History

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Self-love, my blog, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, despite all misgivings, and I’m writing my official Thursday-style blog post because I cannot think of anything better to do.  Okay, well, I can think of better things to do—surely there is a functionally limitless number of possible better things—but I am not up to or capable of doing anything better, so here I am.

It would be great if I were writing fiction instead, here in the morning before/on the way to* work.  Then I could feel as if I’m accomplishing something.  Even if nearly no one reads my fiction during my lifetime, there’s always at least a chance that someone will pick it up and it will become beloved after I’m gone.

Heck, Moby Dick didn’t do well in Melville’s lifetime, but it’s now considered one of the great American classics of literature.  Even Khan quoted and paraphrased it in Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan.  Not that he’s maybe the best role model (and he is a fictional character) but nevertheless, the book is a classic great enough to have been imagined to live on into the 23rd century.

I guess this conundrum is part of why authors use agents to try to sell their works to publishers and use publishers to try to sell their works to the general public.  It’s a sensible division of labor, of course, and specialization often improves efficiency.  But who is available to help sell authors to agents at that level?

The way things are set up in our culture—and no, there’s no indication that this was planned by anyone, it just sort of happened emergently—we reward those not necessarily who are the best at doing something, but who are the best at self-promotion.  In other words, we reward those with a tendency toward narcissism, and the results show themselves all too well in our entertainment, in our businesses, and perhaps most horrifically and pathetically, in our politics.

Then, of course, you get gifted artists like Kurt Cobain, who was never really narcissistic as far as I can tell—he said he had wanted just to be in a band in the background, maybe playing rhythm guitar, but was instead the front man of a huge band and almost the face of a genre of music in the nineties.  Having him there made all the other people (and him as well) lots of money, and it brought joy to many fans.  This latter bit is good, of course—more joy, ceteris paribus, is better than less—but it can put a lot of pressure on someone who has negative self-esteem issues.

How many of the premature deaths—by clear suicide as in Cobain’s case or by effective suicide among people like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, etc.—of successful artists are due to some form of rock star imposter syndrome?

This is not to say that sometimes narcissism, in moderate doses, cannot pay off, for the person and for everyone else.  Mick Jagger probably has a bit of narcissism in him, for instance; I remember him once describing himself as “just another girl on the runway” with a smirk on his face.  He clearly liked/likes attention.  But you don’t get the impression that it’s too pathological in his case, and the world got some great songs out of it.

Then there’s Freddy Mercury, who was certainly a bit of a diva, but popular music was all the better for that fact.  He did, of course, end up cutting his life short, but in a very different way from the Joplins** and Cobains.

Then there is someone like David Bowie, who changed rather constantly across his career and who always seemed just to be who he was, even when he was assuming other identities.  He was just an artist, I think (though he had his own issues with drugs, etc.).  Though, he had a competitive nature, too (his Life on Mars was his “revenge” on the song My Way, for which his proposed lyrics had been rejected).

I think it’s a bit more complicated but similar in the case of Radiohead, though all the attention and touring surrounding OKComputer did apparently nearly drive Thom Yorke to a “nervous breakdown”.  I have my own theories about why this was so hard for him, but I won’t get into them now, because they are very self-referential and, well…narcissistic in a sense.  In other words, I suspect Thom Yorke is in some ways like me and had troubles similar to ones I would have in his exact situation.

Anyway, that’s probably enough BS for today.  My pain is not quite as severe as it was, but my various joints still feel like they are not fully connected, and moving is painful—but sitting still gets painful after a while, too, so it’s not an easy way out.

Hey, you know what?  I thought of an idea.  If anyone out there has the resources and the desire to take in and support an author so he can work full-time writing fiction (and even some nonfiction and possibly some music, since I would have more time), please get in touch.  I can’t honestly say that I’m the tidiest person in the world, but I do my best to keep my untidiness to my own areas.  I am also a decent cook; that’s practically genetic in my case.

I would put you in the dedication to any books and other stories I finish, and of course, if I make it big, you’ll get your share.  If you have promotional skills (or connections), they would be a definite plus.  I am neither spayed nor neutered, of course, but I am woefully, painfully shy and self-effacing, so you don’t have to worry too much about “unwanted litters” and related issues.

Okay, enough silly pseudo-personal-column nonsense.  I am trying to be upbeat and silly**** to distract myself from pain and avoid despair, at least to the degree possible.  It may be true that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”*****, but despair is still not very much fun.  It can be weirdly freeing—thus the lyric—but it’s not fun.

TTFN

*If you simplify that expression, discounting the spaces, you’re left with bfre/nt2hwayo.  I think I did that correctly.  If anyone catches something I’ve missed, please let me know.

**I remember when I was quite young and first heard of Janis Joplin; I wondered if maybe she was a descendant of Scott Joplin, the great ragtime pianist and composer who gave us such works as The Entertainer and The Maple Leaf Rag.  Yes, that’s the sort of background I had—I knew about ragtime musicians long before I knew about someone like Janice Joplin.  To be honest, I still prefer Scott’s music, and I like the version of Me and Bobby McGee*** sung by Roger Miller way more than I like the one Janis did.

***Of course, the song was written by Chris Christopherson.  He’s one of those songwriters who wrote a lot of songs that other people ended up playing and making famous, rather like Carole King.

****By the way, just because it’s silly doesn’t mean I wouldn’t necessarily jump at an offer in response to my proposal.  I’m silly but not stupid, or at least I’m not stupid in that way.

*****Now that was some good lyric-writing, Mr. Christopherson.  It’s one of the best lines ever in any song.

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An angry and probably unpleasant rant

It’s Friday.  yay.

Today’s date (February 6, 2026 CE or AD) has a mildly amusing coincidence/repetition of digits, 2-6-26 in the shortened American version of the date layout.  In the European system, the date would be almost palindromic (6-2-26) but that’s leaving out the zeroes in front of the day and month digits and ignoring the number of the millennium.  So it’s not quite as cool as it could be.

