Nature

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We have met the cosmic horror, and…

Well, here I go again (on my own, like the song says) writing another blog post.  As for why I am doing so, well, there is surely a set of causes‒potentially tracing all the way back to the Big Bang, or at least the period just during and/or after inflation, assuming that happened, which seems more likely than not‒there may not be any good reason for it.

Oh, of course, I could come up with reasons.  I could “justify” myself.  Indeed, there is reason (har) to think that justification and persuasion to bolster one’s status and identity in a tribe against others with opposed motives may have been one of the driving forces behind the development of the human reasoning capacity.  This is apart from, and perhaps almost orthogonal to, the basic power of reasoning to understand and thus best navigate the territory of reality.

Once it got started, reasoning would have accelerated thanks to biological arms races between those competing for survival and reproduction, and then it would have turned out serendipitously to have been more broadly and powerfully useful than merely for securing status and food and mates.

Imagine if the peacock’s tail had turned out not only to be ostentatious and beautiful and sexy (to peahens, anyway) but tremendously useful and broadly powerful, especially once it reached a certain level.  Imagine if the peacock’s tail had allowed peacocks to build skyscrapers and boats and trains and planes and cars, if peacocks’ tails helped peacocks build a global civilization, quite apart from their ability to secure one’s status and acquire good mates.

That’s quite possibly more or less what happened with human brains.

Of course, like the peacock’s tail, the human brain is not without its drawbacks.  I suspect that things like depression and anxiety, and perhaps even neurodivergence, are simply potential (and statistically inevitable) outcomes for a brain that has grown powerful enough to assess the world deeply and uncover the almost Lovecraftian terror of our tiny little existence when placed against the scope and scale of the cosmos.

I say “Lovecraftian”, but even with Lovecraft, though the beings in the mythos are thoroughly inhuman and incomprehensible‒unsane, as I like to say‒they are still beings.  The true cosmic horror is surely that beings of any kind are almost nonexistent; indeed, to a very good approximation, they are nonexistent.

In some senses, this can at least be morally reassuring.  If we do go and spread out through the universe‒or even just the galaxy or even just our local family of stars‒and there are indeed no other life forms, then at least we need not worry about violating implicit rights.  Uninhabited asteroids (for instance) don’t have goals or wishes and, as far as we can tell, they cannot suffer.

Of course, we may have aesthetic concerns about such things, but aesthetics are not as urgent as ethics.  And, of course, we will still have moral/ethical concerns toward each other; that almost goes without saying.

Whether or not we will exist long enough for the ethics (or lack thereof) of changing the state of uninhabited other places in the galaxy to be pertinent is quite uncertain.  I see nothing in the laws of physics that makes it impossible, so in that sense, I am optimistic.  But I see nothing in the laws of physics, nor more specifically in human nature, that makes it certain or even likely that we will survive to spread out from our native planet to any significant degree.  And I see nothing in the laws of nature that seems to imply that, if we don’t succeed and spread through the cosmos, anyone else will do so, or indeed that anyone else even exists.

Don’t get me wrong; physics clearly and undeniably allows life to exist, and it allows (human-like) intelligence and civilization to exist.  But those are two different scales of allowance.

The molecules and principles of life as we know it, with long-chain molecules capable of carrying information and of replicating themselves, leading to “competition” and “improvement” and increasing complexity and so on, seem so straightforward as to be happening potentially (but far from certainly) in a good many places in the universe.  This is straightforward enough.  The equivalents of viruses and prokaryotes may exist in many regions.  It’s even possible that there may be such life in other places in our solar system (Europa and Enceladus being possible contenders).

But multicellular, “eukaryotic” life, seems likely to be much rarer.  Basic life started on Earth, as far as we can see, very shortly after the Earth formed and cooled enough for complex molecules to endure (nearly 4 billion years ago).  Eukaryotes, especially multicellular ones, didn’t really arrive until about 500 million years ago.  So, seven eighths into the time of life on Earth, it was basically just “bacteria” and some viruses.

Then, for significant, interpersonal, symbolic and technological intelligence to develop took another…well, basically another 500 million years.  And as far as we can tell, it’s only happened once.

That doesn’t give us a good, clear picture of how rare or common such a thing is‒one is a difficult number of experimental subjects from which to draw too many conclusions‒but it’s possible that the existence of technologically intelligent life is so rare as to occur only once per, on average, every chunk of spacetime as large as our visible universe.  It could even be rarer than that.

In an infinite cosmos, of course, even such exceedingly rare events would happen an infinite number of times (so to speak).  But that doesn’t necessarily make things less lonesome.  If you have an infinite number of decks of cards (with no jokers), all thoroughly shuffled together, there are literally just as many Aces of Spades as there are red-suited cards in total (ℵ₀, the “smallest” infinity).  Nevertheless, if you draw cards randomly, you will only get an Ace of Spades one twenty-sixth as often as you will get a red-suited card.

Similarly, there are as many whole multiples of a trillion as there are integers in general (again, ℵ₀), but if you pick a random integer, you’re still only going to pull such a multiple one out of a trillion times (on average).

So, maybe the takeaway is that the real cosmic horror may be that we are the only entities haunting the abyss, and there are no (other) mad idiot gods bubbling away at the center of celestial existence.  Maybe it’s just us.  And if our lights go out, then nobody is home.

It’s worth considering, not least because it has every chance of being true, whether literally or just practically.  For if the nearest other technological life form is in another galactic cluster, for instance, then we are, for all reasonable purposes, alone in the universe.

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A stochastic, elastic, would-be fantastic blog post

Well, here we go again.  It’s Monday, the start of another (standard) work week, though I know that many people operate on other than a Monday through Friday schedule.

For some places of employment, this makes very good sense.  For instance, hospitals must, if they are to be of use, be open basically all day and night, every day and night, and so there must be people working in them at all hours‒because illness and injury do not know anything about arbitrary human schedules.  Indeed, many injuries and illnesses are more likely to happen when people are off work.

