Language

by

I had a headline in mind, but it would have been gross

Well, today I am writing on my smartphone because I simply, and stupidly, forgot to bring my lapcom yesterday.  I don’t always know where my mind is, to tip a hat to the Pixies, but it often seems not to be with me.

Of course, that’s a figure of speech.  I know that my mind is me, whatever that ultimately means, so I am never anywhere without my mind, anymore than a square can be said to exist even if all its sides are removed‒really, even if one side is removed (though in that case, it can be implied, somewhat like the famous square illusion made of four incomplete circles).

Anyway, I’m going to keep it short today, partly because I’m feeling somewhat queasy, and that takes away a lot of one’s energy‒at least, it takes away a lot of this one’s energy.  I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up or anything; it’s not that bad currently.  I just feel a little like my upper GI tract is not happy with me.  Perhaps it’s a bit like a frowning parent:  not angry, just disappointed.

It’s not a great way to start a day, but there are many worse ones, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.  I will complain‒I am complaining‒but I shouldn’t.

Here’s a peculiar question that occurred to me after writing that last sentence:  are there cases where one shouldn’t do something, but one ought to do it (or vice versa)?  Or are those two words such nearly complete synonyms that such a thing would be contradictory?  One can speak a contradiction, or write it, etc., but one cannot actually bring one into being.  “Talk is cheap, mother fucker,” DMX said.  Reality, on the other hand, has a huge cover charge at the door and you have to pay à la carte for what you get.

This reminds me (I’m not sure why) of a brief, mainly inconsequential writing error I found yesterday in an article related to the new Spider-Man movie.  They used “i.e.” when they were providing an example and should have used “e.g.”.  I know it’s a minor error, but come on, they went through this difference in Get Shorty, for crying out loud (the movie, at least; I don’t remember if it was in the book).

Anyway, it’s not a very auspicious day, for me or for the world, so I’m going to try not to drag this on.  I don’t feel very well, physically or mentally, and what’s more, I don’t expect to feel well, physically or mentally, in the future.

That doesn’t quite reach the level at which I expect not to feel well, physically or mentally.  It’s a subtle difference in wording, but conceptually the states are quite distinct.  One can vaguely not expect that things will necessarily be good, perhaps based on past experience, but not really be inclined one way or the other, or one can frankly expect that things will be bad.

Of course, in the end, no one here gets out alive, but even that isn’t necessarily a bad thing (nor is it necessarily a good thing).  It’s just the way reality appears to be, as best we can tell right now, no matter what anyone claims based on “belief” and “faith” and centuries old to millennia old hearsay (also known as religious writings).

A delusion embraced by millions or billions or even quadrillions of people is still a delusion.  You don’t make dog shit into fillet mignon just by telling yourself and others repeatedly that it is, and if you eat it, that’s on you.  Don’t try to feed it to me, especially not by force.

Of course, you can sort of turn excrement into steak, such as by using it to fertilize grassland on which cattle will graze before eventually being eaten.  But the fact that nature allows this particular remarkable transformation does not mean (for example) that a cracker becomes the body of an ancient rabbi, or that some wine becomes his blood, just because someone said something in Latin near it.

All the pseudo magical crap distracts from the actual good messages that can be found (occasionally, here and there) in religions and ideologies.  People don’t want to have to do the work of really turning crap into burgers, though, because that involves actual farming, which is hard and the results are not guaranteed.

Of course, one can consider or imagine oneself more or less guaranteed to get certain outcomes from religious practices, but the actual outcomes are almost certainly going to be largely the opposite of what people want and tell themselves they will get.

Humans can be very stupid a lot of the time.  But they can also be brilliant, even the most unassuming and humble of them.  Like Ultron said, they’re grotesque and yet lovely.  Like him, I’m often torn between reveling in the human works of art and science and engineering and exploration and so on, and doing my best to wipe every last one of them from the face of the universe.

Unfortunately, right now my tummy is too icky for me to put much energy into either one.

I hope you have a good day.

by

“But we don’t reckon time the same way, do we, Clarice?”

Well, ten-six, good buddy, it’s the sixth of October, and we’re already almost a fifth of the way through the month.  It’s curious how, while one is trying to get through things that one must do, one feels real sympathy with Gandalf’s line, “each day was as long as a life-age of the Earth”, and yet the overall passage of days, weeks, and months rockets on so quickly that one is almost unable to keep up.

Pink Floyd really was/were* insightful in their song Time.  And consider how young they were when they did it!  Roger Waters‒arguably the greatest lyricist since, I don’t know, W. S. Gilbert‒was only 29 when he wrote it, and he worried he was getting on in years, I guess.  Poor child, if only he knew.

Still, he was a brilliant child.

Time can feel very flexible and stretchable and squeezable, because the clock rate of our processors (aka brains) varies somewhat.  Maybe someone should study the subjective topology of time, how the experience can be fascinatingly inconsistent, even within the same person, within the same day, and yet the overall thing is fundamentally unchanged‒it has, you might say, the same, unchanging number of holes.

