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There’s an infinity that shapes our ends, despite having no end itself

It’s Friday now.  It will in fact be Friday now until midnight tonight, local time.  Indeed, one could argue it will be Friday now until finally midnight strikes at the international date line, when this Friday will finally be gone from the entire Earth, forever.  So, though as a matter of physics there is no universal “now”, and even for individuals, the “now” is an evanescent thing, a constantly moving and infinitesimal single frame of the movie of one’s existence, nevertheless that “now”, for me and for most others on Earth, will still be Friday for some time.

How many such “nows” are there, even for one individual?  Well, that depends a bit.  If the Planck time (5.39 x 10-44) is just an artifact of our lack of complete knowledge or ability to calculate, and time is truly continuous, then there is an uncountable infinity of such “nows” in any given day, or indeed in any given hour, or in any given second, or in any given picosecond, or indeed, in any given Planck time*.

Such is the nature of the uncountable infinity, as in the case of the real numbers:  between any two numbers, no matter how arbitrarily close you want to make them (as long as they are not identical) there is an uncountable infinity of numbers, larger than the number of possible quantum states in the visible universe, larger than the “countably” infinite number of integers.  In fact, that uncountable infinity between any two such real numbers is as large as the uncountable infinity of the set of real numbers itself, of which it is a subset.

Infinities are weird.  You need to be careful with them.  I doubt that contemplating them has actually driven anyone to madness‒though it’s easy enough to imagine that it might exacerbate depression‒but maybe minds somewhat prone to madness are more likely than others to contemplate infinities in the first place.  In any case, contemplating them can put other things into perspective.  For instance, no matter how arbitrarily large a number you might pick, it is just as far from infinity‒even the boring old “aleph nought” infinity‒as is the number one.

An interesting thing to contemplate is that, if you could pick a truly random number from, say, all positive integers, you would almost certainly get some number far huger than any number ever named or contemplated by humans, larger than a googolplex, larger than Graham’s number, larger than TREE(3), larger than the time required for a Poincare recurrence of the cosmos.  Graham’s number (for example) is big; the information required to state it precisely, if contained within the space equivalent to a human brain, would cause that space to collapse into a black hole!  But Graham’s number is nevertheless finite, and so there is a finite number of positive integers lower than Graham’s number but an infinite number of them larger than it.

It’s interesting to note the related fact that the chance of you randomly picking any particular integer is mathematically equivalent to zero‒so I’m told‒and yet you will pick some number.  Let that bake your noodle for a bit.

By the way, when I earlier compared the moments between two points in a continuous time stream to the number of possible quantum states in the visible universe, I was being a bit contradictory.  After all, our designation of the maximum number of possible states in a given enclosed region of spacetime‒which is “equivalent” to the number of square Planck lengths (each such square being 1.6 x 10-35 meters, squared, or 2.6 x 10-70 square meters) in the surface area of a sphere surrounding such a region**‒is based on quantum mechanics, and thus implicitly entails time being only sensibly divisible down to the scale of the Planck time.  So comparing that to a continuous time is comparing two fundamentally incompatible realities.

Oh, incidentally, I’m writing this post on my smartphone today.  I just didn’t feel up to bringing the lapcom with me yesterday, and I didn’t expect to write any on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado today.  I did, however, have a bit of a thought, as I’m prone to do when conscious, whether I want to do it or not.

That thought was that, perhaps, I can try to write my blog posts in the evenings‒on the way back from work, say‒but set them up still to be published the following morning and work on fiction in the morning.  Writing fiction seems to give me a boost, mental health-wise, when I do it in the morning.  It’s quite ego syntonic, as they say, or at least it seems to be.  But I don’t really want to stop writing this blog.  Then I’d just be floating in the void all alone, writing fiction that I like but that almost no one else will ever read.  That is a discouraging thought.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll be writing a post (for) tomorrow, since I don’t think I’m going to be working tomorrow.  If I am, and if I cannot get out of it, I guess I will write a post, and it will likely be a grumpy one if it happens.  But I may start next week writing the following day’s blog post on the evening before and doing fiction in the morning.  One good aspect to writing fiction in the morning is that the initial writing and the editing process are separate.  I don’t have to edit what I write each day on that day, which I have to do with this blog.

We shall see what happens.

In closing, I leave you with this juxtaposition of two notions:

*If time is not sensibly divisible even in principle below the Planck time, then the maximum number of “nows” in a given day is just 24 hours divided by the Planck time, or about 1.6 x 1048 “nows”.

**See Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy calculations and the Holographic Principle.

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“For years and years I roamed.”

Well, I might as well stick to the same pattern, so…ahem.  It’s New Year’s Eve Eve today, which means tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve and Thursday will be New Year’s Day.  At that point, if we wanted, we could just start counting days down or up‒i.e., Day 1, Day 2…or Day 365, Day 364…and so on.

Of course, if we were going to do such numbering, I guess it would make sense to divide things up into months for easier “local” day-keeping, which is what we’ve done as a civilization.  But those months are irregular and rather haphazardly named.  This can occasionally be irritating, though of course I have a sentimental fondness for at least some of the month names.

Unfortunately for the goal of making months of uniform length, the number of days in the year isn’t evenly divisible by any number larger than 5, unless I’m mistaken…

Yes, I was correct, unless you want to divide the year into 5 groups of 73 days.  That might be kind of fun, since 73 is one of those overlooked prime numbers, and it has the slight extra fun that its digits add up to 10, the base of our usual number system.

Still, especially considering the necessity of leap years (with the convoluted adding of days, removing of seconds, not adding a day when it’s the turn of a century unless it’s also the turn of a millennium and so on) it seems cumbersome to divide the year evenly.

