Language

by

Should I write on Substack? Should I not write at all?

Well, first, today’s date is a bit boring; it’s just riddled with even numbers.  Even numbers, of course, are almost never prime‒out of all the infinite prime numbers that exist, only one is an even number, and that’s the even number:  2.  Likewise, out of all the infinite even numbers, only 2 is prime.

Now, you might point out that there is a 2 in today’s date; in fact there is more than one (har):  1-28-2026.  However, each of those twos reads, almost inescapably, as part of a larger, non-prime* number‒28, 20 (or 2000), 26.  So, they lose their charm.

And that’s my weird, number-related nonsense out of the way for now.

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day, but I’ve done my best to get a head start on that this week, to the degree possible.  We’ll see whether or not that does me any good.  Well, I will see.  I doubt any of you will see, and you probably won’t know in any sense.  I guess I might share it here on this blog, if it sticks in my mind enough for me to mention it, but I doubt that will happen.  It seems unlikely that anyone would care, anyway.

The cliché thing to add at the end there wanted to be “but never say never”.  However, that expression annoys me, partly because it includes the word “never” twice while admonishing others not to use it.  Of course, I recognize that to be deliberate verbal irony, but I don’t find it very clever.

My preference is to say something like “never is a long time” when admonishing someone against making sweeping, “never”-related statements.  Or, if someone says something like, “they were supposed to get back to me, but they never did,” I will often say, “Never hasn’t happened yet.  They just haven’t gotten back to you so far.”

No, actually, I don’t have any (local) friends.  Why do you ask?

I still haven’t received any feedback regarding the Substack question.  In fact, the only feedback I’ve received of any kind has been from the two people who are basically the only people who comment on my blog.  It’s nice to get feedback from them, of course, but I would welcome others as well.  And I would really appreciate someone’s thoughts about the Substack and/or monetization idea.

I don’t know.  Maybe to be able to monetize one’s (nonfiction) writing, one needs to have some consistent shtick or something‒a focus on politics or medicine or philosophy or what have you.  Whereas I don’t even know what I’m going to discuss until I’m already discussing it**.  Is that the sort of thing that could sustain a paying audience?  I don’t know.

I would like to get some broader feedback on this, but I don’t know how to elicit that feedback except by asking here.  It’s not as though I have anyone else to whom I can talk about this kind of thing.  I barely have anyone to whom I can talk about anything.

I guess I could just try to “fake it until I make it” with a more focused blog, obeying an idiotic admonition that people recall only because it rhymes.

Now, I’m fond of lyrics and good poetry so I appreciate rhymes, but rhyme does not equal reason; in other words, don’t fall for someone saying something like, “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

If anything, if someone tries to convince you using a rhyme, veer in the other direction from accepting what they say.  When people have good reasons for something, they don’t require clever verbosity to persuade a reasonable person.  I say “persuade”, but that’s really being a bit disrespectful to the notion of true persuasion.  Using the “rhyme as reason” fallacy is really a form of dishonest manipulation, as is the willful application of many fallacies when trying to influence another’s thoughts.

Anyway, I don’t want to fake it with respect to having a particular focus or agenda in a blog or other series of writing.  I’ve been faking being human all my life, and that’s more than exhausting enough.  Also, as time goes by, and I see more and more of the things humans do and the ways that humans do things, I’m thinking maybe trying to act like one of them isn’t such a well-advised undertaking.  Maybe humans are vastly overrated.

Then again, so are most other life forms on the planet.  Perhaps phytoplankton/cyanobacteria are the only innocent life forms on Earth (and I’m far from certain of their innocence).  Of course, since no being had any choice in being the being that it’s being, one could say that every life form is innocent, and that’s fair enough, but then the very concepts of innocence and guilt become nearly useless.  Maybe they should be.  Maybe they tend to mislead and muddle people’s thinking.

I don’t know what I’m on about with all this.  I suppose I’ll see how I got to this point when I edit the post.  I doubt it will be terribly enlightening, but it’s not impossible.

That’s enough for today, though.  If any readers do have any thoughts about the Substack idea or anything else, I would be interested to hear them.  And, yes, I would hear them even if they are just written on the page (or, rather, the screen), because when I read, I hear what I’m reading in my head; that’s how I read.  So there.

I hope you have a very good day.

*I think the official term is “composite number” but I don’t think they need (or deserve) a special name.  They are just non-primes.

**I’m using the word “discuss” fairly broadly here, since usually I’m the only one “talking”, and it’s not clear whether or not that counts as a discussion.

by

Dysphoria, dat phoria, de udder phoria, to Hell with it, none of it matters

Well, we’ve reached the just-shy-of-two-thirds point in the month of January, and we’re exactly nine months out from the most important day of the year (Ha ha).  How exciting.

It’s still chilly here in south Florida; at least, it’s chilly for south Florida.  I don’t think we’re in any immediate danger of having snow in Miami‒we’re more than twenty degrees Fahrenheit* too warm for that‒but it’s cold if you’ve lived in the subtropical cesspool climate for more than a quarter of a century.

