Nature

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Cats, raccoons, spiders, furniture…sometimes even humans

It’s Friday, now, and I’m writing what should be the final blog post of the week, since exclusis improvisis I will not be working tomorrow—which usually means that I will not write a blog post tomorrow.

I am writing this post today on my lapcom, again.  That’s because I am still at the office from yesterday; I did not go back to the house last night.  I had called my sister on the phone after work, in the office, and by the time we were done, it was quite late.  It was too late for the train, so I would have needed to get an Uber back to the house, which would have been expensive, and by the time I got there, I would basically just need to go to bed and then get up and come back in.

What a waste that would have been.

Of course, the neighborhood (nayborhood?) cats will have had another evening and morning without food, but they are stray cats, after all.  They can handle themselves pretty well.  Actually, maybe this hiatus will discourage the stupid little family of raccoons that keeps coming in and eating the cat food after the cats have the eaten their initial amount.

They are cute, of course, bordering on adorable—the raccoons, I mean, though so are the cats—but I do not buy cat food to feed to raccoons, who can do an even better job of taking care of themselves than cats can.  They just get annoying, and although I have learned that silly string and silly foam do kind of freak them out (fire doesn’t seem to, not when it’s just seen, and I don’t want actually to burn them) it’s not enough to discourage them for long*.

I will occasionally lob a coconut (there are scores of them on the ground) in the raccoons’ general direction, which does freak them out some, but it also freaks out some of the cats.  I have even more harmful means at my disposal, but I would have a hard time using them.

It can be quite inconvenient and irritating sometimes, how much I empathize with things like raccoons and opossums (and stray cats) and even with lizards and spiders**, and even with ants and stuffed animals and—occasionally–furniture.  Heck, when I’m in the right state of mind, I can even empathize with palmetto bugs.

But it’s not a deliberate kind of empathy.  It’s certainly not done consciously.  It’s not the kind of empathy termed “cognitive empathy”, in which one can sort of tease apart and understand how the emotions are unfolding in another person’s mind, without necessarily sharing those emotions***.  I can do that if and when I put my mind to it, at least to a point.  But my issue is the sort of automatic, emotional empathy, in which it’s almost possible to feel what the other being (or thing) is experiencing, or at least to imagine that one does.

I experience that with humans, too, at least to some degree.  Actually, it’s often rather overwhelming, especially if there are significant numbers of people around.  I don’t think that it’s a literal sense, like sight or hearing or smell or touch, but those mirror neurons—or whatever other functions in the brain turn other creature’s reactions into literal feelings in one’s own mind—seem to want to try to take in as much of everyone’s percussive passions as they can, and that process cannot readily be shut off, as it wasn’t consciously shut on.

This can be, and has been, useful, such as when dealing with patients one on one as a doctor.  One person at a time is just about manageable, though even that can wear you down when it’s many “one persons” throughout every day.

But still, it can be done.  However, being around many people, especially ones who are not necessarily regulating themselves much, can be damnably irritating and overwhelming.  It’s a bit like being at a rock concert in which every individual crowd member’s favorite band is playing at the same time, all different songs and genres and everything, and the members of the crowd are each and all trying to sing along with their band.

It’s not a pleasant situation, as I’m sure you would agree.  That’s at least part of why being in social gatherings can be quite daunting.  It probably also at least partly explains why things like arcades, which are certainly noisier than most parties, are not nearly as overwhelming as even a small party can be.  Plus, video games can be much more entertaining than trying to talk to various people you’ve only just met, who may or may not have any shared interests with you.

A key indicator or barometer or highlighter of the comparison between the two is the fact that, if you drink alcohol in an arcade, your performance on the games is likely to suffer.  On the other hand, alcohol is all but an absolute necessity at a party just filled with milling humans.

Why do humans insist upon repeatedly arranging activities for which even they, the arrangers, need pharmacotherapy (e.g., ethanol) to enjoy?  I would ask one, but I am almost sure that none of them would have a well thought out answer to the question.

Okay, well, don’t mind me, I’m in an atypical state, for me (which doesn’t necessarily mean that one has become more “typical”, as I discussed yesterday, using the entropy diagram).  I’ll draw this post to a close now, and I wish you all a very good weekend.  I will next return here neither before nor after Monday…

…yet again, exclusis improvisis.

*I’ve read somewhere recently that raccoons are starting to show signs of early pre-domestication toward humans, much as dogs probably did way back in the day.  Cats, on the other hand, mostly domesticated people.

**Okay, I could leave them out of this list.  I like spiders quite a bit, and I more or less always have, so I don’t feel bad about empathizing with them.  In fact, as I’ve said here before (I think) when I accidentally wreck a spider web because it’s too effective at not being seen, I tend to feel really bad.  That is, after all, their extended phenotype, as Richard Dawkins coined the term, and they put a lot of effort and literal bodily resources into it.

