numbers

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What do you call an infinite number of finite and separate beings? Maybe just “reality”.

I don’t really have much to say today.  Not that such a thing usually prevents me from running off at the keyboard (or the smartphone in this case) for stupid lengths on any given day.  But I think it may do so today, because my energy is flagging, and it’s only just very early in the morning.

I suppose today’s date is mildly entertaining:  it’s 7-7-2026, and that is the same in either the USian or the European way of ordering the day and the month.  But that’s pretty unremarkable.  Any day of a month in which the ordinal* number for the day is the same as the ordinal number for the month will produce this.  There are, thus, 12 such days every year, and they are the same days every year.  So, they are not very exciting.

I guess it would have been better back in 2007 (07-07-07), or even better, in 1977 (7-7-77).  But then it would only be fun if you drop the two digits for the century (i.e., 20… or 19…).  It’s not great, is it?

I don’t know.  What should I talk about, here with my shouting into the void and gazing into the abyss and jumping into the conclusion?

That latter expression almost sounds like a euphemism for dying, doesn’t it?  Is it like skipping to the end of a mystery novel?  Probably not, because I’m very close to being certain that, unlike the end of a mystery novel, nothing will be revealed when one dies.

By that, I don’t mean that the truth will be revealed and it will be that there is nothing.  It’s more subtle than that.  I mean nothing of any kind will be revealed to you, because that to which the revelation might occur is what will cease entirely‒in a way, that happens every moment, but not in quite the same way as it will (I suspect) at the time of death.

Of course, I could be wrong about this, in principle.  But I am not “agnostic” in the usual sense of simply not having any inkling one way or another about a question.  I think there are good, strong reasons‒based on all we know of physics and biology and mathematics, and on how many different mythologies there are about “life after death” and how much they stink of desperate human fear and wish-fulfillment, how anthropocentric they are, when clearly the universe is not anthropocentric‒to think that death is simply the dissolution of the four-dimensional pattern that was a person, a sort of re-annihilation of “virtual particles” back to the vacuum state of the quantum field.

In a spatially infinite universe (or in some other version of a multiverse) it seems to be that there will exist other versions of you, both identical ones and nearly-identical ones, as well as quite different ones, including ones that inexplicably have all the memories of being other versions of you.  But they will not literally have been you, and there will be a much higher proportion of “you” that will have random memories of every possible kind of nonsense.

Of course, none of these versions of you can violate the laws of physics**.

And they aren’t really you, are they?  If they were, you might be experiencing everything any version of you is experiencing now, and you are not.  There are strong impediments to such a simultaneous experience of infinite lives, not the least of which is the relativistic impossibility of information traveling at infinite speed, as well as the incoherence of the concept of “simultaneity” for objects with spatial separation (if this is not obvious, I encourage you to look into special relativity).

So, yeah.  You are the state of your being right now, and that state is always changing (not randomly, though a lot of it does seem to be stochastic).  There is not a much better description of “you” for accuracy, though there can be more precise and thorough descriptions of the details.

There could be a billion or a googol or Tree-3 number of “identical” copies of you, but each one would be just a separate “you”, no more a literal part of your being than would be your former womb-mate if you were one of a pair of identical twins.

Reality can be disappointing, though that’s really only if you think you have any right to expect it to be otherwise than it is.  And you don’t have any such right.

Have a good day if you can.

*I think it’s ordinal, not cardinal, in this case, but I’m not too sure.  I’ll look it up.

**I truly despise expressions, usually found in clickbait headlines, such as “this or that finding breaks physics” or “this shouldn’t happen, according to physics”.  No.  Nothing breaks physics.  Nothing that happens “should not” happen according to physics, because physics is what describes what is out there in reality.  If something seems to defy physics, that just shows that we don’t understand physics well enough.  Such things are not generally frightening or worrisome to physicists (and other scientists); these things get them motivated, for they reveal places where we can learn new things about the universe.  Scientists, ceteris paribus, love finding things no one understands.  Science knows it doesn’t know everything***, and what’s more, science kind of loves that it doesn’t know everything.  That’s part of the excitement, the challenge, the possibility of growth.