I rather like the solution of making 12 months that are each 30 days long and having the remaining 5 (or 6) days be a period of celebration.  It could be held around one of the equinoxes or the solstices, or it could even be split up between two of them.  I’m inclined to put them at the end of the year, when the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere happens, because it’s long been a holiday time anyway.

Of course, this all biases against those in the southern hemisphere, but there are significantly fewer people in the southern hemisphere, or at least there were the last time I looked into it…

Yes, I was correct again, it seems.  According to my quick and dirty check, there are on the order of about a billion people in the southern hemisphere, as opposed to the remaining roughly seven billion people in the northern hemisphere.  I guess that means the winter solstice would be a good time for those separate days.  And I’ve not heard many Aussies complain about being able to go to the beach on Christmas or New Year.

Mind you, one could do that down where I live anyway, if one were so inclined.  I am not.  The beaches on the east coast of Florida are mostly annoying, and the Atlantic is not much fun for swimming.  The west coast of Florida, where one swims in the Gulf of Mexico, is much more pleasant.

I’m not a very big beach person at the best of times (or the worst of times) but I have quite a few pleasant memories of being on one or another beach on the Gulf (of Mexico).  They all date back to at least 33 years ago, though, so maybe it was just due to the nature of youth that I enjoyed them.

Alas, I’m not truly young anymore by most standards; I’m 954 years old.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Or, wait, maybe not.  I know that exoplanets have been discovered that orbit very close to their stars, and so have orbits that can be as short as a few Earth days (possibly fewer).  So, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, which it so far looks as though it is, and if there is no lower constraint due to the laws of physics on the length of possible “years”, then there exists, somewhere in spacetime, a planet by the years of which I would be 954 years old.

Actually, if spacetime is infinite, there should be an infinite number of such planets even if they happen only once within any cosmic horizon.  But let’s not get into that right now.

Let’s do the math; it’s simple and easy, so why not?  56 years old x 365.25 days in an Earth year makes me 20,454 days old, at least on my latest birthday.  Dividing that by 954, which is almost a thousand, should give a year length of roughly 20 days per year…okay, well, the “exact” number of 21 and 70/159 days per planetary year is what is required to make me 954 years old.

Actually, though, since the number of days in that hypothetical year is smaller than the time since my last Earthday birthday, I will have to adjust my days’ old age number to the precise one:  20,525 days, which if divided by 954 gives us a year length of 21 and 491/954 days, or 21.51 days (playing slightly free and loose with significant figures).  There will be a range of possibilities, of course, since I could be anywhere in the 21-ish day course of my 955th year and still be able to call myself 954 years old, if we go by similar conventions to those followed by humans on Earth.

Okay, well…that was sort of a weird digression.  I know, I’m weird, so maybe given that, a weird digression is, in a sense, not weird.  But given other considerations, it still is.

I am an odd person, I know (though I don’t know if I’m prime).  Sometimes‒rather often‒I think I’m losing my mind.  At other times, though, I think my mind is functioning within parameters, but it is contemplating things that are vast and potentially troubling to the feeble mortal ego if one does not drape oneself in the obscuring veil and cloak of delusion.  But my fabric sensitivity doesn’t allow me to tolerate such garments for long; you could say I lack PPE for such things.  Perhaps the secret is to destroy the ego (which may well just be an illusion, anyway), but that is more easily said than done.

Who knows?  Not I.

And yes, it’s “Not I” not “Not me”.  You wouldn’t say, “Me don’t know”, so you shouldn’t say “Not me” in response to the question “Who knows?”  Apologies to David Bowie and Nirvana‒but The Man Who Sold the World is a song, and so they are allowed poetic license.

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“I am still right here”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and in the American ordering of date numbers, the date is 12-3, (which means “December 3rd”, not “9”).  That’s mildly fun, since it has 1, 2, and 3 in order.  In 20 years, we’ll have 12-3-45, which is also kind of fun.  But we’re ignoring the century number, which ruins everything:  12-3-2045 if you “spell” it out.  See what I mean?  I guess in 2542 years we’ll have 12-3-4567.  That’s much more amusing, but odds are good that by that time, we’ll have different ways of representing the date, so it probably won’t work.

Oh, well.  Life is indeed unsatisfactoriness, or dukkha as you might say.  

I’ve been trying to find something interesting to read, but neither fiction nor nonfiction seems able to grab my attention.  I’ve tried reading books about computer science/machine learning, and about the nature of mathematics in general, and about political philosophy, and about physics, and so on.  I can’t seem to summon the energy to focus or get into any of them.

I did listen to the song Like A Stone by Audioslave* for the first time during the last several days.  I got the chords for it and everything.  I’ve played the video over and over (as I do) and practiced singing it and playing it myself.  It’s got a lot of barre chords, so it’s good exercise for my left hand (which can get very sore) but otherwise it’s fairly simple.

It’s a good song.  Even so, I can only distract myself with that for a short while at a time, and the whole thing is already losing interest for me.  But then again, so is Radiohead, and the Beatles, and Bowie, and Pink Floyd, and all those other people whose songs I play and sing for myself.  It’s all just been done, and it’s just me trying to amuse myself, like when I used to play tabletop RPGs alone as a teenager, rolling random encounters and making stories up based on those as I went along.

I almost wish I still had my old role-playing games, like Gamma World and DragonQuest and Villains and Vigilantes (and even D&D) as well as some dice and hex paper, so I could play again.  But probably, if I had them, I would find them boring, too.

