Language

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“I thought you died alone a long, long time ago”

Happy Day of the Moon, everyone.

A weird thing happened when I began this blog post.  As I was trying to write a footnote to explain that by writing “Day of the Moon” I simply meant “Monday”, the little spell-checker in the footnote marked Monday as a misspelled word.  Now, I have in the past temporarily forgotten how to spell a common word, for causes unknown—the last time I clearly recall such an instance was when I could not for the life of me remember how to spell “sure” when I was a kid—but Monday?

I tried to figure out how I could have messed that up.  And when I right-clicked on the word all the options offered to replace it were French.  It turned out that somehow, the proofing language in that section of the post had flipped to French, and I had to reset it and start the post over.

That seems truly bizarre to me.  It’s not because of anything I did, at least nothing obvious, because I have never used French in writing anything, as far as I can recall.  I know only a very limited number of words in French.  Unlike many people, I don’t find it a particularly beautiful language, and the very fact that the French government tries strictly to control the language’s grammar and lexicon by law is frankly (Ha ha) laughable.

Anyway, that’s all a weird, contingent tangent* that had nothing to do with anything I was planning to write.  That’s okay, though, since I didn’t really have anything planned to write.  That’s how I usually begin these posts.  When I do deliberately try to write about something, it’s usually a subject that not many people seem interested in.

My post from last Thursday was a good example—when I pondered whether reality is more truly described by continuous functions or by stepwise changes iterated at such a minute level and in such short intervals that we, the macroscopic, cannot tell the difference between them and the truly continuous, and how one could tell the difference.  It seems like an interesting question to me, but I don’t appear to have anyone with whom to interact who has any particular thoughts about it, or has anything to add to the conversation.

I did talk to my sister on the phone last night (not about that subject), and that was really nice.  It’s hard to find the time to do it when we’re both available, so the frequency of those interactions has been lower than I wish, but then again, a great many things in the world are quite different from what I would wish them to be.

I took melatonin and Benadryl in the evening on both Friday and Saturday nights.  I don’t know how well it helped me rest—I certainly woke up several times during both nights, but at least on Saturday morning I let myself stay in bed, though awake, until comparatively late in the morning.

Last night was rough for sleep, mainly because I got spasms and pains alternating down first my right side from my lower back to my hip and knee and ankle and foot, then switching over to my left side a little later.  It’s rather maddening, but I’m probably “mad” anyway, so it’s not like it’s going to make me insane in any new or different way.  It will just pound away at the gravel that’s all that remains of any monolith of sanity I used to possess, until it’s eventually turned into sand.

Related to that pounding, a rather odd thing happened yesterday, or it seemed odd to me.  I often watch “reaction” videos, especially to songs that I like, because it’s neat to see someone apparently experiencing a piece of good music for the first time.  It’s almost (but not quite) like listening to a song with a friend who hasn’t heard it before.  Anyway, after the second or third one I watched, the YouTube algorithm offered me an actual song, not a reaction.  In this case it was the original, David Bowie version of The Man Who Sold the World, and I played it and sang along with it, then with Ashes to Ashes, then with Karma Police, by Radiohead.

The weird part was that, as I sang these songs—none of which are especially sad, though they’re not especially happy, either—I started to cry.  With each one, there were several places in the course of the song in which I had to catch myself and hold back tears and even sobs, and I’m not at all sure why.  I haven’t done any singing in quite a while, really, other than rare and brief moments, just as I’ve only played guitar once or twice in the last six months or so.  But I don’t know why it felt so horribly sad and despair-inducting to be singing.

I stopped playing songs after that.  It was too weird and disquieting; I’m not sure what it signifies, if anything.  But I do feel more sad and hopeless as time goes by.  This blog—in its current form, anyway—was meant in part to be a cry for help, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might have the desire and the ability to do or say something that would rescue or at least assist me out of my downward depression spiral and my thoroughly empty life, which is devoid of anything deeper than work “friends”, commuting, and YouTube videos.

I get the impression that people don’t think I’m savable, which I guess I can understand.  Or maybe I make arguments that are too convincing, or at least too persistent, about my own lack of hope, so much that people think they could never talk me out of despair.  Maybe they couldn’t.  Maybe talk isn’t what’s needed.  I certainly think I would need something more than just talk, but my judgement is far from sound.  Still, I really feel like I’m wasting time, more and more, if what I was doing was trying to ask for, or to seek, or to wish for, help.

As far as I can see, help is not forthcoming.  And while it may seem, from the other side of the blog post, that this is something with which I’m sanguine and of which I’m coldly accepting, this is not the case.  I am not quite dead yet, even internally.

Time’s been my way when I’ve rescued other people—actually, I’ve done it quite often, and I did it for quite a while.  Still, apparently there’s no counterbalance for my having saved other people’s lives and relieved other people’s suffering—or else maybe I’m even more reprehensible than I often feel I am.  Whatever the case, I don’t seem to be eliciting any assistance from anyone who can do much of anything.

Maybe I need to be in situation where there’s immediate danger to life and limb before I can actually get anyone to help me.  Maybe I just am not going to get any help.  I’m certainly not able to help myself.  I’ve been doing it and trying to do it for years or decades, depending on how you draw boundaries and define your terms.  I’m at the end of my psychological resources.  I’m also caught in some kind of mental block, where I can’t seem to reach out (directly) to anyone in any way, or to explain how badly I’m doing, or even to call 988, which I often want to do.  I just feel like I’d be wasting their time.

Anyway, that’s already too much for today.  I’m going to head to the bus stop.  Maybe something will happen on the way to work that will bring things to a head, and I’ll either get help or get gone.

Almost certainly that won’t be the case.

*Which might be a good name for a band.

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Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my blog alone.

Hello.  Good morning.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m still writing this blog post.

I’m also still alive, which I guess more or less goes without saying, since I am using* the present progressive form of the combined verb “am still writing”, albeit with part of the “am” contracted with “I”, and I mean it literally, and as far as I know, one has to be alive to be writing, at least if one is a biological organism.  I also certainly don’t see how one could in any sense be the gerund, “writing”.  That’s just a weird notion.  Imagine Groot saying it that way:  “I…am…writing.”  Strange.

I had a pretty stressful day at work, yesterday, but perhaps not as bad as it might have been.  If you expect the worst, you’ll only be pleasantly surprised‒though “worst” is difficult even honestly to consider, since there are so many ways and by so many measures that something can be bad.

Anyway, I actually decided to leave the office early after finally getting the very involved payroll work (and other office work) done.  I took an Uber back to the house, which was not as expensive as I thought it would be, though it is not something I could do very often.  It brought me along a route that I had never taken before, and that’s always nice.  Well, it’s not “always” nice, I guess, but in this case it was.  I learned firsthand a bit of new geography about the roads near where I live, and that’s rather fascinating, albeit not terribly exciting.

I also forgot, or neglected, to bring the laptop back with me, so I’m writing this on my smartphone.  That will hopefully keep it shorter for you than yesterday’s post, which is probably good.

I don’t feel much better than I did yesterday, though.  In fact, shortly after posting my post yesterday, I felt a brief, light, almost giddy feeling, as if I got some benefit from just sharing some of those bitter truths, and declaring some of my possible intentions.  It didn’t last long, but it was there.

