numbers

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Nihil vere refert. Quisque videre potest. Nihil vere refert. Nihil vere mihi refert.

Well, I did warn you yesterday that I would be writing a blog post today*.  Go ahead, take a look.

Yesterday’s post was another of my recent, deliberately benign blog posts, not dwelling on my mental health and chronic pain issues, because nobody gives a shit about those things, or at least they don’t want to have to hear about them, because they’re not going to (be able to) do anything about them, and that makes them feel guilty and uncomfortable, which is unpleasantly awkward.

So, anyway, it’s the last day of February in 2026.  We are, in a certain sense, one sixth of the way through the year.

I say “in a certain sense” because it’s not precisely true.  Today is the (31 + 28)th day of the year, so the 59th day of the year.  If that were literally a sixth of the way through the year, the year would only be 354 days long.

It’s somewhat interesting to note here that, because February is shorter than every other month, the first two months of the year are shorter than any subsequent, nonoverlapping** months of the year.  And, let’s see, the first three months of the year have 90 days exactly on non leap years, whereas April thru June have 91, July through September have 92, and October through December also have 92.  So, all the later groups of three months have more days than the first three‒except on leap years, when January through March is 91 days.

Evidently, though, the latter six months of the year always have more days than the first six.  I wonder why they did it that way.  Was there an actual reason or did it just sort of happen?

Of course, I know they can’t be equal except on a leap year, since the number of days in a year is odd.  But why couldn’t they have come up with a way that made the years alternate, with one year‒the odd years perhaps‒having the surplus in the first 6 months and the other years having it in the last 6 months?  On leap years they could be equal.

How might that work?  We need 182 days divided by six months, which means we need four months which have just 30 days and two that have 31.  We could say January and February have 30, March has 31, and then repeat with April, May, and June and then July, August, and September***.  I was about to suggest that on odd years we make January have 31 days and on even years we make July have 31 days, but all leap years are even years, so the latter half would be comparatively short-changed with respect to years in which they are longer. if we add the leap year day to the first half as we do now.

On the other hand, we could put the leap day always in the 2nd half of the year, perhaps in November, or even more sensibly in December:  we would thereby add our extra day to the very end of the year, rather than squeezing it into the earlier part of the year like someone cutting into a line.  Though that would make the second half two days longer than the first, though, which is unpleasantly asymmetrical in a year with an even number of days.

Of course, really, all days are fungible.  I remember seeing on QI once that apparently some sect maintained that they added an extra day not at the end of February but in the middle; I don’t recall precisely where they thought the day was being inserted, alas, but I can imagine some alternative, anatomical suggestions I’d like to make for them.

Days of a month are fungible (dammit!).  It makes no more sense to say that you added a day into the middle of February and pushed subsequent days later than it does to say that you deposited $100 into your bank account right after the 256th dollar that was already there, pushing what had been dollars 257 through 356 to become dollars 357 through 456.  Every dollar is just “a dollar”, every cent is just “a cent”.  It’s rather reminiscent of the way every electron is interchangeable with every other electron (likewise for all other elementary “particles”).

So, on leap years, the extra day of the year is and can only be (in our current system) the 29th of February, because that’s the day-label that isn’t there in other years.

You’re allowed to imagine if you like that you’re adding a day to the middle of the month and pushing the other days back and renaming them.  You’re also free to argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or to debate, without first agreeing on word usages****, whether unattended trees that fall in forests make noises.  That doesn’t mean you’re doing anything that has any bearing on the real world.

Okay, well, that’s been much ado about nothing, hasn’t it?  Or, multum strepitus de nihilo fuit, as is apparently the way to say it in Latin, which almost always sounds fancier, though it doesn’t always sound better aesthetically (consider the above headline’s Latin versus the original English).  English is‒or can be‒quite a beautiful language if you take a step back and see it as if from outside.  It can be hard to distinguish that beauty “from within”, though, because the meanings and usages of the words involved can distract from their inherent loveliness.

Tolkien, for instance, wrote that he thought the most beautiful sounding phrase in English was “cellar door”.  I’m not sure I agree with him on this, but it’s a matter of taste, so there’s no slight, or “diss” or “shade”, involved in not both liking the same thing.

Enough nonsense for now, or at least enough nonsense here in this blog for now.  I’m sure that there is plenty of nonsense to be had elsewhere.  Do try to find some that’s enjoyable for you this weekend.

*That was unless I was lucky enough to get very sick or very injured or to die, which I have apparently not been lucky enough to do by this time.

**I say “nonoverlapping” because February and March combined contain the same number of days as January and February combined.

***I think in the final three months it should be October that always has 31 days, because Halloween really should fall on a day that’s a prime number, not a 30th or a 1st.

****Most such debates tend to devolve into discussions about the “definition” of the word “noise”, as if that were concrete and singular and fixed‒which it is not‒rather than the laws of physics and biology that constrain all the actual events of such an arboreal catastrophe.

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Our wills and fates do so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown; Our blogs are ours, their ends none of our own.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 26th of February in 2026, a date that’s only very slightly interesting whether you write it as 2-26-2026 or 26-2-2026.  The fact that you have repeated 2s and repeated 26s is somewhat entertaining, but the zero throws potential symmetries off, making it not nearly as much fun as it could conceivably be.  It’s a shame, really.  I suppose you could write it as 26-02-2026 and rescue a bit of symmetry, but that feels like reaching.  It’s not quite symmetrical anyway, unless one is writing in base-26 or higher.  No, wait, even that wouldn’t work.

I don’t know about what I’m going to write this morning.  That in itself, of course, is nothing unusual.  But I don’t feel that I have much to say about anything at the moment.  I don’t want to get into my depression and ASD and anxiety and chronic pain and insomnia and just general moribund state, because I’m sure no one wants to hear about it anymore, and in any case, there seems to be no way anyone can do anything about it that’s useful, which makes it all the more frustrating.  Writing about it certainly hasn’t cured or even improved my state much, if at all.