I am not interested in online RPGs, especially not the MMORPG things, especially the ones with graphics.  I have no interest in playing role-playing games with strangers.  That’s an almost horrifying thought.

The problem is clearly with me in all of this.  I got spun off years ago from having any kind of the close and consistent social interaction (outside work and my interlude of prison) which had previously served to keep me more like a human.  Since then I’ve gotten, or felt, more and more…different.  I’ve always known I was weird, really, but in the past I had family and friends around to keep me from going off the rails too much.

It’s a bit like a neutron.  As you probably know, neutrons in a nucleus, where they interact with surrounding nucleons via the strong force, are stable effectively forever.  However, a neutron outside the nucleus decays with a half life of only about ten minutes.  That means that after an hour, only one in 64 such neutrons will not have yet decayed.  After two hours, that would be only one in 4096.  They will all decay eventually.

That’s just an analogy, but it’s apt, I think.  I am a free neutron (and cheap at twice the price!) and must decay before long.

I think I just don’t have any capacity actually to connect to any other beings, anymore.  I don’t feel as though there’s anyone whose interests even complement mine, let alone match up to any reasonable degree.  And when I try to interact with people at a more personal level, it tends before long to be the case that we are both awkward and uncomfortable (but especially me).

Oh, well, again.  I have no reason to expect things to be otherwise, nor to expect to find any “kindred spirit(s)” out there.  I’m way past tired of trying to change myself to fit in with other people, to try to make them happy.  I tried to do that in the past, really pretty much all the time; it slowly but surely wore me down and wore me out.  It never ended up working, anyway; at some point or other, everyone I love has, consciously or unconsciously, found me not worth the effort of being around.

And what have I become, my sweetest friend?  I’m a neutron, a sustained interaction between the up quark field, the down quark field, and the gluon field(s), and I will decay into a proton, an electron, and an electron-antineutrino.

Okay, I’m pushing that metaphor way too far, sorry.  Bottom line, I know I’m weird and unpleasant, and I am not worth the trouble even for myself, let alone anyone else.  If someone wanted to help me or save me, I couldn’t encourage them, not if I were being honest and kind, anyway.  I’m not a good pony, and I don’t recommend betting on me.  “I will let you down; I will make you hurt.”

*Quick Chris Cornell-centered “dad joke”:  Where does an Audioslave work?  In the Soundgarden behind the Temple of the Dog.

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How should I title this blog post?

I can’t really remember what I wrote about yesterday, other than the fact that at one point I referred to being grateful and in a footnote admitted that my gratitude was probably worthless, like most of my other feelings.  I remember all that mainly because of the comment (and my persistently and perversely negative reply) about it.

Yeah, I was very tired yesterday.

I got better sleep last night (i.e., the one from which I most recently arose and started writing this post, today) than the night before.  That’s not saying a huge lot‒I still woke up slightly after two am‒but it feels significantly better.  I guess to a person who has eaten only a can of tuna a day for weeks, an ordinary bologna sandwich with potato chips on the side would seem a feast*.

There’s that gratitude stuff I mentioned yesterday again, though in a more general sense.

Speaking of yesterday, I’m sure readers noticed that I titled yesterday’s post just “Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday”.  That is the format in which I name my blog posts as I save them when I write them.  It’s concise and specific, and could even be useful, in principle, to future archaeologists***.

It is not, of course, how I usually “headline” my blog posts here on the site.  Usually I’ll try to think of some pertinent phrase or play on words or quote that seems apposite****.  And of course on Thursdays I find a Shakespearean quote that seems vaguely pertinent and replace one of the words with some form of the word “blog”.  This is how the sausage is made, as they say.

But I wonder how my readers would like it if I just did perhaps every title but the ones on Thursday in that format I used yesterday.  Please do say; ink wiring minds want to know.

I’m serious (despite the weird wordplay).  Actually, I would be pleased to get most any kind of comments from more of you on a regular basis.  This blog is the vast majority of my personal interaction on almost any given day, apart from liking some posts on social media and occasionally adding a cynical comment.  Still, my request should be received like a broken barometer:  no pressure.

I suspect that the words in the footnotes of this post may so far outnumber those in the main body (though I’m not certain).  Somehow, that possibility makes me think of the “fact” that gut organisms outnumber all the human cells in a typical human by something like a factor of ten or so.  I’ll need to look that up to see if it’s true*****.

That’s not really important, though.  Actually, probably nothing in this post is particularly important, nor is anything in practically any other blog post I’ve written, nor in any other thing that I’ve written or otherwise created (with the exception of my children, who are important in and of themselves, quite apart even from their importance to me, which is very great indeed).

Of course, from the proper point of view, nothing is important.  And, similarly, from the proper point of view, everything is important.  But if everything is important, that is almost the same as saying that nothing is important.

Ah, whatevs.  I hope you all have a very nice day, whether it’s an important one or not.

*And since, surely, a feast is in the mouth of the consumer, then a feast it is.  This fact highlights the potential paucity of joy in a life where one can and does too readily indulge one’s appetites.  I think Aristotle and the Buddha would both have pertinent commentary on this matter, and so would Marcus Aurelius and his Stoic homies**.

**That might be a good name for a band.

***Such neo-Indiana Joneses will be exploring this part of the world of their past through digital digging rather than hunting through deserts and jungles and temples and tombs.  My blogs are stored digitally-only (as far as I know), in various places and formats, with some redundancy.  There are, on the other hand, physical versions of my fiction.

****I’m trying to think of a word that is the opposite of apposite but also contains the “-posite” ending, just for fun.  I think my sense of humor is rather similar to that of George Gamow.  Anyway, I haven’t thought of a good one yet, so I would welcome your suggestions.

