Physics

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If you can look into the seeds of time, and blog which grain will grow and which will not

Hello, and also, good morning.

What to write about, what to write about‒that is the question today.  Of course, “to be or not to be” is always the question as well, as was recognized by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.  If I recall, he arrives at the conclusion that the titular rock-rolling protagonist must be “happy” despite the patent and constant pointlessness and absurdity of his existence.

That goes along with the whole recognition of the absurdity of life itself that is central to the existentialism movement.  Still, it’s hard for me to “imagine Sisyphus happy”, unless he was a true Bodhisattva or had been thoroughly lobotomized by Zeus (or whoever it was that had doomed him to his…well, his doom).

It can help, I guess, to think about the vast scale of the cosmos in space and time (and any other dimensionality that might apply) and also about the incredibly minute scale of the cosmos, the fundamental quantum fields (and whatever gravity ultimately is) interacting from the Planck scale on up.  It helps keep things in perspective.

Of course, even given the scales of the cosmos*, there’s another, almost sort of Buddhist/Taoist notion that notes that each individual‒each particle even‒always exists at the nexus of two “light cones”, existing in an ever-moving now.  These are 4-dimensional cones, by the way, but it’s okay to reduce things by one dimension if you will.  It makes them easier to visualize.

Your (or anyone’s) past light cone is the outer boundary of all influences that can possibly have had any effect upon you at the present moment‒those influences that could have reached you at the speed of light or more slowly.  Similarly, one’s future light cone encompasses all those things that could possibly be influenced by things at the present location at or below the speed of light.

Any motion within the light cones‒the only motion that anything within spacetime can execute, as far as we know‒is called timelike motion.  Any motion that would require going outside a light cone is considered “spacelike” motion, and is not allowed by relativity.  This is not merely because of the speed of light, it’s because the speed of light is defined by the speed of causality.  Causes cannot travel faster or have effects beyond the speed of causality.  This is a bit tautological, I know, but it nevertheless simply must be true.

So each individual’s experience, each individual process, sits at the moving balance point of a future light cone and a past light cone, crossing at the moving present, tracing out a “timelike” path in spacetime.  Of course, individual creatures are not individual particles, and so their overall spacetime path would resemble the final line produced by a sketcher going over and over a particular path to make the curve the artist desires.

If one could look at the structure of a human in spacetime, like the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse Five, but one could also trace even the spacetime paths of individual “particles”**, a human life would be a sort of higher-dimensional braid in spacetime, surrounded by a haze of incoming and outgoing quantum entities, most of which will be locally bound and interacting, and so will be moving at a net velocity lower than the speed of light.

I’m assuming you don’t eat your food or drink your water or breathe your air or (shudder) sweat or excrete at near light speed.

Imagine what the inside of a mere proton or neutron might look like if one were able to see it as a rendered, four-dimensional model in fine detail!  If you think it wouldn’t be that interesting because it’s so wee, think again.

Remember, only the tiniest fraction of the “rest mass” of a nucleon comes from the mass of the three “net” quarks in it (two up, one down or two down, one up depending on whether it’s a proton or neutron).  Almost all the rest of its mass is the energy of the interactions between these three quarks:  all the gluons exchanged, all the virtual quark/anti-quark pairs popping into existence, mediated by that famous strong force and its weird*** “asymptotic freedom”.

Bringing this back around, I guess my point was merely to note that everyone and everything is pointless from the perspective of the laws of nature and the spacetime scale of the cosmos, but when you learn about those things‒the cosmos at large and small levels‒you are at least familiarizing yourself with those vast workings, and you are in a sense taking part of them into yourself.  That’s kind of a cool thought.

But don’t take too much of it into yourself!  For, much as would happen to someone who stuffed all the information about Graham’s number into one head, if you do you will become a black hole.  Now, it may be possible to survive becoming a black hole, but I don’t recommend betting on that pony.

TTFN

*I wrote a post on Iterations of Zero about how it might be useful for people to consider the cosmic perspective as contrasting with their prosaic concerns.  I don’t remember how good it was, but here’s the link, in case you want to read it and give any feedback you like.