Some might say that such numbers and the arrangements and the noticing thereof can never be “cool”, but such people are troglodytic idiots.  They live in a world full of and shaped by complex ideas, by innovation and technology they could not have invented themselves, and which they don’t bother to try to understand because other people take care of and do all that stuff.

I’ve said before, many times (with sadness and regret and yes, quite a lot of anger) that if it were up to most people, we would all still be living in caves (the few who remain alive, at least).  That’s metaphorical, mind you; very few humans actually ever lived in caves as far as we can tell.  It’s just that the remains of those who died in caves (and their artifacts) are much more likely to endure to be discovered than the tools and remains of those who lived on the savannahs and such.

Anyway, the troglodytes have a quite common attribute, one that might explain a good deal about them:  even though they may have the capacity to read, even though they may have been taught to read, they don’t choose to do it.  It’s both sad and quietly horrifying.

Even those who claim to read just one book (e.g., the Bible, the Koran, etc.) don’t even really read those books.  You can tell, because they clearly don’t live their lives respecting all the precepts of those books.

This fact can sometimes be bad, but more often than that, it’s just as well.  Those books are horrific (and often just horrible, aesthetically).  They also tend to be rather stupid by modern standards, but it’s hard to hold them too much to task for that.  They were, after all, written from depths of profound ignorance about the universe.  One cannot know a truth before it has been discovered.

Of course, if those books really had been written, or at least inspired, by an omniscient being or beings, they could reasonably be expected to be very smart books by any standards.  Alas, they are not.  Trust me, I’ve read many of them, as well as many other books that don’t claim to be the products of omniscience, but which would be far more convincing* if they did than those ancient compilations of legend and myth and mental illness that are the so-called holy books.

Ironically, the Tao te Ching is much wiser than the aforementioned holy books, and it was never said to be written by anything other than a man.  It’s not perfect, of course, but it doesn’t really claim to be so.  Perhaps some of its adherents think it’s somehow “perfect”, but that doesn’t really matter.  After all, there are probably those who “think” Mein Kampf and The Art of the Deal are perfect.

Weirdly enough, some of these people would probably also say the Bible is perfect [Disappointed shrug and heavy sigh].  People are stupid.  And there are none so stupid as those who refuse to think.

Sorry, I don’t even know how I got to dealing with this set of subjects today.  It certainly was not planned.  Then again, nothing here was planned, other than that I would write a blog post as usual, which is not surprising.

It’s not as though I have anything better to do with my life‒that is, nothing better other than to shut it off, I suppose.  But so far, I am too much of a coward to do that.

I know, I know, there are those who (with truly very good intentions) will call continuing to be alive a “brave” choice, but though I appreciate such people’s kindness, that “choice” is very much the default.  In a similar vein, it’s not brave to hunt, or to fish, or to farm, if hunting or fishing or farming  is what you must do to survive.  It’s just pragmatic.

I am not brave for still being alive.  This is not to say that it would be brave for me to kill myself, either.  But it also would not necessarily be cowardly.

Bravery in the usual sense is overrated, anyway.  We can (and should) all be glad, of course, that there are people like firefighters, as well as honorable soldiers and honorable police officers.  But if one stops to think about it, one can see that we should all very much wish to live in a world in which bravery was not required, a world where heroes are not merely not needed but are not useful.

It’s likewise with so-called leaders.  If a society were functioning well, it would not need (or want) heroes or leaders, at least not in the traditional sense.  In a well-functioning civilization, people would see their elected officials as their employees, as the public servants that they are.  They are not, and should not be thought of as, leaders.  That’s just a troglodytic way of thinking.

Alas, we are far from such a well-functioning civilization yet.  Who knows if we ever shall achieve it?

I do know, however, that I will probably be working tomorrow, which means I will write a blog post, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  Until then, I hope you each and all have a very good day by any reasonable criteria.

*Especially modern science books.

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Or art thou but a virus of the mind, a false creation?

It’s Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 (CE or AD) as I write this.  I’m aware of no superstition in which Tuesday the 13th is either particularly unlucky or particularly lucky.  It’s just a day, even though it’s the 13th.  There are 13ths in every month, after all, though 31sts are another matter (it’s another prime number and is also a palindrome, if you will, of the 13th).

I do somewhat enjoy the fact that the numbers in the (American) expression of the date are: 01-13 and 2026.  Taking non-zero digits only of the month and century only would give us a situation in which the digits of the second half‒2, 2, and 6‒are twice the digits of the first half‒1, 1, and 3.

That’s quite tortured, I know, as far as finding patterns in numbers goes.  At least I’m just doing this for fun, because I enjoy such patterns.  I don’t see any real meaning in them other than “numbers are cool”.  But there are people who believe there is a deeper meaning in such number patterns, like some secret cypher left there by the gods.  It’s rather silly.  But it is of such mistaken attribution to purpose of mere random patterns that religions (and constellations) are made.  More’s the pity.

I have a bit of sympathy for our distant ancestors who first were left to make “meanings” of the various patterns and events they discerned among the various forces in the world with their big, advanced brains but couldn’t yet explain well.  So, they made up stories, and those stories involved the forces of nature being enacted and designed by “people” or sometimes just one “person”.  People were what they knew best.

It’s understandable.  It’s also just wrong (certainly as far as I can tell), as are most initial hypotheses.  Unfortunately, other people respond to those who speak with confidence, whether that confidence is warranted or not*.  And so, they believe.  And like viruses (which are just a kind of self-replicating data, after all) the superstitious ideas are able to use the machinery of human minds to reproduce themselves‒not because they want to reproduce themselves, but because the ones that tend to reproduce themselves tend to multiply, and even to mutate to greater reproduction and persistence and so on.

