Nature

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If thou hast no name to be blogged by, let us call thee devil.

Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, the day of the week on which I wrote blog posts even when I was spending my other days writing fiction.  I tended to start those posts with some variation of “Hello and good morning”, and the title was always a slightly altered quote from Shakespeare.  I’ve kept up that Thursday template even now that I blog daily, because I like to stick to a pattern or routine once I’ve established it.

The above information is provided for the sake* of any new readers of this blog.  Apologies to any long-time readers for the redundancy.

I walked to the train station this morning, after having rested a bit yesterday (I only walked a total of about 3 miles overall), since I’d walked almost 16 miles over the previous 2 days.  Thus far, including this morning’s walk, I’ve done about 24 miles this week.  That’s not too bad.

It would be faster if I could jog the distance; maybe I’ll eventually be able to do that.  I used to really like jogging/running, and even when I was in residency I used to run on the treadmill in the mornings.  I had to stop eventually, as I went into practice and had a growing family; time just wasn’t really available.  And since my back problem began, running has tended to exacerbate it.  Maybe, if I were to get back into shape and lose a bit of weight, that wouldn’t be an issue.

(And maybe if we all wish hard enough, there will be world peace and happiness, and unicorns will appear that poop ice cream that provides all nutrients humans need without any health detriments, and they’ll also pee sweet tea with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol but none of the negative toxicity.)

I’m sorry that my posts have been such downers lately (if they don’t come across that way to you readers, then I’m really not expressing myself well).  I’ve just been feeling steadily and persistently more despondent as time has proceeded.  My optimism, such as it ever was, has declined and declined, and my hope even of the possibility of any rescue or revitalization is diminishing.  I don’t see how my life is ever going to turn around and improve.

I’m just tired, you know?  I’m really quite worn down and nearly out.  Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily keep me from walking to the train despite the heat, and sometimes walking back from the train in the heat, but some of that fact is because I’m able to think of it as a kind of self-harm.

Of course, it’s self-harm that could backfire and end up doing me good, but that’s the chance a person takes when doing such things.  The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.  Which just goes to show that it’s really not a great idea to try to get mice and men together to make plans for things.  Their priorities just don’t mesh.

As for my own plans, I guess I don’t really have any.

I’m getting close to my train stop, and I haven’t written much yet today, and I certainly haven’t written anything of consequence.  I haven’t even reached 600 words yet, let alone 800 or 1000.  Should I try to push for more?  Or is this enough?  Is it already too much?

My life has almost certainly already been “too much”, by any reasonable, objective measure.  I really should do something about that.  But, of course, I don’t really want to make too big a mess for other people to clean up‒though why I should be so considerate is sometimes beyond me.

Also, I have the faintest, residual hope that somewhere out there, someone has some answers, some purpose or meaning that I can learn, or that I can discover.  But it is a faint hope.  I’ve sampled most of the popular, ready-made suggestions and ideas, from religion to philosophy to psychology and psychiatry, and so far have been thoroughly disappointed.  But, as I’ve said before, I don’t want to want to die.  But I also don’t want facile, delusional, banal pseudo-motivation.

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for me‒nor was it made for you, or for any or all of us put together, as far as anyone can tell‒so I don’t expect it necessarily to fit my preferences.  Honestly, I don’t know what I would ask of a universe if I were given the opportunity to special-order one.  Any change I might request would likely have unexpected consequences, much in the way that any pharmaceutical intervention in the human body brings side-effects that can be quite unpredictable.

Now, take that to a cosmic scale.  Everything in the universe has to fit with everything else without producing any actual contradictions.  No part can contradict the whole, nor can it contradict other, actual parts.  You can speak a contradiction‒the rules of grammar allow it‒but you cannot instantiate one.  It’s analogous to the way you can write a computer program with a syntax error or an endless loop or an old “return without gosub” error, but the program will not run.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I don’t know what I’ll title this, or what picture I’ll add to it, but of course, if you’re reading this, you know, which is kind of cool in its way, showing as it does a form of temporal relativity and multidimensionality that has nothing to do with Einstein.  I hope you all are feeling reasonably well and trying not to get too overheated (in any sense).  With that in mind, I’ll close with a rather “chilling” but pithy statement I heard from a climate scientist in a WIRED YouTube video:  “On average, this is the hottest summer you’ve ever experienced.  It’s also the coolest summer for the rest of your life.”***

TTFN

for your own sake

*That’s “sake” with a long A and a silent E, not the transliteration of the Japanese word  酒, which means, in Japan, more or less any alcoholic beverage, but which in the West is how we think of Nihon-shu (日本酒), the Japanese so-called rice “wine”…which would actually be more a kind of a beer, since it’s made of grain, whereas wines are made from fruit (interesting side note:  originally the fermentation was begun after the rice was chewed and then spit into a container, because salivary amylase starts breaking the starches into sugar**).  “Sake” is one of the few Japanese things that doesn’t really do much for me.  I’ve yet to try Japanese whiskey, but since it’s based on Scotch whiskey, and produced with typical Japanese attention to detail, it’s probably pretty darn good.

**You can test this for yourself.  If you take an unsweetened white cracker (no pun intended) or, say, a bit of potato in your mouth and just kind of keep it there, perhaps chewing it, it will eventually start to become noticeably sweet…unless you’re so overexposed to sugary foods that your taste buds are too insensitive to notice.  Don’t do this experiment around other people, though‒you’re likely to get some odd looks.

***Of course, he is basing his predictions on current technology.  And though, as he pointed out during the video, our current carbon capture technology is woefully inadequate to turn things around on any reasonable scale, one must not underestimate the power of human ingenuity when Mother Necessity is standing over the world with a ruler, ready to rap everyone on the knuckles until they bleed.  The next Manhattan Project may well be geared toward developing newer, much more potent, means of carbon capture that could be effective on a scale big enough to correct climate change in a sensible time frame.  This won’t happen on its own and it won’t be cheap, but as more and more‒and richer and more powerful‒people start suffering from the effects of climate change, distractions will tend to fall by the wayside.  If they don’t, then I guess the human race will get what it deserves.

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Universal heat death will be cold, but today it’s too hot and yet too air conditioned, and life hurts

     I don’t quite clearly remember all that I wrote in my blog post yesterday, and even the memory of the process of writing it has that slightly hazy feel of delirium, though I don’t think it literally applies.  Today I have to go to the office, because it is payroll day, and I’m already way behind on what I need to get done for that.  But I am still in a great deal of pain, even for me.

     I do remember deciding to indent my paragraphs by five spaces, as a kind of homage to the days of writing fiction‒though I used tab keys for that then, because I was using MS Word, not a smartphone.  I’m still indenting for this post.

     I’m getting on a very early train today so that I can get into the office in time to get some catch-up work done, and at a slow pace, because I still am in enough pain that my usual concentration is markedly diminished.  I don’t feel quite as delirious as I did yesterday‒I seem to have had some form of GI bug that made things worse‒but I’m far from my peak powers.  I still feel rather ill.  But I cannot simply take much time off.

     It’s oppressively hot and humid out.  Just standing still and waiting for the train caused me to be covered with sweat.  And then, getting on the train, I find the car is over-air conditioned, so it feels, at least for a moment, uncomfortably cool.  This is an interesting paradox of our climate control of our little, self-contained worlds: we control transient environments perhaps too much, and can never fully acclimate to the overarching external circumstances.  Admittedly, the weather being so hot and humid is quite uncomfortable, so I have a preference for some degree of climate control.  But it becomes a minor shock to the system when one leaves one environment for another.

     And, of course, the second law of thermodynamics (and the first) demands that the only way we can get it cooler inside is by putting more waste heat, and at higher entropy, into the outside world than we remove from the interior of, for instance, a train car.  No matter how efficient the system may be (and I doubt that it’s all that efficient) it cannot, in principle, be perfectly so.  This has been known for more than a century and a half.  Even the biological machinery that maintains a mammalian body within a narrow range of temperature, which is more efficient than any equivalent product of technology, still produces tremendous waste heat in highly disordered form, converting low-entropy energy into high entropy heat that cannot readily be used, eventually radiating into the surrounding cosmos, where it spreads out more with the expansion of spacetime, as all things head toward a predicted final fate of maximal entropy.

