History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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

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Blogger that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but I thank you

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (obviously) and I am writing this on…my lapcom!!  That’s right, I’m pleased to say that after all my discussion yesterday about trying to give my thumb bases a break, I maintained the impetus into the evening to bring the mini lapcom back with me, and I am now using it to write this post.

I’ve probably already said more about this than was merited, but I’m rather pleased with myself.  That doesn’t happen all that often nowadays—me being pleased with myself, I mean—so I am trying to indulge it as much as I can, hopefully without overdoing it.

Let’s see, now, is there anything else to talk about today?  Hmm.  Nothing comes to mind right off the top of my head.  Perhaps I should just call it good and wish you all a good day and say “Ta ta for now” in abbreviated form.

But, no, I don’t think I’m going to do that.  Not having anything to say has rarely stopped me (or lots of other people, I suspect) from running off at the keyboard/mouth.  I don’t know if that’s healthy or good or not; probably there is no specific absolute “value” slot or slots in which to put that fact.

The goodness (or badness) of a thing is often largely dependent on that for which some particular person might use it, or the semi-arbitrary tastes of any given person.  But as for absolute goodness or badness, I’m not sure those concepts ever fully apply.

Even nuclear weapons can at least be argued to have had some modicum of benefit.  It’s an ill wind indeed, as they say, that blow no one any good.  There can be little doubt that the atomic bomb shortened the war in the Pacific in World War II, and that was good for Allied soldiers, though clearly not good for Japan, at least not in the short term.

Then, of course, there was the Cold War, which was terrifying and had the potential to send civilization back millennia or more.  Thankfully, it did not.  It’s a bet I wouldn’t encourage the world to make again—that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction would prevent most conventional wars that might otherwise have led to the death of many millions and the immiseration of millions more, albeit without destroying civilization in the process—but we got away with it that time (so far).

So, yeah, good and evil are largely viewpoint dependent, though they are not absolutely subjective.  I suspect there are quite a few things in the world, or in the potential of human behavior, about which if you surveyed many hundreds of thousands of people, the very large majority would agree on whether they were generally good or generally evil.  Child sex trafficking comes to mind as one of those more or less universal evil things, I suspect.  On the other hand, saving innocent children from violence or disease or catastrophe would probably pretty generally be considered good.

But of course, all this is very anthropocentric (or anthropoidocentric, maybe).  If you were to canvas the opinions (if they existed) of various sexually transmitted viruses and bacteria and protozoa, they would probably be in favor of all forms of sex trafficking, and of indiscriminate, unprotected sex in general.  It might be their equivalent of clear-cutting the Amazon rain forest to make room for non-native crops.

Blowflies would surely be quite satisfied, at least in the short term, if humans had massive, bloody wars that left bodies strewn, unburied, in the streets.  But humans—selfish bastards that they are—are unlikely to do such a thing just because it would be nice for the flies.  They might do it for other—arguably no better—reasons, but not for the flies.

Shakespeare said (or, well, Hamlet said*), “there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  And, of course, in Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place, and of itself, can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, though I may have left out some archaic contractions.

To be fair, we should expect Satan to say something like that, shouldn’t we?  And we should not give too much credence to his viewpoint.  Hamlet, on the other hand, is much more morally ambiguous than, say, the leader of the fallen angels, so it’s more convincing when he says his line during a semi-philosophical interaction with his two former friends.

Well, I feel that this has been a rather peculiar blog post, even for me.  I suppose one might expect that, if one normally wrote peculiar blog posts, one might expect that a “peculiar for me” blog post by such a person would be a “normal for someone else” blog post.  But that intuition is misleading and usually wrong.

There are many more ways to be “peculiar” than there are to be “normal” in most cases, so, like the phase space that can be used to diagram entropy, when things move from one spot semi-randomly to another, they are much more likely to become more peculiar than to revert to more normal.

The other way only works in strictly one-dimensional situations, though in those situations it is worth noting.  For it is a fact that, ceteris paribus, the lesser of two evils is the greater of the two goods, just as a less negative number is a more positive number, by mathematical definition.

On that, I’ll draw this lapcom blog post to a close, with a deep, sincere thank you for reading:

Thank you, deeply and sincerely, for reading.

TTFN

*You cannot assume that an author agrees with a point made by one of the characters in the author’s works.  This is true of many a celebrated quote.  The famous Oscar Wilde line “I can resist anything but temptation” is spoken by Dorian Gray, who is not a particularly good person, and probably does not represent Wilde’s considered ethical opinions.