Anyway, though this is a day of bad remembrance for me, I don’t want to do anything drastic today or tomorrow, nor at least early next week, because it’s my coworker’s birthday next Monday, and it’s his daughter’s first birthday a day or two after that.  So, here I go again, not doing something** to get me out of here because I don’t want to spoil someone else’s day or week or whatever.

To think, I used to fear that I might be some kind of psychopath because of my difficulty connecting with the way other people thought, or to care too much what most of them thought of me, and my fascination with villains of some stories and comic books and so on.  Now, I suspect that was always some manifestation of (possible albeit not diagnosed) Asperger’s or whatever you want to call it.  Anyway, I think I’ve talked about some of why I envied and admired villains before:  they are weird, they are outsiders, they think differently than the people around them, they are pretty sure they can run things better than the more ordinary characters, and though they are weird and are outsiders, people don’t mess with them, generally, certainly not in any casual sense, because they are dangerous, and they really are exceptionally competent.  This doesn’t apply to all villains, but generally to the ones I like most.  Doctor Doom, in particular, I suspect to be on the autism spectrum, so to speak.  He has many attributes of the syndrome, especially when he’s written by someone who gets the character well.  On the other side of things, Batman is also an interesting possible dweller on the spectrum, though of course, both he and Doom have other psychological issues due to their traumatic histories.

Anyway, that’s all not truly  important.  Maybe I’ll explore it more, sometime‒though I doubt it.  I’m just trying to say that I may well try to survive at least to and possibly through next week, and then probably to the weekend, since I am scheduled to work next weekend and don’t want to leave my coworker and others hanging on the week of birthdays (and after a national holiday, though that has less impact on the office).

It’s kind of pathetic when one’s only reason for continued existence is that one doesn’t want too abruptly to inconvenience one’s coworkers.  That’s somehow more pathetic and sad even than just being alone and depressed and suicidal in the first place.  It certainly can’t keep working forever.  It’s hardly the sort of thing Frankl was talking about in Man’s Search for Meaning.

It’s certainly not going to give me the strength to keep going indefinitely.

In all honesty, I can’t even guarantee that I will avoid leaving my coworker in the lurch in the week of‒or even on the day of‒his birthday or that of his daughter.  All other things being equal, I prefer not to do so, but I’m in tremendous physical pain right now, for instance, to say nothing of dealing with the daily cacophony, and my strength and my reserves are quite low.  I’m not sure quite how low, nor am I clearly able to gauge them except by seeing when they finally run out.

Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got in me to write, today.  I make no promises about tomorrow or whatever, but I do pretty much know that I will not be writing a blog post this Saturday, since I am off this Saturday.  Well, I’m always off, ha ha, when you get down to it, but you know what I mean, I think.

And now, please fill in the end-of-post goodbye sentiment of your preference, and know that, if it’s a well-wishing thought towards you, my readers, it’s almost certainly something I would honestly endorse.

TTFN

weariness

*That’s a present progressive form as well.  It would be even weirder to say “I am using” and mean it as a gerund than it would be to use “writing” that way.

**I sometimes think of silly things such as imagining that “something” is the present participle of the verb “to someth”.

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In Diana, we are simply passing through history.

It’s Tuesday morning, now, as I’m writing this, which makes sense, since yesterday was Monday.

In case anyone was wondering about the title to yesterday’s blog post:  After deciding not to try to work any reference to any song titles or lyrics relating to Monday into the title‒though I did link to that Carpenters’ song‒I thought I would reference the moon, nevertheless, perhaps as some metaphor for madness.  That seemed appropriate for my blog, since I’m rather steadily mentally deteriorating.  So I figured, who better to give a quote about the moon and madness than Shakespeare?

My first thought, though, led me just to the classic Heinlein novel, which I had thought had been a direct quote, albeit not from any play I had read.  But it wasn’t, apparently.  So I dug around a bit and found a quote from Henry IV part 1‒which I have read, but quite a long time ago‒and took the appropriate lunar reference.

However, I didn’t want simply my usual, slightly altered Shakespearean quote, though that might make up for last Thursday.  The fact that the original line references Diana* made me think of turning it into a Japanese “quote” and replacing Diana with Tsukuyomi, the traditional Japanese moon god or goddess (more often the latter in manga and anime depictions) sibling of Amaterasu, the Japanese god (or goddess) of the Sun/Dawn (obviously a very important deity in the land of the rising sun).

I can’t claim the Japanese expertise necessary to have translated by myself the quote into yesterday’s title, at least not without a lot of work and probably making a mess of things, so I used Google Translate.  I do know enough Japanese to have been able to tell, basically, that it was a decent translation.  I originally planned to leave it in the Japanese characters‒I had gone as far as to remove Google’s transliteration of “Tsukuyomi” or “Tsukiyomi” into katakana** and put in the actual kanji/hiragana characters‒but then I decided that would too pretentious, even for me***, and so I left it in the transliteration into romaji.

For the picture, I used a version of Tsukuyomi found in the brilliant and beautiful manga Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle by the unparalleled manga team CLAMP, creators of such works as Cardcaptor Sakura among many other (in my opinion) even better and more beautiful works.  I altered the picture, though, to make it darker and more eerie and sinister-seeming, since that seemed appropriate for a moon goddess as a representative of madness, as the Shakespearean reference seems to imply, and which certainly seems most pertinent when it comes to me.

Anyway, I’m sure that’s all quite boring, but I thought the title might seem strange and obscure enough to merit an explanation, and while I was at it I ran off at the keyboard.  That, at least, is not too unusual.

I’m writing this on my phone again, by the way.  Yesterday I decided not to carry my laptop back to the house, because I knew I planned to walk from the train to the house (which I did) while talking on the phone to my sister (which I also did), and I figured I’d keep my load light-ish, just to make the process as pleasant as could be.  It wasn’t raining, which was good, but it was rather hot and, of course, humid.  Fortunately, having someone to whom to talk makes the trip pass rather quickly, subjectively speaking.  In objective time, it took slightly longer than usual for 5 miles for me, which makes perfect sense.  I was talking while walking, after all.

I’m afraid I have to report that I am still pretty stressed out at work, and when I am not at work, and just in general, other than when I was talking to my sister.  I had a third quasi-chamber locked and loaded already yesterday, if you’ll remember my reference and metaphor/analogy from the other day.  At one point, I decided just to take it, which I did, and that little bitty minor risk did calm me down a bit.

I’m still just quite, quite depressed, and I guess I’m also what would be called terribly anxious.  Though it doesn’t feel like “fear” of any kind exactly to me as much as it does a kind of mental itchiness and swelling tension, as though most things in the world give me a central nervous system neurologic allergic reaction that makes me want to peel myself out of my own metaphorical skin.  I’m not afraid of anything per se; it’s more as though I’m being squeezed and stretched at all times in numerous directions in some mental vector space, and it’s both crushing me and tearing me apart, slowly and sadistically.  I find nearly every interaction‒especially ones involving interruptions to something I’m already doing‒to be incredibly irritating and stressful.

