Language

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“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t”

Well, first let me apologize for yesterday’s blog that largely concerned the weather, and in a trivial sense at that.  It was rather lamentable, I know, with emphasis on the first four letters of that adjective.

On the other hand, I don’t apologize for having had my little bit of fun with the date.  That may have been even less interesting to most of you than my jabbering on about the weather, but I like it.  I fully expect that I will do such things again.  For instance, in a similar vein, today is a bit fun because it is 11-12*, so the numbers are in appropriate ordinal sequence with no gaps.

That’s not very fun.  More fun will be had (by me, anyway) on Friday, when it will be 11-14-25.  If you don’t immediately see the fun there, it may help that a similar fun date next month will be available on 12-13-25.  This fun also works with the European date order (but in both you have to leave out the digits that denote the century).  Also, there were no equivalently fun dates in any month before October.

This is the most fun I’ve had on any kind of date in at least 16 years, I would guess.  That’s an easy call, because I haven’t been on any date at all in at least that long.  See what I did there with the multiple meanings of the word “date”?  Of course you did.  What do I think you are, a moron?

No, I do not think that.  You are reading a blog post, so you are a reader, which gives you a serious leg-up, moronia-wise.  You draw from the well of that greatest of all human inventions:  written language.  Your taste in reading material may be somewhat questionable, but I cannot legitimately complain about that.

Wow, I feel like I ought to be almost done with this post, but I’ve barely passed 300 words.

On to other things.  I’m going to try to do a better job about science reading during my downtime in the office.  It’s not that I’m completely slacking; I’m reading Shape by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, and I just read his earlier book How Not to Be Wrong.  I’ve read both before and/or listened to the audio books, but they are well worth rereading.  He’s a great math professor, and has a gift for explaining potentially abstract concepts.  I think he’s slightly better at this than Steven Strogatz, the author of The Joy of X and Infinite Powers, but they’re all good.

I also just yesterday gave in to an urge I’ve had for some time:  I ordered a textbook I liked in med school but which we didn’t really get into as deeply as I would like:  Principles of Neural Science, by Kandel et al.  The edition I had was by Kandel and Schwartz, if memory serves, but Dr. Schwartz is no longer involved, it seems.

It’s a textbook, so it’s pricey, even in paperback, but I discovered that I could put it on a payment plan through Amazon, so that’s what I did.  It arrives today.

I’ve also resolved, at least tentatively, to try to take the heat off my reading of my science books‒including the above newcomer‒by doing something I did when reviewing/studying in med school:  I would get a text that I was reviewing, and I would pick a section to read/review by flipping a coin.

Actually, it was a series of flips, each one dividing the “remaining” part of the book in half.  In other words, for the first flip, heads would mean I would look in the front half of the book, tails would mean the back half.  Then the next flip would decide to which half of that half I would narrow things down further.

Anyone who has spent any time dealing with computers and/or binary numbers can readily recognize that, with 10 flips of the coin, one could choose a specific page in a 1024 page book.  I guess every flip would count as a kind of “half-life” for the book’s pages.  If one wanted, one could even choose one’s pages not with a coin flip, which is not truly random, but with a quantum event that has a 50-50 chance, like measuring whether a given electron’s spin is up or down.

Of course, I don’t have a Stern-Gerlach gate, so I would have to “farm out” that process.  But I understand that there are apps that you can use that have their sources at labs where each decision is truly made by a quantum measurement.

It’s not terribly practical nor more useful for pickling book pages than is a coin flip, but if you’re a convinced advocate of the Everettian, “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, it has the added “benefit” that each “flip” will divide the universe into two “worlds”, one where you choose from the earlier half, another where you choose from the latter.

Coin flips do not enact such splitting, not in anything but the trivial sense that every quantum level interaction potentially does so.  The experience will be the same for you, though, except whatever glee you might derive from splitting the universe to choose a section to read.

Anyway, I’ll be trying to read my books, random section by random section.  Believe it or not, this works for me.  I don’t have to learn things in order, usually, and this method avoids me feeling bored while trying to trudge through a text in order.

Perhaps I do have some aspects of ADHD up in there in my brain.

Well, I’ve now passed my target length for this post by some margin, so I’ll call this enough for today.  I expect to be writing another post tomorrow, but like everything else**, it is not absolutely certain.  I hope you have a very good day.

*Only in the American style Month-Day-Year format, though.  It is less fun in the European Day-Month-Year format.

**Yes, even death and taxes, in principle.

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“Bright and early for the daily races, going nowhere, going nowhere…”

First of all, I would like to point out a bit of numerical fun we have regarding today’s day and date:  it’s November 11th, or 11-11.  That’s the case whether you’re using the US or the European date ordering system, since 11-11 is indistinguishable from 11-11.  It’s also Tuesday, and we have 2 of the same number with 2 of the same digits, which each add up to 2, so, two twos on Tuesday.  Fun!

Well, maybe things like that are only fun for me, but I have to try to entertain myself and find fun where I can; no one is gonna do it for me, that’s for sure.

Speaking of fun, what about this crazy weather?  I imagine it must be worse for the rest of the eastern US where this front or thing or what have you has had its effect, but it’s remarkable enough here in south Florida.

Yesterday, the high was 80F (I think that’s just under 27C‒or almost exactly 300K‒but I’m doing the figuring in my head while on the way to work, so I may be off), but now, this morning, it is 51F, and it is supposed to get lower before it starts warming up a little.  That’s a 29 degree drop (in Fahrenheit‒it’s roughly a 16 degree drop in Centigrade or Kelvin, which I guess would make the current temperature 11C or 284K) in about 12 hours.

