holidays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cool it with a baboon’s blog, then the charm is firm and good

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 25th of June.  This means we are at the more or less exact temporal antipode of Christmas, which was six months ago and will be six months from now.  Does that imply that we might all be feeling the “anti-Christmas spirit”?

Maybe the cycle acts something like a half-integer spin quantum entity, such as electron, and it takes two full rotations to bring it back to its initial state.  Or, rather, it could be like a spin 2 particle (e.g., the hypothetical graviton), rotating ½ times and being the same as where it started.

No, I guess it really seems like just a spin 1 particle, where half a rotation leaves it 180 degrees (or pi radians) different.  So:  Merry Anti-Christmas (you filthy animals).

I know, that’s rather silly.  But that’s okay, so was Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Mind you, they were much funnier than I am.  That’s no real shame on me, though.  It’s rather like saying that the Beatles were much better song-writers overall than I am.  It’s true, but it’s also true of nearly everyone else in the world (that the Beatles were better song-writers than they are, or that Monty Python was funnier than they are, not that they are funnier or better song-writers than I am).

I’m also not as accomplished a scientist as Newton or Darwin or Einstein or as good a mathematician as Noether or Ramanujan or Euler.  This is nothing about which I (or you) should feel ashamed.  These are among the finest minds the world has yet produced.

On the other hand, none of them has a publication credit in the scientific journal Mycoses, do they?  No, they do not.  But I do.

Also, I have literally and directly saved people’s lives and helped ease and even prevent their suffering, whereas I don’t know that any of the above people ever did that, not directly* anyway.  So, neener neener neener!

Oh, by the way‒or by the by, or by Grabthar’s** hammer and by the suns of Worvan‒I have written all my posts this week so far on the smartphone, not on the lapcom.  And I am trying very hard to avoid writing too long a post.  I have seen that I can really write a lot with either the lapcom or the smartphone, though it’s easier in a sense to do so on the lapcom; it’s also easier and quicker for me to lose track of how much I have written thereon.

Oh, and another “by the fill-in-the-blank”:  I wanted to point out that yesterday’s voice recording thing was recorded using my smartphone, not any kind of fancy mic (those are fancy mics on smartphones, really, but not in a pertinent way), so unfortunately, it’s hard to keep breath sounds out of it.  And the tunnel kind of sound is probably because I (injudiciously, it seems) added a wee bit of reverb in post, to try to counter the flatness produced by the “noise reduction” function.  Sorry about that.

I tried a goofy little thing on the phone yesterday (speaking of such things) where I took a brief video, but with a thin cloth over the camera, so it was a video that was really just audio, but in principle it could have been uploaded without trouble directly to YouTube, etc., but no one would need to see me.

I don’t really like my face, so I don’t like to have to see it, let alone to inflict it on the world.  If you look at my relatively sparse YouTube videos, you’ll see that even when my face is shown, I usually try to cover it at least partially.

The exceptions, I guess, are the music-playing videos, but in those it just wouldn’t make as much sense to cover my face, since my singing would probably suffer.  Though, who knows, maybe I could become famous as a performer who always wears a mask and sunglasses.  M F Doom wore a mask.  Daft Punk wore their weird space uniforms.

This subject calls to mind the fact that yesterday evening I received a package from my sister.  It contained, among other things, some old stuff of mine, including a big print of my high school senior picture, which I didn’t know still existed.  I didn’t think to get a picture or a scan of it before writing this, but maybe I’ll do so later, so you can see it and I can learn if you agree that I resemble a certain character (not the hero) from a very popular movie franchise.

Anyway, as one of the spirits summoned by the three wyrd sisters said in Macbeth, “Dismiss me.  Enough.”

Tyler:  This conversation…

Narrator:  This conversation…

Tyler:  …is over.

Narrator:  …is over.

TTFN

*Of course, their various contributions have shaped all of modern science, and thus technology, and have thus indirectly saved many lives and relieved much suffering, far more than my little, localized efforts have done.  Still, let me throw myself a bone, okay?

**I initially wrote, going from memory, “by Frothgar’s hammer”, but then I realized that was a slightly bastardized name from Beowulf, i.e., Hrothgar, the Danish “king” whom Beowulf rescues from the depredations of Grendel, not the line from Galaxy Quest.

