Nature

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While the orchestra blogs fitfully the music of the spheres*

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (thus my standard “hello and good morning” salutation) and it is the 2nd day of July in 2026 AD/CE.

I don’t really expect that those reading this on the day are going to be unaware of the day and the date.  If they are unaware and yet are reading this online, then their unawareness must surely be willful or at least willing, for the day and date tend to be plastered all over most of our devices.  But in case someone reads this in the future‒even rather far into the future‒I figured I might give a bit of temporal context.

Admittedly, I don’t deal much with current affairs and politics and scandal and the like here, because I consider almost all such matters to be flashes in the pan, or stutters and sputters in the pan‒or even just flash powder that got drenched and then washed away in a dreary rain.

It’s almost all trivial, and almost all of it is so eye-rollingly repetitious, and much of the importance people attach to it is laughable.  The political concerns of a given modern human are no more important than the particular political concerns of a villager somewhere in the far-flung reaches of the Roman Empire…or the Phoenician empire, or the kingdom of Sumer or what have you.

All this local political turmoil, while not unimportant on a local level, is still vanishingly small and unnoticeably brief on any kind of even human historical scale, let alone something less anthropocentric.

Now, I want to be clear:  there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking part in local politics (local in space, local in time, etc.).  It makes sense to deal with one’s immediate concerns, as it does to try to secure one’s next meal.  That’s how you continue on to the following meal, after all.  As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “My favorite breath is whichever one gets me to the next one.”

But one should keep one’s next breath in perspective.  Your personal shortness of breath does not per se endanger the respiration of your office, your town, your region, your country, or the world.  It’s just you.

That’s okay.  It’s fair and reasonable for you to be concerned about things that affect your life directly.  But you should not expect others to be just as concerned about just the same things as those that concern you, nor should you consider it a moral failing if they are not.  If you think they ought to be concerned, then it’s incumbent upon you to use your reason‒not your emotions, they just won’t work‒to convince them.

Don’t behave like an adolescent who imagines that the world will end if they cannot see some particular show or play some particular game or attend some particular event.  Your emotions are salient and motivational only to you, at least directly, and they in and of themselves will influence only those who already care about your emotional state.

If you want to convince other, disinterested** people that something you find important should be important to them as well, merely weeping or wailing or shrieking at them is unlikely to persuade them (and will often do the opposite).  Your passion is persuasive mainly (or solely) to you.  You’re going to have to calm the eff down and explain things.

And you might fail to convince someone.  If so, the failure is on you.  Admittedly, it may not be solely on you; other people can be trapped in their own emotional cages just as you can be in yours.  You can only try.  And, if you want to be logically consistent, you should also listen to reasons other people might give for their own points of view.  You could be wrong, after all, hard though that may be to accept (especially about something about which you feel so strongly).

But there is no law of nature saying that people will definitely be persuaded even by the most rational and clear and complete arguments.  Sometimes you’re just banging your head against a brick wall.  It’s not a good state of things, but it’s just something that happens.

Of course, in the long run, nature itself will take care of those who are unreasonable and irrational‒and by “take care of”, I mean eliminating them.  Don’t get too smug about that.  To the degree that you are less than perfectly rational, you are at increased risk for nature “taking care of” you.

This is not to say that perfect rationality would protect you from every danger that might tend to “take care of you”.  Supernovas and meteors and earthquakes and the like do not respond even to your cleverest arguments.

That is to say, they don’t respond to them in the moment.  In the moment of a gigantic catastrophe, it’s too late to reason one’s way around it.  But being rational ahead of time can indeed affect how even the most calamitous disaster acts on you.  As I intimated yesterday, it’s conceivable that even the heat death of the universe (or the big crunch, etc., as the case may be) might be avoidable or at least endurable.

Maybe not.  But maybe so.  And the only way to know if it is amenable to intervention is to try to understand such things better and better all the time, to use the laws of nature to your advantage, for you cannot break or even bend those laws.  There is no lovely, tempting political corruption that can allow you to persuade the universe to waive the law of gravity just so that you don’t fall to your death after losing your grip on the edge of a cliff.  I’m sorry.

Except, I’m not really sorry.  You were under “constructive notice” of such things already‒a legal term meaning that you knew or should have known about the facts involved and so are responsible for what that knowledge entails.  Any genes that tend to make a human-sized organism less aware or less convinced about, say, the dangers associated with gravity are, ceteris paribus, less likely to persist throughout the generations than ones that give them real awareness of those dangers.

So, don’t casually walk along unstable cliff edges if you want to maximize your chances to continue living.  You may think you have “main character energy”, which sounds cool and all, but you’re only the main character of your own mind (if that).

To the universe, you are not even a paid extra.  You’re not even an offstage voice or a stage hand.  You’re at best a speck of dust somewhere on the rear-facing surface of some negligible bit of the backdrop, probably blocked by a curtain.  As Poe pointed out, the hero of the tragedy, Man, is the conqueror worm.

Which raises thoughts about that stupid social media based trend of asking, “Would you still love me if I were a worm?”

Well…maybe if you were a conqueror worm.

TTFN

*This is not a modified Shakespeare quote.  See if you can discern the source of the quote.

**Let alone uninterested.

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“The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Welcome to July of 2026 (AD or CE) everyone.  Yes, since yesterday was the last day of June, then it must follow, as the day the previous day, that today is the 1st of July (given the specifications of “our” date-assigning system).

It’s payroll day today, of course, this being Wednesday.  I’m never too enthusiastic about such days.  I am, however, pleased to have learned that we, meaning those in my office, are not working this Saturday, it being Independence Day here in the US.  And we’re not working next Saturday, either, since it is a Saturday we would have had off, anyway.

That will be three Saturdays off in a row.  What will I do if I actually accrue a bit of rest and recover a bit of physiologic reserve?  Huh?  Have you ever thought about that?  Or are you too self-centered to be always and principally concerned about what is going on with me?

I’m kidding.  Even I don’t have much interest in my day to day life…or my life overall, now that you mention it.

Wait, you didn’t mention it; I mentioned it.  Then I projected my feelings onto you, whoever you may be that is reading this.  What pathetic, but very typical of human, behavior that is.