This is one of the days I’m glad I’m not riding my “scooter”* anymore, because when you’re going over 70 on the highway and it’s 50ish degrees out, the effective wind chill is brutal.

For most of the US, especially up north, and for Canada, the weather down here is probably laughable.  Canadians would probably go swimming when it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10C), and not in a heated pool, either, but in one of those cold Canadian lakes.  I grew up in Michigan, so I’m not far from that background, myself; I swam in cold lakes and rivers quite a few times in my youth.  But of course, I’ve now lived in Florida for quite some time‒more than 2 decades‒so I’ve gotten a bit soft.

Ugh.  I’m doing a blog post about the weather!  I was even about to talk about whether I prefer it hot or cold, and to give my reasons.  I’ll let you guess, if you’re so inclined, but I need to veer away from this subject.  It’s one thing to discuss the science of weather and climate‒those are interesting and very nifty and important subjects‒or the mathematics of weather prediction.  But merely to talk about the weather is just too sad.

I already expect it will be the “hot topic” (ha ha) at the office this morning.

There are, of course, good, sound, biological reasons for people to be concerned about the weather.  But that is not what I’ve been discussing, is it?  I’ve just been discussing it because it’s a little bit out of the ordinary, and it’s easy to talk about the weather.  That doesn’t make it particularly fun or engaging, though.  For instance, I never did quite grasp the opening lyrics to the Tears For Fears song, Head Over Heels:  “I wanted to be with you alone and talk about the weather.”

Presumably this is some manner of love song, and in it the protagonist wants to talk to someone‒I presume*** the object of his affections‒about the weather?  I’m almost sure there’s more to it; perhaps it’s an expression of how gripping the loved one’s company is, such that even talking about the weather with them is something worth seeking.  I have to think there was depth there (I don’t know the song well), because these are the guys who wrote Everybody Wants to Rule the World, and also Mad World (though my favorite version of that latter song is not theirs but the cover done for the movie Donnie Darko).

I guess in some ways I am too literal-minded, but I do try to catch myself at it and make it into a joke when I can, which often works very well.

Speaking of literal jokes, here’s a little one I posted on Threads and Facebook and the website formerly known as Twitter yesterday.

I made the joke up on Sunday, when I walked past a (now-abandoned) furniture store which still had a sign out front like the one in my joke.  If you know me, you’ll understand why this joke occurred to me at that time.

That’s enough gibberish for now, I guess.  I’m certainly past 701 words.  I hope you all have as good a day as you could hope to have (even if it’s not necessarily as good as you could wish to have).  Stay warm, my friends.

*I used “scare quotes”** because it was a 650cc scooter, so basically it was a full-on motorcycle, just with continuously variable transmission.

**It wasn’t strictly necessary, but I couldn’t resist putting scare quotes around the term “scare quotes”.

***Though one must be careful.  As we all know, when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me, and that’s not as good a thing as it might have been in the past.

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For ’tis your thoughts that now must blog our kings

Hello and good morning.  It’s the first Thursday in November today—it has to be so, since it’s the 6th, and there are only 7 days in a week, so there could not have been a prior Thursday in November, there being no “negative numbered days”.  QED*.

I’m writing today’s post on my mini lapcom, as I call it, which I decided to bring with me to the house yesterday, just in case.  Possibly I was persuaded by my discussion in yesterday’s post about the prospect of writing and writing and writing, on some future day, to see how long I could just keep writing off the cuff, impromptu, without a script and without an agenda, with only bathroom (and food) breaks.

I realized that was not something I would ever want to do on my smartphone.  Not that it couldn’t be done, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.  Also, I think the bases of my thumbs would probably swell up to twice their baseline size if I did that, and I might never be able to use them again.

I don’t know what subject or subjects to address on this first Thursday post of November in 2025 (AD or CE, whichever you prefer), but that didn’t stop me from writing nearly two hundred words before even beginning this paragraph.  I guess maybe this is how most casual conversations go, isn’t it?  People just sort of start talking and see what comes out of their own mouths and the mouths of their interlocutor(s).

I suspect that, a decent portion of the time, most people in a conversation are only slightly more “surprised”** by what another person says than they are about what they say themselves.  We don’t tend to think ahead before we speak, at least not in most interactions; we hear our own thoughts even as we’re enunciating them.

So it is with my writing—at least my nonfiction (though my fiction very much also just happens).  I rarely know ahead of time what the next word will be.  I certainly don’t know more than a word or two in advance, unless I’m really focused on making some specific point that’s going to require specific words.

I guess it’s not entirely unlike the way LLMs produce words and so on.  They don’t exactly plan it out ahead of time.  The various weights in the network interact in whatever way they do, which has been influenced by their “training”, and they come out with the next word and the next.  They don’t really have any clearer, linear, step-by-step processes that they would understand (in detail) themselves.

That’s not to say they couldn’t in principle know the weight values of their nodes (I think that’s the term usually used), and could literally copy those weights into other places to run an AI that starts off identical to the original—it’s much easier for software to do this than for wetware like human brains/minds.  But they couldn’t discern and work out the logic, the steps, the process in detail of how and why they work they way they do specifically.

