holidays

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But though my blogs be mean, take them in good part.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m writing another edition of my blog post.  It’s not the first nor the second post I’ve done this week, so calling it my “weekly” blog post would seem somewhat inaccurate.

It’s now only two weeks until Boxing Day, so you should get out your gloves and your speed rope and your heavy bag and get yourself back in shape for the ring!

I really didn’t want to go to the office today.  If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have written a post, except perhaps a single line such as “No blog post today”.  That would be borderline self-contradictory, but since my thoughts and words have been dealing with depression and suicidality lately, I thought if I just wrote nothing people might become concerned.

I’m probably being egotistical even to imagine such a thing.

The reason I didn’t want to go to work was because the office holiday dinner takes place tonight, and I really feel tense about it.  We’ll be going to the same restaurant we used last year, and it was overcrowded and had too much sensory overload even back then, such that I had to start drinking (alcohol) as soon as possible to keep from scratching my own skin off.

It would have been one thing if everyone there had been people with whom I felt comfortable.  There are three or so people at the office with whom I get along well enough that, if just that group and I were going somewhere, it would have been okay.  Certainly there have been many times in my life when I’ve gone out to eat (and similar) with family and/or close friends, and I enjoyed myself.  But I was younger then*, and I had more energy for acting normal, and the people who knew me well were nonjudgmental about my weirdnesses, anyway.

Most of the people at the office, though, are people with whom I wouldn’t normally hang out at any stage in my life‒no insult to them intended, there’s just no common framework.  And the two or three people with whom I think I would most have enjoyed spending time seem to have become more distant recently.  Perhaps that’s all my doing; it almost certainly is my fault.  I know I’m becoming ever less fun to be around.  So I don’t really have anyone with whom I feel I could hang out comfortably‒not in the office, probably not in the world.

It’s not that there’s no one out there who might be willing.  There are many kind people about, though sometimes that can be hard to believe.  But I am not good company‒not for anyone, probably not ever again‒and I certainly don’t deserve any kindness.  I am too weird now, and my life is a mutated, Lovecraftian monstrosity compared to what it once was.

Let’s face it, I was always just a weirdo, anyway; I was just better at pretending to be human in the past‒or if not better, I at least had more energy for it.

Now, I barely have the will to get up and get going in the morning**.  Almost everything I do is just to distract myself, to divert my attention from being aware of my own pathetic and worthless existence.  It makes me wish I had a serious drug or alcohol problem.  Then I could both have a powerful distraction and something that would potentially lead to my death in short order.  Instead, I’ve wasted years trudging through my nosferatu pseudo-life.  My books and blog posts notwithstanding, it really would have made more sense if I had died some time in 2013.  Nothing since then has been of any real use, not to anyone else, and not to me.

I’ll try to work up something remotely akin to enthusiasm for the holiday dinner tonight.  But, if I’m too stressed, I just won’t go.  I know the food will be good, though.  I’m trying to watch what I eat, but everything and everyone around me tends to want to sabotage that intention (including me) especially at this time of the year.

Maybe I should just eat and drink until I make myself really sick, and then I won’t want to do it anymore.  It would be quite nice not to be a person who eats as an escape, as his only reliable source of distraction.  I feel much more clear-headed when I don’t eat, and I know I am much sharper.

How nice it would be not to be such a pathetic glutton.  But I do miss my sister’s holiday cookies.  And I mean to eat whatever I feel like eating this evening‒whether I go to the office dinner or not.

Maybe I’ll get botulism, or a bad case of Hepatitis A that turns fulminant or something.  Keep your fingers crossed!

TTFN

*Such is the nature of the past.

**Though I still cannot sleep even close to as much as I would need to be healthy.

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But can a short blog post be neverending?

It’s Tuesday morning, which is probably not neverending, because if it were, one would never even reach Tuesday afternoon, in which case it couldn’t be neverending, no matter what the Beatles say.

Although…if Tuesday afternoon never begins (because Tuesday morning is neverending) then Tuesday afternoon would also be neverending.  After all, according to the Oracle, everything that has a beginning has an end.  To which I tend to respond, “Yes, at the very least, if one reverses the direction in time in which one is considering a thing, then its beginning is an end.  QED.”

Enough.  I’m writing this post this morning because I have nothing better to do with my time‒or at least nothing better that I am capable of rousing the gumption to do.  I mean, I could always be on brilliant dot org, working on some mathematics or physics or computer science problems, or I could be writing a story‒you know, something productive.  But I don’t think that’s likely to happen.

This Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving.  You’re welcome.  So, only two more shopping days left.

It used to be that nearly everything was closed on major holidays like Thanksgiving.  And Thanksgiving is still maybe a more “closed for the holiday” holiday than even Christmas and New Year.  But there will always be stores open now‒at least a 7-11, a Wawa, or some other equivalent.  And working at those stores on that holiday will be people who don’t have plans to celebrate with anyone and/or who could really use the extra money so they work.

Anyway, I think it’s still the biggest family holiday in the US.  It’s certainly the time when people travel to visit other regions of the county and exchange viruses from those different regions with the greatest fervor.  This is part of why, in the US at least, there tends to be a big surge of respiratory infections early in December.

I don’t have statistics on that.  I just remember it being the case.  That’s clearly not a rigorous scientific conclusion, it’s my perception of the situation, possibly supported by the experience of other physicians, and possibly by some remembered textbook reference(s).  Anyway, that’s not significant evidence, not if one is trying to make a scientific evaluation.  But I still do think it’s the case, and I think that impression is based on good evidence that I have encountered in the past.