*****Okay, I looked it up, and it turns out that the latest count that I could find among reliable outlets available on quite short notice, estimates the number of gut bacteria to be about 3.8 x 10^13, whereas their count/estimate of human cells in a typical person’s body is about 3.0 x 10^13.  That makes us only slightly outnumbered by our gut bacteria, contrary to popular understanding, of which I was one “victim”.  So, it’s 3.8/3, or 1.26666…, times as many bacterial as human cells.  That’s got to be closer to the ratio of footnote words to main body words in even the most pathologically footnoted****** of my blog posts.

******Like this one*******.

*******Although, even despite the many footnotes here and the relatively brief main body, the words in the footnotes are still outnumbered by those in the main body of this post.  Go ahead, check for yourself.

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How now, you secret, black, and midnight blogs!

Hello.  Good morning.

It’s Thursday.  It is, in fact, the 2nd Thursday in November, which means that, from the point of view of Thursdays in November, we are halfway to Thanksgiving (which in the US is the 4th Thursday in November).

Of course, we are not precisely halfway to Thanksgiving from the point of view of the days of the month of November overall.  Thanksgiving falls on the 27th of November this year‒14 days from today, of course‒so we are not quite halfway there as far as the days of November are concerned, but we are close to it.  If the month had started on a Friday, the halfway point in days versus Thursdays would be the same.

I think that the maximum disjunction would happen if the month began on a Thursday.  The 8th would then be the 2nd Thursday, and Thanksgiving would fall on the 22nd, which is quite a bit larger than 2 x 8.

Mind you, all this depends on starting one’s count in November.  That is not too unreasonable, but one could just as sensibly start counting Thursdays right at or after January 1st (let’s see, this year that’s 46/48 Thursdays, or about 95.833%).  If we did that, we would already be practically at Thanksgiving.  If we counted all days, we might be even closer still, percentage-wise.  Let’s see, 317/331, or about 95.770%.  Whataya know?  I was wrong, the Thursday one is “closer”.  I suspect this varies from year to year, but I’m not interested enough to check.

We could also begin our count at the beginning of autumn, which sort of seems appropriate.  Or, perhaps most sensibly still, we could start right after the previous Thanksgiving, beginning our counting on “Black Friday”.

Jeez Louise, I think I’m losing my mind, here.  Why am I writing about such nonsense?  I mean, yes, it’s interesting to notice how arbitrary and artificial human ways of counting days and things and so on are, so I suppose it’s somewhat edifying, and even could be mildly interesting for a moment.  But I nevertheless feel bad for wasting my readers’ time.

Though, I suppose, in a certain sense, one could say that all time is wasted‒“Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines” and all that.

“Where do we come from?  The dust.  Where do we go to?  The grave.”

Of course, that last quote was not meant to be a general description of the human condition, but refers to Ray Bradbury’s “October People” in Something Wicked This Way Comes.  I’ve always thought that I’m an October person, since I was born in October.  Like Macduff, in the play from which Bradbury’s title above is taken, I was a C-section, though it would be a hyperbolic* to say that I was “ripped untimely” from the womb.  (Still, does my manner of birth mean I could defeat Macbeth?)

October is over now, in any case, and who** knows if I shall see another.

I don’t know if anyone has ever written about “November People”, but they don’t sound particularly scary nor particularly inspiring.  This assessment is not meant to refer to people born in November!  Several of my favorite people were born in November.

In other news, I did receive my Principles of Neural Science yesterday.  I used my dollar coins to choose a section, and I read it in the afternoon:  it was about neural firing and muscular activation during locomotion, briefly comparing lamprey with vertebrate, especially mammalian, locomotion patterns.

It may seem trivial, and I didn’t learn much that I didn’t at least implicitly know before, but the specifics are new, and all information has the potential to be useful.  We cannot know for certain ahead of time what knowledge might be most beneficial, just as we cannot predict the specifics of progress and invention.

As I said, I chose the textbook page via my coin-flipping process, using my three Sacagawea coins.  I keep a few dollar coins with Susan B. Anthony and/or the aforementioned Sacagawea with me at all times.

I carry such coins not so much for decision-making but because I like to roll them across my fingers when I want to “stop my hands feeling busy”.  I guess it’s a form of “stimming”, and I’ve been doing that particular one since college.  I taught myself to do it after I saw Val Kilmer, as Chris Knight, doing it in the movie Real Genius, which was one of my favorite movies.

Well, this has been a lot of pointless nonsense today, hasn’t it?  I apologize, and I guess I can try to mitigate my offense by at least trying not to produce too much of nothing***.  So I will draw this post to a close now.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will very likely write a post tomorrow, so you can look forward to that, if it’s the sort of thing to which you look forward.

TTFN

*You know, like non-Euclidean geometry.

**The WHO does not know, though with a bit of background information they could probably make reasonable predictions.

***According to the song, that can make a man feel ill at ease.  It can also, according to the same song, make a man abuse a king, which seems like it would be quite a rare situation.

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“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t”

Well, first let me apologize for yesterday’s blog that largely concerned the weather, and in a trivial sense at that.  It was rather lamentable, I know, with emphasis on the first four letters of that adjective.

On the other hand, I don’t apologize for having had my little bit of fun with the date.  That may have been even less interesting to most of you than my jabbering on about the weather, but I like it.  I fully expect that I will do such things again.  For instance, in a similar vein, today is a bit fun because it is 11-12*, so the numbers are in appropriate ordinal sequence with no gaps.

