Language

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A 2sday blog post 4 U

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday now, which often happens immediately after the end of Monday, at least when one is using the ordering of days that we use here in the modern, technological world, agreed upon just by general convention, since there’s no particular real meaning to any such ordering.  Also, of course, the specific names of the days varies from language to language.  But somehow, the seven-day week became the generally accepted one worldwide—possibly partly because it’s a prime number, and of course, partly related to the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies visible before the invention of the telescope.

Not that any of that is very interesting, but it’s not as though I make it my business to write interesting blog posts.  I just…write blog posts.  Whether they’re interesting or not is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, as it were.

I think maybe I will embed the audio of my recent recording of Nothing Compares 2 U below, which I mentioned last week some time.  The audio is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than one might expect.  Whether the playing and singing is any good is, again, up to the aesthetic taste of each individual who happens to listen.  I make no promises or guarantees or representations about it being particularly good.  It’s okay, I would say.

As for other things, well, this morning I did not walk to the train station, nor did I bike here.  I’m still at the stage of working on my fitness in which I have to take a day off in between walks.  That’s not so disappointing, I guess; I did walk about seven or so miles total yesterday.  The biggest impediment so far to walking two or more days in a row is that my left knee is a bit sore from yesterday’s walk.

You might think I would be used to pain by now; I haven’t had a day free of significant pain in a quarter of a century now.  Unfortunately, biology mandates that pain is not something with which a living thing can easily become “comfortable”.

At least the blisters on my right foot are not acting up.  I wore a different pair of shoes than usual yesterday, a make and model I haven’t worn in a while, and it seems they were kinder to my heel and Achilles tendon than the others.

It’s rather frustrating.  I like the other kind because they are very lightweight and “breathable” if you want to call it that.  That’s important in south Florida, where merely standing still for more than five minutes is likely to lead to the growth of various fungi and algae on your skin*.

At least there’s always Lysol.  It helps if you pretend you work for a bowling alley and have to spray each pair of shoes after it’s been used to make sure no one catches a fungus from the previous wearer.  Even when that wearer is you, you don’t want to have a foot fungus if you can help it.

Ugh, all this is so boring, isn’t it?  Life is almost entirely composed of boredom interspersed with stress and tension anymore.  When I meditate, which I do, it helps my tension and stress and hostility a bit, but I find myself feeling very depressed instead.  It’s quite annoying.  Is tension and stress my only alternative to profound depression anymore?  Perhaps.  The world is overall so utterly idiotic and frustrating, this is just par for the course, as they say.

Despite the fact that I’m sharing a bit of singing here today, I haven’t played my guitar or sang even for a moment in over a week.  I haven’t really done anything creative or expressive in a long time, unless you count this blog (which I don’t, honestly).

I am rereading The Lord of the Rings, which is always good, at least.  I’m in The Two Towers now, at the point where Pippin and Merry have just met Treebeard.

It occurs to me that I tend to write (and think of) that pair of hobbits as “Pippin and Merry” rather than “Merry and Pippin”, despite the fact that Merry is the first alphabetically and in the stories Merry is slightly older.  It’s peculiar.  It’s not important or anything, but it is odd.

I also tend to write “off” accidentally nearly every time I’m trying to write the word “odd”, but that’s not so peculiar (ha ha).  The “d” and “f” keys are right next to each other on the keyboard, and both words (“odd” and “off”) are legitimate words.  They also can both often be workable in the same context.  Calling something “a little off” can be synonymous with calling something “a little odd”.  Curious.

My train will be arriving soon.  I am sorry to have to admit that I have provided nothing of value here.  That’s not too unusual for me, though.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever contributed anything of value to the world other than my children.  They are valuable, of course, so I’m not unhappy about that.  I’m just unhappy by nature, and I’m unhappy about that fact, and that further fact is something about which I am, again, unhappy.  It’s like an infinite series**, and the question is, does it converge to some finite limit, or does it diverge to negative infinity?  I don’t know.

And sometimes—most days, maybe—I share that unhappiness with you, my all-too-generous readers.  It seems grossly unfair to you.  And it is.  I admire your optimism, though.  I don’t understand it.  But I do admire it.

Have a good day,  You might as well.  Somebody ought to do it.

*I’m exaggerating, of course.  It usually takes as much as ten minutes.

**Mathematically, I mean, not like, say, The Simpsons, or Superman comics.

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Try to remember the kind of Sexember…

Well, first of all:  TBIF (Thank Batman it’s Friday).  I’ve been feeling particularly poorly this week, with sleep that’s even worse than my usual, and that is not good to start with.  At least, on the weekend, I can knock myself out at night with Benadryl and not really care that I will be groggy the next day.

I’m basically going to call this week a loss.  I haven’t gotten much of anything done that I had intended to do, and that’s discouraging.  But it’s a new month now, so there may be some psychological* tendency to think of it as a potential new beginning of sorts.  Mind you, there’s really nothing special about this day relative to any other; the length of a month is related to the lunar cycle and the length of the year, but only roughly, and the specific divisions are fairly arbitrary.

Of course, we know that August is named for Augustus Caesar, née Octavian, who succeeded in taking control of Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar (after whom July was renamed).  But it’s interesting, at least to me, to consider what it would have been named otherwise.  September, after all, is named after the fact that it was “originally” the seventh month, as October was the eighth, November the ninth, and December the tenth.

So, would August originally have been named Sexember (the sixth month)?  I think that would be the correct form, though Latin scholars among my readers should please correct me if I’ve used the wrong prefix**.  If I’m correct, I would like to propose a global change of name for this month back to the potential previous name.

“Sexember” sounds like a much more fun month than “August”, with its dog day connotations and so on.  Although, the prefix “sex-” referring to six has, as far as I know, nothing at all to do with the word “sex” relating to the reproductive divisions among animals, nor to the process involved, which‒for good, sound, biological reasons‒is something dwelt upon and enjoyed and even obsessed over by so many.  But I’m not worried about etymological purity here.

