holidays

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April, come she has. No contradictions allowed.

Well, it’s the first of April, so‒April Fools!  Except that, given that it is April Fools’ (Fool’s?) Day, to say April Fools about the fact that it is April 1st would be contradictory.  It’s rather like the self-paradoxical statement:  “This sentence is a lie”.  Because if that sentence is a lie, then it is not a lie, but that would mean that it is a lie, but that would mean that it isn’t, and so on.

Of course, one can write paradoxical things down any time one wishes.  That doesn’t constrain or harm actual reality in any way whatsoever.  Words‒and written language especially‒are the single greatest human invention, but they are not literally magical.  No matter how much hatred you try to put behind it, or what manner of “wand” you use, shouting Avada kedavra will never kill anyone or anything*.

And while we can imagine that the world would be much more polite if words could directly cause things to manifest‒including paradoxes‒I think we can all feel pretty glad that people can’t kill us just by telling us to drop dead.

So, make up all the paradoxical sentences that you might like; no actual paradoxes can exist.  If you come to a point of cognitive dissonance, you should probably focus on the fact of that discomfort and try to sort it out.  People can “believe” two or more contradictory things (sometimes before breakfast) but they cannot be right about more than one (though they can be wrong about all of them).

Anyway, enough of that nonsense.  It’s mildly engaging, but not terribly durable as a topic, or so it seems to me at this moment.

I am still (as far as I know) unable to use any of Fuckerberg’s apps, and to be honest, I haven’t even tried since before the last time I wrote about it.  It’s annoying, to some degree, to lose access to some entertainment, but it’s not as though I had any right to their use.  I was not the customer, I was the product, as is the case with all of you, too, if you use your social media for free.  Facebook et al sell advertisers access to and information about you.

Now, if I had been kicked off some service for which I had paid and for which I was paying, then I would have a beef**.

Speaking of paid services, what I really should do‒what I want to crave doing‒is to spend those moments that I would spend looking at funny reels on Instagram or whatever doing stuff on Brilliant dot org.  I pay for that service, and it is very good.  I also have a lifetime subscription to Babbel, which I obtained to try to encourage myself to learn more languages (duh!).

So, at some level, at the frontal lobe level, I want to use those sites and their services, to hone and increase my skills.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have contracted the services.  But in any given moment, the activation energy required to begin using them is higher than that for doing other, less beneficial things.

But maybe now that will be a bit different.  Maybe now that differential, that equilibrium, will shift.  I mean, it’s almost certain that it has shifted, or has begun to shift.  It’s all but impossible for one to remove a large factor from a situation that is in dynamic near-equilibrium and to have that near-equilibrium remain unchanged.

I hope that I shall be able to make use of this to improve my mind‒at least to improve my abilities, if not the overall nature of the thing.  At least it would be good if I get some more such use in.

I will miss the sort-of-social-circles one can have and the connection with old friends and distant family members on social media, however tenuous and removed and even occasionally illusory it might be.

I don’t socialize in real life, other than at work during the working day, and that’s a limited thing.  So I feel a little worried about being more disconnected from larger society.  We all know what happened to Melkor when he spent too much time in the Void, away from his brethren, and started to develop thoughts…unlike theirs.

Well, maybe we don’t all know, but read The Silmarillion if you wish to learn more.  It’s really good.

I guess I always have this blog and those who follow it, at least (and that’s no small thing).  I am concerned that some people who only see the blog via Facebook or Threads might not get to interact with it now.  But they are all hereby encouraged to leave a comment or two below.  I welcome them.  Seriously.

That’s all I have to say about that for right now.  I hope you all have an excellent day.

*Unless maybe you swallow a small insect or similar when you open your mouth.  I don’t think that’s how people imagine “the killing curse” working however.

**I’ve been aware of and have occasionally used this expression for as long as I can remember, but it does sound very weird if you listen to it as if from an outsider’s perspective.  “Wait.  You have a…beef?  You have a beef?  What the hell are you talking about?”

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“You know the day destroys the night. Night divides the day.”

It’s Friday again.  But it’s not just any Friday‒it’s the Vernal Equinox, the day when the line between the Earth and the Sun is orthogonal to the line of the axis of the Earth, and so the day and the night will be (effectively) of equal length.  This is more fun in some ways than the solstices, because it’s the same for everyone, northern and southern hemispheres.