Obviously, I have nothing in mind about which to write today, despite having already written, let’s see…228 words.  I guess that’s not all that many words so far, is it?  Then again, it’s not very few words so far, either.

Speaking of “few” words, do please try to remember the difference between “fewer” and “less”.  If the referent of the adjective is something that comes in discrete, countable units, e.g., people or marbles or books, then the word to use is “fewer”, while if it is something that is continuous, such as some form of fluid or substance, e.g., water, air, sugar, then “less” is the word to use.  If you think* that it does not matter‒that it’s fine to say, “I have less friends than I used to have”**‒then try to realize that it’s just as bizarre as saying, “I’ve been drinking fewer water lately”, or “we only have a few sugar left in the sugar bowl”.

Even the Google Docs grammar checker balks at such uses of “few”, underlining them in blue as possibly incorrect, but it doesn’t highlight the “less friends” disgrace that precedes them.  This is what happens when these programs are “taught” their grammar simply through patterns of usage on‒of all the stupid things‒the internet, rather than by learning the logic behind grammar, and why it matters for clarity of communication.

There are arbitrary and unnecessary “rules” of grammar, of course, but they are fewer*** and farther between than you might expect.

I suppose it probably doesn’t matter, really, not on any kind of large scale.  Not unless it is possible‒allowed by nature, that is‒for humans or their descendants eventually to become cosmically important, to endure for eons, to engineer the shapes of galactic clusters and so on, and perhaps even to solve the problems of the “end” of the universe.

How’s that for a huge and noble quest:  to save the universe from the heat death/big crunch/big rip?  It’s crazily ambitious, but then again, only those who attempt the “impossible” can achieve the unbelievable.  I won’t say it’s the only way to make existence worthwhile‒such judgment is in the mind of each judge, and eternity is not a requirement to make a life a worthwhile thing (though the converse is also not necessarily true).

But for anything about any life to be remembered for any serious duration, then memory itself, conscious memory, must endure.  Simply stored records are not quite enough, not if one wants to leave anything behind that’s even as significant as “trunkless legs of stone” in the desert.

The universe itself seems unlikely to be finite in any larger sense‒the laws of nature that allowed our universe to exist at all seem likely to be, at some level, ever-present and “eternal” (though time is a function within the universe as we know it, so that “eternal” quality is not merely a function of time, but also of the very stuff of which space and time, and whatever else there may be, is made).

But one wants a universe where information from the past can persist, not merely be wiped away inevitably by the whips and scorns of time and big crunches and heat deaths.  If all one seeks is some time capsule that will never be opened, well, then you’re already making that, at least if the conservation of quantum information is correct, which most physicists who work in such areas seem to think it is.

Everything you are and do leaves evidence behind of itself and of you.  But so would a narrow, laser-based optical signal detailing all your thoughts‒something like a blog, say‒that you shine out into the widest void in space you can find, such that it will never so much as encounter a possible recipient before universal expansion has rendered such potential recipients too far away ever to be reached, even in principle.  Would that be satisfying?

I don’t know.  A lot of my writing hasn’t been too far from that situation.  But I do at least have readers here, whose minds become at least a little encoded (infected?) with the memes of my thoughts on a regular basis.  I can only apologize.

*And I use the word “think” here quite wrongly.

**No one should be surprised by your dearth of friends.

***See how weird it would be to think “they are less and farther between”?

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“A distant ship smoke on the horizon”

Well, it’s here at last:  the final day of June in 2026 AD/CE.  You might say it’s the hospice day for the first half of this year.  Let us try to make its passing as peaceful and comfortable as we can.  I recommend high doses of opioids.

I’m kidding.  I don’t actually recommend such a thing unless one is in severe pain that’s simply not responding to anything else, or unless all the other stuff is simply too toxic.

That’s a big part of the conundrum of opioids.  All the other types of pain medications‒aspirin, other NSAIDs, acetaminophen, lidocaine injections, steroid injections and so on‒have significant systemic toxicities, even at relatively moderate doses.  They affect the stomach, the kidneys, the liver, the local tissues, the endocrine system, etc.  Quite often, one cannot adequately control significant pain for long using them without causing actual, serious, perilous damage to some of the most essential parts of the body.

On the other hand, opioids work.  They directly hit the pain centers/processors, and they actually can relieve pain, even very severe pain.  But they don’t just relieve physical pain.

Somewhat ironically, that’s one of the big drawbacks.  Though they do not cause systemic or organ toxicity, and they will not trigger diabetes, and they will not cause you ulcers (though they may well constipate you), they can affect your behavior and even your character.  Their relief of psychical pain‒sometimes the only such relief some people have felt in a long, long time‒is like their relief of more visceral pain:  it doesn’t actually correct any underlying disorders.

Well, I suppose if the disorder is simply a neurological misfiring such as that which leads to chronic pain, you could say they do at least act on the area that is dysfunctional.  But they don’t cure it.  They almost never correct even neuropathic pain; they simply squelch the alarm for a bit.  And the successful squelching of the alarms tends to require increasing doses, and can lead to dependence and various other issues.

So, there are no very good, relatively simple corrections for significant pain.  This is probably not a surprise, if you think about it.  In some form, at least, pain is among the oldest things in nature and among the most crucial (ha ha)* functions of nervous systems‒and even things that aren’t quite nervous systems, like the internal communication systems in hydra and jellyfish or the analogous systems of plants.

Living bodies don’t readily give up on pain, and they have good reasons.  Pleasure is nice, and is useful, of course, but it’s like having a pretty picture on your wall or having nice, scented candles in your living room or what have you.  No matter how pretty your decorations, you want to have your fire alarms in good working order.  You want them sensitive enough to go off even in situations without real fires‒the classic case of burnt toast, say‒rather than take the chance that they will not to go off in the case of a real fire.  The first error causes annoyance, perhaps requiring you to wave towels at the sensors and open a lot of windows and so on.  The second error can lead to your house burning down, perhaps with you in it.

