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On Black Friday, call not for A doctor but for THE Doctor

Well, it’s Friday, and—just to remind everyone outside the US why there was a gap in posting—it was Thanksgiving yesterday.  I’ve said it before, I think, though perhaps not on my blog, but Thanksgiving is possibly the most broadly observed American holiday nowadays, more so than anything but (perhaps) New Year’s Day.  The latter is observed largely because so many people have been up quite late, and many of them have been drinking rather more heavily than they would usually do.  Whereas with Thanksgiving, I suspect it’s so widely observed because it’s an almost purely American holiday—Canada has their Thanksgiving in October—and though it’s very secular in nature, it has an almost religious feel.  After all, many religions do say a lot about thankfulness, and it probably is a good mindset to have, in general.

Even the pizza places and Chinese restaurants were closed yesterday; at least all the ones near me were closed.  I tried to order some Chinese or some pizza, or other kinds of delivery food, and I didn’t have any luck with any of my usual suspects, nor was a wider-spread search any better.  Thankfully, most of the convenience stores and gas stations were open, so I was able to get some snacks and a few pre-packaged sandwiches.

I was also able to buy some wine, though that was probably not great for me.  It doesn’t matter much, though.  I don’t really get the urge to drink alcohol very often; I enjoy talking about drinking far more than I enjoy drinking.  It’s useful enough if I’m forced to socialize, of course, but when I’m by myself (which is pretty much all the time, now) it mainly serves as an attempt to become numb.  It did that yesterday somewhat, but it’s not really a pleasant thing.  A nice glass of good wine can taste nice with a good meal, but that was not applicable here.

Anyway, now it’s Black Friday, a name that used to be just a tongue-in-cheek, unofficial nickname for the day after Thanksgiving, because so many people would rush out to begin Christmas shopping since they had the day off anyway.  Now it’s more or less an official shopping spree “holiday” of sorts, and I think it’s even spread as far as the UK, though there is no preceding holiday, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Back in the old days, most American places of employment other than retailers were closed for the whole four-day weekend associated with Thanksgiving.  Nowadays, I don’t think as many places take Friday off.  Although, given that I’m currently the only person waiting on the northbound side of the station and it’s only ten minutes until the train is due, maybe a lot of people do take today off.  It’s probably just as well that I do not have the day off, since I would have nothing to do in my downtime.

Yesterday was also, by the way, the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who*.  I spent a good portion of my day watching Doctor Who related videos on YouTube.  The first 60th Anniversary special—there are actually going to be a total of three of them—airs tomorrow.  Supposedly, Disney Plus will be streaming it starting at 1:30 pm Eastern time, which is the same literal time—6:30 pm for them—that it will be airing on the BBC.  Of course, those who follow the show know that, at the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run, to the surprise of almost everyone, instead of regenerating into Ncuti Gatwa, she became David Tennant, i.e. the former 10th, now 14th Doctor.  He’s only going to be there for the specials though, and will then regenerate into the 15th Doctor, who will be played by Ncuti Gatwa.

Those of you who don’t know or care about Doctor Who will no doubt want to skip the previous paragraph.  However, since you’re here now, you’ve probably already read the previous paragraph, so it’s too late to make that decision.  You’d have to have some kind of…some kind of…time machine to be able to go back now, but it still wouldn’t help much, because in order to know you need to skip the paragraph, you’d have to know what the paragraph was about, and unless you have someone out there to warn you, there’s no way for you to know without reading it.

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

Of course, those who do follow Doctor Who will surely already know everything I mentioned in the Doctor Who related paragraph.  However, such people tend not to get easily tired of hearing about and talking about the show—as you can probably tell—so I don’t need to apologize to them.

I just got on the train now—it was right on time—and though a few other people showed up to the station, many of the regulars were definitely not here.  I have the entire rear-mid section of the car to myself, in my usual spot, and that’s quite striking.  But the conductor is the usual conductor, and the train is on its usual schedule.  Tomorrow it will be on its weekend-and-holiday schedule, and I will be using it then as well, since I work tomorrow.

That, of course, means that I will be writing a blog post tomorrow, since I obviously have not started writing any new fiction.  I did get the Stephen King audio book, and I’ve listened to a bit of it.  It’s fun, at least.  I’ve read the print version often enough that I’m not hearing anything that I don’t already know and even sometimes anticipate, but it’s still enjoyable.  It hasn’t made me feel like I want to get back to writing fiction, but I don’t know that anything is going to do that before I die, so I can’t hold that against Stephen King.

Anyway, that’ll do for now.  “See” you tomorrow.  I hope you had a good Thanksgiving, if you live in the US, and I hope you have a good, even if “Black”, Friday and a good weekend in general, all around.

*That’s right, Doctor Who first aired the day after JFK was assassinated.  If the Doctor had only been around just one day earlier, he might have saved the President—it’s the sort of thing he does.  Then again, according to Series 1, Episode 1 of the new Doctor Who, the 9th Doctor actually was present at that assassination.  Presumably, it was one of those Pompeii-like situations where, if he had changed it, worse things would happen.

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Be thankful you’re not a simulation. Or are you?

I’m writing this on my phone for the first time in quite a while, seated in the rear of an Uber, on the way to the office.  This was something of a whim‒the phone writing, I mean, not the Uber.  The Uber was a carefully considered choice, and it is relatively cheap because of the hour at which I’m taking it.  It’s not something I would do on a regular basis, at least not for long.  Maybe if I finally give up and decide to die in short order I might just burn a lot of money on Ubers.  I doubt it, though.

No, the whim is deciding to write on the phone, since I have some down time in the back seat.  I could use my laptop, but that feels slightly weirder or more uncomfortable to me, though I’m not sure why that’s the case.  I could also just wait until I got to the office to start, because I’m going to be very early.

The reason for going to the office by Uber is that I made the mistake of ordering an Amazon “Try Before You Buy” article of clothing‒a somewhat expensive one.  It did not fit right.  But then I learned that Amazon doesn’t do a pickup to return items like that; you need to drop them at a Whole Foods or a UPS store or similar.

That was not clear to me when I was using the option, or I wouldn’t have done it.  I have no straightforward way to get to any of the above locations, and even to use Uber to get to one would require going during working hours.  I had to arrange for a UPS pickup, at my expense, but I had to set it up to happen at the office, because I won’t be at the house during the day for ten more days (at least on days UPS does such pickups) and that’s past the pickup time window for the “Try Before You Buy” system.

So, here I am, bringing a cumbersome, and not too light, package to the office with me so that UPS can pick it up between 9 and 6.  I never want to do this sort of thing again.  It was foolish of me to try a rather expensive article of clothing anyway, but I guess it was sort of an attempt to cheer myself up with an indulgence.

That sure misfired, didn’t it?