***Psychopaths are, apparently, often quite good at this.

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A belated first post of the work week

I hope nobody was worried about me yesterday when I didn’t write a post.  I was out sick.  I had some kind of gastrointestinal bug, or perhaps some type of bad reaction to something I ate.  I’m not sure.  Anyway, it was unpleasant, as such things tend to be.

I often find myself wishing, in such situations and even less severe ones, that I didn’t ever have to eat at all.  Of course, if you see me, you’d know that I’ve tended to err in the other direction, but I would very much like to lose my sense of hunger, or perhaps more my sense of pleasure in food.  My current life is almost completely devoid of any real, reliable joy of any kind, and I am chronically depressed, so I unfortunately tend to go for biologically reliable sources of “feeling good”, however minor and evanescent, such as eating.

I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t have any kind of drug problem, since I’d probably be stuck going to that for my diminishing returns of transient joy.  I suspect many people with drug problems do just that.  Actually, I often kind of wish that I did have a drug problem, because then I would be (a) more likely to be thinner than I am, and (b) might die of a drug overdose, which is comparatively faster and less painful than dying of a food “overdose” over time.  It’s a moot point, though.  I’m not the sort of person who could really manage an illicit drug habit; I would find the whole process stressful and irritating.  I didn’t even like taking opioids legally when I was given them for my chronic pain.

Alcohol, which is legal, has many drawbacks, not the least being that beyond a certain point, it doesn’t really do anything for me and exacerbates my chronic pain.  It can be useful as a social lubricant, and in that it can be very useful, considering how socially awkward I am.

But alcohol doesn’t make me feel much euphoria past the initial relaxation stage, which is definitely pretty good for short times.  However, one trouble with alcohol is that it impairs one’s judgement—it certainly impairs mine—and so when one feels a little relief from anxiety and a consequent bit of euphoria because of it, one falls into the cliché, “if some is good, more must be better, and a lot more must be great”.  Most of you probably have direct or indirect experience with how that line of “thinking” turns out.

Now, I will say that I took one medication a few times, in medical circumstances, that could probably become a problem for me, and that was diazepam (brand name Valium®).  I’ve written before about how, when I was given diazepam, even though the circumstances were far from pleasant ones—wisdom teeth extraction in one case, and a heart catheterization in the other—I felt tremendous.  I felt normal, if you understand the sense of what I mean by that—and even if you don’t.

Anyway, that’s a prescription med, and I’m not really interested in taking it.  I know too much about how rapidly diminishing are its returns, and about its long-term effects on cognition, and worst, about how tolerance to it tends to lead to increased anxiety between doses, so it pretty quickly becomes counter-productive.

This leads me to wonder if it might be somewhat useful to people with chronic anxiety to take medications or similar that increase their anxiety, and to stay on them for a while, then to stop.  It wouldn’t address any underlying issues, of course, but not all such chronic states are due to Freudian-ish causes in experience and upbringing.  Some of them are genetic or at least congenital.  Sometimes, a person’s biology can just give them an anxiety set-point that is significantly higher than average.  Some other people, of course, will have the opposite.  And most people will be somewhere in between.

This is the nature of traits in populations of sexually reproducing species (e.g., humans):  there is variability in nearly every attribute, as genes get shuffled and reshuffled, paired up with different alleles and other genes in the genome, reacting in highly complex ways, and providing the broad variation on which natural selection does its ruthless work.

This is what is largely behind the famous phenomenon of the moths that changed coloration in industrial age England compared to their pre-industrial age colors, matching the new soot-encrusted bark of trees.  They did not develop the trait or attribute de novo; there was always a variability in that physical aspect (color).  But in different circumstances, different colors were more likely to survive to reproductive age, and so they began to predominate when a persistent change in circumstances happened.

The same sort of thing surely has happened with humans many times, over and over, as civilization changes, and our own effects feed back on our natures and alter their own causes.  If people could step out of their little, provincial world-views, this would likely be obvious to all but the most benighted of souls.

How did I get to this subject/topic*?  I don’t know, though maybe it will become obvious while I’m editing.  Anyway, I’m going to draw this to a close just with the revelation that I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  Was there any difference between its style and that of one written on the smartphone, now that I reveal the fact to you only at the end?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I truly hope you have a good day.  And I really wish I could actually hang out with some of you or with someone today with whom I could have a comfortable interaction.  But I am not good company anymore, if I ever was.  So I will probably, and appropriately, continue to be alone, and will die alone, and hopefully fairly soon.

*I never really have been able to discern a consistent and sensible difference between these two terms, but people often use them as if they are two different things, rather than simply synonyms.  Possibly that’s just a function of pretentiousness.  But maybe I’m just ignorant.

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A plague on both your houses…especially the one by the beach in Florida.

Look, I paraphrased Mercutio in two of my headlines over the last three days!

