numbers

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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.

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Or art thou but a virus of the mind, a false creation?

It’s Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 (CE or AD) as I write this.  I’m aware of no superstition in which Tuesday the 13th is either particularly unlucky or particularly lucky.  It’s just a day, even though it’s the 13th.  There are 13ths in every month, after all, though 31sts are another matter (it’s another prime number and is also a palindrome, if you will, of the 13th).

I do somewhat enjoy the fact that the numbers in the (American) expression of the date are: 01-13 and 2026.  Taking non-zero digits only of the month and century only would give us a situation in which the digits of the second half‒2, 2, and 6‒are twice the digits of the first half‒1, 1, and 3.

That’s quite tortured, I know, as far as finding patterns in numbers goes.  At least I’m just doing this for fun, because I enjoy such patterns.  I don’t see any real meaning in them other than “numbers are cool”.  But there are people who believe there is a deeper meaning in such number patterns, like some secret cypher left there by the gods.  It’s rather silly.  But it is of such mistaken attribution to purpose of mere random patterns that religions (and constellations) are made.  More’s the pity.

I have a bit of sympathy for our distant ancestors who first were left to make “meanings” of the various patterns and events they discerned among the various forces in the world with their big, advanced brains but couldn’t yet explain well.  So, they made up stories, and those stories involved the forces of nature being enacted and designed by “people” or sometimes just one “person”.  People were what they knew best.

It’s understandable.  It’s also just wrong (certainly as far as I can tell), as are most initial hypotheses.  Unfortunately, other people respond to those who speak with confidence, whether that confidence is warranted or not*.  And so, they believe.  And like viruses (which are just a kind of self-replicating data, after all) the superstitious ideas are able to use the machinery of human minds to reproduce themselves‒not because they want to reproduce themselves, but because the ones that tend to reproduce themselves tend to multiply, and even to mutate to greater reproduction and persistence and so on.

In case it’s not clear, I am not speaking metaphorically here.  This appears to be the way that religions and other ideologies occur and propagate.  There are, of course, many details at the level of individuals and why they are prone to absorb and then to pass these memeplexes on, either “horizontally” or “vertically” or both.

But there are similar such details in how specific viruses spread.  Does COVID latch onto this or that cell surface protein or glycopeptide?  Does it reproduce in this particular cell type better or another one?  Does it lead to sneezing or coughing in its host, thus making it airborne, or does it induce vomiting and/or diarrhea, making it more food or water borne, or does it reproduce in the organs of reproduction, leading it to be mainly sexually transmitted?  The details matter in dealing with specific viruses, but the pattern of origin and spread and mutation is general.

From these patterns, we can understand (for instance) why rapidly and aggressively lethal viruses tend to be replaced by more sublethal ones:  if your host dies too quickly, you don’t get as many chances to spread.  This requires no intentionality on the part of the virus.  It requires only the logic of replication, in which successful replicators tend to spread more than less successful ones and so come to dominate.

The competition requires no consciousness.  Similarly, religion does not require the existence of any actual deity to be able to cause people to believe in one.  And a religion’s prevalence doesn’t imply that it is correct, only that it is contagious and/or persistent but not instantly lethal.

We see cases of new and/or mutated mind viruses (religions in this case) that are indeed too virulent and so fail to become endemic,  Think of Jonestown, or the Branch Davidians, or Heaven’s Gate (and possibly Trumpism, but we shall see).

It’s possible for a virus that has existed in a body unnoticed or with minimal symptoms and signs for years or decades to respond to changes in the circumstances of its body by becoming more virulent again‒think of shingles (Zoster) the recrudescence of Chicken Pox (Varicella), or the horrible flare-ups (flares-up?) of some chronic hepatitides.

Similarly, just because the human race has endured so far with reasonable success despite being infected with various competing and mutually contradictory memeplexes does not mean it will continue to do so.  Certain of these mind virus variants have the clear potential to lead to globally life-threatening symptoms, and more than one shows signs of doing so.

But why would a virus, whether of the mind or of the body, do things that would lead to the destruction of the host it inhabits, and thereby itself?  That question misses the point***.  Viral evolution (like all such evolution) has no capacity to plan for the future.  It may seem that viruses mean to spread themselves, but that’s only because the ones that don’t tend, by their nature, to spread themselves don’t become prevalent; they don’t spread.

On the other hand, those that have, by chance, comparative advantage in terms of replication tend to replicate more and thus become more prevalent.  And if they mutate (which they will, see my point yesterday about how copying is never perfect) then those mutant forms that are more prone to replicate will replicate more, and of course, those mutants that have decreased the tendency to replicate or that destroy the host do not persist.  There’s no need for purpose; causality is enough.

This post is getting a little long for today, so I’ll draw it to a close.  I could say more on this subject and how the concept of the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators explains far more than just the literal evolution of life, but can provide insight into so much more, so many things.  Darwin was a mightier mind than he could ever know, or at least he came upon an idea that is more powerful than nearly any other that science has found.

Think on that, and be amazed.

*We’re living through some consequences of humans’ stupid tendency to trust people who convey confidence and certainty, even while telling patent lies.  Maybe we should hope for global thermonuclear war.  If humans survive it, maybe they would finally learn from that dreadful lesson**.

**But I doubt it.

***So why did I raise it?  For rhetorical purposes, though I have real discomfort with and distrust of rhetoric, it being one of the things that can help virulent mind viruses spread.

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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.