I really don’t have much else to say.  Even this nonsense is too much effort to continue for long.  But who knows, maybe a short blog post will be more popular.  In any case, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but I plan not to write a post on Thursday, so this may be my last chance to wish those of you who celebrate it a Happy Thanksgiving.

My wishes are never very effective, unfortunately.  Just look at my life.  But maybe they’ll work better for you than for me.

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If I could write the beauty of your blogs, and in fresh numbers number all your graces…

Hello.  Good morning.

Aaahhh, doesn’t that feel better?  Now I can use my standard Thursday blog post opening phrases, because today is, in fact, Thursday.  It’s the 21st of November, the third Thursday of the month, so in the USA you only have seven shopping days until Thanksgiving.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, since next Thursday is that holiday, I probably will not be writing a blog post then.  It is one holiday on which our office is always closed.  We will be open on so-called Black Friday, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll write a post on that day.

Of course, in principle, I cannot guarantee that I’ll write anything at all ever again after this post.  I may not even survive to post this entry*‒I am in the back seat of a Lyft, on the highway (I-95) of the East Coast of the US, so goodness knows there’s a non-zero chance of a fatal accident.  I would even wish for one, but I know such a thing would involve harm and possibly death to other, more innocent, people.

Also, of course, wishes don’t actually directly affect reality‒thank goodness.  Imagine if even one percent of wishes came true as wished.  The world would be thoroughgoing chaos…and not in a good way.  I tend to say of wishes that “If wishes were horses, then we’d all be hip deep in horse shit,” but it would be even more terrifying if wishes worked.

The “if‒then” character of the wishes saying (my version or the more SFW one that involves beggars riding) often makes me think of lines of computer code in some generic programming language, like:

If wishes==horses then execute beggars.ride

Or maybe 

If wishes==horses then horseshit_level = “hip deep”

I wonder what that would look like in machine language.  Or, I wonder what it would look like in straight binary.  Really, though, I know part of the answer to the latter piece of wondering:  it would look, to the naked eye, like a random string of ones and zeros, perhaps the tally of some very long record of flipping a coin and marking heads as 1 and tails as 0 (or vice versa).

Actually, of course, given a binary-based computer language, one can literally generate every possible computer program just by flipping an ever-increasing number of coins.  Or, to be honest, one can do it just by counting in binary:  0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000…

This is why, if memory serves, computer science people and information theory people say that every program can literally be assigned (and described by) a number.  You could express that number in base ten if you wanted, to make it a bit more compact and familiar to the typical human.  Or, if you want to be more efficient and make conversion easier, you can use hexadecimal.  This is easier because a base-sixteen number system is more directly and easily converted to and from binary, since 16 is a power of 2 (2 to the 4th).

Even the human genome, or any genome in fact, could be fairly readily expressed in binary.  The DNA code is a 4 character language, so it wouldn’t take too much work to make it binary, however you wanted to code it.  Then, each person’s genome would have a single, unique number.  That’s kind of interesting.

It would be a bit unwieldy as an ID number, of course.  The human genome is roughly 3 billion nucleotides long, which means it would be roughly 6 billion binary digits (AKA bits).  And since every ten bits is roughly a thousand in base 10 (2^10 is 1024, which is very close to 10^3, aka 1000) then 6 billion bits should be roughly 2 billion decimal digits long (a bit less), which is much, much larger than the famously large number, a googol**.

It’s a big number.  This should give you at least some idea of just how unique each individual life form is at a fundamental level.  There are so many possible genomes that the expected time until the final heat death of the universe is unlikely to be long enough to have a randomly created duplication within the accessible cosmos.

Of course, within an infinite space‒which is the most probable truth about our universe as far as we can tell‒one will not only have every possible version that can exist, but will have infinite copies of every possible version.  Infinity makes things weird; I love it.

Of course, just as with the making of computer programs by simply counting in binary, the vast majority of genomes would not code for any lifeform in any kind of cellular environment, using any given kind of transcription code you might want (the one on Earth, found in essentially all creatures, uses three base pairs to code for a given amino acid in a protein, but that’s not all that DNA does).  Similarly, most of the counted up programs would not run on any given computer language platform, because they would not code for any coherent and consistent set of instructions.

But even so, you would still, eventually, get every possible working program, or every possible life form in any given biological system if you could just keep counting.

On related matters, there are things like the halting problem and so on, but we won’t get into that today, interesting though it may be (and is).

It’s quite fascinating, when one is dealing with information theory (and computer science) how quickly one encounters numbers so vast that they dwarf everything within the actual universe.

Mind you, the maximum possible information‒related to the entropy‒carried within any bounded 3-D region is constrained by the surface area (in square Planck lengths) of a black hole with that size event horizon.  For our universe, roughly 96 billion light years across, I think that’s something like 10 to the 124th bits, or at least it’s that many Planck areas.  That’s quite a bit*** smaller than the number of possible genomes, though I have a sinking feeling that I’m underestimating the number.

And information, at least when instantiated, has “mass” in a sense, and the upper limit of the amount of information in a region of spacetime is delineated by the Bekenstein entropy description.  So there’s only so many binary strings you can generate before you turn everything into a black hole.

Something like all that, anyway.