That’s not very fun.  More fun will be had (by me, anyway) on Friday, when it will be 11-14-25.  If you don’t immediately see the fun there, it may help that a similar fun date next month will be available on 12-13-25.  This fun also works with the European date order (but in both you have to leave out the digits that denote the century).  Also, there were no equivalently fun dates in any month before October.

This is the most fun I’ve had on any kind of date in at least 16 years, I would guess.  That’s an easy call, because I haven’t been on any date at all in at least that long.  See what I did there with the multiple meanings of the word “date”?  Of course you did.  What do I think you are, a moron?

No, I do not think that.  You are reading a blog post, so you are a reader, which gives you a serious leg-up, moronia-wise.  You draw from the well of that greatest of all human inventions:  written language.  Your taste in reading material may be somewhat questionable, but I cannot legitimately complain about that.

Wow, I feel like I ought to be almost done with this post, but I’ve barely passed 300 words.

On to other things.  I’m going to try to do a better job about science reading during my downtime in the office.  It’s not that I’m completely slacking; I’m reading Shape by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, and I just read his earlier book How Not to Be Wrong.  I’ve read both before and/or listened to the audio books, but they are well worth rereading.  He’s a great math professor, and has a gift for explaining potentially abstract concepts.  I think he’s slightly better at this than Steven Strogatz, the author of The Joy of X and Infinite Powers, but they’re all good.

I also just yesterday gave in to an urge I’ve had for some time:  I ordered a textbook I liked in med school but which we didn’t really get into as deeply as I would like:  Principles of Neural Science, by Kandel et al.  The edition I had was by Kandel and Schwartz, if memory serves, but Dr. Schwartz is no longer involved, it seems.

It’s a textbook, so it’s pricey, even in paperback, but I discovered that I could put it on a payment plan through Amazon, so that’s what I did.  It arrives today.

I’ve also resolved, at least tentatively, to try to take the heat off my reading of my science books‒including the above newcomer‒by doing something I did when reviewing/studying in med school:  I would get a text that I was reviewing, and I would pick a section to read/review by flipping a coin.

Actually, it was a series of flips, each one dividing the “remaining” part of the book in half.  In other words, for the first flip, heads would mean I would look in the front half of the book, tails would mean the back half.  Then the next flip would decide to which half of that half I would narrow things down further.

Anyone who has spent any time dealing with computers and/or binary numbers can readily recognize that, with 10 flips of the coin, one could choose a specific page in a 1024 page book.  I guess every flip would count as a kind of “half-life” for the book’s pages.  If one wanted, one could even choose one’s pages not with a coin flip, which is not truly random, but with a quantum event that has a 50-50 chance, like measuring whether a given electron’s spin is up or down.

Of course, I don’t have a Stern-Gerlach gate, so I would have to “farm out” that process.  But I understand that there are apps that you can use that have their sources at labs where each decision is truly made by a quantum measurement.

It’s not terribly practical nor more useful for pickling book pages than is a coin flip, but if you’re a convinced advocate of the Everettian, “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, it has the added “benefit” that each “flip” will divide the universe into two “worlds”, one where you choose from the earlier half, another where you choose from the latter.

Coin flips do not enact such splitting, not in anything but the trivial sense that every quantum level interaction potentially does so.  The experience will be the same for you, though, except whatever glee you might derive from splitting the universe to choose a section to read.

Anyway, I’ll be trying to read my books, random section by random section.  Believe it or not, this works for me.  I don’t have to learn things in order, usually, and this method avoids me feeling bored while trying to trudge through a text in order.

Perhaps I do have some aspects of ADHD up in there in my brain.

Well, I’ve now passed my target length for this post by some margin, so I’ll call this enough for today.  I expect to be writing another post tomorrow, but like everything else**, it is not absolutely certain.  I hope you have a very good day.

*Only in the American style Month-Day-Year format, though.  It is less fun in the European Day-Month-Year format.

**Yes, even death and taxes, in principle.

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“Bright and early for the daily races, going nowhere, going nowhere…”

First of all, I would like to point out a bit of numerical fun we have regarding today’s day and date:  it’s November 11th, or 11-11.  That’s the case whether you’re using the US or the European date ordering system, since 11-11 is indistinguishable from 11-11.  It’s also Tuesday, and we have 2 of the same number with 2 of the same digits, which each add up to 2, so, two twos on Tuesday.  Fun!

Well, maybe things like that are only fun for me, but I have to try to entertain myself and find fun where I can; no one is gonna do it for me, that’s for sure.

Speaking of fun, what about this crazy weather?  I imagine it must be worse for the rest of the eastern US where this front or thing or what have you has had its effect, but it’s remarkable enough here in south Florida.

Yesterday, the high was 80F (I think that’s just under 27C‒or almost exactly 300K‒but I’m doing the figuring in my head while on the way to work, so I may be off), but now, this morning, it is 51F, and it is supposed to get lower before it starts warming up a little.  That’s a 29 degree drop (in Fahrenheit‒it’s roughly a 16 degree drop in Centigrade or Kelvin, which I guess would make the current temperature 11C or 284K) in about 12 hours.

This is one of the days I’m glad I’m not riding my “scooter”* anymore, because when you’re going over 70 on the highway and it’s 50ish degrees out, the effective wind chill is brutal.

For most of the US, especially up north, and for Canada, the weather down here is probably laughable.  Canadians would probably go swimming when it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10C), and not in a heated pool, either, but in one of those cold Canadian lakes.  I grew up in Michigan, so I’m not far from that background, myself; I swam in cold lakes and rivers quite a few times in my youth.  But of course, I’ve now lived in Florida for quite some time‒more than 2 decades‒so I’ve gotten a bit soft.