I’m writing this blog post‒wait for it!‒on the desktop computer at the office, because I slept at the office last night.  I had stayed after work to do a Discord meetup with my youngest to watch some Doctor Who.  We watched the first two of the “David Tennant specials”.  Those of you who are fans of Doctor Who will recognize that one of the episodes we watched was The Waters of Mars, which is among the best episodes of the show.

Anyway, after that, it was late enough that it made no sense to go all the way back to the house, since I was working in the morning (now today) and would just have to come right back.  The cats will be fine for 24 hours, and honestly, I feel rather pleased that the raccoons will not be able to come in and steal the “leftover” cat food.

Do raccoons deserve to eat any less than cats do?  Of course not.  But I don’t buy food to feed raccoons, I buy it to feed cats.  I wish I could take a cat in as a pet, but my allergies in general are already a pain in the ass‒well, more a pain in the head and chest, but that’s not the idiom‒just from living in Florida, where there is so much airborne life that if you stand still for too long, things will start to grow on you.

And I don’t figuratively mean by that that you’ll begin to become accustomed to them and might begin to like them.  I literally mean that you’ll begin to develop moss and algae and fungi and possibly even a lichen or two on your skin*.

If there ever is a cordyceps-style fungus that takes over human nervous systems the way some species hijack the nervous systems of various insects and other arthropods, it will probably start in someplace like south Florida.  Actually, maybe there already is such a fungus, but it’s not some rapidly growing, zombie-creating thing like in The Last of Us (or so I’m told).  Maybe it just makes people weird, particularly at the level of government.

That would make more sense than a fungus that makes people want to go around and, I don’t know, eat other people or try to infect them or something‒I haven’t played the game or seen the show or whatever, so I don’t know for sure what happens‒because fungi grow slowly.  Even ants can recognize the signs of an infected member of the colony and work aggressively to drive it out.  That doesn’t stop spores from spreading from the fruiting body that eventually grows out of the poor critter after it dies, and the spores get into the wind and go on.  But it does protect the ants locally.

Humans are rather cleverer about such things even than ants, believe it or not.  If there were a fungus that caused bizarre and violent changes in humans, and if it were significantly contagious, people would pretty quickly recognize the signs, once they saw what was happening.  Depending on how possible it was to cure, I think humans might well do more than just ostracize someone, at least if the disease was severely virulent, contagious, and madness-inducing.  They might just kill people who had the fungus and burn their bodies under high heat, or some similar process that prevents reproduction of the next round of spores.

The most successful pathogens among humans are ones that are not too dangerous (most of the time), not too obvious, and not too debilitating.  With the advent of any new pathogen, such as a new virus, the most rapidly or certainly lethal strains usually die out, or are selected out, relatively quickly, because if you’re a virus (for instance), you “want” your host to spread you before it dies, ideally for as long as possible, and they can’t tend to do that if they’re very sick or dead.

With a new disease, the tendency is for the most susceptible people and the most lethal pathogens to be selected out‒by each other, really‒early in the timeline of the spread.  That may be part of why the so-called Spanish Flu was so lethal in the early 20th century, killing tens of millions of people…and then became less dreadful over time, so now it’s just one of the strains of influenza that kills only (!) tens of thousands of people a year (in the US).

Maybe there’s a CNS pathogen that makes people get weirder over time and want to go south into subtropical, swampy, sunny and humid habitats, because‒I don’t know‒that’s where it needs to complete its lifecycle (or Peloton or whatever it uses for exercise, ha ha).  As Spock said, it would explain a great many things.

There’s so much I could go into about misunderstandings and misleading oversimplifications about pathogens and epidemiology to which even otherwise quite intelligent people fall prey (and then, alas, spread to others).  I could also discuss how various “ideologies” spread within and between human minds very much like mental viruses‒not exactly like, for instance, chronic hepatitides and HIV and HTLV and so on, but not all that different, either‒but there’s so much that could be said and, like the backrooms, I could just go on and on and on…

Even just sticking with more ordinarily biological pathogens, there’s so much misunderstanding out there; I have sympathy for some of it, but not for a lot of it.  But this is already a longish post.

I guess I will close with a minor public service statement:  Yersinia pestis‒the coccobacillus that causes “plague”, and about which there was some talk in the news after a woman in Russia in a plague research facility apparently died of an “unspecified pneumonia”‒has never been gone.  It’s not like smallpox.  It’s in the environment, it occasionally still infects people, and even more occasionally kills people‒probably fewer worldwide annually than the average flu deaths in the US, so, far from zero, but not exactly a major global public health crisis.

But plague, being a bacterial illness, is quite treatable by antibiotics!  And because it’s not everywhere all over the shop all the time, it doesn’t seem to be as prone to develop antibiotic resistance as quickly as the more common pathogens tend to do.

Certainly, if you start to develop bubos, you should get to the doctor/hospital, but it is not a death sentence.  You should pay more attention to newer viruses than to bacteria and fungi that have been around for a long time, and pay attention to older viruses (e.g., measles) that had been controlled by vaccines but for which that control is attenuating because people who don’t know their subject nevertheless feel free to pontificate about it and even to give advice to others.