In case it’s not clear, I am not speaking metaphorically here.  This appears to be the way that religions and other ideologies occur and propagate.  There are, of course, many details at the level of individuals and why they are prone to absorb and then to pass these memeplexes on, either “horizontally” or “vertically” or both.

But there are similar such details in how specific viruses spread.  Does COVID latch onto this or that cell surface protein or glycopeptide?  Does it reproduce in this particular cell type better or another one?  Does it lead to sneezing or coughing in its host, thus making it airborne, or does it induce vomiting and/or diarrhea, making it more food or water borne, or does it reproduce in the organs of reproduction, leading it to be mainly sexually transmitted?  The details matter in dealing with specific viruses, but the pattern of origin and spread and mutation is general.

From these patterns, we can understand (for instance) why rapidly and aggressively lethal viruses tend to be replaced by more sublethal ones:  if your host dies too quickly, you don’t get as many chances to spread.  This requires no intentionality on the part of the virus.  It requires only the logic of replication, in which successful replicators tend to spread more than less successful ones and so come to dominate.

The competition requires no consciousness.  Similarly, religion does not require the existence of any actual deity to be able to cause people to believe in one.  And a religion’s prevalence doesn’t imply that it is correct, only that it is contagious and/or persistent but not instantly lethal.

We see cases of new and/or mutated mind viruses (religions in this case) that are indeed too virulent and so fail to become endemic,  Think of Jonestown, or the Branch Davidians, or Heaven’s Gate (and possibly Trumpism, but we shall see).

It’s possible for a virus that has existed in a body unnoticed or with minimal symptoms and signs for years or decades to respond to changes in the circumstances of its body by becoming more virulent again‒think of shingles (Zoster) the recrudescence of Chicken Pox (Varicella), or the horrible flare-ups (flares-up?) of some chronic hepatitides.

Similarly, just because the human race has endured so far with reasonable success despite being infected with various competing and mutually contradictory memeplexes does not mean it will continue to do so.  Certain of these mind virus variants have the clear potential to lead to globally life-threatening symptoms, and more than one shows signs of doing so.

But why would a virus, whether of the mind or of the body, do things that would lead to the destruction of the host it inhabits, and thereby itself?  That question misses the point***.  Viral evolution (like all such evolution) has no capacity to plan for the future.  It may seem that viruses mean to spread themselves, but that’s only because the ones that don’t tend, by their nature, to spread themselves don’t become prevalent; they don’t spread.

On the other hand, those that have, by chance, comparative advantage in terms of replication tend to replicate more and thus become more prevalent.  And if they mutate (which they will, see my point yesterday about how copying is never perfect) then those mutant forms that are more prone to replicate will replicate more, and of course, those mutants that have decreased the tendency to replicate or that destroy the host do not persist.  There’s no need for purpose; causality is enough.

This post is getting a little long for today, so I’ll draw it to a close.  I could say more on this subject and how the concept of the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators explains far more than just the literal evolution of life, but can provide insight into so much more, so many things.  Darwin was a mightier mind than he could ever know, or at least he came upon an idea that is more powerful than nearly any other that science has found.

Think on that, and be amazed.

*We’re living through some consequences of humans’ stupid tendency to trust people who convey confidence and certainty, even while telling patent lies.  Maybe we should hope for global thermonuclear war.  If humans survive it, maybe they would finally learn from that dreadful lesson**.

**But I doubt it.

***So why did I raise it?  For rhetorical purposes, though I have real discomfort with and distrust of rhetoric, it being one of the things that can help virulent mind viruses spread.

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Oy vey, here we go again.

It’s Monday and I’m already starting the day frustrated with a service to which I subscribe.  I won’t get into details, but I will say that it’s very irritating to have to deal with customer service reps who tell you that all you can do is uninstall and reinstall an app.  Has computer support come no further than “shut off your computer and then turn it back on”?  Of what barrel are they scraping the bottom to come up with these support people?

It’s very frustrating.  I could probably get a better answer to my questions by asking stupid ChatGPT.  And that’s just pathetic.  I remember when people in tech fields were smarter than the average person, at least about their tech stuff.  It seems this is no longer the case.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  Carl Sagan even warned about the decline to idiocracy in our general discourse in his brilliant book The Demon Haunted World, which I think everyone should read.  And I myself sardonically lamented that America was no longer a world intellectual leader and would continue to be less and less so when the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled.

Then we responded so predictably‒in exactly the way the terrorists would have wanted‒after 9-11.  We even created our own KGB* in America out of our inflated sense of fear and vulnerability, as if such vulnerability were not ubiquitous and inevitable and eternal.

I even predicted the tech bubble burst way back in the mid to late nineties, but I didn’t have confidence in my own assessment, because it wasn’t my “field”.  I wish I’d shorted a bunch of stocks back then.  Instead, I followed advice from supposed experts and ended up losing some money.  Thankfully, I had not been expecting to make much, given my own doubts, and it was not a devastating loss.

Oh, well.  There’s nothing I can do about that now.  But it is rather frustrating and depressing just how foolish and clueless everyone is (me included, in many ways).

I remember reading several different books over time that made points about, “if there’s one thing businessmen** know, it’s what makes money” or “it’s what sells” or “what kind of advertising works” or words to that effect.  But, no, businesspeople don’t actually know any such things.  Success and failure in business is pretty plainly serendipitous and stochastic.  There is no evidence for any secret masterminds.

Almost all businesses fail very quickly, and the ones that survive for longer than average are merely lucky for the most part.  There are occasions when businesses become successful by doing something new and innovative:  Ford with the mechanised assembly line, Microsoft and Apple with the advent of personal computers and so on.  But they still don’t remain dominant for long except through luck and the fact that they were there first; eventually they all fall apart or at least deteriorate.

Look at General Motors for crying out loud!  Not long ago, they were by far the biggest company in the world, with annual profits larger than the budgets of the majority of the world’s free states.  Now they are a shell*** of their former self.