I may have been imprecise in some of what I said, but when you’re dealing with very large numbers, precision is only theoretically interesting.  For instance, we**** have found Pi to far more than the number of digits needed to calculate the circumference of the visible universe down to the Planck length.  It would require only about 40 digits of Pi to get to that precision to the size of a hydrogen atom, and those are only about 10^25 Planck lengths across, so we wouldn’t expect to need much more than 65 digits of Pi to get that precise, but let’s be generous and use 100 digits.

How many digits of Pi have actually been “discovered” by mathematicians?  Over 105 trillion digits.  Talk about angels dancing in the heads of pins!  It’s literally physically impossible, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, even to test whether that number precisely defines the ratio of any given circle to its diameter by measuring it.  One cannot, in principle, measure finely enough.

Still it just goes to show that mathematics is vastly larger in scope than any instantiated, superficial reality.  Information is deeper than one might think…so to speak.  But, then, so are minds themselves, vastly deeper.

As Idris/the TARDIS asked in Doctor Who, Series 6, episode 4, “Are all people like this?  So much bigger on the inside?”  Yes, Idris, I suspect they are, even those people we don’t like and feel the urge to denigrate.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve achieved nothing, really, other than write a Thursday blog post, but then again, that’s all I meant to do.  I hope you have among the better half of all the vast number of possible days available to you.

TTFN

*If you’re reading this, though, I clearly did survive.  I have mixed feelings about that.

**How much larger?  Soooo much larger that if you subtracted a googol of something from 10^1,800,000,000 of something, you would not change it to any extent measurable even by the most precise instruments humans have ever created.  And a googol is already something like 10 to the 19th times as large as the total estimated number of protons and neutrons in the accessible universe.

***No pun intended.

****Actually, I had nothing to do with it; it’s just the sort of “royal we”***** kind of thing everyone uses when discussing the accomplishments of humanity as a whole.

*****Not to be confused with royal wee.  That’s the sort of weird, niche thing one might find for sale in mason jars on the dark web.  Be careful if you’re into such things.  I wouldn’t buy it unless you’re sure of the source, so to speak.

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Doubt is called the beacon of the wise, the blog that searches to th’ bottom of the worst.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “regular” weekly blog post.  It’s the first Thursday in October of 2024.  It’s also Rosh Hashanah, so for those of you who celebrate it, L’shana Tovah.

I haven’t been working on any fiction at all since my last report‒unless you count my façade of being a normal person or living a normal life, of course.  That’s doing what it does, and I continue to do it for whatever reason(s)‒perhaps habit, perhaps duty (to whom or what, though?), perhaps out of self-punishment or self-harm, I don’t know.

I wish I had something interesting to discuss.  I’m nearly done with Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach novels.  They are (so far) much better than the movie Annihilation was.  But they are disorienting, as I’ve mentioned before, and given my own chronic and worsening insomnia and pain, they make me feel as though I might not be experiencing my own life as what it really is.  Not that I actually think I’m being fooled or am hallucinating in any serious ways.  But I do feel disconnected, separate, as though I’m not fully within or fully a denizen of this universe, but of some nearby, partly overlapping one.

I’ve long suspected that it would be difficult to “gaslight” me, because I have always found my own memory and understanding (certainly of my experiences) to be better than that of anyone around me.  Yet I don’t “trust” myself, either, which means I tend to keep checking and confirming aspects of reality to test the consistency of my impressions.  It may smack of OCD a bit, but it means that, at least intellectually, I find my own take on reality to be more coherent and consistent than that of most people with whom I interact.  Though there are always things one can learn from others, too.  One just has to be rigorous and strict in assigning credences.

As Descartes pointed out, we can never truly be certain that some powerful enough entity has not pulled the world over our eyes*.  He famously came down to the conclusion, or rather the starting point, of cogito ergo sum‒“I think, therefore I am”, the point being that he knows, to his own satisfaction at least, that he is there and is thinking, because he experiences it even if all else is an illusion.

Of course, even subjectivity could be an “illusion” in some sense, in principle.  The characters in all my stories have thoughts and subjective experiences‒they “think” they exist‒but that subjectivity only exists when they are being read, or when I wrote them.

And of course, we could be within an immensely complex “simulation”, and “merely” be aspects thereof.  Such a simulation could be paused, say, and this could happen frequently or for tremendous periods of time up in the level of reality in which the simulation is being run, and as long as the simulation picks up right where it left off, no one here would ever have any way to notice or to know.

There could be a googol “higher-level” years between every Planck time in our universe** and as long as the simulation wasn’t changed, or was changed in ways that were logically consistent, there would be no way to see it from inside.  This is one of the implications of the “simulation hypothesis” or whatever the “official” term is, put forward by such notables as Nick Bostrum, who apparently has a new book out called Deep Utopia.  I have not read it; I never finished his book Superintelligence, because it dragged on a bit and I didn’t find it as challenging or revelatory as I hoped it would be.  Maybe if I started again, the experience would be different.

I am reading at least two other books, though.  I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Nexus, which is quite good so far, though nothing is likely to surpass his first book, Sapiens, which is one of the best books I’ve read.

I’m also working through Now: The Physics of Time, by Richard A. Muller.  He’s trying to describe his notion of the true source and nature not only of time’s arrow, but of time itself.  It’s reasonably good so far, but his arguments have not been as interesting or as impressive as I’d hoped they might be.  Still, I look forward to getting to the point in which he elaborates on his idea that not merely space is expanding, but time is also doing so, and this is the source of time’s arrow and the nature of “now” and so on.  It’s intriguing, and it’s far from nonsensical, considering that Einstein/Minkowsky showed that space and time are one entity.