Anyway, as I said the other day, you have been put on notice.  Unless you just started reading my blog for the first time yesterday, you’ve no right to act fucking surprised no matter what happens.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.

Now, let’s see, what should I write today?  I could discuss some topics in science, especially physics, though I also have literal, legally recognized expertise in biology, and I know a lot about quite a few other branches of science as well.  This is because I have always been curious about how the world, the universe, actually and literally works on the largest and on the most fundamental scales.

I mean, yes, humans also have their rules and laws and social mores and antisocial morays and all that nonsense, but if you step back even a bit, you can see nearly all human behavior encapsulated by basic primatology.  If you know how the various monkeys and gibbons and gorillas and chimpanzees behave‒especially their commonalities‒human behavior almost always fits right in.  It’s usually not even very atypical.

That doesn’t make the specifics of behavior very easily predictable in any given case, necessarily; then again, we understand an awful lot about the weather and the climate, but the specifics of tomorrow’s weather are tough to predict precisely and accurately, let alone next week’s weather.  Nevertheless, the physics of longer term climate effects of certain kinds of atmospheric gases is almost trivial.

Anyway, humans are too annoying to be very interesting, except in special circumstances.  In this, they are perhaps a bit like cockroaches.  From the point of view of a scientist who studies them, they can be interesting, and from just the right angle and with the right detachment, they can even be beautiful (or some of them can).  But overall, they are merely large masses of highly redundant little skitterers, just doing their shit-eating and reproducing and infesting almost every possible location.

Which type of creature did I mean to describe just now?  See if you can figure it out.

Of course, on closer scales, cognitive neuroscience and neurodevelopment and related stuff, such as “neural” networks, “deep” learning, and other such areas are fascinating.  One thing interesting about them is how all the things that brains and computers and so on are and do are implicit in the laws of physics‒clearly they are some of the things that stuff in the universe can do‒and yet, for all we know, they have only ever happened here, just this once in all the vast and possibly infinite cosmos*.

And for all we can tell, given the human proclivity to plan about 20 Planck units ahead and then after that trust to luck, this could be the only place they occur, and their time will not continue much longer, certainly not on a cosmic scale.

I could be wrong about that…except in the sense that, since I am stating it merely as one of the possibilities, I am not actually wrong at all.  Even if humans do survive into cosmic time scales and become cosmically significant, it will still not be easily debatable that it could have happened that humans would go extinct and would fail to go anywhere but Earth.

Of course, depending on the question of determinism, I suppose one could say that if humans (or their descendants) become cosmically significant then there literally was nothing else that could have happened, at least as seen from outside, at the “end”.

On the other hand, if Everettian quantum mechanics is the best description of the fundamental nature of reality, then in some sense, every quantum possibility actually happens “somewhere” in the universal quantum wave function, though those variations may not include all conceivably possible human outcomes.

Some things that seem as though they should be possible may simply never happen to occur (or occur to happen?) anywhere in the possible states of the universe.  That feels as though it should be unlikely, given how many possible states can be locally evolved in the quantum wave function, but I don’t think we know enough to be sure.

Okay, well, I vaguely hope that this has been mildly interesting and perhaps thought provoking.  It would be enjoyable to get more feedback and thoughts, but I don’t have a very large readership, and only a certain small percentage of people ever seem to interact with written material in any case, so I’m probably lucky to get the feedback that I get.

TTFN

*With the inescapable caveat that, if the universe is spatially and/or temporally infinite, and if as it seems there are only a finite number of differentiable quantum states in any given region of spacetime (the upper limit of which is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of the given region) then every local thing that happens, and all possible variations thereof, “happen” an infinite number of times.  But given that all these regions are more or less absolutely physically distinct and incapable of “communicating” one with another, they can be considered isolated instances in a “multiverse” rather than parts of the same “local universe”.

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“‘Cause I’m your superhero. We are standing on the edge…”

Well, it’s Friday the 13th.  That’s at least one good thing about today.  And, of course, next month will also have a Friday the 13th, as I’ve noted previously (I don’t know specifically in which post I noted it, and I don’t really have the urge to go figure it out, so I’ll leave that to you to do if you’re interested).

It is slightly interesting to think about the fact that, on average, one of every seven Februarys will have a Friday the 13th, but not all of those will then lead to a subsequent Friday the 13th in March, because every 4th February will have 29 days*, by the Gregorian calendar, which is the one the world uses overall.

So, the total fraction of years with dual Fridays the 13th would be something like 1/7 minus a further ¼ of that one seventh—so 4/28 (i.e., 1/7) minus 1/28 (1/4 x 1/7), which leads us to the rough conclusion that only three out of 28 years will entail February and March each having a Friday the 13th.  That’s slightly less than one out of every nine years.  And since I’m 56, which is twice 28, I should have experienced about 6 such years in my life (perhaps counting this year).

Mind you, the numbers aren’t quite right overall.  The Gregorian calendar waives the extra day in February on years that are divisible by 100, i.e., the turns of centuries.  However, there’s a further exception to that:  the turn of a millennium, like what we all just had in the year 2000, does keep its 29 days in February.  So that brings the average closer to the raw number, but doesn’t account for the extra  ones that happen at more ordinary turns of centuries.

Of course, the only turn of a century through which I have lived—and through which I am likely to live**—was indeed the turn of a millennium, so I guess for me, the fraction 3/28 should be fairly accurate.

I could, if I were so inclined, go back to the first year in which I experienced a February—that would be 1970 (AD or CE)—and work through them to find out just how many dual Fridays the 13th I’ve experienced.  With modern computer-based calendars it would even be relatively easy.  But I don’t think I am so inclined.

Okay, that’s enough of that for now.  Actually, it’s probably too much of that, at least from any normal person’s (i.e., not my) perspective.  On to other things.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, and I wrote yesterday’s post on the lapcom as well; I am doing this partly to spare my thumbs, but also to try to encourage myself to use the lapcom more and maybe even to write fiction again.  I don’t know whether or not that will happen, but it’s also just more natural for me to use the lapcom.  I’ve been typing, in one way or another, since I was 11 years old, if memory serves.  Clearly I have not been using a smartphone nearly that long, because they have not existed for that long.