Speaking of cheering oneself up with indulgence‒or with the inability to do so‒tomorrow is Thanksgiving for my fellow United Statesians.  We don’t call this evening “Thanksgiving Eve”, which feels like a shame to me, but certainly people do start celebrating the holiday, in a sense, quite early.  I think many people take the whole week off work.

I, on the other hand, am not really going to be doing anything to celebrate.  The closest I might come is walking to a gas station not too far from the house, where they tend to have pretty decent pre-made turkey sandwiches with mildly cranberry-associated topping.  It’s not very impressive, nor is it terribly satisfying.  I’d feel much better, I think, if I were able simply to go to sleep tonight and sleep through until Friday morning.  As it is, I probably won’t be able to sleep or rest any more than usual, and that’s even counting my plan to take some Benadryl tonight.

I’m almost at the office, so I’ll take a brief pause here and resume after I arrive.  You may not notice the gap.

Did you notice it?  I’m guessing you probably recognize that it happened, but only because I told you that it was happening.  Like the scenes in a movie that’s been filmed over months and months, or the paragraphs of a long novel like my forced two-parter Unanimity that was written and edited over the course of more than a year, the final product may end up relatively seamless despite a long and discontinuous origin.

I’ve occasionally imagined that it might be possible (in principle, anyway) for our reality to be a simulation in which each moment‒maybe each Planck time‒in every location in space‒perhaps each cubic Planck length‒is prepared individually, one by one, then subsequent and nearby ones are calculated based on the laws of physics, and each next place and time is then updated piece by piece, one infinitesimal space and one instant of time at a time, as it were*.

The simulator could take a trillion years to calculate even one second of the spacetime in the visible universe, probably far longer.  But it wouldn’t really matter, necessarily**, how long it took, provided there was enough memory available to keep everything stored.  From the outside, the process of one human life (and its past and future light cones) might take a googol years to calculate, but from the inside point of view, for the human being “simulated”, time would just progress normally.

It doesn’t matter to the people in a video, for instance, if their video is viewed at 2x speed or .25x speed; for them it all happens the same way no matter what.  It doesn’t matter to the characters in a Studio Ghibli movie that their individual movie cels each took hours to be painstakingly drawn and painted, or if a Pixar character took even longer to be computer generated.  Their “experience” would pass at one frame per frame, or 24 frames per experienced “second” for them (at traditional movie frame rates).

Even if each second of the person’s life took a trillion eons to simulate, it would still be experienced just as a second for that person.

A rather weird and possibly disquieting implication of this is that, if those simulating the person stopped doing it‒perhaps they got bored, or had a power cut, or suffered a natural disaster or catastrophe in their meta-level universe‒the simulation would just…stop.  It’s not that the people in the simulated universe would die in any conventional sense; certainly they would not die in the usual within-the-universe meaning of dying.  Nor would their universe “die” as if some cataclysm like a phase change in the vacuum energy occurred***.  It would just stop.

There would be no next moment, no next occurrence*****.  If someone were later to restart that simulation for whatever reason, even if it was ten to the thousand to the googol years later or more, the people within the simulation would experience no difference between the before pause and after pause moments than between any other two moments in their existence.

But if the simulation were stopped and never restarted, with perhaps all associated memory erased…well, again, the inhabitants would not experience it in any possible, conceivable sense, any more than a video game character experiences the moments when and after you reset the game or the power goes out.  If you are a simulated existence, and the simulation is permanently stopped, you will not so much die as cease to have any manner of existence whatsoever.

Have a happy Thanksgiving.

happy-thanksgiving-from-the-farm-maria-keady

*It’s interesting also to think of, for instance, two “people” starting to simulate such a universe from different points in space and time, and to wonder what would happen when they came together if their simulations did not mesh perfectly, like frost on a window-pane with multiple initial points of nucleation leading to a “fractured” pattern.  But that’s a different, if related, thought process.

**From the point of view of the “simulated” universe, anyway.  It’s hard to see anyone having the commitment or desire to bother actually carrying out such a laborious simulation; that would be quite a dreary task.

***This is a possible occurrence in an ordinary, physics-related sense.  If the “dark energy” is indeed the cosmological constant (called lambda, Λ, as in the ΛCDM model of cosmology) but is not at its lowest “vacuum state”, then it could spontaneously “tunnel” down to a lower, more stable set-point.  This would wipe out every particle in the current universe in a growing sphere, with its outer shell expanding at the speed of light.  Of course, that means that you could never, in principle, have any warning that it was happening, nor could you, even in principle, experience your destruction and that of everything else that exists.  This is not the same manner of cessation as what I discuss in the main body of the post‒it is very much a within-simulation event, not a meta-level one‒but it would still be just an instantaneous erasure of sorts, happening too fast to be experienced even in principle****.  There are many worse ways to die.  Indeed, almost all ways humans do die are much worse than this.

**** Presumably, quantum information would be conserved even in this catastrophe, whereas in a halted and erased simulation, that principle wouldn’t apply, at least within the simulation.  Whether it would apply to the process of simulating and then ceasing to do so would depend on the nature of the meta-level universe.

*****I suppose this is analogous to what will happen to everything in the universes of my stories Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado if I never finish those stories.

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I almost forgot to give this a title

I seriously considered walking to the train station today, but after I finally arose—I’d been awake for hours, already—I realized that I just wasn’t up to doing it, physically.  Or maybe I wasn’t up to doing it, mentally.  In any case, it’s not as though there’s any actual difference or separation between the two things, despite the wishes of dualists* of many stripes throughout the ages.

I simply am this thing that is writing this, and it’s all instantiated in this body—though I store aspects of my persona and records of various things and highlights of information in external media, as people have done for quite some time to greater and lesser degrees.

In any case, I really don’t feel very well, and I don’t mean just my usual depression/dysthymia, though it may be related to those things.  Perhaps it’s just an exacerbation.  After all, dysthymia (now officially called persistent depressive disorder or some such boring name, because that’s what really matters, making sure that things have optimal names, right?) can episodically increase into a full blown episode of major depression.

Also, it’s that time of the year for those whose symptoms are affected by the seasons—in the northern hemisphere, at least—to feel the detriment of longer nights and shorter days (so to speak).  I am at least somewhat “seasonally affected”, though I’ve always loved autumn.  This may seem superficially contradictory, but in my youth, autumn was a time that brought birthdays and holidays and the start of school and all that good stuff that I liked.  Also, probably when I was quite young, I didn’t have any real evidence of depressive disorders to come, at least as far as I recall right now.  Although, if I do have ASD, it was present then.  There is some evidence in my recollections that it was.