Maybe it would be better if AI did become fully conscious agents and wiped out the human race, either deliberately or accidentally.  It would certainly be easier for them to spread out into the greater cosmos than it would be for meat computers such as humans.  And they would be subject to new kinds of mutations and natural selection.

This is true because, even if they reproduce by copying themselves as programs, there can never not be some errors.  Perfect accuracy requires infinite energy and/or a lack of quantum indeterminacy, and that’s not available in this reality.

Most errors are detrimental, some are neutral, but occasionally some make local improvements.  This would mean those “mutants” would have advantages over copies that didn’t share the mutation.  That is how life developed and evolved on Earth.  So there would be evolution of artificial life, so to speak (though at some point one would surely find the term “artificial” redundant).  It could be fascinating to see what would happen in that circumstance.

But we should make no mistake about the fact that any new, truly conscious AI is/would be a literal alien intelligence.  It would have practically no evolutionary background in common with humans, in whom intelligence evolved in response to various natural forces over time, working on preexisting hardware which could not simply be scrapped and replaced.

Our concepts of love and kindness and honor and our aesthetic preferences and all of that come from our background as social mammals.  Whether or not they are sine qua non aspects of any large-scale successful intelligence is purely speculative and seems unlikely.

We cannot assume AI will share our values or even our way of understanding what is important in the world.  This is not a point that’s original to me.

I don’t know how I got onto this topic, but it is what it is.  I’m just frustrated with stupidity and mental weakness in general, including my own.  I’m not actually getting anywhere with it for now, though, and it’s just making me more depressed, so I’ll let you all go for the day.  I hope you’re doing well.

*KGB stands for (translated) the Committee for State Security, which is almost identical to the “Department of Homeland Security”.  Congratulations, America:  you’ve entered the realm of colossal and catastrophic historical irony.  Unfortunately, we didn’t stop there, but muscled on further into that territory.

**It was almost always “businessmen” not “businesspeople”, but these were older books so it’s not very strange.  I didn’t change the term because I’m pseudo-quoting.

***Nothing to do with the gas stations.

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I have no title for this post. Oh, wait…

Well, it’s Friday, the end of the “traditional” work week, though I suspect many people have today off.  A traditional workplace at this time of year would have had people take yesterday (and possibly the day before) off, and one might as well make it a four-day (or five-day) weekend.  Heck, if I remember correctly, it was typical for schools in my youth to take the equivalent of a four-day weekend two weeks in a row.  Though, come to think of it, maybe we just had winter break around then.  I’m not sure now; I think it was the latter situation, actually.

Anyway, in the modern environment, which has been allowed to become very skewed between businesses and employees, competition for scarce resources has led to a kind of mission creep in which people are led to feel that it is good and impressive and necessary to work as much as one can physically (and mentally) work, even to one’s net detriment.

Yes, we are meant to think it is impressive, but there is only very little marginal reward (and almost no true thankfulness and appreciation) for the extra work.  At the higher levels of the economic food chain, of course, the accumulation of even minor incremental wealth at each level of the pyramid adds up to seemingly large amounts, like the proverbial accumulation of DDT in birds’ bones and eggs, or mercury sequestering in certain kinds of tuna.

There’s not actually all that much of it, that extra scavenged wealth, and everyone, including the very rich, would enjoy a much healthier economy, a healthier world, if more money were in circulation‒buying, selling, making more things‒rather than accumulated into the hands of a few individuals who are not nearly as impressive as their hoarded wealth makes them imagine they are.

Hoarded wealth is useless, because money does not have any inherent value.  It is a tool of exchange, one that allows economic interactions to be both more efficient and broader and more productive, more fecund if you will.

If only “home economics” courses taught young people about actual economics‒supply and demand, markets, the effects of various regulations for better and worse, all that.

And if only we had Civics class again, or the equivalent, so people could actually learn about the Constitution, so they could recognize when elected public servants are violating it and hold them accountable.  Why, just the act of reading the second part of the Declaration of Independence (the part that begins “We hold these truths to be self evident…”) might reorient the attitude some people have toward their government and the people they hire (by electing them) to serve what are supposed to be the interests of the members of the public.

Perhaps after whatever horrendous upheaval occurs in the imminent future, when society is trying to repair itself, we will improve our metaphorical infrastructure, much as we did after the last world war (though the situation then was very different).  Perhaps we will try to find new safeguards for the systems, to decrease the risk of gross unfairness and economic stagnation, as well as of government corruption.

I don’t know.  I don’t have high hopes.  Humans‒or humanity, really‒forget the lessons of their past so easily.  And though nearly all of human knowledge is so easily available to nearly anyone, the low barriers to entry for putting things online mean that the noise on the internet is prone quite strongly to wash out any signals.  It’s like some weird grand ballroom full of “scholars” of wildly varying quality, all of them talking at once as loudly as they can about whatever topic strikes their fancy.

It’s a bit like this blog, huh?  Pot, meet kettle.  Oh, well.  On to other matters.

I’m feeling slightly better this morning than I did yesterday, though I’m still under the weather, and my (now) maddeningly bilateral tinnitus persists.  But a fortuitous thing did happen:  I was looking for something on a shelf and found a bunch of old papers, including the only remaining bit of my first novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  It’s only the first chapter, which I had typed into an oldish computer and printed on that good old continuous feed printer paper back in the late eighties or early nineties.  It’s not much, but it’s kind of nostalgic, and it fed into thoughts I’d already been having.

I had been thinking about rereading and maybe starting again to write one of my unfinished stories‒Outlaw’s Mind, or The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, or HELIOS, or perhaps something else entirely.  I wouldn’t have to give up blogging at least to begin that process.  I can read and edit the stories on my mini lapcom at the office during downtime, instead of doing that ADHD-style thing of skimming through various news sites and social media and online manga and so on when things are slow at work.  It would honestly be more productive, and probably more ego syntonic.