Imagine the antics on the various social media as oodles of young people of all ages geared up to celebrate “Sexember” and talked about how they planned to celebrate it.  Of course, I suspect most people would exaggerate their planned exploits, as people tend to do.  Social media is a supremely fertile ground for hyperbole and posturing and pretense and performative outrage, whether about political matters or just how “hot” one is and how perfect one’s life is.  I wrote a song about this topic a few years ago:  Like and Share.  Here, I’ll embed it in this post.

That brings up an issue raised by a very old*** and good friend of mine.  He noted that, since the company which published my songs put things on YouTube with disabled comments, there’s no direct way for people to give me feedback on them, good or bad.  Of course, the songs are also on Spotify and iTunes and supposedly on TikTok and all those others, but many of those don’t allow comments, either.

My works are also among the various available background songs that one can choose for “reels” on Instagram and on Facebook.  I enabled that last bit, and even used one once.  You all should feel free to use them, too.  In principle, I get paid when you do****.

Anyway, the thought I had was that maybe I should embed the songs here, on my blog, as posts.  Or maybe I could create a new page, like the one I have for “my books”.  I could call it “my songs” and could put the officially released ones there, as well as ones in progress, and I could even share some of my covers.  If I shared them as blog posts, at least, comments would be always available, and are almost always welcome.

Of course, that covers and the incomplete stuff are already on my YouTube channel, such as it is, and I even have a created playlist with all of them in it.  Those are already available for comment and response on YouTube.  I’m a long way away from having a monetized YouTube channel, though, and this blog isn’t monetized, either (though I sometimes think maybe I ought to monetize it, at least partially, or make a Patreon account or something).

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

In the meantime, hopefully today will be better than yesterday, which was a day on which I quite literally wished to be dead, because I felt miserable and in pain and alone, to say nothing of failing to achieve what I’ve wanted to achieve this week (or in this life).  The thing that most prevented me from taking action on that wish was that the effort involved would have been too great.

I feel less bad today, which‒given the nature of number lines and greater than/less than meanings and equivalences*****‒means I feel better than I did.  I still haven’t crossed the origin into positive territory, though, and I don’t know if I ever will again.  That’s the consideration that leads to contemplation of death:  if one’s present and expected future wellbeing function is always in the negative, then a return to zero is a net gain.  It’s analogous to a jokey thing I used to say:  The one who dies with the most debt wins.

Enough of this nonsense.  I’ll call this post and this work week to an end now.  I wish you all an excellent weekend, and of course, enjoy the first of Sexember!

*I made an interesting typo when I wrote this word, one which I don’t think I’ve made before, though it would seem a very easy one to make, given the layout of the QWERTY keyboard:  I wrote it as “paychological”.  That seems almost like something that could be a new slang term, with related terms “paychopathology” and “paychopath”.

**Perhaps “Hexember” would be at least as proper or more so (though we don’t have “Heptember”).  I’m not sure.  That would surely please some of the many Goth people I tend to follow online, but it doesn’t have as broad an appeal as “Sex-” does.

***By which I mean he has been my friend from way back (starting freshman year of college), not that he is very old.  He’s roughly the same age I am, and‒though I often feel as if I’ve been kept alive by one of the great rings for centuries or even millennia beyond my natural time‒my real age, in proper time, is 55 years, soon to be 56.  Of course, there is no actual quantum leap in age at the anniversary of one’s birth.  Time is continuous‒or, well, it is quantized, but at the scale of 10-43 seconds.  So for all foreseeable, practical purposes within our lifetimes, it is continuous.

****Though the pay rate is nearly as miniscule as the Planck time mentioned in the previous footnote.

*****A pet peeve of mine is when some people denigrate the notion of choosing “the lesser of two evils”, particularly during elections, expressing such sentiments as “the lesser of two evils is still evil”.  This may be true in a simple-minded sense, but it misses the point entirely and expresses woefully clunky thinking.  Such a person might be expected to feel that owing a debt of $10 was not any better than owing a debt of $100,000, since both are debts.  But when you think about with which debt you’d prefer to be saddled, the difference is clear.  Money has a way of sharpening people’s intuitions regarding numbers.  Indeed, there’s some evidence that “negative numbers” were first invented to deal with debts.

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“Wednesday morning, papers didn’t come.  Thursday night, your stockings needed mending*.”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I’m feeling a bit better than I have so far this week.  Perhaps I really did have a virus of some type that my body has been fighting.  If so, it triggered/worsened symptoms of already existing pathologies in my body—in my back and hips and shoulders and other joints, and so on—in addition to making me feel achy and feverish, though without the actual fever.

I can’t really blame my psychopathology on a virus, unless it’s some form of mental virus**, or more likely some lifelong accumulation thereof.  Such “viruses” are rarely acute and self-limited, though they could be, I suppose.  What, after all, is a momentary fad or brief obsession, perhaps with a song, or the spread of a particularly funny new joke, that goes away before long?

I don’t really think my mental issues are primarily caused by acute memetic infection, if you will.  They started a long time ago.  In any case, my brain is apparently of an atypical type, at least based on my autism diagnosis, and that creates a substrate on which supervening inputs can become prone to cause certain forms of pathology.  Depression and anxiety are two of those things that are very common in those with ASD—significantly more so than in the general population***.  The statistics on autism indicate that suicidal ideation and attempted and successful**** suicide are much more common in people with ASD than in so-called neurotypicals.

I often think of depression—at least in some of its forms—as a sort of weather-pattern in the mind that becomes self-sustaining in the right circumstances, rather like a hurricane or other massive storm system.  One doesn’t find hurricanes in environments that are not conducive to them—Siberia and the like, for instance—but in minds that are the metaphorical equivalent of the tropics, such mental storm systems may be much more common, and sometimes very destructive.

Who knows, maybe ECT treatment for severe and recalcitrant depression is something akin to the (ill-advised) notion of dropping large nukes in the middle of a hurricane to disrupt its pattern.  If hurricanes occasionally had the tendency to obliterate all or even most life on Earth, we might be willing to try something as extreme as dropping nuclear weapons in a developing tropical storm system to disrupt it, if we could find no other solution.