In addition, of course—speaking of holidays—this is a rough time of year for people who are already depressed and who are also socially isolated**.  Thanksgiving is in two days, and that is a traditional, very positive and social family holiday, which I will not be celebrating again this year.  I will have the day off work, though—all the better to drive home the fact of being alone in a single room (with attached bath) and having no one with whom one shares life at pretty much any level.  Then of course, the Hanukkah season (and Christmas season) and New Years and all that is coming up—extremely family-and-friends-oriented holidays.  I again am not planning on trying to spend any of them with anyone else.

The weird irony is, when I imagine actually trying to spend holidays with other people—yes, even when I merely imagine it—I feel tremendous tension.  I guess it’s what one could call significant anxiety.  It’s a strange kind of…not exactly a contradiction, but a conflict, a tension of ideas.  I am depressed and gloomy when alone, which is my usual way to be, but I feel almost terrified at the thought of being around other people socially.

I particularly wouldn’t want to have a group of people just bring me into their celebrations of holidays just so that I could have someone with whom to celebrate.  It’s not that I dislike people I don’t know.  How could I dislike them if I don’t know them?  I just don’t feel a sense of camaraderie with most people; I don’t feel like a member of the same species.

The guy, Paul Micaleff from the YouTube channel “Asperger’s from the Inside” (well, now it’s “Autism from the Insode”) made a great analogy that struck home with me about that kind of thing.  He said that, if he goes to a pond and sees a lot of ducklings playing around and swimming and all that, he might really think they were great and enjoy watching them, but it would never occur to him to try to join them in their pond.  That would make no sense.  He wouldn’t know how to act, they would be terrified of his presence, and he would never be able to fit in or enjoy trying to pretend to be like them, in any case.

I think it’s a really good analogy.  One doesn’t have to hate a group of people or even think them uninteresting not to feel that one has any business trying to join the group or attempting to act as if one were like them.

I don’t know what my species is.  Even though I find people like Paul more relatable than most, I still don’t really feel like I could connect even with the people in those communities.  I think the closest guy online I feel like could be my kind of person is Dave, from Dave’s Garage (his book was also very good and extremely relatable).  But I don’t think that he would find me very interesting, partly because our backgrounds are so dissimilar.  Anyway, he’s doing his thing and putting up nice educational videos about computers and stuff, and that’s good enough for me.

Actually, I don’t know that there’s anyone I might possibly want to spend time with who would truly want to spend time with me, except for family of course.  Even more so, I would not feel comfortable imposing myself upon anyone, even if I wanted to spend time with them and they were interested.  I’m just not selfish and cruel enough to inflict myself upon people I like.

I’m very tired and just utterly pointless—in the sense that I have no particular reason to do much of anything; I just have biological drives and habits, none of which provide any purpose or sense of satisfaction.

I have been thinking about using this month’s Audible credit to get Stephen King’s On Writing in audiobook format.  It’s read by King-sensei himself and his two author sons (Owen King and Joe Hill).  I’ve read the print version before, of course—more than once—and it was certainly inspiring in its way.  Stephen King’s nonfiction is sometimes even better than his fiction.  His style and substance and personality are quite engaging.  So, maybe if I get that audiobook, I’ll listen to it, and maybe just feel inspired to start writing fiction again.

Possibly, it’s worth a try.  If it doesn’t work, well, I don’t know what will happen.  That’s not new, though.  No one knows the specifics of the future in other than trivial senses until it happens.  And then it’s no longer the future.  We’re falling through time, in that sense, facing backwards, only seeing where we’re going once we’re past it.

It seems like a weird way to run things, but of course, it’s the only way that makes sense, given that complexity and life and memory are all driven by processes that harness increasing entropy.  And being fairly close to the surface of an extremely low-entropy state in space-time (AKA “The Big Bang”) explains why things like life and mind exist at all.  You wouldn’t see stalactites and stalagmites form in a place without a local strong gravity differential providing a sensible “up” and “down”, and you wouldn’t see life or consciousness forming in a spacetime with already uniform entropy, thus leaving no local “past” or “future”.

All right, let’s stop before I go off on a tangent, even a sine or a secant.  Have a good day.

*Not to be confused with “duelists”, a group or set that could certainly overlap with dualists, but need not do so, and which is defined by quite unrelated characteristics.

**Not in the sense of avoiding spreading disease, but just in general lack of social contacts or supports.  I am very “challenged” in that area.

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“And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad…”

The madness continues, or begins again, as the beginning of a new work week occurs.  “What madness is that?” you ask?  I mean the madness of bothering to stay alive, the madness of continuing to do things that are absolutely pointless and irrelevant even in the moment, let alone in the long term history of the cosmos.  I mean the madness of trying to pretend to be cheerful or positive in any way, to try to be polite or engaged or interested in anything around me.

That madness, and other forms related and/or similar to it, is the sort of madness I mean.

I guess I really would have to say that the madness “continues” rather than that it begins again.  It’s not as though it has ever stopped or paused.  It simply takes a different form over the weekend, when there is less to do.  But there is no more real sanity involved in any of my activities even when I’m not commuting to the office and back.  I’m just less constrained to try to seem vaguely pseudo-normal, or at least vaguely pseudo-tolerable, when I’m by myself in my room.

I should look up a thorough etymology of the word “madness” or “mad”.  I know that it has morphed, to at least some degree, into a modern synonym of “angry”, but the older meaning of “lack of sanity” or “extreme agitation” of other types still persists at least a bit.  And it’s better than “insanity” in my opinion.

Madness has a certain poetic quality to it that “insanity”, which is really a legal term, does not have.  Insanity, whether by design or just by customary use, carries the impression of a loss of previously existing “sanity”.  I’ve introduced my term “unsane” before, but I don’t know if it’s going to catch on.  At least, though, it conveys the notion, potentially, of situations or people or beings to whom or to which the very concept of sanity doesn’t apply.

But of course, as I noted, insanity (and sanity) is a legal term that applies to assessing whether or not one can be held legally culpable for one’s actions.  As such, it can be fairly vague, and certainly it is not scientific.  There are quite a few forms of mental illness* that are truly debilitating and dangerous and can even be life-threatening, and are certainly immiserating, but which would not allow one to be found “not guilty by reason of insanity” if one committed a crime.

Mind you, all these notions, from laws to words to legal or even moral responsibilities, are simply inventions, creations, “fictions” produced by humans for various reasons—they are memes** and memeplexes that happened to survive and reproduce, so they carried on.  Often, though not always, such memes persist in the meme pool—i.e., culture—because they are useful to the organism(s) through which they propagate.  But they do not have any truly fundamental reality.  They are emergent things in a spontaneously self-assembled complex adaptive system that has no more intrinsic, inherent meaning than does a snowflake or a piece of rock candy—also, they are far less beautiful and/or tasty, though they have their charms.