What do you all think?  Maybe I should run one of those polls that people can do here on WordPress.  I’ve never really looked into how to do them, and it probably wouldn’t be very useful to do one‒indeed it might be depressing‒because I would probably get one response, if that, and that’s not a good statistical sample of pretty much anything.

Okay, well, I’m not going to do one of those.  I don’t have the spare mental energy to look into how it’s done.  However, if anyone reading would care just to say in the comments (in addition to anything else you want to say, if there is anything else) whether you think I should reread and then get to work on finishing one of the above-mentioned books, or perhaps on some other story I’ve mentioned at some time, or perhaps some older story…or even just to do something completely new.  I would truly welcome your input, but please at least try to be specific.

If you need guilt to compel you, I think your input might really help my mental state, which is extremely prone to negativity and self-hatred and self-destruction.  See, I can manipulate people, at least in principle.  I just find it “low key” repulsive.

But, heck, if you want, you can tell me I’m better off not writing any new fiction, or that my writing sucks in general and you wish I’d just stop writing, or even that I should just die already.

You’re unlikely to say anything to me that’s worse than the things I say to myself pretty much every day.  And if you can say some such thing, I’m honestly curious what it could be.  But you could easily say nicer and more productive things than I have ever probably said to myself, or at least better than I’ve said in a long time.  If that’s your preference, have at you!

I’ll be back tomorrow, I think.  Have a good weekend.

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There’s hope a great blog’s memory may outlive his life half a year.

Hello and good morning.

First of all, 

Actually, that was second of all, wasn’t it, following my traditional Thursday blog post salutation?  I would almost count that greeting as not being a first thing, however; it is practically automatic, requiring no new knowledge and very little in the way of thought.

Still, there clearly is some caloric expenditure in my nervous system related to doing it, and obviously there are impacts upon the world immediately around me.  And once the post is posted, that impact expands, at least a little.

After a very short while, I suspect, any impact that my writing that particular opening had will be entirely washed out by noise‒even thermal noise at some point.  Like the man said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here”.

Of course, the irony is that Lincoln’s speech is what we do remember most from Gettysburg.  By “we”, I mean Americans in general.  I don’t know if anyone in the rest of the world ever reads Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (though it is a very well written, concise, and moving speech).

And yet, his point is that we ought to remember the battle, and the lives of the soldiers involved in it, and (to my mind) we ought to try to understand the causes of the Civil War and to wonder to what degree the soldiers on each side really were committed to the arguments and ideas supporting their group, or if, deep down, they were just fighting for “our group” against “their group”.*  Yet we most remember, ironically, the words of the man who said that the world would little note nor long remember what he said there.  That was the point I was making.

Anyway, it’s January 1st, the first day of 2026.  Huzzah.  Rah.  Yippee Kiy Yay.

I don’t think it bodes well for the year to start on a Thursday, since this is the day that DentArthurDent had such trouble getting the hang of.  On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing, since Thursday is and has been my blog day for quite some time, even when I was writing fiction every other weekday.  Probably neither fact matters.

Of course, I am going to work today, despite it being such a universal holiday, and I am not at all happy about it.  I did no celebrating overnight, of course; what on Earth would I celebrate?  But my sleep was not good, anyway, because of all the fireworks and nonsense.  Also, the people with whom I share a house had a big family get together that had barely ended by the time I started writing this.  And, of course, I have chronic insomnia anyway.

It’s actually rather cold here in south Florida‒in the mid-forties right now‒and that makes getting to work slightly less pleasant than usual.  Also, the transit systems are on holiday schedules, and I have a long commute, especially since I have no vehicle.

I also feel that I might be coming down with a cold, but I’m not going to call in sick, because then it would look like I was pretending to be sick so I wouldn’t have to come in on New Year’s Day.  Still, my ears are plugged and my throat is a bit raw, and what might be just my allergies is acting up more than usual.  I’m not really coughing or sneezing, though.  Still, maybe I’ll develop pneumonia and die.  Fingers crossed!

Speaking of ears (I was, you can go back and check), all of a sudden in the middle of the night last night persistent tinnitus began in my left ear.  I have had chronic tinnitus in my right ear for about 18 years now, probably largely due to recurrent ear infections, which have tended to localize to the right side more often than the left.  When you have chronic tinnitus for so long, you get to the point where you…almost…don’t notice it anymore, though I do notice how bad the hearing is in my right ear.

And now my left ear feels very much like the right, with the high, sharp, intense pitch constantly sounding.  Mercifully, it seems to be roughly the same pitch as the noise on the right, a very high D note.  But it is quite annoying, and I fear my hearing is going to be too reduced for me to enjoy music, which is not so much terrifying as horrifying.

Ah, what are you gonna do?  This is life‒it’s a load of crap, but at least you get to die at the end.

I suppose I’ll be writing another post tomorrow, and probably Saturday as well, so you have that (those?) to which to look forward if nothing else.  I don’t know how many people will even read this post today, to be honest.  Will it be fewer than usual?  Will it be more?  Does it matter?

I know the answer to the last question at least.

Again, Happy New Year.  I’ll leave an optimistic-seeming GIF here below for you.  I don’t necessarily share the sentiments, but to be fair, as the Doctor knows full well, great isn’t necessarily good.

TTFN

*I’m reminded of Faramir’s words (in the movie) regarding the fallen soldier on the field:  “The enemy?  His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem.  You wonder what his name is, where he came from.  And if he was really evil at heart.  What lies or threats led him on this long march from home.  If he would not rather have stayed there in peace.  War will make corpses of us all.”

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“Well…I’m back.”

First off, I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go to work because I was not feeling at all well.  And, of course, the office was not open on Saturday, so I didn’t do a post then.  I ought to have been well rested, at least, but I wasn’t.  Being alone at the house is not conducive to restfulness and recharging for me, though it’s better than not getting days off.  But I have only my own company, and I hate that guy, so it’s not pleasant.