Of course, these weighted preferences are not absolute.  If one’s smoke alarms were always going off‒or even going off a significant fraction of the time‒one might very well want to wipe out the whole system, to pull all the plugs, to remove all the batteries,  to flip all the breakers to “off”.  Or, indeed, one might simply want to abandon the house entirely, if there were no way to get the alarms to shut the f*ck up.  One might even be tempted to burn the stupid place down, just as a form of petty revenge against it.

There’s a metaphor in all this, I would imagine.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to discern it.  I won’t say it’s particularly clever, but it’s not terrible, and it works pretty well.  Anyway, I’ve dealt with this subject before, many times, I’m sure.  It’s fairly tedious, but it does seem to stick in my mind for some inexplicable reason.  I don’t, however, know how to solve the associated problems.

Ah, well.  There are some things humans aren’t meant to know.

Ha ha ha ha!  Sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight “face” while writing something so very stupid.  Humans aren’t “meant” to know (or not to know) anything, anymore than any particular foodstuff “belongs” on a pizza.  People can try to learn and understand anything, even everything, and ultimately, in the long run, as far as I can tell, the more one knows and understands, the better.

If you want to do your best in a game, you would do well to learn the rules as well as you can.  Because, to quote an old car commercial, in real life there is no reset button.  You are the avatar and you are the player, and when you get blasted into nothingness by the depredations of the game’s limitless antagonists, then for the character and for the player, the game is done.  There is no respawning, there are no experience points, there is no starting again at the last save point.

Game over.

*I say “ha ha” because the word “crucial”, related to the Latin for cross (apparently evolving into its modern usage from a metaphor for arriving at a crossroads), is also related to the word “excruciating” which derives from the Latin use of torturing as if crucifying someone.  And that, of course, relates pretty clearly to the topic of pain.

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Don’t make such a phus, you Sisy

Well, it’s Saturday and, as I predicted, I am writing a blog post.  I’m writing it on my smartphone, because I felt lazy about bringing the mini lapcom along with me when I left the office yesterday.

I’m still in pain, of course, but it’s not as bad as it was Thursday, and combinations of NSAIDs and Tylenol and some cbd related medicine makes me able to tolerate it‒though the latter leaves me a bit loopy and slightly foggy.

Anyway, it’s Saturday, and I won’t be working as late today as during the week, so that’s good as far as it goes.  It’s not much good, though, because the day is pretty much still used up, especially given my commute.  One certainly cannot rest very well.  Then, of course, tomorrow is the one day in which I can get things done around the house‒or around the room, as I should say, since I live in one room with an attached bathroom.  So, Sunday is laundry day, among other things, and then it’s back to work on Monday.

What a lovely boulder that is, Mr. Sisyphus‒but what on Earth do you mean to do with it?  It’s not actually doing anyone any good, you know.  Initially, constantly rolling it up that hill made your body stronger, but you’ve long since passed the point of diminishing marginal returns and entered full-tilt into the negative returns stage, where you’re wearing yourself down.

It’s sort of like a ballistic arc:  for a bit of time it goes up nicely, but it slows and slows, then it goes around the point of zero velocity and starts going down at an ever-accelerating rate.  We all know the eventual outcome.  As Radiohead sang, gravity always wins.

Forget Atlas Shrugged.  What about Sisyphus Shrugged?  It could be a story about what happens when people give up on just rolling their daily boulders to the top of the hill only for them to roll back down again, to start everything over again.

Of course, what’s-his-name‒Camus, that’s his name‒would argue, indeed he did argue, that though Sisyphus’s actions are ultimately futile as well as futile from moment to moment, Sisyphus is okay.  I think his (translated) words are “we must imagine Sisyphus happy*”

Must we?  I don’t know, maybe.  Certainly he has a felt purpose.  He has been given some drive to push the boulder up, over and over, and it’s clearly an overwhelming drive.  I suppose acting on such an impulse can at least give one the satisfaction of being able to act on one’s drives**, which is almost certainly better than having strong drives and being unable to act on them.  See Harlan Ellison’s classic, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

Have pity indeed for a truly celibate priest, though at least he imagines he will be rewarded for his abstinence (though I’m pretty darn sure his only reward will be oblivion…which is not without its charms).  Have even more compassion for those who are truly starving.

Or, if you want the personal experience, turned up to eleven, you can try having someone waterboard you.  Cutting off one’s ability to follow the urge to breathe, even for a few seconds, is (empirically) the most terrifying and stressful situation for humans.  Trust me, if you ever want to have all other concerns vanish from your mind, just start suffocating*** for a few seconds‒true perspective fall on you like a very massive boulder indeed.

Anyway, even if Sisyphus does have this drive, this motivation, and can act on it, that doesn’t guarantee any form of happiness.  If you’ve ever known anyone with bad OCD, you know that having irresistible and pointless drives does not tend to make someone happy.  It’s not joy such people are feeling, it’s profound anxiety, which let’s face it, is just a comparatively pretty term we use to try to polish the turd, fear.

And fear is, by nature‒I almost could say by design‒unpleasant.  It’s not evolved for you to be able to ignore it.

But people with OCD don’t get any lasting satisfaction by carrying out their rituals; they just get a brief lessening of their fear.  That is undoubtedly better than non-lessening fear, or worsening fear, but that isn’t saying much.  Losing a toe is better than losing a whole foot, but you would rather avoid both if you could.

I don’t know what point I’m making; these are just my random, stochastic thoughts.  But they do seem focused on the fact that people are somehow able to keep going and doing like Sisyphus does, despite there being no evident point or benefit, and indeed, despite their existence and actions seeming like an almost comedic curse from the non-existent gods.

Some people console themselves with fairy tales about Heaven (and Hell, of course, because humans always want a “bad guy” in their stories), and maybe that’s not horrible, as long as they don’t fuck around with other peoples’ lives as part of their delusion.  As far as the afterlife stuff, well, if they’re right, and it’s a good one, then hey, that’s great for them.  Thumbs up.  And if they’re wrong, they’ll never know it, so “whatevs”.

But it would be nice if people overall could reassess the nature of our existence, now that we’re not solely constrained by the blind idiot god, Evolution.  Maybe we can develop actual, real purposes that will make people feel joyful but won’t be driven by fear‒though I suspect this will not be an “evolutionarily stable strategy”, whether for biologically evolved minds or even other kinds of minds one finds.

