holidays

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Thoughts meander like a restless Melkor in the Outer Void…

It’s Friday, and this week I can be thankful therefor, because I do not work tomorrow.  The office will be closed (and locked) on Saturday.  Only those who have keys and the alarm code and some other reason for being there would be there (I suppose someone could break in, but there are cameras and alarms in place, and there is nothing of any significant net value, i.e., value worth risking the alarms and cameras to reach, inside).

Next Friday won’t be as good from a strictly work/not work point of view, but at least it will be Friday the 13th again, for the second month in a row.  Then we will have to wait an average* of 7 years for it to happen that way again.

***

Okay, I guess I’ve always known that I’m weird, but I just wrote a series of footnotes about Friday the 13th and year lengths and lengths of weekly cycle recurrences that dwarfed what I had yet written in the main body of this post.  I think I’m probably the only being in the universe that would write about such things and imagine that anyone else would be interested.

Yeah, definitely weird.

Still, I guess that sort of thing just happens when you talk to yourself in print and share it with any interested parties who might stumble upon it.  Also, when one is without companions or interactions one can, like Melkor, develop thoughts and thought patterns that are unlike those of one’s brethren.

I suppose that can sometimes be a good thing, though it can also sometimes be a very bad thing (rarely as bad as in the fictional Melkor case).  Though all improvement is change, most change is not an improvement‒at least not if it’s not deliberate and directed change.  So if one develops thoughts that are significantly divergent from those of all of one’s peers, odds are that they will not be a net improvement over most of the peer-born thoughts.

I have, of course, mitigated against this somewhat by reading a lot (and consuming other media that deal with science and mathematics and philosophy and such, as well as comedy panel shows).  That’s not randomly chosen reading, either; it’s carefully chosen reading.  I think this has helped improve the general content and tendencies of my thought, because I’ve influenced myself with the carefully thought-out thoughts of very bright people.

I suppose, though, that if one can read what one wants and does so, one is not really isolated from all other thoughts, so one’s own cannot be too very different, or at least are not very likely to be.  That’s good, I think.  Simply developing new thoughts without much input from others would be most likely to lead to some sort of feral state or something akin to schizophrenia.  

So, I guess it can be good to take tangents in one’s thinking, as long as they are not too many and too extreme.  But even given that, it’s clearly useful to have someone to rein one in, if one can, when one goes too far off the rails (yes, that’s a bad metaphor, since a train going off the rails at all is in huge trouble, rails representing a near-binary situation‒if one is a train and one is not on the rails completely, one has experienced a failure of locomotion).

Well, I guess that’s that for this week.  Actually, I suppose that is always that, by some principle of identity or self-reflection or something; I’m sure there’s an “official” name.  “It is what it is” as they say.  What I mean, though, is that I am drawing this post, and this week of posts, to a close now.

I hope you have a very good weekend.

After that I don’t give a shit.

(I’m kidding.)

*I know, I know, we won’t have to wait an average number of anything.  There is a specific and exact number of years before the next time February and March have Fridays the 13th, but I cannot be arsed to work it out just now**.

**Okay, well, since I am unable to keep myself from thinking about it at least a little, I think it’s going to be 6 years from now.  That’s because each regular year is 1 day longer than a multiple of a week:  365/7 is 52 with a remainder of 1, so one day longer than an even number of weekdays.  So next February should have the 13th on a Saturday, then a Sunday the following year, but then on a Tuesday the year after that because of the leap year (366/7 is 52 with remainder 2).  Then it will be Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday.  So 6 years, if my figuring is correct***.

***If it seems counterintuitive that it’s 6 years when the average should be 7, remember that while in this case the leap year makes the next instance come faster, there will be occasional years when Thursday the 13th falls on a leap year and the following year will go straight to Saturday the 13th, the first of another six years (I think) that will be needed for the subsequent Friday the 13th in February.  In any case, 6 plus (6 x ⅙) equals 7, as does 6 + (a x 1/a) no matter what a is****.

****This doesn’t factor in those leap years in which February has a Friday the 13th, but March will not.  That may change the overall calculations somewhat regarding the average time between dual Fridays the 13th, but not the calculations about when the next one will be.

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Nihil vere refert. Quisque videre potest. Nihil vere refert. Nihil vere mihi refert.

Well, I did warn you yesterday that I would be writing a blog post today*.  Go ahead, take a look.

Yesterday’s post was another of my recent, deliberately benign blog posts, not dwelling on my mental health and chronic pain issues, because nobody gives a shit about those things, or at least they don’t want to have to hear about them, because they’re not going to (be able to) do anything about them, and that makes them feel guilty and uncomfortable, which is unpleasantly awkward.