Of course, in the north it’s officially the Vernal Equinox, heralding the beginning of spring, whereas in the south it heralds the beginning of autumn.  I don’t know, however, if it is officially called the Autumnal Equinox in the south.  Probably it is.  After all, I’m sure they have their “official” winter solstice on what is “our” summer solstice and vice versa.  It would be a bit perverse for them to do otherwise.

It’s somewhat interesting to note, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson has pointed out with some ardor, that since, for instance, winter officially begins on the “shortest”* day of the year, the days actually get longer and longer through the winter (and the opposite happens in summer), until finally, on the Vernal Equinox, they break even with it and then daytime passes the night.

I wonder what Zeno would say about that race.

On a different topic, it’s quite rainy here this morning, and it’s a rather chilly rain, which is mildly unusual for south Florida.  It occurred to me, seeing just how sloppy it is here at the train station, that I hope it will not be so rainy at my destination.  What’s interesting about that is that it may not be rainy at all there, at work.  And yet, it could still be raining heavily down here in Hollywood.

In the modern world, weather can seem to change much more rapidly than it really does because we travel through the weather, whereas throughout all of our ancestral time we would merely have seen the weather passing over us.  It can give a somewhat misleading impression of how quickly the weather changes, even in Florida, where it can be raining on one side of a street and dry on the other**.

I recall when visiting my grandparents as a child, that there were times we would all be going somewhere in the car, and as we went along it would start to rain heavily, all of a sudden‒and then, just as suddenly, as we went along, it would stop.  And then it would suddenly start again, and then stop again, and so on.

But even in south Florida (or, well, west central Florida back then) the weather doesn’t change like that if you’re sitting still.  It changes quite rapidly compared to many other places, but not the way it seems to do when one is traveling in a modern vehicle.

For some reason, I feel as though there’s an analogy or insight available here with respect to special and possibly general relativity, but I don’t feel like trying to explore it right now.

I did bring my hardcover copy of General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum, which is part of Leonard Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum series, with me when I left the office yesterday, thinking I might read it while on the train last night.  I did not read it.  There are too many distractions, it seems, for me to be able simply to flip my attention into focus on that, however much I really am interested in it.  It’s frustrating.

I have read part of it, mind you, as well as parts of the other Theoretical Minimum series.  I have all of them in both physical copies and on Kindle, so really, I didn’t need to bring the physical book.  But it is a lovely hardcover edition, and I hoped that might make me more likely to read it, since reading a nice hardcover is much more pleasant than reading a Kindle book on one’s phone, though that can still be fun.

I also entertain the admittedly absurd fantasy that I might be reading the hardcover copy on the train some day and some other, like-minded person (preferably an attractive woman) might notice and be interested because she is into the subject as well, and so on.

This is particularly silly as pipe dreams go, because even if such an absurd event happened, I would definitely screw the whole thing up.  I tend to be quite terse when strangers try to speak with me, even if they are beautiful women.

Looking back on my life, I’m sure that there have been several occasions in which someone was expressing interest in me, but I didn’t get it or got too anxious and froze up.  Sometimes I figured it out soon after, and sometimes it took longer.  There are probably some cases that I never noticed at all, even in hindsight.

Of course, I was married for fifteen years, during some of which I was in medical practice, and so such interactions would have had a different character.  There were sometimes more flagrant and obvious “advances” in that time, because, well…doctor.  But I never had any inclination to pursue them, even when I recognized them; I’m not the kind to want to cheat on a partner.  Hell, I’m not even the kind to seek a new partner two decades after my wife divorced me (though I briefly tried a little).

I wouldn’t mind a nice relationship, but I know that I am difficult to handle in many ways (I try not to be, but I am weird, and not in some charmingly popular manner), and in certain senses, my standards are high, or at least they are fairly strict.  For instance, someone who doesn’t read for pleasure is unlikely to be terribly interesting to me.  It’s not impossible; there are other ways for people to be interesting and smart.  But not liking to read would definitely be an entry for the “con” column, not the “pro” one.

I don’t know what I’m doing, going on about such nonsense.  I am not going to have any more romantic relationships in my life.  I am going to die alone, as is only appropriate and to be expected for something like me.  And while I won’t say “it can’t happen soon enough for my taste”***, I do really feel impatient for it.  I wouldn’t say I am “eager” for it, because that’s a positive feeling.  I am just quietly desperate for it, like someone trying to find an exit from a (slowly) burning building.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you have a good one, and that you have a good weekend as well.  Yes, I mean you.