It’s an important thing to recall:  our subjective experience of time can be highly variable intrapersonally and interpersonally, but that’s just a perception.  Time itself is progressing as it always does‒which may well be “not at all” from a 4+ dimensional viewpoint.  Yes, relativity says that time “passes” at differing rates in different situations.  That difference is the main producer of what we experience as gravity, here on Earth.  But the space-time interval between any two events will be the same no matter who is measuring it, like the speed of light itself.

Many things in the universe, in life, are like this.  For instance, we know that our basic color perception, with the semi-arbitrary delineation of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet**, is born of our way of seeing:  with three kinds of cone cells, each of which responds maximally to a certain set of wavelengths, and the measuring and balancing of the degrees of activation of these kinds of cells.  From 3 not-completely-independent measurement types, one can construct an astonishing array of shades as it were.

But the fundamental nature of the electromagnetic spectrum has no inherent blue or red or yellow.  It’s just a long stretch of continuously variable frequencies.

A threefold variable system is also used in describing quark and gluon interactions in quantum chromodynamics.  The guy who does the Highly Entropic Mind YouTube channel did a great video on (the mathematics of) quantum chromodynamics that gets into some of that, and I recommend it if you’ve ever been curious about such things.  I’ll embed it here.

Anyway, our 3-photoreceptor visual system is why any humanly perceived color can be “produced” digitally by using only three different pixels, the RGB (red, green, and blue) ones, and why printers can print (pretty much) any humanly perceived color using CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).

But some alien race that perceives light using different specific means, even if they see the same visible spectrum, might think our various electronic and printed imagery, even our paintings, look very little like the things they are supposed to represent.  Probably there are even other terrestrial creatures who would think so; eyes have evolved independently dozens of times on Earth.  They are not all exactly the same, and vertebrate eyes are not necessarily the best ones.

Man, I’m all over the place this morning.  I’m so effing tired‒so tired that I’m not bothering to use profanity!‒that I don’t know if I’m making sense.  My sleep last night was particularly bad.

Have you ever been so fatigued from chronic sleeplessness that you honestly wished you would get hit by a (car or similar) just so you could get a break?  Even if the break is in your bones, even if it kills you, because at least you could rest in some sense.  If this is what Brahma feels like when dreaming the universe, it’s no wonder it has to dissolve it all into a dreamless sleep once every few hundred billion years, or however that legend/myth goes.

As for me and my house, I would really like to be able to rest so I can feel refreshed again someday, after what feels like many life ages of the Earth.  So far, though, I have not yet found the method for doing so.

Maybe music will help.  Today, I’m going to try to commit to playing guitar for at least a few minutes this morning.  It’s a shame not to do it for so long, and not just because my calluses are softening.  Maybe I’ll even sing (I have a hard time not singing when playing, honestly).

I hope you all (or “y’all”, a very sensible and useful contraction) are better rested than I am.  Cat forbid that any more people feel this way than necessary.

*This depends on whether you’re using the British plural form‒since it’s a band with multiple people in it‒or the American singular, since a band counts as a single unit despite being composed of multiple subunits, much as anything bigger than an elementary particle is.  It gives a new meaning or implication to e pluribus unum, doesn’t it?

**According to what I’ve read, Newton just threw in “indigo”, which does not actually constitute a separate kind of color like the other six, because he had a mystical notion about the number 7.  He was not alone in that, of course, but his influence was tremendous, so even when he had no real scientific reason for the divisions, his combination has persisted in the public consciousness for more than 300 years.

by

Don’t bug me with your sophisticated Halloween ideas; it’s too rainy for that

There are only 29 shopping days until Halloween, so you might as well start preparing your costumes and decorations early…if you call this early.  I don’t recommend getting your candy this early, though.  It’s all too easy to succumb to the temptation to eat it early, and that candy ends up in various places in your body‒however, it tends not to go where you would like it to go.

Anyway, it’s Friday and (as the preceding paragraph implies) it’s the 2nd day of October‒October 2nd, you might be tempted to call it if you were hopelessly naïve*.

It’s now been raining here in south Florida for the entire month of October, so far.  That’s not saying a lot, of course (day-wise), since it’s only the 2nd day of October, as I said.  Rain-wise, however, it has most assuredly been a lot.  I’m actually mildly surprised that there’s not more flooding than there is, though there is some flooding.  Considering that most of the state is barely above water in the first place, flooding is practically the default setting.

Speaking of the physical nature of the state (Florida) and things to which it lends itself, I saw a white SUV yesterday going along that bore various illustrations and logos centered around “The Bug Lady”.  I think there was a dot TV thing there as well, and most amusingly and coolly, under the passenger side window was stenciled the word “Entomologist”.

How cool is that?  Presumably this person is an educator of some variety.  Possibly she has a YouTube or Instagram or TikTok channel, or maybe all three, or maybe only two of the three, or maybe others in addition or instead.  But I think it’s pretty neat for someone to go around in a vehicle that advertises that one is an entomologist and an unabashed “bug lady”.