     Of course, on a universal scale, that process is going to take a very long time, so long that a human lifespan might as well be one of the fabled “virtual particles” of quantum field theory, popping into and out of existence before the universe can notice them‒though they can have effects.  I’ve written about this stuff before, I know, and won’t go into it again.  I’m sure if you searched either on this blog or on Iterations of Zero, you could find posts that discuss such things.

     As for me, I feel that my little, virtual existence is rapidly approaching its end.  Every day is painful, and that pain is not productive or useful; it certainly does not seem to make me stronger.  And, of course, I don’t really do anything for fun, I don’t do anything useful, I don’t make any arguable contribution that I can see.  I don’t think I’m even so much as a part of the quantum foam that has effects that can be felt in the reaction rates of elementary particles.  I’m just a virtual photon in intergalactic space.

     Though, I guess, I’ve had some effects already, since I have saved some lives and eased some suffering, and I’ve written several books and short stories, and most importantly, I have two wonderful children.  But my effects on them‒and certainly the impact of my fiction, and any past effects of my medical work‒are no longer happening. I hear from my daughter, but I have nothing of use to offer her, and I almost never hear from my son.

     I’m not doing much that has even a local, transient use anymore.  I certainly don’t think I’m having or sharing any insights or ideas that could honestly be useful to any of my readers.  And I no longer seem capable of making friends, nor of connecting with my prior friends, nor anything else along such lines.

     So, when I vanish back into the vacuum state of whatever quantum field I represent, there will be no real loss to anyone in the universe.  It would be nice to have family and friends around as one gets sicker and wastes away, but I don’t think I’ve earned any such thing.

     It is whatever it is, I guess.  I’m very tired, anyway.  And so much of what I am is pain, nowadays, without any counter-balancing joy.  At least I have done those bits of good in the past, for whatever they are worth.

     Anyway, I’m getting close to my stop.  I’m still a bit queasy, I’m sorry to say.  Or, well, I’m sorry to be able to say it truthfully.  It’s the fact, not the sharing of it, that troubles me.

     I hope you all have a good day, though.  Try not to air condition things too much‒it only serves to make the universe that much hotter that much sooner.  Ironically, so does heating things, by the way.

     Take care of yourselves and each other.  Spend time with your friends and families.  Be beneficent or at least neutral as much as you can.  And don’t worry too much.  In ten to the hundredth years, no one will remember all this, even in principle.

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Here we go again.

It’s Monday again.

I don’t know how we keep allowing this to happen, but it keeps on doing it, over and over again, from the Monday on or immediately after the day we’re born until the last Monday on or before the day we die.  I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t really want to go back to work.

I’ll try to make this a comparatively short blog post if I can, unlike the weird one I did on Saturday, where I got off on a tangent about the number of possible blog posts one could write given a thousand words of length and a limited number of potential words after each previous one.  If you like that sort of thing, and you didn’t read it yet because you don’t read blogs on the weekend, do feel free to check it out.  I was writing off the top of my head, and I only briefly fact checked a few quick items, so there could be errors in specifics, but I think the reasoning was okay.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I suffered from ill-effects of something I had eaten Saturday, or perhaps some combination of things.  Anyway, I was feeling quite poorly, though thankfully whatever it was seems mostly to have worked its way through my system.  Fingers crossed!

Oh, and I don’t know if anyone anywhere has noticed, but for my last two blog posts, I added “tags” which are supposed to help people find what you write if they’re looking for material on given subjects.  It’s a part of that whole “search engine optimization” thing that’s been a big deal on and off, but which must surely change faster than even fashion and politics, given how the various things operating and interacting on the internet and the web are changing so quickly, and how new things become a big deal so quickly, and presumably will be altered and will warp and distort and mutate if they survive at all.  Remember Myspace?

And, of course, the advent of the various GPT-type things and their use in searching and in creating will no doubt change not only the structure but the content of the cyber-world.  Heck, soon most of the internet and web could be things written by LLMs having cobbled stuff together by interacting with other LLMs, and the humans who still go there won’t even realize that the base of the structure, founded in reality initially, has long since washed away, leaving only a cobweb of nonsense built on earlier layers of nonsense built on earlier layers of nonsense and so on.  And, unless there is some collision with actual, practical requirements of reality that forces natural selection to act on such things, it could go on existing for a very long time, all the while signifying nothing.

Of course, unless it is forced to solve problems for which there can be real world right and wrong answers, with consequences, I don’t know how it could develop into any kind of actual general, self-directed intelligence.  But I haven’t really thought about it all that much, and I am no expert.  I have read and listened to some of the experts in the area, and some of them impress me with their reasoning, and some strike me as rather foolish and simple-minded,  seeming to miss many points about how things can and do go wrong in reality.

I suppose it doesn’t make much difference what I think.  Anyway, servers produce so much waste heat and they use so much power, the whole WWW may become increasingly unworkable as temperatures rise and use of resources needs to be curtailed.  It may be more energy efficient and climate-friendly to build artificial intelligence using actual nerves, genetically engineered and powered by photosynthetic cells that remove carbon dioxide from the environment and are vastly more energy efficient than electronic circuits.

What are the odds that humans will avoid total catastrophe long enough for those few, those happy few, creative and intelligent individuals to figure out solutions to various problems and implement them?  Will the demagogues and the polarizing political fashionistas wreck everything too soon for it to be saved?

The clever and creative people are very impressive, and they never stop trying if they can help it, but it is much easier to destroy than to create.  The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics makes it just so easy for things to fail.

That’s not because the second law is some force acting on everything, some quantum field or curvature of spacetime.  It’s much more fundamental than that.  It’s simply the mathematics of probability and statistics, and it will apply in any system in which mathematics applies, which seems likely to be any possible universe.  There are simply vastly more ways for any system to be “disordered” than there are for things to be ordered in any particular way one might desire.  So, even the most well-constructed things will fall apart; even the most carefully balanced center cannot hold forever.

I guess I’m not an optimist, am I?  Nevertheless, I’m not a complete pessimist.  I think it is possible for the clever, creative people to create faster than what they create is destroyed, and to carry the mass of humanity and life itself forward into a future of cosmic consequence, the nature of which we cannot predict, because to predict it, we’d have to already know the things we’ll need to know to get there.  It’s possible.  But there are no guarantees, and there are so many ways for it not to happen.  It will require tremendous care by so many people‒as it has all along‒to avoid utter dissolution.

I don’t know if the odds make it worth the effort. But the clever people often don’t let that stop them.  And though most will fail, it doesn’t take very many clever, creative successes to move the world along.  They are just that powerful.

Maybe I’m more optimistic than I like to let myself believe.  That would be disgusting, wouldn’t it?  But I’m not dead yet, even though I often wish I were; I haven’t killed myself yet, though I think about it so very often and feel so bad so much of the time.  I’m stubborn, I guess.

I could really use some help with that‒not the stubbornness, but the depression and anxiety and pain stuff‒but I don’t have the energy and I don’t like myself enough to seek it out and to do anything more than cursorily try to help myself.  We’ll see how long I last.  Not long, I’ll bet.  But I’ve been wrong before.

With that, let’s quit this post.  Have a good week.  If I’m still alive tomorrow morning and going to work, I will grudgingly and grumpily write another blog post.  Damn it.

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There is no receding, you are pain. Something like that.

I’ve been trying, over the past few days, to write blog posts that are slightly more upbeat, and maybe a bit funny here and there, compared to most of my other posts.  I’ve done this to try to give a bit of a break to the people who read my blog with some regularity, and I hope the most recent posts have actually been enjoyable for them.  I’m quite sure they deserve to have something fun to read.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep that up for long, or very consistently.  I’m afraid the increased pain I’ve had lately doesn’t seem to be abating.

Every night, pretty much all night, it’s been just gnawing away at my back and hips and knees and ankles like a demonic, semi-ethereal rat that can’t not gnaw because its teeth are always growing, and if it doesn’t wear them down, it will die a rather slow and horrible death.  If my pain were caused by some dreadful, progressive illness, I would surely be long dead by now, and that would likely be a mercy, for me and for the world at large.