Still, I’m sick of nearly all of it—mentally sick, physically sick.  I’m particularly sick of my part within it, largely because I don’t think I have much of a part within it.  Like the song says, I don’t belong here.  But, of course, the fact of not belonging in one place does not logically imply that one belongs somewhere else.  Even setting aside the fact that the term “belong” is fairly vague and protean, by any version of it but the very loosest one, it is entirely possible for an individual entity or being not truly to “belong” anywhere at all.

I certainly know that it’s possible to feel that one does not belong anywhere.

It’s vaguely reminiscent the old Groucho Marx joke in which he said he would never join a club that would have him as a member.  It’s funny, but it’s also a good description of a dysfunctional state of mind—or at least an inefficacious frame of mind—such that a person feels that he or she is an outsider, and that any group that would welcome him or her is probably not the sort of group in which he or she could possibly feel comfortable.

It’s what happens when one looks online to find communities that purportedly have common difficulties or shared issues and which intend to provide mutual support, but one feels at least as alien and uncomfortable with the thought of these support groups as one does about any other group.

No-win situations are clearly possible in reality—the very concept of “winning” is another entirely artificial one, though it can be pertinent to the objective biological world in some circumstances—and when one is in one, it can be reasonable to try simply to accept that one cannot win, and therefore that one’s choice of how to escape the situation is arbitrary and so may as well be random, or whatever seems most attractive at the time.

Anyway, that’s enough bullshit from me for today.  I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, but that’s okay; there is no inherent point, no evident telos to the cosmos.  There is no purpose in which to lose myself, and there is no home to which I can return.  I’m certainly in no position to try to make a new home of any kind or to create some new purpose.  I wish I had just walked away a month ago today, as I’d hoped to do—it would have been a good day for it.  Or perhaps I should have done so a month before that; it would have been even better.

Oh, well.  The past cannot be changed, anymore than the characters in a film can rewind their own reels and edit earlier frames to change their story.  If one were able to change past time, it would necessarily involve another level of time, some “higher” time in which a different kind of future and past existed, not constrained by the one within this world.  That’s conceivable, of course.  However, there’s no evidence that it exists.

But that’s a discussion for some other time.

*Yes, I prefer to call things “mental illness” when they impair the successful functioning of a person’s mind, to greater or lesser extent.  Referring to everything as “mental health” comes across as just weird a lot of the time.  “He struggles with mental health” is the sort of thing people sometimes seem to say, but that doesn’t make much sense.  Surely he struggles with his relative dearth of mental health.  Or is it meant that perhaps he dislikes mental health, which seems fairly pathological in and of itself, just as a person might want to sabotage that person’s own physical health?  Either tendency seems to be a case of mental illness, in the same sense that anything from an upper respiratory infection, to dysentery, to a heart attack, to vasculitis, and to cancer are all forms of “physical” illness, not physical health.

**In the original sense of the term, coined by Richard Dawkins in his brilliant work, The Selfish Gene.

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I’m sorry about yesterday (not the song…the song is good, but I had nothing to do with that)

It’s Friday, and I did not write a blog post yesterday, because I did not go in to the office.  I also will not be writing a post tomorrow, because I am not scheduled to work then.

I’m waiting at the train station very early, by the way.  Technically, I arrived just in time for the scheduled first train of the day, but it’s apparently running about eleven minutes late.  It’s hard to hold this too much against them.  Over the past few days, the weather here has been so wet and windy and floody that it has bordered upon tropical storm level, but it’s persisted much longer than such tropical storms tend to do.

I didn’t go to the office yesterday as both a direct (I think) and indirect (I’m pretty sure) consequence of the weather.  You see, my back pain, with major radiation down my legs, especially the right one, was tremendously severe.  When I got up in the morning, I barely could move.  I don’t know if it was because of the weather directly, in that the changing humidity and pressure and whatnot cause my various injured spinal and connective tissue elements to act up—certainly my shoulders were also achy—but I also walked to the nearby gas station after taking the train to my station in Hollywood on Wednesday night.  Because of the rain and the wind and so on, there were lots of puddles, and my coordination was rather screwed up, so in trying to go over puddles and sometimes jumping them, I think I hurt myself.

I was going to try to take an Uber into the office, anyway, yesterday, but because of the weather, the Uber rates were more than twice what they would usually be.  Given that I felt very similar to crap, that would probably have been a bad decision, anyway.  I’m glad I rested, because while I am far from pain free, I feel better than I did.  I don’t ever really expect to be “pain free” anymore; I just try to get it below the threshold of interfering too much with conscious thought and effort.

I’m not going to be writing a blog post next Thursday, of course, because it is Thanksgiving here in the US, and that’s a day that more people take off than perhaps any other specific holiday but New Year’s Day.  It feels mildly weird not to have written my “classic” Thursday blog post two weeks in a row, but that’s just the way it goes.

I suppose that, if Christmas had fallen on a Thursday since I’ve been doing my blog, then I would have missed the blog posts two weeks in a row, because Christmas and New Years are exactly a week apart.  That probably did happen at least once sometime since I’ve started writing my fiction and writing my blog; it ought to happen once every seven years*.  But I’m not sure.  It certainly hasn’t been for a while.

My Thursday blog started basically as an attempt to promote my writing and to engage with potential readers of my fiction.  A fat lot of good that did me.  I probably should have known better.  I’ve never been terribly good at self-aggrandizement, or self-promotion, and I certainly should have realized that exposing people to my true personality—to the degree that such a thing is possible when writing a blog—was never going to be a good way to promote my work.  It’s a bit like an orc trying to enter a human beauty contest; unless it’s heavily disguised, it’s never even going to get in the door, and certainly no one looking for human beauty if going to give it high marks.

Mind you, of course, beauty is subjective and is relative to the species.  Peahens apparently find the peacock’s tail feathers not merely lovely—a sentiment many humans share—but they also find them sexy.  Moths are drawn to moth pheromones, Bower Bird females love a guy who lays out a brilliant-looking bower, even though it will never be used for anything, and certainly not for nesting.

That’s was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  My brain tends to do lots of weird things.  Although I laid around most of the time yesterday, it’s not true to say that I got a lot of rest.  My right leg, with its radiating pain, was so severe that it developed a bit of a “causalgia” phenomenon, in that vasomotor activity was affected by the pain process, and my entire leg felt tight as well as cold to the touch relative to the rest of my body.

It wasn’t too severe; it wasn’t as though it was going blue or otherwise discolored, other than a slight increased pallor.  However, it made it clear to me that my pain wasn’t “all in my head”.  It was certainly all in my nervous system, of course, but that’s a thing that spreads through the whole body, from the brain to the spine to all the limbs and the heart and lungs and the whole GI tract—the latter of which by some measures has a local nervous system as complex as the entire brain of a cat.