South Florida must be one of the best places in the continental US to find and study insects and other land arthropods.  There are over a million described insect species in the three meter by three meter area right outside my door alone!

Okay, that last bit was (slightly) exaggerated, but there are a lot of them.  I wonder how the total biomass of arthropods in Florida compares to the biomass of humans in Florida.  I doubt that it’s greater, but the size of its fractional comparison might be impressive.  And, of course, before the modern era, there were almost no humans living in Florida, so the arthropods were the long-term champions.  It’s not a naturally human-oriented habitat.

It is, however, very good for creatures that eat arthropods, creatures like reptiles and amphibians and the occasional mammal that eats such things preferentially.  For instance, I think I remember that opossums eat a fair number of insects and arachnids, such as ticks, and are actually quite useful to humans and do us no harm.  They’re even relatively resistant to rabies because of their relatively low body temperature!

So, yeah, there are a fair few lizards and their relatives in south Florida, and that is one pretty cool thing about the state.  I wonder if, somewhere out there, there’s an SUV with “Snake lady” or “Lizard Lady” on the side, with the word “Herpetologist” under the passenger side window.  If so, I wonder if she’s single.

Now that I think about it, there are some fish that tend to eat insects that come near the surface of the water, and there is quite a lot of water surface around here (see above).   Also, dragonflies and their kin do quite well here, though technically they are also arthropods.  Still, they’re the good kinds of arthropods, the ones that eat the pests, and they and their ilk do well.  As evidence:  ordinary houseflies seem far less common around here than they ever did up north during the summertime.

Oh, and how could I forget spiders?  We’ve got some really cool spiders around here.  None of them are terribly big, alas, but some of them are quite remarkable, and they’re all pretty cool.

Though, when I accidentally walk through a nascent spider web because‒by nature‒they are often hard to see, I get a double shot of irritation.  First, I feel sad and somewhat guilty for having wrecked something some poor spider put its blood, sweat, and tears (or at least its silk) into.  Though, it’s an operational hazard for the spiders, since they want (so to speak) for their webs to be hard to see and thus hard to avoid.  But big clumsy things that are not potential prey can also have a hard time seeing and avoiding them.

I guess that’s the cost of doing business for spiders.  Maybe they can do a tax write-off with Mother Nature.

But the other problem with spider webs is that once you get them on you, it can be maddening to try to get them completely off, and despite being very fine and light, they are still quite palpable.  And I think I wrote here once about the time I accidentally walked through a spider web and got some in my eye.  I developed a mild case of irritant conjunctivitis from that, which lasted the rest of that day.

I don’t hold it against that particular spider nor against spiders in general.  After all, it was just doing what it does, and it was surely far more inconvenienced, both relatively and absolutely, than I was.  Imagine a giant tripping on your house and caving in an entire side of it.  Maybe the giant hurts its foot in the process, but you have to rebuild a substantial part of your house!

Okay, well, that’s enough for today, and for this week.  It’s Friday, and I do not work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so don’t expect a blog post from me before Monday.

I mean, well…you can expect one if that’s the way you roll, but your expectations are almost certain to be incorrect.  Why do that to yourself?  Instead, just try your best to have a good weekend.

*You would also be correct, in this case, but it’s not naïveté that makes you correct, that’s just a coincidence.  To be naïve is often to be at a higher risk of being incorrect.  It’s not always the case, however.  Sometimes when people become more “sophisticated”, it leads them to sophistry more than to philosophy**.

**Did you notice how “sophisticated”, “sophistry”, and “philosophy” are all related words, bearing the root sophia***, which is Greek for wisdom.  Philosophy, for instance, means “love of wisdom”.

***I recommend against looking into what the literal meaning of Sophia Vergara would be.

by

Maybe DON’T wake me up when September ends

I wish that I had brought the lapcom back with me to the house yesterday evening after work.  Alas, I did not, and so I am writing this post on the “smart”phone like some Zillennial.  It’s annoying.

Although, I want to be clear, putting the word “smart” in “scare quotes” as I did just now is merely rhetorical.  It’s snarkiness.  It is a true fact that modern cellular phones are indeed quite smart compared to all prior generations of phones.

They’re smart compared to most prior generations of home computers.  They’re smart compared to many prior iterations of the operating computers on board real space ships, for crying out loud.

And if rumors are correct, they’re smarter than our current strategic defense computers.  Though that could be false intelligence, just a negative rumor about the military, because such rumors are enticing and so spread easily.  I don’t know.

I’m just annoyed to be so susceptible to using the phone to write, simply because its presence is convenient, even though I very much prefer to write on the lapcom, or on any other real (as opposed to virtual) keyboard.

Of course, I use the phone for many other things that I previously would have done with something else.  Calculator functions are one of those things, and I have no complaints about being able to use the smartphone for them.