That’s way too long to be in Florida.  Florida is a nice place to visit, but given the overall quality of humans that tend to have influence here‒and we all know one extremely prominent one‒you wouldn’t want to live here.  Or, as a popular local saying goes, “Florida:  come on vacation, leave on probation.”  Even my grandparents on my mother’s side, who had lived in Florida for some years, moved back north for their final years.

I’m not sure what to “talk” about today.  Or, to be my usual unnecessarily strict self regarding such things, I am not sure about what to “talk” today.

Here’s a mildly amusing point:  when I try to construct that last sentence’s last phrase without ending it (not counting the word “today”) in a preposition, or a dangling participle, or whatever the proper term is, the stupid Google Docs word processor tries to suggest that I’m incorrect and recommends the less grammatically correct but more popular way to put things, such as what I wrote in the preceding sentence.  It’s pathetic and disgusting.  Google should be ashamed of themselves, every last one of them, to the point where they commit mass seppuku.

It’s almost as if someone said they wanted to listen to some lovely orchestral music, perhaps something by Rachmaninoff, and the respondent‒perhaps some artificial “intelligence” program‒played “Baby Shark”.

Anyway, so much of nearly everything is so very frustrating in this life.  Nothing is rewarding.  Well, nearly nothing is rewarding, and the few rewarding things are not just few but also very far between.

I see no future for me.  I cannot visualize actually having a remaining life that’s any better than that of a homeless drug addict.

Everything is maddening.  Or maybe it’s just that I am maddened by everything.  It hardly matters which is the more accurate way to put things, since the experience for me is the same:  unhappiness, loneliness, frustration, insomnia, chronic pain, constant tinnitus in both ears, professional and personal disgrace, and who knows how many other things I could list if I had the energy for it.

I don’t think I can do this much more, perhaps not any more.  I’m so frustrated and miserable and stuck.  Supposedly, someone with my level of ASD‒level 2** officially‒needs moderate support, not just “some” support.  I don’t have any.  I am on my own.

That’s not to say I don’t have people who care about me, but they are far away and have their own shit with which to deal.  They certainly don’t need to waste their energy on the added piece of shit that I am.

I don’t know how often I have felt that I really ought to kill myself, that it’s probably the most sensible course of action for me‒socially, biologically, ethically, what have you‒but I have not done so yet.  Each occurrence of such contemplation must carry some certain percentage of risk****, like a more metaphorical version of Russian Roulette (though I literally tried that once).  Eventually, probability suggests that my actual killing of myself would approach a mathematical certainty.

It will never quite reach certainty, of course, even if (when?) I finally kill myself, at least not as a matter of retroactive probability.  Just because someone won the lottery last week doesn’t mean we can retroactively say that their odds of winning were 100%.  One could say such a thing from a certain point of view‒the past being unchangeable and so fixed and deterministic‒but it’s not a useful way to think about probability.

Anyway, enough of this shit for now.  I don’t know if I’ll write a post tomorrow; I mean, it’s always uncertain, but it feels less likely than usual.  If I do, I guess it’ll show up here.

*Let’s see, in centigrade (or Celsius) that’s five ninths as many degrees as in Fahrenheit, so 20 times five is 100, divided by 9 is 11 and one ninth, or 11.1111111…

**Level 2:  Perfume, lingerie, women’s clothing, and jewelry***.  Everybody out of the elevator.

***That stuff would probably actually all be on level 1.  They usually keep things of interest mainly to women on the first floor of department stores, since statistically, those are the things that bring in the most business.

****If you want to call “risk” something that would end my constant dysphoria and also free other people from having to think about me in any other than a sad little, throwaway, “Aw, what a shame” kind of way.

by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by

Free will with any purchase of $100 or more

Happy Boxing Day, everyone.

For those of you in the US who don’t have much interaction with Great Britain or Canada (or the “antipodes”, where I think the day is also “celebrated”), Boxing Day is the official name for the day after Christmas, and since Christmas was yesterday, today is Boxing Day.  QED.

There is, no doubt, a thorough and accurate explanation for why this day is called Boxing Day, but I have not yet encountered it, despite occasional half-assed searches.  I also, honestly, don’t care very much.  I have a vague set of notions for possible explanations, existing in a sort of quantum superposition/probability cloud in my head, and that’s good enough for me.

On the other hand, if anyone out there knows the definitive, accurate, appropriately cited and replicated explanation for the source of the term Boxing Day…just keep it to yourself.  I’m not interested in reading any comments about it.

I am also not interested in reading any comments about Christmas, but I hope those of you who celebrate that holiday had a very lovely day, and enjoyed it in the best possible way with the best possible company.