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

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

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

Still, he was a brilliant child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Birthdays, Holidays, Mythology, Vectors, Maxwell, and a Beatles song…

It’s Friday again, the 25th of September.  There are only three more shopping months until Newtonmas.

Yes, I know that it isn’t strictly accurate to celebrate Newton’s birth on “Christmas”, because Newton was born on December 25th according to the Julian calendar.  The Gregorian calendar had been invented already; England just hadn’t adopted it (partly because it was a Catholic invention).

But Newton’s birthday was a lot closer to December 25th than Jeshua bin Josephus’s was.  According to what I’ve read and heard from scholars who specialize in such things, the Nazarene was born sometime in the summer.  Oh, and also, there was no census requiring men to return to their towns of birth ever promulgated by Caesar Augustus, not according to any single official record of any kind.  The author of that gospel just threw that in to provide an excuse to have Jesus born in Bethlehem, so that his birth could comply with certain messianic prophecies.

Yes, the so-called fulfillment of prophecies that is used as “evidence” that Jesus was the messiah was added after the fact, by people who never knew Jesus, writing decades (or longer) after his death.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone, really.  Religions in general don’t tend to be very coherent and consistent; they just sort of happen by a kind of memetic evolution, and they are made of various hodgepodges of prior myths and folklore and post-hoc shoe-horning into supposed prophecies.  They bear no hallmarks of having actually been created and/or delivered by supernatural entities of any kind, let alone omniscient ones.

I certainly don’t think any deity is responsible for the fact that today is Friday, so I will not be thanking one, whether God or Brahma or Amaterasu or Quetzalcoatl or Odin or Jupiter* or Whatever.  Also, I am scheduled to work tomorrow, so this is not the end of my work week, anyway.

I’m relatively pleased to inform you that I’ve been reading a decent book for the past few days (not continuously, ha ha).  It’s called Vector, and it’s about (oddly enough) vectors‒the mathematical entities that have magnitude and direction, among other things.

It follows the lives and insights and advances of people like Hamilton, who brought us quaternions (which are very cool) among other vector insights, and various other people who developed the mathematics and science of vectors (we will be getting to tensors and so on before long).

Currently I’m in the midst of the discussion of Maxwell and his astounding development of the principles of electrodynamics, including his recognitions that electricity and magnetism would, if oscillating, produce a self-propagating wave that would travel at precisely the “speed of light”, by which he deduced that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave.  (This accomplishment is one of the most impressive in the history of science, and it is a tragic injustice that Maxwell’s name is not as well-known as those of Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Schrodinger and so on.)

Indeed, the very invariance of the speed of light as revealed by Maxwell’s equations was one of the things that led Einstein to postulate that the speed of light is an absolute constant in all reference frames, leading to Special Relativity (and eventually, even more impressively, to General Relativity, which will make use of and extend the vectors and tensors and matrices to which we’re gradually being introduced).

It’s very exciting.  Honest, it is.

And, of course, there’s the very cool fact that quaternions ended up being useful for describing the curious properties of particle “spin”, including the fact that, for spin ½ particles (which are “fermions”), if you want to rotate it and get back to the state in which you started, you have to rotate 720 degrees, not 360.

If this seems counterintuitive, just think about a Mobius** strip.  Are you thinking about it?  Good.  That should distract you nicely from trying to grasp the nature of fermion spin.

Kidding!  It helps to show you how the notion is not something deeply bizarre or seemingly nonphysical.  With a simple Mobius strip, going around 360 degrees will land you on the opposite side*** of the paper from the place where you started; you need another full trip around 360 degrees to return to where you began.

I’ve occasionally thought that it would be fun to set up an art gallery or other kind of museum with a single “circular” corridor that crosses over itself (by going up or down a level gradually) and that requires visitors to go around twice to get back to the entrance.  It wouldn’t really be difficult to pull off, and it would be much better (I think) than the Guggenheim layout.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to commission such a gallery, so I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Don’t let me down.

Okay, well, that’ll about do it for today.  I should be writing a post tomorrow, so if that’s something that pleases you, then you can safely and reasonably anticipate being pleased, exclusis improvisis.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

*Though the planet Jupiter deserves some thanks for helping make life on Earth more possible and stable by sweeping up a lot of the stray space debris that might otherwise have slammed much more often, or much more persistently, into Earth.  But, being a planet, Jupiter doesn’t require thanks or praise to do what it does.  It just requires physics.