Other places of employment, such as restaurants and the like, get most of their business during non-work hours for other people, because people don’t typically do their office work in restaurants.  There is, of course, lunchtime business (sometimes even for meetings), and many places even see breakfast time business, but people are still not usually eating there while working, at least not when they’re on the clock (independent contractors who do distant work notwithstanding).

Of course, banks are the most traditionally nine to five places of business‒thus the traditional and somewhat disparaging reference to “banker’s hours”‒but really, that has never made much sense to me.  People who work need to go to the bank when they are not at work, if they need to go in person, but banks are open (almost solely) during other people’s working hours.

It’s almost as if banks (long before things like Facebook and Twitter) weren’t actually seeing the ordinary users of their services as their customers; they were the product, or at least, they were the source of the product.

The customers’ savings were the source of the money the banks lent out to others, charging interest for the use of other people’s money, and then as often as not (or more) charging the depositors to keep and use their money as well!  What a racket (SMH).  No wonder people don’t trust bankers.

By comparison, raw capitalism‒or at least, any approximation of free market exchange‒is generous and fair.  That’s by comparison only, mind you.  After all, the basic principle, that of providing goods and/or services in exchange for money that can be used to buy other goods and services, is quite logical.

One problem with this is that advantages in business tend to be self-reinforcing, even if the initial advantage happened randomly.  This can be good in limited amounts‒for instance, a successful business that employs many people is best when stable, so people’s lives can be relatively stable.  But past a certain point, i.e., when it becomes a monopoly, or close to it, a business can become ossified, non-reactive to customers and improvements and changing situations, and this can lead to significant inefficiencies that rob everyone (except perhaps a very limited few) of much opportunity and prosperity.

So, fully unrestrained free markets don’t lead only to good things (though they are very good at creating new wealth and products and innovations).  Like most other such natural-selection-style interactions, they can be brutal and cruel and horribly inefficient at times, and can even readily evolve to extinction.

As for the concept of property ownership (i.e., real estate), that’s a deep thing for primates and many other kinds of mammals and even other kinds of vertebrates and even non-vertebrate multicellular life forms.  The tendency to claim and mark and defend territory predates humans by eons, and makes good biological sense.  Ants claim the space of their hills, and will defend their claimed space to the death, though they did not originate it.  Likewise for bees and wasps, and likewise for baboons and gorillas and chimpanzees and naked house apes.

These are not the only examples of this in nature.  Territoriality is almost ubiquitous, at least among creatures for which it can make any sense at all.  Even plants can have a sort of territoriality.

No one keeps their territory in the long run, of course.  That’s partly because someone else always wants any useful territory.  And useless territory is rarely defended, at least for long.

Usefulness, though, is in the eye (or ear or antenna/pheromone receptor or what have you) of the beholder.  Dead trees were useless for a very long time, until finally fungi evolved to be able to break the dead wood down for resources.  And then, eventually, after many millions of years, even the wood that had died and not been broken down by fungi became coal (some of it did, anyway), which became useful in a different way for those aforementioned naked house apes.

But of course, no new coal is being made, and no new coal has been made since those fungi and other organisms finally evolved the ability to break down wood.

Ah, we’re just scratching the surface now of evolutionary economics, aren’t we?  Alas, we’re coming to the end of a reasonably long and reasonably short blog post, that comparatively narrow Venn diagram overlap.  So, I’ll draw to a close for now.  Perhaps I’ll discuss these subjects further at a later date.  Perhaps I’ll veer into other subjects.  I could make predictions, but even I cannot hope to know for sure what I will write in the future.

I hope the future for all of you‒starting immediately after you read this‒has a continuing, indefinite, “goodward” trend.

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Queasy does it

Ugh, it’s Monday again.  I’m very much not ready to start another work week.  I’ve felt a bit queasy and under the weather since yesterday afternoon‒probably due to some dietary indiscretion, I don’t know‒and just felt kind of icky.  I’m not nauseated at the moment, though, just kind of wiped.

I’m sure that’s how you were hoping to begin your week of reading blog posts:  with news of my upset stomach from yesterday.  One can imagine Tom Brokaw, or perhaps even Walter Cronkite, breathlessly delivering such a bulletin, am I right?  What would the banner headline in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal say about such a story?

Probably nothing, of course.  Imagine how slow and anti-interesting a news day would have to be for major news outlets to carry stories about my minor ailments.

Not to say that the ailments of certain people don’t get covered; they do, of course.  Sometimes this is just frivolous curiosity or even prurient interest, as in the case of “celebrities”.  Sometimes it really is important, as in the case of powerful individuals who carry great responsibilities.  In those cases, people can legitimately be concerned, especially if the responsibilities carried by these individuals are things only they can do.  That’s rare in the real world, but it can happen*.

Oy, sorry about the interruption there.  I had a little sneezing fit.  Oh, wait, you all didn’t experience that interruption; only I did.  How embarrassing.  I shouldn’t have said anything.  Well, it’s too late now.

Though, of course, it isn’t too late, not for me as I write it‒I could change it if I wanted to change it.  But by the time you read this, then, yes, it will be too late for me to change it.  I mean, I could edit the post after the fact‒I have that power‒but it wouldn’t affect those who had already read it.

I could conceivably affect your memory of what it had originally said if I changed it and then persistently repeated the lie that it had never been the way I originally posted it.  But even if I got everyone in the universe to believe the lie‒getting them all to care would be a big enough undertaking‒it would not change the fact of what had originally happened.

This underscores the true, fundamental powerlessness of lies.  Words can change what people “believe” in the short term, but talk is cheap (mother fucker).  No matter how much a person believes they can fly under their own power, if they step off the top of a tall building (on Earth, in normal gravity) they will plummet.

And they may believe, all the way down, that they are actually flying and that the falling is the illusion, but once they reach the bottom, everything with which they believe anything will, if the fall was far enough, be utterly broken, perhaps even scattered across the pavement.  All that they believed or remembered will be obliterated, in a very true sense of the word.

That’s one of the good, albeit sometimes frustrating, things about reality.  Whatever it is, it is, regardless of whether anyone believes it or even knows it, regardless of whether there even exists anyone who can know it.