I feel a bit like an injured and sick feral cat that’s being approached and molested by various different gawking people (no good Samaritans) and other animals when my instinct is to want to be left alone and unmolested, so I can succumb to the elements and just die.

It’s all really very uncomfortable‒though there are pleasant interludes, at least, as noted above about talking to my sister‒and I really don’t think I can last much longer.  I need to escape, but there’s nowhere in this world, in this life, to which I can safely flee.  Not as far as I know, anyway.  There’s no rescue shelter out there that’s going to take in and try to help and heal and find a home for as diseased and damaged a stray as I am; certainly I see no sign of one, and I can’t just keep waiting and hoping.

Well…I can, or I could, in principle, but there is no percentage in doing so as far as I can see.  I’ve been waiting and hoping and waiting and hoping for quite a long time, meanwhile subsisting on the delusion that some nominal, abstract “fact that people somewhere in some abstract kind of sense kind of care about whether I live or die” can actually make any literal, physical difference.  But, like “thoughts and prayers”, it seems not to matter in actual fact (though it is appreciated, and I don’t mean to denigrate such thoughts).  Or, if it matters, it doesn’t matter enough to keep me going indefinitely.  I’m a miserable person to be around, and I’m a miserable person to be.  I just need to screw my courage to the sticking place and finally take more decisive action than exposing myself to a slight risk of a GI bleed.

Real daggers still work against daggers of the mind, but a bare bodkin is an intimidating thing to turn upon oneself, as Hamlet knew.  But I need to do something.  I can’t just keep waiting and deluding myself that something in me will get better.

Oh, well.  Time to head to the bus stop.  Maybe the walking will help my morning back and leg pain.

Have a good day.

*Not Wonder Woman, but, unless I’m mistaken, the counterpart to the Greek god (or goddess) Artemis, sibling of Apollo.

**Which seemed a dreadful bit of disrespect toward such an important deity, treating it as if it were a foreign-introduced word.

***If you can imagine.

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Aleph naughts, alphabets, infinite libraries, decks of cards, and monkeys

It’s Tuesday, the thirteenth day of the month of June.

I was going to try to avoid any commentary about the number two today—it gets to be two much, sometimes—but I do just want to start by saying that, if you subtract the digits in today’s date, the difference is two.

You could also, if you’re leaving out the first two digits of the year, look at 6-13-23 and say, “To get six, first you take one three, then a second three, and there you have six”.  I know, depending on how you read it (e.g. one three plus two threes), you might actually come out with nine, but that’s the risk you take with numerological interpretations.

This should hopefully alert any who might be susceptible that they should not to give credence to numerology or any other similar detected “codes” in unrelated things, like the old Bible code nonsense and so on.  The fact is, if you’re looking for patterns, especially if you’re not too picky about what patterns you seek, you can almost always find some.  It can be fun, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that there actually was some hidden message in the text or the number in the first place.  It’s all, almost certainly, in the eye (and mind) of the beholder.

Don’t feel too bad if you have occasionally fallen for such things.  No less than Isaac Newton himself, among the mightiest of minds the planet has yet known, got sucked into the whole notion of looking for hidden messages in the Bible.

Now, admittedly, he didn’t have the background of genius predecessors that we have nowadays from whom to learn lessons about signal and noise.  And though he worked out far better ways to calculate pi (than Archimedes’s method of exhaustion) and similar matters using infinite series, it may not have occurred to him that, since pi was an infinite, non-repeating number, if one looked far enough, long enough, one could find any given finite sequence of numbers one might want within it.  And that, of course, can be converted into any given sequence of letters, or whatever, using whatever translational code or cypher one might want.

I’m pretty sure I’m correct about that, but please correct me if there’s a flaw in my reasoning.  There’s certainly a ceiling*.

It’s a bit like the wonderful “Library of Babel”, based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the algorithm can generate every possible string of letters in the modern version of the Latin alphabet, (AKA the English alphabet).  Using the program, you can search for any expression possible in the library.  In principle, it encodes everything that could ever be written (up to a certain length), though they are not generated until you search.  In other words, every paragraph (or at least subparagraph) in this blog post is already, at least implicitly, written there.

Of course, the vast majority of what’s in there is utter gibberish, mere random collections of letters and spaces and so on that would mean nothing to anyone.  But it’s sobering to think sometimes that, in potential, everything that could possibly be written could be generated somewhere in that computer code.  Does that mean that it is, in a sense, already written?  I suppose if one is a mathematical Platonist, one would probably be forced to say that it is there, in a real, albeit fuzzy-ish, sense.

This is nothing new.  It’s like the old notion of an infinite number of monkeys writing on an infinite number of typewriters.  Eventually, not only will they produce the works of Shakespeare, but they will produce every possible work that could be produced by typing in this alphabet and associated characters.  Indeed, if there really is an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters, they will produce each possible work an infinite number of times—in fact, they already will have done so, and will continue to do so, over and over again (usually in different places by different monkeys) forever.

Still, the vast majority of what they produce will be gibberish.  You’d have to look for a long time to find a bit of writing that is even arguably coherent, and much longer if you sought something specific.

It’s a bit like the “level one multiverse” implicit in a spatially infinite universe in which in any given region there are only a finite (however large) number of possible quantum states:  everything possible will be instantiated not just somewhere, but an infinite number of times.

To think about such things in “smaller” terms:  if you have an infinite number of decks of cards (no jokers), and they are all shuffled—each random sorting being one of 52! (approximately 8.06581752 x 1067) possible orderings—there will still be only a finite number of ways to order them.  It’s a big number!  Don’t, get, me, wrong!  It’s BIG!  It’s so big you can know to a mathematical confidence much more than secure enough that you could comfortably bet your life on it** that if you shuffle a deck thoroughly it will be in an order that has never existed before in the world.

But the number of possible orderings of shuffled decks is no closer to infinity than is the number one.  So in an infinite collection of shuffled decks, every possible sorting will appear an infinite number of times.

In fact, if you think about it, every possible ordering will somewhere be sitting next to multiple iterations of identical orderings, somewhere in that infinite selection (say if you had your decks all floating in some 3-D matrix).  Depending on how many duplicates you want to find you may need to “look” farther and farther, but even if you want a huge number of duplicate shufflings next to each other, if the space of shuffles is infinite, and is sorted randomly, you will be able to find that group somewhere.

It may even be the case—and here I’m not on completely certain ground, so any mathematicians out there please give me some feedback—that you can find a “region” in which there are an infinite number of repeated shufflings “next to” each other.  How could this be possible, when the set of decks itself is only infinite?  Well, infinity is weird, and strange things happen when you’re contemplating it***.

Perhaps thinking of a similar but more straightforward notion might help.

Of all the integers, only every tenth one is a multiple of ten, so there should be only one out of ten integers that meet that criterion of being a multiple of ten, if you’re looking for them.  Yet, the number of multiples of ten is equal to the number of integers in total!  If you don’t believe me, just knock the final “zero” off each multiple of ten and take a look.  You will have reconstructed the original integers!  So in any infinity, you may be able to find an infinite subset—say all on one row if your infinity is grouped in rows and columns and levels—that meets any given criterion or criteria, depending on how you sort it.