***If it thought it knew everything, it would cease.

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Drop and give me twenty! (The prime factors of twenty, I mean)

It’s another lapcom blog post today, for the second day in a row.  Huzzah!

That doesn’t really count as any kind of streak—though no doubt WordPress will send me an automatically-generated “You’re on a streak!” message, since that’s apparently something that encourages people to keep using the site regularly.

I guess it would be nice if I were going for some kind of personal record—if I were trying to write as many days in a row as possible, for instance—to be aware of how many I had done without having to keep track of it myself.  And, I guess, if you’re recording streaks, you have to start somewhere, and the smallest possible streak is two.  You don’t really want to count one as a streak, because then everything is a streak and it loses much of its meaning.

This is somewhat analogous to the reason that 1 is not considered a prime number, though you cannot deny (correctly, anyway) that it is divisible without reminder only by one and itself (which is also one).  But for mathematical purposes dealing with primes, this would be a rather useless add-on to the set.

It would also make deciding the number of prime factors of a number pointless, instead of being specific and fixed for each number.  As it is, without one counted as a prime, it is specific and fixed.  For instance, the prime factors of 36 are 2, 2, 3, 3.  But if 1 were considered a prime, you could have 1, 2, 2, 3, 3 or 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, with any arbitrary number of 1s, because every 1 would not change the final product of those primes.  You could have an endless string of ones if you wanted.  And so, the number of prime factors of any given number would be up for grabs, whereas right now it’s fixed.

I know, I know, it’s not terribly important in day to day life for you to think about such things.  Some people are disdainful of even learning about such things unless they have a direct impact on their lives in a clear and obvious and simpleminded way (emphasis on the “simpleminded” there).

There are people who make jokes about the fact that they learned the Pythagorean theorem and don’t use it, or that they know how to do square roots but don’t really need them, or learned the quadratic equation and haven’t used it since that class in high school (or college, maybe).

Such people perhaps think that the point of doing push-ups or bench presses or squats or lat pull-downs is to get really good at doing push-ups or bench presses or squats or lat pull-downs.  They may imagine that the reason to do toe touches is to get really good at touching your toes, and if you’re not going to try to do that, then don’t do toe-touches.  These people probably think that everyone who jogs regularly is doing it so they can get better and better at jogging.

I think you probably see my point, but I’ll make it explicitly.  The purpose for all that physical exercise is not to get good at doing calisthenics (or whatever), not for the vast majority of people.  It’s to be comes stronger, fitter, more flexible, to develop better endurance, so that you will have those capacities to bring to bear on any other task in life.  In many, many matters, being physically fit will make a person more effective.  Sometimes it can even save someone’s life.

Likewise for doing things like math.  Some people will go on to be mathematicians, of course, or to become physicists, who use mathematics regularly in their work.  But everyone can strengthen their brains (far more than they can strengthen their muscles, which have a hard ceiling on improvement).  They can improve their ability to think logically and systematically, to recognize patterns and to be able to manipulate them in their heads, by practicing and understanding mathematics.

Understanding percentages will make it immediately clear, for instance, that something cannot sensibly be reduced in price by 600%.  Understanding probabilities can help one recognize why one should not invest in the lottery (unless you’re the one running it, in which case, by all means—if it doesn’t trouble your conscience).  And one should not blindly trust the representations of, say, managers of mutual funds and the like.  Even though what they happen to tell you may be real data, omission can be just as misleading as straightforward lies.  You also need to know what they have left out.

If they tell you their fund increased in value ten days in a row, implying thereby that you should want to invest in it, you need to think about (for instance) just how many funds they have.  How many funds are they picking from and for how long?  If they have a thousand funds, assuming equal chances of gains or losses, you should expect on average for one of them to go up for ten days in a row in any ten day period.  But the next ten days, it would be a different, random one that goes up*.  Or, if you can pick any ten days out of a given year, you can probably find somewhere where there’s a ten-day streak, or nearly so, even if you only have a few funds.

I have not done the math to figure that last bit out specifically, but it directly relates to the probability that you will have a string of ten heads in a row somewhere if you flip a coin 365 times.  That goes back to basic probability.