This is the good ol’ Elessar’s Conjecture (which I suspect is a law, or else I wouldn’t conject it):  No mind can ever fully and completely understand itself, because each data processing unit, be it neuron or a transistor or whatever, does not have the information processing power to describe itself, let alone its interaction with the rest of the network of which it is a part.

Intelligence cannot ever be a simple process, I’m very nearly certain of that.  And nonlinear, neural network style “programs” are not simpler just because we can grow them far more easily than we can write out the program for an actual AI.  We don’t know how they work—not in detail, sometimes barely even in vague terms.  They just “grow” if we follow certain steps.

But you can grow a plant in a similar fashion.  Heck, you can grow a new human if you follow a few relatively simple and often not unpleasant*** steps.  But could you “write” a human?  Could you design and them build one, biochemistry to brain and all?

If you can honestly and correctly answer “yes” to that question, what the hell are you doing reading this?  We need you out there solving all the world’s problems!  Maybe you are, though.  I could hardly expect to know better than you what actions you should take if you are such an incredible mind.  Maybe you know exactly what you’re doing.

I doubt it, though.

Nevertheless, perhaps we only truly understand something when we can actually design and build it, piece by piece.  We do not understand our AIs.  What’s more, they do not understand themselves, any more than you and I understand ourselves in detail (though I think we’re currently better at that than AIs, but we’ve had a lot more practice).

Okay, well, I passed 701 words just a moment ago, so I’ll bring this post to a close, having once again meandered into surprising territory, though I hope it’s at least mildly interesting and thought provoking.  I’ll just close with the notion that, perhaps, if one wishes to take drastic, revolutionary action to save the world from great crisis, one should not act against specific human political leaders and the like, but one should rather sabotage server farms and related parts of computer infrastructure.  It is relatively fragile.

I’m not saying I recommend this, I’m just…thinking “out loud” on a keyboard.

TTFN

*That’s the old quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics, though kudos indeed to the Physics community for making one of the best science acronyms ever in QED.

**By which I don’t mean “startled” in any sense, though that can happen.  I just mean that one doesn’t know ahead of time and so one’s own speech is as much a revelation to one’s consciousness as is that of others.

***For good, sound, biological reasons:  Creatures that enjoy sex are far more likely to leave offspring than those that do not, so over time, such creatures will tend to comprise the vast majority of any population that reproduces sexually.

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Wee are the champignons, but I still won’t eat them

First of all, I want to say, “Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.”  So, here goes:

Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.

My mother would have appreciated that joke, so if anyone out there is inclined to be offended on her behalf, well…you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself, like the song said.  My mother’s sense of humor was very goofy and giggly and rather silly.  I got a goodly fraction of my sense of humor from her; she had extra, and no one else wanted it, so I got a very good deal.

Oh, on an unrelated note, I would like to note that, today, I am wearing cologne (or, well, aftershave, but I see no serious difference between the two things–one is named after a German city* and the other is just named for when you use it, as long as you’re not averse to the sting of alcohol on a freshly shaved face, which I am not, depending on whose face it is).  I felt awkward having yesterday used the misheard lyric from Whitesnake which says that I was born to wear cologne, when I wasn’t wearing cologne.

Of course, I’ve never really been like a drifter, either.

I do, unfortunately, drift and meander in my writing, at least when it’s nonfiction (broadly speaking) and when I’m trying not to write about my negative thoughts and feelings so I don’t bring people down too much.  That’s not as easy as it might seem, because those thoughts and feelings are always there, and they’ve been there for nearly as long as I can remember.

I’m not sure why they are there; presumably, and apparently, a lot of it has to do with my until-recently-undiagnosed ASD, but there’s also just something of a tendency toward dysthymia/depression in especially my Dad’s side of the family.

Though, honestly, there was almost certainly ASD on that side of the family, too**.  I would be very surprised if my father could not have been so diagnosed, though he was surely “Level 1”, whereas I am said to be “Level 2”.

Speaking of my Dad‒which I was‒I guess I should wish him a belated Happy Birthday, wherever he may be.  His birthday was a month ago today (it was a Saturday, so I wrote no blog post).

My own birthday is exactly in between my parents’ birthdays, which was something of a choice on their part; I was born by elective c-section, which was the usual practice in that era if one had previously had a c-section, which my mother had.  So they had at least some choice about the specific day on which I would be born.

They couldn’t just pick willy-nilly, of course.  If they had tried to wait until December, it would not have worked, and September would have been disastrous.  Probably even early November wouldn’t have panned out.  Still, I think they had at least a few days’ window in either direction, so‒it’s my understanding‒they picked my birthday to be right between theirs.

It’s the sort of thing I might have done, myself, so I appreciate it.

Let’s see now, what else is going on?  Of course, there are many things happening in the world, as is always the case, and many of those things seem and feel quite momentous to the people who see them or experience them.  From a certain point of view, they are indeed important, of course.  But I imagine that the average Roman citizen often thought that the momentary political happenings in their world were the be-all and end-all, and now we don’t even know what those concerns (or who those citizens) might have been.

Mind you, if their concerns related to the incoming Vandals and Visigoths and Huns and so on, I suppose they might have been at least somewhat justified in their belief that pivotal events were taking place.  But such times were narrow and few, relative to the “uninteresting times” in between.

Nowadays, of course, there are no actual external invaders coming in (though various propagandists might say there are).  Alas, in the modern world, we have met the Vandals, and they are us.

