason to be afraid, then you want that fear****, believe me, and you want to listen to it.  And if you feel new-onset pain in your right lower abdominal quadrant, and it doesn’t go away, you want to look into it; something life threatening may be going on.

But when such states‒pain, fear, boredom, dissatisfaction, etc.‒pull free of specific reactive causality and become self-sustaining, free-floating, bootstrap-levitated things that exist merely because they exist, then there is a problem.

I am such a problem.  And as with the majority of even slightly complex problems in (for instance) mathematics, we don’t know how to solve it (or even if there is a possible solution).

Sometimes, eventually, there’s not much to do but to wipe the chalkboard clean.

*Actually, I think their company would be better named Dukha than Meta.  Get it?

**This despite the comically self-contradictory and stupid (and thus out of character) line that Obi-Wan says in episode 3:  “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”.  Obi-Wan!  Are you listening to yourself?  Do you know what an “own goal” is?  You literally just spoke an absolute.  And, oddly enough, though the Jedi love throwing such statements around, I don’t recall any Sith character making such an “absolute” statement.

***Actually, in Episode 5, despite his long exile and his recognized failure due to his arrogance, Yoda© still says some stupid shit to Luke, especially the whole “Do or do not, there is no ‘try’” bullshit.  No, Yoda®, the “do or do not” is only determined by trying.

****To no reasonable surprise, the attitude of the 12th Doctor toward fear, or at least the one he wants to have, is much more logical, and was expressed best in series 8, episode 4 of Doctor Who:  Listen.

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When pigs fly and so do fried eggs, things are weird

Well, I did something rather unusual (for me) yesterday, and I’m doing something rather unusual (for me) now.  I bought tickets for the Powerball lottery yesterday.  And this morning I’m composing at least part of this blog post by using voice to text on my phone.

Apparently, when using voice to text. just saying the word “paragraph” doesn’t cause the text to begin a new paragraph.  This is in contrast to what happens when you use the names of ordinary punctuation, and the voice to text turns it into that punctuation, which is actually reasonably impressive.

Okay, well apparently you have to say “new paragraph” to get it to do a new paragraph, but that makes it challenging to describe in writing what you have to say to make it do that.

As for the Powerball ticket thing, well, yesterday we had a customer who didn’t seem to understand how their credit card worked, and we had difficulty getting their purchase to go through.  When they had spoken with their credit card company (supposedly) and told us that it should be clear (for the second time), as I was proceeding to run the card, I said aloud “if this goes through I’m going to buy a lottery ticket”.  It went through.

Then, later in the day, a similar thing happened, and one of my co-workers heard me say what I had said earlier. He said that he would be happy to go in with me on lottery tickets.  I said I don’t know how you even buy them*, but I want to get one of the big ones, the Powerball ticket.  So we said he would chip in $10 and I would chip in $10 and we would buy $20 worth of Powerball picks.

Then, as I was heading out, the boss asked what we were doing.  I told him, and he said he wanted to chip in 10.  So, I bought $30 worth of quick pick Powerball tickets for the drawing that apparently happened last night.  I did not bring them with me to the house, they are waiting at the office.  I do not by any stretch of the imagination expect to win.

Okay, well, to say by any stretch of the imagination is a bit of an exaggeration.  However, as I said to my co-worker, I am probably more likely to survive jumping off the Empire State building than I am to have one of these lottery tickets win.  As he replied, it’s not impossible, though.  He knew he was being silly, but it definitely was a “you go first” moment.

This was a one time thing, done both out of a sense of ennui and a sense of pointlessness; it was just a silly, frivolous thing to do.

Okay, enough with the voice to text stuff.  It’s irritating.  I won’t say that it doesn’t have its charms, but they are limited.  I also don’t like the way it auto-punctuates.  It also doesn’t even seem to know the word “ennui”, if you can stomach that fact (and even if you cannot).

In other news, or “olds” as the case may be, I continue to try to mitigate my chronic pain, with erratic (at best) results.  But I’m still trying.  It’s a profoundly unsatisfying thing to which to have to dedicate a substantial portion of one’s mind and life, but it’s very difficult to ignore or to take in stride.  Even Mr. Spock couldn’t just ignore his pain after he got infested by that flying fried egg thing.