It can serve you well to study some micro- and macroeconomics.  It can also do you good to study a bit of basic chemistry and biology; you wouldn’t even have to have any more advanced medical knowledge than high-school level to know that while injecting enough bleach will kill COVID, it will also kill you, and so will not be a much better therapy than setting yourself on fire or detonating yourself with TNT.

I made a meme about a similar idea that I sent to a friend who was all too easily persuaded by conspiracy theories about various “natural” substance being able to kill cancer but that “Big Pharma” didn’t want you to know about them.  Actual knowledge of how cancer works and how lab tests in vitro work would have protected him from such claims, but I took a slight shortcut to hammer the point home.  Here it is:

Anyway, that’s already a lot for today.  I tend to write faster with the lapcom, and so I tend to write more.  I hope it’s not too irritating.

I hope that about myself and the things I do quite often, but I’m afraid I still end up being irritating more often than not.  My apologies.  I also hope you have a good day.

*Again, all this assumes about a 50/50 chance of going up or down.  Considering how many regulatory and other factors are in place to encourage markets to go up, it’s probably skewed slightly toward gains**, and this will increase the chance of ten-day streaks of gains.

**As evidence, if one had invested in a simple index fund without any significant churning (I think that’s the term) over the last several decades, one would have made around about 10% a year.  That’s roughly twice the rate of inflation, so there is still a real, adjusted net gain.  Given compounding, if you invested $1 in, say, 1990 with that return, you would now have, let’s see…$30.91.  If you invested a million, you’d now have $30.9 million.  Higher rates of return than this will tend to involve higher risk.

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Your dates are numbered

Okay.  Well.  It’s Tuesday now, and it is the second day of June in 2026.  That’s a borderline almost mildly fun date to write out:  6-2-2026.  It has sixes and twos, mainly (though there is a zero in there, which I’m not sure my mind will let me discount despite its lack of any magnitude), and it is almost palindromically arranged when in the US format of date writing.  There are even three twos, which add up to six, and that might be cool…except for the fact that there are two sixes, so if we’re thinking that way, we would need six twos.  That would also be a more pleasing number of twos, given everything.  Unfortunately, I don’t know if there will ever be such a date.

Let’s see…2-22-2226 has six twos but only one 6, whereas 2-22-2266 has two sixes but only five twos.  I guess 2-22-22,266 will be good, but that is quite a long way in the future.  I doubt very much that I will be alive 20,000 plus years from now.  I’m not sure of 20,000 minutes!  Actually, again, let’s see…there are 24 x 60 minutes in a day, so that is 1440 minutes in a day, and so 20,000 minutes would be only around two weeks.  Okay, so I will probably still be alive in 20,000 minutes.

Let’s see (a third time)…20,000 hours would be about 833 days, so a bit over two years.  That’s quite a bit more doubtful than two weeks, but still not a crazy possibility.

As for 20,000 days, well that’s getting quite unlikely.  That’s just under 55 years, which would make me almost twice my current age.  Again, that’s quite unlikely, and I’m rather glad that it is.

20,000 weeks is not really worth considering.  If I were to live for centuries, it would only be because of astonishing medical advances* that presumably would have cured or at least ameliorated my many dysfunctions, so I would probably feel much happier than I do now or have felt for many, many years.

Speaking of many, many years, 20,000 months would obviously be well over a thousand years (20 being well over 12, as I’m sure is obvious).  If we’re going to consider that, then we have to invoke the same kinds of pseudo-miracles as we did for 20,000 weeks, we just need around four and a half times more of them, so to speak.

How the hell did I get onto this subject, or topic, or whatever it is?  Oh, right, I was noting the numerals in today’s date and how they came teasingly close to being fun, but don’t quite make it.

For those of you who might be puzzled by my use of the word “fun” when dealing with simply pointless patterns or lack thereof in things like dates, well…I like numbers.  It’s similar to the way I also like words.  I like words when they’re used to convey interesting information, and when they’re used to tell interesting stories, and when they’re combined and juxtaposed in beautiful and/or amusing ways to make poetry‒and I also sometimes like nonsensical wordplay and puns.