Humans will probably be replaced by AI, anyway, and it’s looking like it’s going to happen sooner than expected.  Even if AI ends up being entirely aligned with human interests‒a very tiny region in the space of possible or even likely AGIs‒it will still be doing the thinking, the designing, the making, the growing.  Humans, previously the cleverest things they knew, will become little more than pets in such a scenario.  They could be beloved pets, maybe‒pampered and even spoiled‒but still just pets.

Maybe some people would be okay with that.  It’s certainly not the worst possible outcome.  Most other possibilities are not nearly so nice, and we don’t even really know how to steer the future toward which kind of AGI we want because we don’t know how to know what kind of AGI we want.  We don’t even know how to make our own**** wants align with each other’s wants, and we don’t really know in detail what’s happening inside these minds we’re growing so aggressively and haphazardly (not much more than we know our own or others’ more typical minds).

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  Civilization:  it wasn’t very nice while it lasted, but it was probably better than what preceded it and what’s to come, at least for those not running on huge banks of GPUs.  But by all means, old Sisyphumans, let that boulder roll.

*I originally made the typo “we must imagine Sisyphus bappy”, which is a whole ‘nother way of thinking about Sisyphus.

**Utterly unrelated parenthetical:  I had a weird thought just while writing this sentence about whether there are any raps in a true 3 / 4 time signature, since it occurred to me that even the ones that had patterns of three syllables repeated ended up being something like three beats and a rest beat or two beats then a half note (a held double beat), but remained in 4 / 4 time.  It turns out that there are a few, but it’s said (by Google’s AI) that such a time signature is not as popular because it produces difficult songs to which to dance.  Evidently, rap fans don’t like the waltz.

***A crucial part of this is the inability to blow off CO2, since that is the primary and almost sole driver of respiration, not the absence of oxygen.  This is why, in a pure nitrogen atmosphere, people don’t even realize that they’re suffocating, or asphyxiating, or whatever the official term is.  All their CO2 is getting breathed out nicely, so they feel no panic or horror as they merely get lightheaded and lose consciousness and…well, that’s it, unless they are rescued.  It doesn’t sound all that bad, does it?

****I know, I know.  I’m speaking, just for the sake of argument, as if I were human.

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I almost forgot to put a title here again

I’m writing this blog post on my smartphone, as I did yesterday’s post, and in contrast to the posts from Monday through Wednesday.  I haven’t yet received any direct feedback on whether there’s a difference for the reader or what it might be, but the numbers seem to indicate that the phone-written posts are more popular than the lapcom-written ones.

This could, however, be mere statistical fluctuation, having no relation to whether readers find one or the other type of post better.  Quite possibly, most readers wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other without being told, even if the lives of their dearest loved ones were on the line.

Such is the difficulty with finding truly dispositive evidence in ordinary life.  But that’s not to say it can’t be done.  One just has to try very hard to be clear-headed and objective.  And I don’t mean “try to try” to be clear-headed, not just to be able to say “I tried to be clear-headed”, but actually to act with the true intent to be clear-headed.

Of course, the human senses and human brains gather a tremendous amount of information every waking moment, checking it against their hitherto-built model of reality, seeing if things meet expectations according to that model, and trying to improve that model, that map, of reality.  Mind you, there’s way more info in most places than anyone can take in.  That’s okay, for the most part.  Most of that detailed information is irrelevant to the life and reproduction of a far-flung African ape*.

Speaking of updating one’s models of reality, I just yesterday came across a video/written course on tensors (for physicists and would-be physicists).  The professor’s approach seems like it’s going to be a good one, so I’m planning on trying to go through the course.

I want to learn well about tensors (about which my understanding is not yet fully clear, though I get the gist of the basics) not just for my own curiosity‒which drives me, in principle, to want to try to understand everything in the universe‒but also because I will need skill in using them and manipulating them if I am to solve my longstanding point of curiosity in Special/General Relativity.

I have a specific question about what the theories predict would happen in specific circumstances, and I have not been able to find anyone who reliably answers it.  Really, no one has answered it at all, which is not too surprising, since it is fairly esoteric.

We’ll see whether I can commit to the bit.  I have a hard time maintaining focus on things for too long at once.  I dearly love to learn about new things and to develop new skills, especially in the sciences‒well, also in the arts‒but it seems that after (far too short) a time I get distracted by another interesting thing.  Either that or I just get mentally fatigued and need to distract myself, usually either with music or something funny.

I suppose that’s not really that unusual.  But lordy, it’s frustrating.  I wish I could actually want to do what I want to want to do.  Maybe I will be able to do so someday.  Maybe I will be able to devise or find more direct control of the regions of my brain which govern attention, focus, and drive.

Of course, we do have some somewhat direct ways to affect those brain regions.  The most widely used of these ways is caffeine.  The majority of people in the world use some form of caffeine on a regular basis.  At least, that was so the last time I looked.

Of course, there are other such tools, some more powerful in some ways than caffeine, but they come with their own sets of difficulties:  these include the amphetamines and related compounds and cocaine.  They can be useful in certain circumstances, but are difficult to use well, without significantly detrimental overall outcomes.

It would be easier if we could directly stimulate (and suppress) specific areas and processes of our brains at will.  Of course, the technology to do such things exists, more or less, in raw form.  One can stimulate the brain with implanted electrodes, or one can manipulate it more indirectly via externally applied electric and magnetic fields.

This has been done, of course, if only fairly crudely.  The technology I describe in Unanimity is (mostly) very real.  Is that what makes it scaaaary?

Probably not.

Okay, that’s enough for today, and for this week as well, since I am not working tomorrow (barring the truly very much unforeseen).  I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.  Have a good meal or two while you’re at it.  Though, possibly, that’s implicit in most concepts of good days and good weekends, come to think of it.

Oh, well.  Have good ones nevertheless.

*That refers to humans, in case it’s not clear.

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Drop and give me twenty! (The prime factors of twenty, I mean)

It’s another lapcom blog post today, for the second day in a row.  Huzzah!