Also, even when I saw the imagined future tech on Start Trek:  The Next Generation of tablets with virtual keyboards, I thought they looked like a terrible idea.  How lame, how unaesthetic, just to tap at a flat screen with no real keys.  Also, the “keys” on such devices in the real world are too effing small to be used to type in any traditional way.  Not but what one can get to be pretty speedy with them—I can zip along pretty well on my smartphone—but it’s nothing compared to being able to use one’s whole set of fingers to write.

Although, I’ve often touted the value of writing things longhand before retyping them into the computer, especially for fiction, because it can slow one down beneficially.  I did that—because I had no choice, being at the time a guest of the Florida DOC—with Mark Red, with The Chasm and the Collision, and with the “short” story Paradox City.  I don’t know whether they come across as better or worse or indistinguishable from the stories I have written directly onto the computer.

I would say that they might tend to be shorter, but Paradox City is a nominally short story that was about 60 hand-written pages long, so that didn’t make things much shorter.  Also, I think The Chasm and the Collision is longer than Son of Man, but that may just be a function of the nature of those stories.

Certainly Unanimity is longer than anything else I’ve written, by quite a margin, but that surprised me as much as it might anyone else.  I just started writing the story and it ended up taking that long to tell it.  That happens.  Outlaw’s Mind began as an idea for a short story, but there was definitely a lot there implicitly, even in the original idea, that made it unreasonable to plan to make it “short”.

Anyway, if any readers of this blog have also read my stories and have noticed any tendency toward difference between the initially handwritten and the entirely computer written (meaning written on a computer, not by a computer, unless one is referring to me as a computer) ones, I’d be pleased to get your feedback.

In other personal news, well…my pain is leveling off a bit, though my leg joints still feel loose and floppy and unstable, so I have to be careful, and I have my general persistent tension and neuropathic discomfort in my lower body.  I’ve tried to adjust (and decrease) my workout a bit to compensate, and that seems to be doing some good, but I cannot go without working out, because that tends to make my pain worse.

My mood is pretty much as it usually is, but I’ll spare you that hellscape out of courtesy.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I am not supposed to be working this weekend.  If that changes—in other words, if I do work—I guess I’ll write a post.  Though, really, I should try to get back into Outlaw’s Mind and finish what I had started earliest so I could then get on to newer things.  And if wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in manure***.

Tomorrow is also Valentine’s Day, but this is of no relevance to me, and that holiday hasn’t been relevant to me for more than 15 years, possibly quite a bit more.  It is not likely to be relevant to me again this side of the grave (and even less likely to be relevant on the other side).

I hope you all have a good weekend, even those of you who have loved ones with whom you can revel in the romance of the holiday.  It’s not your fault that you piss me off.

*This means, of course, that there will be some March Fridays the 13th in years where there was no February Friday the 13th.  If my figuring is correct, those will be the leap-year Februarys in which the 13th falls on a Thursday.

**If I were to be alive in 2100, I would be 130 years old, which would make me even with the Old Took, and which would be substantially older than any human is known to have lived.

***And ironically, any wishes for the manure to go away would just make things worse!

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My way of life is blogg’d into the sere, the yellow leaf

Hello and good morning.

TTFN

Ha.  Ha.  Sorry about that.  Just, honestly, I don’t really feel much like writing right now.  There are no other twos here today (at least, I’m not going to be talking about them, except to the extent that saying that I’m not talking about them constitutes talking about them).

Actually, wait.  I will make a relatively fun note that includes the number two, since it just occurred to me that today is the fifth:  If you add (or if anyone else adds) the first two prime numbers together, they give you the third one.  2 + 3 = 5.

This is the only place in all the infinite realm of the prime numbers in which you will be able to add two consecutive primes to get the next prime, because all prime numbers except two are odd, and if you add (or anyone else adds) two odd numbers together, you (or they or he or she) will get an even number.  And the only even prime is two.

Actually, it’s worth noting that one can add two primes that are not consecutive to get a third prime.  If one takes any of the first member of a set of twin primes* and adds two (that solitary even prime) to it, one will get the second of the pair of twin primes.  This may be able to be done in an infinite number of cases; it’s thought that there are an infinite number of twin primes, i.e., that there is no largest twin primes set.

However, this has not been proven yet (as far as I know) though work has been done on it and progress has been made.  I won’t get much more into it than this, except to say that apparently a lot of the work has been done by large, decentralized groups of mathematicians (professionals and amateurs) through a site called “polymath”, if my memory is correct.

Now that is an excellent name for a collaborative mathematics website.

Oy, there I go again, talking about trivia about prime numbers and so on.  Maybe it would make sense for me to get into these things if I were truly involved, but I’m a spectator of mathematics (apart from my truly useless invention of the gleeb**, a number which, when multiplied by 0 gives you 1).  So my interest is entirely esoteric and reflected.  I apologize to those of you who find it tiring.  To those of you who like it, I’ll say “You’re welcome”.

You’re welcome.

See, I told you I would say it.  And then I said it.  I guess that’s one point in my favor.

I’m not sure there are any others.  At least, none of them appear to me to be in my favor.  I am all but completely worn out.  I’m running on fumes, or whatever other metaphor one might want to apply that is applicable (since applying inapplicable ones is stupid) and my incessant pain continues to wear me down, adding to my depression, and eroding what little joy I have left.

I really have wanted so often just to hang it up.  I came relatively close yesterday afternoon and considered leaving a “post” that just said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”  The would be the title and the content.

I didn’t do it, of course, which you can tell by looking, if you are so inclined***.  But I came closer than I’ve come before, at least subjectively speaking.  Last week—I think it was—I posted a similar sentence on most of my social media, just the line “I don’t know if I can do all this much longer.”  I’ll embed a screen shot here:

 

So, fair warning is being given, here and elsewhere.  The fire alarm is giving off little warning beeps.  The readout dial is high in the yellow range, perhaps already inching into the red.  Creaking sounds and little wisps of steel and concrete dust are issuing from the support beams of the bridge.  Small tremors and puffs of escaping steam are increasing in frequency near the hitherto dormant volcano.  There’s a red sky in the morning, today****.