**He shows up in the book, too.

***Though the Mobius strip has only one side, really.  And a Klein bottle has a continuous, single surface encompassing its inner and outer aspects (i.e., the inside and outside are the same), and crosses through itself without breaking that surface.  At least, it does that in 4 spatial dimensions.  Our three dimensional Klein bottle models are shadows, if you will, of a true Klein bottle, much as a drawing of a Mobius strip is just a shadow of such a strip.

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You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks

It’s Friday, but I won’t thank God for it this time, because I expect to work tomorrow.  I also am simply disinclined to thank that imaginary sky daddy for much today, nor to say that he/it is great, since today is the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, which were just the latest in the atrocities performed in the supposed name of the God of Abraham™ (other deities are available, though they are not really any better).

I’m not going to get into September 11th related stuff, though.  I doubt that I would have anything to say about it that others haven’t said at least as well as I ever could.  If you would like a good discussion by a very good thinker, Sam Harris released a recent, brief podcast about it.  The event both shaped and catalyzed his career as a public thinker.  It shaped a lot of things, and unfortunately, very, very few of them produced anything good or beneficial as a consequence, unlike Sam’s work.

I don’t know what I am going to write, though.  I’m still really wiped out from a very bad pain day yesterday (that pain is far from gone).  Also, I somehow scratched my right eye during the night, and it is quite irritated, so looking at the smartphone as I type is more irksome than usual.

I had at least a passing thought, though, about the notion of owning up to when we’re making immoral (but best available) choices rather than justifying to ourselves why what we are doing is “right”, which can sometimes lead to increasingly excessive behaviors driven by a sense (sometimes desperately clasped out of fear of facing the facts) of self-righteousness that can expand into dogmatism.

Dogmatism almost never makes any real sense, and it often leads to terrible, horrible, and reprehensible deeds (9-11 was just one of countless such depravities).

I think it would be better for us, culturally and perhaps individually, if we owned up to it when we violated our own precepts, even‒or especially‒when we do it out of real necessity.  At least it might give us more intellectual and moral humility.

For instance, it says in the founding document of the United States that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights.  In other words, they cannot ever be taken away by some outside power, not morally.

One can argue whether those rights actually exist and whether any such rights exist and so on, but I’m not interested in that discussion right now (though it is a good topic).  But if we assume arguendo that the rights enumerated are real and apply to the USA, then we cannot resist the fact that we violate them frequently‒by law, by custom, by various accidental means.

We imprison people, for instance, often out of necessity (when we do it “legitimately”, anyway, but again, that’s another subject).  If someone is dangerous to others and cannot be cured of whatever makes them dangerous, then we must separate such a person from others to protect their rights.  That doesn’t mean we aren’t violating the first person’s rights; those rights are declared to be unalienable.  But we are trapped in a place of competing rights, and must do our best to balance them.

We should admit that to ourselves.  We should say to ourselves, “Yes, we are violating this person’s rights, and it is not by nature a moral act.  But it is the best act we have available right now, so we will accept and endure the pangs of our consciences and do it, while always trying to find better alternatives.”

It’s that last part on which the crux of my point rests.  When we admit that we are doing something that is not moral, but that is the most moral option we have available, then we leave open‒indeed, we invite and encourage‒the quest for better solutions.  Whereas, when we tell ourselves we’re right to commit such violations, then we effectively raise a barrier against forces that might improve things.

When challenged on the morality of such deeds, if we haven’t already faced their morally turbid status, we unfortunately often get defensive and double down, because it’s too uncomfortable for most people most of the time to face the fact that they might be really wrong about something really consequential.

But dogmatism precludes improvement.  And if you believe that there is no room for improvement in any ideas you have been handed, then, well…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.  You can pay me for it in cash or, better yet, in precious metals and jewelry‒I’m hoping to make a great big heap of gems and jewelry and try to sleep on it.  Maybe it would cure my insomnia; I’ve always suspected that Smaug was onto something.

Anyway, that’s enough.  I don’t think I did justice to that random, walk-in topic, and I may not even have been coherent.  But, it was the best I could do for now, until I can figure out a way to do better.

I hope you have a good day today.  I will write another post tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.

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Memento mori

Well, it’s the first day of a new month today.  September is that new month, of course, and despite its seven-related name, it is our ninth month, pushed back partly because of the egotism of two ancient dictators and those who revered them.