You should probably stay away from Florida.

*This is an exaggeration to make a (slightly humorous?) point.

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‘Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a blog-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

Well, hello and good morning to you, too.  It’s Thursday, and so I have used a version of my “traditional” Thursday blog post opening, and I will use a traditional Thursday ending.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m glad that at least some people liked my rather atypical* blog post yesterday, in which I basically just described what I had played (and sung) the morning before.  Somewhat ironically, I did not play, nor did I sing, yesterday morning, and I don’t expect that I will do so today.  This is mainly, or at least pivotally, due to my chronic pain.

I don’t tend to talk that much about my chronic pain anymore, or at least not as often as I think I used to talk about it.  I don’t know, maybe I talk about it roughly just as much as I have all along, at least in the time since this stopped being a Thursday-only blog.  Still, it feels to me that I’ve been discussing it less, because I fear it’s not only boring for people but also depressing, and I am depressing enough without talking about pain.

But my chronic pain has not diminished, though it is variable from day to day and moment to moment.  There are times when I feel that something I’m doing is making it improve, but it usually ends up just to have been a normal part of whatever complicated cycle the pain intensity and character undergoes.

There are cyclical and periodic phenomena at nearly all levels of the cosmos, it seems.  Biological processes, which often involve thermostat-style feedback controls, are far from being an exception.  So, chronic pain goes up and down‒in a complex pattern that has differing periods and amplitudes overlapping** each other‒in ways that can be particularly misleading if you’re also trying to reduce it by various means.  Also, the things you try, even if they don’t truly work, can nevertheless affect the periods and amplitudes of one’s pain cycles.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’ve been having a lot of pain over the last several days‒more than average, though I am almost never not in pain.  I have also been eating an unusual number of legal CBD/delta 9 gummies.  They don’t seem to make the pain go away, but they change how I respond to it a bit, decreasing the amount of spasm and disordered walking and posture and tension and grumpiness that I experience, at least a bit.

But they make me groggy, if that’s the right word.  They also make my time sense rather weird, though that’s rather interesting, since it calls attention to the subjectivity of the experience of time*** which I discussed the other day, I think.  They also engender some minor perceptual illusions, especially auditory ones, possibly because of my poor hearing, but that is also rather interesting.

So, they make my pain experience a bit less intense and maddening, and they make it feel less as though one or the other side of my body is being forcibly twisted and contorted as I move, which is often how this shit feels.  At least, they make that sensation less stressful, and they seem to decrease some of the muscle spasms.

They also make my mathematical figuring and other mental processes feel less reliable.  I already have a seemingly deficient sense of being right‒for instance, no matter how often my mental figuring of sales amounts and so on is shown to be correct, I never for a moment feel secure enough about it not to check a few times using the computer.

Even then, I feel somewhat worried and uncomfortable, but sooner or later, I have just to go on to the next thing, because I will never be able to convince myself that I am correct beyond even a reasonable doubt, let alone to mathematical certainty.  It’s like the classic OCD thing where one has to keep going back to the house to check that one hasn’t left the stove on even though one empirically knows they have, or things along those lines.

To be clear, the gummies don’t appear to affect the quality of my mental work‒as far as I can tell, I can do mental figuring and other, similar processes as quickly and as accurately with it as without it.  But it makes me feel less sure, if anything, than without it, though I guess it also makes me slightly less anxious about being wrong.

It also takes away some of my mental focus, and also generally makes me feel a bit less motivated.  Perhaps, if I were able fully to embrace that lack of motivation, I might eventually come out the other side of the phenomenon and have a new, purer kind of motivation, one not born of constant tension and anxiety (and even some paranoia).  But I don’t know how to accomplish that, and even if I did, my credence in the possibility of it working is not nearly high enough to make me willing to try it.

Anyway, so, these are some of my thoughts on why I didn’t play or sing yesterday, and why I almost certainly won’t play or sing today.  It’s also part of why I don’t write fiction or draw or paint, and also part of why I don’t finish teaching myself professional level general relativity and quantum mechanics.  Yes, my interests tend to go all over the place and get in each other’s way even when I am at my best.  But even I know that I could accomplish so much more, so many more interesting things, if I were not in significant pain every fucking day.

So, yeah.  I’m out of it more than usual, which I don’t like, since mental acuity is my primary strength, and the thing I like most about myself.  That may not be a high bar to clear, but still, it’s what I have.  And I’m enervated and discouraged, and I’m tired of bothering to do anything, but I can’t seem to convince myself that, no, the stove is not still on, it doesn’t need to keep being checked.

What a pain.

TTFN

*I’m not sure if there really is a typical blog post type for me, so maybe “atypical” isn’t a very useful adjective here.