**I use this word for want of a better term that everyone would recognize and that would be succinct.  I think we need such a different term, because a lot of the perceived so-called weirdness and mystery of quantum mechanics comes from trying to use inaccurate terms that originated in times before we understood things as well as we now do.  Quanta are not little “particles” that sometimes act like waves, nor are they little waves that sometimes act like particles (though that’s slightly more accurate).  They are entities unto themselves, and the ways they behave are all always consistent with that nature.  They don’t sometimes act like one thing and at other times act like another.  They all, always, act like what they are.

***Except it’s not weird, really.  Those of us who are surprised by it?  We are the weird ones.  Quantum chromodynamics has always done exactly what it still does, since long before any life at all existed in this universe.  To quote Yudkowsky again, “Since the beginning not one unusual thing has ever happened.”

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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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Are gravity and frivolity truly opposites?

It’s Wednesday morning (not quite five o’clock yet) and it is February 25th.  There are only ten more shopping months until Newtonmas*.

For those of you who don’t know (and as a reminder for those of you who do know) Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, 1642 (AD**).  Now, there is a parenthetical here:  Newton was born on December 25th by the Julian*** calendar, which was the one used in England at the time of his birth.  By the Gregorian**** calendar, Newton would have been born in early January of 1643.

This might seem to imply that December 25th nowadays shouldn’t be considered Newtonmas, but of course, it’s a closer fit than celebrating the birth of Jesus on that day; supposedly, biblical scholars have found that Jesus was probably born in the summer or something.  As with many things, “The Church” appropriated the popular holidays celebrating the winter solstice and grafted Christian religious significance onto it.

There’s nothing particularly bad about that.  All these holidays and divisions of the year are fairly arbitrary (though celebrating solstices and equinoxes is common enough in multiple cultures, which makes sense because these are objective events in any given year that can be noticed by any culture that is paying attention).

The length of a year is a concrete, empirical fact, as is the length of a day and the length of a lunar orbit around the Earth.  None of them are straightforward multiples of each other, unfortunately‒they are waves that are not harmonically associated with each other.

I don’t know how long it would take for their “waves” to come back into some primordial alignment and “start over”, but it’s probably moot, because the length of a day and of a lunar orbit and of the orbit of the Earth are changing slowly.  The moon, for instance, is moving steadily (but very slowly) away from the Earth over time, and so its time of orbit is increasing (since things that orbit farther away orbit more slowly).

I think Kepler’s third law was/is that the period of a planet’s orbit around the sun is proportional to the 3/2 power of the length of the semimajor axis of its orbit.  I’m not sure if that exact power holds up on the scale of, say, the lunar orbit, but the laws of gravity are as universal as anything we know.  Indeed, there are materials that are opaque to light, but as far as we know, there are none that are opaque to gravity.  Gravity is nevertheless constrained by the geometry of spacetime, so orbits will always slow down at a faster rate than the distance from the center around which a mass orbits increases.

The inability of anything we know of to block gravity is one thing that makes me take seriously the notion that, at some level, there could be more than three spatial dimensions.  If gravity is not confined to three dimensions then nothing that is so confined could stop it; it would merely flow around any obstacle (maybe gravity waves, for instance, can even diffract around matter and energy, though that might not imply higher dimensions).

This is related, indirectly, to the fact that it is impossible to tie a knot in a string in 4 or higher spatial dimensions.

By the way, having those extra spatial dimensions curled up tiny, as is usually presented in depictions of the notions of string theory, is not the only way for them to exist and be undetected.  If most of the forces in the world we know‒the electromagnetic, the strong force, the weak force, and the various matter-related quantum fields‒are constrained to a 3-brane because their strings are “open-ended”, then we could live in a 3-brane (in which all other forces, including matter, are confined) nested in a higher-dimensional “bulk”.  Gravity could be conveyed by a “looped” string, which could pass through the 3-brane, interacting but not being confined to it.  This could also explain the comparative weakness of the gravitational force and might even explain dark matter (and why it is so difficult to detect).

This sounds extremely promising, maybe, but there are issues and hurdles, not the least that strings and higher spatial dimensions are very difficult to detect, if they exist.  Also, it’s very hard to pin down all the implications mathematically in a useful way.

I remember one lunch break when I was still in medical practice when I tried to see if I could work out mathematically if “dark matter” could be explained by a relatively nearby, parallel brane-universe (it would probably be more than one, but one was difficult enough) whose gravity spills over into and overlaps the gravity of our brane-universe.