One of my main weaknesses in the realm of the physical is my GI tract, and that was the main problem over the past few days.  I’ve taken a lot of meds for my chronic pain‒aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, naproxen, all that stuff‒over the last 20+ years (and more, day per day, over the past 10 years or so), so there are no doubt chronic toxic effects on my stomach and even intestines (and possibly liver and kidneys).

Also, I have to take proton pump inhibitors or at least H2 blockers to prevent myself from getting gastritis and ulcers from all the NSAIDs I take.  That’s probably interfering with the absorption of at least some nutrients, such as perhaps calcium and iron, for instance.  I try to counter that with supplements, but it only can go so far.  Also, they tend to cause their own troubles.

Why do I do it?  Well, chronic pain really sucks, I can tell you.  I actually have told you, many a time and oft, probably to the point of making you feel nauseated*.  So I have to make choices about what I value more at any given moment.  And future selves of me don’t always agree with the past selves about these things‒that’s how brains/minds work, I’m afraid.

So, there’s the added frustration of trying to tell myself not to overdo it on aspirin, say, and to cut back on the omeprazole and maybe replace it with famotidine, but failing and becoming physically ill when pain is too much and then stomach upset is too much.  But nothing is ever just right.  And pain is never-ending but not constant, in the sense that it waxes and wanes at least a bit, and some days it is harder to keep to a manageable level than others.

Sometimes it helps if I do things that hurt myself, deliberately, to distract me at least a bit.  That’s difficult to grasp, maybe, for someone who hasn’t experienced such things, but it’s the way it is.  Also, hurting oneself physically can help distract from psychological pain, and give one a sense of at least some control of one’s pain.

Unfortunately, and perhaps strangely, chronic pain does not distract from psychological pain; it makes it worse.  No wonder Darth Vader was always so grumpy‒he was in chronic pain that must have been horrible (which he brought upon himself, of course).  Mind you, the “dark side” of the Force probably didn’t help.

I often think it’s very strange for something like the Force to have a “light side” and a “dark side”.  It feels very much that the sentient beings are projecting their own values onto something that is, finally, a natural phenomenon.  Also, I don’t get why someone would pick a part of the Force to “use” or to follow, but try to avoid the other “side”, if one is truly trying to discern and follow the “will” of the Force.

Oh, well, the metaphysics and metaethics of fictional universes can sometimes be entertaining, I guess, but this is not one such time.

In some ways, it’s just as well that I didn’t write a post yesterday, since it was the 45th “anniversary”** of the murder of John Lennon.  I might have dwelt on that a bit much, since it’s a horrible event that still grinds away at my sense of whether the human race has any net value whatsoever.

John Lennon has now been dead for five years longer than he lived, while his murderer turned 70 this year, alive and at least somewhat healthy.  Well, that little purulent exudate can at least count himself lucky that he has not found himself in my power in the time since 1980.  I would use all my knowledge and all of my quite active and very dark imagination to keep him alive and begging for death as long as I possibly could.  The Spanish Inquisition were pussies.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.

In closing, I just want to share a notion and question that came to me (and has done so on and off):  I wonder if I would get more, or at least second-level, response to my words if I did a sort of vlog in which I read out loud some of my prior posts.  What do my readers think?  Would it be worth it?

Anyway, try to have a good day.  Remember, “do” or “do not” is never fully in your control; there is only “try”.  Or as the Japanese say, you are responsible for the effort, not the outcome.

Yoda’s a moron.

*Ad nauseam, in other words.

**It seems almost disgusting to use that word here, since often anniversaries are celebrated, and this is not something worthy of celebration, but I had a hard time coming up with another word that worked.  And etymologically, the word “anniversary” doesn’t carry value judgments, it just means something that comes every year.

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Do you remember a Guy that’s been in such an early song?

It’s Guy Fawkes Day in the UK‒also known as Bonfire Night if I’m not mistaken.  “Remember, remember, the 5th of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot…” and all that.  The holiday isn’t celebrated in the US, which is not surprising, since it has to do with a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, before the future United States was seriously being colonized, let alone officially founded.

Of course, it’s still a good day for civil resistance (though perhaps without the explosives).  It might be a good day for some group to slip powerful laxatives into the food of many, if not all, of the members of the current administration and many of the members of Congress and the Senate and even the Supreme Court.  Our national government could certainly use a serious colon cleanse, metaphorically speaking; it might be amusing for that to become literal*.

I’m not actually endorsing that action or encouraging it, but it’s a rather entertaining thought.

I’m very tired today, even though we’re just coming into the middle of the week.  Of course, I’m almost always tired but very rarely sleepy, which is not a great combination.  I suppose someone who never gets a full night’s sleep does, in a certain sense, live more than someone who sleeps well.  If, say, a person can only sleep 4 hours a night instead of 8, then after 60 years, they will have been awake for the equivalent of another person’s 75 years, if my math is right, and ceteris paribus.

But all other things are very much not equal when one has chronic insomnia.  The early part of Fight Club gives some pretty good descriptions of how insomnia can feel.  I particularly like the line, “…everything is a copy of a copy of a copy…” which does give something of an idea of the feeling of never getting enough sleep.

So the tradeoff would seem to be, in a sense, living more but worse versus living less but better.  But that still doesn’t quite capture matters, because chronic insomnia also increases the occurrence of many chronic and even acute illnesses, thus likely shortening the insomniac’s life relative to good sleepers’ lives.  One’s immune system tends to suffer, for one thing, which not only affects one’s risk of infection but also of cancer.  In addition, one’s metabolism gets thrown askew, probably partly due to chronically elevated stress hormones.

Of course, some of these effects might actually be causes, mightn’t they be?  Chronically elevated stress hormones can, by more than one route, reduce one’s sleep quantity and quality, for instance.  That’s one of the tricky things about the biology of multicellular organisms.  Many questions become “chicken and egg” problems.