Also, of course, while “fun” may or may not have some manner of absolute scale, like temperature, nevertheless, as with temperature, our experience of fun is a relative one.  Tepid water can feel quite cool when you’re coming out of a sauna, but would feel nicely warm if you had just come inside to escape a bitter winter storm.

Fun can be similar.  So, if you’re used to having a goodly amount of fun in your life, then noting patterns and relations within ordinary “numbers”** can seem rather dull, even if you’re fond of numbers.

But if your life is as pathetic and irritating, on a day to day basis, as mine is, why then even simple, stupid, pointless things can seem somewhat positive.  The value of the function at that point is still well below the x-axis, but it’s not as far below, for that brief moment in which one notes an amusing numerical coincidence***.

That’s all theoretical today, though, because as I noted, today’s date doesn’t quite measure up.  It’s somewhat disappointing, but at least I was able to write an idiotic little blog post about it.

*I can, of course, think of various horror story scenarios in which someone could keep living for centuries and yet continue to deteriorate, but not be able to die.  These are probably quite a bit less likely even than the “medical advances” scenario.

**Why did I use the “scare quotes” there?  Because dates, even when expressed numerically, are not really numbers.  They are more of a code or a location marker, just a kind that uses numerals as its digits because they are memorable and at least correlate with some physical externalia.  “Phone numbers” are even less to be thought of as true numbers.  Their digits don’t even signify anything logically or arguably numerical.  “Phone address” would be a more accurate term.

***Yes, yes, I know, the specific placement of the x and y (and z, etc.) axes is arbitrary, so one can shift one’s target axis down‒lowering one’s expectations, perhaps‒and not need to change the shape of the function.  That may be true, but one does change the integral and the absolute value of the function, so it is not the same, unless one throws in a constant that exactly corrects for the shift in the axis.  In which case, what the hell are you doing wasting our time with this crap?

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When pigs fly and so do fried eggs, things are weird

Well, I did something rather unusual (for me) yesterday, and I’m doing something rather unusual (for me) now.  I bought tickets for the Powerball lottery yesterday.  And this morning I’m composing at least part of this blog post by using voice to text on my phone.

Apparently, when using voice to text. just saying the word “paragraph” doesn’t cause the text to begin a new paragraph.  This is in contrast to what happens when you use the names of ordinary punctuation, and the voice to text turns it into that punctuation, which is actually reasonably impressive.

Okay, well apparently you have to say “new paragraph” to get it to do a new paragraph, but that makes it challenging to describe in writing what you have to say to make it do that.

As for the Powerball ticket thing, well, yesterday we had a customer who didn’t seem to understand how their credit card worked, and we had difficulty getting their purchase to go through.  When they had spoken with their credit card company (supposedly) and told us that it should be clear (for the second time), as I was proceeding to run the card, I said aloud “if this goes through I’m going to buy a lottery ticket”.  It went through.

Then, later in the day, a similar thing happened, and one of my co-workers heard me say what I had said earlier. He said that he would be happy to go in with me on lottery tickets.  I said I don’t know how you even buy them*, but I want to get one of the big ones, the Powerball ticket.  So we said he would chip in $10 and I would chip in $10 and we would buy $20 worth of Powerball picks.

Then, as I was heading out, the boss asked what we were doing.  I told him, and he said he wanted to chip in 10.  So, I bought $30 worth of quick pick Powerball tickets for the drawing that apparently happened last night.  I did not bring them with me to the house, they are waiting at the office.  I do not by any stretch of the imagination expect to win.

Okay, well, to say by any stretch of the imagination is a bit of an exaggeration.  However, as I said to my co-worker, I am probably more likely to survive jumping off the Empire State building than I am to have one of these lottery tickets win.  As he replied, it’s not impossible, though.  He knew he was being silly, but it definitely was a “you go first” moment.

This was a one time thing, done both out of a sense of ennui and a sense of pointlessness; it was just a silly, frivolous thing to do.

Okay, enough with the voice to text stuff.  It’s irritating.  I won’t say that it doesn’t have its charms, but they are limited.  I also don’t like the way it auto-punctuates.  It also doesn’t even seem to know the word “ennui”, if you can stomach that fact (and even if you cannot).