That doesn’t really count as any kind of streak—though no doubt WordPress will send me an automatically-generated “You’re on a streak!” message, since that’s apparently something that encourages people to keep using the site regularly.

I guess it would be nice if I were going for some kind of personal record—if I were trying to write as many days in a row as possible, for instance—to be aware of how many I had done without having to keep track of it myself.  And, I guess, if you’re recording streaks, you have to start somewhere, and the smallest possible streak is two.  You don’t really want to count one as a streak, because then everything is a streak and it loses much of its meaning.

This is somewhat analogous to the reason that 1 is not considered a prime number, though you cannot deny (correctly, anyway) that it is divisible without reminder only by one and itself (which is also one).  But for mathematical purposes dealing with primes, this would be a rather useless add-on to the set.

It would also make deciding the number of prime factors of a number pointless, instead of being specific and fixed for each number.  As it is, without one counted as a prime, it is specific and fixed.  For instance, the prime factors of 36 are 2, 2, 3, 3.  But if 1 were considered a prime, you could have 1, 2, 2, 3, 3 or 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, with any arbitrary number of 1s, because every 1 would not change the final product of those primes.  You could have an endless string of ones if you wanted.  And so, the number of prime factors of any given number would be up for grabs, whereas right now it’s fixed.

I know, I know, it’s not terribly important in day to day life for you to think about such things.  Some people are disdainful of even learning about such things unless they have a direct impact on their lives in a clear and obvious and simpleminded way (emphasis on the “simpleminded” there).

There are people who make jokes about the fact that they learned the Pythagorean theorem and don’t use it, or that they know how to do square roots but don’t really need them, or learned the quadratic equation and haven’t used it since that class in high school (or college, maybe).

Such people perhaps think that the point of doing push-ups or bench presses or squats or lat pull-downs is to get really good at doing push-ups or bench presses or squats or lat pull-downs.  They may imagine that the reason to do toe touches is to get really good at touching your toes, and if you’re not going to try to do that, then don’t do toe-touches.  These people probably think that everyone who jogs regularly is doing it so they can get better and better at jogging.

I think you probably see my point, but I’ll make it explicitly.  The purpose for all that physical exercise is not to get good at doing calisthenics (or whatever), not for the vast majority of people.  It’s to be comes stronger, fitter, more flexible, to develop better endurance, so that you will have those capacities to bring to bear on any other task in life.  In many, many matters, being physically fit will make a person more effective.  Sometimes it can even save someone’s life.

Likewise for doing things like math.  Some people will go on to be mathematicians, of course, or to become physicists, who use mathematics regularly in their work.  But everyone can strengthen their brains (far more than they can strengthen their muscles, which have a hard ceiling on improvement).  They can improve their ability to think logically and systematically, to recognize patterns and to be able to manipulate them in their heads, by practicing and understanding mathematics.

Understanding percentages will make it immediately clear, for instance, that something cannot sensibly be reduced in price by 600%.  Understanding probabilities can help one recognize why one should not invest in the lottery (unless you’re the one running it, in which case, by all means—if it doesn’t trouble your conscience).  And one should not blindly trust the representations of, say, managers of mutual funds and the like.  Even though what they happen to tell you may be real data, omission can be just as misleading as straightforward lies.  You also need to know what they have left out.

If they tell you their fund increased in value ten days in a row, implying thereby that you should want to invest in it, you need to think about (for instance) just how many funds they have.  How many funds are they picking from and for how long?  If they have a thousand funds, assuming equal chances of gains or losses, you should expect on average for one of them to go up for ten days in a row in any ten day period.  But the next ten days, it would be a different, random one that goes up*.  Or, if you can pick any ten days out of a given year, you can probably find somewhere where there’s a ten-day streak, or nearly so, even if you only have a few funds.

I have not done the math to figure that last bit out specifically, but it directly relates to the probability that you will have a string of ten heads in a row somewhere if you flip a coin 365 times.  That goes back to basic probability.

It can serve you well to study some micro- and macroeconomics.  It can also do you good to study a bit of basic chemistry and biology; you wouldn’t even have to have any more advanced medical knowledge than high-school level to know that while injecting enough bleach will kill COVID, it will also kill you, and so will not be a much better therapy than setting yourself on fire or detonating yourself with TNT.

I made a meme about a similar idea that I sent to a friend who was all too easily persuaded by conspiracy theories about various “natural” substance being able to kill cancer but that “Big Pharma” didn’t want you to know about them.  Actual knowledge of how cancer works and how lab tests in vitro work would have protected him from such claims, but I took a slight shortcut to hammer the point home.  Here it is:

Anyway, that’s already a lot for today.  I tend to write faster with the lapcom, and so I tend to write more.  I hope it’s not too irritating.

I hope that about myself and the things I do quite often, but I’m afraid I still end up being irritating more often than not.  My apologies.  I also hope you have a good day.

*Again, all this assumes about a 50/50 chance of going up or down.  Considering how many regulatory and other factors are in place to encourage markets to go up, it’s probably skewed slightly toward gains**, and this will increase the chance of ten-day streaks of gains.

**As evidence, if one had invested in a simple index fund without any significant churning (I think that’s the term) over the last several decades, one would have made around about 10% a year.  That’s roughly twice the rate of inflation, so there is still a real, adjusted net gain.  Given compounding, if you invested $1 in, say, 1990 with that return, you would now have, let’s see…$30.91.  If you invested a million, you’d now have $30.9 million.  Higher rates of return than this will tend to involve higher risk.

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“And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word…”

Hello again.  It’s Friday now, as usually happens immediately after Thursday (but also six days before Thursday, though not the same Thursday it follows).  It’s all very reassuring, this regular, cyclical procession of the days of the week…

…isn’t it?

Well, maybe it would be if they weren’t just arbitrary day names following an arbitrary convention of numbers of days in a week, which number was mainly based on the number of “unfixed” astronomical objects visible to the naked eye:  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon.  Some of our modern English day names still refer to those objects, namely Sunday, Monday, and Saturday.  The other four, somehow, got saddled with references to Norse mythology.