Of course, that makes sense.  Biologically, as I’ve said possibly hundreds of times, it does not make sense for an organism to be able to ignore pain.  Oh, sure, it can be suppressed briefly in emergency situations, and we know that happens.  You can also squelch alarms of various kinds in the industrial world, as you can silence alarms on heart monitors (temporarily) when you know why it’s going off or you know that it’s an artifact.

But important alarms do not bear complete silencing or disconnection‒not without creating significant danger.  That is, unless the alarm is a holdover, a remnant of something that used to be relevant but no longer is so.

Imagine a carbon monoxide alarm, put into a house in the days when they had gas heat and cooking and so on.  This was a reasonable precaution.  But then imagine that it started going off because it detected CO, and in response, the homeowner replaced the gas heat and gas cooking with electric alternatives.  Now there are not even any connections to the gas supply, and as an extra precaution, the owner bought an electric car, so no danger exists of CO poisoning other than some deliberate chemical attack.

And yet…the carbon monoxide alarm keeps going off.  And it doesn’t just do so intermittently; it is constant, though the volume varies a bit.  And by design, it is intrinsic to the very structure and function of all else in the house, so to remove it is either impossible or would disable numerous other, still important systems and still relevant alarms.

That’s a bit like what chronic pain entails.  It ruins some things and taints all things.  After a while, it’s hard to remember what it was like not to be in pain.  And after it has helped drive away everyone important to one‒for no one wants to spend much time around a lost cause‒it can be very difficult to maintain even any semblance of optimism.  You just want to shut that bloody alarm off, even if you have to blow up the house to do it.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  Maybe if I have won the lottery, I’ll be able to find some newer answers.  I’ll look into that right after I catch the flying pig back from my celebratory skiing trip in Hell.

If I were to win the lottery, I don’t think I would stop working, at least not immediately, and I certainly would not reveal it here‒again, at least not immediately.  Possibly there would be ways to tell, but don’t spend too much effort thinking about them; the chances of winning are almost nanoscopic.

Actually, the chances are much higher of me choosing to jump off the Empire State Building than of winning the lottery.  And the chances of me choosing to jump from a much nearer tall building are higher still.  I even have a building chosen for the purpose, just in case.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  I don’t matter, certainly not in any larger sense, and barely even to myself.

You all matter to me more than that, though, so I hope you do well and have a good day today and a consistently improving set of days hereafter.

*It turns out to be quite easy, of course.  When you’re trying to encourage people to give you their money for nothing, you don’t want to make the process too difficult.

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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.

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“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.

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A pox upon those who do not learn the history of science and medicine

Well, I’m back to writing on the smartphone today, with mixed feelings.  One of these feelings is the residual soreness in my thumbs, of course, but the day-long break did seem to help a little bit.  Mind you, some of that is probably in my head, for I don’t write on my smartphone on Sundays, and I also don’t write on non-working Saturdays.  So, if resting is enough, I should feel least sore on Mondays following one of my two-day weekends.  If that is the case‒if I am least sore in those instances‒I certainly haven’t noticed.

Actually, if it isn’t the case, I haven’t noticed either, but at least there it would make sense, since there is nothing to notice.  It can be much harder to notice things that are not so than to notice things that are so.  That’s part of why people don’t give credit to vaccination, for instance:  they can’t see the sickness and death that are prevented.  There’s no It’s A Wonderful Life revelation about all the lives that have been saved and‒perhaps more important*‒all the suffering that has been prevented.

There’s a similar, lesser-known preventative effect of proton pump inhibitors (e.g., omeprazole).  These medicines (and their somewhat weaker predecessors, the H2 blockers**) have prevented untold suffering and death related to gastritis and peptic ulcer disease and esophageal cancers, all of which used to be major contributors to premature death, especially in young men (if memory serves).  So, using these medicines is not necessarily an overindulgence in avoiding transient discomfort.  They are very real and powerful preventative interventions‒though, as with all such things, they do have some long term side-effects, and these must always be weighed against the benefits of taking them.

This is one of the reasons that educating people about history is so important.  If one is not aware of just how horrifying and heartbreaking the effects of smallpox were (for instance), one might think that the smallpox vaccine***** was just a sort of convenience, not a response to a low-flying, slow-moving, global catastrophe.

I suppose it was easier for Ben Franklin to recognize that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” because there were far fewer preventable ailments and fewer avoidable disasters back in his day.  Still, he was a very smart person; he might have recognized the nature of such things even if he had lived in our more comfortable times.