But, I appear not to be able to stop yet.  I’m not yet able to escape.  I’m still pushing the stupid boulder up the stupid hill, like the stupid idiot that I am.  I’m even writing this blog post on my lapcom for the first time in two weeks (well, this is the first time at all that I’m writing this blog post, but hopefully you know what I mean), just because I felt mildly nostalgic.

One of these days, though, I’ll be able to end my blog post with just “TT” instead of “TTFN”, and it won’t be over just for now but finally and for good—not just the blog but everything.  And I don’t know if that will be sad or a relief for anyone out there, but I hardly think it will be a tragedy, nor will it be more than little noted, and it will certainly not be long remembered.

But for now, I must needs sign off with the annoyingly non-climactic

TTFN

*Primes that are two apart from each other, such as 29 and 31, or 137 and 139.

**Seriously, I worked out a lot of the algebra that involves it and everything (for instance, it turns out that a gleeb squared is still a gleeb, and 1 over a gleeb equals 0).  I’m sure I discussed it in a previous blog post.  If I can find which one without much trouble, I’ll leave the link here.

***In principle, you can tell by looking even if you are not so inclined, but you simply will not tell because you won’t look.  Should that count, then, as a “can” situation if it’s not physical impossibility but mental disinterest that leads one never to do a thing?  If it simply will not ever happen, can one not just then say that it cannot happen?  Are “cannot” and “shall not” synonymous here, as when Ian McKellen misspoke his most famous line when facing the balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring?

****This may be true somewhere—it probably is, come to think of it—but it’s not true for me, because it’s still fully dark as I write this; the sun is not even lightening the eastern horizon yet.  I’m just being melodramatic.

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どうも ありがとう Mister ロバあと

It’s Wednesday the 4th of February (02-04-2026 in the US).  The best I can currently think of to say about today’s date is that it is composed entirely of even digits‒twos, zeroes, a four, a six‒which is at least uniform in a sense.  But it’s rather boring, too.

Admittedly, most people probably find any such evaluation of dates with respect to numerical patterns boring.  I would apologize, but it’s not as though anyone is forcing anyone else to read my blog.  If someone were doing so (and I wouldn’t necessarily try to stop them), I’d like to think I would have a far larger circulation than I have.

As it is, my circulation is roughly 5 liters.  Ha ha.  That’s a (lame) joke regarding the volume of blood in a typical adult human body.

While I may not feel as though I am a member of the same species as most humans, I recognize that my gross physiology is basically the same, and so my blood volume should be comparable.  My body just doesn’t seem to work quite as well as that of the average person, at least in some senses.  For instance, my chronic pain has continued to attack me with exceptional aggression over the past several days; yesterday was particularly bad, and today is not shaping up well so far.

Not that this is anything new.  I’ve been in chronic pain every day for a quarter of a century now (though I suppose when it had just begun one would not call it “chronic”), if my memory is accurate, which it usually is.  That’s just a bit longer than my youngest has been alive.  It’s not pleasant (though my youngest is), and at least partly in consequence of my chronic pain, neither am I.

I do think that my outlook and my personality would be much better if I did not have pain every day.  I would probably sleep better, as well.  I almost certainly would not have gotten involved in trying to treat other people’s chronic pain in less than ideal circumstances, and so would have avoided at least some catastrophes that happened because of that (apparently misguided) intention.

Still, I’ve been prone to depression since I was in my early teens, well before the onset of my chronic pain, so maybe I’ve always been unpleasant.  And though I didn’t know it, I’ve had ASD all my life (even after the heart-based ASD I had was corrected through open-heart surgery when I was 18).

That’s a weird coincidence of acronyms, isn’t it, those two kinds of ASDs in one person*?  It can be rather confusing when the same acronym signifies two quite different things.  Still, there are only so many 3-letter acronyms available.  The maximum number in English is 26 to the 3rd power, or 17,576.

You might think that ought to be more than enough for there to be no overlap, but of course, acronyms aren’t merely randomly chosen letters.  They need to signify something specific in order for them to be useful, and far more words start with A or S or D, for instances, than start with X or Z or Q.

It’s a bit like dealing with words in general.  In principle, a word of a particular length (let’s use the variable x to signify that length) in English could be any one of 26 to the xth power possibilities.  But English is not a random cipher, and there are many possible orderings of letters than are not “allowed” in English, because they don’t produce any plausible sound.  English is, of course, a written version of a spoken language.  If a word can’t even be pronounced, it’s not much of a word.

One cannot, for instance, have a word that consists of all consonants (certainly none are coming to my** mind).  One could produce strings of consonants that could be sounded out, I suppose; one could for instance pronounce the string “mrndl” pretty readily, I think.  But that’s just generally unwieldy, and in some languages it cannot be done.

In Japanese, for instance, all but one pair of kana representing sounds/syllables (hiragana for native words, katakana for imported words) are of the “consonant-vowel” sound type (e.g., ha, ke, ni, su, to, etc.) or just vowels (e.g., a, i, u, e, o).  Only the “n” syllable stands alone (sometimes pronounced as almost “m” depending on the context) and it occurs only at the ends of words.  Thus, in the game of shiritori***, if a player says a word that ends with “n”, they lose, because the next person cannot possibly begin a subsequent word.

How did I go from discussing the uninteresting digits of today’s date to the game of shiritori?  I suppose I’ll find out when I do my editing.  It is strange, though, even to me.  I can only imagine how bizarre and confusing it must be for others to read my blog posts.  With that in mind, I’ll cease this particular crime against humanity or against logic or reason or whatever for now.  Please accept my apologies, and hopefully you will have a good day.

[P.S. The above headline would be transliterated as “Doumo arigatou, Mister Robaato”, which can be meant as “Thank you very much, Mister Roboto” (as in the Styx song) or as “Thank you very much, Mister Robert.”  Curious, ne?]