**Fourier (I think he was the one) famously showed how any kind of waveform can be produced by the superposition of sine waves of various periods and amplitudes, and this insight has tremendous impact on the nature of quantum mechanics and its particular types of superpositions.  It’s also the deeper explanation of the Uncertainty Principle.

***This has no effect on actual time itself, of course, at least based on all the best information we have about such things.  It’s just a perfectly understandable product of the nature of a biological computer’s (multiple) means of keeping track of time and reporting on that process to the rest of that biological computer (i.e., the brain).  It’s simply not true that experience is reality.  One’s experience is part of reality, of course, and need not be treated dismissively, but while toilets are necessary in any office skyscraper, it would be absurd to say “toilets are skyscrapers”.  Unless, of course, one built a toilet 50 stories tall.  Even then, that’s just one edifice.  So one could say, “that toilet is a skyscraper” legitimately, but that doesn’t make it any more sensible to speak categorically about toilets being skyscrapers.

This is not about buildings and plumbing.

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

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

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

Still, he was a brilliant child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wouldst thou blog that which thou esteem’st the ornament of life?

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday.

TTFN

Ha ha.  I’m just kidding.  It would be absurd for me to let you all off that easily.  Not that you don’t deserve to be let off easily; you probably do.  Whatever “deserve” means.

But it rarely matters in this world what you “deserve” or think that you deserve or have been told that you deserve.  Nature, physics, biology, the universe‒they don’t notice anything at all about what you might “deserve”.  They just do what they do, and if you don’t want to be ground into nothingness before your time, you’d better learn to surf on that chaos.

The notion of people deserving things has always been a bit strange to me.  It is nebulous and ill-considered in almost all situations.  What does it mean, for instance, for someone to deserve love?  How can you deserve something that is dependent on the judgment and emotion of another person or people?  You can’t have an innate right to another person’s esteem.

You can have a right, of sorts, to be left alone (as long as you’re not infringing other people’s rights) but not necessarily to be supported or admired or rewarded or what have you.

I suppose you can have a legal right, for instance, to health care (in principle), depending on the laws where you are.  But you can’t exactly have a moral right to it, because somebody‒a lot of people, really‒has to provide it, both the substance and the processes, the knowledge and the infrastructure.  You cannot morally own another person’s effort without a freely chosen mutual exchange for it.  Otherwise, you’re just enacting a form of slavery (which you’re only willing to do precisely because the service being provided is so important).  Think about the moral illogic there.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve come to the pretty strong suspicion that “universal” healthcare is generally very good for a society.  It helps make the life of those in that society more stable and more worth living, and I think it tends to help people be more creative and productive, ceteris paribus.  And it can be made a legal right, as I said.

But it cannot be a moral right, and it’s important for people to remember that.  Because when people start feeling truly entitled, they tend to become unreasonable, forgetting that in the real universe, everything requires energy and effort and understanding, and there is always some tradeoff somewhere.

Again, I want to reiterate, I think universal healthcare is generally a good use of resources, one that has a sort of money multiplier effect on a society, at least when administered well (which is not a low bar to clear).  But, again, it cannot be a moral right.  It has to be paid for by somebody, somewhere.  You don’t have a moral right to a particular bridge being built, say, or to cable TV and internet access, or to a luxury car…or to any car at all, really.

How could people have an innate right to a car, for instance?  What would that mean for the billions and billions of people who lived before cars ever existed?  What about air travel?

Heck, what about space travel?  In the future, space travel might become necessary for most people to be able to work, rather as cars are in some places and situations now.  Will that imply that there is and has always been a moral right to space travel?  Have we all had our rights systematically thwarted by the tyranny of linear time and causality?  Whom do we sue?

I think we should dispense with the notion of “deserving” things in general, except specific performance or products for which one has paid through mutual, freely chosen exchange with someone else.  In other words, if you made a contract and you held up your end of the bargain, it makes sense to say that you deserve for the other party to hold up their end of the bargain.

Everywhere else, the notion of deserving things tends to be subjective and self-serving, and it tends to turn people into entitled assholes who appear to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

Of course, physically, each person is the center of their own visible universe.  Congratulations, you are experiencing the phenomenon of a 3-dimensional horizon.  It happens to us all.  You are not special.

Well, you are special in some senses, of course.  You have various specific, local aspects and attributes that are not exactly duplicated anywhere within our visible universe.  This makes you unique.  Which, ironically, makes you just like everybody else.

Dash was right; saying that everybody is special is just another way of saying that no one is.  And, in fact, except from the highly parochial, anthropocentric, myopic, terrified point of view of the typical human, no one is special‒not from “outside” anyway.

Still, it’s okay to think that the ones you love are truly the most wonderful people in the universe, because‒in the universe of your mind and experience‒they are.  Unless you don’t think they are, but that’s a different sort of problem.