This fact is part of what gives rise to the so-called “measure problem”, which I won’t address just now, but to which I have linked.

I could go on and on about this—almost by definition—but I don’t have any intention of writing an infinite blog post, even if such a thing were possible in a universe in which entropy is always increasing.  But it can be fun to think about arrangements of letters and numbers, and information, and signals versus noise.

Unfortunately, after thinking about it, one can sometimes find the ordinary bits of everyday life rather silly and pointless and even worthy of despair—“the pale deaths that men miscall their lives”.  Maybe that’s part of why some great mathematicians were psychologically troubled.  Gödel, for instance, starved to death because he wouldn’t eat any food not prepared by his wife; he feared being poisoned, and eventually she either got sick or died (I don’t recall which).

His logic doesn’t seem very good—if you’re avoiding dying by poison but thereby inevitably die of starvation when your wife can no longer cook for you, you’re clearly not protecting yourself, except perhaps from a painful poisoning death, instead gaining a comparatively peaceful death by starvation.

Anyway, they say genius and madness are related.  They would say that, wouldn’t they, since they understand neither state.  But you lot are much smarter than they are.  And therefore, I hope you have a good, albeit finite, day.

*Ba-dump-bump.

**And you bet your life on MUCH riskier things every day, numerous times per day, make no mistake about that.

***And we’re just discussing the “smallest” infinity, Aleph Number Alef 0 Cardinality Mathematics Infinity, PNG, 565x580px ... AKA “Aleph nought” or “Aleph zero” or “Aleph null”.  It’s the so-called “countable” infinity, meaning not that you really could count the whole thing, but you could at least get started and make progress, as in “1, 2, 3, 4,…”.  When you turn to, for instance, the infinity of “real” numbers, you can’t even start counting, because between any two non-identical, arbitrarily chosen real numbers, no matter how close they are to each other, there is an uncountable infinity of real numbers between them!

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This title has nothing to do with this post, other than the inevitable fact that it is the title of this post

It’s Monday again, and I’m using my laptop to write this post, after having used my phone all last week*.  It’s much faster and more natural for me to write on the laptop, of course, and it doesn’t tend to cause soreness in the base of my thumbs (since I hardly use them when I’m typing).  But of course, it has its disadvantages, too, the biggest being the computer’s weight.  Although it is a slender, small, 11 inch laptop, it’s still heavier than my smartphone—and I carry my smartphone with me even when I have my laptop.

Nevertheless, it’s not that heavy, and I would like to be in decent enough shape that simply carrying my laptop in my backpack along with other stuff makes no real difference.  If I ever mean to go on any long hikes, with a backpack full of clothes and supplies, I would hope the laptop would seem negligible.

Also, when I’m writing on the laptop, using Word, at least the autocorrect function of my phone doesn’t keep changing “its” to “it’s”.  I try to catch them all—like Pokémon, I guess, but much more irritating—but I’m not certain that I succeed.  It would be frustrating to find that I’d allowed a grammatical slip caused by the “smartphone” to go out when I was just using it out of laziness.  I guess it would be just deserts**, but still, I’d rather be hoist by my own petard for something I did myself, not something that was a poor consequence of an automatic, would-be spelling assistant.

Speaking of malfunctioning technology, I had a stressful morning yesterday.  I put my laundry in the washing machine, with soap and fabric softener as usual, and then…the machine didn’t turn on.  There was not so much as a flicker or blink of its lights.

I have to admit that I freaked out much more than was probably warranted, though I doubt that any outside observer would have been able to tell.  Evidently, my emotions don’t show much on my face, and apparently also not in my voice or my choice of words.  Inside my mind, I felt like I was going to rip into pieces from tension and stress.

Sunday is the only day of the week on which I do laundry, since it’s the only day of the week I’m certain to be at the house, and I’ve done it that way for years, now.  I also start my washing early, because I get up early, and the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can stop having to go out into the rest of the house where I might encounter my—perfectly pleasant—housemates and have to interact with them.

Anyway, I texted my former housemate and the owner each (knowing I would have to wait a while for their replies), while trying to brainstorm ideas for what might be the issue.  Of course, I checked (and reset) all the circuit breakers, and checked the locking mechanism on the machine, and all sorts of other obvious things.  I’m not sure any of that improved anything.  In the meantime I ordered a few new shirts and a new pair of pants and some underwear (I accidentally ordered the wrong size, though), and so on, just in case.

Meanwhile, faced with the prospect of not being able to do my laundry, I honestly wished that I would have a heart attack or a stroke or something like that, and that it would all become moot.

I didn’t, of course, have either of those things, as far as I can tell.  In the long run, between me and my former housemate and the landlord, texting back and forth in parallel conversations, I got the washer to work by stretching a very long combo of extension cords to an outside socket and doing what I think was a hard reset of the washing machine—after having left it unplugged for quite some time, starting it on rinse, then stopping, turning it up to “normal” wash while it was running.

Anyway, I got my laundry done, thank goodness.  I honestly think that, in my current state of semi-life, I would rather die than have to find a way to go and use a laundromat.  I’m not speaking hyperbolically, except perhaps in the mathematical sense in which I’m at the long tail of a hyperbolic function (such as y=1/x), asymptotically approaching zero.

Wouldn’t it be horrible to find oneself steadily and slowly getting closer and closer to zero, but at a slower and slower rate, so that actually to reach zero would literally take an infinite amount of time?  The horror of getting weaker and more depressed and more decrepit, and yet never being able to die, would be…well, quite obviously, a fate worse than death.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that such will be the fate of the universe itself on the longest of time scales, if the cosmological constant really is a constant and whatnot.  But that’s in a truly, very long time.  Hyperbole aside, I don’t imagine I’ll live long enough for that to be relevant, except as a matter of scientific curiosity.

Speaking of decrepitude, I’ve been trying to do some wider spaced pull-ups recently, rather than my usual, shoulder-width ones, because I thought it might help my back.  I think it actually may have been helping my back a bit, but unfortunately, an old injury to my left shoulder began acting up by the second iteration of those pull-ups, and has gotten worse, and that pain and soreness radiates down the whole arm in a sort of electrical feeling (not the good kind), reminiscent of “causalgia” which is a term that might not be in current use anymore.

In any case, this morning I went back to more usual width, but my shoulder is still acting up.  This isn’t too surprising; once triggered, that kind of thing can take a while to calm down.

In conclusion, my life is definitely not worth the effort.  It’s just a bad habit for me, at this point.  I don’t contribute anything of substance to anyone, probably not even to myself.  I’m stressed out to the point of near-suicidality by even minor things—like having to get up and go into the office.  But, as is often the case, bad habits are hard to break.  I mean to try, though.  I’ve been hoping for some way to wean myself off, and I still have hope for that, but I may need simply to go cold turkey***.

*Imagine what someone perhaps a century or so ago would have thought upon reading that sentence:  What?  You used your laptop to write something…a post?  And…sometimes you used a phone to write?  WHAT?

**There must be plenty of bakeries or ice cream shops or similar places that call themselves “Just Desserts”.  The sorts of people who make and sell sweets are definitely the sort to enjoy a nice pun.  I mean that as a compliment.