I’m sort of on hiatus from Nate Silver’s On the Edge, which is a good book, but is quite long and in-depth, and some things he discusses are more interesting than others, to me.

Other than that, I continue to feel discordant, or hazy or separate, like everything, including me, is “a copy of a copy of a copy of itself”.  Last night, the feeling of being disconnected, rootless, and that I am in the process of disintegrating felt highly distressing***.  I wished I could find a way to feel connected with the daily, normal processes of my life, instead of feeling as though I am, for instance, one of the people exploring Area X and trying to understand it without much chance or hope of success.  Or perhaps it felt more that I am the analogy of Area X, I am the alien thing/environment in the more “ordinary” world, dropped here perhaps by accident, with no idea where I really belong or whence I really came.

Now, this morning, those notions are not gone, but the alarm associated with them is not as intense, replaced more and more by fatigue, a kind of learned helplessness.  As time goes by, I tend more and more toward apathy‒not acceptance but merely giving up, just not having the energy to continue to care.  I would like to connect in some way, to feel as though I belonged somewhere, but I am a Nexus 13 in a world of humans‒a world where, inexplicably, nobody seems ever to have manufactured such replicants, and yet here I am, making everything ever more drearily baffling.

Oh, well.  Maybe as the disjunction progresses, I will reach some turning point, and I will melt, thaw, and resolve myself into a dew.  Or maybe I’ll have to try Hamlet’s next mentioned option and make my own quietus as I intended to do on the 22nd‒I don’t believe in any “Everlasting” being, fixed canons or otherwise, that could prohibit “self-slaughter”.

Or maybe I will find some answers; or if answers don’t already exist, maybe I’ll create some answers.  It seems unlikely, given my personal experience and understanding, but the odds are not zero.  Though they may well be close enough for all practical purposes.

TTFN

rosh-hashanah-merged

*To borrow a lovely expression from The Matrix.

**Ignore Relativity’s problems with simultaneity for…well, for now.

***So many “dis” words.

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I must have liberty withal, as large a charter as the wind, to blog on whom I please

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another of my weekly blog posts.

It’s also the 4th of July, which in the USA is Independence Day, the day on which we celebrate the official founding of the country, the date on which the Declaration of Independence was signed and “published”.

I’m often led to wonder how many—or should I say, how few—people in the US have actually read the Declaration of Independence even once.  It’s really not a very long document.  It’s not.  There are, so I’m told, 1320 words in the document proper, which goes up to 1458 words if you count the title and all the signatures*.  I’ve written many blog posts longer than that!  And yet, I wonder how many of the most vociferous “patriots” have actually read it.  There are even YouTube videos of someone else reading it to you, if that’s easier than reading it yourself.

Most of the loud and proud advocates of one or another political affiliation aren’t really people who have first evaluated and then adopted a particular set of ideals.  They are sports fans, rooting for their arbitrarily chosen team, angry when a coach or player they don’t like is seeing prominence, happy when their team is winning for the moment, imagining that they have some effect on the game—and perhaps they do have some effect—deluding themselves that they really understand or intuit their sport well.

Ironically, of course, many actual sports fans really do have deep knowledge of their sport.  They know a bit about its history, they study actual statistics, they recognize hidden complexities, all in fields where there is almost literally nothing important at stake—beyond the salaries and careers of athletes, coaches, and commentators, and the joy of fans.

But in areas where it can potentially, truly matter to them, most people accept random streams of noise from various websites and social media platforms and pundits and—Cat help them—Fox News as more than enough data for them to use to choose political candidates.  Except, they don’t really, actually even  use any of that information, at least not any pertinent information, to pick and choose candidates.  That would require effort.

Cat forbid any of them read the Constitution.  That’s a little longer than the Declaration of Independence**, but unlike the Declaration, it is an actual, legal document—the operating system of the United States of America, if you will.  To read the whole thing, once a year—or even once in a lifetime—doesn’t seem too high a bar even for the average person to clear.  Again, I believe there are YouTube videos that basically consist of someone reading the document aloud.

And Schoolhouse Rock did such a lovely and catchy song version of the preamble to the Constitution when I was young that I don’t think I’ll ever forget it while I am alive.  Indeed, it may be that, if I ever haunt some location after death, unlucky visitors to that place after midnight on moonless nights will hear a hollow, chilling voice singing, “We the people…in order to form a more perfect union…”

Given that people read all sorts of stupidities and absurdities on social media, one might think that familiarizing themselves with the documents that underlie the society in which they live might be not just useful but doable.  It might even be useful to study something of the political and moral philosophy behind these documents, and the jurisprudence that has grown up around them since the country began.

I’m tilting at windmills, I guess.  Still, if you live in the US and haven’t read the Declaration of Independence in a while, I encourage you to do so.  Even atheists often sing carols on Christmas; if they can do that, how hard can the other thing be?

Remaining in nation-level politics:  today is also the day of a General Election in the UK.  It’s apparently expected that the Labor Party will win the majority of seats in parliament and that the Tories will be ousted from power after quite a long time “in charge”***.  I suspect it will just be another instance of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, but we shall see.  While no one actually runs or controls anything, there are actions and laws that can have effects on patterns and outcomes in the short and long-term.