By “best possible” please don’t take me to refer to some idealized, perfect*, eutopian** day.  I mean, the best possible day you could have given the circumstances of all the people and events in your life and around you.  I don’t expect it was without any unpleasantness or drama or minor irritations.  At the very least, most of us have to use the toilet several times a day, and those who don’t are generally worse off, not better off, than those who do.

But if you got to spend the day (or a significant chunk of it) with at least one person you love and who hopefully loves you, then you have at least some reason to think of it as a good day.  I did not have a good day, but hey, this is me, right?  When do I ever have a good day?

The next big holiday coming up is New Year.  Of course, if the universe overall is a closed loop of time (I have no real reason to suspect that it is, but no strong reason to be convinced that it is not) then this year is not new, nor is it old, it is just fixed.  From within any kind of deterministic spacetime, loop or otherwise, it can feel as though time has passed, but as Einstein pointed out, this would be an illusion (albeit a persistent one).

If things are nondeterministic, then all bets are off with respect to whether time is an illusion or not.  But please, don’t fall for the notion that the facts of quantum mechanics mean that the universe is non-deterministic.  They can mean that, depending on the truth underlying the mathematical descriptions, but quantum mechanics can be just as deterministic‒in a slightly more complicated way‒as Newtonian or Einsteinian classical physics.  Two examples are “superdeterminism” and the Everettian, many-worlds description of quantum mechanics.  There are probably others.

The point being, if the universe is deterministic, then each moment, each year, each Planck time is in a way permanent and “eternal”.  Each event is not only implied in the prior state of the universe, but it is also implied in the future state of the universe.

Some might complain that this would imply that there is no such thing as free will.  I think you are correct.  But so what?  Your will is patently less free than you imagine even in simpler, more straightforward terms.  Can you quickly drink a fifth of Wild Turkey 151 on an empty stomach (with no regurgitation) and choose not to become intoxicated (and possibly dead)?  Can you choose just not to feel tired after being awake for 36 hours?  Can you choose not to feel acute or chronic pain?  If you can do that last thing, I’d be interested in knowing how, so feel free to put that in the comments, but don’t waste my time with nonsense, please.

Anyway, as I like to say, I either have free will or I don’t, but I don’t have any choice in the matter.

It’s a bit like when people say absurd things such as “I wouldn’t want to live in a world without a God”.  My response, usually internal, to such statements is, “I don’t recall being given a choice about which kind of universe I would live in.  Did I miss some prenatal, preconceptual meeting where people were given the various options regarding into which universe they would be born?”

Anyway, it is whatever it is.  In a certain sense, it can of course be useful to consider what the nature of reality most truly and completely is, so we can navigate it in the best available way.  But in another sense, the ability to learn about a deterministic universe is just baked in.  And like everything else, it is permanent, albeit not in the usual, prosaic sense of enduring through time unchanging, since time itself is one of the permanent things.  Does this imply some “meta-time”***?  Not necessarily, but it could in principle.

I don’t think we know enough about the deep roots of reality to do more than speculate about such things.  The speculation can be fun, though, and occasionally it can briefly distract one from the unbearable shittiness of being.  Alas, that distraction never lasts for long; mine is fading rapidly even now, and I don’t feel like writing or even breathing any more.  I can’t do much about the latter process without causing a big to-do, but the writing I can stop any…

*Whatever that even means.

**This is not a typo or a misunderstanding or misspelling.  This is my (apparent) neologism for a truly and realistically ideal place.  The word “utopia” means essentially “no place”, highlighting the fact that such a place does not exist, even potentially.  Whereas my term uses the prefix “eu-” which means “true or good or well” as in eukaryote or eugenics or my middle name “Eugene”.

***This term has nothing to do with Facebook or Instagram or whatever else to which Z*ckerberg has tried to arrogate the term “meta”.

by

Well, ain’t we a pear, Raggedy Partridge?

Well, today it really is Christmas Eve, with just one “Eve”.  We are approaching day zero, then there will be no more “Eves”.  You might say we will be eves dropping (har).  But don’t worry, there will be no associated invasion of privacy‒except perhaps by Santa Claus, who supposedly sees you when you’re sleeping (creepy) and knows when you’re awake (vaguely threatening).  Also, he supposedly knows if you’ve been bad or good, but we are not given any list of criteria‒not so much as one criterion, in a pear tree or elsewhere‒by which he measures or judges your goodness or badness.

I suspect that any true Santa Claus* would be very forgiving, especially with children, especially if they were trying.

Okay, sorry, that was all silly.  Then again, I guess some people do call this the silly season.  At least, that’s what Martin Riggs called it in Lethal Weapon, when he was trying to talk down the would-be jumper on a building.

They caught/saved that guy (with Riggs’s help) by inflating one of those big Hollywood air cushion things like stunt people use in movies.  I don’t see how that could work in real life to stop an attempted suicide, though.  How would they get such a thing into the correct location?  One is supposed to land in such cushions back first, but someone trying to kill himself would not bother, nor would he aim for the center of the thing, or indeed for the thing itself.