I guess the Vikings really did have a significant impact on the British isles, didn’t they?

Anyway…

As I said, it’s Friday, and it’s the end of the typical, traditional work week, though I am working tomorrow, so I expect I’ll probably be writing another post.

It is interesting to think of what we mean by “tradition” and “traditional”, because not all traditions are of the same order by any means.  For instance, the “traditional” five-day work week is not really all that old.

Previously, people worked more days and longer hours per week (unless they had no need to work), but various workers’ rights movements over time got various laws passed and then new “traditions” began, and to some degree, people’s quality of life was somewhat protected.  Also, in the US, benefits like health insurance were tied to long-term employment by union contracts and sometimes by legislation.

Then, of course, we rebelled against being told that we could not work longer hours without special, extra compensation.  Why, that made our businesses less able to grind ahead and innovate and compete in global markets of various kinds (or so it was said).  We wouldn’t want that!  So, first salaried people were sort of exempted from the rules, and then that spread in various ways, as businesses and related enterprises tried to compete for more money, more resources, more power*.

Except, of course, plenty of other people and companies and countries were competing as well, so there was never any singular advantage that lasted for long; instead, like trees that evolved to grow taller and taller to compete with other trees for sunlight (while the other trees were subject to the same pressures), they raised the minimum requirement merely to stay alive, to which they were all subject, making life harder for each and every one of them, even the “winners”.

Such are natural equilibria.  Just because they become stable and persistent and “successful” doesn’t mean they are not immiserating for every organism in their structure.  And, of course, it is possible for such equilibria, as for species and for cells, to evolve to extinction.

Evolution by natural selection does not plan ahead, and it is neither benevolent nor malevolent, but it is instead entirely and completely uncaring**.

A somewhat parallel process happens in economies at various scales.  It’s not a perfect analogue, for there exists the capacity to learn from others’ practices without having to reinvent everything oneself, and one doesn’t have to wait for new generations to enact even small adjustments.  But it is still fundamentally a mindless process overall.

And, most pertinently, the mutual competition involved leads to higher and higher minimum requirements for success.  You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, of course, but even more subtly horrifying is the spike-ridden, trap-door-bearing, caustic and red hot floor.

I don’t know, maybe those metaphors don’t quite work.  I’m making these expressions up as I go along, as happens with all my blog posts.

I just wanted to remind everyone that nothing in the way the world is set up‒or, well, at least very few things‒is a necessity in anything but a highly local sense.  “Best practices” are not something inherent in nature; our financial and banking systems are not in any way equivalent to fundamental physics.  It’s all ad hoc, spontaneously self-assembled, no more inherently fundamental or necessary than is any one particular pattern of frost on a window pane.

So, don’t be fooled by the tendency to follow traditions, at least not blindly.  The oldest traditions humans have are only a few thousand years old, which is tiny compared to how long humans have existed.  And most traditions are far more recent.

Maybe your family has or had a tradition of getting together to watch The Ten Commandments every year around Passover/Easter.  But that tradition clearly cannot go back to before the movie was made, nor‒even more restrictive‒before televisions were available to most households.  That’s barely a few generations.

So, traditions are only as important as they are good and useful, though those measures depend very much on who is measuring and what the perceived use and good is from that person’s point of view.  That’s okay.  We don’t have any objective, external measures to use for such things.  They were invented by us, and for the most part, are only pertinent to us.

The universe doesn’t give the slightest f*ck.

Maybe, someday, the distant descendants of humans will gain so much knowledge and power that the universe will “notice” them.  I’m not going to hold my breath.

*The actual events involved in all this were far more involved than may seem implied by my summary, but I’m not trying to capture historical minutiae.  Rather, I’m trying to illustrate, to sketch, the general shape of the things that happened.

**This is not to be confused with saying that successful organisms are uncaring.  Caring, mutual support and protection, cooperation, love, can all be very successful survival attributes.  But that cooperation, that familial support, that maternal caring, that mutual love, as the case may be, does not exist just because it’s nice, or because it’s moral, or because it’s necessary; it exists because, for those organisms in those times and circumstances, it is successful, i.e., it tends to increase the odds of reproduction of the genes that engender that set of attributes.

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Don’t rent a phase space in a detrimental State

First off, just to get it off my chest (and in case “they” are listening) I want to say that I hate Google’s latest iteration of the symbol for Google Drive.  Before, it looked like a 2-D representation of a three way analog of a sort of Mobius strip.  Now it looks like a poor attempt to draw that previous symbol by a somewhat challenged child who doesn’t understand proportions, let alone how to produce a facsimile of a 3-D shape on a 2-D surface.

No shade on such a child for not immediately and intuitively being able to apply techniques that took centuries for adult artists to discover.  But I do willingly throw shade at the adult graphic designers‒professional artists who have the shoulders of all those previous artists on which to stand‒who produced this new version of the symbol.  It certainly doesn’t look professional.

It seems that almost every time Google updates things for apparently aesthetic reasons, it makes them a bit less good than they were before.  This brings me back, as so many things do, to a point I often make, which could really be considered a theorem when you get down to it:  while all improvement is change, most change is not improvement.

Just look at any phase space representing possible states of reality that are good or bad or neutral from your point of view, and put the “origin” at where you are now.  If you pick any random direction to move in this phase space‒perhaps flipping a coin for each axis (or dimension) and either increasing or decreasing your coordinate in that axis by one unit vector based on the outcome of the coin flip‒and do this for all axes, and repeat if necessary, the odds of you getting anywhere you actually want to go are less than 50%*.  At least, this is so by any pre-chosen measure(s) of goodness that does not deliberately and flagrantly include most of the phase space.

So, this is my exhortation to Google and all other such similar companies, or companies that may face similar perceived pressures:  don’t just change things for the sake of “being a company that doesn’t appear to accept things as being good enough as they are”, especially if your desperate changes are just cosmetic crap.  Focus your energy on things that are “objectively” in need of improvement‒processing speed, ease of use, environmental impacts and other externalities, reliability of backups, security, that kind of hardnosed, practical stuff.