I almost feel that should have read “they are we”, but it might be taken as implying they are tiny, as in “they are wee”***.  Also, I wanted to throw a little homage to the famous Pogo cartoon in which Pogo originally said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

With that, I will call this blog post to a close today.  I hope you all remember and embrace what we’ve accomplished here (basically nothing, as far as I can tell).  I also continue to hope that you all have an objectively good day.

*Weirdly enough, the full term is “eau de cologne” which I think is French for “water of Cologne”.  This is a curious term which must be quite historically contingent.  It must also be quite exaggerated, because I very much doubt that the water in the city of Cologne has any particularly attractive and pleasant odor.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

**There was even ASD, meaning Atrial Septal Defect, on that side of the family, which I had too, requiring open-heart surgery when I was 18.  It is an interesting fact that the cardiac ASD is more common in people with the neurodevelopmental ASD, as is cavum septum pellucidum, a benign atypia in the space between cerebral hemispheres, which was found in me incidentally while I was being worked up for, I think, the cause of some then-occurring pituitary dysfunction.

***Or that they are urine, I guess, which would be a more acceptable misunderstanding.

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Mon Dieu, it’s Mon day

Well, it’s Monday again and here I go again…on my own…going down the only road I’ve ever known.  Like a drifter, I was born to wear cologne*.

Anyway, I’m starting a new blog post at the beginning of a new work week, and the number of words in the footnotes is already significantly larger than the number here in the “main body” of the post.  That’s not all that unusual for me, but it is probably above the mean by at least a standard deviation.  I don’t see any practical way to check that, though, and I certainly don’t have enough interest to try to figure out such a way.  If any readers want to figure it out and share their results, please feel free to share them (but not with me).

I wonder if I’ve ever written a blog post in which the number of words in the footnotes is larger overall than the number of words in the main body.  It’s not impossible.  I wouldn’t be surprised either way, honestly.  But I’m not going to check.  You guys can if you want, and you should definitely share the results if you do (but again, not with me***).

[Quick aside‒I just thought of a spoof term, “Alexathymia”:  a condition that occurs when a person is so ensnared by the internet, web, and social media, that they need to ask their “digital assistant” how they feel (or should feel) about some product or issue or person.]

I’m sorry, I know this is a fairly strange sequence of thoughts to convey in a beginning-of-the-week blog post, even for me.  At least it feels that way from the inside.  I guess that’s one of the perks and the drawbacks of not having an agenda when one starts writing a post.  It can go anywhere (yay!), but also, well…it can go anywhere (ugh!).

Still, however erratic or hard to follow or annoying my writing here is, it’s at least better than me writing about all the negative thoughts and feelings that run through my poor excuse for a mind.  I hope it’s better.  If my dark, crumbly center is the best of me, well, I’m not sure what to make of that.  Probably, I would just make a mess.

However jerkily erratic my writing might be this morning, at least I’m sticking with my new word count “goal” of 701, so hopefully I won’t bore you for too long with my weirdnesses.  Also, I hope I won’t bore you with my banalities.  To be too unremarkable or to be too unusual are both negative things; you can tell by the use of the word “too”, which in this case refers to detrimental excess (though it can also mean “also”, but that wouldn’t make much sense here).

As for anything else, well…I guess this is the first full week of the new month, November****.  We also had the daylight savings time flip over this weekend here in the US, the one where we “fall back”, i.e., we set all clocks back an hour.  I’m never sure whether this constitutes the start or the stop of “Daylight Savings Time”, but it really doesn’t matter, so I don’t waste any time trying to memorize it.

It’s a strange thing, this hour shift, and it can throw one’s circadian rhythms off a bit, which is troubling if one is subject to seasonal affective problems, which I am.  It’s particularly annoying for nightfall to come suddenly much sooner than it did the day before.  I know that the nighttime grows longer during the time between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice anyway, but it’s easier to stomach without the sudden jump.

In college, though, I liked getting that extra hour on one weekend in the autumn, though I rued its reverse in the spring.  Mind you, I suspect it had little actual impact, but the psychological reward/punishment effect on my affect was not to be entirely dismissed.

And, with that, I think I’ll draw this fairly disjointed blog post to a close and put it out of your misery, if not its own.  Thank you for joining me here in the month of November.  I say “here” as if it referred to a place rather than a time (or a range of time, though we rarely refer only to dimensionless points when we refer to places in space, so I guess that’s okay).  ANYWAY, I hope you all have a week this week that is better than the last was, and that this trend continues, even if only in the most gradual fashion, for the rest of your lives.

*That’s a Mondegreen‒a misheard lyric‒from the song Here I Go Again by Whitesnake (which I thought came out much later in the ‘80s than it actually did, which was 1982).  Well, the last sentence was a Mondegreen**, the previous ones were accurate.

**Though I often do wear cologne, because I like having a pleasant odor.  But I’m not wearing any today, and I certainly was not born to do so.

***Okay, I’m trying to be funny and to seem coolly uninterested, but I would hate for someone to figure those things out and yet not share them with me, so please do share it if you gather that data.

****“November” almost seems like it might mean “new” something…a new ember perhaps, the first cast-off remnant of a dying fire symbolizing the fading of the year.  But, of course, the Nov- here refers to the number nine rather than to newness, as in “nova”*****.

*****Of course, in Spanish, nova could mean “no go”, as in, “it doesn’t go”, which partly explains why the Chevrolet Nova didn’t sell that well in Latin America.