 

[Aside:  it would be cool if someone made a simulated spin-½ coin, with inertial sensors within and LCD faces, so that it could start, say, at heads, flip once and be intermediate, flip twice and be tails, flip three times and be oppositely intermediate, and flip a fourth time to come back to heads!]

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Awe, for self-pity’s sake!

Well, it’s Tuesday, the 23rd of June in 2026, in case any of you aren’t aware of that fact (or if you’re reading this post later…but not earlier, because I strongly suspect that it’s impossible for you to read it earlier).  It’s the third day of summer and the third full day of what I rather jokingly refer to as “The Days of Awfulness” or even “The Days of Aw, Shit!”*.

The number of days in that stretch is not constant, because one of the bookends on them changes a bit every year.  My Days stretch between Father’s Day and the date of my wedding “anniversary”, on June 29th.  Heck, one of the regular readers here was at my wedding on that day.  How cool is that?  Anyway, those two days highlight and commemorate, or lament, or what have you the two greatest and most terrible of my personal failures, about the two things that have mattered most to me in all my life.  They weren’t my only failures, obviously enough.  But they were, have been, and are the most devastating and heartbreaking ones.

I shouldn’t dwell on them, I know.  It’s not healthy.  But my nervous system (i.e., me) is prone to latch onto numbers and dates and patterns and cycles and all that kind of stuff.  This is part of why I tend to be so skeptical and even sometimes disdainful of people’s tendency to feel significance in truly absurd notions, like the zodiac signs and imagined alien interlopers and other such things.  I recognize my own tendency to find and latch onto patterns even when they are only in my mind.

I’m fine with enjoying those patterns and even playing with them, in a sense, but I don’t want to attach some imagined significance to them.  Even Newton fell into that trap, though he had more of an excuse‒you can’t be the founder of mathematical physics and at the same time know all the stuff that will only be discovered by building on your insights.  That’s related to the whole “you can’t be reading my blog post before it was written” thing.

Anyway, I tend to feel pretty despondent around this time of year, because I cannot seem easily to stop thinking about those things at which I failed and which I lost.  I know it’s contrary to the recommendations of the Stoics and the Taoists and the Buddhists, but I’ve never sworn loyalty or fealty to any of those -isms, I just think some of their ideas are good (and some are not, though these three are way above average in terms of signal-to-noise ratio).

I do, however, have to call attention to the fact that I am having semi-regular interactions with my youngest child, starting since after I was hospitalized with my kidney stone.  We watch Doctor Who together over Discord™ and have gone to a couple of movies together, the most recent of which was Backrooms**.  So, that’s very good, indeed, and those moments are the happiest ones I’ve had in well over a decade.

Mind you, my son (my eldest) still won’t interact with me at all.  And I get it.  Though he knows (I hope) that I didn’t do anything willfully or even willingly that caused him (emotional) pain, he still felt the pain, and that’s a hard thing to get past, especially since it’s the more recent of things (see The Peak-End Rule).  Also, he’s got a stable and (presumably) comfortable and happy life, and disrupting it would be unpleasant and very stressful.

I cannot really blame anyone for not wanting me around.  I know I don’t, a lot of the time.  It’s been a bit of a tendency over my lifetime, for others and for me.  I feel like so many people who have been around me would readily sing along with a Beatles parody called Got to Get You Out of My Life.

Ugh.  Can self-hate and self-pity go together?  Apparently so, and it must be a nauseating spectacle for you to take in.  I apologize.  I guess it’s sort of akin to Gollum hating and loving the Ring, as he hated and loved himself.

People are complicated‒brains being the most complicated local things in the universe known by us (though that could soon change).  Internal contradictions don’t necessarily cause the program to freeze in people, like an old “return without gosub” error**, but there are consequences…probably.

Anyway, thank you for reading.  I forgot to publish the post I had prepared with that audio file I mentioned yesterday, so I’ll do that sometime today.  In the meantime, I hope you all have a good day, then double that, then double it again, and so on.

*This is a reference to or parody of the stretch of days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Jewish tradition, which are sometimes referred to as The Days of Awe.

**I highly recommend both the movie and the earlier YouTube channel series by Kane Parsons, the now-twenty-year-old (!) who directed the movie.