It’s quite convenient, though I can do relatively simple mental arithmetic pretty well without any calculator at all.  Still, it doesn’t take much for it just to make more sense to use a calculator, because the way it processes arithmetic is more direct and logical than repurposing a general biological intelligence to be able to do arithmetic via relatively elaborate algorithms.

You can use an LLM to multiply two three-digit numbers together, and it may even do better than most people would do at the task‒I don’t honestly know‒but it would be a waste of that machine’s capabilities, when you could just tap on your calculator app, or even just use an old-fashioned physical calculator.

You don’t use a VTOL fighter jet to go to the corner store for a candy bar, after all.  I mean, it would be pretty cool to see someone do it once, just for a stunt, but it’s not a sensible way to go for a snack.  Heck, it’s not really sensible to drive to the corner store, unless you have some physical infirmity that makes it necessary.  In general, walking is better.  You’ll not only get there nearly as fast as (and sometimes faster than) by driving, you’ll also be making yourself ever so slightly stronger and healthier because of the exercise.

A bicycle would probably also be a sensible way to go.  But it has the disadvantage that you need to park your bike and chain it up (unless you live somewhere far less petty-theft-prone than where I live), and in general bikes require more maintenance than feet do, or at least they require additional maintenance.

Anyway, I’ve had my troubles with bicycles, so I have a hard time talking them up, though I recognize that they have many advantages over motor vehicles and over plain ambulation.  My difficulty with bicycles is one of the many things about myself that frustrates me.  Still, there are many places that one can walk where bicycles or other wheeled vehicles are not going to work.  There are reasons why the Incas, for instance. didn’t really use any wheeled vehicles.

Well, enough of that weird little set of mutual tangents.  It’s the last day of September today, which means tomorrow will be the first day of October.  That’s just the way that works.  I’ve noted before, recently, that October is my favorite month, but the reasons for that favoritism have eroded over time.

Birthdays and holidays become just reminders of the fact that things are worse for me than they’ve ever been in the past; I have no one with whom to share any of them.  And the notion of changing leaves and bright autumn colors is just a cruel joke in south Florida, as is the notion of weather cool enough to require a windbreaker.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  I’m sick of all this bullshit, anyway.  I would say it’s a waste of my time, but my time is wasted no matter what I do, so that’s not a good point.  But it’s also a waste of mental energy and effort, for something that does almost nothing for anyone, if it does that much.

I need just to shut all this shit down, and I don’t just mean the blog.  I’ve been gradually phasing out most of the relatively productive and creative things I do, though that hasn’t been deliberate or conscious.  It’s just happened, like I’m petering out.

Of course, given that “peter” is a word derived from the Greek for rock*, saying I’m petering out could be construed as meaning that I’m rocking out (dude).  But, of course, I am doing no such thing.

No, I’m just winding down, I think.  It can’t happen too soon, can it?

*Thus Jesus’s famous play on words when he said to Peter, “Upon this rock I shall build my church” or whatever the specific wording was.

by

I haven’t had a drink or two, but I don’t care

It’s Tuesday now, the 29th of September—the 2nd to last day of the month—and I am writing this post on my lapcom, for the second time in three days.  Well, okay, it’s four days if you count Sunday, but with respect to blog posts, I don’t count that.

It seems that the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom on the 29th of September was back in 2022, based on the saved files on the lapcom.

I know, I know, I need to slow down with all this craziness or some of you readers are going to have trouble with your blood pressure or asthma or generalized anxiety or what have you.  It’s all so very…exciting, isn’t it?  Sometimes you have to step back and take a slow breath, just to keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed.

Anyway, I’m writing this on the lapcom today because I slept in the office last night.  It wasn’t any bad thing, though, don’t worry about that.  I just stayed late in the office doing a Discord call with my youngest so we could watch a couple of episodes of Doctor Who together.  That’s definitely a good thing, at least from my point of view.

But it did get to be late enough that there was no real point in heading back to the house for the night just to come back here in the morning.  It’s expensive, relatively speaking, it’s time-consuming, and frankly there’s nothing very interesting about the house.  It’s only real benefit is the shower (but I’m pretty good at doing “bird baths” in the office bathroom).  It’s not particularly comfortable nor welcoming nor personal.  It certainly doesn’t feel like home to me.

I guess the cats will have to scrounge a bit for their food for the extra 24 hours, but they’re cats.  They’re good at stuff like that, believe me.  They’ll be fine.

So, yeah, anyway, I slept on the floor on the office again, using my hoody as a blanket and the backpack as a pillow, and it was fine.  I slept no worse than I usually do (though admittedly, I didn’t really sleep any better than usual, either).

And that’s about all that can be said about my life.  I go to work, I go back to the house, I write this blog on workdays, I watch YouTube videos which are becoming increasingly uninteresting on average (though there are intermittent ones that are good).  I’m reminded of the line from the Beatles song I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party:  “There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear.”

There really is nothing in my daily life that’s worth sticking around to experience.  Only things like watching Doctor Who with my youngest over Discord are of any real interest to me.