***Homer Simpson:  Mmmmm…turrrrkeyyy.

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When we shall hear the rain and wind blog dark December?

Hello and good morning, everyone.

It’s not only Thursday—and thus time for my “weekly” blog post, which goes back to when I was writing this blog only one day of the week and working on fiction every other morning.  It’s also the first day of June in 2023 (and thus, inescapably, also the first Thursday of June).  So, we begin a new month.

Before the end of this month, we will have the Solstice—the summer one in the northern hemisphere and the winter one in the southern hemisphere.  After that, officially, the season either of summer or of winter will begin, and the days, having reached either a maximum or minimum of the sine curve of their “daylight” length, will begin to head in the other direction.

Of course, the change will be very gradual at first, since the derivative of a sine curve—its rate of change—is a cosine curve, and where a sine is either at a maximum or a minimum, the cosine is at zero, albeit only instantaneously.  It’s at the equinox that the rate of change hits a maximum (or, technically it could also be a minimum, but when we’re discussing absolute rates of change, a minimum and a maximum are interchangeable, |x| being a positive number at any time, and all).  Anyway, that’s enough of that minimal review of the rates of change of seasons and the nature of sine curves and cosine curves.

Sines and cosines are well-behaved curves, at least.  Tangents and secants and so on are not so well-behaved, at least if by “well-behaved” you mean, “staying between a specified range of the y-axis instead of tending towards infinity in multiple places on that axis”.  Of course, a sine or cosine do go to infinity in both directions on the x-axis, come to think of it.  I don’t think I’ve considered it quite the way ever before.

Wow, talk about going off on a tangent*.

Anyway, not much else is new currently, not that I was just discussing anything new other than my new way of looking at the infinities of sine curves and, of course, the new month, which isn’t really all that new when you get right down to it.  Is June named for Jupiter (i.e. Juno)?  I should look that up.

…Okay, I did, and reminded myself that Juno was the Roman name for the goddess equivalent to Hera, the wife of Zeus/Jupiter, so it’s indirectly related to Jupiter, not directly.  That was an embarrassing mix-up of names and ideas in my head.  Good thing I didn’t write it down and publish it for everyone to see!

Of course, July and August are named after Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus (née Octavian).  Then we have months that used to be named for their ordinal place in the calendar:  September (7), October (8), November (9), December (10), but I guess they all got shifted over two spaces at some point after they were originally named, though I don’t recall quite when and why that happened, and that isn’t something in which I’m interested enough right now to look it up.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this sort of stuff today.  I’m just following whatever random—or at least stochastic—impulse occurs based on the preceding thought or statement or whatever.  It’s not as though there’s any reason for me to do anything different.

I had a brief moment or two of “inspiration” yesterday evening, during which, on the train heading back to the house, I wrote a poem/song lyrics on the notepad function of my smartphone.  Having been written by me, it’s a very gloomy sort of poem/song, and I don’t have even an inkling of a melody for it.  I just felt a bit of a dip in my mood, even relative to baseline, and decided to express that the way I sometimes used to do.  That’s how I wrote what turned into the lyrics of my song Come Back Again, and something related to it was responsible for Catechism and Breaking Me Down, though the latter two were semi-deliberately written as song lyrics from the start.

A little later, I was watching someone on YouTube reacting to the “unplugged” performance of a few Nirvana songs, and I decided to look up the chords to Come As You Are; I downloaded a PDF of those.  It’s not a very complicated song, but it sounds quite good.  Kurt Cobain had a way of writing melodies that were unlike anything just about anyone else ever wrote.  Though, I also like his/their performance of The Man Who Sold The World, which is originally a David Bowie song.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard Bowie’s version of it, though.  I should have looked up the chords to that; maybe I will today.

But, of course, the odds of me ever doing anything with such chords, let alone writing a tune to and making a new song of my own seem vanishingly small.  Right now—by which I mean “now in general” not “now this very moment”—I’m just meandering through each day rather thoughtlessly, certainly pointlessly, with no goal or aspiration or anything of the sort.  There isn’t any point to anything I do.

I do really miss my kids.  I miss everyone else, too—my old friends, my immediate and more distant family, living and dead, all those people—but especially my kids.  I’m very lonely, but I’m also very socially withdrawn and incapable/incompetent.  I don’t think it’s at all possible for me to seek out and meet with or connect with anyone, new or old, in the world—except for my kids.

If they wanted to meet with me, I would do it.  I don’t even think it would be a struggle.  As far as everyone and everything else goes, though…well, I’ve lost my communication/connection hardware and software or whatever, or maybe I just didn’t get the updates, and so my system is hopelessly outdated, and when I even think about such things, the application crashes.

That’s a pretty weird couple of metaphors.

Anyway, I’m not capable of reaching out to people, other than through here, even when I want to do it.  I’m also not capable of trying to take care of myself (medically, psychologically, whatever), or take care of any other proactive business of life.  Life isn’t my domain anymore, I think.  Nevertheless, I can’t be darkly cool and quote the Bhagavad Gita like Oppenheimer:  “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  It would probably be more appropriate for me to say something like, “I am become Drizzle, the dampener of spirits.”

That was sort of the subject of the poem/song I wrote yesterday.  But most people don’t like to drink watered-down spirits—though I do, sometimes.  I also like watered down soda, I’ve come to realize.  Go figure.

Anyway, that’s enough of all that.  I think it’s time to head off to go to the train, thence to the office.  If I get there early enough, maybe I’ll play some guitar.  I doubt it.

TTFN

sine and cosinetwistedanddistorted

*Ba-dump-bump.

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Silence will fall when all questions are answered by the unthinking

It’s Saturday morning as I write this, in case you don’t know.

I hope you all had a momentous night.  I wouldn’t say that I had one, but I was awakened by pain again, which is not a rare occurrence.  I do take something for pain before I go to sleep, but I guess it wears off too quickly, even though the dosage period for Aleve (the “something” to which I refer) is 12 hours.  That’s a bit frustrating.  I also had reflux, which hasn’t happened in a while, but that’s a minor problem, and I think I know what caused it.

So, here I am, with less sleep this week than I think I’ve had since one November rotation in the ICU/CCU at Einstein/Weiler hospital during my medical residency.  That was the rotation during which, on one shift, I literally did not even sit down for nearly 36 hours.  It was very stressful, but at least I was doing some good in the world, and practicing my skills to do more good in the future.  That’s not the case now, and frankly, I’m not sure I could ever have the energy even to try to figure out some new way to do good.

Here’s a little aside:  When I wrote the phrase “even to try” just now, Google Docs underlined/noted it as possibly incorrect, as most word processors do nowadays.  But the thing is, it recommended that I change it to “to even try”!  That’s right, automatic grammar checkers are encouraging people to split infinitives*, instead of encouraging them not to do so.

I can be reasonable and nondogmatic and accepting about split infinitives‒they occasionally provide a cheap means of rhetorical emphasis that might require a full second or two of thought to achieve otherwise.  But ever since I started studying Spanish in high school and college and realized that there are many languages** in which it is impossible to split infinitives without actual tmesis, I’ve decided to try to avoid the practice.  In writing dialogue, of course, I’m quite happy to split infinitives, since people do that frequently in extemporaneous and casual speech.  But I try to leave it out of narration or nonfiction.