How did I get there from having noted that I felt sick yesterday and don’t feel great today to be starting the week?  I’m sure it’ll be clear in the editing process.  But it is a fact that I got to this point, so it happened somehow.

I don’t really know what else to discuss.  Nothing of consequence happens in my life anymore, not even from the narrow, parochial point of view of my own mind.  At this stage, my life is of more or less of zero significance to anyone, including me, so I guess it doesn’t matter what I discuss.

I’m very tired, though, and it’s just the start of the day and the week.  I hope I get to feeling better as the week goes along, though the second law of thermodynamics seems to imply that such a thing is by no means guaranteed to happen, and indeed, in the long run, will definitely not happen.  At least, the tendency for entropy to increase is as definite as anything we know.

Clearly, though, huge regions of low entropy are possible; the universe as we know it “began” in such a state.  Mind you, we wouldn’t want to be suddenly transported to such a low entropy region of spacetime, as they are not readily amenable to life, which is dependent upon local gradients in free energy and entropy.  This is why life occurred in sort of the “middle state” of the universe, the mixing state, as when one sees the many swirling forms and patterns in one’s coffee cup as one is pouring in milk or cream, before the mixing finally becomes uniform.

Also, though quite uniform and low entropy, the Big Bang was also pretty darn hot, and I’m not speaking metaphorically.

If one could open a teeny, tiny wormhole back to some region of the early universe just after the Big Bang, one could conceivably obtain functionally limitless energy**.  But that would affect the subsequent evolution of the early universe, I suspect, though perhaps it could not possibly affect the universe in such a way as to prevent itself from being instantiated.  Or, well, maybe for that reason it cannot be instantiated.

I don’t know.  I’m tired.  You can probably tell.  Anyway, I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Though no examples spring to mind.  If you can think of one, please share it in the comments below.

**Though, would that outweigh the energy required to create and maintain the wormhole?  I have a strong intuition that it would not.

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It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s not even about everyone.

It’s Friday today (as I write this, anyway‒it may be another day entirely as you read it), and I am in the process of heading to work.  I will also be working tomorrow, barring (as ever) the unforeseen.  And that doesn’t just include the foreseen unforeseen; the unforeseen unforeseen (especially that one) can also change what happens tomorrow, in ways that we do not expect, more or less by definition.

Of course, the Tao te Ching advises us to act without expectation, and I suppose that’s pretty good advice.  The universe doesn’t make special deals, such that if you do some particular thing, it will definitely turn out the way you hope.  The universe does what it has always done, and you are not the subject or the object of its action‒you are just one of the innumerable things the universe does.  It did not have to ask your permission, and it will not apologize.  It also does not make exceptions, not as far as anyone can see.

 

Since the beginning

not one unusual thing

has ever happened*.

 

You can imagine and draw a map that looks any way you want, that contains fairy lands and misty mountains and roads that are shorter in one direction than another**, but if your map doesn’t match the actual territory, it’s not going to be useful for traveling through that territory safely and successfully (by whatever reasonable criteria you might judge success).  Likewise, blank spots on the map don’t imply blank spots in the territory, and writing “here be dragons” does not somehow conjure dragons into existence (alas).

Reality is that which actually exists, whether or not anyone “believes” it or “believes in it”, whether or not anyone has been, is now, or ever will be aware of it.  Heck, if eternal inflation and a consequent inflationary multiverse following (for instance) the string landscape are true, then the vast majority of the stuff of reality will never, ever be known, because most of it‒the ever-expanding inflaton field and those bubble universes where local laws are such that complexity cannot exist, as well as those huge stretches of even our universe that precede (or follow) any existence of life‒will never be accessible to conscious experience.

That’s okay.  Man is not the measure (nor the measurer) of all things.  Man is the measure of almost nothing.  Man‒indeed, all life of which we know‒is a tiny little epiphenomenon that exists in a tiny little sphere of nonzero thickness on and around the surface of the Earth.  I’ll try to remember to do the math comparing that volume to the volume of the visible universe and put it in a footnote below.  If it’s not there, I didn’t do it***.

One sometimes hears people say‒often they seem to be trying to make excuses for themselves to believe in some deity or other‒that the universe is exquisitely tuned for life, such that it requires explanation by some “supernatural” means.

When I hear or read such things, my reaction is, “What universe are you looking at?!?”  Almost no place in the universe can be survived by life as we know it, let alone produce it.  The fraction is so close to nonexistent that it is zero to a good first approximation, and a good second approximation, and a good third, and so on.

It may seem that time could possibly give us a bit more comfort than space does, since life on Earth has existed between roughly a fourth and a third of the time since our Big Bang.  But the future of this universe gives every indication of being without end, whereas conditions for large scale matter to exist‒as far as we can tell‒will not last long (not compared to infinity, which to be fair, nothing is, not even TREE(3) or Graham’s number or any other huge but finite numbers).

By the time the last supermassive black holes finish evaporating due to Hawking radiation, which will be about a googol years, things will already have been impossible for any kind of life we would recognize for eons of eons.

Of course, it’s conceivable that life will grow to become cosmically important and able to engineer specific ways for the universe to avoid heat death (or whatever is coming), or to make new universes, or whatever.  But that’s a mightily narrow course for the future to thread.

And the time until a straightforward Poincaré recurrence of the current state of our universe makes a googol years seem unnoticeably teensy by comparison.

Anyway, the main point I’m making, if there is one, is that the universe neither promises nor owes you anything.  That doesn’t mean it’s not okay for things to be important to you.  You matter (on the scales we’ve been considering) nearly as much as the whole Andromeda galaxy.

It’s fine for you to try to make your life what you want it to be.  Why not?  There’s no one else who has any legitimate claim to it (not counting children, friends, etc., all of whom could be considered part of “what you want it to be”).  Just don’t expect other people, let alone the vastly bigger number of things that are not people, to be also trying to make your life the way you want it to be.