In other news, or “olds” as the case may be, I continue to try to mitigate my chronic pain, with erratic (at best) results.  But I’m still trying.  It’s a profoundly unsatisfying thing to which to have to dedicate a substantial portion of one’s mind and life, but it’s very difficult to ignore or to take in stride.  Even Mr. Spock couldn’t just ignore his pain after he got infested by that flying fried egg thing.

Of course, that makes sense.  Biologically, as I’ve said possibly hundreds of times, it does not make sense for an organism to be able to ignore pain.  Oh, sure, it can be suppressed briefly in emergency situations, and we know that happens.  You can also squelch alarms of various kinds in the industrial world, as you can silence alarms on heart monitors (temporarily) when you know why it’s going off or you know that it’s an artifact.

But important alarms do not bear complete silencing or disconnection‒not without creating significant danger.  That is, unless the alarm is a holdover, a remnant of something that used to be relevant but no longer is so.

Imagine a carbon monoxide alarm, put into a house in the days when they had gas heat and cooking and so on.  This was a reasonable precaution.  But then imagine that it started going off because it detected CO, and in response, the homeowner replaced the gas heat and gas cooking with electric alternatives.  Now there are not even any connections to the gas supply, and as an extra precaution, the owner bought an electric car, so no danger exists of CO poisoning other than some deliberate chemical attack.

And yet…the carbon monoxide alarm keeps going off.  And it doesn’t just do so intermittently; it is constant, though the volume varies a bit.  And by design, it is intrinsic to the very structure and function of all else in the house, so to remove it is either impossible or would disable numerous other, still important systems and still relevant alarms.

That’s a bit like what chronic pain entails.  It ruins some things and taints all things.  After a while, it’s hard to remember what it was like not to be in pain.  And after it has helped drive away everyone important to one‒for no one wants to spend much time around a lost cause‒it can be very difficult to maintain even any semblance of optimism.  You just want to shut that bloody alarm off, even if you have to blow up the house to do it.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  Maybe if I have won the lottery, I’ll be able to find some newer answers.  I’ll look into that right after I catch the flying pig back from my celebratory skiing trip in Hell.

If I were to win the lottery, I don’t think I would stop working, at least not immediately, and I certainly would not reveal it here‒again, at least not immediately.  Possibly there would be ways to tell, but don’t spend too much effort thinking about them; the chances of winning are almost nanoscopic.

Actually, the chances are much higher of me choosing to jump off the Empire State Building than of winning the lottery.  And the chances of me choosing to jump from a much nearer tall building are higher still.  I even have a building chosen for the purpose, just in case.

Whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  I don’t matter, certainly not in any larger sense, and barely even to myself.

You all matter to me more than that, though, so I hope you do well and have a good day today and a consistently improving set of days hereafter.

*It turns out to be quite easy, of course.  When you’re trying to encourage people to give you their money for nothing, you don’t want to make the process too difficult.

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Reality, calories, and joules, oh my!

I had a moment of idle curiosity this morning just before starting to write this.  I recalled the bit of trivia that the average human power output/consumption is something around 80 or 100 Watts.  I wasn’t sure which was more typical, but it doesn’t really matter; the numbers are well within the same order of magnitude, despite having nominally different numbers of digits.

Anyway, I decided to convert that into kilocalories* per day, just to confirm that the typically described numbers match up, because if they don’t, then something very strange is going on.

A Watt is a joule per second**, so to figure out how much energy output (in joules) there is in or from a human per day, you just multiply the watts times the number of seconds in a day (24 hours per day x 60 minutes per hour x 60 seconds per minute, or 86,400 seconds per day).  Multiply that by the above-noted wattage and you get between about 6 and 8 million joules per day.

Now, there are 4,184 joules per kilocalorie, so dividing that into the number of joules yields:  roughly between 1600 and 2000 kilocalories a day, which matches the data on basal metabolic rates.  Neat.

Of course, they must match up, otherwise there would clearly be some major logical inconsistencies in our understanding of such thermodynamicalish matters.  I don’t suspect that such a mismatch would have survived the scrutiny of scientists much longer than a snowball would last in a blast furnace; in other words, I consider textbook level physics to be pretty darn reliable.  Nevertheless, it is good occasionally to check even such basic things, just to confirm for yourself that your understanding of reality is internally consistent and consistent with that which is measured and described by other people.