It’s not as straightforward to achieve any given end as politicians and pundits would like to believe, or would like you to believe, but it does happen.  This is one reason I think we should treat all new laws and regulations literally as experiments, with pre-chosen measures of outcomes upon which to evaluate the successes and/or failures, as well as side-effects, of any given act of legislature.

It’s simply not enough to have good intentions.  It never has been, and it never will be.  Good intentions are merely the beginning of actually doing good, and they are barely even that.  They are more akin to the very first, mild early pangs of hunger that eventually must be turned into actions such as hunting and gathering and starting fires and cooking food and then chewing and eating it, or the modern equivalents thereof.

In other news, I wrote only 3,752 net new words on Extra Body this week, since I had last Saturday off.  It’s now 107 pages long (in current format), and yes, it really, honestly, is nearly done—at least the first draft is nearly done.

I’m not sure why it’s taking me so long to finish.  Maybe it’s because it’s not in any sense a horror story, so I can’t bring my darker self to bear upon it; darkness is, after all, my dominant aspect.  I don’t think that’s really the cause, though.  I think it’s really just because I am nearly out of gas, with no thoughts or hopes for any future worth having for myself.

I’ve had very bad pain this week, and my insomnia continues, and my tinnitus and disequilibria continue, and the noise and not-infrequent idiocy is no more bearable than before.  And I have very little in my life to counterbalance the negatives, to make up for the minor tortures of daily life, not least among which is the willful human stupidity to which I alluded above.

I probably ought to expunge myself from the world before I decide to try to expunge the world itself.  It’s always a temptation.  I frequently brainstorm ideas for relatively modest interventions that could destabilize the world, both politically and physically, just to try to put it out of its misery and mine.

Speaking of misery:  does anyone actually like the new Aptos font that Microsoft has made its current default?  I find it repulsive, and it makes me lean toward preferring Google’s alternatives to the Microsoft word processing and spreadsheet programs.  To whomever designed this font, I say:  I’m sorry, I’m sure you put significant effort into it, and that you did your best given the circumstances and your innate abilities and all the various vectors impinging on your state at the time…but you fucked up.

Oh, well.  That’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  In the UK, I hope you have a good General Election, with outcomes that are overall beneficial or at least not detrimental.  Keir Starmer may be a bit lackluster, but it’s not as though Sunak and his eighty-three or so immediate predecessors over the last several years have been all that impressive.

In the US, I hope you all have a nice holiday, and I encourage you to take a moment to read at the least the beginning and ending of the Declaration of Independence—you can skip the list of grievances if you must.  If nothing else, you’ll encounter compound complex sentences that would be daunting even for me to write.

TTFN

happy independence day

*I haven’t counted them myself, so I make no guarantee, but those numbers certainly seem about right, so I don’t really doubt them.

**Excluding the Amendments, it is apparently 4,543 words long—or 334 words fewer than the net new words I wrote on Extra Body before last week’s blog.  That’s far from an insurmountable task to read.  With the Amendments included, it’s still only 7,591 words.  That’s only twice as long as my shortest short story, Solitaire, and it’s far less dark and horrifying.

***No one is ever really in charge of anything, not on any significant scale.  Also, queen ants don’t actually organize ant hills, and queen bees don’t run their hives, and queen termites don’t design and manage the construction of termite mounds.  Get over it.

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Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night and, for the day, confin’d to blog in fires

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so I am writing my traditional Thursday morning blog post.  This is my first post this week—which feels odd, I have to admit—and should also be my last post for the week, barring (as I always say) the unforeseen.

It’s the Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere (the Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere), and so it is the “longest” (“shortest”) day of the year.  It’s also the official beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere (winter in the south), though nature doesn’t give a flying f*ck at a tiny little rat’s ass about how humans label the days.

Speaking of labeling the days, the Tri-rail system is making a repeated, official announcement that on July 4th it will be operating on a weekend/holiday schedule, which is not a surprise.  What is irritating—to me, though probably not to anyone else—is the fact that they have set it up to say that this schedule will occur on “the 4th of July, July 4th”, which they repeat in Spanish and Creole.

It’s irritating because, if they’re going to name the holiday and then give the date, why don’t they refer to it as “Independence Day”, which is after all the original name and point of the holiday?  I mean, it’s worth recalling the ideas included in the Declaration of Independence, aspirational though many have always been and not yet quite fully instantiated.  You know, the whole right to life, “liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the fact that all (people)* are created equal, and the fact that governments only legitimately exist in order to secure the rights of the people, “deriving their just power from the consent of the governed”, and that when government fails to perform its fundamental duty, it is the right of the people to change it, with the caveat that one should not change governments lightly or frivolously.

It’s absurd to say that the 4th of July is on July 4th, because it’s redundant, quite apart from failing to acknowledge the point of the holiday.  It’s a bit like making an announcement, “El tren funcionará según el horario de los domingos el Cinco de Mayo, el quinto día de mayo.”  The fact that the announcement is in the form it takes is further evidence that humans don’t think either about the significance of the day nor the logic and concision of the language they use to convey information.

It sometimes gets to the point where one doesn’t bother trying to determine why a particular person is a misanthrope but rather one wonders why anyone is not a misanthrope.  I’m not a bigot, though; I don’t just hate humans.  I don’t think the other animals are any better that humans are (and I’m no great admirer of fungi, plants, protozoa, and prokaryotes).  They’re just less competent (in the broad sense of the word), and so their blind self-interest and response to entirely “local”** influences tends to cause less damage and create fewer absurdities and stupidities.