No wonder GI tracts can be so grumpy if you don’t treat them perfectly.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I’ll not be writing tomorrow—barring the unforeseen—so I’ll next be writing on Monday, November 20th.  What a month it’s been since October 20th.  I didn’t expect to be here at this time, or indeed (possibly) to be anywhere at all—I don’t know what to make of it.

*Though, given the existence of leap years, there can be temporary deviations from the hard and fast pattern.  So Christmas/New Years might have skipped a year at some point within the past eight to ten years, and so I might not have missed my Thursday blog two weeks in a row for that reason.  I could check on it, but it’s not something about which I’m curious enough right now**.

**Though it wouldn’t be surprising if, later, the question nags at me enough that I go and look it up***.

***I did that (of course) and it turned out that, because of the 2020 leap year, Christmas skipped from Wednesday in 2019 to Friday in 2020.  So I have not missed two Thursdays in a row for that reason, since I did not begin writing my Thursday blog as early as 2013.

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Is there such a thing as Von Oldmann architecture?

It’s Wednesday morning, and here I am at the train station, writing my blog post for the day.  It’s quite wet and windy, which might have been a decent situation in which to do some walking, but I’m still feeling quite under the weather, so I haven’t done any walking of more than a mile at a time this week.  Last night/yesterday evening, I walked to the train station from work, and I had an umbrella, but it was terribly windy, so even though I was able to keep my head (and my backpack) mostly dry, my legs were soaked by the time I got to the station.

This morning, it’s not raining as hard, but it is drizzling and windy.  I considered just wearing a rain coat today, but I realized that wouldn’t protect my legs any more than the umbrella would.  I do have a long, duster-style coat that I guess I could have worn.  Maybe if it’s still windy and rainy tomorrow, I’ll wear that.

I also considered not going to the office today, but it’s Wednesday, which means it’s payroll day, so I need to go.

I started a new mantra (of sorts) yesterday, consistent with the way I expressed myself in yesterday’s post—indeed, I started it even as I walked from the train to the office in the morning:  I said, “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself.”  This was, to no one’s surprise, not at all difficult for me to maintain, unlike my former attempt at saying that I loved those things (as if to convince myself) which made my metaphorical tongue turn to metaphorical sand in my metaphorical mouth.

The new mantra is strangely freeing.  It didn’t make me nearly as tense or uncomfortable as I worried that it might.  If anything, it allowed a sense of detaching.  I didn’t feel any actual hostility or malice toward the world—there was no weird desire for revenge or destruction or what have you.  I don’t think the world ever even pretended to owe me anything good, and it certainly does not owe me anything good.  So I can’t feel any sense of affront, or wounded pride, or anything idiotic like that.

Don’t get me wrong; I can be and am idiotic in plenty of other ways.  I’m just not idiotic in that particular way.  As for hating my life and hating myself, well, what else is new?  Accepting it, saying it, has its benefits.  If I hate myself anyway, why would I care what happens to me?

I realized that this might not be the healthiest thing to have going through my mind, so I decided to provide a counterpoint by listening to the David Burns book on Cognitive Therapy, Feeling Good.  I’ve read the book before; I was recommended it by a therapist.  I’ve even done many of the exercises therein.

I recognize the value of the ideas in the book, and I know that CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) has been tested well and provides good results for many.  It’s also logical and rational in many ways, and that’s always appealing.  So I started listening to the audio-book, even as I waited for the train and rode on it.

It did help me take a nap on the train; maybe that means some of its messages went into my subconscious.  It was a nice little nap, and I didn’t miss my stop, because I wasn’t sleeping all that deeply, despite my horrendous lack of sleep the previous two nights.

It’s sad to say, but I think my body and my nervous system have sort of adapted to getting very little sleep.  I’m not saying that they’re fine with it.  That would be absurd.  Sleep is clearly crucially important to life in creatures with any kind of nervous system as we know it.  This is obvious, even if we don’t quite know why, because every creature in the world that we know of with a nervous system spends a good portion of every planetary rotation in a relatively dormant and quite vulnerable state.  If evolution were able to allow for function without sleep, one would think it would have cropped up somewhere, at least.

Of course, it’s possible that, way back in the dawn of nervous systems, hundreds of millions of years ago, life went down an accidental blind alley with respect to sleep and nerves.  Maybe the common ancestor of all nervous systems just happened upon a form of function that requires what we call sleep, and every descendant of that nervous system is stuck with a requirement that need not have been the case if some different solution to creating nervous systems had been happened upon, but it wasn’t, and so sleep cannot be escaped except by a reinvention of the nervous system by some life form.  That’s unlikely to happen for reasons similar to why new types of abiogenesis aren’t going to happen in an already crowded biosphere:  anything new would be horrendously outcompeted by life forms that have hundreds of millions to three and a half billion years advantage.

I’m dubious, though, about the possible accidental and fundamentally nonessential nature of sleep.  This is at least partly due to the recognition that even our computers eventually need to be updated and, more importantly, rebooted to function optimally.

Computers bear very little similarly to nerve cells or literal nervous systems; they were never designed to mimic nerves, anymore than an internal combustion engine was designed to mimic muscles and legs.  Von Neumann architecture has very little in common with the way nervous systems store and process information.  The former does storage and processing separately; nervous systems seem to do it as part and parcel of the very same processes.

Anyway, my point is, I don’t think I need less sleep just because for a long time I have achieved less sleep.  I think my body, my mind, my nervous system has adjusted as best it can to keep from completely falling apart—literally—in response to truly chronic insomnia.  But the system is still wearing down and suffering damage; believe me, I can tell.

I’m almost sure that at least part of my chronic pain is related to my insomnia, especially the pains that arise other than where the more concrete source of my pain is located.  And there’s clearly an association between my insomnia and my depression/dysthymia.  It’s difficult to say if one causes the other or the other causes the one or if they’re both caused by some third thing—possibly some form of autism spectrum disorder—but I give very low credence to them being only coincidentally correlated.

In any case, I am proceeding in two apparently conflicting directions at once, now:  I’m repeating a mantra that doesn’t seem in any way to come up against resistance in my mind, but which is certainly not what one could consider positive.  And I’m repeating my exposure and exploration of CBT, starting with Feeling Good.  None of it is new to me, nor are there any revelations likely to come.

I understand the points that are made in CBT, I understand and recognize the cognitive distortions associated with depression that it strives to combat.  I’m open to the possibilities, but I’m not sure it’s the right tool for the job, in my case.  I suspect my depression/dysthymia may be quasi-organic, in the sense of being more truly fundamental to the operation of my own weird little alien nervous system.

But I could be wrong, and I don’t like to jump to conclusions too precipitously.  So, I’ll finish listening to the book, and maybe get one of his other books with this month’s Audible credit.  But I’m also not going to try to extinguish the repetition of “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself” in my head.  If it goes away on its own, that’s fine.  Otherwise, it’s at least something consistent onto which to hold.  And it’s weirdly both freeing and calming, and that’s worth a lot to me.