***I don’t know what more recent error messages are.  I haven’t done any real programming since college.

 

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Summertime, and the living is…

Well, it’s Monday‒one day after the Summer Solstice, and thus the 2nd day of official summer‒and here I am writing another blog post.

It’s funny how weird the perception of time can be.  Why, it seems like just yesterday that I was writing my abnormally long blog post from Saturday, when in fact it was a full two days ago.  Weird, huh?

All joking aside, it was quite a long post that I wrote on Saturday.  I wonder if anyone actually read the whole thing.  I mean, I read it, course; I wrote and then edited it, after all.  I don’t remember it all that well right now, but that’s because I wrote it down and I know where I can find it if I want to revisit it.

Working memory and narrative memory and all that are useful, powerful attributes of human minds, and my own copy of both of those systems is better than those of the majority of people I have encountered.  But I do still have fundamentally limited internal memory, so there’s no need to clutter my hard drive with the contents of all of my blog posts.  I know where I can find them, in general.

Though this triggers a thought that I’ve had before:  I was thinking of doing some audio recordings of me reading some of my blog posts and sharing the audio here and as videos on YouTube.  What do you think?  I would love to hear input from any long term (or short term) readers as to which posts they might nominate for such a treatment.

Oh, yeah, in the latter part of last week I did a voice recording, this time about AI as an attribute-weakener for humans.  It’s somewhat related to what I said recently about humans becoming‒in what is nearly the best case possible scenario‒the “pets” of future AI.  Anyway, it’s pretty short, so I’ll probably edit it rather quickly and share it here and maybe do a “video”.

The annoying thing is, it ought to be quick and easy to use Microsoft’s basic video editor just to add a picture to the audio for the video, but now they have it where you need to sign in to your Microsoft account to use the program.  That means mucking about with accounts on the work computer, and that’s stressful.  So, I don’t know.  I’ll try to think of some other solution.

Speaking of solutions and things not necessarily working the way they ought to work, my smartphone‒on which, by the way, I am writing this post‒is starting to be a bit laggy and somewhat herky-jerky* in its operations.  It may be that it just needs a restart‒I haven’t done that in a while, because it consistently slips my mind.

On the other hand, the phone has a finite time of operation, meaning it will eventually stop working, as will all things that are not constantly maintained (and even they will almost certainly all fail eventually).  At that point, I would need to get a new smartphone.

I really hoped not to need to do that ever again.  It’s such a pain.  I really hoped that I would not live long enough to need to get a new smartphone.  I had various intentions regarding that, but so far they have not yet come to fruition‒as witness, the fact that I am writing this blog post.

I’m certainly feeling much less verbose right now than I was on Saturday morning.  I don’t know what circumstances and local forces are behind that, but of course, I’m pretty darn sure that there are good explanations available.  It’s just hard to gather and trace all the innumerable threads of the web of causality even for the tiniest of behaviors in any given moment or event.  I’m no Laplace’s demon (nor is anyone or anything else, as far as I can see).  All I can say for sure is that all of those events lie in the past light cone of the event itself.

Okay, well, this is getting to feel tedious to me, though I don’t know how it is for you, so I’m going to wrap it up and leave this blog post near the left end of the bell curve for word length of posts, whereas Saturday’s was nearer the right end**.

I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the week.

*Please excuse the technical jargon.

**That tail of the curve can’t really go off toward infinity, even if a mathematical description of such a curve does, because I cannot actually write an infinite number of words…though I fear sometimes it might feel that way to my readers.  On the other end, the low end of the curve cannot get below zero, since a blog post with a negative number of words is like a house whose rooms have negative lengths and widths.

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Are you a Memorial Daypot Dome Gate scandaloholic?

First off, Happy Memorial Day, for those who live in the US (or anyplace else Memorial Day is observed, if there are such places).  I have to admit, it seems slightly weird to wish someone a “happy” Memorial Day, since it’s a day in which we honor and remember fallen soldiers.  At least, that’s the idea behind the holiday.

But of course, when I was quite young, Memorial Day was a happy sort of holiday.  We got a day off school, it was all but summer already, and we always had a big family get-together with grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and all sorts of side dishes like potato salad and chips and such like.  There often tended to be desserts, as well, including (if I recall correctly) popsicles.  I’ve never been a huge popsicle fan, but sometimes, during warm weather, and at such special, family events, they could be quite refreshing.