So, anyway, it’s the last day of February in 2026.  We are, in a certain sense, one sixth of the way through the year.

I say “in a certain sense” because it’s not precisely true.  Today is the (31 + 28)th day of the year, so the 59th day of the year.  If that were literally a sixth of the way through the year, the year would only be 354 days long.

It’s somewhat interesting to note here that, because February is shorter than every other month, the first two months of the year are shorter than any subsequent, nonoverlapping** months of the year.  And, let’s see, the first three months of the year have 90 days exactly on non leap years, whereas April thru June have 91, July through September have 92, and October through December also have 92.  So, all the later groups of three months have more days than the first three‒except on leap years, when January through March is 91 days.

Evidently, though, the latter six months of the year always have more days than the first six.  I wonder why they did it that way.  Was there an actual reason or did it just sort of happen?

Of course, I know they can’t be equal except on a leap year, since the number of days in a year is odd.  But why couldn’t they have come up with a way that made the years alternate, with one year‒the odd years perhaps‒having the surplus in the first 6 months and the other years having it in the last 6 months?  On leap years they could be equal.

How might that work?  We need 182 days divided by six months, which means we need four months which have just 30 days and two that have 31.  We could say January and February have 30, March has 31, and then repeat with April, May, and June and then July, August, and September***.  I was about to suggest that on odd years we make January have 31 days and on even years we make July have 31 days, but all leap years are even years, so the latter half would be comparatively short-changed with respect to years in which they are longer. if we add the leap year day to the first half as we do now.

On the other hand, we could put the leap day always in the 2nd half of the year, perhaps in November, or even more sensibly in December:  we would thereby add our extra day to the very end of the year, rather than squeezing it into the earlier part of the year like someone cutting into a line.  Though that would make the second half two days longer than the first, though, which is unpleasantly asymmetrical in a year with an even number of days.

Of course, really, all days are fungible.  I remember seeing on QI once that apparently some sect maintained that they added an extra day not at the end of February but in the middle; I don’t recall precisely where they thought the day was being inserted, alas, but I can imagine some alternative, anatomical suggestions I’d like to make for them.

Days of a month are fungible (dammit!).  It makes no more sense to say that you added a day into the middle of February and pushed subsequent days later than it does to say that you deposited $100 into your bank account right after the 256th dollar that was already there, pushing what had been dollars 257 through 356 to become dollars 357 through 456.  Every dollar is just “a dollar”, every cent is just “a cent”.  It’s rather reminiscent of the way every electron is interchangeable with every other electron (likewise for all other elementary “particles”).

So, on leap years, the extra day of the year is and can only be (in our current system) the 29th of February, because that’s the day-label that isn’t there in other years.

You’re allowed to imagine if you like that you’re adding a day to the middle of the month and pushing the other days back and renaming them.  You’re also free to argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or to debate, without first agreeing on word usages****, whether unattended trees that fall in forests make noises.  That doesn’t mean you’re doing anything that has any bearing on the real world.

Okay, well, that’s been much ado about nothing, hasn’t it?  Or, multum strepitus de nihilo fuit, as is apparently the way to say it in Latin, which almost always sounds fancier, though it doesn’t always sound better aesthetically (consider the above headline’s Latin versus the original English).  English is‒or can be‒quite a beautiful language if you take a step back and see it as if from outside.  It can be hard to distinguish that beauty “from within”, though, because the meanings and usages of the words involved can distract from their inherent loveliness.

Tolkien, for instance, wrote that he thought the most beautiful sounding phrase in English was “cellar door”.  I’m not sure I agree with him on this, but it’s a matter of taste, so there’s no slight, or “diss” or “shade”, involved in not both liking the same thing.

Enough nonsense for now, or at least enough nonsense here in this blog for now.  I’m sure that there is plenty of nonsense to be had elsewhere.  Do try to find some that’s enjoyable for you this weekend.

*That was unless I was lucky enough to get very sick or very injured or to die, which I have apparently not been lucky enough to do by this time.

**I say “nonoverlapping” because February and March combined contain the same number of days as January and February combined.

***I think in the final three months it should be October that always has 31 days, because Halloween really should fall on a day that’s a prime number, not a 30th or a 1st.

****Most such debates tend to devolve into discussions about the “definition” of the word “noise”, as if that were concrete and singular and fixed‒which it is not‒rather than the laws of physics and biology that constrain all the actual events of such an arboreal catastrophe.

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Are gravity and frivolity truly opposites?

It’s Wednesday morning (not quite five o’clock yet) and it is February 25th.  There are only ten more shopping months until Newtonmas*.