I wonder if even the large storm cells that occur over places like the great plains of North America could be considered something like episodes of depression (the fact that some weather systems are called “depressions” relates to the barometric pressure, and should not be construed as in any way related to psychiatric depression, other than etymologically).  To what would a “super cell” that produces massive tornados be analogous?

Of course, there need be no actual analogy, because the weather concept is a metaphor, really.  But it is not completely a metaphor, so I don’t think it’s too frivolous to push the notion further in order to trigger some thoughts.  Complex systems like the brain and the weather, with internal feedbacks and feedforwards and “feedsidewayses” that can lead to vicious and/or virtuous cycles can have actual attributes in common if looked at in the right way.

It’s a bit akin to how the motion of a pendulum and the oscillation of a circuit and the “probability waves” of quantum mechanics can be described by very similar mathematics.  Also, the relations between pressure, flow, and friction in fluid dynamics with voltage, current, and resistance in electric circuits are almost spookily alike.

This probably demonstrates something rather fundamental in the nature of reality.  Perhaps it’s distantly related to the fact that geometry seems to have a deeper influence on the workings of reality than one might at first think, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Pythagorean relations and the appearance of Pi (π) in often surprising places.

This is all speculative stuff, and I’m not being very rigorous in my thoughts, though I’m trying not to be too frivolous.  But I think this is a good place to wrap up this post for today.  I hope you all are doing well and that you continue to do well, and even better, that you improve at least a little bit, in at least some way, every day.  You might as well.

*Has anyone reading ever actually mended their stockings (or darned their socks, as in another Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby)?  I have mended a sock at least once in my life, and probably more than once, but nowadays socks are so readily available that I tend just to throw them away when a hole develops.  I guess that’s a testament to how “spoiled” we are in the modern world.  Incidentally, I added the Thursday part of Lady Madonna to this quote-based title because I realized that I’m never likely to use it on an actual Thursday blog post, because for those I use mutated quotes from Shakespeare.

**In his classic book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as a replicator of the mind, and it has become a useful scientific term, in addition to being a slightly imprecise shorthand for usually humorous pictures of various kinds shared online.  Such memes can become highly potent self-replicators in various senses, and they can combine in ways that make them more prone to spread, in “meme-plexes” of various kinds.  Some are useful for the organism, and so could be considered beneficial viruses (memetic rather than genetic) while others can become terribly destructive, at least in certain circumstances.  Certainly the mind-virus(es) associated with the Jim Jones cult was/were lethal to most of those who were infected.  Likewise with the Heaven’s Gate viruses.  Some of such comparisons can be a bit glib, but others are robust and can be subject to rigorous study.

***I’m not referring to a prison-based “general population”, though at times the metaphor of modern society as a prison is truly warranted, especially for those of us with atypical brains.

****There are times when I would think of a completed suicide as indeed a thoroughgoing success, i.e., a positive thing overall, but here I’m just using the term “successful” to mean “having completed what was intended, as intended”.

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If I could write the beauty of your eyes and in fresh numbers number all your blogs

Hello and good morning, and welcome to another Thursday morning blog post.

I’m not sure how many of these I’ve written, but since I’ve done them nearly every Thursday, even when I was writing fiction on all other weekdays (and excusing the occasional sick day), we can guess that I wrote on the order of fifty such posts a year for about ten years.  Thus, there are on the order of five hundred such daily posts over the years, each one nearly a thousand words long (and some going beyond that).  So, overall, the number of words I’ve written in these Thursday blog posts alone is comparable to the number of words in my longest novel (Unanimity…so long I had to publish it as two separate books).

Of course, when we approach it from the point of view of actual information, à la Claude Shannon’s information theory and whatnot, I would have a hard time estimating how much actual information there is in such a post.  In the first draft of the preceding paragraph and a half, there were 174 words, which comprise 940-ish characters (counting spaces, which I think one should count, since a space or the lack thereof can matter quite a bit in English).

Now, each character in a typewritten document, not counting ”special” characters, can have one of 26 letters (not counting upper and lower case as separate things for my current purposes) ten numerals, and maybe a comparable number of punctuation marks.  So, each potential space in the writing would have a total of roughly 26 plus 10 plus, say, 8 other characters, so 44 possible characters.  Rounding up, that’s about six bits per character (26 = 64).  Rounding down would give five bits (which is only 32 possibilities), so it’s something closer to 6 bits than 5.

Assuming the ratio of characters to words in the average blog posts stays fairly consistent, that would be, for a 900 word post:  (900/174) x 940, which rounding here and there* gives about 810,000 divided by, say, 180.  This can be reduced first to 81,000 divided by 18, or 9,000 divided by 2, or 4,500 characters per post.  Checking the math on the calculator gets roughly the same amount.

So, 4,500 characters, times five and some fraction bits per character, gives us between 22,500 and 27,000 bits of information per blog post.  Let’s say 25,000 bits.

But when I look at the storage space of my average blog post, they are almost all between 17 and 20 K (which is actually as much as 160,000 bits) in size.

This mismatch shouldn’t be surprising, because while English is (like most written languages) a “redundant code”, storing a word processor document entails storing more than just the individual characters.

Returning to what we mean when we refer to the redundancy of written English, we mean that not every new character gives you as much information as is potentially available.  For instance, if one types the letter “q”, what follows will almost always** be a letter “u” in English, and so we would be quite justified, at least in this, in writing the word “quite” as “qite”.  But, of course, redundancy in any kind of code is useful for counteracting the problem of lost data in transmission, which was one of the things Claude Shannon was thinking about in founding information theory.

There are surely other ways in which the data in a given blog post is “compressed” during the process of saving, but I don’t know enough about the computer science of word processors to know the specifics of how that’s done off the top of my head.  And since, of course, I write these blog posts “off the top of my head” each morning, I’m not going to try to research that subject for now.  That would make writing my daily blog much less pleasant, and make the process quite (ha) a bit (ha ha) longer than it would otherwise be.