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Words about fear and words about words

Well, it’s Saturday again, and for the second week in a row, I am writing a blog post.  I warned you that I probably would:  here, go take a look.  See?  I told you.

Of course, a blog post means I’m going to the office today.  It’s not a full day, but it chews up so much of the middle part that there’s no possibility of getting any extra rest, at least not for me.  For instance, I have awakened well before I would need to go to the office, but my anxiety or tension or whatever it might best be called does not let me sleep‒for fear of oversleeping, I guess.  It’s some manner of fear, anyway.  It’s not a fear of physical attack (I think) but it sort of feels like I have to watch my back, as though someone or something is out to get me.

Fear is not the mind killer, of course, despite the popular mantra from Dune.  Fear (up to a point) can sharpen the mind, if it’s not resisted inappropriately.  I think the 12th Doctor’s take on being scared is far better than that from Dune.  See below:

–

Obviously, too much fear is bad, but as Stephen Fry, playing the unscrupulous tobacconist points out (starting at roughly the 2:45 point here), that’s what the term too much means.

Too much of anything, more or less by definition, is bad.  This is one of those somewhat rare circumstances in which one can say “by definition” and not be relaying a merely semantic point without substance.

This is in contrast to the silly old conundrum “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound?”  If you simply define your terms precisely, there is not going to be any ambiguity in the answer‒but you have to choose your “definitions”* of each word clearly, especially ones like “hear” and “sound”.

If you’re ever arguing about something (other than etymology and/or usage and/or diction) and you want to go to the dictionary to settle it, then you’ve probably been arguing about something without substance‒arguing past each other, as they say.  I’ve heard such arguments, even between people with seemingly above-average intelligence.

Of course, if they’re arguing for fun, as a sort of mental sport and exercise, and if they both (or all) are enjoying the process, then I have no trouble with it.  It probably sharpens their thinking skills, as long as they don’t let themselves forget that they’re just arguing over misaligned coding and the logical implications thereof.  Even a skilled martial artist who trains purely for exhibitions may be in real trouble in a street fight against serious opponents.

But even the OED doesn’t decide or define what English words mean; it records what words have been used to mean, their origins, their etymology, all that good, interesting stuff.

How did I get on this subject?  I guess I’ll see as I do the editing.  I certainly do bounce and meander in my head, don’t I?  And that process is often inextricably intertwined with writing.

That can be a good thing, sometimes, I suppose.  I would think it’s at least related to the nature of creativity.  But it’s also important to be able to focus and stay on point, to be disciplined, if one is truly to create anything of depth.  One of my biggest problems in the past was that I would come up with, for instance, good story ideas, but I would soon get distracted by some new story idea and get diverted from the first.

One of the best things about having been to prison‒yeah, there were a few good things, though they were strongly overwhelmed by the bad‒was that I was in a situation in which I could discipline myself to write every morning, when lights came on (about 3 am) for 3 to 4 pages, and not go on to a new story until I finished the first.  I mailed the pages out to my Mom, Dad, and sister as I went along, after rewriting them for a bit of legibility**.

In this fashion, I wrote first Mark Red, then CatC, then Paradox City.  Then, after I got out, I continued writing, finishing one story before starting the next, right up until I began Outlaw’s Mind.  That was the last story I started in that pattern, though I’ve since written a bit on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and even less on HELIOS.

Currently, I just write this every work day.  I cannot explain why in any quick and simple fashion, but it is what it is, as the tautology goes.

I hope you have a good day.  I should be back on Monday.

*I put that in scare quotes because in nearly all cases, words don’t have real, singular, exclusive definitions, but instead have usages.  Now, as the person who coined various words in, for instance, The Chasm and the Collision, I can actually and literally define those words.  I have actual authority over those words; I created those words and I created those worlds.

**I kept my first draft so I would be able to go back and check things if I needed to do so.

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Some Halloween-style pictures among unrelated words

First of all, Happy Halloween to everyone who celebrates this day in any fashion.  Even if you don’t celebrate it, you might as well have a good day.

I don’t discriminate based on Holiday celebrations.  How very admirable of me.

Once again, I mean to keep this post short by making my target 701 words to start with, because I’m very tired this morning.  It was difficult to get up at all, and I still feel as if I’m vaguely sedated.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been one of those sedatives that’s associated with euphoria.  It would be nice if it were, right?  If they would agree, I would agree.

Unfortunately, I’m just groggy and weak and blurry.  By which I mean I feel that the world seems slightly blurry to me.  I don’t mean that I am blurry if you look at me.  I might imagine that I could be blurry (meaning as a function of me not just poor vision in the observer) but I have looked in a mirror already this morning, and while I am far from easy on the eyes, I seem to be in focus.

Thinking of atypical interpretations of things people say, I was listening to one of the guys on the phones in the office yesterday, and I heard him use the expression “qualified individual”.  Now, I know what he meant, and it’s a perfectly valid term when discussing a promotion with a customer.  But it occurred to me that one could use the term to refer to someone who is an individual…but only from a certain point of view.

For instance, Norman Bates could be thought of as a “qualified” individual.  Yes, he’s a single person in the sense that he is one organism*, but there is more than one distinct personality in his head.  You could also say that the narrator in Fight Club is a “qualified” individual, as is James McAvoy’s character (should that be “characters”?) in Split.

Oops, sorry, I guess I could have given a spoiler alert for those movies.  But if I had done that, it would have ruined the surprise!