I’m not just sitting back and letting it happen, just so you know.  I am always trying different stretches and exercises and combinations of analgesics and ointments and so on.  I also have massage gun thingies and a foot massager and a foldout massage chair at the office to try to help relax my back and feet.  I’ve tried inversion tables.  And I try to adjust various things to improve my sleep at night, and my sleep posture, changing pillows and locations and types of bedding and all.  Believe me, I don’t relish being in pain.

Speaking of relish, I even try adjusting what foods I eat, and when, to see if that makes any difference.  That’s a bit of a ham-handed* segue, I know, but it’s true.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to tell if any of it makes any difference at all.  For all I know, my chronic and daily pain might be no worse if I had never taken anything for it at all nor tried in any way to combat it.  My moments of temporary respite might be happening on their own, or due to my expectations, rather than thanks to any intervention.  It’s so difficult to judge these things with trials on one person involving a process that waxes and wanes in what amounts to a very long-period, low-frequency throbbing, but never quite goes away.

Even when I was taking chronic, prescription pain meds, the pain didn’t go away for long at a time, and the meds ended up causing suppression of my TSH and GnRH, so I had secondary hypothyroidism and low testosterone, which didn’t help my mood and health.  Certainly, weaning myself off of them didn’t make my pain worse, overall.  And as a bonus, my eyebrows grew back at their outer edges, where they had stopped growing when my thyroid was low.

There are some problems that we do not have the technology and science and resources to be able to solve or correct, and for which we may never have these things.  Perhaps it would be necessary for me to grow a new, cloned body in which to transplant my brain to cure my chronic pain.  Maybe even that wouldn’t work, because my central nervous system‒never quite ideally tuned anyway, though it has many fine features‒might have been too altered by chronic pain to do anything but induce it in a new body.  Maybe if I were a full on cyborg it would be better.  Or maybe it wouldn’t be.

There comes a time when fighting something is no longer beneficial, but is just an act of habit, or of ego, or of stubbornness, or some combination of these things.  My father died peacefully at home, with his wife and daughter (my mother and sister) nearby, taking medication to control his pain‒at that point, hypothalamic/pituitary suppression was not an issue‒and there are far worse ways to do things.  My mother was in hospice when she died, but my sister and I were nearby for her.

I’m sorry to say it, but when I die, I will probably die alone, and not merely in the sense that everyone dies alone.  Though I don’t like the idea of causing trouble for others, I fear that I will be one of those people who dies a solitary death in a lonely room and is only found sometime later.  It’s probably no more than I deserve, and no less.

Oh, by the way, I looked for that graffiti on the way back from work yesterday‒the one I mentioned that had briefly triggered a story idea but that I forgot afterwards.  I didn’t see it, though I tried to start looking at the graffiti as the train passed the spot where I remembered having seen it.  I saw lots of other graffiti that I remembered, but I didn’t see that one.  I’m pretty confident that I would have recognized it, though I suppose I cannot be completely certain.  I was in a slightly different position in the train car, so my angle might not have been right to catch the one I had seen the day before.  Oh, well, I did re-transfer my old notebook file of story ideas from my previous phone to this one, so I wasn’t otherwise idle.

That’s probably all futile, anyway.  I doubt that I’ll actually write any more fiction, or draw any more pictures, or write any more songs‒I probably won’t play and/or sing even any covers of any songs.  I’m just wishing when I think about things like that, just like I’m wishing for someone to be able to help me and to choose to do so.  Anyway, I don’t really deserve any help, so it’s not as though I expect it.

But boy, this pain is really getting old.  I mean, it’s been old for quite a while, and‒as they say‒it’s not getting any younger.  Neither am I, of course, and neither is anyone else.

I’m tired of being in pain, and I’m tired of being tired, and I’m tired of being alone.  I can try to do things about them, and I have done, and I am, though I may not necessarily mention all the things I do here in my blog.  But I do try.  I’ve been trying for a long time, and I will keep on trying for at least a bit more.  Like probably everything else in the universe, it’s almost certainly pointless, but it’s the way nature has programmed me.  I’m an idiot who doesn’t give up easily, even when he thinks it’s the sensible thing to do.

Maybe that’s why I make so many arguments about futility and pointlessness.  I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone else about life being pointless‒I would hate to think I had talked someone else into suicide**.  Maybe I’m trying just to convince myself.  Obviously, I haven’t succeeded yet; if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this.  But I am tired, and I am in rather nasty pain, and I am alone, and I don’t see readily available alternatives for the life I’m living, which I really don’t like.  I don’t have the energy to make any radical changes.  I barely have the energy to write this blog (and I can do that on my phone).

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for my sake, and like everyone else, I wasn’t ever promised anything by the universe other than mortality.  It is what it is.  I don’t know if my existence is overall better or worse than that of an insect that’s accidentally wandered into an outdoor elevator car at a train station, and which will probably die in there, unable even to comprehend why it cannot seem to escape.  But I can’t be other than what I am.  Neither can anyone or anything else be other than what they are.

One thing I am is, “working tomorrow”.  So, barring the unforeseen, there will be a blog post forthcoming.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to report that I’ve figured out the solution to my pain and my depression and my insomnia and my disconnection and loneliness, and I’ll be able to share it with you and the rest of the world, and Earth will be transformed into a place of peace and joy for everyone.

I wouldn’t hold your breath, but I suppose that, technically, it is possible.  Have a good day.

*Ha ha.  There was no pun intended when I wrote that.  Honest.  I was actually quoting Hannibal Lecter…for whom food-based terms seem particularly appropriate, I guess.

**With the possible exception of some rare political figures.

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Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell, blogging to each his thunder, rain and wind

Hello and good morning.

I decided yesterday afternoon that I would try to write something a bit different for today’s post, rather than just another litany of my depression and despair, since I’m sure any dedicated readers are probably getting almost as tired of reading them as I am of experiencing them.  I cannot directly alter the fact that I experience them—if I could, I would—but I don’t have to make it an uninterrupted trail of goo for you all to slog through on a daily basis.

I came up with two, more or less unrelated, ideas, but I’m only going to focus on the first, which is nearer and dearer to my heart and mind, in any case.  It’s also been something I’ve thought about on and off for some time.  I do wonder what pertinent quote from Shakespeare I’ll find to alter to make the title, but of course, you who are reading will already know the answer.

Don’t spoil it for me, okay?  I want to be surprised.

Anyway, the idea I wanted to bounce around today has to do with the question of the discontinuity of reality at a mathematical level.

I’m sure many of you are aware that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, there is no sensible differentiation in, for instance, location at any scale smaller than the Planck length, which is about 1.6 x 10-35 meters, or in time below the Planck time, which is roughly 10-43 seconds.

There are various reasons for this, and I won’t try to get into them, but this is generally agreed upon by all the scientists who work in the field.  It’s part of why there is an upper limit to the number of possible quantum states within any given region of spacetime, defined, thanks to Bekenstein and Hawking, as the surface area of an event horizon surrounding that region as measured in units of square Planck length.

Thus, based on the best current understanding of the micro-world, the universe is not so much pixelated as blurry at the smallest scales.  Admittedly, these are very small scales—far smaller than we can probe currently, so we may, in principle, be wrong about some of it, and quantum gravity might change our understanding, but there are strong reasons for this assessment.

Now, mathematics—thanks to work threshed out by Newton and Leibniz, building on ground first broken (though no one quite realized it at the time) by Archimedes about two millennia earlier*—can deal with things that are truly continuously divisible.

Those of you who took high school level calculus (or higher) probably recall that a derivative involves finding the instantaneous slope, or rate of change, of a curve describing some function, such as the instantaneous acceleration being the rate of change of the “speed”.  The idea of it had to do with taking the slope of a line connecting any two nearby points on the curve and bringing them closer and closer together, taking the limit as that distance goes toward zero.

Analogously, integrating a function involves finding the area under a curve, and is in a way the opposite of a derivative.  This involves splitting the area under the curve into rectangles of fixed width at any given point along the curve (the height defined by the value of the curve at that point) and adding them together, then taking the width between the points to be smaller and smaller, until one approaches the limit of an infinite sum of “infinitesimally” narrow rectangles.

These processes are tremendously useful, and can describe the orbits of astronomical objects and the trajectories of ballistic materials, just to take two simple examples.  They are good for describing the universe in many ways, and they often produce useful and accurate answers and predictions to the best of anyone’s ability to measure.