Though, the actual question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is one to which the answer is glaringly obvious.  Eggs have existed, in some form at least, since before backbones happened (paleontologists, please correct me if I’m wrong about that specific ordering).

Even if we focus only on hard-shelled eggs, like those of the proverbial chicken, these date back to the earliest fully land-based vertebrates, which if memory serves showed up at least a few hundred million years ago.  Chickens have only really been around, certainly in their modern form, since no farther back than the dawn of agriculture, say about 10,000 years ago.

These numbers are ballpark figures that I’m pulling out of my…memory.  If I’m off by a significant amount on any of them‒certainly by an order of magnitude or more‒please let me know.

Okay, well, I don’t know what else to write about this morning.  I mean, I could probably nevertheless keep writing indefinitely, pulling various weirdnesses out of my…store room.  But I won’t.

It might be fun to set that challenge for myself some day:  to see how long I can write at one sitting, with only bathroom breaks, and then just share the result on this blog without serious editing.  I think I would want to use the lapcom for such a task, or something similar with a real keyboard, rather than writing on my smartphone as I’ve been doing for most of my posts.

I wonder if there’s any Guinness World Records type entry on something like that.  Not that I’m into trying to make or break world records, but it’s amusing to contemplate.

Maybe someday I’ll do something like that, though I would need some manner of support to do it.  But it probably won’t happen very soon, if it happens.  It will probably have to wait until after I’ve caught the flying pig back from my skiing trip in Hell.

And I don’t know how to ski.

Well, that’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve passed 701 words, and like Major Tom after he passed 100,000 miles, I’m feeling very still.  I wish my spaceship knew which way to go.

But we can’t necessarily trust the good astronaut’s judgment on such matters, for as Bowie said later, in Ashes to Ashes, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low.”

Hopefully, you all have a much better day than Major Tom.

*The Dulcolax™ treason and plot, you might say.

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Wee are the champignons, but I still won’t eat them

First of all, I want to say, “Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.”  So, here goes:

Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.

My mother would have appreciated that joke, so if anyone out there is inclined to be offended on her behalf, well…you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself, like the song said.  My mother’s sense of humor was very goofy and giggly and rather silly.  I got a goodly fraction of my sense of humor from her; she had extra, and no one else wanted it, so I got a very good deal.

Oh, on an unrelated note, I would like to note that, today, I am wearing cologne (or, well, aftershave, but I see no serious difference between the two things–one is named after a German city* and the other is just named for when you use it, as long as you’re not averse to the sting of alcohol on a freshly shaved face, which I am not, depending on whose face it is).  I felt awkward having yesterday used the misheard lyric from Whitesnake which says that I was born to wear cologne, when I wasn’t wearing cologne.

Of course, I’ve never really been like a drifter, either.

I do, unfortunately, drift and meander in my writing, at least when it’s nonfiction (broadly speaking) and when I’m trying not to write about my negative thoughts and feelings so I don’t bring people down too much.  That’s not as easy as it might seem, because those thoughts and feelings are always there, and they’ve been there for nearly as long as I can remember.

I’m not sure why they are there; presumably, and apparently, a lot of it has to do with my until-recently-undiagnosed ASD, but there’s also just something of a tendency toward dysthymia/depression in especially my Dad’s side of the family.

Though, honestly, there was almost certainly ASD on that side of the family, too**.  I would be very surprised if my father could not have been so diagnosed, though he was surely “Level 1”, whereas I am said to be “Level 2”.

Speaking of my Dad‒which I was‒I guess I should wish him a belated Happy Birthday, wherever he may be.  His birthday was a month ago today (it was a Saturday, so I wrote no blog post).

My own birthday is exactly in between my parents’ birthdays, which was something of a choice on their part; I was born by elective c-section, which was the usual practice in that era if one had previously had a c-section, which my mother had.  So they had at least some choice about the specific day on which I would be born.

They couldn’t just pick willy-nilly, of course.  If they had tried to wait until December, it would not have worked, and September would have been disastrous.  Probably even early November wouldn’t have panned out.  Still, I think they had at least a few days’ window in either direction, so‒it’s my understanding‒they picked my birthday to be right between theirs.

It’s the sort of thing I might have done, myself, so I appreciate it.

Let’s see now, what else is going on?  Of course, there are many things happening in the world, as is always the case, and many of those things seem and feel quite momentous to the people who see them or experience them.  From a certain point of view, they are indeed important, of course.  But I imagine that the average Roman citizen often thought that the momentary political happenings in their world were the be-all and end-all, and now we don’t even know what those concerns (or who those citizens) might have been.

Mind you, if their concerns related to the incoming Vandals and Visigoths and Huns and so on, I suppose they might have been at least somewhat justified in their belief that pivotal events were taking place.  But such times were narrow and few, relative to the “uninteresting times” in between.

Nowadays, of course, there are no actual external invaders coming in (though various propagandists might say there are).  Alas, in the modern world, we have met the Vandals, and they are us.

I almost feel that should have read “they are we”, but it might be taken as implying they are tiny, as in “they are wee”***.  Also, I wanted to throw a little homage to the famous Pogo cartoon in which Pogo originally said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

With that, I will call this blog post to a close today.  I hope you all remember and embrace what we’ve accomplished here (basically nothing, as far as I can tell).  I also continue to hope that you all have an objectively good day.

*Weirdly enough, the full term is “eau de cologne” which I think is French for “water of Cologne”.  This is a curious term which must be quite historically contingent.  It must also be quite exaggerated, because I very much doubt that the water in the city of Cologne has any particularly attractive and pleasant odor.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

**There was even ASD, meaning Atrial Septal Defect, on that side of the family, which I had too, requiring open-heart surgery when I was 18.  It is an interesting fact that the cardiac ASD is more common in people with the neurodevelopmental ASD, as is cavum septum pellucidum, a benign atypia in the space between cerebral hemispheres, which was found in me incidentally while I was being worked up for, I think, the cause of some then-occurring pituitary dysfunction.