I’m sure I accidentally allow it to happen without even noticing at times.  Such are the fruits of living in a society that indulges in lazy grammar.  But between the fact that autocorrect keeps replacing “its” with “it’s” when the added “s” is possessive, and that it’s*** now suggesting that writers split infinitives, I’m leaning toward the conclusion that it’s time to pull out the Glaive of Silence and do a restart on the world.

DeathRebornRevolution

Just wipe it all out, everything but the microbes, and see what happens next.  Because with bullshit shortcuts like ChatGPT and whatnot, humans are going to get lazier and lazier, and their thinking is going to get sloppier and sloppier.  And, of course, since these “deep learning” programs don’t actually learn deeply or understand at all, but are merely “trained” on oodles of brain droppings from across the internet and web to predict what sorts of words might follow a previous one, and what might be a typical response to particular queries, cyberspace is going to be flooded with recursive nonsense.

Future ChatGPT type programs will “learn” from, among other things, the garbage produced by prior chatbots and so on, with no way to discern what’s good, or what’s correct, or what’s reasonable or logical or true, only what’s common.  Then it will make those things more common by its own actions.  And while it might be interesting to see how such crap evolves as people use it more to avoid having to think and work themselves, there’s no path toward actual understanding.

Probably most people don’t think about how things work, and they don’t want to do so.  They just want to become the Eloi.  Who cares if they’re being eaten by Morlocks?  It’s worse than the Matrix.  People will become addicted/enslaved, to a system that can’t even know it’s enslaving them.  It’s worse than an idiocracy or a kleptocracy or an autocracy.

Imagine a world consisting solely of second-rate, “postmodern” literary and social theorists whose intellectual pursuits consist only of critiquing others of their ilk, in a cycle that never forces itself to make any contact with actual external reality, or with any actual literature, for that matter.  Then take that to the billionth power and turn it into the new, accidental paradigm of civilization.

How long can it survive?

Not long, I would wager.  But it can do a lot of damage before it goes.  So maybe we should do a reset.  Okay, maybe it’s not necessary to wipe out all multicellular life.  Maybe we should just eliminate civilization, but keep the history and scientific knowledge, so that when rebuilding, repeated mistakes can be avoided.

It would be like going back to the last “save” point when your character is killed in a video game; you can learn from what killed you last time.  It would be so much better than just being forced to continue the game without saving, and then, if you die near the end, just losing, without even the option to start over.

Maybe even that would be better than continuing to live indefinitely in a big “neural network” that doesn’t even actually understand itself, let alone anything else in the universe.

Wow, I didn’t expect to be writing about that when I started.  But I know what initiated it and why, and I didn’t just react to it randomly, but have thought about such matters before.  I even explored some of the issues in Son of Man, though not specifically those relating to chat bots and related civilizational tumors.

Son of man icon

I guess I get a bit grumpy from lack of sleep and depression, not to mention a week of persistent and horrible sensory overload that’s borne down upon…well, a person who is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, and who has never been particularly amenable to loud noises and random conversations and chaos except when it serves actual purposes.

I don’t know how long or even if I will be able to tolerate much more.  Every camel’s back has a breaking point.

I already think I probably gave myself a mild concussion yesterday from banging my head repeatedly against a wall out of stress.  I’m not exaggerating; I got woozy and sleepy not long after that, and even felt a bit confused and spacey.  I still have a slight headache and just a mild degree of spaciness, even now.

I probably should avoid doing that too often.  Knowing my luck, I’d probably get debilitating brain damage with which I would then live for decades, rather than something that kills me on a relatively short time scale.  That would be ironic.

I need to find other, better reactions to my extreme stress, I guess.  But it usually needs to be something painful, whether psychologically or physically (or both), to do the job.  I’ve torn up drawings and paintings and music and the like in the past, but I don’t really have such easy targets nowadays.

Of course, it would be nice not to feel so tense and horrible that I have the‒sometimes irresistible‒urge to hurt my things or myself.  But I don’t know how that is ever going to happen.  The world only seem to grow less tolerable, not more, and whatever doesn’t kill a person often kills one slowly, with drawn out pain and suffering.

On that note…well, I hope you have a nice remainder of your weekend.  ^_^

*And to do so boldly, one might be inclined to think.

**Spanish is one of them but not the only one.

***This is a contraction, and that is when an apostrophe belongs between that “t” and that “s”.

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The deep of night is crept upon our blog, and Nature must obey necessity.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 27th of April, the week after my son’s birthday, and I’m already in the office as I write this blog post‒because I never left the office last night.  It got to be late enough that, if I caught the next train, I probably wouldn’t have reached the house before nine, whether I took the bus(es) from the train station or walked.  That is what happened Monday night and Tuesday night.

Of course, If I’d had the bike at the train station I might have reached the house earlier, but I didn’t, and I don’t regret that.  Given that every time I ride that bike, it triggers a flare and a new (but not improved) alteration of my back and leg and foot pain, I think I’m going to keep it for “special occasions” or something like that, even though I’ll be paying for it for three or four more months or something like that.

Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?

Even if I’d caught an earlier train, I don’t think I would have had the energy to get back to the house from the train station, and had I reached the house, I don’t think I would’ve had the energy to come back to the office this morning.  I had sort of planned all along to stay here, because if I went back to the house, I didn’t think I’d be coming in today, and I wasn’t sure if I would be coming in ever again (if you know what I mean).  I guess maybe it was a kind of semi-conscious self-preservation thing, in a way.  But, of course, that can’t work forever.

It’s not a big deal if I stay one night in the office.  It’s not like it will produce a noticeable effect, outwardly.  I always wear one of 2 kinds of black shirts, the same kind of black pants (or trousers if you prefer), the same brand of black socks and one of three brands of black shoes.  Once you find something that’s comfortable for you, I say, you might as well wear that.

I prefer black because you don’t have to worry about matching anything; black goes with everything, particularly other black things.  It’s also a nice, outward representation of my character, my heart, my outlook, what have you.  And if I ever have to pass as a Sith Lord, I can do that.  I only wear black nowadays.  Even my underwear(!).

In any case, though, I don’t mean to stay at the office tonight, though if there were a shower here I might be tempted.  I feel very grimy and sticky, and that’s a particularly unpleasant feeling for me.  But it is dreary to have the daily ritual of going back to a place that feels no more like home than does the office or the train, and not much more like home than the bus, frankly.

Nothing feels like home, anymore.  The planet Earth doesn’t feel like home‒not that it ever really has, to be honest.

I find myself strangely envying my former coworker who just died.  That may seem insensitive, but it’s simply true.  He didn’t die instantly, with the initial heart attack, which sometimes happens.  He had a few weeks or more of being ill and having all other responsibilities taken away, and his family (and friends), aware of his ill health, got to come and be near him for one last time.  That might be nice.  I sometimes think that, if I were known to be dying of cancer (for instance), maybe my children would come and see me.

I don’t know what other sort of thing might engender that outcome, and I certainly don’t want to try to force my way into their lives.  They deserve autonomy and to be free from my odious self, who already screwed up everything in his own life, and caused them pain in the process.  But I would dearly love to spend time with them.