But that raises my question.  Do we currently have the capacity to tell the difference between processes in the universe—say, for instance, acceleration due to gravity—being truly continuous or them being in a sense discontinuous?

We know that the Real Numbers are uncountably infinite, as a matter of pure mathematics.  Between any two nonidentical real numbers, however arbitrarily close together, exists an uncountably infinite number of more real numbers, as large—so to speak—as the number of real numbers themselves, a Russian doll in which every new doll revealed by opening the previous one has just as many dolls inside it as there were inside the original Russian doll…but even more unlimited than that.

This is, however, not necessarily relevant to reality**.  Just to demonstrate that fact:  we can calculate Pi (π), the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to any number of decimal points we might choose, but it will never come to an end—it’s an infinite, non-repeating decimal number, one of the “transcendental” numbers.  Pi has been calculated to 62.8 trillion digits (as of 2021) but that’s not a number we could ever measure as the ratio of the circumference of any actual circle to its diameter.

I’ve read (from a reliable source) that only 39 digits of Pi are necessary to calculate the circumference of the visible universe*** to the fineness of a single hydrogen atom.  Now, a hydrogen atom is about 1033 Planck lengths across, according to a quick search, so that means, in principle, we’d only need Pi to 72 digits or so to calculate the diameter of the universe to the nearest Planck length.  That’s a fairly large number of digits, but it’s smaller than the order of magnitude of, for instance, the estimated number of baryons in the visible universe, and is smaller than the entropy “contained” in even a solar mass black hole****, unless I’m seriously misremembering.

So, finally, my question is, how well have mathematicians ascertained that aspects of reality can in truth be described by equations that are actually continuously variable, or whether we could ever tell the difference?

A computer, for instance, could simulate some model of a continuously varying system to a high degree of precision by taking each current state and then applying an approximation of the applicable equations to the next state, iterating each step in sequence, as if recapitulating the steps that led to the limit defining the derivative or the integral of a function.  This would be considered an approximation of the true function, of course, but one could, in principle, get arbitrarily close to the true function by taking one’s intervals to be arbitrarily small—solving, for instance, or at least simulating, the three (or more) body gravitational problem, by calculating, at each instant, the net effect of each object on all the others, calculating the acceleration, applying it, moving each thing a tiny step, then recalculating.

But what if it’s not the step-wise approach that’s the approximation?  What if the continuously differentiable functions we use to describe things like gravity and electromagnetism and the various quantum mechanical matters are the approximations?  What if reality is more Δx/Δt than dx/dt?

Obviously this is a simple enough concept to come up with, and I’m far from the first one to think of it.

My more immediate question is, has anyone demonstrated mathematically just how fine our measurements would have to be to tell whether, for instance, the orbit of a planet around a star follow a truly continuously differentiable path, or if it is just a step-wise, iterated process?  If one were able, for instance, to simulate the orbit of a planet, say, by iterating an approximation each Planck time, and reconfiguring the system at each step to the nearest Planck length, how long, in principle, would it take to be able to tell the difference between that simulation and a truly continuously differentiable motion?  Could there, given the constraints upon the nature of reality applied by our best understanding of quantum mechanics and the like, ever be any measurable difference?

I don’t know if this has been addressed by mathematicians.  It may not have any practical implications, since we’re a long way from being able to measure reality precisely enough—or so I suspect—to tell that difference.  But I wonder if it’s been worked out just how finely we would need to be able to measure to tell if reality is truly continuously differentiable.

If anyone reading is a mathematician familiar enough with this sort of question to give me an answer, I would love to hear it.  Or if you know a mathematician with appropriate expertise, or a physicist of similar expertise, I would dearly like to know if anyone has done any explorations from the mathematical (not simply the practical) point of view regarding this.

That’s it, that’s my subject for the day.  I feel that I’ve been very ham handed and brutally quick in the way I’ve gotten into the subject, and for that, I apologize.  I only have the time to write this between my shower and when I leave to go to the train station, so it’s a bit quick and dirty, as they say.

Obviously, I don’t have time or space today to address my other, unrelated question, which is about whether the legality and ubiquity of large-jackpot lotteries of various kinds has changed the general psychology of, for instance, the American people in a way that has decreased “average” ambition and work ethic, providing “bread and circuses” to the masses in a way that has at least contributed to the greater economic disparity between socio-economic levels in the nation (and the world) and the gradual dissolution of the middle class?

I wouldn’t dream of thinking it the only or even the dispositive factor, but I wonder if it might have contributed.

Maybe I’ll write about that tomorrow.  Weirdly enough, we may have a harder time coming up with definitive answers for that question than the one I tried to discuss today.  Mathematics and physics are easy, in a sense.  Biology, psychology, sociology, economics…these things are truly hard to model and describe in useful, predictive ways, because the systems are so complex, with so many variables, both dependent and independent.  Even weather, the quintessentially chaotic system, may be more tractable.

I hope this has been more interesting than my usual reflections and projections of gloom.  I also hope you all have a very good day, and maybe that you think a bit about what I’ve written.

TTFN

Domenico-Fetti_Archimedes fractal tiles

*What a Mary-Sue that guy was!  I mean, forget the whole acrimonious debate on priority between Newton and Leibniz regarding calculus, these guys were about two thousand years behind the Eureka Man!

**Though it could be, even if distance and time and not limitlessly divisible.  For instance, if the Everettian “Many Worlds” description of quantum mechanics is correct, the overall “space” of “universes” created at points of decoherence/branching could be infinitely and continuously divisible, making it a no-brainer as to how many potentially different worlds there might be in that space—not “real” space, but the orthogonal space that contains all the branches of the many worlds.  However, that might not be infinitely divisible, either.

***That’s everything that can, even in principle, be seen given the finite time light has had to reach us since the Big Bang.

****The Entropy is about 1077, but Entropy is proportional to the natural log (basically, taking a log is the opposite of raising something to a power) of the number of possible microstates in a system, so that number of states is e to the 1077 power, or e multiplied by itself 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times.

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3 billion heartbeats, and what do you get?

Well, it’s Wednesday morning now, as one might expect, if one lives life linearly and ordinally, which is how I do it.  I’m writing this on my little laptop computer today, because my thumbs have been getting sore from the use of the smartphone for blogging—more precisely, the base of my thumbs and my first MCP joints on both sides hurt quite a bit.  Also, I just type faster on the laptop, and It’s easier for me to express myself, though why I ever bother doing that is not quite entirely clear to me.

I feel pretty rotten still—physically, I mean.  I still have body aches and soreness and weakness (or at least asthenia) and a general feeling of being slightly breathless.  I still had a very low-grade fever as of last night, but I checked my oxygen, which was 95-96% saturation, occasionally pushing up to 97%, and my pulse rate was in the high-90s to low 100s, a bit variable with respiration.  That’s actually slightly low for me.  All my life I’ve tended to have a rapid pulse, possibly related to the atrial septal defect with which I was born, which can affect the heart’s inherent pacemaker and conduction system because of its location.

Apparently, the average number of heartbeats in a lifetime for a human (or closely related alien) is about 3 billion.  This is more than that of most mammals, which hover a little below two-thirds that many, if memory serves.  That number is roughly consistent from shrews to blue whales.  Geoffrey West discusses some of this in his book Scale, which is really interesting, and I recommend it.  As for me, I haven’t read anything in over a week, really, other than a few blog posts.

I just did a quick calculation regarding my chronic, diagnosed “sinus tachycardia”*.  If my average heart rate were 110—which my pulse can hover near, at least some of the time—I should have lived to about 51.8 years.  I’m already slightly past that, but within the realm of rough experimental error.  If 105 were closer to my average, my expected lifespan would be about 54.3 years, which would mean I have less than a year to go.  I figured the first number by dividing 3 billion by 110, then by 60, then by 24, then by 365.25.  I then did the second one by replacing the 110 with 105 and repeating the whole thing, but it occurs to me that I could just have taken 51.8 x 110/105 and gotten the same answer more easily.

So, basically, if my pulse has been steadily tachycardic—which I can only infer roughly based on the moments in which I’ve actually measured it, since I obviously didn’t measure it in between—then I’ve already lived just about as many heartbeats as I’m expected to live, on average.