As for me, well, I am to be working tomorrow as far as I know, so I will be writing a blog post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen.

*Of course, this is a bit of a misleading characterization.  The day is the length that it is‒roughly 24 hours‒and does not change very quickly, for which fact we should all be grateful.  It’s just the length of time in a given day during which the sun is above the horizon (so to speak) that varies.

**This is not an exaggeration.  I have seen it myself on many occasions.  It seemed to happen more frequently in the area where my grandparents used to live (Spring Hill, north of Tampa) than it does down here‒or maybe I noticed it more because I was a kid‒but it is very real and quite impressive when it happens.

***Except to say that I won’t be saying it.

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Is it small talk if you discuss the weather despite being alone?

Well, I brought the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday evening, but nevertheless I am writing this post on my smartphone.  Why?  Because the lapcom is more inefficient to get out of my bag and put back in my bag, and the smartphone is much easier to unsheathe and restow‒it just sits in my front pocket when not in use.  I can also use it to check the temperature, which is a bit chilly this morning even here in south Florida.  I’m sure that it’s quite a bit worse for regions north of us that have been hit by the wave of unpleasant recent weather.

I don’t find it unpleasant for it to get a bit cool down here‒55 degrees Fahrenheit* with a bit of overcast and some rain feels like autumn up north where I grew up, and that was always my favorite season.  It’s usually rather easy to adjust by wearing more clothes and moving around a bit if one feels chilly.

On the other hand, there’s not much to do about the heat and humidity other than to stay inside air conditioned buildings.  That isn’t very much fun, unfortunately, especially when one lives in a state that is touted for its beautiful and interesting nature.  After a point, though, one can take off as many clothes as one likes, but one will not get cooler; one will only be at risk for sunburn in rather uncomfortable places.

The worst part, though, is the humidity.  Yes, humans developed in sub-Saharan Africa, so we’re built well for endurance in hot environments (humans have more sweat glands per square inch of skin than any other animal).  But humidity is another matter.  Humidity is almost like an electronic counter measure to sweat’s ability to cool the body.  Sweat works by evaporative cooling; like blowing on soup, taking away the warmest liquid molecules lowers the average temperature of those remaining, and so on.

But evaporation depends at least partially on the differential in concentration between the liquid and the gas “above” it.  If the air is already saturated (or nearly so) with water vapor, there is going to be significantly less tendency for net evaporation to occur, and thus there will be less cooling.

This is why the reassuring and somewhat comical statement, “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat” is actually pertinent and indeed positive.  If the air is dry, and if they have adequate water, humans can tolerate surprisingly intense heat.  But when it’s humid, things don’t work nearly as well.

Also, when it tends to be humid and rainy a lot, one finds fungi and algae and the like growing on almost every immobile surface, as well as on some that are mobile, such as human intertriginous areas.

Anyway, to make a long diatribe slightly longer by summarizing it, I don’t mind cooler weather, but humidity is very annoying when it’s warm.

As for other matters, well, the holiday is over from yesterday, and I did not get to eat any corned beef and cabbage.  That’s a bit disappointing.  The next major holiday (which is coming soon) is the Passover/Easter holiday.  There’s no particular food related to these holidays that I like, though, nor really much of anything else come to think of it.

I did get into the St. Patrick’s Day spirit by drawing a shamrock yesterday, then scanning it and coloring it and fiddling with it a bit between other things at work.  Here, this is how it’s turned out so far:

It’s nothing terribly impressive, but it’s at least one very tiny, mild, creative act.  Not that writing this blog isn’t creative, but it’s not as creative as writing fiction, or not creative in the same way.  And drawing a picture is closer to writing a story than to writing a blog post.  Though I have to admit, at first glance drawing and writing would seem to be somewhat too different to compare.  And yet, I think I’m not the only person who has a deep, intuitive feeling that they are part of a strong, self-similar group.

It’s quite curious.  I wonder if such seemingly odd combinations are common among intelligent life forms.  Of course, if this planet is the only place in the universe on which intelligent life exists, then it’s a universal attribute of such life, if we count only creatures that use languages and create and use artifacts.