Now that I’ve thought about it and mentioned it, I’ll probably be on moderate alert for information regarding the process if I should happen to come across it, and if I do, I’ll be more likely to focus on it and add it to my model of reality than I would have otherwise.

And now I am rapidly approaching the 800 word mark for this post, a mark which I will no doubt pass before I have finished writing the first draft of this sentence.  And, indeed, I did.  So let’s draw this very peculiar post to its close, today.

I’m sure many of you*** are thinking something along the lines of, “Geez, I hope he goes back to just writing about depression and chronic pain and all that shit tomorrow…this post has been really boring.”  To those people, I can only apologize.  To anyone who shares my idiosyncratic interest in esoteric (but highly amateur in my case) things like information theory and whatnot, well—I hope at least you have enjoyed this.

TTFN

*It’s okay to do this since I’m not trying to be terribly precise, just to get “back of the envelope” numbers for fun, anyway.

**Not in this case, of course, since there is a quotation mark after that last “q”…and this one here, as well.  So, the “u” is not a completely redundant character, but it certainly doesn’t give anything like 5 more bits of information.

***If a fraction of my few dozen readers can really be called “many”; I’ll let myself get away with using it as at least a relative term.

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Stupidity make me angry–especially my own

Once again, I am writing this on my smartphone.  Yesterday I didn’t even bother to take the laptop computer back to the house with me.  I was pretty much fed up with everything.  Though we had a successful day at work, there were multiple cases of people not paying attention to our guidelines and rules; but whenever I would bring them up, there was (and is) always an excuse to go around them‒sound familiar to anyone?‒and I repeatedly got overridden, leaving me to wonder why I bother.

I also hit the top of my head hard on the corner of my metal filing cabinet early yesterday, while reaching down to pick up a dropped pen.  It really hurt, and it left a cut, and I had a headache and a sore neck for pretty much the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have developed a subarachnoid hemorrhage, so I have to keep moving.  It sucks.

And, of course, there’s all the idiocy that is actively occurring in America and the rest of the world.  There might be some who would characterize certain things that happen and that people do as “sick” and/or even “insane”, but I don’t like to use such terms to describe the various moronic and submoronic things humans do that are not only detrimental but cause spreading suffering to others.

First of all, it denigrates people who are actually sick/have mental illness and other related disorders.  Such people (of which I guess I am one) rarely do much harm to anyone but themselves‒though sometimes, some of us wish to do harm to certain carefully chosen other people.

But also, it dignifies the idiots.  After all, insanity is a legal term that indicates someone does not know right from wrong or lacks the capacity to control their own actions.  Now, at a deep level, it is almost certain that none of us has free will, at least not in anything but the vaguest, most hand-wavy, compatibilist sense.  But there is a real difference between someone who has OCD and cannot help but wash his or her hands until they bleed and a person who selfishly and arrogantly assumes that they have the right and the power and the competence to try to run other people’s lives but who then don’t accept responsibility for the horrific messes they make.

Stupidity can be defined as doing something in such a way that it is worse than just random action‒like trying to get to the airport by driving around one’s residential block over and over again ad infinitum*, or to try to solve a Rubik’s Cube by just spinning one side over and over (again, ad infinitum).  And this is so often the distillation of so many things that humans do, especially when they group together in significant numbers.

It reminds me of a post I saw on Threads or X or Bluesky or one of those.  The person said that people are selfish when isolated, but that such selfishness doesn’t really work, that we only survive and thrive by drawing together and supporting each other, working together, caring for each other.  This is true, as far as it goes‒humans are the most social of the social primates, and their greatest power comes from their ability to work together, to cooperate, to communicate.  This is why written language is the wellspring and lifeblood of civilization.  And yet, I am also reminded of the line from the original Men In Black, which I will only paraphrase here:  a person can be smart, but people together are stupid, reactionary, panicky, dangerous animals.

Both of these things are true, at least within certain contexts.  This probably explains at least part of the appeal of Ayn Rand’s** focus on rational self interest‒which, in a large society, is going to, in its limit, come to be the same thing as rational altruism.  But it is strange to have those seemingly at least partly contradictory facts both be true, at least in a highly simplified outline of the social nature of naked house apes***.

It is terribly frustrating.  Even the most well-intentioned people, like the person who made that point about humans being social and needing each other (or at least many of those who agree with those sentiments) will often virulently demonize those who are on the opposite side of a given political spectrum or argument, not even trying to show compassion or empathy or understanding for those who disagree with them.

Likewise, those on the “other side” who seem to wallow in self-righteousness and yearn for authoritarianism will nevertheless seemingly believe that, for instance, they follow the teachings of a very socialistic, compassion-loving rabbi from 1st century, Roman-controlled Judea.

These are some of the things that make me angry, not just the persistent headache and my other, never-ending body pains and mental divergences.  And although anger can be energizing, it is also unpleasant and, as Radiohead said, “it wears me out”.

I can endure a lot, it seems, whether out of stubbornness or willpower or just my own form of stupidity, but there’s no clear reason to keep enduring when there’s no evidence of any available relief or any joy that lasts more than a few hours at a time before leaving me alone to stew in my own, solitary, odious juices again.

I really do hate the whole universe a lot of the time, and that time proportion appears to be growing as that time goes by, like the product of some perverse Dark Energy in my own psyche.  I don’t know what to do about it in my almost entirely empty life.

I say almost entirely, because there are just enough little rays of light to keep me fooling myself that I might one day return to a satisfying, mutual daily existence with people I love, only to have those hopes draw away like a will-o-the-wisp, keeping me eager and even desperate to follow them, but leaving me lost and stranded in the marshland of my mind instead of just escaping into oblivion.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  No shit, Sherlock, what else is new?  Further clichés as thoughts warrant.

I hope you lot are in better mental states than I am, and that you each and all have a good day.

*To borrow an example, though I cannot right now recall from where.