I suppose it’s better than using one of those circular net/trampoline type things, such as one can see in old cartoons.  I’ve never seen one in real life, not even in old pictures, so I’m not sure they aren’t one of those Hollywood-based, self-referential tropes that never really were like anything that truly existed and was used.

I guess such a net might at least have the advantage that it can be maneuvered.  But if someone is falling long enough for those below to make significant adjustments, that person is going to be moving fast when they hit that little net.  And the net is only a few feet off the ground, so even if all the people holding the net can keep their grips, either the person falling is going to slam into the ground below the net with their speed not reduced significantly, or‒if the net has very strong elasticity so it can decelerate a falling person fast enough that they won’t hit the ground‒hitting the net will kill them more or less as readily as hitting the ground would kill them.

Physics can be a bitch sometimes, but I still love it.

Maybe if they had big, premade blocks of aerogel or something it might work.  Does anyone know whether aerogel has been tested to see how well it slows and/or stops rapidly moving/falling objects and how cushiony it is?  If so, is such a person reading this blog post?  If so, I invite you to share that knowledge below, in the comments.

Okay, while I must admit that I never actually plan out any of my blog posts**, this one is more undirected than many.  Or maybe that’s only the way it feels to me.  Maybe I feel chaotic and undirected, but the reader finds the post entirely logical, pleasantly whimsical, and smoothly written.  I don’t know and I seem unable to tell.  If anyone wants to comment about that in the comments below, you would be most welcome.

Anyway, I’m going to leave you with a picture with a Christmas message from the 12th Doctor.  The picture is from the Doctor Who 8th series Christmas special, Last Christmas.  The title doesn’t refer to the previous year’s holiday, but to the fact that every Christmas is the last Christmas for someone.

Despite that sad and heavy line, the episode is quite quirky.  In it, the Doctor and Clara Oswald, with the help of Santa Claus (Really?  Well, it’s hard to tell for sure.), played by Nick Frost (the perfect name for an actor to play Santa, right?), fight these alien crab beings that look a lot like face huggers**** and which feed you dreams/hallucinations while they slowly digest your brains.

A question has just occurred to me:  Could Santa be a time lord?  I can think of how it could work; certainly a TARDIS as the “sleigh” could help explain Santa’s ability to reach every Christmas-celebrating house in one night.

Even more thought-provokingly, I have a storyline worked out in my head in which Jesus was actually a time lord who used the chameleon circuit to be reborn as a baby and was given to Mary and Joseph to raise.   John the Baptist would actually be the time lord’s companion, who‒at the River Jordan, of course‒opens the fob watch containing his essence and returns the time lord to his true self, thus the whole “holy spirit coming to Jesus…”

Anyway, I won’t get more into that; I don’t want to offend anyone too much.

By the way, the words on the picture below don’t come from the episode in the picture.  They are from the 12th Doctor’s last speech to himself to prepare for his regeneration.  Indeed, these are almost the last words of that speech.  I will close this post with the subsequent, final words of the 12th Doctor.

“Doctor…I let you go.”

*According to Ze Frank, Morgan Freeman is attempting to create a true Santa Claus.

**Okay, well, “never” may be an exaggeration.  But if I ever have planned out a post, it was probably a one-time thing or so.  Certainly I strongly suspect I could count the occurrences on the fingers*** of one hand.

***Am I considering the thumb as a finger in this assessment, or am I not?  I won’t tell you, but I will say that I am almost certain that it doesn’t make a difference either way toward the accuracy of my “fingers of one hand” comment, unless the hand was Yoda’s or Nightcrawler’s.

****This is noted within the episode, and sets up a particularly good joke:

by

“Is there anybody out there?”

Here we are again, I guess.  I told you it wasn’t likely that yesterday was my final bellyache, didn’t I?  Anyway, I wrote words to that effect.  And I was right, though many might think that’s a pity and a shame.

It’s Christmas Eve Eve, a silly designation involving iterated “Eves” which would become unworkable pretty quickly.  You’ll notice that I didn’t call yesterday “Christmas Eve Eve Eve”, even (ha) though that would have worked and been accurate.  Still, if one keeps up that process, then “Boxing Day” (aka the day after Christmas in the US) would be “Christmas (Eve364)” or some such notation.

I suppose if one wanted, one could keep track of the days of the year in that fashion, but it seems quite clunky.  Also, if one were inclined just to count the days of the year, or to count them down, it would make more sense to use counting numbers and to start with New Year’s Day.  So the first day would be just Day 1, or Day 365 (or 366) if one were counting down.

Sorry, I know I’m being pretty bizarre.  Maybe that’s just some kind of hallmark of genius or something (though I doubt it).

It’s been a strange several days, including some atypical days at work.  Everyone else in the office has various things happening with their (sometimes growing) families, not all of it joyous and positive, but much of it disruptive.  And sales are always a bit slower at this time of year; people are busy buying presents for loved ones and the like in the latter part of December, even when the political and economic situation isn’t a category 5 shit storm.  But, of course, they are, collectively, just such a shit storm now, so things are more erratic than usual.