Okay, that’ll do, pig.  I’m tired (What else is new?).  I’ll most likely write a post tomorrow.  I hope you have a good day.

*I got this haiku from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationality: From AI to Zombies, though I am not sure if it originated with him.

**Actually, I’m not sure how you would draw that.

***I did it, though I initially made a mistake in calculating the surface area of the Earth, as you can see below if you look closely (I forgot to square pi in the denominator).  Anyway, assuming that the depth-to-height range of life on Earth is about 20 km, then the volume for life as we know it is about 1 x 10^19 cubic meters.  The volume of the visible universe on the other hand is 2.6 x 10^81 cubic meters (if my calculations are correct).  That means that the fraction of the universe that is, to our knowledge, amenable to life is 3.8 x 10^(-63), or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000038 of the volume of the universe.  By comparison, the fraction of your volume represented by one of your tens of trillions of cells is roughly 10^(-12), or .000000000001.  You lose thousands of cells every proverbial time you scratch your nose.  How much do you notice them?  How much less would the universe notice if it scratched all life off?

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Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft blogged without merit, and lost without deserving

Hello and good morning; it’s Thursday, the 9th.  By that I don’t mean, for instance, the 9th Symphony by Beethoven or the 9th rule of Fight Club.  No, it’s the 9th of April in 2026 AD/CE.

I’m not sure if any of you would have suspected anything like those first two possibilities, but just in case, I figured I would rule them out.

Now, before I forget:  if any of you use Facebook and/or Threads, and if you wouldn’t mind being associated (indirectly) with my work, would you mind sharing the links to my blog posts there from time to time?  I traditionally shared my posts on those venues after writing them, but obviously I cannot do that now.

It’s up to you, of course.  Like a badly broken barometer, there’s no pressure.

Okay, well, that ought to be out of the way for today.  But, well, it is an ongoing request, in that I request for it not just today, but any time you have the chance and feel so inclined.  I would greatly appreciate it.  If you do it, and you want to come here and let me know, by all means, do a bit of showing off.

Though I don’t know whether it could honestly, fairly be considered “showing off”, at least as things are right now.  Nevertheless, sometime in the future, I may become famous (or perhaps notorious) and it will be a mark of honor, or at least of interest, that you were one of the few dozen people who regularly followed my blog from way back when (i.e., now).

I don’t know what I might do that would lead to me being famous (or notorious), but considering some of the otherwise highly unimpressive people who are famous* (or notorious) I’d say I at least have a fair shot.

On to other matters that are randomly (or at least chaotically) bringing themselves to the front of my mind.

I saw the early express train go by the station this morning, only a short bit ago as I write this.  That train doesn’t stop at my station, but instead zooms by at nearly full speed.  It’s rather unusual to be so close to a fast moving train, and it really makes you feel how apparently tenuous the power of the train tracks is.  It really, really feels as though the train is not truly secure in its movement, but could instead slide off at any second, very easily, and cause a catastrophe.

Our intuitive feelings about such things are hard to ignore‒I half brace myself for a derailment almost every time such trains pass.  But the empirical, all but irrefutably powerful, fact remains that countless trains travel along tracks, some at quite high speeds, every day (but usually not twice on Sundays), and derailment is almost a non-occurrence.  Clearly, the physics and engineering principles at work here are doing their jobs very well.

It’s good, I think, to take a glance at these seemingly mundane (because we have become accustomed to them) things that happen around us and to contemplate either their solidity despite our misgivings and inability to internalize what’s happening, or the truly remarkable things happening underneath occurrences that may seem unremarkable.

This is one of the things I really like about the YouTube channel “The Slo Mo Guys”.  In their videos, one gets to see physical processes slowed down to astonishing degrees sometimes.  But even the more “run-of-the-mill” slow motion videos can let one appreciate the intricacy of so many things happening below the level of perception in ordinary phenomena.

Also, many of the things one can see in slomo remind me of how slowly the galaxies and clusters and stars within galaxies move from our point of view, whereas if seen from outside, by beings for whom a million years is like a second, they would seem much like the splashes of water from popping balloons (for instance) when we look at it as if through one of the Phantom™ high-speed cameras.

Okay, well, that was indeed a fairly stochastic blog post, wasn’t it?  I’ll call it good now‒at least in the sense that it is done, if not in the sense of quality.  Thank you in advance*** if you do share the links to the post on your social media.

TTFN

*This is not meant to imply that all famous (or even notorious) people are unimpressive; that is not the case.  There are people who are famous for being exceptionally good at certain things, like sports or acting or singing or writing.  And there are also people who have done great work in science or technology or medicine and so on (No, starting a social media company in and of itself is not necessarily impressive, at least not to me, though there is no doubt that it requires certain skills…but when it comes to such a company’s success, as with so many things, a lot of it is luck**).  Many times fame is well and truly earned.  But many times it is not.

**I read a good book called Fooled by the Winners that addresses this issue as one of its main theses.  I think it would be good for everyone to think clearly and specifically about the way “survivor bias” misleads us and can give us a faulty notion of how aspects of the world work.

***I would/will also gladly thank you after the fact; don’t think that I’m prethanking in order not to have to say thank you later.

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“You know the day destroys the night. Night divides the day.”

It’s Friday again.  But it’s not just any Friday‒it’s the Vernal Equinox, the day when the line between the Earth and the Sun is orthogonal to the line of the axis of the Earth, and so the day and the night will be (effectively) of equal length.  This is more fun in some ways than the solstices, because it’s the same for everyone, northern and southern hemispheres.

Of course, in the north it’s officially the Vernal Equinox, heralding the beginning of spring, whereas in the south it heralds the beginning of autumn.  I don’t know, however, if it is officially called the Autumnal Equinox in the south.  Probably it is.  After all, I’m sure they have their “official” winter solstice on what is “our” summer solstice and vice versa.  It would be a bit perverse for them to do otherwise.

It’s somewhat interesting to note, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson has pointed out with some ardor, that since, for instance, winter officially begins on the “shortest”* day of the year, the days actually get longer and longer through the winter (and the opposite happens in summer), until finally, on the Vernal Equinox, they break even with it and then daytime passes the night.