Here’s a sort of reproduction of some of the scribbling I did then:

Unfortunately, though I could visualize what I was considering and get an intuitive feel for what the math would be like, my precise mathematical skills were just not up to the task of sorting it out rigorously.  Also, of course, lunch was not long enough, and I had many other things on my mind.  Anyway, findings like the “bullet cluster” provide some fairly strong evidence that “dark matter” is something physical within our three dimensions of space.

Okay, that’s enough for today.  I’ve managed not to talk about my depression and stress and self-destructive urges/wishes (except just now, of course), so I hope you’re pleased to have had those things cloaked from you today.

Take care.

*Working out the exact number of days, I think I figured that it was 302.  December 25th is 7 days before New Years, so it’s day number 358 in the (non-leap) year.  And today is the 25th day of the second month, and January has 31 days, so today is day 56 of the year.  And, of course, 358 – 56 = 302.

**Why not my usual “AD or CE?”  Because at the time, in England, it was just “anno domini”.

***Named for Julius Caesar, though as far as I know, he had no more to do with actually formulating that calendar than he had with the invention of the 7th month.  As far as we know, he wasn’t even born by the then-existing version of Cesarian section, which was more or less always fatal to the mother, and his mother lived well beyond his birth.

****Named after Pope Gregory XIII, also known (by me) as Pope Gregory Peccary*****.  He did not formulate the newer calendar, but supposedly he at least commissioned the Vatican astronomers to create it when it had become obvious that the Julian calendar was not quite tracking the actual year but was overshooting over a long period of time.  So, the Gregorian calendar is better named than the Julian calendar, or so it seems to me.

*****The nocturnal, gregarious wild swine.

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Man overboard

As the real weekends go, it was better than most, to paraphrase The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  By this, I’m referring to this last weekend, the two days before this day, of course.

I did not work on Saturday, which is good, because that would have been the third time in a row.  I also got to hang out with my youngest on Saturday, and we watched about four episodes of Doctor Who together, which was good, good fun.  I cannot complain about that in any way.

I have though a weird, disquieting, sinking sort of feeling that it may have been the last time I will see my youngest, or maybe anyone else that I love.  It’s is not one of those reliable sorts of feelings, like those that lead one to new insights in science or mathematics or what have you.  It’s probably more a product of depression and anxiety, the feeling that anything good in my life is sure not to last, if it happens at all, because I do not and cannot possibly be worthy of anything good happening to me.

Is that irrational?  Of course it is irrational.  It cannot be expressed in any sense as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how many digits they may have.

Wait, wait, let me think about that.  My thought, my feeling, was expressed above finitely.  That is, of course, a shorthand for what is really happening, but even if one were to codify those processes down to the level of each molecular interaction that affects any neural/hormonal process that contributes to my feeling, we know that must be a finite description (though it could, in principle, be quite large).

Even if we’re taking the full spectrum of quantum mechanics into account when describing my mental state, we know that quantum mechanics demands a minimum resolvable distance and time (the Planck length and the Planck time) below which any differentiation is physically meaningless.

A finite amount of information can describe the events and structures and processes in any given finite region of spacetime.  In fact, the maximum amount of information in any given region of spacetime is measured by the surface area (in square Planck lengths) of an event horizon that would span exactly that region, as seen from the outside*.

Any finite amount of information can be encoded as a finite number of bits, which can of course be “translated” to any other equivalent code or number system.  So, really, though the contents of my mind are, in principle, from a certain point of view, unlimited, they are finite in their actual, instantiated content, and can therefore certainly be expressed as an integer, and thus also as a ratio (since any integer could be considered a ratio of itself over one, or twice itself over two, etc.).

So, in that sense, my thoughts are not irrational.  Neener, neener, neener.

In many other senses—maybe not the literal, original sense, but in the horrified, cannot accept that not all numbers can be expressed as ratios of integers because that makes the universe too inconceivable, sense, among others—I can be quite irrational.

It’s very difficult to fight one’s irrationality from the inside, alone.  Even John Nash didn’t really beat his schizophrenia from within as shown in the movie version of A Beautiful Mind.  Also, his delusions in real life were far more extravagant and bizarre than those which appear in the sanitized version that made a good Hollywood story.