That’s enough of me griping about train announcements.  In other news, I have been writing this week (though I did not work on Saturday after all, because the office was closed, so I didn’t write any on that day).  Since last post, I’ve written a total of 3,731 words on Extra Body.  It would have been more—it probably should have been more—but I’ve really been writing only a page a day, and I’ve had to force myself to do that.

I’m incredibly exhausted.  My sleep has been consistently poor, even for me, and if anything it seems to be deteriorating steadily.  I can’t even rest when I have down time; I’m extremely tired but I don’t feel sleepy.

To quote John at the bar in the song Piano Man, “I believe this is killing me”.  I’m not speaking metaphorically.  Every day I feel vague and separate, like a very faintly received and poorly rendered analog television signal, dominated by static.  My dysthymia/depression is very bad, my tinnitus is just awful, making my sensory sensitivity to sound (or “SSS” for short) all the worse.  I can’t even tell if I’m writing coherently, or if I’m speaking coherently at any given day or time.  Thankfully—I guess—I speak to nearly no one, other than a few people at work, and that’s pretty limited, because I feel like I have nothing to say that isn’t inane or repetitive.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Sunday was Father’s Day, which is at best a bittersweet holiday for me; I haven’t physically been in the presence of my children since about 2013, and though I’ve exchanged emails, texts, and a few phone calls with my daughter (and she sent me a cool gift for Father’s Day), I’ve had all of one e-mail exchange with my son since 2013 (unless I’m forgetting something).  Clearly, I’m unsatisfactory and/or unpleasant even to the people I love most in the world.  You can just imagine how irritating I am to people who hate me (of which group I am the chief member).

And, of course, two Saturdays from now, June 29th would have been my 33rd wedding anniversary.  Thirty-three is, of course, the age at which hobbits “come of age”, and was Frodo’s age at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, though it was seventeen years later that he left the Shire to begin his great journey.

Okay, well, I’m rambling now.  I’ve probably been rambling all along, but it’s becoming impossible not to see it at this point, even for me.  I’ll try to get a little more done on Extra Body this week if I can.  It really is almost finished, but that’s a rather nebulous status.  I could conceivably finish the first draft by next Thursday, but I would not recommend placing any bets on it.  I also wouldn’t recommend placing any bets on me living to see it published, let alone to writing and finishing HELIOS, or anything else, for that matter.

I’m just too damn tired and discouraged, and whatever my species actually is, they seem to have forgotten about me, if they ever realized that they left me here***.  I’ve been investigating high, open parking garages in the area—they’re not as common as I would wish in this part of Florida—and experimenting with replacing the psyllium with other substances in these generic Metamucil capsules I have, just to try to figure out promising techniques or ideas.  I don’t know what’s going to happen, of course.  But I’m damn near sure that there will be no epiphany or miraculous rescue.  As far as I can tell, that’s just not how my life works.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good week, and a good beginning of summer, though of course the heat in the American east and northeast is supposedly pretty bad.  It’s rough down here, too, but that’s not anything new.

TTFN

destroyer

*Even Star Trek only fixed their androcentric version of things with the start of The Next Generation in the eighties, so we shouldn’t be too hard on Jefferson et al for unthinking sexism (they had other moral errors that were at least as egregious).  Even in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, women only got the right to vote in 1952, so the US had them beat by over 30 years.  And, of course, there are plenty of countries throughout the world where women still do not have equal rights…or often any rights.

**I’m using “local” in a relatively technical sense, here.  Obviously in these days of global communication networks of various kinds, one can be influenced by ideas and forces not merely from across the planet but also—given the information from history—from the past.  However, all these influences only come to bear upon individuals when they actually receive the information that influences them, when any incoming influence actually impinges on their nervous systems.  And, of course, no organism can help but respond to the forces that operate directly upon and within it, anymore than one can choose to waive one’s compliance with the laws of physics.  So, local, national, and international news are in this sense nevertheless all local forces.  Even gravity is really a local force in this sense—each portion of the gravitational field responds not literally to distant objects, but rather to the state of the field right next to it.  This is especially obvious in the phenomenon of gravitational waves, but is true of all gravitational effects.  And, of course, like all influences in this, our universe, the transmission of those influences cannot go faster than the fundamental speed of causality, which is the speed of light.  There is some possibility that, at least in some sense, quantum mechanics is a non-local process (or set of processes) but I have my doubts about even that.

***This is metaphorical—well, usually—and I am not literally delusional.  It merely captures how I feel about myself in relation to all the other people in the world.

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Writing report and some talk of the peaks and drop-offs of June, and of me

Report on today’s fiction writing:

Block words: 1,103

Net Words:  1,140

So there was a difference of roughly 3.3% between the two, which is consistent with the first couple of checks I did, and less of a difference than there was on Wednesday.  It is consistent with my experience today, because I know I added a few sentences to my previous writing to clarify some moments and make the flow of a conversation feel more natural.  That happens all the time when rereading/editing, of course, but I guess it doesn’t generally end up making more than a few percent difference in total writing for the day, based on what I’ve measured so far.

This all probably doesn’t matter in the slightest to anyone but me, but once I’ve started paying attention to such a thing, it’s very difficult for me not to note it.  I doubt that it adds any significant insight even for me, but who knows?  More knowledge is usually at least not detrimental, and can often be beneficial, unless the cost of obtaining the knowledge it a loss of energy or knowledge or some opportunity cost in some other area that produces a greater detriment than the new knowledge is a benefit.