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with the concept of “deserving” things is that it is a powerful impediment to feelings of gratitude.  And that’s pretty pathetic, both for those around the ungrateful ones and for the ungrateful ones themselves.  If you think you’re entitled to many things, you’re likely to be miserable, because you’re unlikely to get all those things to which you feel entitled, and you’ll be prone to make the people around you miserable, too.

You don’t deserve to read my blog.  And I don’t deserve to have you read it, nor to have you like and share it (as in my song, below).  But I am grateful that you are reading, and would be pleased if you decided to spread it around.  I am lucky to have any good things at all, as are all people who have good things.

And now, for real this time:

TTFN

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“I said he’ll flip ya…flip ya for real.”

It’s Friday today, and though I am not a believer (and, more or less as I say in the meme below, I don’t want to be one, since I’m not impressed by “belief”) I will thank anyone and everyone who might be responsible for the fact that this is the end of my work week this week.  So, thank God it’s Friday, thank Cat it’s Friday, thank Frigg it’s Friday (thank Tony for his “Friggin’ Friday” comment), thank Cthulhu it’s Friday, thank Doom it’s Friday, thank Eru it’s Friday, thank Brahma it’s Friday…

I suspect that you get the idea.

Anyway, I’m very tired and need some rest.  It’s not that it’s been a particularly onerous week; it hasn’t really been.  If anything, it is I who has been more onerous than usual this week even than I usually am.  But I don’t think I’ve been much more onerous than usual.

I suppose that it’s up to those around me to say how much of a burden I’ve been, but I know their answers would be inconsistent and pretty confabulated.  This is not intended to insult them; it’s just the nature of human accounts of things that have happened to them when they are asked without having been paying attention to those things (in particular) in the first place.

Nature didn’t create a brain that keeps a running measure of its mood in relation to each individual around them, like some endless EEG plot.  What would be the use of such a function in the natural world?  Even if useful, would the use be worth the inevitable cost?  And could the drunken walk of the blind idiot god Evolution ever stumble upon such a process even if it were useful?

Well, given infinite time, it probably could, but we haven’t had infinite time to explore the space of possible biological innovations, and we probably will not have it.

Anyway, the point is, as Louis C K pointed out, it’s not up to me whether I’m being an asshole, at least not according to the impressions of others.  And I guess it’s not up to me whether others feel I am onerous or not.

Then again, it’s not up to them whether I consider myself to be a burden or not.  And I have the only front-row seats to me.  I am the one (and only) who is with me all the time*.

And consider something else:  all my meandering oddness (oddity?) that is on display here is me when I am tired, slowed down by literal decades of insufficient sleep.  Imagine how irritating I might be if I were fully rested and energetic!

Don’t make the mistake of imagining that it would necessarily make me calmer and more sedate.  I knew me back in the years when I used to get much more adequate sleep (though I have always slept less than most anyone else in my family).  I was not particularly sedate or calm then.

In closing, I’ll mention a weird thought that occurred to me when I was looking in the mirror (another daily burden) after my shower.  In principle, if one were picked up out of 3D space into 4D space, rotated in the proper way while there, then set down in 3D space again, one would be physically mirror-reversed***.

This would be a big problem, and not just because other people would be freaked out in subtle ways.  Every chiral molecule in one’s body would also be flipped from ortho to sinister, left to right (and vice versa).  That means you would need to eat similarly flipped food****, because your biological molecules only work on one version of most molecules.

Also, your DNA (which has chirality in spades) would be rotated in the other direction, so you certainly couldn’t reproduce.  But you couldn’t build new cells anyway, because many of the requisite molecules in that process are chiral.

Even your neutrinos/W and Z particles would behave differently, because this is one force/process in nature that is not parity-symmetric.  Meaning there is in a sense a handedness to the way the weak force acts.

Of course, that’s also the case with electromagnetism, come to think of it.  There is the famous “right hand rule” for how magnetic fields occur in response to changing electric fields/moving currents, and how electric fields respond to changing magnetic fields (see Maxwell’s equations).

So, heck, if you were so flipped, you might not even be able to interact with the electroweak sector of the quantum fields of our universe, and you might fall apart immediately at the subatomic level.  It would depend very much on whether such constraints are carried along with the stuff of one’s body or if they are imposed (and reimposed) by the fields in the universe around it.

I don’t even know what would happen with electric charge or hypercharge or spin or whatnot.  It almost makes me want to write Changeling in a Shadow World.  But I doubt that will happen.

With that weird stream of consciousness, I will let you go for the week.  I won’t be writing any new posts before Monday, exclusis improvisis.

*At least I’m the only one with a nervous system.  I suppose my skin and gut flora are with me all the time, but as far as I know, they don’t think in any reasonable sense.  Also, can any of them really be said to be with me always?  Their dividing/reproducing rates are very high compared to a human (or humanoid) lifetime, after all.  I guess it depends upon whether I consider a bacterium that undergoes mitosis to be two new organisms or just one increased organism that is continuous**.  Both options are reasonable and plausible, and nature doesn’t appear to care, outside the minds of humans, how such things are considered.