**Do you think Ayn Rand might have been an undiagnosed autistic person?  Discuss.

***It reminds me of the “Riddle of Steel” as described in the movie Conan the Barbarian.  Early in the movie, Conan’s father tells him that you cannot rely on men or gods, but that you can trust steel.  But then, later, Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones) reveals the punchline of the riddle:  Steel is not strong, flesh (i.e., a person) is stronger.  These contradictory truths engender and represent the vortex of seeming paradox through which people must try to navigate, to find the eye of the storm, the balance point at which effective action is possible.

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Mind your vectors and terms of address

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again, because even though I find the extra weight of carrying it mildly annoying at the end of the day, at least sometimes the irritation of trying to write using my stupid smartphone is worse.

Although, since those two versions of me exist at different times, it’s hard to weigh their degrees of perceived irritation against each other.  In the morning, if I’m using my thumbs to try to type on a diminutive screen in a fashion that could be easily predicted to lead to some manner of repetitive stress injury, its all too natural for the “me” of that moment to hate the “me” of the previous evening who elected not to bring the laptop computer back with him.

But the “me” of the evening, when faced with the minor extra effort of the mini laptop, can feel very much overwhelmed and exhausted and think that the “me” of the following morning won’t find the process of writing using the smartphone particularly difficult.

The human consciousness clearly doesn’t have one, singular, constant terminal drive or goal as an imagined artificial general intelligence might.  I suppose one might think that the drive “to stay alive” would count as an ironically designated terminal goal, but that’s clearly not an accurate interpretation of the situation.

Not only are some people quite self-destructive and even actively suicidal—which you might credibly dismiss as dysfunction, not the lack of a dedicated system, though I think that would be imprecise—but there’s no good way to think that such a specific drive could evolve.  Evolution is blind to “death” as a concept or force, except as a failure, an accident, a lack, whatever you want to call it.

Before humans, as far as we can tell, no creature on Earth had a concept of “death” as the cessation of the biological processes of an individual organism.  Instead, there are proxies, such as the drive to avoid pain, and the related strong sensation of fear relating to danger and so on.

Similarly, there is no drive “to reproduce” in human (or other animal) minds.  Teens going through puberty don’t start feeling the literal desire to replicate their DNA in other bodies.  Instead, proxies for reproduction evolved, urges and drives that tended to lead to increased chances of reproduction, such as dominance hierarchy drives and displays in social primates such as humans, sexual attraction, and—of course—the pleasure of sex itself, with the reward-based drive to have it as often as feasible (with other inputs adjusting the strength of that drive and causing it to manifest differently in the two biological sexes and at different times and places).

The human brain—like probably all the other adequately complex brains on Earth—is a mélange of modules, with varying drives and processes that have evolved in parallel and sometimes independently, and also developed ways of interacting with each other.  Of course, at the root are the automatic drives that are all but undeniable—the respiratory drive, the thermoregulation drive, and so on.

There are even drives that are neurological in a broad sense, but that are so fundamental that they cannot be interdicted by the rest of the nervous system, only adjusted—I’m thinking here mainly of the heartbeat, the driver of which is in the sino-atrial* node and the Purkinje system of the heart, which is sort of a cross between muscle and nerve tissue.

The upshot is, if you ever feel that you’re “of two minds” on some particular subject, you’re probably not just speaking metaphorically, whether you know it or not.  Your final actions are produced by what I see as the final vector sum (and it can be quite small in the end or it can be huge in magnitude and surprising in direction) of all the drives or “pressures” in the brain that have any effect on decisions about behavior.  Then the action caused by the final behavior feeds back on the system**, changing the lengths and directions of some (perhaps sometimes all) of the contributing vectors, causing changes in the inputs and thus changes in the final vector sum of behavior.  Lather, rinse, repeat as needed, ad nauseam if not actually ad infinitum.

Please don’t imagine this as the sum of physical vectors in real spacetime.  The number of possible dimensions of such mental/neurological vectors is huge.  For all I know, there might even be spinors and tensors and matrices involved, but I don’t think those are necessary for my vague model.  “Simple” higher dimensional vectors probably do the trick.

What a curious set of things about which to write that was!  I had originally intended to start this post with some version of The Simpsons’ “Hi, everybody!”  “Hi, Dr. Nick!” exchanges, perhaps then noting that I could change “Dr. Nick” to “Dr. Robert” and thus reference both The Simpsons and the Beatles at the same time.

But then I might have noted that, although the Beatles song is so titled, “Dr. Robert” is not the way anyone has ever referred to me in actual practice.  It would be, honestly, a little weird for someone to refer to their physician as, for instance, “Dr. Joe” or “Dr. Judy” or whatever, certainly in our culture.

Mind you, there was that tendency for a while (it may still be prevalent) to have kids speak to adults such as teachers and daycare workers and people of that sort using their “title” and then their “given name”, such as “Miss Barbara” or “Mister Jimmy”.  I have always thought that was weird.  I mean, just imagine someone trying to address a certain prominent fictional character as “Dr. Hannibal”.

Alas, that all ended up being a discussion not worth having, except as an afterthought.  Though it’s debatable whether any discussion at all is actually worth having—including the discussion about whether any discussion is worth having.

You all can discuss that if you want; feel free to use the comments below, and to share this post to your social media platforms or what have you.  When you do discuss it, remember to define your terms ahead of time, and stick to them rigorously—i.e., the meaning of “discussion”, and of “worth”, and so on—so that you decrease your chances of getting involved in semantic games and misunderstandings and sophistry.

Whatever you choose to do, please try to have a good day.

*The “sino* in that term relates to its location in what’s called the sinus of the heart, and the “i” in it is a long “i”; it has nothing to do with China, though an identical prefix is sometimes used to mean “related to China”, but in this case with a sort of short “i” sound…or, really, a long “e” sound.

**And there are surely numerous other feedback loops all along the way affecting many, or perhaps all, of the vectors.

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The stochasticity of quantum interactions and the names of days of the week

It’s Wednesday today.  That’s a weird way to spell a day, and a weird way to spell a version of the name of the god Wotan or Odin, after whom the day is named (unless I am quite, quite mistaken).