If one escapes from mental illness from within, one has to consider it largely a matter of luck, like a young child who doesn’t know anything about math getting a right answer on a graduate level, high order differential equation problem.  It’s physically possible; heck, if it were a multiple choice question, it might even be relatively common***.  But it’s not a matter of being able to choose to do it right and to know how it was done.

Severe mental health issues are going to need to receive assistance from outside, almost always.  This is not an indictment of them or of the need for help.

Surely, someone who has been swept off the deck of a ship by a rogue wave cannot be faulted for needing help from those still on the ship of they are to survive.  It would certainly seem foolish and almost inevitably fruitless if such a person tried to claw his way up the side of the ship to get back on board when there is no ladder and no handholds.  He should certainly not be ashamed that he cannot swim hard enough to launch himself bodily from the water and back onto the surface of the vessel.

One cannot reasonably fault such a person for trying to do the superhuman.  A person might try to do practically anything rather than drown or be eaten alive by some marine predator.  But, of course, barring an astonishing concatenation of events such as the time-reverse of the splashing entry into the ocean happening and sending the person out of the sea just as it was entered, such efforts will not succeed.

And though it might be heartening or at least positive for one to receive encouragement from those still on the deck—don’t drown, keep treading water, you can do it, you’ll make people sad if you drown, you deserve to stay afloat, I’m proud of you for treading water yet another day, it’ll get better, this won’t last forever, you’ve made it this far so you know you can keep going, you don’t want the people who know you to feel sad because you drowned, etc.—in the end it might as well come from the seagulls waiting to pick at one’s floating corpse.

Mind you, certain kinds of words can be more useful than others.  Words like, “Hey, around the other side of the ship there’s a built-in ladder; if you can get over there and time things right, you might be able to grab the lowest rung when the waves lift you, and then climb up,” might be useful because they are directions for using real, tangible resources that we know can make a difference.  Also, words like, “Hang on just a bit longer, we’re throwing down a life preserver on a rope so we can haul you up” would be useful, obviously, unless they were mere “comforting” lies.

Alas, though one could reasonably expect such literal assistance if one were washed overboard—the “laws” of the sea are deeply rooted in the hearts of those who work there, and they include a general tendency to help anyone adrift to the best of one’s abilities—when it comes to mental illness, the distress and the problems are difficult for others to discern and easy to ignore.  Calls of distress are often experienced as annoyances, and even treated with contempt, since those hearing them cannot readily perceive that they themselves might be similarly washed overboard at any time.

But, of course, they might be.

I don’t know how I got on this tangent, but I guess I never really do.  I just go where my mind takes me, and my mind is not a reliable driver.  It is, though, a reliable narrator.  It doesn’t matter, anyway.  Nothing does.

Anyway, here we go again into another work week, because that was what we did last week.  I wish I could offer you better reasons, but I’m really only good at breaking things down, destroying things, not at lifting anyone or anything up.  That comes from other regions and is conveyed by other ministers.

*From within an event horizon, the volume could be much larger than the spacetime that seems to be enclosed from the outside, because spacetime inside the horizon is massively curved and stretched.  It’s conceivable (at least to me) that there could be infinite space** within, at least along the dimension(s) of maximum stretch, just as there is infinite surface area to a Gabriel’s Horn, but only finite volume.

**See, mathematically, one can stuff infinite space inside a nutshell.  Hamlet was right.  He often was.

***Perhaps this explains why certain types of mental health problems can respond well to relatively straightforward interventions, and even to more than one kind of intervention with roughly comparable success, e.g., CBT and/or basic antidepressants and such.  These relatively tractable forms of depression are the “multiple choice problem” versions of mental illness.  This does not make them any less important.

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Each new morn new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows blog heaven on the face

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (of course) and it’s also the 29th of January in 2026 (common era).  At least today’s date (the 29th) is a prime number, but other than that, nothing interesting about today’s date jumps out at me.

Not much interesting is jumping out at me about anything, come to think of it.  Not that there aren’t plenty of “interesting”* things happening in the US and the world at large; there are.  But they are largely just stress-inducing, and all too redolent of Yeats’s The Second Coming, i.e., “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  What rough beast indeed slouches its way toward Bethlehem to be born?

Meh.  It’s always been like that, though.  Peace and kindness in any populations are too easily infiltrated and spoiled by any freeloaders and parasites that come along‒on societal scales, these are often politicians as well as too many of the most wealthy individuals, though it would be foolhardy to say that they are all parasites or that they are the only ones.