**This implies, in a sense, that all life on Earth could honestly be considered one organism, since there appears to have been one ultimate common ancestor to us all.  Thus, Life would really be a (so far) immortal organism.  I think that’s actually a pretty reasonable way to look at things, and it’s very much a sort of larger-scale, fractally self-similar pattern to how a human body is initiated with one cell−the “ensouled zygote” as I once mockingly made a meme about, after deciding it would be a good name for a band.

***If this is difficult to imagine, consider it in lower-dimensions.  Imagine an asymmetrical trapezoid in Abbot’s Flatland, with one of its two “legs” different than the other.  If it were picked up into three dimensions, flipped over, and then put back down, its asymmetry would now be in the other direction, and other Flatlanders might no longer even recognize it.

****This is part of why the possibility of being eaten by aliens, or of them eating us, makes little sense.  If you tried to eat food from an alien ecosystem, it would at best just go through you unabsorbed, and at worst would give you potentially fatal indigestion.  All your digestive processes are honed to work on other biological substances that occur within the ecosystem that evolved on Earth.  And this entails many lock-and-key enzymes and molecules that digest depending on chirality.  This was part of the motivation behind creating left-handed sugar and left-handed fat, which might physically behave similarly and perhaps even smell or taste somewhat the same, but would not be absorbed.  But such products almost inevitably lead to digestive troubles at best.

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This post is about 900 words long; other than that I don’t know what it’s about

It’s yet another day‒this time it’s Wednesday, the third day of the work week.  This is as expected and probably does not truly merit or at least require my pointing it out.  That’s fine, though; nearly everything that I do is without merit, let alone necessity.

Of course, merit and necessity tend to depend very much upon one’s point of view.  This is not to say nor to imply that such merit or necessity is entirely subjective and relative.  Some things have an intrinsic necessity in that, if one does not satisfy the need for them, one will suffer and/or die.

Think of food.  A person can, in principle, decide that they don’t ever want to eat again, and they may even be able to carry out that intention, but they will not be able to do so for long.  It’s not just an evolutionarily unstable strategy, it’s an individually unstable strategy.

The fact that suicide happens does not refute the drives and requirements for survival.  It just means that some organisms will be sieved from the rest of the biosphere and from the future.  Just because some buildings are destroyed in earthquakes does not mean that they should all be abandoned or that buildings are overall a bad or useless thing.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make with this.

My audio yesterday seemed to work okay.  I guess the sound quality was decent using the mic from my headphones.  That’s kind of nice.  I don’t know how often I’ll be doing that, or if people will like it or not, but I feel that there are some subjects about which it feels more natural for me simply to speak rather than to write, if only because of the discomfort in my hands.

It still uses up a lot of memory for the amount of useful data conveyed.  I certainly have no intention to do videos of me speaking any time soon.  The notion of using tons of memory to store and share images of me is worse than useless, to me and to the world.

Indeed, if I could find a mask that I could wear all the time and that would be tolerably comfortable even in Florida (and wouldn’t lead to horrible fungal rashes, like what led me to have to stop wearing watches) I would probably use it.  But people would probably think I was weird if I wore a mask all the time.  I wouldn’t want that.

That’s a joke, of course.  People think I’m weird already, and they always have.  This consistency of opinion probably points to a clear underlying common fact:  I am weird.

I want to make it clear that I don’t hate myself because I’m weird.  I’m okay with being weird.  That’s not why I hate myself.  But I am also very, very dark inside.  There’s a reason that I tend to write horror (even when I’m not writing an “official” horror story) and that I have a blog subsection called “My heroes have always been villains”*.

I just seem to have a tremendous fount of anger inside, a fierce urge to lash out and destroy, and it’s been there as long as I can clearly recall.  I don’t know why it’s there.  Probably it’s at least partly related to my ASD (not the heart one, the other one), but there may be other psychological processes behind it.

I’ve gone to therapy a lot, in several different places and times, and I don’t recall getting any insight into the whole thing.  If any of you know any real subject matter experts who are willing to give me therapy for free‒or if you’re willing to pay for it‒then by all means, let’s hear the pitch.

Or, of course, if you think you have some insight that might be revelatory or just useful for me, I suppose you should feel free to leave it in the comments.  But remember, I’ve been trying to sort through myself for a long time, and I’m pretty bright and tenacious, so obvious sorts of things are unlikely to have escaped my notice.

Then again, I’m on the inside, and that sometimes hampers the clarity of one’s vision.  If you honestly, and not just out of hubris, think that might be the case and, given that, you think you have some useful insight, by all means, have at you.  Don’t get your hopes up, though.

I could probably give that as general advice to everyone about everything, come to think of it:  Don’t get your hopes up.