Well, this has been a weirdly inconstant blog post, especially for a relatively short one.  It’s not just meandering around among topics, it’s ricocheting.  I would prefer to meander; ricocheting seems like it would be very bad for my chronic back and joint pain.

*If it were 55 degrees Celsius, it would not be chilly at all.  Indeed, many people would be dying around here from the heat.  If it were 55 Kelvin, then, yeah, that would definitely be chilly.  Not that anyone would feel it, because we would all be dead if it were that cold.

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“Silence will fall”

Oh, right, today is Saint Patrick’s Day, a holiday celebrated more intensely (but far less religiously, I suspect) in the US than in Ireland.  It’s a holiday in which everyone here is said to be a little bit Irish.  I am largely Irish, in fact (by ancestry), so I feel no need to put on an act.  I also am not going to wear green today‒it’s been a long time since I’ve worn anything but black‒and I don’t recommend pinching me, or the only green you’ll have to be concerned about will be whether that will be the color of your rotting corpse or just the color of the bile leaking from your perforated gall bladder.

I certainly don’t expect to drink any beer or stout or even Irish whiskey today.  I do like corned beef and cabbage, and there’s a restaurant near work that makes a great meal of that, but they will probably be a bit oversubscribed today, and I really hate having to jockey with other people for such things.  I would rather go without.

I guess I’ll see what happens.  Getting corned beef from the restaurant is the sort of thing that’s enticing from a (temporal) distance, but the closer one gets, the more it loses its charm and feels not at all worth the effort.

There is an astonishing number of such things.  So many things are so much better in the anticipation than in the experience.  Even James Bond, in the Ian Fleming novels, noted that his favorite drink of the day was the one he had in his head before the first actual one*.

So, the anticipation is better than the payoff in many cases, which goes right along with my recognition that pleasure and joy cannot ever be durable outcomes, biologically speaking.  It’s not an evolutionarily stable strategy.

One might imagine that one could build up one’s anticipation of a thing, but then trick oneself and not give oneself the reward in the end, but the anticipation modules only really become active if you believe that they will be satisfied.

Failure to get the reward after anticipation can be more unpleasant than never anticipating it, as I think most people would agree.  And then, of course, after repeated disappointments, one stops anticipating, so one loses even that positive aspect of the situation.  “Edging”, as they call it, is only reliably pleasurable because of the knowledge that eventually there will be release.

Okay, that’s enough vaguely risqué crap.  I guess it may be better than dealing with all my dark stuff, which I have been withholding deliberately and consciously of late, since it just seems to make people uncomfortable but doesn’t engender any useful ideas or beneficial interactions or anything remotely resembling help.

So, apart from minor stuff like this, I’m going to just hold the negative thoughts back from sharing, and when I break, that will be it.  Like Keyzer Soze ( “And then, like that [fwoof]…he’s gone!”) you’ll probably never hear from me again. 

That will probably not be today, by the way, just in case you’re worried.  If someone thought some crisis were imminent today they might panic and actually, accidentally do something.  But of course, that’s a horrible way to approach matters, only intervening in a panic when catastrophe is right in front of one, at the very last moment‒when success is least likely‒when intervening earlier might actually have a decent chance of producing a good outcome.

It seems so intuitive.  If you’re trying to go somewhere, the sooner you realize you’re headed in the wrong direction and correct your course, the easier it will be to get where you want to go.  It’s easier to steer the future in the direction you hope to reach if you start the steering early (if you do it intelligently, anyway‒randomly twirling the steering wheel will almost certainly be worse for you the sooner you start doing it).

As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  Sometimes the disparity is far more stark even than that.  Sometimes, without prevention, the possibility of a cure is moot, because a lost patient cannot be treated, let alone cured.

Enough.  This, like everything else, is stupid.  Where is Sailor Saturn?  Let there be no alarms and no surprises.  Let there be silence.

*This is second-hand information.  I did not read it myself.  I have tried on more than one occasion to read a James Bond novel, but I could barely last a few pages.  Somehow, I found it utterly non-gripping.  I’m glad other people liked the books enough to make movies, because I really like some of the movies, but man, based on my sample, those books are dry.  Pussy Galore would be ashamed**.

**I know, that’s a rather raunchy and not very good joke.  Sorry.  Let’s pretend I’m already drunk from celebrating the holiday, and that’s why my judgment is impaired.  It’s not true, but the fact that it isn’t true doesn’t stop us from saying it, curiously enough.

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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.