It is useful, and it may be more than just useful, for people to learn how things were before the arrival of so many powerful technologies and knowledge and social and biological insights.  For 300,000 years, humans existed without (for instance) the internet, and then, starting around 30 years ago, it was here (and widely available).

But that’s a full generation of people who have never known a world without the internet, despite the fact that by default the world has no internet.  It can be immensely useful for those people to learn about what things were like pre-internet, not only so they can truly appreciate this remarkable phenomenon, but also so they can recognize some of its detriments.

Likewise for planes and cars and televisions and even books and agriculture.  What was life like before these things?  What would life be like if they disappeared?  Are their benefits worth their costs?  How can those costs be mitigated, even if they are bearable (for why not make things as net-beneficial as possible?)?

I encourage everyone, myself included, to take these notions seriously, to think about the contrafactual cases, not to accept that things simply are the way they are, because for the most part, historically, they were not that way.  Even humanity itself is a latecomer.

I don’t know how I got onto those subjects, but I guess I’m thinking of health (and particularly of gastric health) more than typically in recent days.  I still don’t feel too well, but that’s nothing unusual for me.  It’s just annoying because it’s a new, or at least atypical, discomfort.

Oh, well.  This brings us back to my point that decreasing/preventing suffering is more important than “saving lives”, since all such saved lives are merely saved for later, if you will.  Death (it seems) cannot be forever avoided, but suffering, in principle, can be eased and even sometimes prevented.  Though, sometimes, the only practical way to stop certain kinds of suffering is to hasten the inevitable other phenomenon.

In any case, I’ll draw at least one instance of your suffering to an end now, by finishing this blog post.  I hope you have a very good day, by any reasonable measure of goodness that you might choose.

*Because death is, as far as anyone can tell, completely inevitable‒it’s a matter of when, not if‒whereas suffering is variable, and boy can it vary, from person to person, from moment to moment, from culture to culture, and so on.

**No, they don’t block molecular hydrogen***, though if one thought that, one could certainly be excused.  Rather, they block the so-called type 2 histamine receptor, the one that responds to stimulus (histamine) by making the stomach secrete more acid.

***Interestingly enough, the proton pump inhibitors do block hydrogen, but it’s not molecular hydrogen, it atomic hydrogen‒or well actually, it’s ionic (cationic, specifically) hydrogen, which is a naked proton, since a hydrogen nucleus is just a proton****, and is the key effective part of essentially all acids, at least regarding their acidity.

****Sorry about all the footnotes within footnotes, but it just occurred to me to wonder what it would be like to make a sample of an acid but with all the ordinary hydrogen atoms replaced with deuterium, so-called heavy hydrogen, which has a neutron in its nucleus as well as a proton.  How would this affect the properties of such an acid?  Of course those properties are almost entirely related to the valence electron or the lack thereof, but when a positive ion of a substance is just a naked nucleus, one cannot completely dismiss the impact of that nucleus’s structure.  So, I would love to see an entirely deuteric acid being put through its paces.  An acid made entirely with tritium (one proton, two neutrons) would be interesting as well, but even in my imagination, that’s asking for a lot of the very tiny amount of tritium in the world.

*****This is the original source of the word “vaccination” since being exposed to Vaccinia (related to cowpox) provided resistance to Variola (smallpox).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Man doth not yield himself unto the angles save through the weakness of his feeble vectors

It’s Friday.  It must be, because yesterday was Thursday, and by the conventions of the modern English-speaking world, the day after Thursday is Friday.

We could have named the days differently, and if we had, then different days would follow other different days, but they would still proceed in a consistent order.  A day naming system that changes its order from day to day and week to week would not be useful at all.

Similarly, we could name the numerals and numbers differently‒the names we use are fairly arbitrary‒but that would not change the deep nature of arithmetic.  Whatever the equivalent of 2 + 2 might be, it would still equal the equivalent of 4.

That which we call arroz, by any other name, would still be rice.

I am not using the lapcom today.  I felt a bit lazy yesterday afternoon, so I didn’t bring it with me (there was already cat food in my bag, so it was somewhat heavy).  Also, I am still sick, strictly speaking; in fact, I feel slightly worse this morning than I did yesterday morning.