Of course, I do have a potentially terminal condition, and I don’t just mean “life itself” which is uniformly terminal as far as we can see.  I mean depression.  Depression has a direct lifetime mortality rate of about 15%, or at least that was the statistic the last time I checked.  That’s not counting the many things depression makes one more likely to have‒people with depression are more prone to various kinds of physical illnesses and to worse outcomes if they get those illnesses, and they are also more prone than others to drug and alcohol problems.

But I’m talking here about direct self-destruction: suicide, from the Latin “sui” meaning self, and the “cide” part that always means killing, as in fungicide, herbicide, insecticide, anthropocide, etc.  “Suicide” almost feels like it ought to be the opposite of “sui generis” but that’s not correct, and in fact they probably often go together, subjectively speaking.  Maybe it would be the opposite of “sui genesis”.  Could it also be called “sui exodus”?

Anyway, my point is that depression has mortality rates comparable to many cancers, but there are no Ronald McDonald houses for it (as far as I know).  It’s not a sexy/tragic/dramatic disorder worthy of Hallmark movies and that kind of twaddle.  It just sucks all around, because its very nature is to suck and to make everything in the universe feel like it sucks.  Maybe in this it’s like the very curvature of spacetime; tending to bend inward on itself and collapse, unless it is infused with a uniform, positive energy, in which case there will be a tendency to expand.

Believe me, I don’t have a uniform positive energy.  Maybe I used to, but my cosmological constant has long since quantum tunneled into a vacuum state so close to zero that it makes that of the universe, tiny as it is, appear flipping gargantuan.  I don’t know if I have a negative cosmological constant, which would make a kind of human anti de Sitter space.  Then I would collapse rapidly, which might be nice in and of itself.  Also, you could mathematically demonstrate the holographic principle on me using certain areas of string theory.

Maybe the state of suffering from depression is rather like being a human anti de Sitter space.  And the speed of collapse depends on how large the negative lambda is, but collapse is inevitable unless it changes signs.

Incidentally, it appears that people on the autism spectrum‒which I suspect I am, though I don’t have an “official”* diagnosis‒suffer from depression, including chronic depression AKA persistent depressive disorder AKA dysthymia (which I do have), at a significantly higher rate than the general population, are harder to treat, and also, if I recall, are more likely to commit suicide, and certainly to engage in self-harm.

I could have told you that.  Wait, I just did!

Okay, well, that’s more than enough for this Thursday.  I don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow or the next day.  I’m scheduled to work on those days, and I suppose I will, since I don’t like to inconvenience the people around me.  But as I told a coworker yesterday, I’ve been staying alive for quite a long time mainly just not to inconvenience other people, and there’s only so much longer I’m going to be able to do it.  I don’t have any other drive to stay alive; there is nothing to which I look forward.  I’m tired.  Sleeping on the floor in the office is no worse than sleeping at the house, but that’s not saying much at all.

Someday, perhaps soon, my sign off on a Thursday will be “TT” rather than TTFN, because I won’t expect to return.  But for now, the expression remains:

TTFN

ads space ish

*It’s an odd notion, the “official” diagnosis of anything.  I mean, it’s useful for things like insurance and statistics and science, and certainly there is some value in the judgment of experts on such matters, but it is not something handed down from Mount Sinai (the medical school or the Ten Commandments place).  No one can speak ex cathedra on medical diagnoses, or on any fact of nature, frankly.  So don’t put too much stock in them**.

**Unless it’s good chicken stock.  Good chicken stock is tasty.

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Voice-to-text is ill-advised for ready-to-publish blogging

What follows is an attempt to see if I can write a blog post using voice-to-text technology.  Paragraph.

Okay, “paragraph” doesn’t work; one has to start a new paragraph manually.  Anyway, I wanted to try to write on my phone today, but my thumbs still have not fully recovered from whatever dsmage caused them trouble previously.  Therefore, I am going to see how well I can initially “type” this out simply by speaking into the voice to text and then fixing up the incongruities and failures to make paragraphs when I edit it.  Return.

“Return” doesn’t work as a command, either.  Can I say “period” without it making a period?  Apparently, if I continue to the end of a sentence and the word period is in the middle, it does correct things eventually.

Today it’s raining, so I am going to be walking to the bus stop, taking the bus to the train station, the train to Deerfield, and taking a walk from Deerfield train station to the office.

I’m really not sure how good a technique this is for writing a blog post. It may have more in common with a podcast or personal reflection or what I call audio blogs then my typical blog post.  I don’t know how well it will come across but I will be editing it, so we’ll see.

I have just manually inserted a paragraph break then restarted the audio portion of the input.  We will see how that goes.  I’m going to have to be inserting a lot of punctuation and spacing after the initial draft.  It may not be worth it in the long run.  But it’s an interesting experiment for Monday morning when there if they’re already thunderstorms. (That should read, when there are already thunderstorms”).

I’m going to take a brief break now, because I haven’t yet left the house.  I want to give myself plenty of time so that I’m not going to wait at the bus stop any more than necessary.  It’s raining out, which is another reason I decided I wanted to try to write this on my phone.  I figured the phone is less vulnerable to the depredations of stray rain than the laptop is.

***

Okay, I’m at the bus stop now.  I’m a little worried about how traffic noise is going to affect this, but at least there’s not that much traffic at this hour.  It’s 5:00 in the morning, now.

I’m not sure what to discuss, since I’m doing this in a different way than I usually do.  I just cleared my throat, and it didn’t pick that up; that’s mildly interesting.  But it also didn’t pick up the first time that I attempted to speak that sentence after the throat clearing.  I had to backtrack manually, and then restart the sentence I had intended to speak.

I suppose the system has a propensity to miss hear, and to put the wrong words down, such as writing the words “miss” and then “here” instead of writing miss here…miss here…as in, to hear badly!  I can’t seem to say that word* in a way that makes it clear to voice-to-text technology what word I’m trying to produce.  That’s a bit annoying.

It does seem that when a car is driving by while I’m speaking it interferes with the function’s accuracy.  I suppose using this technology might be useful to improve one’s enunciation, at least.  After all, it can be quite frustrating when you have to backtrack manually and correct a computer-based error that doesn’t make much sense, so you might get in the habit of speaking very clearly.

I don’t know how many words I’ve spoken in this blog post yet.  It doesn’t seem very interesting to me, but then, most of my blog posts don’t seems terribly interesting to me anyway.

I’m not very good at judging what will be interesting to other people.  Many of the things that many people find interesting are utterly dull to me, and apparently many of the things that I find interesting are opaque to others.  I guess this explains my lifelong fondness for the Edgar Allan Poe poem alone.

I’m going to have to edit that last sentence so make it clear that the word “Alone” is the title of the poem.  There seems to be no easy way to cue the computer vocally that I’m trying to put quotation marks in.  Open quote quote quote.  Close quote.  See what I mean?  This is frankly more frustrating than I expected it to be.

There was a big flash of lightning just now but only distant and late following thunder.  So it was quite a long way away.  That was a random, interjected, spoken-aloud thought, but this sentence is not; it has been typed in later.