Of course, there are some big “ifs” there.  There have certainly been times when I’ve been more fit, and that has tended to slow my resting heart rate somewhat.  Also, let’s not be too quasi-mystical about all this; it’s not as though there is some ethereal hourglass that measures out not seconds but heartbeats in the platonic space of life and death.  It’s just a rough average.

If the world is deterministic, then of course, one does, in a sense, have a pre-programmed number of heartbeats before one dies, but there’s nothing about that number that would determine the length of one’s life; it would, indeed, be a consequence of the various things that determine the length of one’s life, just as would the length of that life in seconds.  It wouldn’t be a dispositive fact, merely an epiphenomenon.  It would be casual rather than causal, one might say.

This is all a bit silly, but in many ways it’s reassuring to me that, just maybe, I really have come to what will be the natural end of my expected life.  I’ve read that people on the autism spectrum have shorter expected lifespans than people not on the spectrum (the range is wide, apparently anywhere from 36 to 61 years, which seems pretty imprecise) supposedly largely due to the various difficulties with self-care and social support and the like.

One reads plenty of reported evidence that a key determinant of a long and “happy” life is the degree of one’s social support network—not necessarily its size, but certainly its quality.  Well, when one of the fundamental aspects of a dysfunction is difficulty with ordinary social communication and connection, one can expect a group to tend to have a poorer social support network and ability to self-advocate.  And, of course, the three major proximate causes of death are apparently—according to a quick Bing search—epilepsy, heart disease, and suicide.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of epilepsy.  I do have a cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, which was discovered by chance on an MRI done for other reasons.  It’s a benign finding, in and of itself, but it turns out to be slightly more common in people with ASD (the neurologic one, not the cardiac one) as does ASD itself (the cardiac one, this time, which I also had).

So, I do/did have at least one form of heart disease, though I don’t know whether it counts in the measure of what they’re describing as such causes.  I think the third thing in the list is by far the most likely cause of premature death for me, if “premature” is really the right word.  After all, my “social support network” is locally all but nonexistent, and is very limited on a distant scale.

Of course, sleep disorders—also apparently very prevalent in those “on the spectrum”—are significant impediments to a long and happy life for anyone, and my sleep has been disordered for a very long time.  As a case in point, yesterday I was so physically wiped out from work and feeling ill that I just took a ride from the train station to the house and tried just to shut off the light, take half a Benadryl, and go to sleep.  Then—to no one’s surprise, but to my frustration—I could not get to sleep until after midnight, and then I started waking up by no later than two in the morning, awakening on and off every ten to twenty minutes until finally there was no point in delaying anymore.

I don’t know why I’m discussing all this trivia.  Maybe I’m just to try to get the message out that, if I do die “young”** in the near-future, which doesn’t seem terribly unlikely, you shouldn’t think of it as something sad, as some kind of tragedy.  My life is pathetically empty, and rather unpleasant most of the time.

I would never say there aren’t people who have it much worse than I do.  Of course there are.  That will almost certainly always be true, by any set of criteria one might choose.  It’s also irrelevant.  There are people who die young who, based on the quality of their lives, would have been better off having died even younger.  And there are those who live very long lives who still could have lived even longer with great happiness and well-being, and so even after a century, such a death could be considered premature by some criteria.  Futility is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I’m dragging this out, as I tend to do.  I just feel very tired, and very uncomfortable, and I don’t have any particular joy, or prospect of future joy, that makes me want to keep going and live longer.  I’m lonely and sad and uncomfortable and awkward and weird, living in a world in which I feel like an alien or a changeling or a mutant, or whatever.

Well, lets call that good for now, so to speak.  I’m going to get a Lyft to the train again today, because I’ve taken longer than I’d like to catch the bus, and anyway, I’m still just wiped out.  I’m going to try to time the train I take so that I get to my destination after the nearest CVS is open, so I can pick up some cold medicine***.  Maybe a decongestant will help me feel like I can breathe a little better.  Who knows?  But I need to do the payroll today, so at least it might help me stay awake for the time being, even if the decongestant effect doesn’t make much difference.  After that, I don’t think it really matters much.

*Nothing to do with the sinuses in one’s head, but with the sino-atrial node in the heart, the intrinsic pacemaker.  It means that one has a fast heart rate—tachycardia—but that its origin is at the usual source of the heartbeat.  It’s not an aberrant source or a reentrant tachycardia such as might occur when the conduction system of the heart develops a loop that keeps feeding rapidly back into itself and generating a truly and significantly over-fast heartbeat.  That can degenerate into more dangerous arrhythmias, whereas sinus tachycardia does not tend to do so.

**Scare quotes added because I do not feel young in almost any way, other than, perhaps, my ability to remain curious about various things in a way that seems unusual in other people somehow.  Many days I feel as if I’ve lived for centuries, but not in a cool, Anne Rice vampire kind of way.  Rather, I feel more like a mortal who has kept one of the Great Rings.  I’ve discussed that metaphor before and won’t bother going into it now.

***I did time it correctly, and the CVS was open…but the pharmacy was not, and will not be until 9 am.  Unfortunately, one cannot get real Sudafed—the decongestant that actually works without causing dangerous elevations in blood pressure—except at the pharmacy counter, and only in limited amounts, because some people have used it to make amphetamines.

This is a truly absurd and sub-moronic standard.  It’s harder for a law-abiding citizen in Florida to get a product containing pseudoephedrine than it is to get a gun, and all so the state can prevent a small minority of people from willingly taking a substance into their own bodies that no one is forcing them to use, just as some other people use beer or potato chips or Big Macs or ice cream…or tobacco.

And, of course, they aren’t actually preventing anything.  If they wanted to prevent drug use, they’d have to try to find out why life is bleak and empty enough for some people that they seek artificial sources of transient mood elevation (even though those sources are dangerous) and perhaps try to remedy or at least remediate the causes.  But, no, the same sort of people who would decry government overreach if corporate or upper-echelon income taxes were raised slightly, or if the government tried to ensure that people are vaccinated to curtail the spread of actual contagion to millions, and who would take up arms in open rebellion against any attempt to restrict gun ownership at any level, are willing to have the state keep people from using a comparatively safe medication for congestion and force them to use more dangerous ones—like oxymetazoline, which I am going to have to use, today.

The law truly is “a ass” and “a idiot”, and it’s written by people who are—and who are voted into power by—cretins and troglodytes who cannot even comprehend the nature of and the science behind the comforts and technologies which keep them alive and relatively safe.  If any readers here have any influence in this particular issue, please try to do something about it.  If necessary, just burn it all—the whole stupid planet—and let nature start over in some new state.  There are still a billion or so habitable years on Earth in which hopefully to bring an actually intelligent species into existence for the first time.

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It’s the end of the week as I know it, and I feel…

It’s Friday.  This week, that means that I have the next two days off work.  I wish I had something fun to do tomorrow or Sunday, but really, my only goal is getting my laundry done on Sunday morning and trying to get a little bit of extra sleep if I can.

I don’t have any friends with whom to do anything fun, and I don’t want to try to achieve anything interesting or useful with anyone.  And if someone were to surprise me with anything other than, for instance, a trip to some kind of inpatient psychiatric facility (pre-paid), I would not be terribly happy about it, though I guess if it were someone I haven’t seen in a long time I might be happy, depending on who the person is.  But that’s not going to happen, anyway.  Actually, neither of those things is going to happen.  As far as I can see, I’m just going to continue as before.

I guess it’s somewhat noteworthy that this is the last day of June in 2023.  Tomorrow begins a new month, the month of Julius Caesar, huzzah (If June had 31 days, then July would begin on Sunday, and we would have a Friday the 13th in July, but alas, this is not to be).  Rent and power and water and other bills are all coming due.  I don’t really care about all that.  It’s not like I have anything else to do with my money, other than get new Kindle books or what have you.

Even that’s getting harder as time passes.  There just aren’t really any new books in which I’m interested.  I still can’t seem to read any new fiction—or old fiction for that matter, not even my old favorites.  There are no shows I want to watch, and no shows that I really want to rewatch, and very few movies.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind seeing The Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but I don’t want to tempt myself with movie theater popcorn and whatnot.  Going to the movies and not getting popcorn and maybe Goobers and such would just feel terribly sad, quite apart from going alone.  Anyway, I’m trying to avoid such foods.  They tend to make my overall energy and health feel worse, and that’s not something I need, obviously.