*Actually, there is a higher incidence of cardiac ASDs, as well as several other atypia that I have (such as a cavum septum pellucidum) in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD than in the neurotypical population.  Interesting, isn’t it?

**Wait a moment‒the word “my” is superficially composed of two consonants, isn’t it?  Well, in a sense that’s true, but this is one of those cases we were taught about in elementary school in which the letter “y” acts as a vowel.

***(しりとり)  In this game, one person says a word, and the next person has then to say another word that begins with the same syllable with which the previous word ended.  It goes on until one player cannot think of a word that hasn’t already been used or until someone uses a word ending with “n”.

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Is it possible for there to be too many twos on a Tuesday (in month 2)?

It’s Tuesday the 3rd of February today.  It would have been better if Tuesday was the second of February, because then there would have been many numeral twos in today’s date to go along with the rhyming “tue” in the day’s name.

Actually, you know what, let me check something…

…nope, the 2nd of February in 2022 fell on a Wednesday, it seems.  Oh, but wait.  2-22-2022 did fall on a Tuesday!  I can’t believe I didn’t remember that fact, nor do I remember that day.  I’m slightly ashamed of myself for that.

Well, at least this month started on a Sunday, which means it will have a Friday the 13th.  That’s not going to be this Friday, of course‒that will be the 6th, which is inescapable when Tuesday is the 3rd‒but the next one.

Oh, and this is a non-leap-year February, and thus has only 28 days (which is exactly 4 weeks).  That means that March will also have a Friday the 13th, since it too will start on a Sunday.  That’s pretty much as good as it gets with respect to Friday the 13ths; this is the only situation (in our current date-reckoning system) in which we can get two months in a row with Fridays the 13th.  So, huzzah!

It doesn’t actually matter, of course; I attach no mystical significance, good or bad, to any particular kind of date (even a first date, which is something I haven’t experienced in at least a decade and a half).  I just think it’s amusing to celebrate and enjoy a date that is a prime number (my favorite prime number) and of which some people in the west have a bizarre superstitious fear.

Indeed, the fear of that date is so real but so absurd that there’s a whole quite silly and famous series of slasher movies which went by that name.

Thinking about the Friday the 13th movies makes me think about the peculiar stochasticity of creative franchises.  The first of those movies had as its villain (spoiler alert!!) the mother of Jason; she was killing camp counselors as a sort of displaced revenge against the counselors who had been having sex while her son (Jason) drowned* in Crystal Lake while swimming unsupervised.

One might think she would accept some responsibility, herself.  If she’d raised the stupid little fuck even half competently, he might have known not to swim in the lake unsupervised.

And where the hell was she anyway?  She worked for Camp Crystal Lake, supposedly.  When the “drowning” occurred, it was clearly not a regular camp session, or there would have been other kids around, at least.  And the counselors would be unlikely to be having sex in the middle of the day while a bunch of other kids were around.  I suppose it’s possible Jason snuck out at night, in which case:  he was the one most directly responsible, but his mother should have raised him better and should have been keeping an eye on him.

I’m taking this too seriously, I know.  But I do hate when people seek revenge on, or simply blame, a type of person rather than the actual specific person or people who did them wrong.  It’s not that I think that revenge is always a mistake; there are clearly evolutionary reasons why people are prone to take revenge against (perceived) wrongdoers.  Still, that tendency evolved in humans (or their ancestors) that lived in relatively small groups where everyone knew each other, so who did what was usually pretty clear and specific.

However, to hold some group of people to task who are merely similar in some way to someone who (from your point of view) did you wrong is not merely morally reprehensible, it is intellectually indefensible, and as a matter of character it is just pathetic.  It’s very much just another kind of bigotry, and all bigotry is a profound and contemptible intellectual and moral failure, no matter by whom and in which direction.

But I digress.  I was making a point about how franchises evolve from their starting points if they go on for very long (if I remember correctly).

By the second installment of the Friday the 13th movies, Jason‒the boy (?!) who supposedly drowned‒was somehow now the killer, and he wore a burlap sack mask.  Then in the 3rd movie (in 3D!) he took from one of his victims the hockey mask that became his trademark.  And so it went.

I suppose it’s not surprising that a franchise made by lots of different people over many different years should evolve over time.  But even when something creative is done entirely by one person, things can change in interesting ways that would not necessarily be predictable, certainly in their specifics, ahead of time (and it’s more or less by definition impossible to predict something after the fact).

I’ve mentioned this happening with comic strips, citing the examples of Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes, both of which showed striking differences as they matured from their initial, raw forms.  Likewise, the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett developed into much more sophisticated and interesting novels over time (though even the first ones were very good and very funny).

Of course, we’ve all seen this happen to long-running TV shows, some of which initially grow and become more complex only to “jump the shark”** in the end, others of which mature into things of real quality, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, after somewhat uneven beginnings.

And, speaking of things jumping the shark, I don’t even remember if I had a coherent idea for this blog post, but if I did, it’s gone now (and my blog overall has certainly morphed from its original form and intention).  So, given that, I’ll bring this post to a close before I embarrass myself even more than I usually do.

I hope you all have a good day, for whatever such hopes are worth.  I suspect they’re not really worth very much, but then, neither am I.

*Though he was somehow alive for the sequels and was a grown man with bizarre deformities.  But if he was alive, and had been alive (since he had supposedly been a boy when he “drowned” but was fully grown in the remaining movies), then why was his mother so pissed off?

**Literally, in at least one case.

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Should I write on Substack? Should I not write at all?

Well, first, today’s date is a bit boring; it’s just riddled with even numbers.  Even numbers, of course, are almost never prime‒out of all the infinite prime numbers that exist, only one is an even number, and that’s the even number:  2.  Likewise, out of all the infinite even numbers, only 2 is prime.

Now, you might point out that there is a 2 in today’s date; in fact there is more than one (har):  1-28-2026.  However, each of those twos reads, almost inescapably, as part of a larger, non-prime* number‒28, 20 (or 2000), 26.  So, they lose their charm.