In any kind of ecosystem that’s complex and productive enough, with enough thermodynamic “free energy”, there will be many means by which “life”** finds a way to garner resources and increase.  Some of these are generally useful and productive, the equivalent of green plants and earth worms and so on, creating or improving the resources that make the whole thing livable.

But when there are resources, and when there is a complex ecosystem (of any type) then predators (like the cows and horses and sheep that feed on the plants and then the other animals that feed on them) will evolve that prey ultimately on the primary producers, as well as parasites that just drain life from many levels of the system for their own benefit without providing anything that is useful for any other creatures.  There are also symbiotes of various kinds, instantiating various forms of mutual exchange to mutual benefit.

Of course, every living cell‒each of the tens of trillions in every human body and the bodies of all other eukaryotes on Earth‒is a symbiote, really.  The mitochondria (and chloroplasts when applicable) and probably other organelles were separate life forms that long ago took up and adapted to residence within other cells and have never left, to the benefit (in the “short term” at least) of all multicellular life forms.  And, of course, those life forms themselves are each massively symbiotic systems of countless cells.

But, unfortunately, even a life form that originated from a single ancestral cell‒and this applies not merely to each individual organism but to life on Earth as a whole‒can produce parasites that drain and ruin things for the rest.  Think of cancer, here, when applying the concept to “individual” organisms.

And even otherwise sensible and useful parts of an organism can experience a kind of mission creep that ends up making them detrimental to the whole.  Think of autoimmune diseases, or analogously, some of the judgmental and self-righteous excesses of the left that have caused their electability to deteriorate, allowing the already mutated cells on the right (which has seen its own healthy functions overwhelmed by its own cancers over time) to overgrow to general detriment.

Of course, cancers and severe autoimmune diseases and the like will end up destroying themselves, but they are prone to take the organism down in the process, and then all that will be left finally is a decaying corpse.  Am I speaking literally or metaphorically?  Yes, I am.

I know humans tend to think of themselves‒when they think of such things at all, or indeed, when they think at all‒as somehow different, separate, special, other than the various levels and stages and types of life and interactions.  They are not.  It’s just very difficult for them even to think to look at themselves dispassionately, as if from above and outside.

Of course, they are different from all the other things in reality‒as is everything else.  Everyone is “special”, which is just another way of saying no one is***.

If and when humans actually develop a civilization that goes beyond Earth and out into the greater cosmos to become significant at a galactic scale or higher, and in a durable way, I will recognize them as something special****.

Until then, nothing humans have done has really been much different qualitatively than ants making hills and termites making mounds and bees making hives.  Even the various space probes and messengers and, yes, astronauts are not much different than the scouts that bees “send out” to look for new sources of pollen and nectar.

Humans really could stand to develop a greater sense of humility.  I strongly suspect that they would do much better that way in the long run.

I don’t have high hopes for them, unfortunately.  But then, I don’t tend to have high hopes about much of anything.  That may be due to some degree of insight on my part, or it may be just the way my mind tends to work, or there may be other possibilities or combinations thereof.  In any case, I often find humans in general‒with noteworthy exceptions‒utterly exhausting and disgusting and pathetic.

But humans are not the only creatures that merit such reactions.  They are merely, for the moment, the most consequential ones to me.  Saddle me with an infestation of cockroaches or a swarm of mosquitoes or a massive overgrowth of mold and/or mildew, and I will be at least temporarily distracted from my (sad and disappointed) contempt for humans, and to some degree for everything else.  It will not, however, make that feeling go away.

The universe as a whole and in its parts is so noxious as to be barely, if at all, tolerable.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  But I suspect it always will be that way, at least unless and until the whole shmear evolves into a state of uniform, maximal entropy with no free energy and so no dynamic processes beyond those required fundamentally by quantum mechanics.

Oh, well.  I guess I can check out any time I like, and‒unlike the case with the Hotel California‒I can thereby leave.

I hope you all have a good day.

TTFN

*In the sense as used in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times.”  Or, as I have said many times in the past, one should try never to be interesting to one’s doctor.

**This can be literal, or it can be metaphorical‒businesses, nations, ideologies, etc., can be what we are considering when we say “life”, but many of the same patterns hold at every scale.