I wonder what Zeno would say about that race.

On a different topic, it’s quite rainy here this morning, and it’s a rather chilly rain, which is mildly unusual for south Florida.  It occurred to me, seeing just how sloppy it is here at the train station, that I hope it will not be so rainy at my destination.  What’s interesting about that is that it may not be rainy at all there, at work.  And yet, it could still be raining heavily down here in Hollywood.

In the modern world, weather can seem to change much more rapidly than it really does because we travel through the weather, whereas throughout all of our ancestral time we would merely have seen the weather passing over us.  It can give a somewhat misleading impression of how quickly the weather changes, even in Florida, where it can be raining on one side of a street and dry on the other**.

I recall when visiting my grandparents as a child, that there were times we would all be going somewhere in the car, and as we went along it would start to rain heavily, all of a sudden‒and then, just as suddenly, as we went along, it would stop.  And then it would suddenly start again, and then stop again, and so on.

But even in south Florida (or, well, west central Florida back then) the weather doesn’t change like that if you’re sitting still.  It changes quite rapidly compared to many other places, but not the way it seems to do when one is traveling in a modern vehicle.

For some reason, I feel as though there’s an analogy or insight available here with respect to special and possibly general relativity, but I don’t feel like trying to explore it right now.

I did bring my hardcover copy of General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum, which is part of Leonard Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum series, with me when I left the office yesterday, thinking I might read it while on the train last night.  I did not read it.  There are too many distractions, it seems, for me to be able simply to flip my attention into focus on that, however much I really am interested in it.  It’s frustrating.

I have read part of it, mind you, as well as parts of the other Theoretical Minimum series.  I have all of them in both physical copies and on Kindle, so really, I didn’t need to bring the physical book.  But it is a lovely hardcover edition, and I hoped that might make me more likely to read it, since reading a nice hardcover is much more pleasant than reading a Kindle book on one’s phone, though that can still be fun.

I also entertain the admittedly absurd fantasy that I might be reading the hardcover copy on the train some day and some other, like-minded person (preferably an attractive woman) might notice and be interested because she is into the subject as well, and so on.

This is particularly silly as pipe dreams go, because even if such an absurd event happened, I would definitely screw the whole thing up.  I tend to be quite terse when strangers try to speak with me, even if they are beautiful women.

Looking back on my life, I’m sure that there have been several occasions in which someone was expressing interest in me, but I didn’t get it or got too anxious and froze up.  Sometimes I figured it out soon after, and sometimes it took longer.  There are probably some cases that I never noticed at all, even in hindsight.

Of course, I was married for fifteen years, during some of which I was in medical practice, and so such interactions would have had a different character.  There were sometimes more flagrant and obvious “advances” in that time, because, well…doctor.  But I never had any inclination to pursue them, even when I recognized them; I’m not the kind to want to cheat on a partner.  Hell, I’m not even the kind to seek a new partner two decades after my wife divorced me (though I briefly tried a little).

I wouldn’t mind a nice relationship, but I know that I am difficult to handle in many ways (I try not to be, but I am weird, and not in some charmingly popular manner), and in certain senses, my standards are high, or at least they are fairly strict.  For instance, someone who doesn’t read for pleasure is unlikely to be terribly interesting to me.  It’s not impossible; there are other ways for people to be interesting and smart.  But not liking to read would definitely be an entry for the “con” column, not the “pro” one.

I don’t know what I’m doing, going on about such nonsense.  I am not going to have any more romantic relationships in my life.  I am going to die alone, as is only appropriate and to be expected for something like me.  And while I won’t say “it can’t happen soon enough for my taste”***, I do really feel impatient for it.  I wouldn’t say I am “eager” for it, because that’s a positive feeling.  I am just quietly desperate for it, like someone trying to find an exit from a (slowly) burning building.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you have a good one, and that you have a good weekend as well.  Yes, I mean you.

As for me, well, I am to be working tomorrow as far as I know, so I will be writing a blog post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen.

*Of course, this is a bit of a misleading characterization.  The day is the length that it is‒roughly 24 hours‒and does not change very quickly, for which fact we should all be grateful.  It’s just the length of time in a given day during which the sun is above the horizon (so to speak) that varies.

**This is not an exaggeration.  I have seen it myself on many occasions.  It seemed to happen more frequently in the area where my grandparents used to live (Spring Hill, north of Tampa) than it does down here‒or maybe I noticed it more because I was a kid‒but it is very real and quite impressive when it happens.

***Except to say that I won’t be saying it.

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Is it small talk if you discuss the weather despite being alone?

Well, I brought the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday evening, but nevertheless I am writing this post on my smartphone.  Why?  Because the lapcom is more inefficient to get out of my bag and put back in my bag, and the smartphone is much easier to unsheathe and restow‒it just sits in my front pocket when not in use.  I can also use it to check the temperature, which is a bit chilly this morning even here in south Florida.  I’m sure that it’s quite a bit worse for regions north of us that have been hit by the wave of unpleasant recent weather.

I don’t find it unpleasant for it to get a bit cool down here‒55 degrees Fahrenheit* with a bit of overcast and some rain feels like autumn up north where I grew up, and that was always my favorite season.  It’s usually rather easy to adjust by wearing more clothes and moving around a bit if one feels chilly.

On the other hand, there’s not much to do about the heat and humidity other than to stay inside air conditioned buildings.  That isn’t very much fun, unfortunately, especially when one lives in a state that is touted for its beautiful and interesting nature.  After a point, though, one can take off as many clothes as one likes, but one will not get cooler; one will only be at risk for sunburn in rather uncomfortable places.

The worst part, though, is the humidity.  Yes, humans developed in sub-Saharan Africa, so we’re built well for endurance in hot environments (humans have more sweat glands per square inch of skin than any other animal).  But humidity is another matter.  Humidity is almost like an electronic counter measure to sweat’s ability to cool the body.  Sweat works by evaporative cooling; like blowing on soup, taking away the warmest liquid molecules lowers the average temperature of those remaining, and so on.