And that’s my weird, number-related nonsense out of the way for now.

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day, but I’ve done my best to get a head start on that this week, to the degree possible.  We’ll see whether or not that does me any good.  Well, I will see.  I doubt any of you will see, and you probably won’t know in any sense.  I guess I might share it here on this blog, if it sticks in my mind enough for me to mention it, but I doubt that will happen.  It seems unlikely that anyone would care, anyway.

The cliché thing to add at the end there wanted to be “but never say never”.  However, that expression annoys me, partly because it includes the word “never” twice while admonishing others not to use it.  Of course, I recognize that to be deliberate verbal irony, but I don’t find it very clever.

My preference is to say something like “never is a long time” when admonishing someone against making sweeping, “never”-related statements.  Or, if someone says something like, “they were supposed to get back to me, but they never did,” I will often say, “Never hasn’t happened yet.  They just haven’t gotten back to you so far.”

No, actually, I don’t have any (local) friends.  Why do you ask?

I still haven’t received any feedback regarding the Substack question.  In fact, the only feedback I’ve received of any kind has been from the two people who are basically the only people who comment on my blog.  It’s nice to get feedback from them, of course, but I would welcome others as well.  And I would really appreciate someone’s thoughts about the Substack and/or monetization idea.

I don’t know.  Maybe to be able to monetize one’s (nonfiction) writing, one needs to have some consistent shtick or something‒a focus on politics or medicine or philosophy or what have you.  Whereas I don’t even know what I’m going to discuss until I’m already discussing it**.  Is that the sort of thing that could sustain a paying audience?  I don’t know.

I would like to get some broader feedback on this, but I don’t know how to elicit that feedback except by asking here.  It’s not as though I have anyone else to whom I can talk about this kind of thing.  I barely have anyone to whom I can talk about anything.

I guess I could just try to “fake it until I make it” with a more focused blog, obeying an idiotic admonition that people recall only because it rhymes.

Now, I’m fond of lyrics and good poetry so I appreciate rhymes, but rhyme does not equal reason; in other words, don’t fall for someone saying something like, “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

If anything, if someone tries to convince you using a rhyme, veer in the other direction from accepting what they say.  When people have good reasons for something, they don’t require clever verbosity to persuade a reasonable person.  I say “persuade”, but that’s really being a bit disrespectful to the notion of true persuasion.  Using the “rhyme as reason” fallacy is really a form of dishonest manipulation, as is the willful application of many fallacies when trying to influence another’s thoughts.

Anyway, I don’t want to fake it with respect to having a particular focus or agenda in a blog or other series of writing.  I’ve been faking being human all my life, and that’s more than exhausting enough.  Also, as time goes by, and I see more and more of the things humans do and the ways that humans do things, I’m thinking maybe trying to act like one of them isn’t such a well-advised undertaking.  Maybe humans are vastly overrated.

Then again, so are most other life forms on the planet.  Perhaps phytoplankton/cyanobacteria are the only innocent life forms on Earth (and I’m far from certain of their innocence).  Of course, since no being had any choice in being the being that it’s being, one could say that every life form is innocent, and that’s fair enough, but then the very concepts of innocence and guilt become nearly useless.  Maybe they should be.  Maybe they tend to mislead and muddle people’s thinking.

I don’t know what I’m on about with all this.  I suppose I’ll see how I got to this point when I edit the post.  I doubt it will be terribly enlightening, but it’s not impossible.

That’s enough for today, though.  If any readers do have any thoughts about the Substack idea or anything else, I would be interested to hear them.  And, yes, I would hear them even if they are just written on the page (or, rather, the screen), because when I read, I hear what I’m reading in my head; that’s how I read.  So there.

I hope you have a very good day.

*I think the official term is “composite number” but I don’t think they need (or deserve) a special name.  They are just non-primes.

**I’m using the word “discuss” fairly broadly here, since usually I’m the only one “talking”, and it’s not clear whether or not that counts as a discussion.

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I’m having difficulty coming up with a headline

Well, it’s Monday, 1-26-2026 (in the American ordering of dates), a sequence which is mildly but not very interesting because of the repeated “26”.  Now, come February 26th, writing the date in the more European fashion would be 26-02-2026, which will be almost palindromic, but not quite.  So that would be a sort of tease date, in a way.

None of it matters, of course.  Now, if there were a 62nd of February I would be somewhat tickled on that day.  Of course, in a way, you could say that the 3rd of April is the 62nd of February, if my math is correct.  I think that’s right.  Let’s see, there are 28 days in February (no more than that this year), then 31 days in March, which adds up to 59 days.  Then 3 more days will get you 62, so yeah, April 3rd.

Sorry, I know that’s probably terribly uninteresting to anyone but me.  A lot of things are like that.

I was able to get a decent night’s sleep on Saturday night by sedating myself with a combination of three (or so) different (legal and “over the counter”) medications.  Of course, I cannot do that on a weeknight or I will be useless the next day*.

Not to say that I’m particularly useful at any other time, but at least I can think with some clarity.  My emotions may tumble about‒though evidently they rarely if ever show on my face‒but at least I have a sharp mentality most of the time.  In fact, if I were able to bring myself into more durable focus, I think I could be more mentally acute than I’ve ever been in the past.

That’s because, although I’ve been through a lot of failures over time, I am at least always trying to learn, and I succeed in that quite often.  Whether or not I learn the things that are most interesting and/or most useful is another question.  But it’s hard to know for sure ahead of time what will be most useful to know, so it’s probably best to try to learn as much, about as many things, as well as you possibly can.

That’s probably as wise as I ever get.  Enjoy.

Let’s see, what else should I talk about?  I don’t know.  Is there anything you’re interested in discussing?  Do you have any questions for me that you would like answered**?

I suppose today I shall have to deal with the new format for entering the blog onto WordPress, which is somewhat irritating, because it is more difficult to read as I’m editing, and it is less user friendly.  I am at least half heartedly considering moving my blog to Substack (or something).  I have an account there, anyway, and quite a few of the people whose ideas interest me seem to publish there.