For those of you who don’t know (and as a reminder for those of you who do know) Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, 1642 (AD**).  Now, there is a parenthetical here:  Newton was born on December 25th by the Julian*** calendar, which was the one used in England at the time of his birth.  By the Gregorian**** calendar, Newton would have been born in early January of 1643.

This might seem to imply that December 25th nowadays shouldn’t be considered Newtonmas, but of course, it’s a closer fit than celebrating the birth of Jesus on that day; supposedly, biblical scholars have found that Jesus was probably born in the summer or something.  As with many things, “The Church” appropriated the popular holidays celebrating the winter solstice and grafted Christian religious significance onto it.

There’s nothing particularly bad about that.  All these holidays and divisions of the year are fairly arbitrary (though celebrating solstices and equinoxes is common enough in multiple cultures, which makes sense because these are objective events in any given year that can be noticed by any culture that is paying attention).

The length of a year is a concrete, empirical fact, as is the length of a day and the length of a lunar orbit around the Earth.  None of them are straightforward multiples of each other, unfortunately‒they are waves that are not harmonically associated with each other.

I don’t know how long it would take for their “waves” to come back into some primordial alignment and “start over”, but it’s probably moot, because the length of a day and of a lunar orbit and of the orbit of the Earth are changing slowly.  The moon, for instance, is moving steadily (but very slowly) away from the Earth over time, and so its time of orbit is increasing (since things that orbit farther away orbit more slowly).

I think Kepler’s third law was/is that the period of a planet’s orbit around the sun is proportional to the 3/2 power of the length of the semimajor axis of its orbit.  I’m not sure if that exact power holds up on the scale of, say, the lunar orbit, but the laws of gravity are as universal as anything we know.  Indeed, there are materials that are opaque to light, but as far as we know, there are none that are opaque to gravity.  Gravity is nevertheless constrained by the geometry of spacetime, so orbits will always slow down at a faster rate than the distance from the center around which a mass orbits increases.

The inability of anything we know of to block gravity is one thing that makes me take seriously the notion that, at some level, there could be more than three spatial dimensions.  If gravity is not confined to three dimensions then nothing that is so confined could stop it; it would merely flow around any obstacle (maybe gravity waves, for instance, can even diffract around matter and energy, though that might not imply higher dimensions).

This is related, indirectly, to the fact that it is impossible to tie a knot in a string in 4 or higher spatial dimensions.

By the way, having those extra spatial dimensions curled up tiny, as is usually presented in depictions of the notions of string theory, is not the only way for them to exist and be undetected.  If most of the forces in the world we know‒the electromagnetic, the strong force, the weak force, and the various matter-related quantum fields‒are constrained to a 3-brane because their strings are “open-ended”, then we could live in a 3-brane (in which all other forces, including matter, are confined) nested in a higher-dimensional “bulk”.  Gravity could be conveyed by a “looped” string, which could pass through the 3-brane, interacting but not being confined to it.  This could also explain the comparative weakness of the gravitational force and might even explain dark matter (and why it is so difficult to detect).

This sounds extremely promising, maybe, but there are issues and hurdles, not the least that strings and higher spatial dimensions are very difficult to detect, if they exist.  Also, it’s very hard to pin down all the implications mathematically in a useful way.

I remember one lunch break when I was still in medical practice when I tried to see if I could work out mathematically if “dark matter” could be explained by a relatively nearby, parallel brane-universe (it would probably be more than one, but one was difficult enough) whose gravity spills over into and overlaps the gravity of our brane-universe.

Here’s a sort of reproduction of some of the scribbling I did then:

Unfortunately, though I could visualize what I was considering and get an intuitive feel for what the math would be like, my precise mathematical skills were just not up to the task of sorting it out rigorously.  Also, of course, lunch was not long enough, and I had many other things on my mind.  Anyway, findings like the “bullet cluster” provide some fairly strong evidence that “dark matter” is something physical within our three dimensions of space.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  I’ve managed not to talk about my depression and stress and self-destructive urges/wishes (except just now, of course), so I hope you’re pleased to have had those things cloaked from you today.

Take care.

*Working out the exact number of days, I think I figured that it was 302.  December 25th is 7 days before New Years, so it’s day number 358 in the (non-leap) year.  And today is the 25th day of the second month, and January has 31 days, so today is day 56 of the year.  And, of course, 358 – 56 = 302.

**Why not my usual “AD or CE?”  Because at the time, in England, it was just “anno domini”.

***Named for Julius Caesar, though as far as I know, he had no more to do with actually formulating that calendar than he had with the invention of the 7th month.  As far as we know, he wasn’t even born by the then-existing version of Cesarian section, which was more or less always fatal to the mother, and his mother lived well beyond his birth.