Ugh.  I’m doing a blog post about the weather!  I was even about to talk about whether I prefer it hot or cold, and to give my reasons.  I’ll let you guess, if you’re so inclined, but I need to veer away from this subject.  It’s one thing to discuss the science of weather and climate‒those are interesting and very nifty and important subjects‒or the mathematics of weather prediction.  But merely to talk about the weather is just too sad.

I already expect it will be the “hot topic” (ha ha) at the office this morning.

There are, of course, good, sound, biological reasons for people to be concerned about the weather.  But that is not what I’ve been discussing, is it?  I’ve just been discussing it because it’s a little bit out of the ordinary, and it’s easy to talk about the weather.  That doesn’t make it particularly fun or engaging, though.  For instance, I never did quite grasp the opening lyrics to the Tears For Fears song, Head Over Heels:  “I wanted to be with you alone and talk about the weather.”

Presumably this is some manner of love song, and in it the protagonist wants to talk to someone‒I presume*** the object of his affections‒about the weather?  I’m almost sure there’s more to it; perhaps it’s an expression of how gripping the loved one’s company is, such that even talking about the weather with them is something worth seeking.  I have to think there was depth there (I don’t know the song well), because these are the guys who wrote Everybody Wants to Rule the World, and also Mad World (though my favorite version of that latter song is not theirs but the cover done for the movie Donnie Darko).

I guess in some ways I am too literal-minded, but I do try to catch myself at it and make it into a joke when I can, which often works very well.

Speaking of literal jokes, here’s a little one I posted on Threads and Facebook and the website formerly known as Twitter yesterday.

I made the joke up on Sunday, when I walked past a (now-abandoned) furniture store which still had a sign out front like the one in my joke.  If you know me, you’ll understand why this joke occurred to me at that time.

That’s enough gibberish for now, I guess.  I’m certainly past 701 words.  I hope you all have as good a day as you could hope to have (even if it’s not necessarily as good as you could wish to have).  Stay warm, my friends.

*I used “scare quotes”** because it was a 650cc scooter, so basically it was a full-on motorcycle, just with continuously variable transmission.

**It wasn’t strictly necessary, but I couldn’t resist putting scare quotes around the term “scare quotes”.

***Though one must be careful.  As we all know, when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me, and that’s not as good a thing as it might have been in the past.

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It’s a prime day for a (slightly) shorter blog post

Morning has broken!

Does anyone out there know a good, reasonably priced morning repair service or person?  I really don’t have the money or time to go pick out and buy a new morning.

Ha ha.

Sorry.  I know that’s quite a stupid joke.  Still, it should give you some idea just how tired I am.

I should have been able to get a decent sleep last night, but I did not.  That shouldn’t be anything new to me, but some days the effects of the insomnia seem to pile up far more than on some other days.  And today is one of those “pile up” days, it seems.

Thus, I intend to make this a relatively short blog post today if I can.  To that end, I’m setting my “target” number of words to be 701 instead of the usual 800*.  701 has the added advantage of being a prime number, which always makes things at least a little bit better from my point of view.

It’s funny how, as numbers get bigger, there seem to be fewer primes (they fall off as something like the natural log of the number range at which you’re looking, if memory serves).  And yet, there are an infinite number of them‒the same “countable infinity” as the natural numbers, “aleph nought”:

Also, we have the twin primes conjecture‒which apparently most mathematicians think is correct‒that there are an infinite number of primes that are with 2 of each other.

It has apparently been proven that there are an infinite number of primes separated by no more than about 500 or some such (it’s probably a lower separation now, but I haven’t looked into it in a while).  That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but remember, we’re talking infinity here.  No matter how big the numbers get** you will never stop finding new sets of prime numbers that are no more than about 500 apart.

That’s not particularly useful to anyone but number theorists, I suppose, but it seems very interesting to me.

Incidentally, 701 is not part of a pair of twin primes, since 703 is not prime (it has four factors) and 699 is obviously divisible by 3.  And of course there is only one even prime (the number 2) because all other even numbers are divisible by 2.

Sorry, I know many people find these things boring, but I’m a fan of prime numbers.  In any case I’m trying not to be so negative in my blog posts, since I think it bothers a lot of people and may even be contagious at times.

It certainly doesn’t appear to do me any more good than does being a voice crying out in the wilderness, so to speak.  And despite the excellent biblical reference***, voices crying out in the wilderness usually are not heard or received by anyone or anything that can even understand them, let alone offer them any help.

I guess I can still talk about “imaginary” and complex numbers, because they just involve the square roots of negatives, but are not necessarily negative themselves****.  As long as I avoid multiplying them together, I should be able to steer relatively clear of negativity.

Ha ha, again.

I’m trying to try to avoid making other people miserable by expressing my own dark thoughts, so instead it seems I will make others miserable with my bad jokes.  You’re welcome.

Thinking about complex numbers makes me start feeling like I want to learn more about quaternions and spinors and so on, which seem truly fascinating, but about which I have only highly superficial knowledge.

It would be nice to learn more about them.  I probably will not, knowing me and my fatigued and distractible mind, but at least I can maybe be on the lookout for Numberphile videos about related subjects.  There’s at least one YouTube channel with a series on spinors.  Unfortunately, PBS Infinite Series stopped making new videos some time ago, but at least PBS Spacetime is still going strong, as are all of Brady Haran’s excellent channels.

And now, I’m over 701 (in the first draft), and so I’m done (for today at least).  I hope you all have a good day, and that your subsequent good days scale as the number of days, not as any logarithm thereof.