Anyway…

June begins tomorrow, as I noted previously.  It’s a month that begins with a good and important event, for me and my family, so that’s a double-plus-good, to steal a term from Newspeak.

After that, things get much more dicey.

Of course, the summer solstice (June 20th this year) is when the days reach their peak length (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) and then begin getting shorter, so if the winter solstice is a time for celebration as days begin to lengthen, one would imagine the summer one would be a day of mourning.  This doesn’t seem, generally, to be the case, but it’s definitely the harbinger of increasing heat and humidity here in south Florida, which is not great and is apparently getting worse as the years pass.  To paraphrase Porgy and Bess, it’s summertime, and the living is…oozy.

June is also the month of both Father’s Day and my former wedding anniversary.  These are melancholy commemorations for me.  This year would have been my 33rd wedding anniversary, but I now will have been divorced 3 years longer than I was married.  I’ve also now been away from both my children–physically away, neither having been in their presence nor seen them directly–for as many or more years than they were old when last I was truly a part of their lives.

I’ve always been able to do some things quite a bit more easily than most other people seem able to do.  But all those things are trivial, and none of them have ever come to much of anything, anyway.  At almost all of the things which have been most important to me, I am an abject and abysmal failure.

I have apparently been at least a decent brother, so I didn’t fuck that up too royally.  Not yet, anyway.  I think I was a pretty good doctor; my patients always said so.  But I have been a failure as a son, and as a husband, and as a father, the roles which have mattered by far the most to me, in increasing order.  So, June starts on a very high peak, but it goes downhill rapidly, like the graph of 1 over (x-1):

graph of 1 over x minus

Probably there’s some other, more elaborate formula that would describe things better, but you get the idea, I think.  Actually, I should probably make it ((1/(1-x))-x or something similar.  But it’s not that important.  Nothing I do is important, except in a negative sense, which is the whole point.

I’ll work tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, so I’ll be writing some fiction and giving a report (also barring the unforeseen).  I hope you all have a good weekend.

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Monday report, 5-27-2024

I did not write or go to work on Friday.  I started to develop a “classic migraine”, i.e., one that begins with a visual “aura”, on Thursday while on my way back to the house, and despite three Ibuprofen and a caffeine pill, it developed and lasted well into the following evening.  I achieved nothing of worth nor of any real enjoyment over the weekend, so there’s nothing to report regarding that.  I was very much lying about, punctuated by a few short walks to the store (and a malfunction of the clothes washing machine on Sunday morning in the middle of my second load, forcing me to wring out those clothes before putting them in the dryer), because my back was acting up something fierce–possibly because I’d been lying around (in the dark) in a funny way due to my migraine.

Anyway, this morning I wrote some on Extra Body:  1,262 “block” words, but with a net 1,261 total new words, which means that, in my rereading and editing, I took out one more word than I added.

Since I have no life, there is nothing else to report other than that, as usual, there was a bunch of catch-up stuff to do at the office this morning, but I’m awake early in the morning, anyway.  It’s Memorial Day in the US, of course, but our office is open.  We would probably be open on Christmas if anyone would come in, and we are usually open on New Year’s Day.

I hope those of you who observe it have a good Memorial Day, and that those of you who don’t observe it nevertheless have a good day.

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A brief Saturday morning report on May 18, 2024 CE

I just wanted to keep in contact with anyone who is following my progress and to let you know that I wrote about 1,261 words this morning.  I say “about” because, though that is the number of words in the completely new writing I did today, every morning I reread at least a majority of what I wrote the previous day to get myself back into the swing of the story, and I edit as I do this.  This morning, I know that I added at least one decently long sentence during that process, but I probably took some words out, too.  That makes the true number of words added unlikely to be exactly 1,261.

Of course, there is a way to keep track.  I could note the total word count prior to beginning my editing and writing for the day and then, when done, compare the numbers.  This would give the absolute increase in word count for the day.  It might even be mildly interesting to track how this compares to the word count of the new portion written for the day.  Does it tend to be higher?  Does it tend to be lower?  Is there no overall tendency?  However, to do this, I would need to keep notes about the process somewhere, perhaps at the bottom of the file.  That would change the actual word count of the file, though.  Alternatively, I could make a new file the entire purpose of which is to keep notes on such things.  But that would entail the extra effort of dealing with the extra file every day.

So, unless some readers out there in my reader-verse show any interest in getting reports about such minutiae, I probably won’t start keeping track.  But, then again, now that I’ve thought about it, knowing how weirdly obsessive I can get with numbers, maybe I will.  Probably, the only thing that will stop me is my less-than-stellar level of personal energy.

Tomorrow I am off work, of course, but though Monday is a Federal Holiday in the US (Memorial Day, the unofficial “beginning of summer”, and the day we officially remember soldiers who have died in wars for our country), our office will be open and so I will be doing some writing, barring the unforeseen.  Have a good weekend in the meantime, please.

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I hope you all have a good Friday (get it?)

It’s Friday, and for those of you for whom this is the last workday of the week, I hope you have a good weekend; I work tomorrow, so this is not a TGIF sort of Friday for me.  I am obviously writing a blog post today, and I plan to write one tomorrow, as well.  Aren’t you lucky?

However…

…my current plan after that is to bring my small laptop computer with me when I leave the office tomorrow and then, next week, write fiction in the morning every day except Thursday, on which day I will revert to my old, once-weekly blogging.  I don’t know how long this pattern will last; I’m not making promises, merely predictions.  Still, I want to try to finish Extra Body and publish it, and maybe even start writing HELIOS afterwards, though that’s a longer term prediction, and so, like the weather forecast, it becomes inherently less reliable.