Our days are peculiarly and seemingly haphazardly named here in the English-speaking West.  We’re not the only ones with inconsistent weekday names, but ours are certainly a strange hodgepodge.  Sunday and Monday are relatively straightforward:  they’re named for the sun and the moon.  Then, weirdly, we suddenly switch to Norse (!) mythology and name the next four days after four of the old Scandinavian deities.  Then, abruptly, we switch to a Roman god, Saturn, for Saturday.

This “names of the days of the week” thing was clearly not planned out.  It just sort of happened.  But that’s the way so many things occur in the real world—indeed, perhaps everything just sort of happens, and at multiple levels—not randomly but nevertheless stochastically and in a way that is functionally unpredictable, at least in its details.

The various quantum fields just sort of interact in ways that, at their lowest stable energy levels, give us quarks and gluons and electrons and photons and W and Z bosons and various neutrinos and a nonzero Higgs field that interacts with some (but not all) of the other fields.  The quarks and gluons just happen to form up stably into protons (and some neutrons, but neutrons are only stable within an atomic nucleus—they decay with a half-life of about ten minutes when existing freely).  And the protons happen to interact, via the electromagnetic field, with the electron field, and they stably pair up, and neutrons come into play “afterwards”, stabilizing larger atomic nuclei (though that’s not all they do).

Then, on large scales, the graviton field (if there indeed is such a thing, which is suspected but not certain) interacts with all the other fields, and where the density of stuff is slightly higher it pulls that stuff in towards itself, and where it is less, that rarefied stuff gets thinned out further as its components are pulled by neighboring stronger areas of gravity.

This process undergoes positive feedback—as stuff gets denser, its gravity gets more prominent, and that in turn tends to make the stuff get denser still.  And if there is any net angular momentum to larger collections of the stuff—and there almost always is some net angular momentum, since there’s only one way to have zero angular momentum, and there is a functionally limitless number of ways for it to be nonzero*—the stuff starts to rotate around a net common axis.

And then, of course, we get galaxies, and in those galaxies, we get stars, in which the interactions of the various quantum fields and gravity lead the protons and neutrons to get together into bigger clumps, some of which are quite stable (and the ones that aren’t stable simply don’t endure but transform into other states until they find ones that are stable).

Then stars run out of fuel, and the various field interactions and gravity produce various kinds of spectacular deaths, most of which involve scattering at least some heavier elements** out into the reaches of the galaxies.  Then we get next generations of stars, which (by the way) clump and develop angular momentum in a smaller but similar way to the galaxies.  And now, with heavier elements, we get planets, some of which are largely solid.

I think you know the broad strokes of the rest of the story.  If not, let me know.

Of course, this is a very general sketch of how stuff just came together to form the universe in which we exist, and there’s no indication that that is anything more than just small things—or esoteric things, really, such as quantum fields and their local perturbations—interacting with each other and making patterns on larger scales, much as water molecules can clump into fantastic patterns in the frost on windows or in snowflakes when they get cool enough.  Simple (well, relatively simple) rules at small scales can come together to produce surprising things at larger scales when they all interact at secondary, tertiary, quaternary and higher levels.

If you want to see how remarkable that tendency can be even in two dimensions, find a website that lets you play “John Conway’s Game of Life” and see how stable and active and interactive shapes can arise from even truly simple rules.

What was my point?  Sorry, I got distracted there for a minute.  Oh, right, I just meant to say that the things that happen and that all seem very real and important and even inevitable and fundamental are largely the products of stochastic processes interacting in ways that ultimately are far from being representable by any kind of linear equation.

It’s entirely possible and plausible that, if the rules of the quantum fields—or the specific types of quantum fields*** involved—were different, and thus interacted with each other differently, they might still accumulate into structures and functions on higher levels, and though they might produce a universe that would be all but incomprehensible to us, and in which we could not survive for an instant, they might nevertheless form structures and processes that could become what would have to be called “alive” and even “aware” and “intelligent”.

But in how many such universes would there be creatures that name the days of whatever passes for their weeks after various astronomical bodies (or whatever they have that is comparable) and random mythological figures from different places and times?

I leave it to the reader to speculate.

*There’s only so fast anything can be spinning, since no part of the spinning thing can exceed the speed of light.  Even black holes have a maximum angular velocity.  Nevertheless, both the angular velocity and the net axis of rotation can be more or less continuously variable.  If we can apply the real numbers—which ironically may not be possible in the real world—there is an uncountably infinite number of possible ways for angular momentum to be nonzero.  That makes zero really unlikely and unstable.

**Astronomers call any element but Hydrogen and Helium a “metal”, which is a very loose use of the term if you ask me.  I think many astronomers would agree, and sometimes I think I detect more than a tiny amount of embarrassment when they tell people that astronomical definition.

***Or the configurations of strings and branes if superstring/M theory turns out to be correct.

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“It’s just the kind of day to leave myself behind”

Well, it’s Tuesday, isn’t it.

Note that I ended that sentence with a period, despite the fact that it seems to be in the form of a question.  That’s because I didn’t really mean it as a question; I had no desire to imply that I wasn’t sure what day of the week it was.  I’m reasonably certain that today is Tuesday.

I’m not absolutely certain, of course, because outside the realms of self-contained systems of mathematical or logical axioms and rigorously defined and applied operations, there can be no true certainty, only higher or lower credence.  Real-world probabilities never reach zero or one.

Mind you, some things are so likely as to be practically certain, and there’s not much point in worrying about whether they are true unless and until some completely new evidence and/or argument makes itself known.  Such is my conviction that today is Tuesday*.

No, I was expressing a sort of resignation about the fact that today is Tuesday.  I would have said it in a sardonic tone had I been speaking aloud.  It’s not that Tuesday is an especially bad day of the week necessarily, notwithstanding the Beatles telling us that Tuesday afternoon is never-ending.  No, it’s just that Tuesday is still practically the beginning of the week, but I am already tired from Monday, and it’s a long way until the weekend, especially if one works on Saturday, which I am going to do, as far as I know.