It’s a bit of a no-frills site, where you don’t make your page into a fancy-looking thing, you just publish your stuff, but it has its own sort of built-in social media thing where you can make the equivalent of tweets and respond to those of other people.  And, of course, it has a built-in capacity to set up paid subscriptions for people who want them, and one can choose which things are paywalled and which are not.

To be fair, WordPress has that capacity now, as well, but I’ve never seen it used nor looked too much into using it.  If any of my readers know about it and how it stacks up against other things, such as Patreon (and Substack) please let me know about your experience.  I would greatly appreciate it.

Of course, this is all pie in the sky thinking on my part.  I doubt that anyone cares either way, in any case.  And I don’t know if I’m going to crash and burn sometime in the near future.  I feel that the event is approaching rapidly, but I’ve felt that way often and for a long time, and yet against all odds (and certainly not by popular demand) I am still here.  I’m sort of like the world’s most verbose toenail fungus, in a way.

Anyway, I think this is enough for today.  Again, if any of you have experience with Substack, or with Patreon, or even with the subscription models on WordPress (this site is hosted through WordPress), I would appreciate your feedback.

In any case, I do hope that you have a good day.

*I will not, though, sleep more if I use this on weeknights‒I know this from bitter experience.  Something in my mind overrides even medication (within reason) and still wakes me up stupidly early on any day that I have anything to do, whether it’s work or laundry or what have you.  But the cumulative effects of pharmacological intervention nevertheless dull and slow my mind, so I feel worse very quickly.  Believe me, I’ve tried.

**I make no promise that I will answer just any question you might ask, but I will try to be forthcoming if I can.  I wouldn’t want to discourage someone who is taking an interest; such people are rare.

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Minding primes and priming minds

It’s Monday the 19th of January (in 2026 CA or AD).  19 is a nice prime number, but it’s one people don’t think about very often.  Stephen King turned it into an “evil” number in his extended universe, which is much less obvious and predictable than using the unjustly maligned number 13.  I’ve always* liked that he did that.  It was clearly chosen at least partly because it was (and remains, and always will be) a prime number.  But it’s not an obvious one.  So, nice job King-sensei (not that he needs my moral support, though I would welcome such support from him).

I occasionally think about mailing Stephen King a copy of one of my books just on the off chance that he might read it some day when he’s bored.  If I were to develop the chutzpah to do such a thing, what do those of you who have read my stories think would be the best one to send him?

Take your time, and don’t be shy.  I’d love to hear from all…what, one of you?  Two?

I don’t think there could be three, but I could be wrong.

Returning to the topic of prime numbers, I had a cool thing happen on Friday:  I bought some stuff at the local convenience store, and my total was $19.07.  I looked at it for a moment and thought that it was a cool-seeming number.  I know 19 and 7 are both prime, and the digits don’t add up to a multiple of 3, nor is the total number a multiple of 4 or 5, obviously.  I wondered if it might be prime.

Back in the day, I would have had to check that more or less manually, but nowadays, I was able just to type into the search bar “Is 1907 prime?”

It is!  Or so claims Google.  If necessary, I could check it myself, by hand, though that would be laborious.  I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to write a quick computer program to check all the possible factors (among numbers less than 954**).  I doubt that I will do either thing, though.  I’m pretty confident in Google on this point.

And now, having said that, I’m starting to feel uncertain.  Could Google be wrong about this?  Am I really going to have to check for myself?

I remember when I realized I had never seen the Pythagorean Theorem proven mathematically (I grew up in a declining school system, sorry).  So, I had to prove it to myself to my own satisfaction, which I did.  Thankfully, it’s easier to prove something like that when the answer (so to speak) is well known.

Okay, enough numeracy, or whatever the best term for the preceding matters might be.

I did not work on Saturday, which is why I didn’t write a blog post on Saturday.  The office was open, but my coworker was able to come in, and the boss specifically told me to take the day off.  Apparently, my exhaustion really was beginning to show, even to other people, which seems not to be the usual case.

Of course, having one day of actual rest doesn’t cure my situation, but it is a minor respite.  I have more fundamental issues than mere rest or lack thereof, but I am not sure there is any way to fix them, at least not in practice.

In principle, of course, it must be possible at least to improve the settings in my brain‒tweak this set of synapses and adjust sensitivity to this or that neurotransmitter, increase (or decrease) the blood flow to this and that region of the brain, etc.  That sort of thing, done precisely and judiciously, could in principle correct or adjust any parameter of brain function one might want, in whatever ways lie within the realm of the brain’s potential.

We’re a long way from being able to carry out such manipulations, and it’s by no means certain that we will exist long enough for neuroscience to achieve such things.  But there’s no principle of nature that precludes it.

Of course, people might be quite leery of even researching such things, even when we finally know enough to do so.  After all, if we can adjust the brain specifically and precisely to make it less depressed or less anxious or less forgetful, we can adjust it in other ways, too.  One could adjust someone’s brain to make them fall in love with a particular other person, like the mythical old magic love potion.  I think most people would rather not fall in love that way (though there’s no reason to think such love would be any less delightful to experience than ordinary, clumsy, stochastic love such as what we have now).

Indeed, one could adjust human minds to make them happy, no matter what the circumstances.  Of course, this could well be used to dominate whole populations of people; one could keep them under constant control because they would be happy, and you could keep them motivated and loyal and satisfied with whatever their lot might be.  I think most people would find that notion repugnant, but it is at least somewhat morally ambiguous, because such people would be as legitimately happy as anyone who becomes happy “on their own”.  Indeed, they might well be happier than any person had ever been before, and more “well-adjusted”, and more creative, and more psychologically healthy.

I get near some of these concerns in my book(s) Unanimity:  Book 1 and Unanimity:  Book 2.  I wouldn’t say those specific ideas figure centrally, though matters of mind and free will and the nature of a person’s character and how it can be changed by physical events are a big part of it.  Also, all sorts of horrible things happen, since it is a horror novel.  And there’s a lot of room for all of it, since it’s as long (total) as the unabridged The Stand and It, to bring us back to Stephen King.