But evaporation depends at least partially on the differential in concentration between the liquid and the gas “above” it.  If the air is already saturated (or nearly so) with water vapor, there is going to be significantly less tendency for net evaporation to occur, and thus there will be less cooling.

This is why the reassuring and somewhat comical statement, “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat” is actually pertinent and indeed positive.  If the air is dry, and if they have adequate water, humans can tolerate surprisingly intense heat.  But when it’s humid, things don’t work nearly as well.

Also, when it tends to be humid and rainy a lot, one finds fungi and algae and the like growing on almost every immobile surface, as well as on some that are mobile, such as human intertriginous areas.

Anyway, to make a long diatribe slightly longer by summarizing it, I don’t mind cooler weather, but humidity is very annoying when it’s warm.

As for other matters, well, the holiday is over from yesterday, and I did not get to eat any corned beef and cabbage.  That’s a bit disappointing.  The next major holiday (which is coming soon) is the Passover/Easter holiday.  There’s no particular food related to these holidays that I like, though, nor really much of anything else come to think of it.

I did get into the St. Patrick’s Day spirit by drawing a shamrock yesterday, then scanning it and coloring it and fiddling with it a bit between other things at work.  Here, this is how it’s turned out so far:

It’s nothing terribly impressive, but it’s at least one very tiny, mild, creative act.  Not that writing this blog isn’t creative, but it’s not as creative as writing fiction, or not creative in the same way.  And drawing a picture is closer to writing a story than to writing a blog post.  Though I have to admit, at first glance drawing and writing would seem to be somewhat too different to compare.  And yet, I think I’m not the only person who has a deep, intuitive feeling that they are part of a strong, self-similar group.

It’s quite curious.  I wonder if such seemingly odd combinations are common among intelligent life forms.  Of course, if this planet is the only place in the universe on which intelligent life exists, then it’s a universal attribute of such life, if we count only creatures that use languages and create and use artifacts.

Well, this has been a weirdly inconstant blog post, especially for a relatively short one.  It’s not just meandering around among topics, it’s ricocheting.  I would prefer to meander; ricocheting seems like it would be very bad for my chronic back and joint pain.

*If it were 55 degrees Celsius, it would not be chilly at all.  Indeed, many people would be dying around here from the heat.  If it were 55 Kelvin, then, yeah, that would definitely be chilly.  Not that anyone would feel it, because we would all be dead if it were that cold.

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You’re so vain, you probably think that nothing matters

I was going to start by saying that I had probably written all I could about Friday the 13th and the fact that there are 2 in a row when non-leap year Februaries have Fridays the 13th, and that a first glance might lead one to think this should happen roughly every 7 years on average*.  However, as I noted last time I discussed this, because the leap year day is in February, we will not have the two-in-a-row Fridays the 13th (February and March) as often as we might otherwise; it will not happen every 7 years on average.

Then, this morning, after recalling that today was Friday the 13th, I ran through the next years’ Fridays in my head in the shower, and it occurred to me that the next Friday the 13th in February‒which will be in 6 years, as I noted in the past‒will not be followed by a Friday the 13th in March!  2032 (six years from now) will be a leap year, so there will be 29 days in February, so there will be no Friday the 13th in that March.

The next paired ones, then, will be a further 5 years after that, in 2037 (not a leap year).  It would have been 6 years later, but there are two leap years in that interval, 2032 and 2036, so the next one comes a year sooner than it would otherwise.

It occurred to me that, because of the frequency of leap years, which is almost twice that of the cycles of days of the week, the frequency of those paired dates may well be once every 11 years rather than every 7.  At least those are both prime numbers.  I’m not going to work out some exact formula right now, though.  It’s not really important.

Of course, one could say that nothing is truly important, and I am persuadable along those lines.

There is a Doctor Who Christmas Special (the one from series 5) in which the antagonist/guest protagonist (played by Michael Gambon!) describes a woman in a cryo chamber as “nobody important”, and the Doctor characteristically responds by saying, “Nobody important?  Blimey, that’s amazing.  You know, in 900 years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.”

This is typical Doctor, of course, but it raises the objection Dash (from The Incredibles) voiced when told that everyone is special:  Saying that everyone is important can be the same thing as saying no one is.

Of course, important is in the eye of the beholder.  But then again, the beholder is not important, either, except in its own subjective estimation and perhaps that of a few other, equally unimportant, owners of such eyes.

So, yeah, one could argue relative and subjective importance from local points of view, which is valid but more or less vacuous outside its small scale as far as I can see.  On a cosmic scale, it’s all just dust and shadows.  But you could also say that about the entirety of the cosmos itself.

I guess import has always been subjective, even though people are not inclined to see it that way.  But, of course, people are the products of their “local” forces, and they are not responsible for the laws of nature, nor for the things which have happened in the past that have affected them in the present (which could come under a certain interpretation of “the laws of nature” in and of itself).  I won’t get into all that now.

Going back to the shower, but on an entirely different subject, I was also thinking about the effects of diminishing amounts of shampoo in the bottle on the center of gravity of the bottle.  At the start, when it’s full, the center of gravity is roughly in the geometric center of volume of the whole thing.  But as one uses the shampoo, the center of gravity shifts lower and lower, since the air replacing shampoo in the upper part of the bottle is much less dense than the shampoo or the bottle.

But then, as one gets to the dregs, the smaller and smaller amount of shampoo in the bottle contributes less and less to the overall mass distribution of the bottle and its contents, and the center of mass begins to head back up.  Finally, when the bottle is “empty”, the center of gravity will have returned to almost the same place it was when the bottle was full.

All that’s fairly trivial, well-known stuff, I know.  But it got me to thinking about how much of the laws of physics, such as the laws of gravitation (Newtonian form), are solved using such concepts as the center of mass, which is really just a way of combining and averaging the effects of numerous tiny bits of gravitating material as if they were concentrated at one point.