I suppose writing this blog is somewhat interesting.  Certainly, I keep doing it (so far).  I’m not sure whether that’s particularly good or not terribly good or what.  I suppose that depends very much on one’s criteria, doesn’t it?  After all, for something to be sensibly called “good”, one must first lay out one’s standards, because goodness very much depends on the purpose for which one is evaluating something.

A particular car may be a very good car, but might be lamentably bad at being a paperweight, and even worse at being a dining room centerpiece for a dinner party.  And someone can be quite a good doctor but a terrible administrator of a medical practice.  And of course, one can be a good singer-keyboardist but a terrible physicist.  Or one can be good at both, like Brian Cox (the physicist, not the actor).

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that goodness must be good according to some relatively objective and coherent measure, otherwise it’s just a vague adjective (or noun in the case of “goodness”).  As far as I’m aware, there’s no large-scale, global, ultimate measure of Goodness, despite what various religions and other dogmas might claim.

I’ve yet to encounter such a notion that’s even approaching coherence.  And goodness really ought to be coherent, if it’s claiming to be something universal and crucial.  But the real moral world is messy, even when compared to the world of myths and fairy tales, so there are no clear-cut absolute criteria.  Such things are just not terribly useful.

Maybe usefulness is the criterion that should be applied in the real world when speaking of goodness.  And usefulness implies a purpose, which implies some kind of criteria.  Maybe we would all be better off if we stopped worrying about Good and Evil with capital letters as if they were titles or offices or forces of nature.  The laws of physics themselves apply locally; maybe we’d be better off with a slightly utilitarian approach that evaluates goodness versus badness relating to the specific, local circumstances.

I don’t know, I haven’t thought all this through very carefully; I’m just thinking out loud as it were.  So don’t expect me to have arrived at some finished outcome, some theorem or system of thought.  I’m just spit balling as they say, or brainstorming, or…well, thinking out loud, like I said.  Though, of course, this is not literally out loud, unless you count the very faint sound of the keys being pressed as I type.

All right, that’s enough.  I’m tired, so I’m not going to push it too much to try to say anything profound.  I hope you all have a good day today, on this penultimate day in September of 2026 (AD or CE).  You might as well have a good day, by whatever criteria you measure such goodness, if you can.

by

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the blog of him that makes it

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days.  I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.

But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such.  But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.

There is no lapcom involved in this post today.  I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before.  There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.

Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long.  That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting.  Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose.  So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.

In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me.  It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.

I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs.  But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me.  It’s probably a stupid notion anyway.  I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction.  That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.

I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon.  Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.

But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer).  It’s so irritating and so uninteresting.  I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.

Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.

Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment:  I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****.  I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.

I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way.  It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome:  I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.

Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me.  I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me.  Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing.  And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.

Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course.  I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters.   But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.

I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably).  If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so.  In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day.  Don’t stop laughing on my account.

TTFN

[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head:  If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them.  After all, there’s nothing you can’t do.  To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades.  Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines.  Who would have guessed?]

*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”.  How’s that for a weird mistake?  I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio.  But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me.  Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.

**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything.  But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.

***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.

****I.e., a period of time.

by

Memento mori

Well, it’s the first day of a new month today.  September is that new month, of course, and despite its seven-related name, it is our ninth month, pushed back partly because of the egotism of two ancient dictators and those who revered them.

Not to say there weren’t things to admire about Julius Caesar or even Octavian (AKA Augustus, whose earlier name meant “eighth”, which at least suits the current month order).  But it is a fact that they are both just as dead as the veriest plebian or slave in their “empire”; their bodies are dust in the wind, if that.

Yes, we remember them‒a bit‒but that does them absolutely no good.  They returned to their initial state, as Mark Twain discussed at least once:  that he had been dead for millions of years before he was conceived, and it had not inconvenienced him in the slightest, so there was little to fear about returning to that state.

If you want to be remembered as a Roman Emperor (it’s probably too late for you to do that now, but let’s consider it for the sake of argument), be remembered like Marcus Aurelius, whose contributions to Stoic philosophy and the nature of a good life are still guiding and inspiring people today.  Aurelius continues actually to have effects even millennia after his death‒real ones, consequential ones, not just having people know the names of months that are named after him*.

Marcus Aurelius’s words continue to help stimulate thought and to help with psychological equanimity, and they do so in more logically defensible ways than those of most religious patriarchs (largely because the vast majority of religions are mere hodgepodges of various kinds of bullshit).

Of course, it’s almost certainly all futile.  All of it will be entirely effaced in all but the most theoretical sense (e.g., the law of conservation of quantum information) by the passage of time, as everything returns to the state mentioned by good ol’ Samuel Clemens, who is just as dead as Julius Caesar, himself.

I mean all this even if somehow “intelligent” life on Earth survives and advances long enough and successfully enough to become cosmically noticeable or even cosmically important (not a very high likelihood) and even if they discover or create ways to make the universe survive indefinitely or to make new universes or whatever.  There is still simply the matter of the signal and the noise.