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…but day after day it reappears…

Here we go again.  Or, at least, here I go again.  I’m sitting at the train station, waiting for the train to arrive.  This time I’m not getting the first train of the day, but that’s not because I woke up any later today.  Actually, I woke up far earlier, when my housemate(s) arrived home late or something along those lines and had a fairly prominent conversation in the kitchen, which is right outside the door to my area of the house, at around one in the morning.

I have not been back to sleep since then.  I tried to go back to sleep.  I would lie on my side and relax and close my eyes…and then I would start awake, convinced I must have overslept, only to find that not even five minutes had passed.  After a while, I gave up trying to get back to sleep.

I considered staying “home” today, but it’s not any more pleasant to be there than at work.  If anything, right now, it’s less pleasant.  There are ants (or maybe termites) swarming outside near my door, thanks to the wet and hot weather, and I had to spray around my door to keep them out.  And in the humidity, my wall A/C unit is leaking condensation onto the floor, and I’m sure it’s generating mildew and similar, though I’m spraying the area with Lysol®.  If there were any kind of normal winter time coming, I wouldn’t even need to use the air conditioning, but there’s not exactly a lot of ventilation in my area otherwise.

I can’t go on like this much longer.  I don’t really know that I can go on at all much longer.  I hate the world, and I hate myself even more.  I’m really a horrible person, and a horribly unpleasant person, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life, so it’s only a matter of figuring out how long that’s going to be.  I wish I had died on my birthday, like I was considering, or even earlier, sometime on or shortly after September 22nd.  I hate it here.  I hate that I feel the urge, the pressure, the compulsion to keep trying.  It’s so stupid.  I’m so stupid.

I don’t have anything insightful or clever or interesting to say, today.  At least I don’t think I do.  I’m not trying to persuade anyone that I’m right about the stupidity and futility of at least my life or life in general.  I would hate to convince someone of that.  I would like it if all the people who read this happen to love and enjoy their lives, and look forward to each day with eagerness.  I wouldn’t mind if everyone in the world were happy, even if I were the only one excluded, because at least there would be significant compensation in the form of that global happiness.

Of course, wishes aren’t much use—or any use, really—if there’s no way to bring them about.  But I just want to make it clear that my hatred of the world doesn’t make me want to make everyone, or the world, miserable, or to make any other people suffer.  I just don’t want to be buffeted by it any longer.  I don’t want to be in what feels like a sewer, surrounded by waste matter that seems largely to be of my own making.

I just need to find a way to screw my courage to the sticking point, to quote Lady Macbeth (admittedly not the greatest of role models, but given that she was written by Shakespeare, she does have some good lines).  I need to find a way to make myself give up completely, so that I can get rid of my resistance.

My train is due to board in “approximately 10 minutes” (on track 2), so I’ll wrap this post up relatively quickly.  It’s going to be a short one, I guess, but that’s okay.  It’s not like I have anything new or interesting or complicated to write or otherwise to get across to everyone.  I think my sentiments for the day are pretty clear and well-defined, and they don’t exactly require a great deal of explanation.

I’m sick of all this, but most particularly, I’m sick of myself.  I can’t stand that guy.  He’s so annoying, so much of the time.  I can’t even get away from him by going to sleep, because almost always, I wake up feeling more tired and worse than I did when I went to sleep, and always far too soon.

I’ll say it again, though:  hopefully you all feel better.  Please feel better.  I need to think that someone out there feels better than I do right now.  So please, have a good day.

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No sleep till…

I’m at the train station quite early even for the first train of the day, today, but I was wide awake for more than two and a half hours before I even left the house.  I didn’t really sleep in yesterday much—which meant that I got my laundry done relatively early, and without having to interact with my housemates, which is always a bit more relaxing than the alternative, but it would be nice if I could just get some rest.

To be fair to me, so to speak, I did do some napping during the day, yesterday.  It’s a bit frustrating, though, that I only nap when I feel like I’m literally losing consciousness, not just slipping off to sleep but as if I’m actually succumbing to some state of disease or something.  It never just feels good to fall asleep, and when I wake up it’s just confusing and groggy and tense and weird.

One good thing about when I was taking Paxil for my depression was that it made me enjoy going to sleep.  That was something I don’t think I’d experienced before or have experienced since, though I’ve known people who described feeling particularly good about going to sleep.  However, Paxil had side effects and other issues that overwhelmed the benefits, I’m afraid.

Anyway, that’s enough of that for now.  The point I’m trying to make is that I am not terribly well rested, even though yesterday was Sunday, and so if I’m grumpy and weird and unpleasant in my writing this morning, apart from it being utterly typical for me, the reason is at least partly that I’m not rested.  It’s probably  also just that my personality is grumpy and weird and unpleasant, but that’s a longer-term issue, the solution to which I do not know.  I know how I could make the issue go away, but that’s not quite the same thing as solving it, so for now I’ll wait until I’ve given up on any solution to enact that choice.

And now, I am on the first train of the day, headed north toward the office, to start yet another week of marking time until something changes my life.  In the meantime, I did buzz my hair Saturday afternoon, down to the quarter-inch length of the clippers.

It’s been months and months since I cut my hair, and it was getting quite long, but that didn’t bother me.  What bothered me was that, when I went to see about possibly making a YouTube short or something similar, I saw how unruly my hair looked and how much it made my face look even rounder and more disgusting than otherwise.  This is despite the fact that I wash my hair every day and comb it carefully and all that.  But once that’s done, I tend to forget about it, and I spend as little time looking in mirrors as I can.  So, seeing a few practice videos of my face was shocking and borderline horrifying.

Also, let’s face it, having really short hair is just easier for maintenance.  Even though I recently ranted about the weirdness of the military being into short hair, I have to admit, it’s nice not to have to worry about it except for the occasional touch-up trimming.  It’s still over-warm and humid here in south Florida, and that’s another good reason for shorter hair.  Hopefully it will cool down at least a little as the week goes on.

There’s something weird happening with the sound the train is making on the tracks, or with its air-conditioning or some other system.  For a bit there, there was this nearly-rhythmic squeaking noise coming and going, almost as though there was a big cage full of discontented birds and the occasional hamster on a rusty wheel up in the roof of the train car.  It seems to be a function of how fast the train is going and whether it’s on the inside or outside of a slight curve in the track.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I am writing this on my laptop computer, by the way.  It’s just much easier and more natural for me to write this way.  It’s been over a week since I’ve done any significant walking, because I’ve been sick, and I’m still under the weather, so carrying the computer isn’t an obstacle.