I rather wish I had been familiar with Uber and Lyft on that first weekend, when I was considering going to the theater to see GotG, and before I had made my current dietary changes.  At that time, I meant to ride my bike there.  However, I had increasing trouble with my back when using my bike, and then the front tire went flat and everything, and now it’s just sitting there upside down under the overhang, a little way outside my door.  It was yet another waste of money and time and effort.  And it’s too far to walk to any theater to see the movie without arriving sweaty and gross—and, again, right now I’m avoiding movie theater type foods.

I was thinking of walking to the train this morning, but I’m really not up to it.  I’m getting a better handle on shoes for walking—or, technically, boots in this case—at least, and I now have three pairs of identical black lightweight hiking boots, which are good for the ankle support and for the general feeling of having my feet in armor.

But walking is a bit unpleasant just because it’s so very hot and humid right now in south Florida.  This probably comes as no surprise to anyone out there.

I regret coming to Florida, to be honest, though I think the state is quite beautiful, physically, in a great many ways.  I like all the plants and the reptiles and birds and amphibians, and even some of the arthropods (I like spiders, and dragonflies are also very nifty).  But most of the worst things that have happened in my entire life have happened since I’ve come here.

Not to say that there aren’t compensations, of course.  My daughter was born in Florida, and I wouldn’t change her existence or nature for anything.  But it would have been nice, once she was born, to have gone back north.  Imagine if my kids had been able to be in White Plains (where I lived before moving to Florida) and so had been able to go to one of the best public school systems around.

Actually, they’ve both done quite well with respect to their education, as they desire it, and maybe the added pressure of being in a more competitive system would have been unpleasant.  I don’t know.

Anyway, the past is done, so it’s pointless to dwell on changes to it.  And I cannot change the present, obviously, since it’s actually already happened/happening in each given moment.  And the best anyone can do is try to steer toward preferred futures, but it may be, as a matter of physical law, that the future is set and inevitable and/or partially random and unpredictable.

As far as the experience of limited minds and beings such as we are, though, the future feels like something over which we have at least some degree of control, or at least through which we have some ability to steer.  It’s limited steering, of course.  It’s not as if we were in a car and driving; it’s not even as though we’re in a sailboat with a rudder.  It’s more as if we’re surfing, and if we do it as skillfully as we can, we might be able to surf in the direction we more or less would prefer to go.

Me, I think those reefs up ahead look inviting.  There are lots of sharks in the surrounding waters, too.  It would at least be a bit exciting, though perhaps painful and frightening at the time, to go there.  Then again, there’s also that whirlpool over yonder; that might be interesting, too, and probably a bit quicker.

I’m not much of a surfer, however, even metaphorically (non-metaphorically, I’m not a surfer at all).  I don’t think I’m surfing on the chaos of reality anymore, anyway, and I don’t think I have been for a long time.  I think I’m just treading water.  And it’s not as though I can just build myself a surf board, or a raft, or a boat or a ship, or anything else, out of the water in which I’m floundering.  And there are no vessels on the (admittedly quite limited*) horizon (though I do keep trying to send up flares).  So, I’m kind of just stuck here, treading away, until I finally tire out and go under.  I don’t know what else to do, but I’m already terribly fatigued.  I guess it’s “good” that the ocean water is salty**, or else it would be harder work to stay afloat.  Or maybe it would be better if it weren’t, so I could tire out more quickly and just have everything done.

Anyway, that’s enough of all that.  I’m sorry, it’s not an interesting blog post.  I think I’ll head out now.  Maybe I’ll get an Uber or Lyft to the train station.  I feel too lazy even for the bus.  We’ll see.

Have a good weekend, please, if you’re able.  If you’re with friends and family, for goodness sake, don’t take them for granted.  Not that you probably do.  Anyway, thanks for reading.

*I say this because, if one were treading water, one’s head would only be a foot or so above sea level, and so the horizon is very short, being a function of the height above the surface and the radius of the Earth.  Thus, as your height above the surface goes to infinity, your horizon asymptotically approaches half of the planet, though of course you would be having trouble with the limits of angular resolution and the amount of light dropping off as the distance squared and so on.  If the Earth were flat—which it is not—the horizon, even from a foot above the ocean, would be indefinitely large, limited only by structures that got in the way, and any haziness that attenuates light.  If the Earth were flat, then from the top of Mount Everest, with a good enough telescope, you could see everywhere on the planet.  You can’t, of course.  The world is round.  This has been understood for thousands of years, contrary to popular conceptions about the ignorance of people in the past.  Eratosthenes knew it 2200 years ago, and even used clever geometry to measure the Earth’s circumference, to within a few percent of the modern best measurement.

**Oh, by the way, did you see the recent reports about the shifting of Earth’s axis (a very small one, but real and measurable) that’s been caused by redistribution both from melting of glaciers and from the extensive pumping of ground water and the redistribution of that and the glacier water into the ocean?  It’s interesting that I was just talking about the changing angular momentum of the Earth by such things shortly before that report came out.  It makes me feel almost clever, though I did have a bit of a self-deprecating (though far from unhappy) head-slap moment when they mentioned the changes due to depletion and redistribution of ground water.  That had not occurred to me.  It’s always nice to have new facts and notions pointed out that make such sense.

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I was out sick yesterday – again. Or is it “still”?

Okay, I’m writing this post—the first draft, anyway—on my laptop, and actually on my lap, because for right now, I’m sitting on the piano bench* in my room at the house.  I’ve decided not to try to walk to the train this morning, since I’m still feeling under the weather from yesterday.

As you may know, I did not write a post yesterday, and as you may have guessed, this was because I was out sick.  I considered getting onto my WordPress account just long enough to write a pseudo-post titled, “NO POST TODAY”, with a single line in the main body:  “I am out sick.”  However, I didn’t feel up to doing even that, and frankly, I don’t think it really matters to anyone out there, anyway.

Anyway, I was out with a very bad headache and fogginess and some nausea, but it didn’t feel like a typical migraine that I might have.  I suspect it might be a reaction to the fact that, upon arriving at the house, thoroughly exhausted, on Wednesday night, I took a rapid-release pill of melatonin.  I was trying to help myself sleep, if it was possible.

I’ve tried melatonin more than once in the past, and I’ve gotten results that generally made me feel worse rather than better, but I was at the end of my rope, or at least near the end, and I just wanted to be able to sleep.  I knew that if I took Benadryl on a work night, I’d feel groggy and slow for most of the next day, so I didn’t want to do that.

The melatonin may have ended up helping me start sleeping sooner and staying asleep longer—it’s difficult for me to tell—but it did not help me feel in any way better rested.  I awoke—well before my alarm, still—after still not having gone to sleep before eleven or so, despite my horrible exhaustion, feeling absolutely rotten, and having chills, though if I had a fever it was low-grade.  I also felt a bit sick to my stomach, though I did not throw up.

I had reconsidered melatonin after encountering a few stray articles in various sources indicating that melatonin might be useful for sleep disturbances among autistic people—these articles might have been focused more on autistic children, as most of the research is—and since I might have “Asperger’s” to use the relegated term, I thought maybe it would be worth another try.

Of course, Matthew Walker, in his book Why We Sleep, the best popular scientific book I’ve encountered on the subject, said that while melatonin may be good for jet lag and the like, it doesn’t seem to be useful for chronic sleep disorders**.  Still, he was speaking generally, and about the human population, not about changelings and replicants and mutant, weirdo strangers like me, whatever I am, so I thought maybe it would be worth something.

I don’t think I’m likely to try it again, at least not anytime soon.

The most sensible thing for me, probably, would be just to give up.  I’m just not going to be able to get a good night’s sleep ever again, not without the aid of significant pharmaceuticals, and then it won’t really be a good night’s sleep, since pharmaceuticals of all kinds interfere with natural sleep functions.

We don’t know quite what all those are, but sleep appears to be incredibly important for creatures with nervous systems, since every single one of which we are aware spends a significant amount of its time in that semi-inert, quite vulnerable state.  You would think, if it were possible to go without it, evolution would have produced some creature that used that option.  But even marine mammals like whales and dolphins sleep, though I understand that they do so with only half their brains at a time.