This is not to say that I worry about whether my “reality” is significantly different than that of other people.  I don’t.  While I have no doubt that the specific details of my personal experience are unique, this is so only in rather trivial ways.

I’ve not encountered any occurrence or argument that made me doubt whether everyone around me is subject to the same laws of physics as those to which I am subject.  Of course, if tasked or merely bored, I can conceive of ways in which all that I think I know is illusory and/or delusional, as in the argument that precedes the cogito in Descartes’s most famous (non-mathematical) work.

With a bit of effort, one can almost always imagine ways in which the world could be deeply different than it seems.  I’ve been known to do that at length‒indeed, at book length‒myself.  But the fact that a thing can be imagined is not a reason, by itself, to promote a concept into “might actually be true” space.  Presumably, there are limitless such things that could be imagined, but almost by definition (at least as I am using the word) there is only one reality.

Reality, as far as I can see, cannot contradict itself; actual paradoxes cannot be instantiated.  I’d probably be prepared to bet my life on those propositions.  But even if reality could contradict itself, that would also be a fact about reality.  Whatever reality is, it is.

That’s trivial, of course, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded of the trivial things that one carries in one’s background knowledge but rarely considers or reconsiders‒things like the interchangeability of measures of energy and power and heat between different units.

With that full circle moment, I’m going to finish for today.  I’m still very tired, and I’m rather discouraged and despondent and probably other d-words as well.  This blog is all I really do, anymore, but my energy is lagging even for this.  At least I don’t need to do payroll today, since I had to get it done early yesterday…which fact I found out yesterday.

Oh, well.  Please do what you can to have a good day.  And remember, there is no do or do not.  There is only try.

*This is what we call “calories” when speaking of human energy intake and output, but a single “true” calorie is the amount of energy (heat) required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade (or, well, Kelvin if you want to be pedantish).  A kilocalorie, or what we commonly call a calorie, is enough to raise a kilogram of water 1 degree Kelvin.

**A joule being the unit of energy in “SI” units.  A joule (energy) is the integral of force with respect to distance, or a Newton-meter.  A Newton is the measure of force, and is a kilgram-meter/ second-squared.  So joules have the units kilogram-(meter squared)/second squared.  Watts (a measure of power, or energy per unit time) are joules per second, which fact gives us the fun, lovely phenomenon of having cubic seconds in the denominator of the equation!

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I have rather blogged as mine own jealous curiosity than as a very pretence and purpose of unkindness.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 2nd of April in 2026 AD/CE, the 1st Thursday in April this year.  It has to be the first one.  Any date that is the 7th or lower has to be the first whatever day in a given month.

That’s probably fairly obvious, but I think it can be useful to review‒from time to time‒the patterns of things that are “obvious”.  It’s not likely that one will discover that these seemingly obvious things are oversimplified and not so obvious after all, but at least one will gain a slightly deeper feel for the things, rather than simply going through life with a bunch of predigested “facts” which one has never examined seriously.

That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  I don’t know if it’s deep or anything, but it’s at least a good-sounding excuse for me to overthink and overanalyze things as I am prone to do by nature.

I still have no indication that my Meta-based accounts are anything but permanently disabled.  Then again, I probably wouldn’t expect to have such an indication, since I haven’t even tried to use them.  I very quickly uninstalled the Meta-based apps I had on my phone (Threads and Instagram‒I did not have the Facebook app, because when I tried installing it once, it rapidly became very annoying, and I uninstalled it forthwith).

I miss some of the interactions on Threads a bit, but although I enjoyed following the exploits of some other people on there, no one actually paid any attention to me.  Even when I shared or posted words of distress and self-destructive feelings, almost no one even saw them, let alone providing any kind of support.

Not that this is an unusual situation, of course.  It certainly wasn’t unique to Threads, nor to Instagram*.  It’s not as though anyone on Bluesky or Substack has expressed any concern for my wellbeing.  So, I shouldn’t unfairly vilify the Z(f)uckerverse.  It is what it is.