The merely cosmetic crap can be relegated to, I don’t know…the Met Gala or something along those lines, where people make new-looking stuff all over the place for the (apparent) sake of just trying to do something that looks different than anything anyone else is doing.  And, of course, almost everything one sees at such places veers between hilariously awful and just hideously awful.  That’s my judgment, anyway; it’s the only judgment I have available to use.

Okay, so that’s that off my chest.

Except, of course, that it isn’t really “off my chest”.  Unfortunately, human mental states don’t behave like fluids that build up in pressure and volume and then ease when expressed, as if the pressure has been reduced by allowing one to “vent”** it.  It was an old hypothesis (or set of hypotheses) that this was the way mental states work.  It was not a stupid notion at the time, not at all, but it turns out to have been wrong empirically.

Emotions, drives, things like that, are not some kind of metaphorical fluid, but are mental states, somewhat reminiscent of the states of a computer’s RAM (but not exactly like that).  Acting on such states, given the nature of reinforcement that happens in neural pathways, in individual neurons, and in modules of neurons, is if anything likely to reinforce the state on which you are acting.  So, if you feel angry, then venting your anger, acting on it even in a limited way, will not be likely to produce any form of “catharsis”, but will instead make you more likely to get into that state again in the future.

Neural pathways behave somewhat analogously to trails (paths) through a forest or similar place:  the more such paths are used, the clearer, more well-defined, and easier to use they become.

Think about it.  If catharsis were a real thing, a real, causal process, then every time you say or otherwise express the fact that you love someone, you would feel that love less, you would feel it has been released.  But that is not the way things tend to happen (thank goodness).

In fact, expressing emotions you do not feel can make you start to feel them over time.  This is how certain forms of brainwashing and indoctrination work (and it’s probably part of why professional actors so often seem to have such turbulent emotional lives).  Religions have relied upon this fact, sometimes rather openly, for millennia:  say the prayer, enact the ritual, profess the belief, even if you don’t really believe it, and over time, you may actually start to believe.

All right, well, that’s enough from me for today.  I don’t feel very well, either physically or mentally, but I’ll try not to express those facts too much, because I don’t want to reinforce them.  On the other hand, I’m not simply  going to try to change something without having a good reason for the change.  Goodness knows I’ve tried numerous things in many ways, and they have not taken me to regions of my personal phase space that I consider worth inhabiting.

Hopefully you are doing better.

*Unless you do a post-hoc redefining of “good” to include wherever you happen to end up.  But if you do that, then any and every change could be considered good‒even a change that wipes out you and all that for which you care.  Which, honestly, you will kind of deserve, if that word means anything, because you are being willfully irrational and intellectually dishonest.

**Thus the use of that very expression, “to vent”, regarding emotions‒because people wrongly think that things work that way.

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The footnote may make the best point in this post

Well, it’s the start of another work week, and it’s also the start of another month‒June, in case you don’t know.  I wouldn’t say it’s a “work month” since there are no real non-work months.  Though in some cultures, there is (or was) at least a part of this month when people took several days off.  The time around the summer solstice was, in some cultures, a festival time.  They even suspended the counting of the months at that point, to make up for the 5 days (6 on leap years) left after 12 thirty-day months.

Actually, I don’t know for sure if any real cultures did this, but the hobbits of the Shire, in Tolkien’s world, did something like this, and I have long thought that it seemed like a nice way to go.  However, apparently taking 5 days off completely in the middle of the year‒at the beginning of summer, though it’s sometimes called midsummer‒would fall afoul of commercial pressures, much as have most holidays in general in the modern world.

There is too great a perceived disadvantage to taking any time off when one’s competitors are working (and that perception is probably not entirely illusory).  So, one business working on the holidays is liable to spawn others who wish to compete.  Those that don’t may be less likely to survive ceteris paribus.

And the implementation of the decision to work on holidays is made by people in echelons so far removed from the consequences of overwork and the rat-race-ification of daily life that they feel no pressure not to grind their employees into dust; there are (so far) always more potential employees, and the stockholders only pay attention to the last three months if that when deciding how to tell the boards of directors to act.

It’s not so much that (as many young people seem to suspect) capitalism is an inherently evil system‒it is not.  It has indeed contributed greatly to the productivity and prosperity, to the physically good, that exists in the modern world.  But it is not a perfect system.  Or rather, it is a system that is useful for what it does, but it does not encompass or elicit or create all the good things that humans might need to prosper in any thoroughgoing way.  How could one expect it to do so?

Humans are displaced and distributed hunter-gatherers from sub-Saharan Africa; the “modern world” is an epiphenomenon that has developed and grown and is continuing to develop and grow and change, after have been created‒without any prior planning nor understanding of what it is or its implications‒by humans who were, as at all times, working almost entirely under the influence of local incentives and disincentives.

No one designed the world economy, nor any local economy, nor most of the other trappings of civilization.  I almost wanted to add “any more than any ant designs an ant hill”, but the human society/economy is far less a preplanned thing than is even the most haphazard ant hill or termite mound or beehive, for those structures are guided rather specifically by instincts selected and honed over countless generations and eons.

No human society has been in any kind of equilibrium anywhere near long enough for it to have had a very strong evolutionary impact on human attributes.  Some of the pre-civilization eras of humanity endured and were consistent enough to have impacts, certainly, but nothing in culture since the dawn of agriculture has stayed the same long enough for humans to adapt to it biologically in any significant way (though there are probably some effects).

I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make here, except perhaps to remind people that we should not expect pure capitalism and/or free markets alone to be perfectly conducive to every aspect of human thriving in and of itself.  It is useful and productive, far more so when dealing with primate hunter-gatherers than is any kind of pure socialism or communism, let alone any brand of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

But there are certainly socialistic things that can be added as tweaks, if you will, to a society that is productive of goods and services thanks to capitalism, to try to counteract the tendencies of unregulated capitalism to produce inadequate and counterproductive* equilibria as well as uncompensated externalities.

We shouldn’t expect society to be simple, nor for any one notion of things to be adequate to ensure or even encourage health and well-being and flourishing in the people in the society.  This all relates to my earlier point about how all ideologies are wrong.  There are unlikely to be any simple answers that describe and ensure beneficent and productive cultures.  Like a building that exists for decades or centuries while still being used, there is going to need to be constant maintenance and updating and sometimes even rebuilding of portions that are crumbling.