****Named after Pope Gregory XIII, also known (by me) as Pope Gregory Peccary*****.  He did not formulate the newer calendar, but supposedly he at least commissioned the Vatican astronomers to create it when it had become obvious that the Julian calendar was not quite tracking the actual year but was overshooting over a long period of time.  So, the Gregorian calendar is better named than the Julian calendar, or so it seems to me.

*****The nocturnal, gregarious wild swine.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, you filthy animals.

Well, guess what.  It’s Saturday now, and I’m writing a blog post, which can only mean that I am working today.  At the last minute, the schedule of the office was changed and now we’re working.  And we’re supposedly going to be doing this now every other (meaning alternating ones) Saturday.  But, of course, I worked last Saturday.  And who knows how things will change in the future?  I’m pretty sure not even the boss knows, because he changes the specifics somewhat irregularly, though there are always colorably reasonable purposes behind such changes.

I suppose I could merely have said, “No, I’m not coming in this weekend.  I worked last weekend, I had to walk to the bank after work and I caused my knees and my pain in general to flare up badly, and that problem continues.  I need a fucking break.”  But, of course, I’m not really built quite that way.  I have been too strongly trained to operate on the approach that to shirk going to work is to be a jerk*.

So, here I am, at the office, and it’s the middle of the night.  That’s right, when it got to be time to leave, I was in too much pain to want to ride the train‒it’s not comfortable to sit in, and I usually have to go to the upper levels to find a seat, which is a little exacerbating and occasionally exasperating‒and I didn’t want to pay to Uber back to the house like I did on Monday and then Thursday for the above reasons, so…I stayed here in the office overnight.

I’m tired of being in pain, I can tell you that.  I wish it were the sort of thing one could simply “get used to”, but biology does not tend to select for creatures that can get used to and ignore pain.  That would defeat the whole usefulness of pain.  Make no mistake:  like fire alarms, pain was and is (and probably always will be) terribly useful.  And “terribly” has more than one legitimate meaning here.

The trouble is that in the modern world, we suffer from and yet survive injuries and disorders that would almost never have been survived by our ancestors, and we can live on with the consequences of these injuries and illnesses for decades, but our nervous systems don’t have any clear function that suppresses or diminishes pain after a while.  There’s no selection pressure favoring such a thing.  Even for our ancestors who might have survived to have chronic pain, that problem tended to develop after peak reproductive years had already passed, and so evolution literally could not and cannot detect the issue.

Indeed, it’s just barely conceivable, though by no means demonstrated, that it might be good for male humans who have injuries that hamper them to feel the pain worsen, to have it lead to them removing themselves from the population in one way or another.  When they can no longer be physical providers, in order to increase the share of resources for their offspring and their other kin, they can kill themselves, directly or indirectly, giving the genes they share with close relatives that harbor that tendency a selective advantage.  This is hypothetical, bordering on speculative, but it might make some sense.

This could also be related to female humans being better suited to endure long-term pain than males, since matrilineal support among human tribes is common***, but that’s getting ever more speculative.

Don’t get me wrong; the ideas are plausible.  But it’s just when one’s ideas are strongly plausible‒but not specifically tested or backed by clear and specific evidence‒that one must be especially harsh and strict with oneself.  It’s comparatively simple, and psychologically rewarding, to come up with plausible and logical hypotheses, but even if one is very smart, most of one’s hypotheses are going to be incorrect.  Whether you’re more Popperian or more Bayesian, the crucial usefulness of testing a hypothesis to try to refute it or to see how your credences shift is inescapable.

This mildly interesting digression doesn’t change the fact that I am in searing pain lately, and it doesn’t seem to diminish much for long.  I’m already prone to dysthymia/chronic depression (veering into the acute stage frequently) and anxiety with at least some obsessive compulsive patterns, all of it occurring in a nervous system that is…atypical from the start.

I hate the world.  I hate my body.  I hate the twisted mockery my life has become.  I hate large parts of my mind (but not all of it).  I hate being around people.  I hate being alone.  I really just ought to stop the whole fucking ride and get off.  I just need to work up the nerve and the commitment.  I’m getting there, believe me.

Anyway, I hope you’re having just a lovely Valentine’s Day.

*And to rhyme all the time is to act like a slime and be covered with grime**.

**I know, none of that makes sense.  It’s not really meant to make sense.  I just accidentally did some internal rhyming in a sentence and that stimulated me to do more of it.

***There are good biological reasons for this as well.  Mothers, and therefore maternal grandmothers, all know whether a child is their child or not, so it’s easier to know that it’s a good idea to spend effort and resources on those descendants.  Males, in general, can not be as certain.