I already reverted to the old form of blog title yesterday, that of using a Shakespearean quote, altered to insert some form of the word “blog”.  I hadn’t planned to do so, but since I discussed some matters about which I wished I could take vengeance, I naturally thought of Shylock’s little speech in The Merchant of Venice.  I had to have a title anyway, and it was Thursday, so, to quote Doc Brown**, “I figured…what the hell.”

(Had it been Saturday night, I might have thought it all right to say, “What have I got to lose?”)

I didn’t include a picture, as I often used to do for my Thursday posts (imagining that this would garner me more readers).  That’s because finding a usable picture, then modifying it to suit my needs, was always very effortful.  I could do it pretty quickly, and some of the results were even fairly creative and artistic (in my opinion), but they were not worth the effort.  And if they drew more attention, they drew the attention of people who were more interested in pictures than in words, which is not my intended audience, at least not for this blog.

Oh, my!  I just realized that this is “Good Friday”.  It seems odd to call “good” the day memorializing someone’s crucifixion, especially if it’s the crucifixion of a good person.  Still, “good” is a fairly protean concept in any case, and I understand the reasoning behind it, such as it is, for the day, but it still seems slightly perverse to me.

It first occurred to me to check if it was indeed that traditional Christian holiday because there seem to be slightly fewer people at the train station at this time than there usually are.  As far as I know, the train schedule is a standard weekday one, and on Sunday it will be, as always, on a Sunday schedule, so there’s no need to modify it for Easter.

I don’t think I’ve ever ridden the Tri-Rail on a Sunday, come to think of it.  But I have ridden it on many a “holiday”, when it was on a restricted schedule, because my office, like so many businesses in the modern world, is much less likely to take national holidays off than used to be the case for most organizations a few decades ago.

The businesses of the modern world are stuck in a Nash equilibrium (of sorts) in which were any of them to change and improve their practices (in the sense of being less aggressively competitive and allowing employees more days off), they would be outcompeted, would lose business, might go out of business, in which case their employees would also be harmed by losing jobs, which would affect the overall job market, dogs and cats would live together…mass hysteria!  In such situations, there is no way for individuals to change their practices without harm to themselves and even to the system, even if those practices are plainly not optimal.

It is for these reasons, among others, that governments are instituted among the peoples of the Earth (“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”), to try to act upon situations that will not correct themselves.  Unfortunately, governments too can fall into perverse equilibria of various kinds, and once they do, getting them out of it can require significant, sometimes catastrophic, upheavals.

Think of having to pull the power cord on your computer to restart it because it’s gotten bogged down or frozen, and Ctrl-Alt-Del isn’t doing anything at all.  If they haven’t been auto-saved, you might lose some files on which you were working, but at least the computer can be useful again.

That’s a strained metaphor, I know, and I apologize.  But sometimes one does have sympathy (albeit not full agreement) with Jefferson’s notion that, for people to remain free, and presumably for governments to do what they are supposed to do, there should be a literal revolution/rebellion every twenty years or so:  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.”

That’s a bit extreme, perhaps, but maybe it would be interesting if, say, once every twenty years or so, everyone in government had to be replaced.  This is beyond the concept of term limits, and it would not be a staggered affair but would happen all at once.

I know, I know, there would be many detriments, including harms due to the fact that, ceteris paribus, people tend to get better at jobs the longer they work at them.  There would be real losses and setbacks associated with everyone being new to the government.

But then again, when people do politics as a career, they often learn bad habits, and the system can develop unplanned but subsequently entrenched and self-reinforcing negative patterns, equilibria that cry out for punctuation***.  These lead to losses of opportunity, economic losses, the loss of lives, and the occurrence of needless suffering‒but these costs are usually unnoticed because they are diffuse and scattered.  It’s related to the way we don’t recognize antacids as genuinely life-saving drugs, because we’re not aware of the many people who would have died‒who used to die, and often quite young‒from ulcers and perforations and gastric and esophageal cancers.

It’s also related to the fact that, environmentally and public health wise, nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels for the world and for people’s health.  The number of illnesses and premature deaths per capita caused by even the worst nuclear disasters, even if they were scaled up to account for the greater preponderance of fossil fuel based power, is probably little more than a rounding error compared to the respiratory illnesses and other causes of suffering and premature death due to airborne particulates and similar problems from fossil fuels.

Well, there I go again, swerving all over the shop from one tangent to another, like a space probe passing near a bunch of unrealistically closely packed planets and having its trajectory repeatedly altered as it does so.

Speaking of such things, I do wish I could find a way to keep the energy I tend to have on Monday mornings for physics and mathematics and make it last through the rest of the week.  But my mental energy and clarity seems to be swiftly diminished by the slings and arrows of outrageous stupidity throughout the working days, so even by Tuesdays, I am usually significantly enervated.

Well, whataya gonna do?  This post has gotten too long already, anyway, and we’re getting close to my train stop.  I hope those of you who celebrate this holiday have a truly good Friday, and the rest of you as well.  Tomorrow, I’ll probably wish you a happy Easter.

*An interesting phrase combining a present tense verb with a future-oriented adverb in a way.

**That’s the one from Back to the Future, not the one who makes the really great canned sodas you can get in good delis and similar places.

***To bastardize a concept from Gould and Eldredge.