There is even a mouse (or vole of some variety) in the far north that is capable of literally going into a kind of suspended animation for months at a time, lowering its heart rate and body temperature nearly to zero (C) and decreasing the freezing tendency of its bodily fluids, and basically shutting down like a sci-fi astronaut.  But it has to rouse itself from this cryo-stasis periodically to sleep!  It needs to wake up from suspended animation so it can sleep or else its brain will suffer!

So, again, sleep is very important, and I’m certainly not getting anything like enough of it, and never in uninterrupted spans of more than maybe an hour at a stretch.  I think I must be missing out on some of the dreaming process, too, since I don’t remember dreams at night, even though I wake up quite frequently, and you would think I would sometimes do so during REM cycles.

Also, almost as soon as I attempt meditation, once I focus on my breath and am still for a moment, I begin experiencing strange courses of thought and images and stories that are quite reminiscent of dreams, as if my brain had been champing at the bit to get running with them at the first opportunity.

As I say, I don’t expect to find the answer or solve the problem.  I would just like to reset or else unplug the game at this point.  It’s long since ceased to be fun, and it’s getting more and more tedious.

I came up with an interesting possible means of shutting down the game the other night—Wednesday night, actually—and I made a test run of the delivery system that was encouraging***.  I may do another test today, and in the meantime I’m going to consider possible payloads, though I have at least one main idea that I mean to try primarily.

It comes down to a thing I recall from reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  I don’t remember which of the books it was in, but it was  almost certainly one of the first two, and probably The Illearth War.  Thomas Covenant is telling one of his dreadfully dark true stories of the “real” world, about a man from India who was diagnosed with leprosy, and who killed himself during his flight to go to the Leprosarium in Louisiana, after having lost his whole family because of his diagnosis.

Covenant makes the interesting observation that it seems much easier—at least at first—to commit suicide by means that are typical for another culture but are not typical of your own, because they don’t feel as real to you, and so the barrier to their initiation is lower.  I think there is something to that insight, though it must also be balanced against the observed effect that publicly well-known suicides, especially of celebrities, etc., tend to make certain methods feel more normal, more “acceptable”, and like more “reasonable” approaches for people tending in that direction.

Like most things in the world, the system is complex.

But, anyway, my idea is neither really from another culture, nor typical of modern American culture.  It has some antecedents in some old-fashioned things, and its effects would be potentially delayed, which is part of the whole “lowering the activation energy wall” notion.  But it’s really sort of a “uniquely my own” kind of thing, which seems appropriate.

I don’t seem to be able to connect with any other people around me; they don’t understand me and I certainly don’t understand them.  It seems reasonable, or at least predictable, that I would do something atypical or even unique.  It would at least be nice to end things on some original type of note, ironically.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress—probably, anyway.  We’ll see what happens, I guess.  To paraphrase Yoda, the future is always in motion.  Though that may not actually be true, depending on how much (if at all) reality departs from pure determinism, but from the local, “human” point of view, that’s the way it feels, since we’re always simulating the future in our heads as our means of trying to shape it and to guide our own actions.  It feels as though many different things are possible, even if in actuality they are not.

Neo took the red pill, and for the character it no doubt would have felt as if he made a choice that could have gone the other way, but no matter how many times you rewind and replay that moment, it always turns out the same.  Reality may be just like that, only more so.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m working tomorrow, so you can reasonably expect a blog post from me tomorrow morning, barring the unforeseen (see above regarding predicting the future and so on).  I hope the rest of you out there have a good day.

*Such is its official name, though no piano has ever sat upon it.

**If memory serves.  It’s been a bit since I read the book, though I used both the print and the audio version, so I got a double whammy.  Anyway, it’s possible I’m misremembering.

***No, this wasn’t what caused any of my symptoms on Thursday morning.  The delivery system is inert, of this I am convinced beyond what I consider a reasonable doubt.  My “Bayesian prior” is certainly over 90%, anyway.

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“And everything under the sun is in tune, but…”

It’s Wednesday, June 21, 2023 (AD or CE, as you prefer), and I’m writing this on my laptop, but it’s not on my lap.  It’s resting on my desktop at the office, because I stayed here overnight last night.  I had a bad day—personally, not professionally—at the office, yesterday.  I felt just rotten, partly due to how poor a sleep I had, even for me, the night before.

I considered leaving early, but we were rather busy, and I didn’t feel I could justify cutting out on everyone.  Also, I had the nagging concern that, if I left early, I might never come back, because I really felt at my wits end, and though I had no specific plan in mind, I thought I might take some kind of drastic action to make it impossible for me ever to do anything again.  I just wanted to go to sleep and to sleep and to sleep and perhaps never to wake up.

Anyway, it really started to thunderstorm rather badly near the end of the work day, so I decided I would just stay at the office.  I’ve had a hard time getting up to my usual status on the payroll this week so far, and it has to be finished by today, so eliminating the commute time will better allow me to finish that.

But everything is getting too onerous for me.  I’m so tired, and I have no internal drive or purpose of significance, just habit and stubbornness, which can’t really ever make up for the real thing in the long run.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I need help, but I doubt I’ll get any, and I don’t think I’m capable of seeking it.

I can’t make myself believe that I deserve or am worthy of any help.

Speaking of long runs (I was, you can go back and check) today is the Solstice—the summer one in the northern hemisphere, and the winter one in the southern hemisphere.  Thus, it is the “longest” or the “shortest” day of the year, depending on one’s location.  I use scare quotes because it’s not the actual length of the day that varies on this date, or from day to day in any kind of steady way, but the duration of daylight, the time in which the sun is overhead, or at least visible in the sky (barring clouds).

But, of course, the length of a day really does change a bit from time to time, though not in anything like as regular, nor as dramatic, a fashion as daylight does regarding solstices and equinoxes and all that.  The earth is a rotating mass, and is subject to the laws of angular momentum.  Thus, when enough mass changes position on the surface of the planet, it can have an effect on the overall rate of rotation of the planet.

The stereotypical “demonstration” of this process is a skater spinning on the ice, who speeds up when bringing his or her arms close to the body and slows down when extending them.  This is because, crudely, the angular momentum is mvr, the mass times the “tangential” velocity (of the mass), i.e. the speed at which it goes around the center of rotation, times the distance from the center of rotation.  Thus, since angular momentum is conserved, if the radius shortens, the velocity around the center of rotation increases proportionately, and vice versa.

The instantiation of this is somewhat complex, as is usually the case, but this really is the gist of it.  The conservation of angular momentum is related to the rotational symmetry of the universe, as per Noether’s Theorem—i.e., the laws of physics aren’t dependent upon which direction you happen to be facing.  This is similar to how conservation of linear momentum is related to symmetry of translation—i.e., the laws of physics don’t depend upon where you happen to be along any linear direction.  And conservation of energy (locally) has to do with the symmetry of time.  This last one can be tricky when taking the universe as a whole, because conservation of energy doesn’t necessarily apply to the whole cosmos, nor is time fully symmetrical on the largest of scales, or so it seems, but locally it is true.

Physicists, please correct me if I made any gross errors there.

Anyway, back to the rotation of the Earth and the length of days.  Movement of significant amounts of mass on the surface of the planet (or within the planet) can change the rate of rotation of the planet.  I’m led to understand by the program QI* that a massive hydroelectric project in China cause the “elevation” of a large enough mass of water to slow the rotation of the Earth by a measurable—if inconsequential and utterly unnoticeable—amount.

I sometimes wonder if the periodic gathering of millions of people near the mouth of the Ganges has any potentially measurable effect on the momentary rate of the Earth’s rotation.  I’m not aware of anyone having made such a measurement.  Even if it’s true that it changes the rotation rate, it may be too small to detect.

I also wonder whether, as glaciers on mountains and across Greenland and similar melt, with the water thus previously elevated seeking a level closer to the center of the Earth, the planet’s rotation might well speed up.  I wouldn’t expect glacier melt in Antarctica to speed up the rotation in quite the same way, because those glaciers are all far closer to the axis of rotation in the first place, and so might have limited effect in shortening the “lever arm” of rotation.  Indeed, if they raise sea levels significantly enough, I could imagine the “center of mass” of the Earth’s rotation moving slightly outward, especially as the seas bulge more at the equator, thus slowing the motion of the planet down.