I was going to say “chaotic”, but at this stage in the universe’s evolution, chaos is almost always in play‒the mathematical kind, I mean.

Wow, I’ve written about 320 words so far, and I don’t think I’ve actually said anything.  Or, at least, I haven’t said much.  As a method of conveying useful information, this post (and perhaps this whole blog) has been highly inefficient, hasn’t it?  Of course, if I had specific information I was trying to convey, I might do better.

Though, honestly, I have a truly hard time being honest and clear when I’m trying to convey certain kinds of information.  I will often attempt to express what I think are highly urgent messages‒in person sometimes, but much more often in this blog‒yet it seems I am too esoteric or awkward in my attempts to express myself.  Certainly, those attempts have yet to achieve anything like my desired aims.

Yesterday was no exception.  I thought I was being rather ham-handed, to be honest, but clearly I was not.  I cannot, in good conscience, blame my reader(s).  If a pitcher throws a wild enough pitch, the catcher cannot reasonably be expected to catch it, though that’s the catcher’s expertise.  How much more unreasonable would it be to blame other people for not getting points my unconscious or awkward or habit-driven and “neurodivergent” mind is forcing me to make in very awkward ways?

I am far from a professional pitcher in this metaphor, and no one has ever volunteered to be my catcher.  Most people who end up trying to do it, out of chance or kindness or whatever, get sick of the work after a very short while.

I cannot justly blame them; that’s one villain trope I find intolerable, blaming other people and taking out one’s frustration on them instead of assessing how one’s own choices can be improved.  It’s small wonder these bad guys, who have secured all the advantages through diligent villainy, fail in the end.  It’s not just because of plot armor.

Another bad villain habit is gloating over a still-living arch-enemy.  In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious) had caught Yoda off-guard with force lightning.  Yoda was down!  And Palpatine allowed him to get up because he had “been waiting for this for a long time”.

Moron!  If he had pressed his advantage with more force lightning or even just rushed up and cut the little bugger in half with his lightsaber, he would have had time to head to Mustafar (remember, he sensed that Lord Vader was in danger).  Even if Obi wan got away, he wouldn’t have Yoda’s backup or anything.  Palpatine could have won much more thoroughly, and Vader might never have needed his breathing armor and could have achieved his full potential, and he might even have had Luke and Leia with him.

That was a hell of a nerdy tangent, wasn’t it?  Sorry.  It’s a pet peeve of mine.  But I guess tripping over one’s ego is a natural hazard for the sorts of people who become arch villains.

Maybe I dwell on such things too much.  Perhaps that’s what started me down the road to being habitually hyper self-critical, which evolved into self-hatred and a desire for self-destruction.  It’s a bit of a conundrum, but I would still rather not become cocky and arrogant in anything but a comedic way.  I don’t like seeing it; I really don’t want to do it.

Well, this has been another sort of bipolar-pattern post, hasn’t it?  It really does seem to me that I often produce a vaguely sinusoidal pattern of posts veering from very gloomy and morose and thoroughly nihilistic and moribund to weirdly hyperactive, almost hypomanic posts.  Yet even such latter type posts, of which this is one, really feel pressured to me most of the time, in the psychiatric/psychological usage of the term as applied to speech.

There’s nothing really that I can do with these sorts of insights, though, and certainly no one else is using them for any benevolent purpose toward me.  I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.  As Gendo Ikari pointed out, everyone is ultimately alone, and we certainly die alone.

On that cheery note:  Happy Holidays, everyone!

by

Here we go again. Heavy sigh.

It’s Tuesday now, in case you didn’t know, though of course you might not be reading this on a Tuesday.  If by some bizarre set of circumstances my writing is still being read in the far future‒or even more improbably that it goes backward in time somehow or tunnels across to some other part of the universe that nevertheless has people who can read English‒there may not even be Tuesdays where and when you exist.

In case that’s the case, I will just say that in the 20th and 21st centuries‒and actually for quite some time before‒we divided the days into groups of 7, which we called weeks*.  There were roughly 52 of these in a year (52 x 7 = 364, one day and some change less than a full year).

In the English-speaking world we called these days Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  I could go into the etymology of those names, but that’s a bit of a pain.  Anyway, you’re the ones who are in some future, presumably advanced civilization; why can’t you look that stuff up for yourselves?

Anyway, our “official work week” ran from Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday off.  However, that was far from the only schedule people followed, and in a form of evolution due to mutual competition, people vied with each other to work more days and longer hours for less pay, because other people were willing to do it.  Not to participate would lead one to be less likely to get or keep a job, and that could lead to destitution‒at least somewhat more quickly than does steadily working longer and longer for less and less, which is a kind of creeping but pernicious societal malaise.