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“‘Cause I’m your superhero. We are standing on the edge…”

Well, it’s Friday the 13th.  That’s at least one good thing about today.  And, of course, next month will also have a Friday the 13th, as I’ve noted previously (I don’t know specifically in which post I noted it, and I don’t really have the urge to go figure it out, so I’ll leave that to you to do if you’re interested).

It is slightly interesting to think about the fact that, on average, one of every seven Februarys will have a Friday the 13th, but not all of those will then lead to a subsequent Friday the 13th in March, because every 4th February will have 29 days*, by the Gregorian calendar, which is the one the world uses overall.

So, the total fraction of years with dual Fridays the 13th would be something like 1/7 minus a further ¼ of that one seventh—so 4/28 (i.e., 1/7) minus 1/28 (1/4 x 1/7), which leads us to the rough conclusion that only three out of 28 years will entail February and March each having a Friday the 13th.  That’s slightly less than one out of every nine years.  And since I’m 56, which is twice 28, I should have experienced about 6 such years in my life (perhaps counting this year).

Mind you, the numbers aren’t quite right overall.  The Gregorian calendar waives the extra day in February on years that are divisible by 100, i.e., the turns of centuries.  However, there’s a further exception to that:  the turn of a millennium, like what we all just had in the year 2000, does keep its 29 days in February.  So that brings the average closer to the raw number, but doesn’t account for the extra  ones that happen at more ordinary turns of centuries.

Of course, the only turn of a century through which I have lived—and through which I am likely to live**—was indeed the turn of a millennium, so I guess for me, the fraction 3/28 should be fairly accurate.

I could, if I were so inclined, go back to the first year in which I experienced a February—that would be 1970 (AD or CE)—and work through them to find out just how many dual Fridays the 13th I’ve experienced.  With modern computer-based calendars it would even be relatively easy.  But I don’t think I am so inclined.

Okay, that’s enough of that for now.  Actually, it’s probably too much of that, at least from any normal person’s (i.e., not my) perspective.  On to other things.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, and I wrote yesterday’s post on the lapcom as well; I am doing this partly to spare my thumbs, but also to try to encourage myself to use the lapcom more and maybe even to write fiction again.  I don’t know whether or not that will happen, but it’s also just more natural for me to use the lapcom.  I’ve been typing, in one way or another, since I was 11 years old, if memory serves.  Clearly I have not been using a smartphone nearly that long, because they have not existed for that long.

Also, even when I saw the imagined future tech on Start Trek:  The Next Generation of tablets with virtual keyboards, I thought they looked like a terrible idea.  How lame, how unaesthetic, just to tap at a flat screen with no real keys.  Also, the “keys” on such devices in the real world are too effing small to be used to type in any traditional way.  Not but what one can get to be pretty speedy with them—I can zip along pretty well on my smartphone—but it’s nothing compared to being able to use one’s whole set of fingers to write.

Although, I’ve often touted the value of writing things longhand before retyping them into the computer, especially for fiction, because it can slow one down beneficially.  I did that—because I had no choice, being at the time a guest of the Florida DOC—with Mark Red, with The Chasm and the Collision, and with the “short” story Paradox City.  I don’t know whether they come across as better or worse or indistinguishable from the stories I have written directly onto the computer.

I would say that they might tend to be shorter, but Paradox City is a nominally short story that was about 60 hand-written pages long, so that didn’t make things much shorter.  Also, I think The Chasm and the Collision is longer than Son of Man, but that may just be a function of the nature of those stories.

Certainly Unanimity is longer than anything else I’ve written, by quite a margin, but that surprised me as much as it might anyone else.  I just started writing the story and it ended up taking that long to tell it.  That happens.  Outlaw’s Mind began as an idea for a short story, but there was definitely a lot there implicitly, even in the original idea, that made it unreasonable to plan to make it “short”.

Anyway, if any readers of this blog have also read my stories and have noticed any tendency toward difference between the initially handwritten and the entirely computer written (meaning written on a computer, not by a computer, unless one is referring to me as a computer) ones, I’d be pleased to get your feedback.

In other personal news, well…my pain is leveling off a bit, though my leg joints still feel loose and floppy and unstable, so I have to be careful, and I have my general persistent tension and neuropathic discomfort in my lower body.  I’ve tried to adjust (and decrease) my workout a bit to compensate, and that seems to be doing some good, but I cannot go without working out, because that tends to make my pain worse.

My mood is pretty much as it usually is, but I’ll spare you that hellscape out of courtesy.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I am not supposed to be working this weekend.  If that changes—in other words, if I do work—I guess I’ll write a post.  Though, really, I should try to get back into Outlaw’s Mind and finish what I had started earliest so I could then get on to newer things.  And if wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in manure***.