The odds of this perfectly balancing seem small, but I imagine it would require very complex calculations and—more importantly—quite fine measurement to ascertain the net balance.  And, of course, the balance is likely to shift over time.

In comparison, it’s relatively** easy to calculate the balance between special and general relativity required to keep GPS satellites in synchrony with the ground.  In this case, the speed of the motion of the GPS satellites slows down their local passage of time relative to the surface of the Earth, by a calculable and quite constant amount, but their greater distance from the center of the “gravity well” makes their time go faster relative to the surface of the Earth, again in a quite calculable and rather constant rate.

It’s the latter effect that predominates, and this is routinely accounted for in the GPS process.  If it were not, GPS would have huge and increasing errors as the timing in the satellites and of ground-based clocks diverged steadily, and the errors would very rapidly become far too great to be useful.  So, your use of smartphones to find where you are and how to get where you’re going depend on both of Einstein’s theories of relativity.

I guess you all already knew all that.  Sorry to be boring.

Anyway, that’s my bit*** of trivia for the day.  It will probably be the most interesting thing to happen to me in this particular Earthy rotation, but I hope all of you are having more interesting days than I am.  I’m just very tired, and discouraged, and worn out…and it’s only a little after five in the morning.

I’ve been in pain for twenty years, and I haven’t seen my kids (in person) nor interacted with my son at all (barring one email) in over ten years, and my last remembered restful night’s sleep happened in the mid-1990s.

If I could just find way to get restful nights’ sleeps, that would be a start.  Everything else would be easier, or so I suspect, if I could find a way to make that happen.  Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t help, and I would simply be faced with the tragic irony of having that wish come true only to find that it didn’t make the other things better, and might even make them worse.

Never underestimate the potential for things to get worse.  Reality has no bottom.

There’s that symmetry of translation that implies, by Noether’s Theorem, that momentum will be conserved.  Which brings me full circle, thus recapitulating the conservation of momentum/symmetry of rotation.  It’s neat, isn’t it?  Time, however, is a trickier bit of possible symmetry, as Pink Floyd recognized only too well.  But at least after Time has passed, when on The Dark Side of the Moon, one can look forward to the beauty of The Great Gig in the Sky.

If you haven’t listened to that album in a while, why not listen to it today?  Or if you’ve never listened to it, treat yourself.  It’s well worth it.  What the hell, it’s the longest day (or night) of the year.  Indulge yourself.  And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear—you shout and no one seems to hear—and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Summer-Solstice-Stonehenge-860x540

*Which has, upon occasion, been incorrect, but it does, in the long run, try to correct prior errors, often in hilarious ways, usually at the expense of Alan Davies, as in the running conflict over the number of moons the Earth actually has.

**Ba-dump-bump.

***Well, actually, probably a few thousand bits, albeit redundantly encoded.

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How to Lyft oneself Uber a growing population of frogs and pipe dreams

I’m writing at the train station in Hollywood (Florida, that is) this morning, and then on the train itself, because I decided to take a Lyft to the station before even starting to write.  I used one yesterday morning, but only after the initial draft of the blog post had been written.  I just feel too worn down from this URI to want to bother with the bus, and in fact, if not for the Lyft, I might not have gone in to work yesterday or today.  Thankfully, I should have this weekend completely off, since it is my coworker’s second weekend, making up for the two weekends I took in a row.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I have to admit, I find those ride apps—Uber and Lyft—rather useful.  I’m not going to make a habit of using them; that would just end up being way too expensive.  But it is nice to have the convenience when I’m not feeling well.  I wish I had tried them before, about three or four weeks ago, because I had been thinking about going to see Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in the theater, but my bike tire had gone flat and I was having trouble with my back whenever I rode it, in any case.  I was feeling pretty discouraged that weekend, and ended up just saying to heck with it, but if I’d been familiar with Uber or Lyft, I might have used one.

You may ask why I couldn’t just go see the movie this weekend, but that urge has more or less passed.  Also, I’ve gone back on a more restrictive food regimen, so I wouldn’t be able to eat popcorn, which was something I anticipated if I went to the theater.  Now I wouldn’t eat any, and that would remove a large part of my enjoyment of the theater, a part which might have overbalanced the discomfort of being alone in a theater surrounded by so many people.  As it is, now, since my initial urge to see the film soon (largely due to the presence of Adam Warlock) has more or less passed, I’ll probably just wait for it to come to Disney+.

It would be nice if I had a good enough metabolism and/or had been able to maintain better fitness habits over time (my back injury/surgery/failure to completely recover has gotten in the way of that a lot).  Then, I wouldn’t have needed to worry about eating popcorn.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I need to minimize such things not merely for long-term health—about which I have little concern, since in the long term I expect to be dead—but about moment to moment health.  As someone who already feels pretty bad psychologically a lot of the time, I don’t need the added physical weariness and discomfort that comes almost immediately if I eat the wrong things nowadays.

On a more positive note:  I saw a frog (possibly two frogs) this morning.  Indeed, one of them hopped into my room as I was returning from taking out the garbage, and I had to usher it back out as carefully as I could.  This may not seem like much of an event, but it’s nice to me.

Back when I was little, and we used to come to Florida to visit my mother’s parents, after many big rains there would be oodles of frogs and toads out.  We would sometimes try to catch them, and if we did, they would pee in our hands, which was both gross and hilarious when I was a young child, though I imagine it was terrifying for the poor amphibian, which probably thought it was about to be eaten.

Also, when we first moved down to Florida—that’s my now-ex-wife and my then-few-month-old son and I—when we first stopped in a motel in central Florida for the night, it was raining and there was a veritable biblical inundation of frogs of various sizes.  The motel didn’t have those flap things at the bottoms of the doors, and smaller frogs actually came into the room through the gap.  That didn’t bother us.  We thought it was funny and kind of cool to be moving to such a place.

Well, my son probably had no thoughts about it one way or the other.

However, over the intervening years, frog numbers appear to have drastically reduced.  I am under the impression that there was some form of blight or other that hit many frog populations worldwide, though I don’t recall the source of that impression.  In any case, something seemed to have happened to the frogs in Florida, because for many years now, even after a significant rain, there have been none to be seen.

For all I know, the frog I saw this morning may be the last I will ever see in south Florida—though I thought I saw another one as I rolled the garbage out, hopping to get away from me—but I would like for them to be making a comeback.  I am a fan of most insectivores, especially ones that eat things like mosquitoes and flies and—during swarming times—termites.  Of course, there are various lizards and birds that also eat such things, but they don’t seem to be as assertive about their jobs as the frogs and toads are.

Anyway, that’s all a lot of silliness.  It’s an okay way to end the week, though.  Maybe I’ll play a little guitar if I get to the office early enough.  I did a tiny bit of strumming yesterday, when I had some morning free time, though I didn’t know The Man Who Sold the World well enough to be able to appreciate fully the chord progressions as I played them.  They definitely had the David Bowie flair for interesting changes and sounds.

I have not thought about a tune for my dreary little poem from the other day, nor even reread it.  Maybe it would be funny to give it a jaunty, happy, major key tune of some kind.  As I think I’ve said before, I enjoy irony.

Probably nothing will come of it.  It’s not as though I’ve done any more work on the song of which I did a demo on YouTube—I had called it Mercury Lamp based on the inspiration for the song, but I think now I would call it Hollow Doll.  And though I like the tune and stuff for Come Back Again, the trial arrangement and mixing/recording I did was blurry and muddled, and I think it could use some lead guitar.

Again, though, this is all a collection of pipe dreams—or guitar dreams, I guess, though “pipes” can refer to someone’s voice, and I do sing on the songs, so maybe the original term is okay.  Come to think of it, A Collection of Pipe Dreams* might be a good name for an album.  It could be a follow-up to a first album called Iterations of Zero after the title of my other, now more or less unused, blog.

I must be sicker than I thought to be entertaining such things.  Well, it’s a bit of fun to imagine them, at least.

I hope you all have a good first weekend of June.

*Or even A Collection of Guitar Dreams