Not to say there weren’t things to admire about Julius Caesar or even Octavian (AKA Augustus, whose earlier name meant “eighth”, which at least suits the current month order).  But it is a fact that they are both just as dead as the veriest plebian or slave in their “empire”; their bodies are dust in the wind, if that.

Yes, we remember them‒a bit‒but that does them absolutely no good.  They returned to their initial state, as Mark Twain discussed at least once:  that he had been dead for millions of years before he was conceived, and it had not inconvenienced him in the slightest, so there was little to fear about returning to that state.

If you want to be remembered as a Roman Emperor (it’s probably too late for you to do that now, but let’s consider it for the sake of argument), be remembered like Marcus Aurelius, whose contributions to Stoic philosophy and the nature of a good life are still guiding and inspiring people today.  Aurelius continues actually to have effects even millennia after his death‒real ones, consequential ones, not just having people know the names of months that are named after him*.

Marcus Aurelius’s words continue to help stimulate thought and to help with psychological equanimity, and they do so in more logically defensible ways than those of most religious patriarchs (largely because the vast majority of religions are mere hodgepodges of various kinds of bullshit).

Of course, it’s almost certainly all futile.  All of it will be entirely effaced in all but the most theoretical sense (e.g., the law of conservation of quantum information) by the passage of time, as everything returns to the state mentioned by good ol’ Samuel Clemens, who is just as dead as Julius Caesar, himself.

I mean all this even if somehow “intelligent” life on Earth survives and advances long enough and successfully enough to become cosmically noticeable or even cosmically important (not a very high likelihood) and even if they discover or create ways to make the universe survive indefinitely or to make new universes or whatever.  There is still simply the matter of the signal and the noise.

This is the counter to the sometimes-heard claim that “the internet is forever”.  Well…maybe, but I doubt it.  Even if it is, though, your most embarrassing upload is already long-since unnoticeable amidst the cacophony.  You are merely one face in a crowd of billions, most of whom spend most of their time merely looking at themselves.

We live in troubled times, as the saying goes, and it is certainly true now.  But it has always been true, since the very origin of life itself.  Life is trouble, it has always been trouble, and I strongly suspect that it will always be trouble.  C’est la vie, c’est la guerre, c’est la mort.

The only state in which there is no suffering is death.  The state of Nevada may try to claim that spot, what with Las Vegas and Reno, legal gambling, legal prostitution, and whatnot, but just go wander out into the desert for a bit and see how it feels.  Don’t even get me started on California or New York or Florida as being states without suffering!

Okay, enough with the stupid, homonym-based jokes.

It is, whatever you call it, the beginning of the month in which, in the northern hemisphere, summer transitions into autumn (or fall).  Autumn is my favorite season, and not just because of the autumn people and Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show**.

No, there are many things I like about autumn, aesthetically.  It has my favorite holiday, and it has my birthday, and up north it has the lovely changing of the leaves and so on.  In Florida, of course, the good things about autumn are strongly attenuated, but Florida has that effect on many of the pleasant things in life.  At least the weather begins to moderate in Florida in the autumn.

Of course, one of the two most important events in my life happened in September, shortly before the beginning of autumn.  And, less important, but still fun, September 22nd is the day Frodo set off on his journey in The Lord of the Rings.  It’s also his (and Bilbo’s birthday).

Frodo and Bilbo are fictional characters, of course.  Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that many millions of people know far more about them than they know about Julius Caesar or his nephew.  Those two imperators are at least as “fictional” now as entirely made-up characters.  Not much cop, this Roman Emperor lark, is it?

Well, have an enjoyable day if you can.  You might as well.

*I wonder how many people in the Western world even know where the names of August and July originate.  I would not be surprised if I learned that a higher percentage of Japanese people know about the etymology of those two fully summer months (or those two fully winter months in the southern hemisphere).  But what proportion of westerners know anything about Amaterasu or Tsukuyomi?  I’d bet it’s higher now than at any time in the past, but I’d also bet that it’s still mighty low.

**”We are the hungry ones.  We are drawn by your torments like dogs in the night, and we do feed…and feed well.”

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WARNING: The following may contain “sacrilege”. Proceed with caution.

Well, I would say “Thank God it’s Friday”, but I am working tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, and so it’s not the last day of the work week, which is what people are generally celebrating when they say, “Thank God it’s Friday”.

I suppose that tomorrow I could say, “Thank God it’s Saturday” as a replacement expression.  It’s a bit more cumbersome, but at least it would be sort of appropriate, since in Judaism, Saturday is Shabbat.  Then again, if one is an observant Jew, one does not work on Saturday.  Well, I guess if one is a rabbi or a cantor technically one works on Saturday, but that’s a whole nother* thing.