Of course, other, parallel forces led to decreasing regulation of companies’ ability to “encourage” their workers to work more for less, and since in the short term** everyone works in response to their local incentives, people tended to allow these things to happen.  And lawmakers and regulators, subject to the inherently woefully dysfunctional political party system, became less and less incentivized to care about the needs and worries of those they nominally represented, and to whom they had sworn their service***.

They were happy to allow the fortunate wealthy and powerful to take advantage of the foolishly earnest and mutually (and self-destructively) competitive citizens, because they were rewarded for allowing it.

Everyone responds to local forces, of course.  Even spacetime itself responds to the spacetime immediately adjacent to it, as the electromagnetic field responds to the state of the field immediately adjacent to it, as demonstrated by the implications of Maxwell’s famous equations, which I’m sure jump right out at you:

Of course, the meaning of “local” is circular here, almost tautological, since the definition of local is merely “something that can affect another thing directly” more or less.

So it’s only too possible for a system to evolve itself into a state that is overall detrimental to those within the system.  Everyone, even the most seemingly successful, can be in a worse situation than they would be in otherwise, but it’s very difficult to see the way out, to get a “bird’s eye view” of the landscape, if you will.

One can therefore get stuck in situations where, despite the overall equilibrium being detrimental to everyone, any one individual taking action to try to move things in a better direction would make their local situation worse for them.

How is one to respond to such a situation?  Well, one can simply go along with it and try to do what’s best for oneself locally, and that is what most people do most of the time‒understandably enough, even though the overall situation may be evolving toward its own miserable destruction.

Or, of course, one could do what family therapists are often said to do:  effectively setting off a bomb***** in the middle of a difficult situation and seeing what happens when the dust settles, figuring that nothing is likely to be much worse than things are at a given present.  At least this allows for a new system to form, like the biosphere after the various mass extinctions.  Maybe it will become better than the previous one.

Maybe they all will always evolve toward catastrophe, to collapse and then be replaced by a new system.

It would be better if people could learn, and could deliberately change local incentives in careful and measured ways, adjusting settings to correct for and steer things away from poorer outcomes and so on, in ways that are not too disruptive at any given place or time.  That’s nominally what many of our systems are meant to be doing, but they don’t do a very good job at it.

Probably it would be better to do a hard reset.  But I’m not sure.  And it’s probably not worth the effort.  The odds of humanity surviving to become cosmically significant seem very low to me, and I’m not sure it would be good for the universe‒whatever that might mean‒if they do.

It’s probably all pointless, and I’m tired of it, anyway.  I don’t want to be part of this equilibrium or lack thereof anymore.  I want to make my own quietus.  Maybe “civilization” should do the same.

*Not to be confused with “weak”, which sounds the same but means more or less “the opposite of strong” and has little or nothing to do with divisions of time.

**And that’s pretty much the only term that comes naturally and easily to humans, for sound biological but horrible psychological and sociological reasons.

***If they were Klingons, they would surely be slain for their dishonor.  I don’t necessarily disagree with such an outcome morally, but practically, it would probably lead to increasing chaos****, so we understandably avoid it most of the time.

****It’s an open question whether such chaos is inherently bad.

*****Metaphorically, of course. At least, it’s usually metaphorical.

by

A very low magnitude happiness vector

It’s Friday now, for those of you who have been drinking heavily in the run-up to the big holidays and have lost track of the days.  I’m certainly working today, but I don’t know if the office will be open tomorrow, so I don’t know if I will write a blog post tomorrow.  If you’re interested, feel free to check this site in the morning.  Or, if you like, you can subscribe, and you’ll be sent emails for new posts.  But take that suggestion like a broken barometer:  no pressure.

That’s almost all that I feel I have to say.  Ordinarily, not having anything to say doesn’t mean I won’t write a post.  I’ll just blabber and blather for nearly a thousand words, just to see myself write*.  But there won’t be anything of substance.

Probably a good fraction‒perhaps even a significant majority‒of everything you can find on this blog is pointless nonsense.  Though, of course, I might contend that everything is pointless nonsense.  But here in this blog, you will sometimes find it concentrated, distilled, freeze-dried, and vacuum sealed.

No, I don’t know what some of those things might mean here, metaphorically, any more than you do.  I was just saying words that I thought seemed good.  I have curious tastes, though, so I’ve no idea what others might think of them.

Anyway, that’s me trying to act all silly and funny and whatnot, as if I might be even slightly happy, so that other people don’t have to worry about me.  Well, don’t worry about me.  I’m not happy at all, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest, because neither do I.  Maybe that’s just the way everything is, or maybe it’s just me.  Neither would particularly surprise me.

So, anyway, yeah, I’m not happy, not in any useful sense of the term.  John Galt said that happiness is a state of noncontradictory joy, and that’s always seemed to me like a pretty useful definition of the word, though it’s not the only useful one.  But I like how it separates joy from happiness.  Even people going to the gallows can sometimes joke and laugh, if only as a defense from fear, and in those moments of laughter they may feel joy.  But it is perforce transient, and it’s unlikely that they would be willing to say that they were happy**.