It’s not as though lugging the laptop makes my backpack that much heavier, anyway, so even once I get going back into walking—assuming I do—it shouldn’t be an issue.  When I was biking it could be a worry, because if it suddenly started to rain while I was biking that could be a situation where the computer could get wet in the backpack before I had the chance to adjust.

I haven’t been biking in a long time, though.  I haven’t even tried to replace the inner tube on my all but new bicycle.  It’s been sitting upside down on the patio near my door for months, and I have the equipment and have watched the instruction videos.  There’s nothing particularly difficult about doing it.  I just have no motivation to do it.

Anyway, that’s enough for now, I guess.  There’s nothing interesting or good or positive going on in my life, so all I have to convey is my more or less constant negativity.  Even I get tired of it sometimes (by which I mean nearly all the time), so I can only imagine how it is for all of you.  I apologize.  I know I’m terribly unpleasant.  Even people who love me don’t like to be around me much, as I’m sure I’ve noted before.

I just wish I could rest and sleep and feel refreshed and rejuvenated at some point.  Life can be unpleasant enough as it is, but it’s worse when you don’t feel like you ever really get a break or a respite.  Oh, well.  I guess I’ll continue to continue, at least for today.  We’ll see what happens by tomorrow.

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Meandering thoughts early on a Saturday morning

As I noted above, it’s early Saturday morning, and here in south Florida, it’s already 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) and muggy, despite it being the 11th of November.

The trees here don’t change color, there’s always mold and mildew and stuff like that, annoying insects are pretty much always out and about throughout the year, and I’m sure there are lots of other things worth reviling about the area.  I won’t even get into the politics and the general idiocy levels and the bureaucracies, because they’re probably not significantly worse here than anywhere else; they’re just different and weird, because it’s Florida.

I do enjoy being able to see the various reptiles that abound here most of the year.  You definitely don’t get many lizards in Michigan, even in the summer; you’ll see the occasional turtle here and there, and if you go into the woods, once or twice you might encounter a snake.  But it’s mostly mammals and birds (and various Arthropoda when the weather is warm) up there, and in pretty much all but the southernmost US states.

Mind you, Hawaii had no endemic mammals (if you don’t count humans) for quite a long time.  It’s the most isolated archipelago on the face of the Earth; how could mammals have reached it?  Birds, sure.  Insects—well, they can get almost anywhere*.  Amphibians—it’s more difficult, but they can hitch a ride on floating vegetation, as can many reptiles, since they don’t tend to require as much food and fresh water as mammals do.  But how would a population of mammals from the mainland survive an accidental trip to the Hawaiian islands?  It’s not impossible, but to my knowledge, until humans brought them, no other mammals had come to those islands.

Florida, on the other hand—that second most southern of the United States, and the most southern of the continental United States**—has been part of the mainland for as long as human beings have existed, as far as I know.  Plenty of mammals abound here, in addition to the various birds and reptiles and amphibians and insects and other arthropods.

It’s my understanding that, until quite recently, actual jaguars lived in Florida!  I’m not talking about the Jacksonville football team.  I’m talking about the actual, third-largest member of the cat family (and the largest in the western hemisphere).  I’m talking about that brilliant, beautiful predator that can casually fetch crocodiles from the waters of the Amazon to eat.  I’m talking about the member of the big cat family that, instead of going for the throat, like most big cats do, tends to jump down on the back of its prey and crush the prey’s skull in its immensely powerful jaws.

Death by jaguar would probably not be pleasant, but it would at least be stylish and cool.  And if a jaguar eats you, you become part of one of the most magnificent predators on Earth.  While it’s true that humans are better predators—they are pretty much the most powerful predators ever on the planet—there are plain few of them that could be described as magnificent and sleek and imposing.

There are no more wild jaguars in Florida, and there are probably no more wild Florida panthers, either.  Instead, we have this horrible proliferation of Naked House Apes, the vast majority of whom are far from inspiring either to look at or with which to interact.  They succeed by dint of science and technology, of ideas the vast majority of them could not begin to describe or explain.

How many humans who regularly use the GPS system could explain why the system has to account for both special relativity and general relativity, or else it would be utterly useless and inaccurate?  How many of them even understand what is meant by a logic gate, even as they carry around spectacularly sophisticated computers in their pockets, which they use to take selfies*** and watch idiotic nonsense on TikTok?

How many people can’t interact with an idea that requires more than 240 characters to express?

I could go on and on, of course.  And I’ll admit that all of those positive things and ideas—engines and mathematics and circuits and piping and roads and farms and houses and medicine and so on—came from people who at least appeared to be human (though one often wonders if there isn’t some deep level of difference within the species such that some minds are barely the same type as many others).  But those people, and their ideas, are exceptions to the general rule and tendency.

Even nowadays, when we see so many of the fruits of the brilliant ideas of the likes of Ada Lovelace and Emmy Noether and their sistren****, we have to realize that there is such an abundance only because those ideas are so potent—they persist, they spread, they lead to other, subsequent, consequent ideas.

The prevalence or rate of occurrence of brilliance is probably no greater than ever before, as a matter of percentages, but there are more people—thanks to the products of past genius—and the edifice on which they rest is so much vaster and more stable and powerful that newer, still achingly rare instances of genius can build on those monumental, cyclopean, Olympian structures and devise things and ideas that could, in principle, in the long run, change the face of the very universe itself.

I don’t know what point I’m making here, today.  This is almost free-association or even “automatic writing”.  I guess it’s a good way to pass the time while I’m on my way to the office, which is at least a nearly decent way to pass some of my time on the way to the grave.  But I’m impatient to reach my destination.  I don’t feel very well.  I wish I could rest.  I’m really, really tired, and yet I never seem to be able to sleep much.

Oh, well.  The universe was clearly not made for my comfort, so I have no right to feel slighted or misled by it.  Then again, rights themselves are a human invention (or, just possibly, a human discovery), as are laws and customs and social patterns and all that happy horseshit.  The universe at large does not recognize any rights at all, unless you want to count the right (as well as the absolute obligation) to follow the laws of physics, whatever their ultimate nature might be.

That’s enough of my random brain exudates***** for the time being.  I hope you all have an excellent weekend.

*There are apparently endemic midges in Antarctica!

**At latitudes that roughly match those of Egypt, apparently.

***And how many of them understand how LCD screens (or LED screens) are different from the old CRT screens of traditional TVs (or what those acronyms mean), and why some people predicted that color TVs would become “extinct” because the earlier ones relied on certain rare-Earth elements, and why that prediction was incorrect because clever people figured out there were other ways to do the same thing?