Still, if I look at a popsicle now, even if it’s a Creamsicle®, I get more of a positive nostalgic feeling than any even slight urge to eat the popsicle.  Would that this were the case with more straightforward ice cream and other such treats.

I know from experience that it is possible to break one’s proclivities for certain junk foods just by overexposure.  I did that‒unintentionally‒with Nutter Butters® and with Pringles®.  I no longer crave either of those things because, for a time, I overindulged in them quite severely, and it wasn’t good for me‒I ended up getting negative associations with eating those things because of the general physical ill-health they engendered.

I guess that means that one way to break a bad food habit may be to give into it in spades‒say, eating only Cheetos® for every meal, three meals a day, nothing else.  I’m not recommending that, by the way; it would not be good for you.  Though, if you were truly starving and had nothing else, it could keep you alive for a time.

Interestingly, I don’t think this aversion therapy works for more fundamentally pathological addictions.  For instance, I wouldn’t recommend trying to quit heroin by doing nothing but heroin for a while‒as I understand it, that’s actually what some people do, and it tends just to lead to tolerance.  Of course, if you die of an overdose, that would eliminate your addiction, but it certainly would not cure it (by any reasonable definition of “cure”).

And of course, severe alcoholics often just drink alcohol almost solely, sometimes as their main source of calories, but even getting sick to their stomachs doesn’t make them quit nor does experiencing the more horrifying effects of alcohol addiction (including alcohol withdrawal, which can kill you).  If these sorts of things don’t trigger an aversion to something, it’s hard to see what would.

This raises (quite tengentially) a pet peeve of mine:  it makes no sense to describe real or figurative addictions by calling oneself, for instance, a “chocoholic” or a “workaholic”.  This would seem to imply that one is addicted to “chocohol” or to “workahol”, whatever such things might be.

If one were following the paradigm that gave us the word “alcoholic” one would be a “chocolatic” or a “workic”.  It’s flagrantly stupid to do the other thing.  If you’ve got a problem with chocolate or with working too much (or whatever), don’t try to use a cutesy, cannibalized term made by cutting and moving something that was never a suffix and then using it as if it were one.  Just call the problem what it is.

This is similar to the fact that people inexplicably want to add “-gate” to the end of every scandal du jour, in reference to the very famous Watergate scandal.  But the Watergate scandal was about a break in at the Watergate Hotel.  That’s where the “gate” part comes from!

If we were to assume current media scandal standards, we would have thought that historic event was a scandal involving water somehow.  It’s as if, because of the old Teapot Dome scandal, people named every scandal a “-pot Dome” scandal.  Then the actual Watergate scandal would have been called the “Watergatepot Dome Scandal”.

It’s submoronic* to call a scandal about pizza, for instance, “pizzagate”.  Is there a Pizzagate Hotel somewhere that had a breakin?  (Though, I must admit, if there isn’t a restaurant that calls itself “Pizzagate” then I’ll be disappointed in the creativity and chutzpah of restaurateurs.)

If my blog achieves only one thing in the world (or two things, in a sense), and if that is to decrease the use of “-holic” and “-gate” in such situations, then I would be pleased enough with having written it.

I don’t have high hopes for that possibility, though.  Then again, I don’t have high hopes for much of anything.  I’m a pretty miserable sort of person, though I think that before the onset of my chronic pain I was less so (though I did already suffer from dysthymia/depression).  Like Kenny Rogers’s gambler, the best I can hope for is to die in my sleep.  Of course, the fact that I sleep horribly makes even that small hope less likely than it might be otherwise.

Whatever.  I’ll simply have to accept the fact of not being asleep when it happens if that’s the way it has to be.  Who knows, maybe it will be better to see it coming, so to speak.

Try to have a good holiday.

*By which I mean “worse than moronic” not “not quite moronic”.

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“I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders…”

I almost started this post by writing “Hello and good morning,” but I can’t really do that, or future readers‒and possibly even some current readers‒might think this was a Thursday blog post.  But this isn’t a Thursday post.  It’s a Tuesday post.  It’s a “Taco Tuesday post”, really, since Taco Tuesday is a thing (an advertising thing, mostly, but still a thing I like).  Pertinent to that, today is also, of course, Cinco de Mayo.