As for the thanking of any deity for the fact of it being Friday (or any other day), it seems gratuitous, because the days of the week and how we order them and what we do on specific ones seems very much a purely human convention.  It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that a god would arrange specifically, and certainly not for individual people.  After all, when it’s Friday for me, it’s Friday for everyone else, barring those far enough away for the clock to roll over and such.

Of course, I suppose, if there really were a God, and if that God were, as is generally described in the Abrahamic religions, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, then God would be literally responsible for everything, including every action and choice that any and all humans ever make.  So, it wouldn’t be absurd in that case to thank God for the fact of Friday, but it would also be reasonable to say, “Screw God, it’s Monday”.

If God can be given credit for all good things, then God must bear the blame for all bad things.  There is no other logical possibility as far as I can see.

I am open to being convinced otherwise, of course, but please spare me any trite and transparently nonsensical excuses like the whole “free will” thing or blaming Satan (or some other, similar entity) for the bad stuff.  If people have free will‒a fairly nonsensical notion in and of itself, at least as far as the so-called libertarian** free will as imagined by some in the Abrahamic faiths goes‒then God is not omnipotent, and cannot really even be omniscient.

As for the whole “blaming Satan” thing, well, did God not create Satan?  Who is to blame if Satan is faulty?  Likewise, who is to blame if humans are faulty?  If they were made by an omnipotent and omniscient being, along with everything else in the universe, then that being is the only one that can possibly be held ultimately responsible.

Of course, one could claim that Satan (or Ahriman or whoever) was not created by God, but came into existence separately.  That at least is more logically consistent (and somewhat more interesting) than the alternative, but it also inescapably implies that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient (and it raises questions about the omnipresence thing as well, for where was such a God when its antagonist came into being?).

Of course, it’s all pretty much nonsense, though some of it can be entertaining.  We could replace “God” with Eru/Iluvatar and “Satan” with Morgoth and lose nothing from the above discussion.  Actually, the latter two are slightly more honest, for in the very first chapter of The Silmarillion, Iluvatar plainly and openly says that Melkor (aka Morgoth) can do nothing that does not have its uttermost source in Him (Eru/Iluvatar).  Neither can anyone else.  But of course, Tolkien was smarter, or at least better educated, than the men who wrote the Bible and other similar religious works.

An interesting (to me) aside:  the name Lucifer (“light-bearer”) referred initially to the morning star, and is referenced only thus in the “old testament”, though apparently there was some snark involved, since it was a taunt toward the King of Babylon, or so I am led to understand.  But of course, the morning star is the same astronomical body as the evening star (Eärendil in Tolkien’s world), both of which are actually the planet Venus, just at different times in its relative orbit.

Also interesting is the fact that Venus, supposedly representing the Goddess of Love, is the most hellish place in the solar system, with crushing surface pressure, searing heat, suffocating carbon dioxide atmosphere, and even sulfuric acid rain.  Maybe that’s appropriate for the Goddess of Love; love can be corrosive and crushing and searing and even suffocating a lot of the time.

It is funny that the same planet can have come to represent evil (Lucifer) and great good (Eärendil) depending on the story, and also that it can represent love while being the most hellish (though not the deadliest) planet in the solar system.  I don’t think the dichotomy or contradiction or whatever you want to call it has any deep meaning about the nature of the cosmos, or even the solar system, but it does say something about the nature of humans and their myths.

Anyway, if I haven’t irreparably offended you with the preceding, I hope you’ll look forward to my post for tomorrow, which I will be writing, exclusis improvisis.  It’s not as though you can look back to it, at least not today.

*I wonder if “a whole nother” counts as tmesis, the insertion of a word in the middle of another in order to add emphasis, e.g., abso-friggin-lutely.

**Not to be confused with the political ideology of Libertarianism.

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You’re in analysis, or something like that

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  As you may have guessed, I did not work yesterday, because I was out sick.

I think I mentioned the apparent URI I’ve had.  Really, it’s more of a middle respiratory infection, like bronchi to bronchiole level, but the acronym for that would be MRI and that might be confusing.  This is one of those issues with acronyms; when you shorten things enough, the code becomes ambiguous.