So, in that usage of the word happiness, joy would be necessary but not sufficient for actual happiness.  And both might be relatively orthogonal to a state of wellbeing (which is another word that has more than one interpretation).  Still, though the dot product of happiness and wellbeing may be surprisingly small***, I don’t think it could be zero.

Yes, I use vector multiplication as metaphors for such things, though honestly, it’s not really even so far separated as to be merely a metaphor.  Vectors can be useful for tremendous numbers of things that may seem far afield from each other, from computers and artificial intelligence to physics to biology to economics and ecology.

They can even be of use in psychology, though I don’t know how often they are used therein.  I haven’t dived into a lot of more formal psychology recently, though I like the popular works of Daniel Kahneman and of Jonathan Haidt.  And Paul Bloom is great fun.  But popular works of psychology rarely involve measuring aspects of mental functioning as vectors in a phase space.

Though, as you might have picked up if you’ve read a lot of what I’ve written here, I think it’s useful to think of human behavior and actions as the outcome of a vector sum of all the various “pressures” in the brain/mind, which end up with a resultant that determines what one’s actions will be in that moment.

But, of course, the action itself can feed back on the input vectors, altering them in various ways (maybe their angles, maybe their magnitudes, rarely but possibly their actual sign, which admittedly would just be equivalent to an angle change of 180 degrees, or 𝜋 radians).

Likewise, the state of many of those vectors can change with time.  For instance, one could imagine a vector associated with one’s degree of alertness.  Such a vector would tend to have greater magnitude in the daytime than late at night in most humans, so it waxes and wanes inherently (though even this is likely a result of input vectors delivered by various aspects of the sensory systems).

But the actions taken as a product of previous moments’ vector additions can affect this vector, too.  If a previous resultant led to one having a strong cup of coffee, that might increase the magnitude of the alertness vector, though there would be a delay.  Alternatively, if the previous outcome had led to one drinking a significant amount of Wild Turkey 151 on an empty stomach, the alertness vector might soon start decreasing in magnitude.

Okay, I’ve reached the point in the blog post where I’m using vectors to describe the effects of coffee versus whiskey.  I think it’s reasonable to bring things to a close now.  I hope you all have very good days, by any reasonable measure.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll write a post tomorrow.  I’ll leave figuring out what effect that will have on your own wellbeing for your consideration.

*Analogous to speaking to hear oneself talk.

**Though I can imagine possible situations in which one might be literally happy even on the way to the gallows.  It would be a very brief happiness, nonetheless.

***I doubt that it is, but I also doubt that it is the full, direct product of the magnitudes, as it would be if there were no angular difference at all.  Wellbeing, I think, is more complicated than happiness, which is itself by no means simple.

by

I never may believe these antique fables nor these fairy blogs.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as the savvy/experienced can tell from the fact that I said “Hello and good morning” or similar words at the beginning of the post.

I’m not at all sure what to write now.  There’s nothing coming into my thoughts that seems interesting.  There are many annoying things, things that make me want to swat or poison or burn them like a swarm of mosquitoes and other bloodsucking, disease carrying pestilentia.  I don’t know if that last word is “really” a word, as in one that’s used and recognized by many people.  But it’s a word that feels right, and does at least some job of conveying the formication* that so many things in life induce for me.

Everything in my life is either dominated or highlighted by pain and/or tension-anxiety and/or depression, and all of that tends to make me feel angry or at least grumpy a lot.  It’s not pleasant, as I’m sure you’d agree.

Ugh, this is all so tedious and pointless.  I’m spitting in the ocean as if there’s any real chance that my loogie could change the course of the Gulf Stream even at a small scale.  But its impact is entirely washed out by thermal and other noise.

I’m having a hard time getting interested in anything positive‒I haven’t watched any science videos or read any science books or philosophy or whatever for a while.  I have plenty, and there are many things I would wish to understand better than I do.  But I have no available energy for such things.  It takes all the energy I have to get up and go to work and try to pretend to be human and productive, and then to get back to the house at the end of the day.

Time’s been my way when I would have thought it would be a shame if humanity dies out without ever leaving this solar system, without ever expanding and maybe, potentially, becoming cosmically significant, as described in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity.

Now, at least some of the time, I think it’s probably appropriate.  Why inflict the naked house apes and their progeny (literal or figurative) upon the greater, future cosmos?  Let there be disharmony.  Let there be dissonance.  Let there be cacophony.  Let there be chaos.  And finally, let there be silence.

I don’t know what point, if any, I’m trying to make here.

I need to clear my head, or at least I wish to clear my head.  My brain always seems to be cranking away at about a mile a second, in a random, drunken walk through the phase space of my possible thoughts.  I think it’s been like that pretty much all my life, but in the past, when the machine was newer, it ran more smoothly, and all the pipes and tubes and wires and hoses and fans and transistors and every other metaphorical part were functioning more efficiently.