But I came up with the term “metaverse” (dammit!) years and years ago, intending to use it to refer to the broader, connected reality of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, as well as other works of my fiction, going all the way back to Ends of the Maelstrom, the first sci-fi/fantasy (or any genre) novel I ever finished.

That novel, all handwritten, is now lost, of course, along with all but a smattering of everything I ever had up to 2012.  So, the loss of, for instance, Facebook, is really just more of the same, and not even very much of that.  What’s Facebook compared to the cello I’d had since high school, or the piano (an unused one they’d had for many years) I’d been given by my in-laws when I graduated medical school, or the thousands of books and comic books I’d accumulated since I was very young?

Okay, so, if it’s so relatively minor, this debacle regarding Facebook et al, why am I harping on about it?

Well, it has only been three or four days.  I’m sure I’ll get bored of it soon.  But I still hold a deep grudge against the Zuckster for “stealing” that term from me, though I do recognize that I had no actual, reasonable, proprietary right to it.  It’s just frustrating, and he is the source of that frustration, however unintentional it was with respect to me.

I don’t really hold too much against him for the foibles of his social media, and only feel slightly ill-used for having been kicked off them.  I can use my time in better ways.

However, I did not open Brilliant or Babbel yesterday, despite my wish to get more use out of them.  I didn’t even get on Arxiv to see what’s going on in physics/math/computer science papers lately, which can often be intriguing.  I once found a paper by David Deutsch on there, and I could even follow it, more or less, though the mathematical formalism was a bit outside my expertise.

No, I’m afraid I have not yet been able to turn my mind toward more long-term-interesting and beneficial matters.  But my life isn’t over yet, at least not as I write this.  I suppose, depending upon when you read this, my life may be over.  Indeed, I aspire to have the sort of durability in my writing such that, eventually, more people will have read my work after my death than before.  I would, in fact, prefer it to be orders of magnitude more.

I won’t be around to know it, of course, but no one ever is.  That doesn’t mean that hopes for things to happen after one has died are necessarily irrational.  We just need to recognize that it’s not our future selves that we’re actually serving.  We are serving the image of our future selves that we have in the present.  But that’s all we ever really do.  Despite the words of Ted Stryker in Airplane II (see 1:19) the future never arrives; everything is always the present.

TTFN

*Which, to be fair to it, has delivered several times a pop-up screen saying that “someone thinks you might need some help” or something, and gave me links to support ideas and the suicide crisis line.  Mind you, they were links to things I’ve tried before, multiple times**, and none have been terribly helpful, but at least Instagram’s “heart” was in the right place.

**Of course, even something that has never happened could technically be said to have happened “multiple times”; it’s simply that the multiple is zero, and anything but a gleeb*** multiplied by zero gives you zero.  But that’s not the spirit of the expression.

***A gleeb is a number (or concept, I suppose) that I invented long ago.  A gleeb multiplied by zero equals one.  I worked through some of the algebra of it while I was “up the road” and it’s rather interesting.  For instance, a gleeb taken to any positive power is still just a gleeb.

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Man doth not yield himself unto the angles save through the weakness of his feeble vectors

It’s Friday.  It must be, because yesterday was Thursday, and by the conventions of the modern English-speaking world, the day after Thursday is Friday.

We could have named the days differently, and if we had, then different days would follow other different days, but they would still proceed in a consistent order.  A day naming system that changes its order from day to day and week to week would not be useful at all.

Similarly, we could name the numerals and numbers differently‒the names we use are fairly arbitrary‒but that would not change the deep nature of arithmetic.  Whatever the equivalent of 2 + 2 might be, it would still equal the equivalent of 4.

That which we call arroz, by any other name, would still be rice.

I am not using the lapcom today.  I felt a bit lazy yesterday afternoon, so I didn’t bring it with me (there was already cat food in my bag, so it was somewhat heavy).  Also, I am still sick, strictly speaking; in fact, I feel slightly worse this morning than I did yesterday morning.

But I do have some regret over not bringing the computer with me, because my thumbs are rather sore.  You might think that would be enough to motivate me to bring the lapcom with me every evening, but the person I am in the evening does not necessarily appreciate what things will be like for the person I am in the morning.