That last statement has a lower credence than I give to the fact that today is Tuesday, but it’s still well above a 50% chance.

I know, I know, why am I writing this inane nonsense?

It’s just stream of consciousness.  I’m not planning it out, except to the extent that something I’ve written already makes me think of something else I want to write next.  But I have no particular chosen topic today, obviously.  Not that this is atypical.  I almost never have any plan when I start writing blog posts; I just start writing.  Sometimes I’ll just start with an inane phrase, like I did today, and see where that takes me.

Oddly enough, I think when I do have a particular topic in mind—such as in my short-lived series My Heroes Have Always Been Villains—people don’t seem to enjoy my posts as much.  Or, at least, I don’t get as many “likes” or views.  Maybe some people read and “like” them via social media or something, but if so, whatever they’re doing doesn’t reach me as feedback.  I don’t really see comments or responses that aren’t done here on my page.

Of course, as you may already know, the initial purpose for this blog—in this incarnation—was to try to promote my fiction by interacting with potential readers.  Boy was that a dud of an idea!  [No question mark ==> rhetorical, but not really a question].

More people read and have read this blog than ever read any of my books, unfortunately.  It’s rather discouraging, and it’s a large part of why I haven’t been writing fiction for a while, and the last thing I wrote, Extra Body, I just published here.

While I always write the stories I want to write and that I will enjoy (or whatever one might call the process) there really is a rapidly diminishing marginal return as one writes books that almost no one is even aware of, let alone purchases, let alone reads.  And as you know, I have no stomach for self-promotion.  Sometimes I envy narcissists, at least for an instant; then I remember that I tend to find them disgusting (though just a smidge of narcissism can be endearing in the right circumstances).

I also am not very good at interacting with people who might help promote my work, let alone at asking for that help.  I’m pretty good at the creative stuff, or at least I’m tolerably good at it.  I can write, I can draw, I can do music (playing and singing) and other similar stuff.

I’m also pretty good at science and math, and not just in a rote learning sense; I’m pretty creative there, too.  I once invented my own “number” which I call a “gleeb”, the symbol for which was a combined cursive g and b:

The nature of a gleeb is that, if you multiply it by zero, you get one (in other words, a gleeb is the “forbidden” or “undefined” result of 1/0).  That may not seem to make sense, but while I was “up the road” I even worked out some of the algebra and properties of such a number, and it turned out—to my inexpert analysis—to be logically consistent, at least.

I’m not saying it’s useful.  As far as I can tell, it’s not.  But it was a bit of mental fun and exercise, perhaps the intellectual analogue of playing hacky sack.

I’ve also occasionally thought of ideas in physics and in medicine that I thought were interesting, and which later I discovered had actually become areas of research or therapy (the therapy bit is in medicine, not in physics…as far as I know, there are no therapies in physics, despite the fact that there is such a thing as physical therapy**).

But I am not good at putting myself forward or putting myself out there or calling attention to myself.

Okay, well, I guess that’s enough meandering nonsense for the moment, though such nonsense can sometimes be fun.  Hopefully, Tuesday afternoon will not become some bizarre event horizon in which we are stuck forever.

Of course, the person going through the event horizon doesn’t experience the process as eternal; only the distant observers “see****” them slowing and slowing and coming finally, asymptotically, to a complete standstill.  The person who goes through, if they are looking backward, might see the whole history of the universe playing out before them—at least until tidal forces spaghettify them—but they will not experience time stopping.  Think about it:  how could one experience time stopping?  The passage of time is inherent in the process of experience, certainly as we know it.

I hope you have a good day.

*And even if it weren’t, I could just call it Tuesday and say that I have my own way of naming the days of the week, and it would be no more arbitrary than the one in use here in the US and elsewhere.

**This is as opposed to psychotherapy, of course, but it also can lead one to imagine such things as ethereal therapy or conceptual therapy or metaphysical therapy.  What would that last one be***?

***See, I ended that sentence with a question mark; it really was a question, though mainly a rhetorical one.

****I put that in scare quotes because as a person (or whatever) gets closer and closer to an event horizon, any light or other signal leaving them, heading outward, gets red-shifted to longer and longer wavelengths, so it becomes harder and harder actually to see them.  In the end, we cannot truly observe them stuck there forever, because the wavelength of the light leaving them approaches infinity.

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O heavy lightness, serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, of course‒thus the “traditional” opening salutation‒and here I am again, writing another in a line of hundreds of Thursday blog posts.

Have I said all that I could say, already?  Probably not.  The number of possible 800+ word strings of English writing is surely unfathomably vast.  If I were going to try to give some kind of upper boundary, we would consider that there are a few million words in the English language, and I could just try to solve for a few million to the 800th power.  That’s a huge number (104800). But most of those combinations‒all of them, effectively‒would be nonsense.

By “all of them” I mean that, if one applies the constraints of grammar, or even just of making tolerable sense to a potential reader, the number of strings of 800 coherent words is so much smaller than the number of possible strings of 800 words without care for sensibility that, if one were looking at some shape or field that represented the latter, the former would probably be too small to see, given the constraints on the resolving power of visible light.

It’s a bit like the possibilities implicit in DNA.  The human genome is on the order of a billion or so base pairs* long, if memory serves, and each “site” on the genome has 4 possible “letters”.  So, the potential number of sequences of DNA in that genome is on the order of 4 to the billionth power, which would be 2 to the 2 billionth power, which is about 10 to the 600 millionth power (10600,000,000).

That’s a huge number. Remember, a googol is merely 10100, and it is already a number that far exceeds the number of baryons in the (visible) universe (which is on the order of 1080).  And remember how exponentials work:  every time you add 1 to the exponent you multiply by the base number, in this case 10.  So, 10101 is ten times larger than 10100.