It’s not a terribly clever name for a holiday.  It’s about as bland as “The 4th of July”.  At least that’s not the official name for that holiday; the official name is “Independence Day”, which has specific significance, since it is the date of the signing and release of the Declaration of Independence.  I try never to wish someone a happy 4th of July, but say, “Happy Independence Day”, because it’s an important thing to know and recall (for an American).

Of course, there may be an actual, official title to Cinco de Mayo, but if there is, I don’t know it (if there isn’t, I still don’t know it).  I don’t even recall what the day commemorates.  I know it’s not the Mexican Independence Day equivalent.  If anyone out there knows what it is off the top of his or her or their head, please let me know in the comments below.

“Please let me know in the comments below” could be a nice part of some rap, couldn’t it?  It’s got a good rhythm and an internal rhyme.  If you’re a rapper and want to use that phrase, please do.  But let me know about the final product, please.  I’d be interested to see what grows up around it.

I could, in principle, write such a rap myself‒I’m reasonably good at rhythmic rhyming‒but just try to imagine me producing and performing a rap song!  I’m almost certain that would be one of the worst signs of the end of the world.

Though, if that’s the case, maybe I should do a rap, come to think of it.  If by doing so I really could engender the end of the world*, it could be worth doing it.  I could put everyone out of their misery.  As for those who aren’t miserable, well, we have Sweeney Todd’s words to address that:

 

“They all deserve to die

Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.

Because

In all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett

There are two kinds of men and only two:

There’s the one staying put in his proper place

And the one with his foot in the other one’s face

Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you.

No, we all deserve to die!

Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I

Because

the lives of the wicked should be

made brief

For the rest of us death will be a relief

We all deserve to die!

 

And I’ll never see Johanna…”

 

Okay, well, that last bit is the beginning of another segment of the song, in which Sweeney laments his lost daughter.  I won’t get into the plot more than that right now, but it’s a great musical.

The film version with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, and so on was excellent, though apparently Johnny Depp didn’t know whether he could sing (adequately for the role) when Tim Burton asked him to play Sweeney Todd.  He knew he could play music, but singing “lead” was just not something he had done.  So, according to what I’ve heard, before accepting the role he went off in solitude and practiced singing (to confirm he could do it) before coming back and saying okay.

I’m glad he did it.

As an aside, I suspect that anyone who can do various voices and accents and who also can play and hear music almost has to be able to sing reasonably well, if they practice.  The tools required to make alternate voices and accents are more or less the same as the tools for singing specific tones and notes.  You also have to be able to hear tunes and to hear yourself and adjust to hit the proper note, but as I said, Depp was already a serious musician.

Okay, well, that’s a lot of erratic stuff, isn’t it?  Clearly I have no specific agenda here (trendy or otherwise) at least not any conscious one.  As for what goes on in my unconscious mind, well, I don’t know what that is, more or less by definition.  If I knew what it was thinking, it wouldn’t be unconscious.

Of course, there’s always a legitimate question whether the unconscious mind actually has its own internal self-awareness, or even more than one, but this is pretty much speculative for now, so I’m not going to get into it or its implications.

Boy, wow.  I’m really feeling pretty incoherent right now.  As you might have guessed, I didn’t sleep well last night, even for me.  As for pain, well, large portions of my body feel somewhat as if they have already been embalmed, but the sensory nerves‒the nociceptors, at least‒are still working.  If anything, they’re working too well.

Ah, well.  I’ll wrap up now with these almost kindly but ominous words, again from Sweeney Todd:  “You are young.  Life has been kind to you.  You will learn.”

Please have a good day if you’re able.

*“Engender the end of” also has a good cadence or rhythm or whatever as well as a bit of an internal rhyme.  You could go on with something like, “Engender the end of the trendy agenda,” or similar.  “No rapper can rap quite like I can”, eh?  That’s a fact for which all rap fans can be grateful.

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What’s that distress call that pilots use again?

It’s Friday again, at long last, and I should have tomorrow off.  I think I might take tomorrow off, even if they asked us to come in.  I barely wanted even to move at all today.

Of course, “want” is a tricky word in this case.  I don’t ever want to go to work in any kind of “terminal goal” sense.  But in an “instrumental goal” sense, I do want to go to work.  However, there are many conflicting pressures within the system that is I, and the vector magnitude of the “go to work” sum is sometimes not very large at all.