Much of the mathematics of physics works this way, coarsely approximating the very fine details of reality in a way that provides reliable, reproducible guidelines and can produce testable predictions.

But the granularity of reality doesn’t actually ever go away, not at any level.  Even at the level of the quantum wavefunction of a single “particle”, the actual behavior of the thing as it interacts with things in the “larger” world is the summation of the effects of all the possible quantum states of the electron superposed upon each other and interacting with things‒everything‒which are also just collections of superpositions of quanta.  That superposition happening in a “space” that doesn’t directly coincide with the macroscopic space we experience, but whatever its dimensions are, they are real, because they have durable, reproducible effects.

Mathematics may be unreasonably effective in the physical sciences, as Eugene Wigner famously noted, but it seems not to be a refining of description but rather an averaging out, a glossing over, the inking of an underlying rough pencil drawing which nevertheless still constitutes the real, original picture.

It may be that, in a sense, all science is just various forms of statistical mechanics.  We know that, at larger scales, we definitely need the tools of probability and statistics to navigate as best we can the territory of reality.  And yet, we don’t teach this sort of stuff to most people, ever.  I wrote a post about this on Iterations of Zero, if I remember correctly.

I could go on about all this rather easily, I guess, but I am using my smartphone today, and my thumbs are getting sore.  That’s okay; yesterday’s post was probably way too long, anyway.

If I did a video of my thoughts on this I might be able to get into more detail, though it would probably be even more erratic and tangential than my writing.  Still, maybe it would be worth trying.

In the meantime, I’ll write at you again tomorrow.

*Go ahead, do a search on my blog page for Friday the 13th; I’m all but sure it will bring up the pertinent blog posts.

 

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In a better blog than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this post on my lapcom.  I feel as though I ought write these posts only on the computer (not that smartphones are not computers, but cut me a little slack on this, please), and I would be more inclined to do so if Microsoft would stop making Aptos the default font!!!!!

If I could go back in time and change something, that’s one of the things I would be inclined to change.  If I found that there was one person mainly responsible for this new font, well…I don’t know if I’d go all Terminator on them and kill that person’s mother before that person was born, or kill the person when that person was a child, but something needs to be done to erase the stain of this horrible font from existence.

Certainly, if I were given* absolute power over the world, from this moment forward, one of the petty things I would do (I would try to keep the petty things to a very bare minimum, trust me**) is to eliminate that font from any and all standard computer systems anywhere.  I would probably allow for individuals to select the font if they really like it, but would not let them use it on anything but internal work between people who also like the font.

Also, I would probably mark people who chose the font freely for a visit from my secret police.

I’m kidding.  I despise the very notion of thought crime, let alone aesthetic policing in private matters.  This is even though some people’s quality of thought sometimes feels like a crime against nature.  But, of course, there cannot actually be crimes against nature.  Nature does not punish one for disobedience to its laws.  It’s simply not possible to do anything but follow them.

That’s one reason why I truly despise headlines like “The new finding by Hubble that breaks physics!” and whatnot.  Not only are they plainly clickbait, they are stupid clickbait.  I don’t know for sure if it’s just the headline writer or the writer of whatever the attached article might be who makes the headline in specific instances, but in either case, when I see headlines like that, I think that whoever wrote it really, clearly doesn’t understand physics very well.  Nor do they the nature of scientific discovery and advancement.  Because of that, I am far less likely to read the attached article (or watch the video) or even click on its link.

Nothing can break physics.  If you find something that seems to violate physics as you understand it, what you have found is not a violation of physics but rather a place where your understanding of physics is clearly incorrect.  This is far from a horrible thing.  This is how progress in physics (and in other sciences) is made:  by finding the places where our “understanding” doesn’t predict or describe what actually appears to be happening.  The world cannot be “wrong”, so our understanding of it must be, and will need to be revised.

That’s progress.

One should be hesitant to give too much “trust” to anyone who refuses to change their mind.  One of the best lines in a Doctor Who episode (not a truly great episode, maybe, but it has a wonderful speech by the Doctor) is after the Doctor has said to the “villain” (who goes by the human name Bonnie, though she is not human) “I just want you to think.  Do you know what thinking is?  It’s just a fancy word for changing your mind.”

Bonnie responds, “I will not change my mind.”

And the Doctor says, “Then you will die stupid.”***

This is simply true.  If you never learn that you were wrong about something, if you never update your credences or think about things in a new way, you will never learn anything new or develop any better understanding of the world than you did when you formed those credences.  Or, to paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, if no state of the world can change the state of your retina and how you perceive that state, that’s called being blind.

I like to refer to Yudkowsky-sensei a lot, but that’s because he has said a lot of bright and interesting things, and he has said them well.  It’s also nice to know that there are some highly intelligent and thoughtful people in the world—clearly there are, or humans would long since has gone the way of the trilobites—because the idiots and the assholes make so much noise.

The best evidence I see for the fact that most people are good or at least benign (overall) is that civilization still exists, and has done so for a long time.  It is far easier to destroy than to create or even to maintain; the second law of thermodynamics tells us that things will fall apart even if we do nothing at all to break them (it says that more or less, anyway—that’s a bit of a bastardization of the proper, mathematical law, but it is related and implicit).

The fact that civilization still exists—so far, at least—seems to indicate that there must be a lot of people working to maintain and sustain and improve it, because we can easily see how much how many people seem to be trying to make it crumble****.

Assholes tend to make a lot of noise in the world, but they’re pretty much all full of shit and “hot air”.  It’s worth it to keep this in mind, because there have always been plenty of such nether orifices out there, spewing their flatus everywhere like perverse crop-dusters.  But the evidence strongly suggests that they are not the norm; they are just the noisiest.

I suppose that’s a good moral of sorts on which to end this post:  Be willing, even eager, to change your mind when warranted, and try not to let the assholes make you think the world is no better than a camp latrine (even if you’re one of the assholes sometimes, which you are, since we all are, sometimes*****).

Though, to be fair, I am hardly the person to be giving that last piece of advice unironically.