Anyway, I also had some weird urinary signs (not symptoms) that made me nervous that all the NSAIDS I’ve been taking have been starting to catch up with my kidneys.  So, I’ve taken a temporary NSAID sabbatical apart from aspirin.  I’m still taking some Tylenol (and CBD, which does at least some good).  Unfortunately, my pain level overall has predictably increased, and that certainly contributed to the fact that I stayed at the house yesterday.

Anyway, I’m trying to make sure to get lots of fluids and whatnot, and that process at least seems to be doing its thing.  I’ll do another UA today‒I have my own test strip bottle*.

Okay, enough of all that stuff.  I’m sure that nearly no one has any interest in reading about my adventures in analyzing my own bodily fluids.

Of course, I don’t have a lot else clawing its way out of me at the moment‒oh, those lazy xenomorph embryos!‒so I don’t know what I’ll use to fill the rest of this blog post.  But I do expect to be writing a post tomorrow, since the office should be open tomorrow, so maybe that will contain something interesting.

I guess today is the last day of July‒at least the last one in 2026 AD/CE.  Tomorrow will therefore be the first day of August in 2026 (AD or CE).  We go from one month named after the nominal first “emperor” of Rome to a month named after the first “official” emperor of Rome.  After that we start up with the ordinally named months, but they’ve all been pushed back two months because of the two dead Romans, so the nominal seventh month‒September‒is our official ninth month.

It would be slightly interesting if, when the calendar was changed from the Julian to the Gregorian, the month had also been changed.  Imagine if the months went May, June, Gregory, August, September…  That might be kind of funny.  Certainly there’s no less of a reason to give old Pope Gregory the Peccary (or whatever his official indicator was) a month named after him than Julius Caesar.

Okay, admittedly, Caesar was a more pivotal historical figure, but one feels (at least, this one does) that he was more a vessel for things that were happening through him and others rather than being the true author of any change.  And Shakespeare didn’t write any plays about the Pope, but then, he lived in Elizabethan England, so that was just a non-starter.  Imagine trying to write a play about a Pope during the reign of Henry VIII’s daughter.

Also, Shakespeare and Gregory the Nocturnal Gregarious Wild Swine were more or less contemporaries.  It’s hard to write popular plays about people who are still or were very recently alive, especially when they were part of a religious schism with one’s own country.  Whereas Julius Caesar was all but the stuff of legend by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century CE/AD.

It’s too bad Shakespeare didn’t really know anything about ancient Egypt or any of the other ancient civilizations (some of which were as ancient to the Romans as the Romans were to the British of Shakespeare’s time).  He wrote about Antony and Cleopatra, of course, but imagine William Shakespeare’s Ramses the Second (the Great).  Or perhaps consider The Tragedy of Xerxes, Emperor of Persia.

Well, I’m not going to write any plays about them.  I’ve written plays (of sorts) before and have started others, and I have written some (very bad) screenplays and such, but it’s not my area of best creative work.  I’ll just make passing reference to historical figures here, more or less randomly, and maybe someone out there will write a play or show or movie about them, inspired by the reference.

Hey, they keep making movies based on the works of Homer (the Greek poet, not the Simpson).  Mind you, those works are highly fictionalized, if not entirely fictional; you can tell by the presence of things like gods and sirens and nearly invulnerable warriors who gained their protection by being dipped in the river Styx.  Achilles might as well have been bitten by a radioactive spider, for how realistic a figure he is.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Sorry if it’s weirder than usual.  Or, on the other hand, I’m sorry if it’s not weirder, but my blog is always this erratic.  I’m not sure about which of the two I ought to be sorrier.

Oh, well.  Please have a good day and a good weekend and a good month of August (but only once August starts‒if you try to have a good month of August on the last day of July, I think you’re setting yourself up for failure).

*It’s really more of a screw-top can, since it’s a cylinder, but because of the association with preserved food, it feels weird to say that I have a can of urinalysis test strips.

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Fictional birthdays, date misassignments, and the calendars of Caesar and the Pope

Hi, everybody.  It’s Wednesday, July 22nd, which means there are only two months left for you to buy something for Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  Though, actually, they’re pretty well-to-do hobbits, so it seems unlikely that you’ll be able to get them something they want that they don’t already have.

Oh, and also, hobbits give other people presents on their own birthdays, not the other way around.  This always struck me as odd, but kind of cool.  It’s almost like saying, “Here’s a little gift for you in celebration of my birth, just to remind you what a gift it is that I was born and that you know me.”