I’m going, though.  I’m not yet literally on my way, but I will be soon (and as I edit this for the last time, I am at the office).

Oh, I almost forgot to note, today is May 1st, 2026 (AD or CE).  Happy May Day, or whatever that holiday is, if it is one.  According to Camelot, May is a lusty month, a time for every frivolous whim, proper or im.  I’m not too terribly sure of the truth of all that, but it’s an amusing song.

Oh (again), I almost forgot (again) to note, I’m writing this on my mini lapcom today.  I haven’t done that in a while, but then again, I haven’t even picked up a guitar in over a week.  Of course, I haven’t played any keyboard (other than computer ones) in a longer time than that.  I also haven’t drawn, nor have I written any fiction.  I haven’t gone on Brilliant dot org this week, either, though I did do some last week, if memory serves.

I’m just very tired.  My various bits (ha ha) of literal hardware that constitute part of my extended phenotype are also getting a bit sluggish and erratic.  My lapcom here, and the lapcom I use at the house, and my smartphone, are all showing a bit of lagginess, a bit of evidence that they are past their prime.  Hey, they’re not alone in that, at least.  I’m so far past my prime you could call me a super-composite number, like 60 squared or something*.

There is an impetus—and there almost certainly would be recommendations, if I were to ask someone—to get a new lapcom and a new mini lapcom and of course a new smartphone.  But I really don’t wanna.  I look at the lapcoms available on Amazon just for fun, and there is a bit of enticement in looking at them, but honestly, I feel like I want to let them go the way of motor vehicles for me:  just to be gone when they’re no longer workable.

I have the vague hope that I will die before I am forced to replace any of these, my three main personal computing devices, which are my only local friends (of sorts).  It’s not so much that I actually feel a personal, sentimental sense of connection with them.  It’s more that I cannot conceive of finding the energy to go through the process of getting new ones, since that seems especially futile in this case.

I currently have no plan and no desire to live long enough to be forced to replace my personal electronic devices.  It just seems valueless, without any reward other than the things that I would buy, themselves, and these really don’t appeal to me.  Maybe someday they might start to appeal again, and I might feel the desire to get new ones.  I don’t know.  But there’s certainly no logic in trying to invest in my life right now.

Okay, sorry about being melodramatic.  I wasn’t trying to do that, honestly.  I don’t feel dramatic about this stuff.  I just feel resigned and tired and even kind of bored.  Nothing is gripping enough to distract me for long from pain and depression.

Though, I have to admit that I’ve recently discovered the YouTube channel “Yee Yee Life”, which basically is just this guy and his cameraman in Texas who (more or less in their own words) take various things, shoot them with various types of bullets, and see what happens.  The shooting part is mildly interesting in itself, but really the draw is the hilarious deadpan comedy of their interactions and the apparent idiocy/lunacy of the host.  This is all clearly deliberate, by the way.  I am not watching people unwittingly make fools of themselves—they are doing it on purpose, and they do it very well.

But, of course, one can only get limited value out of such things at any given time.  It ain’t exactly Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or the BBC’s Planet Earth.

I still do at times watch the YouTube channel PBS Space Time, which has great videos that are nicely informative, but they lot are less interactive with mere YouTube watchers than they used to be, focusing now on their Patreon supporters.  This makes sense for them, of course, since they get more money from them.

I used to support them on Patreon myself—briefly—but I had to let that lapse, since I never really took advantage of the Patreon perks, if there were any.  Why would I want to go to yet another website to be able to enjoy learning the stuff they discuss?  Also, I had to get off the slippery slope of supporting Patreon accounts of people I followed elsewhere.  It ended up threatening to be a serious combination of monthly expenses.

I already subscribe to YouTube premium, which means I am giving money to the people whose videos I watch (the ones that are monetized), and I cannot simply lavish even more money on these various informative and thought-provoking channels.  I would love to be able simply to do so without worry, but I cannot.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week—but presumably not for this month, since the month has just begun.  I hope you all have a very good weekend, and then a very good week next week, and I hope you then repeat the same pattern but with each new iteration being incrementally better than the last.  If anyone deserves such a thing, surely you do.