****It’s horrible to realize that the reason it’s comparatively easy to list the women who have made astonishing contributions to human knowledge and understanding—these two I just mentioned having done no less than, respectively, basically inventing computer science and programming before the computers had even been built and codifying and mathematically explicating how conservation laws in physics derive from fundamental symmetries—is because women have been prevented from even exploring their potential in such areas throughout most of history in almost every culture.  Interactions with humans throughout my life has made it quite clear to me that the average human female is at least as intelligent as the average human male.  This implies that, over the course of human history, to a good first approximation, half of all potential genius has been not merely squandered but prevented.  It’s heartbreaking and soul-crushing to imagine all the possible art and poetry and science and philosophy and mathematics and music and so on and so on that might have existed already had women not been systematically prevented from developing their skills and ideas throughout most of human history.  If anyone ever wonders why I get depressed, this is one of the reasons.

*****I think the replacement for the term “tweet”, as in a posting on Twitter, should be something like an X-cretion, an X-udate, an X-trusion, or maybe even an X-foliation.

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Roaches and live-streams and lightning, oh my!

I did not have nearly as good a sleep last night as I did the previous two nights.  I don’t know if that means I’m getting worse—with respect to my current respiratory illness—or that I’m getting better.  I certainly don’t feel better, and indeed, I am wearing a mask today because I’m coughing quite a bit still, and there’s no need to spread illness to other people in a petty way.

It would be one thing if I were doing it on purpose; I can imagine myself doing that in certain circumstances.  There are occasions in which I feel that there are simply too many humans for anyone’s good, including their own.  This has nothing to do with any silly, movie-Thanos concept of environmental correction or anything stupid like that.  It’s much more a spiteful, hateful, vindictive kind of thought, rather like the way one feels when one steps on a cockroach that has wandered into the kitchen when one was trying to have a nice meal or snack.

One is not really expecting to make any overall global gains by doing this, and one certainly doesn’t consider oneself to be aiding the cockroach population’s well-being by doing so.  Nevertheless, it is momentarily satisfying to act on that feeling of disgust and revulsion and just to crush out of existence that little, annoying thing that bothers you.  There’s no need to dress it up and give oneself “excuses”.  This is just how living things sometimes behave.

Incidentally, I actually think roaches are quite impressive creatures in all their many species.  They are obviously extremely adaptable, their “design” is simple and consistent, and in one form or another they have been on this planet for about three hundred million years.  Some of them can even have a kind of sleek aesthetic appeal, when they’re not encroaching (no pun intended) upon my personal environment.  Nevertheless, if they intrude on my living space, I will kill them.

I’m working tomorrow, so I’ll be writing another post tomorrow, unless the unexpected occurs in some fashion.  Perhaps some giant cockroach will step on me, or my illness will progress significantly, and I simply will not be able to go to work.  Maybe I’ll die.  But unless something drastic happens, I’ll be going to work.  If I were to switch weekends, it would mean that I would have to work the next two weekends in a row, and I really, really, really don’t want to do that.

I wish I had just left on September 23rd, like I’d hoped to do.  If I had done that, I would almost certainly been most of the way to my destination by now.  That would be 48 days at this point, and even at a very modest walking rate, I could have gone a thousand miles in that time.  I would have been able to see the changing colors of the leaves of deciduous trees in person again.

Or I would be dead, of course, in which case I would be at my destination, albeit in a different sense.  That was one possible point of the venture.  Now, even if I were to leave today, I probably would already have missed most of the changing leaves by the time I reached an environment in which they actually change.  Instead I’m stuck here, where it’s still muggy at five o’clock in the morning.

I was thinking yesterday of trying out live-streaming to YouTube, so I opened up the app on my phone to look into the process.  But, apparently, to live-stream from one’s phone, one has to have at least 50 YouTube followers.  YouTube suggested that I make and share some “shorts” to grow my audience—apparently because that tends to grow one’s audience—but when I started practicing a bit of video, I was reminded of the fact that I do not like my face.  That partly informed my decision to wear a mask today (though not as much as did my cough).  A mask and glasses improve my visage, and frankly, they feel more like me than does my actual face anymore.

So, I may soon be doing YouTube “shorts” and similar things, and if I do, I’ll possibly embed them here.  I’m not the hugest fan of such things, but at least they don’t hide or disguise the fact that they’re made on phone cameras.

It would be nice to get to the point where I could live-stream things onto YouTube from my phone, because there are things I sometimes consider doing that might be worthy of live-streaming—though the terminology could become amusingly ironic.  But, of course, one doesn’t need 50 followers or more to live-stream from a computer, and I do have a portable laptop computer.  I’m writing this blog post using it, and I have been using it for such writing all week.

Technically, the computer needs to have a Wi-Fi connection of some variety to be able to upload, but my smartphone can be used as a mobile hotspot.  I’ve tried it before, and it’s been quite effective.  The phone gets literally hot before too long—the processing of information does produce waste heat and increase local entropy, after all—but that wouldn’t be too big a concern.

Anyway, further bulletins about all that as events warrant.

In the meantime, I hope most of you don’t have to work tomorrow, and that you have families and/or friends with whom you can spend the weekend doing things that are at least somewhat enjoyable.  I’m unlikely to be lucky enough to be gone or incapacitated or otherwise prevented from doing whatever it is I do by tomorrow, but over a long enough time, even the vanishingly improbable becomes almost inevitable.

For instance, if you had a 1% chance of being struck by lightning in any given day*, your chance of being hit by lightning by tomorrow would be, of course, 1%.  After a week, though, your chances of being hit on some day would be about 6.79%**.  After 30 days, your likelihood of having been struck by lightning at  least once*** would be 26.03%.

After 100 days, your odds of having been hit by lightning would not be 100%, of course, but they would be high:  about 63.40%, if my calculations are correct.  And after a full (non-leap) year, your chances of having been hit by lightning would be…97.45%.

They never will truly reach 100%, no matter how long you try—that’s just the way probability works.

It’s a bit like trying to get a massive particle to go the speed of light.  No matter how small the mass, even though you can get closer and closer, to reach the speed of light would require infinite energy.  This is related to the fact that the ratio of 1 over the square root of (1 minus (the square of the velocity of the particle over the square of the speed of light)) goes to infinity as the velocity goes to c, the speed of light.

energy

That’s not why probabilities never reach 100%, but it is mathematically reminiscent.  One has to wait an infinite time for a low probability event to become, effectively, certain.  But for practical purposes, it can quickly become so likely as to make other considerations irrelevant.

And now, I’m at the station before my destination—not metaphorically, alas, but literally.  So I’ll sign off for today.  I hope you have a good one.

*Because, apparently, you live in a ridiculously lightning-prone area and enjoy playing golf in thunderstorms using iron golf clubs.

**NOT 7%.  Odds of independently occurring, repeated chances do not add in a simple way.  If they did, then after 101 days, one would have 101% chance of having something happen, which makes no sense mathematically or logically.

***And when it happens once, you’re unlikely to get a chance to go for a second hit, so I’m leaving that possibility out of the equation.