Speaking thereof, I expect I’ll write posts again tomorrow and Friday and Saturday this week, exclusis improvisis.  I’m not telling you not to look forward to those by saying “don’t get your hopes up”.  On the contrary, I’m advising you against getting your hopes up that you’ll get a break from my vitriol any time soon.

Of course, you are free not to read this any time you choose to stop.  But then again, we are not the pure authors of our actions, nor of ourselves, so I know you may be compelled by forces that you find inscrutable.  I can sympathize.

Please have a good day.

*I am here parodying the old Willy Nelson song, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.  No one seems to get that reference.  It must be a less well known song than I imagined.

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“Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time…”

It is time, once again, for me to write another blog post‒though, actually, for you reading this, that time has already passed; for you, it is time to read another blog post.  That temporal disjunction is mildly interesting, and I have probably long since dwelt on it beyond the level of anyone’s but my own interest.

Still, it does illustrate some of the weird directionality of time, for while the time between when I write and when you read can be, in principle, limitless, it is always and only in one direction.  You will never read one of my blog posts so much as a single Planck time before I write it.

This is the character of causality, and its speed is the real speed limit that we narrowly think of as “the speed of light”.  It is actually the speed limit of causal influence, and that’s a fundamental part of the restrictions entailed in special relativity.

There is, though, the longstanding question of why time is not merely one-dimensional but unidirectional, since at local scales, the laws of physics don’t appear to have an inherent directionality but are time-symmetric.

Spatial dimensions don’t work that way.  You can go up or down, back or forth, left or right, however you please, with equal ease (don’t be a tease).  At least…you can do all that provided there are no strong influences nearby.

One such influence might be, for instance, a planet.  I just happen to have such a planet, right here.  It’s called Earth, and it is quite dense and so produces quite significant curvature of spacetime (time more than space, interestingly enough) in its vicinity.

This has the effect of making space asymmetric locally.

So, near a strongly gravitating object, space acquires directionality.  That directionality is actually spherical, so it’s not a simple kind of one-dimensional directionality, but in local regions it looks linearly directional.  Wherever you may be on Earth, odds are you can move any combination of left-right and forward-backward with equal ease (more or less).  But the difference between up and down is quite another matter.

That difference would be even more pronounced near a much stronger gravitational source.  If you were near the surface of a neutron star, your capacity to go any direction but down (i.e. toward the surface of the neutron star) would be more or less nonexistent.  Space would have a profound and irresistible directionality.  Things seem to become even more inevitably directional beneath the event horizon of a black hole.

And, analogously, when one is not far from a highly energetic, very low-entropy region of spacetime, like our Big Bang, time is forcibly constrained to be directional, since change can only really happen in the direction of lower entropy in such a region, as dictated by sheer mathematics, if nothing else.

I’ve written about this before, about how, in principle time could have more than one dimension, like space, but be so forcibly constrained by the very strong local effects of the Big Bang to be pseudo-linear, just as space is pseudo-planar at the surface of the Earth or a neutron star, with free movement in only two of its three dimensions.

I won’t get into it too much now; I think there are posts both here and on Iterations of Zero that address it.  I will just quickly point out that, in the distant future‒much like when one is much farther from the surface of a gravitating body‒as entropy approaches local maxima, time will lose its directionality and forward and backward will be identical.

The fact that it takes so long for that to happen may point toward the geometry of time being less than three dimensional.  Three dimensional influences fall off as the square of the distance.  So, twice as far from a source, the influence is one quarter as strong, and ten times as far away, it is one one hundredth as strong.

The directionality of time doesn’t seem to be falling off at any notable rate since the Big Bang*.  It doesn’t even seem to be falling off linearly, as would be the case for a two-dimensional process (the circumference of a circle increases linearly with the radius, whereas a sphere’s surface area increases as the square of the radius).  Based on a fairly straightforward interpretation of this, it does seem to point to time being one-dimensional.

But we don’t know the scale of the thing.  We may be, compared to the scope of any higher dimensionality of time, vanishingly close to the Big Bang, still.  We may be like tiny, tiny mites on Earth’s surface (or that of a neutron star), unable to sense or travel a significant height to be able to detect even the local curvature of the planet, let alone the drop-off in the directionality of space (i.e., gravity).

Maybe the nature of time is similar.  Maybe we are too small, moving through time too slowly, too close to its local source of directionality, to be able to discern that it has more dimensions.  Certainly, spacetime around us appears “flat” as best we can measure.  But we recognize that, at much bigger scales, it may be curved.  And time, at those scales, may have more than one dimension.

Or maybe:

Maybe if we can wait long enough, it will be obvious.  Or maybe not.

Have a good bit of time over these next 24 hours if you can, please.

*Though there is the current significant question of the nature of the “Hubble tension”.  Maybe it’s a subtle change in the strength of the directionality of time itself that leads to the seeming disparity in the Hubble “constant” when measured by CMB as opposed to by supernova data.  Hmmm.