***Props to Dash from The Incredibles for this pithy insight.

****Or, well, if I am still alive then‒which seems unlikely‒I will so recognize them.

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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, blogs in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, in case you didn’t already know.  Though, if you’re reading this on some day other than Thursday, then I guess it’s not Thursday for you.

You could think of it as us being on sort of parallel time streams—and indeed, we each carry our own “proper time” around with us, according to Relativity.  And while communication is possible between those timelines, it is communication in one direction only.  I can send messages to you, where and when you are now reading this, but you cannot send messages back to me.

Wait, wait, I hear you say*, you can communicate back to me in my parallel time, because you can comment on the post below (there’s only one person who does this with any regularity, but sure, it’s possible for you to comment, in principle).  So it’s not one-directional communication.

Ah, but that’s where I’m being esoterically precise here.  You cannot communicate back to me where and when I am now.  You can only communicate with some “future” point, something quite a bit down the line from where and when I am as I write this.  And I cannot then communicate with the you that is writing back to me, but only to some future state of you.

Okay, well, duh, you say**, that’s just how time works.

That only seems unremarkable to you because it’s all you’ve ever known, and you’re adapted to it—personally and evolutionarily.  But if you step back, so to speak, it can seem quite remarkable.

Special Relativity demonstrates that space and time are not separate but are intertwined, and space and time bleed into one another depending upon relative motion—indeed, within the event horizon of a black hole, it appears that space and time are flipped ninety degrees (as though along an axis at 45 degrees to those of space and time) so to speak, so that space becomes time, which is part of why you can never get out of the black hole—you cannot reverse time, but must move forward to its end at the singularity, if such a thing exists, which is probably not the case.

So, why does time work differently than space?  After all, If I live on a street parallel to yours, I can cross to your street by any of a number of cross-streets, cut through back yards, follow alleyways, etc., in more or less any direction, and I can return in a similar fashion.

Imagine, though, if it worked the following way.  I start at my address—let’s imagine it’s number 13*** for the moment—and want to go to your street.  But I can only go by routes that are at higher address numbers than my address.  And then, when I want to return to my street I have to go down (or would that be up?) the numbers on your street, to take a cross-street (or whatever) that’s even farther from my house.

So, say I crossed to your street right after number 17, where a cross-street exists.  And say the numbers on your street line up with those on my street, just for simplicity’s sake****.  Luckily, your house is at number 19 on your street, so I can reach it.  I could never go back to number 17 on your street, let alone number 13.

But when I want to leave your place, I can only head toward higher numbers, so I can’t go back to the cross street near 17.  I have to go down to, say, the street past number 23.  But even once I get to my street, I can’t go back to my house!  I must head in the direction of higher numbers.

I can only get back to my house if my street goes all the way around the world and comes back to my house from the other direction, and I suspect that it doesn’t do that.  I’m stuck farther down my own street, homeless now, because I cannot reach my address.  And it’s not as though you can take me in, because I cannot go back to your address, either, and if you leave your house to meet me, you will be in the same predicament in which I languish.

That’s sort of how time seems to work.  Unlike the three spatial dimensions, we cannot simply choose our direction, change our mind and our course, go back to where we came from or even just go around and around the block (which may or may not be a stupid thing to do—see yesterday’s post).  Why is time different?  The laws of physics appear to be locally time symmetric as they are space symmetric.  In other words, they work the same backwards and forwards.  But macroscopically, time is directional.

I’ve speculated a bit on this over at Iterations of Zero.  I’ll try to link to the pertinent blog post(s).  Some of that speculation compares the directionality of time that we all experience to the directionality of space that exists here on the surface of the Earth.

Wait, you say, what do you mean “the directionality of space”?  (You do love to interrupt, it seems.)  Well, think about it.  When you’re on the Earth, the directions forward/backward and left/right (or any other non-parallel axes you might choose along the surface, such as north/south and east/west) are freely navigable.  You can go in any direction or combination of directions along them, barring local obstacles.  But the same cannot be said for up/down.  It’s much harder to go up than to go left or forward.  And if you lose support beneath your feet, you will be unable to avoid going down.

Perhaps, as has been speculated by others with greater expertise than mine, the “Big Bang” provides or entails a local state that creates a local directionality to time, but far enough away from that “event”, time will become just as non-directional as any spatial dimension.