This is the counter to the sometimes-heard claim that “the internet is forever”.  Well…maybe, but I doubt it.  Even if it is, though, your most embarrassing upload is already long-since unnoticeable amidst the cacophony.  You are merely one face in a crowd of billions, most of whom spend most of their time merely looking at themselves.

We live in troubled times, as the saying goes, and it is certainly true now.  But it has always been true, since the very origin of life itself.  Life is trouble, it has always been trouble, and I strongly suspect that it will always be trouble.  C’est la vie, c’est la guerre, c’est la mort.

The only state in which there is no suffering is death.  The state of Nevada may try to claim that spot, what with Las Vegas and Reno, legal gambling, legal prostitution, and whatnot, but just go wander out into the desert for a bit and see how it feels.  Don’t even get me started on California or New York or Florida as being states without suffering!

Okay, enough with the stupid, homonym-based jokes.

It is, whatever you call it, the beginning of the month in which, in the northern hemisphere, summer transitions into autumn (or fall).  Autumn is my favorite season, and not just because of the autumn people and Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show**.

No, there are many things I like about autumn, aesthetically.  It has my favorite holiday, and it has my birthday, and up north it has the lovely changing of the leaves and so on.  In Florida, of course, the good things about autumn are strongly attenuated, but Florida has that effect on many of the pleasant things in life.  At least the weather begins to moderate in Florida in the autumn.

Of course, one of the two most important events in my life happened in September, shortly before the beginning of autumn.  And, less important, but still fun, September 22nd is the day Frodo set off on his journey in The Lord of the Rings.  It’s also his (and Bilbo’s birthday).

Frodo and Bilbo are fictional characters, of course.  Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that many millions of people know far more about them than they know about Julius Caesar or his nephew.  Those two imperators are at least as “fictional” now as entirely made-up characters.  Not much cop, this Roman Emperor lark, is it?

Well, have an enjoyable day if you can.  You might as well.

*I wonder how many people in the Western world even know where the names of August and July originate.  I would not be surprised if I learned that a higher percentage of Japanese people know about the etymology of those two fully summer months (or those two fully winter months in the southern hemisphere).  But what proportion of westerners know anything about Amaterasu or Tsukuyomi?  I’d bet it’s higher now than at any time in the past, but I’d also bet that it’s still mighty low.

**”We are the hungry ones.  We are drawn by your torments like dogs in the night, and we do feed…and feed well.”

by

“He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame”

It’s the day of the moon today.  By which I am not referring to Doctor Who, series 6, episode 2 (the second part of a two-parter) which was called The Day of the Moon, if memory serves.  That was a good episode, and it tied into a long arc of a storyline that Stephen Moffat had put into motion in series 4, when he wasn’t even the show runner yet.  But it has nothing to do with my first sentence, today.

No, I am simply referring to the fact that this is Monday, the weekday named (in English and some other languages) for the moon.  It’s also the last day of August in 2026.

I occasionally wonder, what if Tsukino Usagi, AKA Sailor Moon, recognized that her name was associated with the first day of the work week (and of the school week).  I wonder this because Usagi is notoriously not fond of having to go to school.  She’s also something of a crybaby, and I can just imagine her lamenting the fact that her Sailor Senshi name is linked to the start of the work week.  I can also imagine her being jealous of Sailor Venus, since in Spanish at least, that is associated with Friday (Viernes).  Sailor Venus probably wouldn’t care.

And it also only just occurred to me to wonder what had happened to Sailor Pluto once Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet*.  I mean, if she’s really more associated with the God of the Underworld than with the now-dwarf planet, as does seem to be the case in the manga and anime, then I guess it’s fine.

Perhaps Sailor Pluto wryly smiled and shook her head indulgently upon learning that the humans had named a very small, very icy object among countless other similar objects, with a highly eccentric orbit that isn’t even in the same plane as that of the planets, after her namesake.  And she might indulgently shrug upon hearing of the more recent reclassification.  She probably didn’t care much, but she might well have known.  She was one of the Sailor Senshi who never seemed really to revert to a truly mortal form nor to have been reincarnated as a normal human.

Okay, well, that was a weird little discursion that handily demonstrates some aspects of my rather niche nerd status.  I went from Doctor Who right over to Sailor Moon (while making passing references to planetary astronomy).  That’s fine, though.  I really like both…series, sagas, stories?  I’m not sure the best word to use to encompass them both.  Perhaps “universes” is good.

It does annoy me that we now use the word “universe” when referring to things that might be merely one of many, of perhaps infinite, things, when “uni” means one**, with the implication that it is the only one.  I wish we could find a better term, so we could go back to using Universe, with the inherent capital “U”, to refer to whatever encompasses everything.

I had intended to use the term “metaverse” in my own stories, such as The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, that dealt with many planes and subsections of existence, but then Fuckerberg stole the term.  And I did start thinking about it and using it way before he arrogated it to his pathetic little virtual empire.  Then I had to switch to “Omniverse”, which may actually be a more accurate term than Metaverse, but it doesn’t sound as good in my opinion.