Of course, from certain points of view, even your typical unqualified** individuals are not as monolithic or monotonic or monotropic or, well, monopersonic as one might imagine.  We know that in split brain patients, when the corpus callosum is severed to reduce the problem of, for instance, uncontrollable seizures, the two sides of the person’s brain can act and think in some ways like two separate people.  They act like two individuals in other words, though in such circumstances, that word is least applicable, since if anyone is “undivided”, it is not these people.

But they are only a special, more extreme version of that which is true of the rest of us.  Our minds are all divided into many separate modules and centers, often running largely in parallel with each other.  There is no one central, “terminal goal” region of the mind; there are separate and conflicting areas and aspects, and even they are not constant.  Many introspective practices, particularly those associated with Buddhism, recognize that the concept of an individual, homuncular “self” is nebulous at best and is never even close to being real.

It seems the term “individual” is just as incorrectly presumptuous for people as the term “atom”*** is for, well, atoms.  However, if we’re referring to more physical literality, then it’s still pretty accurate, certainly for everything more complex than a flatworm.  If you start splitting people (and other animals) in pieces, what you get, at best, is a creature with missing bits and lots of dead former body parts.  You don’t get more than one being.  Often you get no one, because you will have killed the person with whom you started.

In such a case, one divided by two might in a sense equal zero.

Of course, even in basic mathematics, if you divide one by ever larger numbers, you get closer and closer to zero (it’s the limit as the denominator goes to infinity).

Speaking of going to infinity, the value of 1 / (701 – x), where x is the number of words I’ve written, has now crossed the singularity at infinity and is asymptotically approaching the x-axis from below.  On the positive side of the x-axis, starting from the beginning of a post’s first draft, that number can never be smaller than 1/701, since even I cannot write a negative number of words****.  But once I’ve passed the 701 point, the numbers can become an infinitesimal negative fraction, in principle.

In practice, I’m practically finished here.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will probably write a post tomorrow.

*Not counting skin and intestinal flora and the like.  If we count those, then we can all, like Walt Whitman, truthfully say “I am large, I contain multitudes”.

**Again, this has nothing to do with the person’s skills or résumé or experience or innate abilities, it’s just saying that one wouldn’t normally feel the need to add any caveats when calling a person an individual.

***Which means, basically, “uncuttable”.  And what we call atoms can indeed be “cut”.

****A number of negative words, on the other hand…

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For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-blog boil and bubble

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  It’s also “Devil’s Night” as it was called back where and when I grew up.  I don’t know if anyone still calls it that.  Nor do I know whether it’s still a night on which some people set fire to things in “celebration”.

I never did quite understand that tendency.  Well, no, actually I completely understand the urge to burn things, but I don’t understand giving oneself license to burn things that belong to other people, just because it’s the day before Halloween.

Of course, one could just call today Halloween Eve, but when you break down the etymology that doesn’t quite work.  Halloween is already “short” for “All Hallows’ Eve”, the day before what I think is called The Feast of All Saints, or just All Saints’ Day.  I guess that must be celebrated on November 1st, since Halloween is October 31st, but I have no idea how it’s traditionally celebrated by those who celebrate it.

Are there people who actually celebrate it?  There probably are such people.

I guess I get the progression:  on Halloween, the ghosts and goblins and vampires and werewolves parade around, before the ascendancy of “good” the next day in the form of all the nutbars who have been declared “saints”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were some fine people who have been made saints, but most of the ones of whom I’ve heard were pretty clearly just people who were mentally ill.  However, their society was not prepared actually to help them in any way, so they called them holy people.  I guess it’s (usually) better than what happened to the people who were mentally ill but were seen to be possessed or to be witches or warlocks or what have you.

Mind you, they’re all dead now, and they would have been dead pretty much no matter what, so I guess it doesn’t matter to them what sorts of nonsense people have imagined about them.

Getting back to the holiday progression, I think the addition of Devil’s Night on the night before Halloween makes some sense and improves the mythology.  By that reading, on October 30th, the Devil is truly ascendant, and there is no flouncing about in silly costumes (well, there is, but not “officially”) just acts of destruction.  Then, on the 31st, regular people dress up as creatures of the night, to turn the tables on beings that live by causing fear (much as Batman is said to do!) and run them out of town—to Hell, presumably*.  And then, once the ordinary people have done the work of driving off evil, the saints can come marching in and pretend to be the source of the goodness, when it’s really just that bad things have been driven off (by ordinary people choosing not to be afraid of them).

That’s my highly editorialized take on things, anyway.  But, whatever.

This is usually my favorite time of year, and Halloween is certainly my favorite big general holiday.  I don’t really have any plans to celebrate it this year, though.  I’m not going to be giving out candy—I live in the rear room of the house, anyway—and I don’t mean to dress up or do anything celebratory otherwise tonight or tomorrow (alas, I plan to set no fires).  Like the rest of the landscape of time before me, this patch is dreary and boggy and gray and a bit smelly.  And there’s just dull mist ahead.

By the way, I think I’m going to do the same thing today that I did yesterday and set my initial goal for this post as 701 words, which I’ve almost reached already as I write this.  I will almost surely pass it, but not by too much.  I think it worked well, yesterday, though not as well as whatever I did the day before, when for unknown reasons I saw a huge spike in the number of people who came and saw my blog.  Perhaps that was because I not only invited people to like it and share it, but actually bolstered that by sharing my song Like and Share**.