Intellectually, of course, I can know what the situation will be, and I do know it, at least implicitly.  But I cannot feel it in the moment; all I can feel is the resistance to bringing it at that moment, because the immediate extra weight feels much more salient than the discomfort I might feel the following morning.

This is natural, of course.  I suspect that you experience similar disparate and antithetical drives and resistances at different times, despite what you know in your “higher” brain.

This is one of the annoying things about the fact that there is no single, stable, consistent “self”, with a single terminal goal (to use some AI-related jargon), in the minds of humans and humanoids.  There is, instead, a fluid of vectors adding together in a high-dimensional phase space, with lengths and directions that change from moment to moment* in response to changing external facts and to feedback from its own internal states.

Willpower is a function of the brain.  It varies from person to person and from moment to moment.  It is also subject to fatigue.  This has been studied with a fair degree of rigor.  People who have recently been engaged in taxing mental tasks, like solving relatively challenging math problems or similar, are less able to resist (for instance) eating an offered cookie despite being on a diet or even being diabetic.

This stuff may be fairly obvious, but in any given moment, most of us are not mindful enough of our own internal states even to be aware of what might be our current relatively depleted will.

It’s analogous to a person who does strength training with free weights in a gym.  Imagine this person comes to the gym after a hard day that involved physical labor, perhaps more than they usually do.  Or perhaps the person is ill but feels they can tough things out.  In the worst situation, this can lead to catastrophic accidents with weights that are‒at that moment‒too heavy for the person to lift, even though at other times the person may have lifted them with relative ease.  At the very least, such a person is at risk of strain and injury that could impair their ability to exercise for some time.

The mind works much like this.  The brain is an organ, a physical, biological thing, and it is prone to illness and injury and fatigue, in addition to all the software-related weirdness it can instantiate (like having conflicting and/or illogical points of view about empirical facts, and various other forms of irrationality).

This is one reason it can be useful to engender strong habits, even ones that border on the dogmatic.  Because the brain works on habit‒it being simply unworkable to try to evaluate each and every situation de novo‒if one can set up good habits, they can protect one from some catastrophes.

For instance, one of the “dogmas” of gun safety is that one should treat every firearm as if it is loaded, even if one has literally just removed all of its bullets oneself, and one should therefore never point the gun at anything (or anyone) one is not prepared to shoot.  This can feel unreasonable, and in the short term, thinking only of that instance where one has just thoroughly unloaded and checked the weapon, it may seem strictly unnecessary.

But humans are not perfect reasoners‒I suspect that nothing is, and that perfect reasoning is impossible for any finite mind‒and when fatigued, they fall into more automatic behaviors rather than thinking everything through.  This is why it is good to train such automatic behavior to be what one wants it to be when one is able to think clearly.

So, treat every gun as if it is loaded.  Buckle your seat belt for even very short trips**.  Don’t keep sweets in your house if you’re diabetic.  If you’re trying to quit smoking, don’t hang out with people who are smoking and don’t go places where cigarettes are easy to get.  Ditto for other drugs of abuse.

Speaking of which, alcohol tends to screw all those things up.  One of the key effects of alcohol on human (and other animals’) nervous systems is to decrease or diminish what can reasonably be called willpower.  This is not its only deleterious effect.

Okay, well, my thumbs are a bit sore, so I’m going to bring this to a close for the day.  It probably goes without saying‒somewhat ironically‒that there is much more that I could write on this topic.  Perhaps I’ll return to it, and to other related subject matter, tomorrow.

There really should be a blog post tomorrow, given that the previous two Saturdays were surprisingly non-working days.  But, as with a coin flip (or nearly so), previous results don’t have any impact on where the outcome will land this time.

Either way, please try to have a good weekend.

*Lawfully, but in such a complex fashion that it is effectively almost a chaotic system.

**Unless you literally don’t mind the increased risk of injury or death.  It’s possible to be in such a self-destructive state***, but if you are going to accept that risk, try to make sure you really don’t care.  It’s easy enough to imagine one doesn’t mind getting injured or killed in a traffic accident, but when one is injured‒or killed‒it is too late to change one’s preferences, and the version of you who suffers injury may be quite put out with their previous self.  See above about the lapcom.

***e.g., Florida.

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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!