Tomorrow is also Valentine’s Day, but this is of no relevance to me, and that holiday hasn’t been relevant to me for more than 15 years, possibly quite a bit more.  It is not likely to be relevant to me again this side of the grave (and even less likely to be relevant on the other side).

I hope you all have a good weekend, even those of you who have loved ones with whom you can revel in the romance of the holiday.  It’s not your fault that you piss me off.

*This means, of course, that there will be some March Fridays the 13th in years where there was no February Friday the 13th.  If my figuring is correct, those will be the leap-year Februarys in which the 13th falls on a Thursday.

**If I were to be alive in 2100, I would be 130 years old, which would make me even with the Old Took, and which would be substantially older than any human is known to have lived.

***And ironically, any wishes for the manure to go away would just make things worse!

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Who’s hogging all the ground?

It’s Monday, and I think it’s Groundhog* Day in the US, but I may be misremembering that.  It’s never been a holiday to which I’ve paid much attention.  The notion of the groundhog seeing its shadow and that leading to six more weeks of winter is one of those rare superstitions that I don’t think anyone I’ve met actually takes seriously.

I was awake almost the entire night last night.  It’s very frustrating.  On Friday nights (when I don’t work on Saturday) I tend to sedate myself rather thoroughly, though I use only legal, OTC methods.  To a slightly lesser degree, I also do so on Saturday nights, though I have to make sure I get up to do my laundry on Sunday morning.

But then, on Sunday nights‒and to some degree every other weeknight‒I have a terrible time getting to sleep and then staying asleep.  And then my brain becomes ever more frazzled and worn down, even after a relatively restful weekend, at the very beginning of the week, and it rarely improves as the days pass through the weeks.

Of course, my rest isn’t helped by the fact that I’m continuing through a flare-up of my chronic pain.  That’s probably not helped by the unusually cold weather in south Florida; it went down to 33 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday night and about 35 last night.  That’s as chilly as it’s been since I’ve lived down here.  I know, though, that cold weather is not the main culprit behind my pain flare-ups, because they happen at least as often during the middle of the summer, when it is neither cold nor dry.

Also, my chronic pain problem only began after I was living in Florida.  Before coming here, New York City was the warmest place I had lived, but I never developed any chronic pain problems up there.  Of course, I’m older than I used to be, which is what happens when you haven’t died yet.  But that didn’t happen all at once, whereas my chronic pain sort of did‒and not terribly long after I had moved to Florida.  So, the problem is basically internal, a neuromusculoskeletal kind of thingy.  I suppose perhaps changes of pressure might affect it, but temperature doesn’t seem to be a significant factor.

Anyway, sorry, I know that must be tremendously boring.  Believe me, I get quite bored of being in pain, which has been ongoing for more than twenty years, with no days off, not even major holidays.  It gets very, very old.  It certainly contributed to the downfall of the life I had tried to build and to the wreckage in which I now live.  And it’s damnably hard to build anything back up, literally or figuratively, when one is in pain.

So, yeah, a lot of things that stir my ambition‒and ambition has always been a noteworthy part of my character‒get left behind at least partly because I just can’t keep doing things when I’m in pain.  I don’t know if that’s because biology has programmed us not to want to do things that are associated with pain (and most everything in my life is so associated now) or just because dealing with the pain wears out one’s willpower, in a sort of “learned helplessness” situation.  Probably, both aspects are involved, and there are likely to be others as well.

Okay, I know, this is still boring, isn’t it?  Sorry.  I would love to say insightful things or pose interesting questions or make serious comments about various things happening in the world.  But, alas, I am rather overdone.  The more I try to explore what’s happening in my life and mind, the more I have trouble finding much that’s positive.

I am surely an emotional drain on those near me; at the very least, I know that I am unpleasant to be around.  At least I’m not so unkind as to be willing to continue to inflict myself upon others when I know that I am almost always a net negative.

I’m really very worn out, in more than one sense.  And I don’t see much to which to look forward in the world.  Humanity in general is becoming even more disappointing than I expected it to be, which is saying something.  That’s not to say they don’t have their good aspects and individuals, just as I think most of the rest of the “natural world” is no more beautiful or inspiring or beneficent than humans are.

I’m very discouraged.  I suppose the only good thing about my chronic depression is that it would probably need to improve (perhaps due to antidepressants) for me to be able to find the energy to kill myself.  This may seem ironic, even contradictory, but it is a recognized phenomenon.

All right, that’s enough.  It’s time I stopped inflicting myself on all of you, at least for the today.  I hope you all have good days (or a good day overall).  You’ve earned it by reading through my dreck.

*I always thought of it as “Groundhog‘s Day”, but apparently it is not a possessive.