This is the way it works with the dimensions of 3D space:  when you’re far enough away from a local “event”, such as the surface of the Earth, the dimensions are all freely navigable.  But there’s not too much to do there, and it seems that life and complexity are likely to emerge only where these local gradients—whether in space or in time or both—exist, doing their part to provide the “free energy” which is required by things like life.

Anyway, that’s my random set of thoughts for this Thursday.  I hope you have a good day.  As for me, I continue to follow the local directionality of my metaphorical space; in other words, I continue to trend downward.  I do not perceive any other available direction for me.

TTFN

*Or I think I do.  I have terrible hearing and persistent tinnitus, so I might have been hearing the sound of rain on the roof or of wind in the trees or of otherworldly, eldritch creatures scratching at the fabric of reality, trying to break through the barriers between their realms and ours.  Probably not, though.

**You’re a bit rude, don’t you think?

***It’s not, unfortunately.

****Simplicity is one high-maintenance person.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think on that, and be amazed.

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

**But I doubt it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We shall see what happens.

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

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

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

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The moving finger writes, and having writ, now must edit

This is it:  my last blog post of 2025 (barring some truly unexpected circumstances).  I will probably be writing a post tomorrow, because I think we’re going to be working tomorrow, despite the fact that it will be New Year’s Day, and a stunningly large fraction of the people of the world will be hung over or otherwise exhausted from ringing in the New Year.

I suspect New Year’s Eve/Day is the most widely celebrated holiday in the world, far surpassing the numbers who celebrate any mere religious holiday.  Since the world in general uses the same “Gregorian”* calendar, it’s a rare commonality for the human race, and worth celebrating.

If only they could work on finding more things in common, since after all, they have almost everything actually in common with each other.  And yet, they focus on trivial cultural or superficial differences and battle viciously over them, as if they were fighting truly alien beings.  Talk about your narcissism of small differences.

Humans are so stupid.  The more of them there are, the stupider, somehow, as though the lowest common denominator tends always to dominate the dynamics.  It’s like Tommy Lee Jones’s character said in Men In Black:  a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

That isn’t always the case, obviously.  Humans have accomplished great things in large groups, interacting with mutual exchange to mutual benefit (or not so mutual benefit), but that probably only happens in rarefied circumstances, discovered or arranged by luck or by the skill of one or a few who are cleverer than average, and sustained thanks to a form of natural selection.

Because of the sheer power of such organizations of people, those rare few types of interactions can endure for tremendous lengths of time and be astonishingly effective and broadly prevalent.  This can distract one from the fact that the ideas were so singular and ingenious.

Money, for instance, has been invented more than once, but it’s a relatively low-hanging and particularly nutritious fruit, allowing as it does for the far more efficient exchange of goods and services to (ideally) mutual benefit.  Of course, commerce can be cheated and can thereby become nonproductive or even counterproductive, especially if one or a few entities obtain disproportionate wealth and power.  This sort of selection for detrimental equilibria happens in the world of biology as well.

Imagine a football game in which, every time one team scores, that team gains an extra player and the other team loses one.  Once one side takes the lead, they’re likely to keep it and increase it, making them ever more likely to maintain their dominance.  It can make for a pretty boring and not very productive game.  Such a situation is worth avoiding, even if you happen to be on the winning team.

Written language is, of course, the single most important human invention‒more important than even the invention of language itself, though that was a necessary prerequisite, so the argument could be made that it is more important or at least more fundamental.  Thankfully, language is a different type of thing than money, so it’s not as easy to game it to secure an unreasonable advantage for any individual or group.

There is, of course, an often-used attempted strategy of discouraging or preventing literacy in some groups or one sex (always the same one, it seems) to keep them from gaining the power that written language can impart, but it can be harder to keep those systems in place than for a monopoly to maintain its economic advantage.

Still, even written language isn’t automatically self-protective.  It’s possible for misinformation and disinformation to spread and even prosper, at least for a time (such situations tend to self-destruct), and it can do terrible damage, much as mutations in somatic DNA can lead to cell dysfunction, cell death, and sometimes cancer.

Analogous things can happen to whole civilizations as well, and they have happened many times, but that’s no reason to blame language or learning.  One doesn’t prevent cancer by eliminating DNA itself or by killing the host organism (that does eliminate the cancer, but in an unsatisfying way).  Only better, more thorough thinking and language, the equivalent of DNA proofreading, can do that without catastrophe.