This technology is still far too stupid to be practically useful on a regular basis.  The time and effort put into editing and correcting it are going to be larger than the time and effort I probably usually use to break the whole thing.  To write the whole thing, I said.  Start to finish.

Maybe I should just stick to writing when I want to write, and if I wish to do audio, simply do an audio blog.  Right now there might be some trouble with that because of traffic noise, but that at least can either be edited out or recognized as background sounds, and I can resay something if it was scrambled up by a car.  That would just be part of the process.  It could even add color to an audio blog.

Anyway, life is frustrating.  For instance, the first thing the computer put in when I started “life is” was to end it with the word “good”, which sounds nothing like the word “frustrating”!  Then it kept writing “frustrated”.  I finally had to finish the sentence manually.

Enough of this nonsense.  This is an idea whose time has not yet come, or never was or will be.  Maybe speech is speech, and writing is writing, and never the tween shall meet.  Twain.

The voice-to-text can’t seem to recognize the word “Twain” except as a proper noun with a capital t as in Mark Twain.  But that name was a pseudonym based on an expression (supposedly) from navigating on the Mississippi River, and referred to a measured depth of two fathoms.  So when someone called out “mark twain” they meant the river at that point was two fathoms deep (12 feet).  It’s not quite full fathom five, as thy father lies‒I guess that might be “mark quint”.  Anyway, this is stupid.  But then again pretty much everything I do is stupid.  So what else is new?

I think I’m going to do a brief audio blog just to follow up on this. I may post it or leave it for my ears only.  Have a good day.

Voice stuffaltered

*Mishear.

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How would you pronounce an infinite sentence?

Well, it’s Saturday, April 1st, 2023, AD or CE, and I am writing a blog post today because I am working today.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Well, you can say it, but it wouldn’t be true.  You can say almost anything, really.  There is a functionally limitless number of sentences that you can utter, and not all of them will be true.  It’s a vaguely interesting question whether the number of truthful sentences that can be uttered is as limitless as the number of sentences one can utter.  At first glance, it seems, one being a subset of the other, that it should not be the case, but when dealing with infinities, one has to be cautious—initial intuitions can be misleading.

If one restricts oneself to existing words or compound words, and one restricts oneself to sentences that follow standard grammatical rules, one can build a functionally limitless number of sentences simply by including compound sentences or nested phrases, like, “He knew that she knew that he knew that she knew that he was a pedantic idiot.”  That feels a bit like a cheat to me, but logically speaking, it can be done.

Of course, even if, in principle, the number of such possible sentences is infinite, there is a practical limit to the number of them one could possibly construct before the heat death of the universe—or, if the universe “ends” in some other way, before that happens.  This is part of why I wonder whether the number of truthful statements potentially constructible is actually as large—in practice, even if not in principle—as the total number of possible statements.

One could, in principle, construct sentences describing, to the degree possible, the quantum state of every describable aspect of all of accessible reality.  Of course, one could also just make up descriptions of quantum states that have nothing to do with our reality, but if Everett was right, or if the String landscape is right, or what have you, they might all be true somewhere, depending on how you define “some” and “where”.

But, of course, it’s trivially easier to describe quantum states in ways that are physically nonsensical, e.g. “The quantum state of that electron is blue with purple polka dots and smells like ripe bleu cheese”.  Or one can make impossible statements using more formal terminology, such as, “The precise location and momentum of this particular ‘particle’ are, at this precise moment: x and y, with no rounding of digits anywhere.”  As far as we know, that’s physically impossible.

It’s not as exciting as the physically impossible tale, “Bob accelerated his ordinary human body instantly from a standstill to the speed of light, at which speed he stayed long enough to go to the sun and back.  It was an incredible sixteen minutes, and everyone who watched him do it was amazed and thrilled.”

We know that can’t be true because, for one thing, nothing with “rest mass” can reach the speed of light at all—that would require an infinite amount of energy.  Also, if you’re going the speed of light, you can’t experience it, because for you, time ceases to pass.  Also, it’s questionable whether anyone could “see” you moving at that speed, and not just because you would become a black hole before you could ever achieve light speed.

Or would you?  I’ve tried to ask people who should know what would happen if a spaceship (for instance) was accelerated to close enough to the speed of light that, given length contraction and “relativistic mass” it compressed to a front-back length that was shorter than its Schwarzschild radius*, but I haven’t seen or received a reply about it.

This is one of the reasons I bought no fewer than two big textbooks on General Relativity; if I couldn’t get someone to give me the answer, I wanted to try to work it out.  I suspect that the fact that the length contraction is along one axis might make it a complicated situation for any large-scale object; maybe no one has done the mathematics on such questions, but that feels unlikely.

It also feels unlikely that I’ll find the time and discipline to work my way through the appropriate textbooks before I die.  There is background mathematics involved that I would need to master if I were to be able to apply the theory properly.

I don’t doubt that I’m capable of it; it’s not like playing professional basketball, where there are fundamental, physical limits to what someone my height (and age and athletic ability) could accomplish.  But there are so many things that interfere, and my time (and my will) is burned up daily upon matters of even more trivial character than all the pointless things I’ve already done in my life.

At least I’m gaining back some time thanks to my new bicycle.  I am now troubled, though (as I always am when I have some structure outside of myself upon which I have chosen to rely) with worries about maintenance, such as:  What will happen if the tires go flat while I’m en route to the train station?  It’s not that such a thing would be an unsolvable problem; I’ve dealt with such occurrences before.  But I don’t want to deal with them.  Even having to think about them constitutes one more straw piled on the camel’s back, and I’ve been carrying too much straw for too long.  I’m tired.  I want to lie down and just stay that way.

At least I’m getting good exercise.  And now that the seat is fixed, the bicycle seems to be operating well.  I may need to edit (slightly) my scathing review of it on Amazon.  We’ll see.  I’m going to watch and wait a bit longer for any other problems that may arise before I do that.

In closing, I’ll grudgingly acknowledge the fact that it’s “April Fool’s Day” just to remind you that you are all fools…but that I am a fool as well.  So were Einstein and Newton and Socrates and Marcus Aurelius and the Buddha and Lao Tzu and Confucius and, well, everybody else.  As Einstein is credited with saying**, “There are two things that are infinite:  the universe and human stupidity.  And I’m not sure about the universe.”

Depending on what you mean by stupidity, that can be trivially true in the mathematical sense, i.e., the number of unknown things in the universe is infinite.  There are other uses of the word stupidity about which the statement might not be true.  For instance, there are those who define stupidity as doing something in ways that are less efficient than randomness, such as trying to get to the airport by repeatedly driving around the block from your house until your car wears out.  Moving randomly could at least eventually get you to the airport, whereas going in “circles” will never get you there, even with a car that lasts forever.

Enough!  I wrote “in closing” and I haven’t closed yet, so I’ll do that now.  Have a nice remainder of your weekend***.  I’ll be back writing on Monday, barring the unexpected.

einstein_sticks_his_tongue_1951

*According to outside observers, that is.  For those on the spaceship, it would be the outside world that would constrict into an ever-narrower “tunnel” in the direction of travel.

**I think this attribution is a correct one, which is not reliably so with many quotes attributed to Einstein online.

***What’s the modulus of a weekend?