But I do have some regret over not bringing the computer with me, because my thumbs are rather sore.  You might think that would be enough to motivate me to bring the lapcom with me every evening, but the person I am in the evening does not necessarily appreciate what things will be like for the person I am in the morning.

Intellectually, of course, I can know what the situation will be, and I do know it, at least implicitly.  But I cannot feel it in the moment; all I can feel is the resistance to bringing it at that moment, because the immediate extra weight feels much more salient than the discomfort I might feel the following morning.

This is natural, of course.  I suspect that you experience similar disparate and antithetical drives and resistances at different times, despite what you know in your “higher” brain.

This is one of the annoying things about the fact that there is no single, stable, consistent “self”, with a single terminal goal (to use some AI-related jargon), in the minds of humans and humanoids.  There is, instead, a fluid of vectors adding together in a high-dimensional phase space, with lengths and directions that change from moment to moment* in response to changing external facts and to feedback from its own internal states.

Willpower is a function of the brain.  It varies from person to person and from moment to moment.  It is also subject to fatigue.  This has been studied with a fair degree of rigor.  People who have recently been engaged in taxing mental tasks, like solving relatively challenging math problems or similar, are less able to resist (for instance) eating an offered cookie despite being on a diet or even being diabetic.

This stuff may be fairly obvious, but in any given moment, most of us are not mindful enough of our own internal states even to be aware of what might be our current relatively depleted will.

It’s analogous to a person who does strength training with free weights in a gym.  Imagine this person comes to the gym after a hard day that involved physical labor, perhaps more than they usually do.  Or perhaps the person is ill but feels they can tough things out.  In the worst situation, this can lead to catastrophic accidents with weights that are‒at that moment‒too heavy for the person to lift, even though at other times the person may have lifted them with relative ease.  At the very least, such a person is at risk of strain and injury that could impair their ability to exercise for some time.

The mind works much like this.  The brain is an organ, a physical, biological thing, and it is prone to illness and injury and fatigue, in addition to all the software-related weirdness it can instantiate (like having conflicting and/or illogical points of view about empirical facts, and various other forms of irrationality).

This is one reason it can be useful to engender strong habits, even ones that border on the dogmatic.  Because the brain works on habit‒it being simply unworkable to try to evaluate each and every situation de novo‒if one can set up good habits, they can protect one from some catastrophes.

For instance, one of the “dogmas” of gun safety is that one should treat every firearm as if it is loaded, even if one has literally just removed all of its bullets oneself, and one should therefore never point the gun at anything (or anyone) one is not prepared to shoot.  This can feel unreasonable, and in the short term, thinking only of that instance where one has just thoroughly unloaded and checked the weapon, it may seem strictly unnecessary.

But humans are not perfect reasoners‒I suspect that nothing is, and that perfect reasoning is impossible for any finite mind‒and when fatigued, they fall into more automatic behaviors rather than thinking everything through.  This is why it is good to train such automatic behavior to be what one wants it to be when one is able to think clearly.

So, treat every gun as if it is loaded.  Buckle your seat belt for even very short trips**.  Don’t keep sweets in your house if you’re diabetic.  If you’re trying to quit smoking, don’t hang out with people who are smoking and don’t go places where cigarettes are easy to get.  Ditto for other drugs of abuse.

Speaking of which, alcohol tends to screw all those things up.  One of the key effects of alcohol on human (and other animals’) nervous systems is to decrease or diminish what can reasonably be called willpower.  This is not its only deleterious effect.

Okay, well, my thumbs are a bit sore, so I’m going to bring this to a close for the day.  It probably goes without saying‒somewhat ironically‒that there is much more that I could write on this topic.  Perhaps I’ll return to it, and to other related subject matter, tomorrow.

There really should be a blog post tomorrow, given that the previous two Saturdays were surprisingly non-working days.  But, as with a coin flip (or nearly so), previous results don’t have any impact on where the outcome will land this time.

Either way, please try to have a good weekend.

*Lawfully, but in such a complex fashion that it is effectively almost a chaotic system.

**Unless you literally don’t mind the increased risk of injury or death.  It’s possible to be in such a self-destructive state***, but if you are going to accept that risk, try to make sure you really don’t care.  It’s easy enough to imagine one doesn’t mind getting injured or killed in a traffic accident, but when one is injured‒or killed‒it is too late to change one’s preferences, and the version of you who suffers injury may be quite put out with their previous self.  See above about the lapcom.

***e.g., Florida.