*I almost always go over my target, but at least it gives me a noteworthy place to decide it’s “time to wrap this up”.

**And there are described numbers so large that if you could memorize every digit of them, the information would be so concentrated as to turn your head into a black hole.

***It’s from the book of Isaiah.  John the Baptist supposedly quoted it and referred to himself as that voice, but then again, a lot of the writers of the “New Testament” shoehorned in references to supposed prophecy in the “Old Testament” to make the whole thing seem more sexy-cool (I guess).

****I just have to try to keep to the right upper quadrant of the complex plane.

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“The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older.”

Okay, well, here we are.  It’s Wednesday.  I don’t know what else there is to say about the day.  I guess…yeah, I don’t know.  It’s another day.  It’s a stretch of (roughly) 24 hours, the specifics depending on whether you’re using solar time or sidereal time or just the “self-contained” UTC time*.

UTC time is kept on a variety of clocks around the world and is based on the oscillations in the hyperfine transition frequency of the Caesium-133 atom.  That frequency has been defined as 9,192,631,770 Hz.  The international measuring community thing, whatever they call themselves, thereby agreed on defining the second as exactly 9,192,631,770 of those Caesium-133 oscillations.

Of course, oscillations of atoms, like all other processes that take time, slow down with increased spacetime curvature and with increasing speed relative to any given observer.  This is why the GPS satellites have to adjust their own time to account for both special and general relativity.  It’s pretty cool; you’re carrying proof of Einsteinian relativity in your smartphone.

You probably already knew that.

Then, of course, once they’ve decided on the precise value of a second‒knowing that the speed of light (or more precisely the speed of causality) is constant‒they then defined the meter as how far light travels (in a vacuum) in⁠ 1/299,792,458⁠ seconds (approximately 30 2/3 “vibrations” of a Caesium-133 atom).  Mind you, two observers moving relative to each other will see their meters as different each from the other, but c’est de la relativité.

It can be easy to imagine that definitions of units in science (and related fields) are not merely arbitrary but circular, almost tautological.  But really, given that these are attempts to codify specific attributes of reality itself, they would almost have to be self-referential with each other to be useful.

The length of a day is something that happens for real.  Thanks to the base 6 and 12 numbering system of the Babylonians, the day was long ago arbitrarily divided into 24 hours, each 60 minutes long, and each 60 seconds long, so a second was 1/(24 x 60 x 60) days or 1/86,400 of a day.

That worked well for a long time, especially since, before Galileo et al, humans couldn’t really measure time very precisely, anyway.  And then, until railroads allowed rapid travel between cities, it wasn’t necessary to worry too much about having the same time in different places.

But eventually that did become useful and necessary for many purposes, and eventually it was realized that a day wasn’t exactly what we were calling 24 hours, and indeed, that the length of a day varied slightly from day to day and year to year; also, a year isn’t a whole number of days long.  Also also, a day could be measured relative to the sun‒which is close enough that a day doesn’t end quite exactly after one full rotation since the Earth moves relative to the sun over the course of a day‒or with respect to distant stars, by which estimate a day comes closer to being exactly one complete rotation.

For most people most of the time, though, this precision, and that upon which it is based, are probably not merely irrelevant but unknown and unguessed.

Likewise, I don’t know how many people know about how Celsius made his temperature scale 100 degrees between the freezing and boiling of water at sea level pressure (a pretty reasonable choice, though I’m led to understand he initially had 100 assigned as the freezing point and 0 the boiling point!).

Then it was discovered that there existed a minimum possible temperature in principle, and they decided to set that scale, the Kelvin scale (named after William Thompson Scale**) using degrees of the same size as Celsius, but with zero defined as‒understandably enough‒absolute zero.

It’s all fairly interesting, if you’re in the right frame of mind.  But, alas, there’s every reason to suspect that all this information will be rendered moot and useless and perhaps even lost as the world winds down, or if life is replaced by artificial intelligence, or everything ends in some other way, as seems more than possible even in the relatively short term.

In any case, the laws of physics, as we know them, seem clearly to predict that the universe will tend toward ever-greater entropy and eventually all life, all structure will end.  Sometimes, I think it cannot happen soon enough for my taste.

Then again, there are cyclic universe proposals, such as Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.  It bases its model on the fact that entropy, though always tending to increase, is not really an absolute quantity, not a substance, and that our universe’s “maximal” entropy may be the next universe’s low-entropy beginning, just on different scales; it doesn’t even require any “inflationary” burst of expansion to explain the uniformity of the CMB, I think.  I haven’t yet finished Penrose’s book about CCC, because though he is a stunningly brilliant mind, his writing can be a bit plodding and dry.

I guess it’s hard for any person to be good at everything, though Penrose has many strengths.  If memory serves, he invented a set of shapes which can be used to tile an infinite plane (in principle) with no gaps and no repeating patterns.  Supposedly this has been proven to the satisfaction of professional geometers, though I am not familiar with that proof.  Still, if it is a mathematical proof, then it is one of those rare things that we know to be certainly true, given its set of axioms.

It’s not necessarily useful in any practical sense, of course.  For instance, I think it’s probably true that any tiling system that can tile an infinite plane without repeating could not be used to tile a closed, finite, simple geometrically shaped portion of a plane‒such as a rectangular room.  I think you would always have to cut some of the tiles as they reach the wall, no matter how big the room is, as long as it is finite.  I do not know this for certain, that’s just my intuition.

Well, I guess I’ve wasted space and time enough here for now.  It’s no more wasteful than has been my entire existence, I guess, but also no less wasteful.  Or is it?  I don’t know.  In any case, for now I will stop wasting your time.

Please have a good day.