Well, at least that’s one way of looking at it.  Anyway, I don’t think you’re likely to receive a gift from Bilbo and/or Frodo, even on their birthday, apart from being able to read and/or watch The Hobbit and/or The Lord of the Rings.  That’s a lucky break for us all, when you think about it, and you don’t need to wait for September 22nd to partake of it.

I know, I know, why would one celebrate the birthday of a fictional character, anyway?  Well, it’s not as though mainstream culture doesn’t do it already, in oodles of major religious holidays.

Even if you’re convinced that Jesus really existed, biblical scholars agree (so I’m told) that he was not born on December 25th, but sometime in the summer, probably.  The later Church, never shy about playing free and loose with facts of reality (as religions tend to do), reset the date in order to appropriate the typical winter solstice-related festivals heavily celebrated by many cultures.  Such celebrations included Saturnalia (Roman culture‒you can tell because it’s got Saturn in it) and Yule (Norse, with the evergreens and mistletoe and holly and such like).  There were probably others.

The earlier Church cared more about Easter anyway, which makes a bit of internal sense.  That’s the purported miraculous day, when Jesus regenerated and flew to the heavens in his TARDIS.  Or whatever happened, if anything.

Of course, if we all wanted to avoid mislabeling Jeshua’s birthday, we could just celebrate Newtonmas on the previously celebrated day, since Isaac Newton was born on December 25th.  And he definitely did things that, while not literally miraculous, boggle the mind of nearly every mortal with knowledge enough to understand those contributions.

Mind you, he was, by all accounts, a serious dick and a born curmudgeon.  But he was effing smart, and his scientific accomplishments surely compensate for, say, his bloodthirsty reign as Warden of the Royal Mint, and even his really petty and childish vendettas against other scientists.

“‘A was a man.  Take him for all in all.  I shall not look upon his like again.”

Ah, but there’s a catch (or a rub, since we’re quoting Shakespeare):  Newton was born on December 25th according to the Julian calendar.  The Gregorian calendar* did already exist, but England did not adopt it until sometime after Newton’s birth.  They were sort of stubborn about going along with Catholic innovations, and it held them back.  I blame Oliver Cromwell.

Anyway, by the modern, “Gregorian” calendar, Newton would have been born sometime in about…January, something like the 7th, I think, but I’ll look it up (see below).

Why the disparity?  Well, as you may know, the Julian calendar does have leap years.  Earth’s trip around the sun takes 365 and about a quarter days, so the extra full day builds up and is added onto every 4th year.  Except…

…well, it’s not quite a full quarter of an extra day there in that orbital period.  So, over time, the Julian calendar gets ahead of the literal year a bit.  It’s a small bit, but it’s there, and it accumulates.  To correct for this, one of the things the Gregorian calendar does is to skip the leap day on any year divisible by 100**.  It also adds the leap day back on every year divisible by 1000, but I think that’s only applied once since the Gregorian calendar was created.

Anyway, by the time the Gregorian calendar was put in place in England, the Julian calendar had accumulated something like 11 extra leap days.  Maybe it was 12.  If January 7th was the Gregorian date of the 25th of December, Julian, that would be, let’s see…I think 14 days.  I suspect I’m off a bit in my recollection, so I’ll look it up and add a footnote***.

Wow, that was a weird, discursive post, wasn’t it?  I guess it’s probably more entertaining than hearing me talk about my problems with my mental health, at least.  Indeed, one might say that I am instead hereby demonstrating my problems with my mental health‒some of them, at least.  Anyway, I hope this was at least mildly entertaining and possibly informative.  It’s at least probably better than my previous two posts.  In any case, I hope you have a very good day.

*Named for Pope Gregory Peccary the Nocturnal Gregarious Wild Swine.

**I mean “evenly divisible”, of course.  Every number is divisible by 100.  Pi is divisible by 100:  ℼ/100.  “i” is divisible by 100:  i/100.  See?  But they don’t give integer quotients.

***Here goes:  Newton’s birthday would have been January 4th of the following year according to the Gregorian calendar.  This is ten days that needed to be skipped by the Gregorian calendar, or a thousand years worth of Julian calendar mismatch.  By now there would have been about five more extra days in the Julian calendar, so your birthday would be officially labelled as whatever day is 15 days before what it is, Gregorian Style.

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“…deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Well, first of all, happy Independence Eve to all my fellow USians out there.  I’m greeting you today because I will not be writing a blog post tomorrow, since I will not be working tomorrow, barring the unforeseen (exclusis improvisis one might say in Latin).