With that, I guess I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, I won’t already be exhausted by tomorrow.  I hope you have a good day.  And if any of you know Stephen King, please ask him which of my books he might think he would want to read.  I’d really appreciate it.

*Well, not always.  I didn’t like it before it happened or before I knew about it.

**Incidentally, 953, which is the rounded-down answer to 1907 divided by 2, is also a prime number.  That’s kind of nice.

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“The numbers don’t decide”

I don’t have any fun numerical trivia to notice about the numbers of the date today, which is Wednesday (1-14-2026), by the way.  It’s not that I’m saying there are no potential fun numerical comparisons or patterns or what have you in the numbers of the date today, just that there aren’t any that stuck out for me, which probably means that there aren’t any which I would think are fun.

Prime numbers and palindromic numbers are probably my favorites of these kinds of things.  But although the primes are considered the “atoms” of the number world by those who study such things specifically—I guess those would be number theorists—there are many situations in which there are no obvious prime numbers.  I suppose the same is true of actual atoms, come to think of it.  When was the last time you encountered a single, naked atom in the wild, so to speak?

Anyway, I’m not really interested in “talking” about that right now.  I’m not really all that interested in much of anything.  I know, I know, this is getting ridiculous, I keep writing one relatively upbeat or at least engaged* post, and then I turn somber and negative on the next one.  Well, rest assured, in case you weren’t already, I feel generally glum and somber during the day even on those days when I write posts in which I’m truly interested, like yesterday’s.  You just have the good fortune not to be around me.

Even among those who are around me, such as the people at work—actually, there’s no “such as”, these are the only people around me except on truly rare occasions—there’s probably not much of a clue as to my glumness.  Apparently, my moods and feelings don’t show on my face, even when I become aware of them consciously, which can tend to be rare (I appear to have a degree of alexithymia).

So, even when I feel that I’m not sure I can make it through the rest of a given day, let alone through any more significant time, no one seems to notice.  There are and have been people at the office who have dealt with drug and alcohol problems, legal issues, erratic life choices, sporadic attendance, stuff like that, and they get at least tacit moral support and even help; there are various resources in the community to assist them that are readily available, and our culture lionizes those who recover from drug problems, even as often as they might backslide.

I just have a dysfunctional brain, or so it seems, and the useful resources to help that (without insurance) are about as prevalent as icicles in Death Valley.  And unless you’ve truly gone down the tubes with those inherent mental health issues, no one gives seems to give you much moral support or encouragement, let alone congratulations, if you’re working on them.

By the way, speaking of drug problems, I was on constant opioids (including the dreaded fentanyl, the patch, in my case) for chronic pain for several years, .  I weaned myself off of them by myself, by my own choice, because I decided they were doing me more harm than good.  This is, of course, different from kicking an actual addiction—very different—but still, I have to try to find something about which I can brag.  Or wait, do I really have to do that?  Probably not.

I’m trying to do things to help myself mentally.  I’ve been reading a new (to me) book that deals with Adlerian psychology and philosophy, for instance.  So far it’s pretty good, but it’s not as insightful or useful (again, so far) as are things like Stoicism and Vipassana and the Tao Te Ching and so on.

I’m also trying to do more with brilliant dot org, which is a truly lovely app that can be used to study various STEM fields.  I did some problems on it in circuits yesterday—I had started that course months ago—but they are so far very basic.  There’s a lot of “drilling” on this app, but when it’s simple stuff it can get a bit tedious.  I guess that might be good.  Doing scales for piano practice is boring but very useful.

I want to get back into the math and science on the site.  I would love to complete every course they offer.  I would love to read every last bit of the textbooks and similar that I have in my mini-library at the office (I’ve added a few things since taking the latest picture).

I would love to learn everything that is learnable, to be honest, but to focus on the scientific before getting to things like literary and other criticism and such like.  As for political “science”, well…I think it’s probably still about at the stage of alchemy right now, and it may never get beyond that.

Unfortunately, my attention span is troublesome.  I get interested in one thing and/or idea and try to immerse myself in it, but then something distracts me soon enough, and some other interest draws me.  I do end up learning about a lot of esoteric subjects that way, though in bits and pieces**.  My ex-wife was always at least mildly annoyed by the number of books I had sitting on my bedside table, most either laid open or with numerous bookmarks.

Still, it would be good to do something until the “end” before moving on to the next thing.  At the very least, it would give me a sense of accomplishment.  I was doing that pretty well with my fiction, starting while I was a guest of the Florida DOC—I would finish a given book (or short story) completely, including editing and, once I was out, publishing before starting the next one.  This was a big deal, because my fiction writing used to suffer from the same issues of my scattered brain described above.

I have veered off that trajectory in recent years, alas.  I now have no fewer than three “begun” stories that I haven’t yet finished.  And no, I haven’t gotten any work done on any of them recently.  I’m too stressed out and worn out, and I am, at bottom, thoroughly alone here.  It’s really very difficult many days just to force myself to continue at all.  Also, disappointing and stupid events throughout the country and the world make that all the more difficult.

I hope you all are having a better time than I am.  I wish for you to be well, however useless such wishes may be.

P.S. Okay, well, if you look at (01-14-2026), you can make each of the digits of the year by adding digits of the month and date, without reusing any given month-date digit for any given year digit.  1 + 1 gives you the 2s, 0 gives you the 0, 4 + 1 + 1 gets you the 6.  That’s pretty lame though, even to me.

*I don’t know whether or not they are engaging posts (a phrase that sounds like an alternative expression for “hitching post”).

**Perhaps the fact that I seem to have to do things this way at least contributes to durability in my understanding, because I keep having to pick up where I left off months and even years ago.  Over time, I have gotten pretty good at being able to do that, and to be able very quickly, usually within the space of a paragraph or at most a page, to remember what was “going on” when I last was reading the book.  Yay, me.