What would happen if I shared by song Breaking Me Down?  Let’s see.  I’ll embed it below, and we’ll see how successfully I’ll be digested or otherwise broken down today.

In the meantime, please have a good Devil’s Day or whatever.

TTFN

*As Dave Barry pointed out, that’s in concourse D at O’Hare International Airport, which frequent travelers will know.

**Maybe it was sharing the Ricochet Racers that did it, triggering nostalgia in members of Generation X.  It’s possible.

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“What IS real? How do you DEFINE ‘real’?”

Well, it’s Friday again, as happens if one waits long enough, but it wasn’t Thursday here yesterday.  Okay, well, that’s an exaggeration, obviously.  I simply didn’t write a blog post yesterday because I was out sick‒I ate something that chose to take vicious, but thankfully temporary, revenge on me for having eaten it‒and when I don’t go to the office, I don’t usually do a blog post.

It would be a somewhat interesting universe if time were constrained in some fashion by my blog post writing, or even defined by it.  Of course, that’s pretty vanishingly unlikely, since it would not readily be able to explain all of history‒including my own life and memories‒from before I started writing my blog and before blogs even existed.

There are philosophical and mathematical prestidigitations that can be performed that can allow one at least entertain the notion that all those memories and all those historical records are in their present configuration by mere chance, but such arguments tend to bite themselves in the ass by destroying all basis for believing in any specific laws of nature, including the probabilistic/entropic ones that, in principle, allow for such things.

Anyway, here I am, heading to the office on Friday, the first “real”* day after Wednesday, though I’m still a bit beat.

Given that last fact, I hope you’ll excuse me if I’ve nothing profound or even interesting to say today.  It’s the tail end of a week that should or at least could have been one of reasonable celebration, if I were inclined to consider the fact that I have lived another year something to celebrate.  Alas, I don’t have any strong inclination to consider that so, and I guess that’s just as well, because it hasn’t been a very good week for me.  I feel exhausted, and this is only “first thing in the morning”.

I don’t think I actually am literally exhausted, in the sense of being completely and thoroughly used up, because I am, after all, going to work and writing this.  A car with no gasoline does not even start let alone move**.  Whereas I am still moving, and contrary to some popular sayings, one cannot keep moving out of spite or stubbornness or whatever similar notions might be applied.  I don’t mean to dismiss the power of stubbornness, let alone of spite, but they do not (and cannot****) allow one to violate the laws of physics.

I am simply very fatigued‒physically, yes, and also emotionally, mentally, even “spiritually”, however that last word might be defined.  I don’t know how close to the bottom of my personal tank I really am.  Goodness knows, I wouldn’t have been surprised to have died at least twelve years ago, or even twenty.  I did not die (as you might be able to tell), so in a certain sense, my surprise is that I am alive.  But it’s not much of a happy surprise.  I certainly don’t feel any giddy joy over the fact that I have gotten through all the nonsense in my life so far without it killing me.

Still, it would be churlish and pathetic of me (perish the thought!) not to admit that there are still moments and occasions of joy and even happiness (which John Galt described as a state of noncontradictory joy, and I rather like that interpretation of the word).  But it would be nice to have occasional truly pain-free days.

Oh, well.  The universe does not conform to anyone’s wishes nor bend to the best interests of any given individual or even all individuals‒not as far as I can see.  But if the world did bend to my will in such matters, then all my readers would have a wonderful day today, and that would be the start of a long‒perhaps unbroken‒string of wonderful days hereafter.

And heck, everyone else might as well have wonderful days, also.  For it is difficult even for the most prosperous to be reliably and persistently happy in a world where there is gross injustice and undeserved misery.

*If by “real” we mean “days defined by the writing, by me, of one of my blog posts”, and if by “me” we mean the first person objective singular pronoun referring to Robert Elessar, the author of this blog (among other things).  But, of course, we don’t mean such a thing when we use the word “real” and though I define “me” that way, you would probably define it differently, but in very specifically different ways.  This is all just me (the same “me” from earlier) being somewhat silly.

**Well…unless it’s an electric car (or even a diesel*** powered car).  Ideally, one probably doesn’t want any gasoline in an electric car.  Gasoline in an electric engine is just a fire hazard.  It’s not a good conductor, so it probably wouldn’t cause the engine to short out directly, but once ignited, the fire could create local ions/plasmas that could conduct electricity and thus, among other things, short out the workings of the motor.  That would probably be among the least of the problems such fire caused, though.

***I once knew a guy who modified an old diesel Mercedes so that it ran on peanut oil.  Due to economies of scale, it was actually more expensive to drive than other cars, but at least it ran on a renewable fuel, of sorts.

****This is definitional, in my view:  anything that actually happens is, perforce, allowed by the laws of physics.  If you find something that seems to violate the laws of physics as you know them, that’s just an indictment of your understanding‒of the events and/or of the laws of physics.  This isn’t a horrible thing; it’s a chance to learn something new.

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If the vacuum collapses, everything gets messy

It’s Wednesday morning now, and I feel slightly better than I did yesterday, which should probably be no surprise.  I went back to the house last night, and I had a decent sleep‒for me, anyway‒and no major evening issues.  Now I am working my way toward the office.  It’s payroll day, so it should be at least mildly more hectic than most other days, but it shouldn’t be too unbearable.