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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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The moving finger writes, and having writ, now must edit

This is it:  my last blog post of 2025 (barring some truly unexpected circumstances).  I will probably be writing a post tomorrow, because I think we’re going to be working tomorrow, despite the fact that it will be New Year’s Day, and a stunningly large fraction of the people of the world will be hung over or otherwise exhausted from ringing in the New Year.

I suspect New Year’s Eve/Day is the most widely celebrated holiday in the world, far surpassing the numbers who celebrate any mere religious holiday.  Since the world in general uses the same “Gregorian”* calendar, it’s a rare commonality for the human race, and worth celebrating.

If only they could work on finding more things in common, since after all, they have almost everything actually in common with each other.  And yet, they focus on trivial cultural or superficial differences and battle viciously over them, as if they were fighting truly alien beings.  Talk about your narcissism of small differences.

Humans are so stupid.  The more of them there are, the stupider, somehow, as though the lowest common denominator tends always to dominate the dynamics.  It’s like Tommy Lee Jones’s character said in Men In Black:  a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

That isn’t always the case, obviously.  Humans have accomplished great things in large groups, interacting with mutual exchange to mutual benefit (or not so mutual benefit), but that probably only happens in rarefied circumstances, discovered or arranged by luck or by the skill of one or a few who are cleverer than average, and sustained thanks to a form of natural selection.

Because of the sheer power of such organizations of people, those rare few types of interactions can endure for tremendous lengths of time and be astonishingly effective and broadly prevalent.  This can distract one from the fact that the ideas were so singular and ingenious.

Money, for instance, has been invented more than once, but it’s a relatively low-hanging and particularly nutritious fruit, allowing as it does for the far more efficient exchange of goods and services to (ideally) mutual benefit.  Of course, commerce can be cheated and can thereby become nonproductive or even counterproductive, especially if one or a few entities obtain disproportionate wealth and power.  This sort of selection for detrimental equilibria happens in the world of biology as well.

Imagine a football game in which, every time one team scores, that team gains an extra player and the other team loses one.  Once one side takes the lead, they’re likely to keep it and increase it, making them ever more likely to maintain their dominance.  It can make for a pretty boring and not very productive game.  Such a situation is worth avoiding, even if you happen to be on the winning team.

Written language is, of course, the single most important human invention‒more important than even the invention of language itself, though that was a necessary prerequisite, so the argument could be made that it is more important or at least more fundamental.  Thankfully, language is a different type of thing than money, so it’s not as easy to game it to secure an unreasonable advantage for any individual or group.

There is, of course, an often-used attempted strategy of discouraging or preventing literacy in some groups or one sex (always the same one, it seems) to keep them from gaining the power that written language can impart, but it can be harder to keep those systems in place than for a monopoly to maintain its economic advantage.

Still, even written language isn’t automatically self-protective.  It’s possible for misinformation and disinformation to spread and even prosper, at least for a time (such situations tend to self-destruct), and it can do terrible damage, much as mutations in somatic DNA can lead to cell dysfunction, cell death, and sometimes cancer.

Analogous things can happen to whole civilizations as well, and they have happened many times, but that’s no reason to blame language or learning.  One doesn’t prevent cancer by eliminating DNA itself or by killing the host organism (that does eliminate the cancer, but in an unsatisfying way).  Only better, more thorough thinking and language, the equivalent of DNA proofreading, can do that without catastrophe.

And I, by writing this post, try to contribute to the good language, the useful or at least interesting language, in the world.  I suspect I will continue to do so as the next year begins.  I hope you enjoy whatever celebrations you have in store.

*Though Pope Gregory the Whatever Number was merely the one who commissioned it.  Astronomers and mathematicians actually did the work.  We have some scientifically literate Popes nowadays, at least, and a Belgian priest was among the first to do rigorous mathematics using Einstein’s new field equations (though Friedman got there a little earlier, his work was apparently not as convincing) to demonstrate that the universe could not be static** based upon them.

**Leading Einstein to introduce Λ (lambda), the cosmological constant.  He later called this his biggest blunder (supposedly) but it turned out to be a useful and term and concept in describing the apparent evolution of the universe as we know it now.  Like Planck before him, even Einstein’s fudges*** were deeply insightful and useful.

***Speaking of Einstein, I recently got an email from my old med school alumni association with the subject line “You are responsible for Einstein’s success”.  To which I so wanted to reply, “I know, right?  But did he mention me in any of his papers or even throw me a word of thanks (in German or otherwise) in his acceptance speech when he got his Nobel Prize for demonstrating that light comes in ‘packets’ which we now call photons?  No!  Ungrateful bastard.”

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“For years and years I roamed.”