TTFN

*If you must be given absolute power, do you actually then have absolute power?  This is similar to the old song that says “Don’t ever take away our freedom.”  If you have to beseech someone not to take away your freedom, you’re not free, and if you have to be given power, your power is clearly not absolute.

**Or don’t, if that’s not in your character.  I’ve often spoken implicitly against the concept of trust, stating that I don’t feel that I can actually, truly trust any living person.  It’s calculated risks all the way down, which is empirically true if nothing else.  So, I can hardly scold someone if they don’t “trust” me.  Go ahead, form your own conclusions.  I do exhort you, though, to be as rational as possible when you form them, with your conclusions drawn as a consequence of the evidence and argument, not with your evidence and argument being curated based on your knee-jerk or at least hasty “conclusion”.

***He then proceeds to lay out the alternatives; he’s not making a threat, he’s making a point.

****When you read that, did you immediately think of your own least favorite political or other public figure, or perhaps of the people you encounter who disagree with your politics or religion or dietary preference or what have you?  Be careful.  Us/them thinking is not usually conducive to formulating true and accurate pictures of reality (though it did inspire at least one beautiful song):

*****We’re also all deuterostomes (I’m assuming only humans are reading this).  Look it up.  It’s kind of funny.

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If you can look into the seeds of time, and blog which grain will grow and which will not

Hello, and also, good morning.

What to write about, what to write about‒that is the question today.  Of course, “to be or not to be” is always the question as well, as was recognized by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.  If I recall, he arrives at the conclusion that the titular rock-rolling protagonist must be “happy” despite the patent and constant pointlessness and absurdity of his existence.

That goes along with the whole recognition of the absurdity of life itself that is central to the existentialism movement.  Still, it’s hard for me to “imagine Sisyphus happy”, unless he was a true Bodhisattva or had been thoroughly lobotomized by Zeus (or whoever it was that had doomed him to his…well, his doom).

It can help, I guess, to think about the vast scale of the cosmos in space and time (and any other dimensionality that might apply) and also about the incredibly minute scale of the cosmos, the fundamental quantum fields (and whatever gravity ultimately is) interacting from the Planck scale on up.  It helps keep things in perspective.

Of course, even given the scales of the cosmos*, there’s another, almost sort of Buddhist/Taoist notion that notes that each individual‒each particle even‒always exists at the nexus of two “light cones”, existing in an ever-moving now.  These are 4-dimensional cones, by the way, but it’s okay to reduce things by one dimension if you will.  It makes them easier to visualize.

Your (or anyone’s) past light cone is the outer boundary of all influences that can possibly have had any effect upon you at the present moment‒those influences that could have reached you at the speed of light or more slowly.  Similarly, one’s future light cone encompasses all those things that could possibly be influenced by things at the present location at or below the speed of light.

Any motion within the light cones‒the only motion that anything within spacetime can execute, as far as we know‒is called timelike motion.  Any motion that would require going outside a light cone is considered “spacelike” motion, and is not allowed by relativity.  This is not merely because of the speed of light, it’s because the speed of light is defined by the speed of causality.  Causes cannot travel faster or have effects beyond the speed of causality.  This is a bit tautological, I know, but it nevertheless simply must be true.

So each individual’s experience, each individual process, sits at the moving balance point of a future light cone and a past light cone, crossing at the moving present, tracing out a “timelike” path in spacetime.  Of course, individual creatures are not individual particles, and so their overall spacetime path would resemble the final line produced by a sketcher going over and over a particular path to make the curve the artist desires.

If one could look at the structure of a human in spacetime, like the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse Five, but one could also trace even the spacetime paths of individual “particles”**, a human life would be a sort of higher-dimensional braid in spacetime, surrounded by a haze of incoming and outgoing quantum entities, most of which will be locally bound and interacting, and so will be moving at a net velocity lower than the speed of light.

I’m assuming you don’t eat your food or drink your water or breathe your air or (shudder) sweat or excrete at near light speed.

Imagine what the inside of a mere proton or neutron might look like if one were able to see it as a rendered, four-dimensional model in fine detail!  If you think it wouldn’t be that interesting because it’s so wee, think again.

Remember, only the tiniest fraction of the “rest mass” of a nucleon comes from the mass of the three “net” quarks in it (two up, one down or two down, one up depending on whether it’s a proton or neutron).  Almost all the rest of its mass is the energy of the interactions between these three quarks:  all the gluons exchanged, all the virtual quark/anti-quark pairs popping into existence, mediated by that famous strong force and its weird*** “asymptotic freedom”.

Bringing this back around, I guess my point was merely to note that everyone and everything is pointless from the perspective of the laws of nature and the spacetime scale of the cosmos, but when you learn about those things‒the cosmos at large and small levels‒you are at least familiarizing yourself with those vast workings, and you are in a sense taking part of them into yourself.  That’s kind of a cool thought.

But don’t take too much of it into yourself!  For, much as would happen to someone who stuffed all the information about Graham’s number into one head, if you do you will become a black hole.  Now, it may be possible to survive becoming a black hole, but I don’t recommend betting on that pony.

TTFN

*I wrote a post on Iterations of Zero about how it might be useful for people to consider the cosmic perspective as contrasting with their prosaic concerns.  I don’t remember how good it was, but here’s the link, in case you want to read it and give any feedback you like.

**I use this word for want of a better term that everyone would recognize and that would be succinct.  I think we need such a different term, because a lot of the perceived so-called weirdness and mystery of quantum mechanics comes from trying to use inaccurate terms that originated in times before we understood things as well as we now do.  Quanta are not little “particles” that sometimes act like waves, nor are they little waves that sometimes act like particles (though that’s slightly more accurate).  They are entities unto themselves, and the ways they behave are all always consistent with that nature.  They don’t sometimes act like one thing and at other times act like another.  They all, always, act like what they are.

***Except it’s not weird, really.  Those of us who are surprised by it?  We are the weird ones.  Quantum chromodynamics has always done exactly what it still does, since long before any life at all existed in this universe.  To quote Yudkowsky again, “Since the beginning not one unusual thing has ever happened.”