What’s the point of all this nonsense?  I’m sorry.  I’m sure this is very unpleasant.  I’m sure that I am very unpleasant; I’ve been told so before, and the cases made were not unconvincing.

I used to be able to hide that part of me a lot of the time.  I used to be able to pretend to be positive and upbeat and to help the people around me to feel good sometimes.  I’ve even done some good at times in the past.  It’s been a long time since that’s been the case.  But that’s not too consequential, since I am now alone, and probably will be for the rest of my life, which feels pretty appropriate to me.

Anyway, whatever.  Try to have a good day.

TTN

*That one is a “real” word**, and no, it has pretty much no common ground with the word “fornication” beyond similar sound and shape.

**And I looked up and confirmed that “pestilentia” is a recognized word also and means roughly what I used it to mean when I “reinvented” it.  I guess that shows that it’s a well-crafted word.

by

“Language is the lifeblood of civilization. Courtesy is the lubricant.”

It feels like Tuesday to me today, since I was out sick on Monday, but of course it’s actually Wednesday.  I need to do payroll today at the office, for one thing, and I don’t do that on Tuesdays‒barring some holiday making it necessary‒since before Wednesday we don’t have all of our own reports in.

Don’t worry, by the way, that wasn’t a preposition that I ended that last sentence with*.  In that case “in” acted more as an adjective (I think) than a preposition, a description of where the reports are, not the beginning of a phrase such as “in a world of hurt”, or even “in that case”.

Of course, the specific rules of language are somewhat arbitrary.  They do have to achieve the desired end of coherent communication, and they need to have structure and dynamics that make that end readily achievable.  But there are multiple ways to achieve any given end, usually.  For instance, in Japanese one has postpositions rather than prepositions (if I recall correctly, anyway).  But it is useful to be consistent with grammar, because it tends to make communication more reliable, ceteris paribus.

Oh, and if I come across as pretentious for using expressions like ceteris paribus instead of “all else being equal”, there’s a good reason:  I am pretentious**.  Actually, though, I just really enjoy using interesting language, and learning at least a little bit of other languages.  Learning other languages improves your grasp of your own language and sometimes of your own thoughts.

It’s analogous to Mill’s statement that defending your arguments against those who disagree and hearing their reasons for disagreeing will tend to improve your own understanding of your “side” of the disagreement.  Perhaps more importantly, it might just get you to see some errors in your own position, and even if it does not lead you to change your mind in the moment, it might eventually lead you to improve your thinking.

If this process is to work, it’s essential for one to have honest interlocutors‒at least relatively speaking‒who are not frankly bigoted or otherwise inappropriately prejudiced against their discussion partners.  And I do mean “discussion” not “debate”.  Debates are contests, put on for show, and if you have your mind changed during one and you admit it, you will have “lost”.

That’s perverse and disgusting to me, as well as a real shame.  When you change your mind because you’ve learned new (reliable and convincing) information and/or have heard arguments you hadn’t considered, you have won.  You have grown, you have improved, your map has come to represent the territory at least a little better; your model has become more useful.

But if you’re going to grow in that sense, you cannot be dogmatic.  I’m very much not a fan of dogmas of any kind***.

Social media, unfortunately, does not encourage open and honest discussion and persuasion, but rather enmity and spite and “hooray for our side, the other side sucks” thinking, as well as interactions that barely rise to the maturity level of a kindergarten playground shouting match.  Honestly, “I’m rubber, you’re glue” is a better argument than many of the things one sees online.  And this is not something exclusive to one or another side of any political or social divide.  Almost all forms of social media are often just arenas full of monkeys throwing feces at each other while shrieking monkey noises.

That’s metaphorical, of course.  If there were just lots of videos of actual monkeys doing this, it might at least be funny the first time or two.  Humans, on the other hand, are not really that charming when they’re being nasty to each other.  Maybe it’s the lack of tails that’s the problem.

I do agree that one does not owe reasoned arguments against someone who is openly and actively arrogating their “right” to take that which does not belong to them or to do harm to others in some other, willful way.  However, when one is not openly and actively engaged in literal self-defense, it’s worthwhile to try to be understanding or at least compassionate even for people who have odious ideas.

At the very least, it’s useful to try to understand how such people came to believe what they seem to believe, or otherwise to understand their thought processes and so on as best as possible, because such things do not happen without causes, even if they lack anything that could honestly be called “reasons”.

And if one is going to correct a problem‒or fight a disease, to use a more loaded metaphor‒one will have a better chance the more one understands, with minimal bias, how that disease works.  Understanding such things about others can even‒hard as it may be to believe‒help us see how we are similar, and help us recognize the flaws in our own ideas.

Perish the thought.

*Ha ha!

**Ha ha again!

***And I see no reason to suspect that karma is a real thing, before you go for the “my karma ran over your dogma” joke.