It’s that or just knock the whole thing down‒but don’t expect to be able to build anything better from the wreckage.  The same forces and principles will apply to your new edifice as applied to the old one.

*They are counterproductive to the great majority of people in such cultures, at least.  There will often be individuals who do very well even while participating in the stagnation of such detrimental equilibria.  Someone who accumulates great wealth‒and, thanks to that wealth, can gain more, and so on, perhaps creating a monopoly‒might consider the system just peachy, at least for them.   But hoarded wealth does not do anything to contribute to an economy.  It’s like biological energy (calories) stored as nearly-impossible-to-mobilize fat.  Indeed, the stagnation of oligopolistic economies may have many similarities to someone who is obese and in a profound state of insulin resistance but with pathologically high insulin to compensate, so they cannot release their stored energy and feel miserable and constantly fatigued despite having plenty of calories in their bodies.

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The name IS bond…but a double-N is more stable than a double-O

Well, it’s Friday at last, and this time, I can actually be pleased, because I don’t have to work tomorrow.

I suppose I don’t have to work any day, in principle.  I don’t have to do anything, really, if you think about it, and neither do you.  As Louis CK pointed out, if you really don’t want to do something, you can always kill yourself.  You can only do that once, but you can do it.

That was stand up comedy, of course, so don’t take it too seriously.  It’s not as though self-destruction is the only option.  One could instead just destroy the people and things that are trying to make you do something.  It would be a bit more work (ironically), but it would probably be much more satisfying*.

And it might be less work than you would think.  Most things and beings are far more breakable than they appear‒the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is always on your side here.  And, to quote another joker (this time the Joker), “Everything burns.”

Actually, though, strictly speaking, if we’re thinking of chemical burning/oxidation such as what the Joker did to that very large stack of money, then it is not true that everything burns.  Actually, burning such as we have here on the surface of the Earth may be an extremely rare cosmic phenomenon.

It only happens here because there is so much free molecular oxygen‒it’s roughly 20% of the atmosphere (by molar concentration, I believe, not necessarily by mass, since oxygen is a heavier element than nitrogen‒each molecule of oxygen is about 8/7 as massive as each molecule of nitrogen).  The percentage of oxygen was even higher in the past for a while; that was the time when those “giant” insects lived.

But free molecular oxygen is not stable for the long term, not if there are other chemical elements nearby.

Nitrogen molecules are stable, of course (else it wouldn’t remain the majority of the atmosphere‒it would, at the very least, react with oxygen).  N2 is a triple-bonded gas molecule, with some of the strongest bonds in all of chemistry.  This is part of why so many explosives are made with nitrogen based compounds.  The separated nitrogen atoms within want to join together, and they do so with a tremendous snap, releasing a lot of energy in the process.

Think of ammonium nitrate:  NH4+ /  NO3–.  If that gets enough of a kick, those nitrogen atoms crash together violently.  Then, of course, the four hydrogen atoms bond with two of the oxygens, releasing more energy and making water.  The remaining oxygen atom probably bonds with whatever atom it next encounters, I would guess.  That’s what oxygen tends to do, unlike nitrogen, which likes** to bond with itself best.

And that is why chemical, oxygen-based fires may only exist on the surface of the Earth (and any other planet that might have evolved organisms whose metabolism releases oxygen as a byproduct).  Free oxygen tends to react with any of many, many other kinds of atoms, and those bonds tend to be very stable.  CO2, for instance, is highly stable, as are the various silicon oxides***.

Indeed, it apparently took eons for the cyanobacteria and archaea that photosynthesized on the early Earth to produce enough oxygen to become a significant part of the atmosphere, because first the free oxygen reacted with all sorts of exposed other elements, such as iron.  It seems that rust as a kind of iron “ore” may not be all that common in the universe either!  It’s prevalent on Earth because of the oxygen that floated around reacting with it for millions and millions of years.

So, anyway, what was I saying?  Oh, yeah:  instead of destroying yourself so you don’t have to work, you could instead destroy the place that wants to make you work.  On Earth, at least, pretty much everything that isn’t already an oxide (and so is, in a sense, ash) can burn, so the Joker’s claim is not entirely incorrect within the appropriate bailiwick.

Or, on the other hand, you could just…not go to work.  If your job is so repugnant to you, you could seek another job or another way of life, and you probably would not need to destroy or even harm anyone.

But that’s crazy talk; we’ll have no more of that!  This is a family blog‒it has a wife blog and two children blogs at home****.

I hope you have a good weekend.

*Actually, satisfaction is a term that probably doesn’t even apply to the dead, so almost everything would at least have a higher “absolute value” or “magnitude” of satisfaction than being dead would have.  The problem is when that vector of satisfaction is pointing in a negative direction‒then, in the number line sense, being dead would entail being more satisfied, or at least less unsatisfied.

**I’m being reckless by using anthropomorphic language here and elsewhere in this post.  There is no reason to suspect that nitrogen atoms actually like anything, nor do they appear to have any capacity to have preferences (panpsychism notwithstanding…and it is not withstanding as far as I can see).  I am speaking figuratively for the sake of being able to convey things concisely, but please don’t be misled by intentional-seeming language.  Perhaps it would be better to say that it “tends to” rather than “likes to”.  It would be more accurate, but I think most people don’t really feel how strong such tendencies can be.

***These are even more stable than the carbon oxides, and they tend to be solid at typical temperatures and pressures, which tips the scales away from the likelihood of silicon-based life.  Otherwise, chemically, silicon is much like carbon, in having 4 valence electrons, each taking up a “half” orbital, so in principle it could, like carbon, make huge, long, complicated molecules analogous to DNA.  But the solidity and density and lack of solubility it engenders would tend to get it the way.  Silicon is also a larger atom and the valence electrons are farther out from the nucleus, so the bonding strength between silicons is weaker, and they don’t form four-partner bonds as stably as carbon.

****To steal a joke from Dave Barry.