Well, I might as well stick to the same pattern, so…ahem.  It’s New Year’s Eve Eve today, which means tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve and Thursday will be New Year’s Day.  At that point, if we wanted, we could just start counting days down or up‒i.e., Day 1, Day 2…or Day 365, Day 364…and so on.

Of course, if we were going to do such numbering, I guess it would make sense to divide things up into months for easier “local” day-keeping, which is what we’ve done as a civilization.  But those months are irregular and rather haphazardly named.  This can occasionally be irritating, though of course I have a sentimental fondness for at least some of the month names.

Unfortunately for the goal of making months of uniform length, the number of days in the year isn’t evenly divisible by any number larger than 5, unless I’m mistaken…

Yes, I was correct, unless you want to divide the year into 5 groups of 73 days.  That might be kind of fun, since 73 is one of those overlooked prime numbers, and it has the slight extra fun that its digits add up to 10, the base of our usual number system.

Still, especially considering the necessity of leap years (with the convoluted adding of days, removing of seconds, not adding a day when it’s the turn of a century unless it’s also the turn of a millennium and so on) it seems cumbersome to divide the year evenly.

I rather like the solution of making 12 months that are each 30 days long and having the remaining 5 (or 6) days be a period of celebration.  It could be held around one of the equinoxes or the solstices, or it could even be split up between two of them.  I’m inclined to put them at the end of the year, when the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere happens, because it’s long been a holiday time anyway.

Of course, this all biases against those in the southern hemisphere, but there are significantly fewer people in the southern hemisphere, or at least there were the last time I looked into it…

Yes, I was correct again, it seems.  According to my quick and dirty check, there are on the order of about a billion people in the southern hemisphere, as opposed to the remaining roughly seven billion people in the northern hemisphere.  I guess that means the winter solstice would be a good time for those separate days.  And I’ve not heard many Aussies complain about being able to go to the beach on Christmas or New Year.

Mind you, one could do that down where I live anyway, if one were so inclined.  I am not.  The beaches on the east coast of Florida are mostly annoying, and the Atlantic is not much fun for swimming.  The west coast of Florida, where one swims in the Gulf of Mexico, is much more pleasant.

I’m not a very big beach person at the best of times (or the worst of times) but I have quite a few pleasant memories of being on one or another beach on the Gulf (of Mexico).  They all date back to at least 33 years ago, though, so maybe it was just due to the nature of youth that I enjoyed them.

Alas, I’m not truly young anymore by most standards; I’m 954 years old.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Or, wait, maybe not.  I know that exoplanets have been discovered that orbit very close to their stars, and so have orbits that can be as short as a few Earth days (possibly fewer).  So, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, which it so far looks as though it is, and if there is no lower constraint due to the laws of physics on the length of possible “years”, then there exists, somewhere in spacetime, a planet by the years of which I would be 954 years old.

Actually, if spacetime is infinite, there should be an infinite number of such planets even if they happen only once within any cosmic horizon.  But let’s not get into that right now.

Let’s do the math; it’s simple and easy, so why not?  56 years old x 365.25 days in an Earth year makes me 20,454 days old, at least on my latest birthday.  Dividing that by 954, which is almost a thousand, should give a year length of roughly 20 days per year…okay, well, the “exact” number of 21 and 70/159 days per planetary year is what is required to make me 954 years old.

Actually, though, since the number of days in that hypothetical year is smaller than the time since my last Earthday birthday, I will have to adjust my days’ old age number to the precise one:  20,525 days, which if divided by 954 gives us a year length of 21 and 491/954 days, or 21.51 days (playing slightly free and loose with significant figures).  There will be a range of possibilities, of course, since I could be anywhere in the 21-ish day course of my 955th year and still be able to call myself 954 years old, if we go by similar conventions to those followed by humans on Earth.

Okay, well…that was sort of a weird digression.  I know, I’m weird, so maybe given that, a weird digression is, in a sense, not weird.  But given other considerations, it still is.

I am an odd person, I know (though I don’t know if I’m prime).  Sometimes‒rather often‒I think I’m losing my mind.  At other times, though, I think my mind is functioning within parameters, but it is contemplating things that are vast and potentially troubling to the feeble mortal ego if one does not drape oneself in the obscuring veil and cloak of delusion.  But my fabric sensitivity doesn’t allow me to tolerate such garments for long; you could say I lack PPE for such things.  Perhaps the secret is to destroy the ego (which may well just be an illusion, anyway), but that is more easily said than done.

Who knows?  Not I.

And yes, it’s “Not I” not “Not me”.  You wouldn’t say, “Me don’t know”, so you shouldn’t say “Not me” in response to the question “Who knows?”  Apologies to David Bowie and Nirvana‒but The Man Who Sold the World is a song, and so they are allowed poetic license.