As you can see, the number of possible DNA sequences is beyond astronomical, at least unless we get into, say, the measures of entropy represented by an event horizon, as an indicator of the number of possible quantum states it could have “within”.  But distances and times and numbers of particles in the accessible universe are unnoticeably small compared to the number of possible sequences of DNA**.

However, the vast majority of those base-pair combinations would certainly not code for anything that we would consider human, or indeed any other living creature that’s ever existed on Earth.  Most are the analogue of throwing random words together to make a blog post.  They wouldn’t come close to coding for anything that would be a living creature.

Nevertheless, even ruling out all the nonsense, the number of possible viable human genomes is vast.  It may still be larger than the number of particles in the visible universe, but don’t quote me on that‒I haven’t checked those numbers.  In any case, it’s much larger than the number of humans who have ever lived, and probably larger than the number of humans who will ever live even if the species goes on to become cosmically significant.

What this all comes down to, I guess, is that I haven’t come close to writing all the possible blog posts I could write, even ruling out ones that wouldn’t make any sense and even ruling out ones that differ from others only by a word or two.  I guess this blog itself constitutes a case in point.

But boy, it can be a lot of work trying to write something new every day, and even more work trying to write something interesting.  That’s why I don’t bother with the latter criterion; I just write whatever comes out, which is usually something at least mildly interesting to me, and I figure it’ll reach kindred spirits if they happen upon it‒and if such people even exist.

Speaking of kindred spirits, I hope you all have a lovely day.  At least I hope it will be as good as it can possibly be‒which it will, since once it’s happened, it can’t have been otherwise than it was.

TTFN

*In case you don’t recall, DNA is a long chain molecule of polymerized “nitrogenous bases”, adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine.  Because each DNA base can pair up only with its complementary base (A with T, G with C) this allows for high fidelity copying, and thus reproduction.

**Now, if the universe is spatially infinite‒which it looks like it is, but may not be‒then of course the number of particles or quantum states or even planets with life would be infinite, and thus larger than any possible finite number, no matter how big you might choose.  Fun things happen when one deals with infinities.

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Crystallized thought and civilizational axle grease

It’s Friday, and I suspect I will be working tomorrow, and if I do, I will probably write a blog post.  Further bulletins on that subject as events warrant.

I’m really, really exhausted.  I think the events of the past few weeks are finally just catching up to me, now that I don’t literally have constant tension and discomfort from the stent, which truly made me unable to rest for more than an hour at a time, maximum.  Yesterday at work was really rough; by the end I was just lying my head back limply in my seat and kind of staring and trying to doze off‒at which I succeeded for a few minutes at a time.  But I certainly haven’t recovered.

I wish I could spend about 24 hours straight just sleeping in a comfortable bed in an air conditioned room with no interruptions.  Oh, and I would want plenty of water and other beverages to drink.

Well, my portable AC unit is supposed to arrive today, and if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even have the energy to set it up and turn it on this evening.  I hope I will.  It would be a shame not to be able to take advantage of it.

I really hope it works well.

As for everything else, well, I have no idea, really.  I certainly feel no urge or drive to create anything, unless you count this blog as a creative endeavor, which I’m not sure I do.  Maybe if I get the AC in and running I’ll have more creative energy.  I don’t know.  I’m somewhat pessimistic, but that’s more down to my character than to a balanced assessment of the situation.

I still have my overarching plan about either losing weight and diminishing my chronic pain or else…well, you know, but I haven’t made much headway yet on that, because a number of events have gotten in the way.  These last few weeks even my upper body workout in the mornings has been erratic; it’s hard to keep my discipline up.

I wish there were some patron out there, perhaps some manner of “sugar mama” or whatever it would be, to sponsor me in doing some creative endeavors.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want such a person to have the rights to any intellectual property I produced, so it’s not as though I would just welcome and work for anyone.

It would be nice to have some help, though, on a regular basis.  But, of course, I know I have no right to expect that nor do I in any possible sense deserve it.

Of course, the very concept of “deserving” things is one that I find vague and nebulous, and often without substance.  I can understand it in a situation in which one has been part of a contract and one has fulfilled one’s agreed upon end of the bargain‒then such a person deserves the payment (or whatever) to which they agreed in the contract.

Other than that, though, I think the term is usually vacuous, at least the way most people seem to use it, as in, “You deserve someone who treats you like a queen/king” or some such sentiments.  Really?  Someone deserves that?  How so?  What service did that person perform for the world or what attributes do they embody that make them deserve such treatment?

I don’t think most people actually really ever think about it when they say such things.  And yet, they fill themselves and each other with these concepts of entitlement without basis, and this leads them to a cycle of letting the “perfect”* be the enemy of the good.  It’s a kind of narcissism, in a way, and as usually seems to be the case (to an outside observer such as I am) such attributes almost always bring misery to the person who embodies them, and often to those around them.

I do wish people would be more careful with their words‒even in private, impromptu interactions to some degree.  Language is crystallized thought, and sloppy language doesn’t merely reflect sloppy thought; it engenders it.

But, of course, while language, especially written language, is the lifeblood of civilization, courtesy is the lubricant**, without which the machinery of civilization grinds itself down and rapidly ceases to function well, if at all.  Thus, it’s worth applying the principle of charity to other people when interacting, rather than trying to pounce on any potential cause of offense, or to “pwn” them (as they used to say) or to “destroy” them in a discussion.

Besides being hyperbolic (and inaccurate in other ways) such notions surely miss the whole point of a discussion (or, Batman forbid, a debate) which should be about interacting with others’ thoughts and trying to improve one’s own (and mutual) understanding and to try to achieve an ever-improving understanding of the reality in which everyone exists.

It’s frustrating.  But so are many other things, I suppose.  I wish there were more rewards to compensate for the frustrations, but it’s been a long time since that has been anything approaching a balance for me.

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, and a good weekend, whether or not I write a post tomorrow.

*Another word that is almost always vacuous.

**I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, but I’m doing it with full and deliberate awareness, so I hope it’s not too grating.