*Yes, it’s probably redundant to say “UTC time”, but the order of the acronym is sort of Yoda-esque‒it did not originate with an English term‒so I feel it’s tolerable to use it this way here.

**That’s a joke.  He was really William Thompson, the first Baron Scale***.

***I mean the 1st Baron Kelvin, of course, all joking aside.  A baron scale sounds like some long forgotten and unused (i.e., barren) bit of laboratory apparatus, left for eons, gathering dust in an abandoned world, like the broken statue of Ozymandius.  It’s very sad.

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The blog and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing my Thursdaily blog post.  There’s not much more to say about it than that.  It’s terribly boring, isn’t it?  Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going on about, here or in the rest of my daily life.

I do, though, have one thing to ask out into the ether (not to be confused with the ethernet):  Does anyone know how to disable (permanently) the default “Aptos” font in the Microsoft Office applications?

I’m not asking merely to find out if there is such a person.  Presumably, someone at Microsoft will know how to disable that moronic and ugly font.  I’m more interested to know if someone among my readers can give me specific and clear instructions about how to do it.  Because if I never see Aptos again, that would be the only satisfying outcome with respect to that font for me.

Oh, also, can we find out how to disable their stupid AI “copilot” until someone asks for it, not make its irritating icon just pop up until you tell it “dismiss until next time I open this document” or whatever?  I don’t want it dismissed until next time.  I want it dismissed until sent for, which is unlikely to happen (but not impossible, which is why I say just to disable it until called for rather than, as with Aptos, permanently deleting it).

All that, noble readers*, is about as interesting as my life gets for the most part.  I am not walking/have not walked today, because I still feel worn out and terribly stiff and uncomfortable, and my left knee is still sore.  All of this does not help my chronic pain, either (other than helping it to persist and to become more prominent).  At least I have a tighter brace on my left knee today, as well as on the other knee (that would be my right knee, which hopefully is obvious).

I wear a brace on the right knee both to prophylax against it developing pain and to keep things even.  I’ve noticed that if I do that, I get fewer blisters on my right foot than if I walk with a brace only on my left, problematic knee.  This implies (to me) that the brace on the left knee shifts the way I walk overall enough to change the pressure points on my right foot when I’m stepping, and thus there develops increased abrasion in between my first two toes on that foot.

Exciting stuff, isn’t it?

I’m being facetious, of course, but maybe that isn’t clear.  Maybe this is all dull** and it’s hard even to tell when I’m not being serious.  I don’t know what to say, though.  Obviously.  But just as obviously, I will keeping saying things despite not having anything of merit to say.  I’ll even allow myself to use one-word sentence fragments for emphasis, because I suspect my subject matter is too dull to allow merely usual written language to keep the reader engaged, so I must resort to cheap rhetorical tricks of writing to imitate verbal communication in some ways.

I wish I had something more to discuss, some interesting subject, some curious conundrum—or even a conundrum that doesn’t have any interest in learning about anything.  Alas, as far as I can tell, I have no such thing.  I’m very frustrated by the pain that makes exercising so difficult, and by the fact that I have so much trouble with bicycles—though at least part of those difficulties would probably be better if I weighed less.

Okay, here’s a mildly interesting thing:  at the end of that last paragraph (1st draft only, I fear), I had written exactly 666 words.  Those of you embedded in a culture that has historically been influenced by Christian mysticism will know that number to be the one supposedly given by “St. John the Divine”*** as the number of “The Beast”, the so-called antichrist.

Now, Sinjun there made it clear he wasn’t writing blatantly and obviously but giving some kind of cryptic hint—I suppose it’s a good way to keep readers engaged and imagining silly things for at least a few millennia so far.  He wrote something along the lines of, “Here is wisdom.  Let him who hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and the number is six hundred, three-score, and six.”  (This is the English translation, of course.  It was apparently originally written in Greek, which I neither read nor speak.)

However, much to what ought to be the embarrassment of all those credulous bumpkins who have been frightened of that rather banal number for so long, it’s my understanding that in the oldest surviving version of the text of Synjon’s apocalypse****, the number of the beast was actually 616!

How did the beast manipulate the process of translation and get the scholars to mis-record the number as 666?

Okay, well, I don’t think any “beast” actually did that, but it’s a funny fact that so many people have it wrong, considering how susceptible people are to numerology.  At least I can have some sympathy for such a thing, for I love numbers in general, and 666 does have a nice symmetry and charm to it.  It’s not as symmetric as 888 or 000, but maybe that subtle lack of symmetry adds to its grip on the mind.

And, of course, “1 and 1 and 1 is three…got to be good lookin’, ‘cause he’s so hard to see”.

Come together?  Well, don’t do it over me.  And there’s no urgency, so feel free to do it right now or not.  Otherwise, try to have a good day.

TTFN

*I think reading is noble, if the what we call nobility matters at all and is based on anything of real worth.

**It’s a bit weird how “all” and “dull” are almost, but not quite, rhyming words.

***Not the author of the Gospel of John.  I guess “John” has just always been a common name.  Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named either John or Robert, it seems.

****That’s just a synonym for “revelation”, by the way.  It doesn’t specifically mean the end of the world, it’s just become associated with the notion.  And Armageddon is named after a neighborhood near Jerusalem, I think:  Megiddo (I’ve probably misspelled it).  And “holocaust”, which apparently comes from middle English through French and Latin and Greek and even Hebrew, has a meaning that’s fairly plain when you break it down:  “holo-“, meaning everything, as in “hologram”, and “-caust”, relating to burning, as in “caustic”.  So, “burning everything”.  Nifty, huh?