Of course, the whole notion of “deserves” is very much an artificial, orthogonal-to-nature concept.  It’s a human invention.  That doesn’t make it not “real”.  But it is not essential, and it is not necessarily even coherent.

Whatever.  Take it easy.  Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

*60 squared, or 3600, may be one of the “anti-prime” numbers.  It has 45 (!) positive factors!!!  That’s not as cool as being a prime number, but it’s pretty close in the coolness measure.

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Shall you this fond pageant see?

It’s Monday again.  It is as I write this, anyway.  Maybe it’s not Monday when you’re reading it.  Who knows, maybe you’re living at some point in the relatively far future in which the human race‒or their computer overlords‒has abolished Mondays because they are too unpleasant.

Of course, then you’d just move the problem to the next day, leading it to be the unpleasant beginning of the week, because it’s not what day it is that presents a problem, it is the function of the day, if you will.  In this case, that means the day serving as the beginning of the “work week”.  Still, even future humans might be foolish enough not to recognize that fact, based on my experience with past and present humans.

Actually, based on the nature of current “AI” and how it functions and is grown, I wouldn’t be much more surprised if they made the same mistake.  Careful, logical reasoning is not necessarily in the nature of so-called deep neural networks and the like.  Indeed, the ability to reason abstractly may have arisen in humans precisely because they needed to be able to convince their tribemates of various things, and also to avoid being taken in by a tribemate trying to convince them of something that was not in their best interests.  As with so many attributes of life, even the ability to reason was probably born of a kind of arms race.

Heavy sigh.  Ah, well, great things can arise even from inauspicious beginnings.

I started my post a little late this morning because I’ve been moving slowly, both mentally and physically.  I’m kind of wiped out, and I have been all weekend; I could hardly get anything done.  I guess this is one of those times when I ought to be grateful that there’s no one to nag me (or cajole me, or encourage me, or what have you).  Honestly though, having such a person around is underrated, I think.

I had a stretch starting about two weeks ago or so in which my back and joint pain seemed to have calmed down a lot, and mere moving didn’t even hurt.  As a consequence, my mood and optimism improved a bit, and I even started to feel like I might be able to like myself to some degree.

Ha ha ha!  Lord, what a fool this mortal be.

Starting when I got sick, which I think I have mentioned more than once, I got a re-flare of my pain, and it has come back with a vengeance.  During the course of the latter part of this last work week, I took a fair amount of extra pain medicine of various (legal) types (I don’t even know how one locates “street fentanyl” or the like, let alone how one could feel confident that it is what it claims to be) and maybe that’s what’s taking the wind out of my sails.  Certainly my kidneys and stomach and probably my liver are not terribly chuffed about the work they have to do dealing with lots of NSAIDs and Tylenol and CBD and topical lidocaine and menthol and all that stuff.

Listless shrug.  It is what it is.  My flare is tapering a bit at this point, at least.  I don’t like to anticipate it getting better (nor it getting worse) but I try to be optimistic, at least for me.  It is simply true that my pain could get better and stay relatively good for a while (and it could go the other way), and I will only find out as it happens.

Whether or not all of you will find out depends very much on the degree to which I share it here.  Of course, no one who sees things only on any of the Meta-owned social media will find out, because (obviously enough) I’m not able to share anything there anymore.  Maybe the occasional (very) odd person might find my stuff via Bluesky and Substack and TWFKAT, but if so, it’s hard to tell.

Whatever the case with respect to those matters, I am still just kind of tired and mentally enervated, so I’m not feeling too enthusiastic here.  I don’t really have anything good or interesting to report.  Nothing is happening in my life other than the steady cranking of the entropy machine, doing what it does.

Sorry.  The pain is very discouraging.  When it ebbs, I can even start to feel like my old self again, the “me” from thirty or more years ago.  But though I keep trying new things and approaches, and sometimes I even get some good results, it doesn’t seem prone to ebb* for very long at a time.

Okay, well, let’s wrap this up.  I hope you all had a good holiday (or are having a good holiday) and that you and those you love are doing well.  Unless I’m lucky, I expect I’ll write a post tomorrow.

*The more often I say “ebb” the more it feels as though I’m saying the name of some character‒perhaps some mountain man‒from The Dukes of Hazzard or The Andy Griffith Show.

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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.