So, yeah, now (even in legitimate physics) there is the general use of (small u) universes, which is almost inherently contradictory.  Many Worlds may be better, but its a little nonspecific.  There are, many worlds, many worlds just in our solar system.

Maybe the term “polyverse” might work?  Perhaps “facets”?  I don’t know.  I suppose it doesn’t matter much.  It’s just me dwelling on and being bothered by things that don’t really even register to most other people.  Thoughts unlike those of my brethren, indeed.

I hope you have a great day.

*I was resistant to the notion when I first heard about it, from my kids as it turns out.  But I looked into it, and I heard the arguments‒perhaps most accessibly addressed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson‒and I was convinced.  It turns out that the international astronomical community doesn’t lightly go and change the designation of something, knowing there will be many pissed off Boomers and Gen-Xers (Hello!), but does so only with very well thought-out reasons.

**Though, to refer to cartoons again, Uni was also the name of the little unicorn on which the barbarian character doted in the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons from way back when.

by

The title of this blog post is wrong

Well, to quote Emperor Palpatine (in Return of the Jedi), “Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.”

Now, admittedly, I haven’t specifically foreseen very much, other than trivial things that are foreseen without any conscious thought.  But I did foresee (and did predict*) that I would go to the office today and that I would write a blog post today, which is what seems to be happening.  Hopefully, the Death Star will not be blown up around me.

Anyway, yeah, I’m going in to the office today.  Huzzah.

Okay, with reference to the preceding sentences:  Someone needs to tell all the word processor programs that just because we have a compound word “into” does not mean we cannot use the expression “in to” without it being a mistake!  The two things do not have precisely the same meaning, and the split words are in any case more fundamental than the compound word.

You’d think the editing software was worried that “in” and “to” were like neutrons or something, and that if you separate the compound words from each other they’ll just…decay with a half-life of about ten minutes, like free neutrons do.  Therefore, it’s got to keep them bound, because neutrons in a nucleus are really stable and can last until, I don’t know, the protons decay, if that even happens**.

Perhaps I’m overly impatient, but I get frustrated by the fact that a lot of the time, perhaps most of the time, when Google Docs gives me its grammatical suggestions, I have to choose the option “Suggestion is wrong”.

What bothers me about this‒one of the things‒is that I am pretty sure that I have more grammatical expertise than most people around me, and maybe more than most of the people who use Google Docs.  So, out there in the world where people are using it, mostly they are not correcting it, but are allowing it to correct them without even critically evaluating it.

And so, far from such grammar checkers improving people’s grammatical skill and knowledge, they weaken it.  One does not, simply by driving 26 miles every day, get in shape to run a marathon****.  If anything, one’s physical fitness tends to atrophy, and if one only gets around by motor vehicle, one tends to become far less fit, less healthy, weaker.

Of course, training too much can damage a person’s fitness as well.  Like the Laffer curve, we find our peak benefit somewhere in the middle of the arc.

Well, it looks like my footnotes today are even longer than the main body of this post.  I suspect that they are also somewhat more interesting than the main body of the post, but interestingness (interest?) is in the mind of the beholder, so only you can judge that.

I hope you all have a very good day today and a very good day tomorrow.  You should rest and prepare yourselves, because come Monday, I will be writing another blog post…as always, exclusis improvisis.

*It’s interesting that this word, which has a similar compound structure to “foresee”, is clearly of at least slightly different origin or evolution, linguistically.  Fore see:  to see before, to see ahead of time.  Pre dict:  to speak before, to speak the thing before it happens.  We pre dict but we don’t fore dict.  Likewise, we fore see, but we don’t pre see.  Curious.

**There are various theoretical reasons many physicists think protons should decay eventually, but that the half life is predicted to be something like 10 to the 35th or 10 to the 40th years or some such.  Now that’s a long half life, obviously.  But…there are a loooooot of protons.  There are so many protons (they’re everywhere, believe me, you just can’t seem to get away from them) that even if it will take 10 to the 40th years before half of them would decay, we should still be detecting some of them decaying now and then, if we look***.  But “we” have been looking for quite a while, and we haven’t been able to detect any instances of proton decay whatsoever so far.

***Think of it this way.  If there were a lottery in which to win you had to match 10 numbers, each of which could be between 1 and 100 (nonrepeating), the odds of matching one ticket would be roughly one in 6.28 times 10 to the 19th power, or one in 62,800,000,000,000,000,000 (sixty-two quintillion, 800 quadrillion).  Even so, if you had 10 to the 20th people (a hundred quintillion) playing it every week, you’d expect to have fairly frequent winners despite the long odds.  The chances of winning for one individual are so slight that they might almost as well be waiting to quantum tunnel through their front door, and yet the odds of there being no winner may be only about a coin flip in any given running of the lottery (I could work out the precise odds, but I don’t know that it’s worth the time and effort).  This is not a contradiction.  It’s a good reason to remind people not to be fooled by the fact that they may see on the news that someone often ends up winning the slightly more sane lotteries that we actually run.  Your own odds of winning are so close to zero that you’re almost certainly far more likely to die in a car accident on the way to buy your lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery, but when someone does win, it’s big news.  It’s somewhat analogous to the situation with airline crashes.