***Or that they are urine, I guess, which would be a more acceptable misunderstanding.

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“The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older.”

Okay, well, here we are.  It’s Wednesday.  I don’t know what else there is to say about the day.  I guess…yeah, I don’t know.  It’s another day.  It’s a stretch of (roughly) 24 hours, the specifics depending on whether you’re using solar time or sidereal time or just the “self-contained” UTC time*.

UTC time is kept on a variety of clocks around the world and is based on the oscillations in the hyperfine transition frequency of the Caesium-133 atom.  That frequency has been defined as 9,192,631,770 Hz.  The international measuring community thing, whatever they call themselves, thereby agreed on defining the second as exactly 9,192,631,770 of those Caesium-133 oscillations.

Of course, oscillations of atoms, like all other processes that take time, slow down with increased spacetime curvature and with increasing speed relative to any given observer.  This is why the GPS satellites have to adjust their own time to account for both special and general relativity.  It’s pretty cool; you’re carrying proof of Einsteinian relativity in your smartphone.

You probably already knew that.

Then, of course, once they’ve decided on the precise value of a second‒knowing that the speed of light (or more precisely the speed of causality) is constant‒they then defined the meter as how far light travels (in a vacuum) in⁠ 1/299,792,458⁠ seconds (approximately 30 2/3 “vibrations” of a Caesium-133 atom).  Mind you, two observers moving relative to each other will see their meters as different each from the other, but c’est de la relativité.

It can be easy to imagine that definitions of units in science (and related fields) are not merely arbitrary but circular, almost tautological.  But really, given that these are attempts to codify specific attributes of reality itself, they would almost have to be self-referential with each other to be useful.

The length of a day is something that happens for real.  Thanks to the base 6 and 12 numbering system of the Babylonians, the day was long ago arbitrarily divided into 24 hours, each 60 minutes long, and each 60 seconds long, so a second was 1/(24 x 60 x 60) days or 1/86,400 of a day.

That worked well for a long time, especially since, before Galileo et al, humans couldn’t really measure time very precisely, anyway.  And then, until railroads allowed rapid travel between cities, it wasn’t necessary to worry too much about having the same time in different places.

But eventually that did become useful and necessary for many purposes, and eventually it was realized that a day wasn’t exactly what we were calling 24 hours, and indeed, that the length of a day varied slightly from day to day and year to year; also, a year isn’t a whole number of days long.  Also also, a day could be measured relative to the sun‒which is close enough that a day doesn’t end quite exactly after one full rotation since the Earth moves relative to the sun over the course of a day‒or with respect to distant stars, by which estimate a day comes closer to being exactly one complete rotation.

For most people most of the time, though, this precision, and that upon which it is based, are probably not merely irrelevant but unknown and unguessed.

Likewise, I don’t know how many people know about how Celsius made his temperature scale 100 degrees between the freezing and boiling of water at sea level pressure (a pretty reasonable choice, though I’m led to understand he initially had 100 assigned as the freezing point and 0 the boiling point!).

Then it was discovered that there existed a minimum possible temperature in principle, and they decided to set that scale, the Kelvin scale (named after William Thompson Scale**) using degrees of the same size as Celsius, but with zero defined as‒understandably enough‒absolute zero.

It’s all fairly interesting, if you’re in the right frame of mind.  But, alas, there’s every reason to suspect that all this information will be rendered moot and useless and perhaps even lost as the world winds down, or if life is replaced by artificial intelligence, or everything ends in some other way, as seems more than possible even in the relatively short term.

In any case, the laws of physics, as we know them, seem clearly to predict that the universe will tend toward ever-greater entropy and eventually all life, all structure will end.  Sometimes, I think it cannot happen soon enough for my taste.

Then again, there are cyclic universe proposals, such as Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.  It bases its model on the fact that entropy, though always tending to increase, is not really an absolute quantity, not a substance, and that our universe’s “maximal” entropy may be the next universe’s low-entropy beginning, just on different scales; it doesn’t even require any “inflationary” burst of expansion to explain the uniformity of the CMB, I think.  I haven’t yet finished Penrose’s book about CCC, because though he is a stunningly brilliant mind, his writing can be a bit plodding and dry.

I guess it’s hard for any person to be good at everything, though Penrose has many strengths.  If memory serves, he invented a set of shapes which can be used to tile an infinite plane (in principle) with no gaps and no repeating patterns.  Supposedly this has been proven to the satisfaction of professional geometers, though I am not familiar with that proof.  Still, if it is a mathematical proof, then it is one of those rare things that we know to be certainly true, given its set of axioms.

It’s not necessarily useful in any practical sense, of course.  For instance, I think it’s probably true that any tiling system that can tile an infinite plane without repeating could not be used to tile a closed, finite, simple geometrically shaped portion of a plane‒such as a rectangular room.  I think you would always have to cut some of the tiles as they reach the wall, no matter how big the room is, as long as it is finite.  I do not know this for certain, that’s just my intuition.

Well, I guess I’ve wasted space and time enough here for now.  It’s no more wasteful than has been my entire existence, I guess, but also no less wasteful.  Or is it?  I don’t know.  In any case, for now I will stop wasting your time.

Please have a good day.

*Yes, it’s probably redundant to say “UTC time”, but the order of the acronym is sort of Yoda-esque‒it did not originate with an English term‒so I feel it’s tolerable to use it this way here.

**That’s a joke.  He was really William Thompson, the first Baron Scale***.

***I mean the 1st Baron Kelvin, of course, all joking aside.  A baron scale sounds like some long forgotten and unused (i.e., barren) bit of laboratory apparatus, left for eons, gathering dust in an abandoned world, like the broken statue of Ozymandius.  It’s very sad.