Well, it shouldn’t be unbearable at all.  I mean, the state of being unbearable or not is a purely binary thing, isn’t it?  Either something is bearable or it is not.  If something is unbearable, then it cannot be borne.  So, saying something is not “too unbearable” is probably almost always nonsensical.  I suppose one could imagine something being only just unbearable, so that one could almost be able to bear it…but not quite, and one would finally be forced to succumb to whatever outcome that entailed, despite one’s possibly heroic struggles.

In some ways that sounds like it could be worse than something being thoroughly and unequivocally unbearable.  If one can see that something is truly unbearable, one will probably be less likely even to try to bear it.  One would not bother attempting to style out the brunt of a supernova; if one could not get far enough away, one would presumably just close one’s eyes and grit one’s teeth and take what comfort one could in knowing that the explosion will probably happen and obliterate one faster than any nerve impulse could propagate.

That’s one of the (tiny) comforts about the possibility of there being a “vacuum collapse” of the universe, in which the present “dark energy” vacuum state could, hypothetically, quantum tunnel down to a lower, truer vacuum state than the present one*, releasing that potential energy drop in such a way that wipes out all currently existing particles/fields.

This would erase everything in our visible universe (the “visible” part is deliberate and crucial; do you see why?**) in a sort of wave of collapse that starts at the site of the first state change, like the propagation of ice crystals forming in hitherto supercooled water.  But though it would be a shame, from our point of view, it would be one we would never experience, since the bubble of state change would expand at the speed of light.  It would thus be literally impossible to see it coming, because once you could see it, it would already be there, and you would be wiped away before you could possibly be aware that it was happening.

By the way, this possibility is “only” hypothetical; we aren’t even sure it could happen, not least because we’re not sure whether the vacuum state of the universe is as low as it can go or not, among other things.  But don’t worry:  if the vacuum collapse of the cosmos doesn’t kill you, something else will.

Even my truly immortal vampires in Mark Red might be wiped out by vacuum collapse.  I suspect they would, which might be a comfort to many of them, so to speak.  Of course, that would depend very much on how the “supernatural” forces in that book’s universe interact with the vacuum state and other quantum fields.  It’s not inconceivable that they might survive even that.  How’s that for horrifying?

These are odd thoughts for a Wednesday morning, aren’t they?  I mean, on a Thursday they wouldn’t be that odd, and even less so on a Friday.  On a Saturday they would be almost boringly predictable.  But on a Wednesday morning?  That’s just, well…odd, as I said.

I’m being silly.  My apologies.

I guess it’s more uplifting than is the prospect of universal Armageddon***.  Though, really, the Tao te Ching (in the version with which I am familiar) encourages us to embrace death with our whole hearts because that will help us to be prepared for most everything else we can encounter.

It does not encourage us to love death or to seek it; quite the contrary.  We are merely encouraged to accept it, not just intellectually but viscerally, to internalize***** it.  This is one of those curious circumstances in which the Tao to Ching and the movie Fight Club give the same advice, which is no indictment of that advice in either direction.

I try not to indulge in the vice of advice, but I will express my hope that every one of you who reads this post today or any of my other posts has a particularly good day, today and every day hereafter.

You’ve suffered enough already.

*This is analogous to what is thought to have happened when the “inflaton” field dropped down to a much lower energy level about 13.8 billion years ago, releasing the differential energy as the very hot soup of elementary particles that eventually became the universe we see.

**Okay, fine, I’ll explain.  It’s not just that the wave is expanding at the speed of light and so one would “see” it only as it hits.  But, given the current, accelerating expansion of the universe, the wave of change could never, even in principle, reach areas of the cosmos that are outside our cosmic horizon, because those places are receding from us faster than the speed of light/causality.  There is no causal influence from us that can ever reach them, or vice versa (assuming no wormholes or warp drives or similar).  Likewise, someplace beyond our horizon****** could be collapsing already, but we need never worry, because that collapse is not going to reach us (unless it changes the rate of overall cosmic expansion or even reverses it, which is not inconceivable.  We might then find ourselves in (or near) an anti-deSitter space, in which case, well…yeah).

***Not to be confused with the often misused**** term “apocalypse” which is basically just synonymous with “revelation”.  It’s become associated with the end of the world (and with lesser catastrophes) because one of the alternative titles of the book of Revelation is “The Apocalypse of Saint John the Divine” or whatever they called that nut bar.

****That rhymed, and it had a good rhythm too, both quite by accident.  I did that in yesterday’s or Monday’s post as well, but I didn’t call attention to it.  Can you find it now?

*****I would love to be able to use the term to grok it as in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, but much as when Fuckerberg stole the term “metaverse” from me, likewise Elon Musk and the would-be tech boys who idolize him have arrogated the term “grok” and made it embarrassing to use.  Don’t even get me started on the disgusting theft of the word Palantir by Peter Thiel.  He deserves to be tortured interminably for the unmitigated gall he has shown in daring to use that term, but I would accept his immediate, painless disintegration and that of his company.

******Speaking of horizons, it is interesting to wonder what a vacuum state collapse would do to currently existing black holes.  I suspect they would basically be impervious to it, since the vacuum state is something that exists within spacetime, with the gravitational field as the backdrop of other quantum fields, but we don’t necessarily know enough about quantum gravity to feel very sure, as far as I know.  I suspect it might change the specifics of Hawking radiation at the level of the event horizon, and thus change the specific rate of black hole decay.  Also, I think in the first rush of particles generated by such a vacuum decay, most black holes would grow briefly with the influx of newly released energy all around them that had previously been bound up in the vacuum energy.  But that’s just my initial intuition.