***Simply walking into Mordor, on the other hand, might be good for one’s fitness, if only there were not so many…environmental health risks.

by

Who hast not in thy blogs an eye discerning thine honor from thy suffering

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 13th of August.  Somehow, “Thursday the 13th” feels less punchy, less interesting, than “Friday the 13th”, but I strongly suspect this is just a cultural artifact of, originally, the day being considered by some to be unlucky, and then of course of the very successful and long-running series of slasher/horror films bearing that title, which took root from that superstition.

This sort of thing can be called more sharply to attention by comparing differences in cultures that do not have very strong shared histories*.  For instance, in the US (and the UK, I believe), ghost stories are generally most associated with mid-autumn, especially around Halloween time.  Whereas, in Japan, telling ghost stories is more associated with the summertime, especially the latter part of it.

I don’t know why that’s the case in Japan, but there are surely causes.  There are causes for all things at some level (probably even of causality itself, though we’re getting into uncharted territory with that speculation).  But, contrary to popular opinion. there are not always reasons.  I actually despise the notion so many people espouse, that “everything happens for a reason”.

Of course, if by “reason” you mean what I would call “cause”, then I cannot quibble with you without engaging in rank hypocrisy, which I try not to do.  But what most people seem to mean by reason in this case has to do with telos, with “purpose”, with “goals”.  In other words, they imagine some personal explanation for things, some willed intention, somewhere.

This is no doubt related to religion‒sometimes it is caused by it, sometimes it probably contributes to causing it, and sometimes it may merely be parallel‒but that doesn’t make it any better.  Deep down, below the façade of piety and orthodoxy, this type of thought seems just to be a kind of self-consolation, like sucking one’s thumb to soothe oneself.

I cannot in good conscience fault all types of self-soothing behavior.  I probably have dozens of what are now called “stims” that I do just to have stuff to do with my hands and feet (and brain, etc.), especially when I feel tense.  But I don’t take them as some hint about the ontology of reality.  I take them as things done by a nervous system trying to cope with a world for which it is perforce imperfectly adapted.

They’re not terrible things, by any means.  Some of them are even kind of cool (I can roll coins across the backs of my fingers, for instance).  But it would be silly of me to imagine or to assume them to have any deeper or broader significance.

What’s the big deal?  Why not let people console themselves with the notion that everything happens for a reason, though it may be an “ineffable” one?  What’s the harm?

Well, there’s always my general recognition that when one fights reality, one always loses.  The course of reality is strict and surrounded by impassable walls; if you don’t maintain your local parallel course to that of reality, sooner or later you will collide with those walls, and it is you who will break, while they will show not so much as a scuff mark.  

If it’s just you who suffers the consequences of this crash, that’s sad but not tragic.  But you may not be the only casualty of your poor steering, and it’s the innocent victims I lament far more than the idiots who drove themselves willfully (or at least willingly) into ruin.

But more specifically, saying that everything happens for “a reason” is a moral “get out of jail free” card.  It lets people look at cases of even terrible suffering and shrug and imagine that the suffering is there for “a reason” and so is “okay”, like Mother Theresa wallowing in the misery of the sick and dying poor as a way to get closer to Jesus.  This sort of thing is easiest when one is not suffering personally.

Now, there is often not much one can do to change a particular case of suffering, but I don’t think that makes it worthwhile to allow oneself to be delusional about it.  It’s better to admit that some entirely unnecessary suffering happens and that it sucks, because that leaves the option open of actually doing something to correct or prevent it, at some point.

It’s better than dismissing it (or worse, embracing it) because of delusions about “God’s plan”, or “karma”, or some Marxist delusion about an inevitable course of history, or any other magical thinking idea, all of which seem to center on an implicit notion of humans being (at least part of) the “purpose” of the cosmos.

Purpose is an invention, something that came into existence in human (and possibly other) brains.  If things in the universe are to be purposeful, it will be up to those who believe in that purpose to make it happen.  This is harder than just imagining that such a purpose is already there, but it actually has the potential to turn out to be made true, at least eventually.

And maybe, here and there, from time to time, when the wind is fair and the stars are right, if one sees suffering but doesn’t imagine that the suffering serves some “greater good”, one might just occasionally take action to relieve it rather than simply to slap on one’s epistemological blinders and go on one’s way.

TTFN

*This is rather akin to finding what processes are biologically fundamental, or at least old, by comparing genomes of organisms that are quite distant relatives**.

**One cannot compare truly unrelated organisms, because on this planet, there are no such things.  All life clearly shows the imprint of common ancestry.  To pick a frequently used example, most of your genes are shared (roughly) with bananas, and far more with banana slugs.