I suppose I could pre-write a post for tomorrow and schedule it to be published in the morning, but that would require a fair bit of extra work, and I barely have the energy to survive to the end of any given day as it is.

As for tomorrow’s holiday, I think it is important for US citizens (“Americans”) to remember what tomorrow represents: the signing (and publication) of the Declaration of Independence, asserting the end of British rule in the colonies and the formation of a new, independent nation.

In this present time, when the extremes of both ends of the political spectrum show all too clear leanings toward authoritarianism, it’s worth rereading the Declaration of Independence in full, including the list of grievances.  I will link to it as part of this post.  It’s not very long, really‒the main text contains only 1320 words, barely longer than yesterday’s blog post‒and it’s worth rereading at least once a year (as is the Constitution).

It’s not that there’s anything astonishingly ingenious about those documents, let alone “divine” in character, though they are well thought out and nicely expressed.  It’s the notions they convey that matter, among which (implicitly) is:  human “authority” is almost always a misnomer.

Stephen King has authority over the universes of his books, because he actually authored them.  Ditto for me regarding my universes.  But the real world is under no one’s authority, since as far as we can tell, it has no author, and no one understands it completely.

There is such a thing as expertise‒it varies quite a bit in its quality, but experts do exist and it tends to be worthwhile to listen to them within their areas of knowledge.  But experts are fallible, and those who would take part in “running” the various governments are extremely fallible, since it is an area of poorly developed science.

It’s worthwhile to remember and emphasize this fact, because naked house apes are prone to be swayed by primate dominance hierarchical urges, just as much as Vervet monkeys and chimpanzees and baboons are.  And since these proclivities are more or less instinctive, they don’t feel like mere thoughts.  They feel like perceptions.  They feel like direct experiences of the nature of reality.

They are experiences of some aspects of reality, of course, but they are frequently misleading ones.  It’s worthwhile remembering that politics, especially politics with authoritarian leanings*, tends to attract those who want to have power for its own sake, for their own sake‒not only those who really want to look out for the people and institutions of their particular nation‒though often they will pretend, even to themselves, that they are seeking some “greater good”.

But if there is such a greater good, and if the glaringly mediocre minds that claim such things can understand it, then that notion can be carefully communicated, and if it truly is good and great, then that should be clear and convincing to any honest and intelligent interlocutor.

Admittedly, there may be many biases that prevent every living hominid from accepting even the clearest bodies of evidence and argument; there are people who claim to believe the Earth is flat, after all, and that is not very bright.  But one should at least find a tendency toward confluence of judgment among those who live by the intellect, such as philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, physicists, engineers, etc.  When ideas are tested honestly and rigorously against reality, they tend to converge over time, because as far as anyone can tell, reality is at root unitary.

But those who seek political power are not generally drawn from fields that encourage and focus on rationalism, empiricism, and fallibilism.  And though I do not doubt that many people go into politics hoping to do actual good and to be of service, there are also very many who crave power over others, for whatever reasons, or even without reasons.  Such people do not tend to be our best and brightest, for as someone once wrote, “power lust is a weed that grows only in an untended mind”**.

This is why checks and balances and votes that include inputs from many (potentially all) people in a society, as well as frequent changes of office, are useful.  Weird shit, being unconstrained by reality, tends to be all over the place, ceteris paribus, compared to more grounded, realistic shit.  So, hopefully, in most cases, the overall mean or median or mode of good ideas is going to tend to be more reality based.

It’s not perfect, and we can certainly strive to improve it.  We can seek increased and better education, and encourage ourselves to seek to understand reality and to traffic in rigorous and self improving ideas to make it ever better.  But a crucial point is that there is no human authority over the world, and the sorts of people who would arrogate to themselves such power are not among the best and brightest.

As the old song says, “He can’t even run his own life, be damned if he’ll run mine.”

Anyway, Happy Independence Eve, again, and have a happy Independence Day tomorrow if you are in the US and celebrate it.  Don’t be put off by the lamentable state of current politics.  The ideas in the Declaration of Independence are still worth celebrating.

*e.g., the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

**Yes, I know who said it.  But though I do like to give credit for well-turned phrases, it’s often the case that naked house apes will either latch onto or dismiss out of hand ideas solely based upon who said them, not on the quality of the ideas.  This is not rational, but it is horribly typical.  I’ve written about this before, this problem of attribution.  So, since it’s the message that matters, not who said it, I will sometimes refrain from revealing a quotation’s source, with implicit apologies to such sources.