And I, by writing this post, try to contribute to the good language, the useful or at least interesting language, in the world.  I suspect I will continue to do so as the next year begins.  I hope you enjoy whatever celebrations you have in store.

*Though Pope Gregory the Whatever Number was merely the one who commissioned it.  Astronomers and mathematicians actually did the work.  We have some scientifically literate Popes nowadays, at least, and a Belgian priest was among the first to do rigorous mathematics using Einstein’s new field equations (though Friedman got there a little earlier, his work was apparently not as convincing) to demonstrate that the universe could not be static** based upon them.

**Leading Einstein to introduce Λ (lambda), the cosmological constant.  He later called this his biggest blunder (supposedly) but it turned out to be a useful and term and concept in describing the apparent evolution of the universe as we know it now.  Like Planck before him, even Einstein’s fudges*** were deeply insightful and useful.

***Speaking of Einstein, I recently got an email from my old med school alumni association with the subject line “You are responsible for Einstein’s success”.  To which I so wanted to reply, “I know, right?  But did he mention me in any of his papers or even throw me a word of thanks (in German or otherwise) in his acceptance speech when he got his Nobel Prize for demonstrating that light comes in ‘packets’ which we now call photons?  No!  Ungrateful bastard.”

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Free will with any purchase of $100 or more

Happy Boxing Day, everyone.

For those of you in the US who don’t have much interaction with Great Britain or Canada (or the “antipodes”, where I think the day is also “celebrated”), Boxing Day is the official name for the day after Christmas, and since Christmas was yesterday, today is Boxing Day.  QED.

There is, no doubt, a thorough and accurate explanation for why this day is called Boxing Day, but I have not yet encountered it, despite occasional half-assed searches.  I also, honestly, don’t care very much.  I have a vague set of notions for possible explanations, existing in a sort of quantum superposition/probability cloud in my head, and that’s good enough for me.

On the other hand, if anyone out there knows the definitive, accurate, appropriately cited and replicated explanation for the source of the term Boxing Day…just keep it to yourself.  I’m not interested in reading any comments about it.

I am also not interested in reading any comments about Christmas, but I hope those of you who celebrate that holiday had a very lovely day, and enjoyed it in the best possible way with the best possible company.

By “best possible” please don’t take me to refer to some idealized, perfect*, eutopian** day.  I mean, the best possible day you could have given the circumstances of all the people and events in your life and around you.  I don’t expect it was without any unpleasantness or drama or minor irritations.  At the very least, most of us have to use the toilet several times a day, and those who don’t are generally worse off, not better off, than those who do.

But if you got to spend the day (or a significant chunk of it) with at least one person you love and who hopefully loves you, then you have at least some reason to think of it as a good day.  I did not have a good day, but hey, this is me, right?  When do I ever have a good day?

The next big holiday coming up is New Year.  Of course, if the universe overall is a closed loop of time (I have no real reason to suspect that it is, but no strong reason to be convinced that it is not) then this year is not new, nor is it old, it is just fixed.  From within any kind of deterministic spacetime, loop or otherwise, it can feel as though time has passed, but as Einstein pointed out, this would be an illusion (albeit a persistent one).

If things are nondeterministic, then all bets are off with respect to whether time is an illusion or not.  But please, don’t fall for the notion that the facts of quantum mechanics mean that the universe is non-deterministic.  They can mean that, depending on the truth underlying the mathematical descriptions, but quantum mechanics can be just as deterministic‒in a slightly more complicated way‒as Newtonian or Einsteinian classical physics.  Two examples are “superdeterminism” and the Everettian, many-worlds description of quantum mechanics.  There are probably others.

The point being, if the universe is deterministic, then each moment, each year, each Planck time is in a way permanent and “eternal”.  Each event is not only implied in the prior state of the universe, but it is also implied in the future state of the universe.

Some might complain that this would imply that there is no such thing as free will.  I think you are correct.  But so what?  Your will is patently less free than you imagine even in simpler, more straightforward terms.  Can you quickly drink a fifth of Wild Turkey 151 on an empty stomach (with no regurgitation) and choose not to become intoxicated (and possibly dead)?  Can you choose just not to feel tired after being awake for 36 hours?  Can you choose not to feel acute or chronic pain?  If you can do that last thing, I’d be interested in knowing how, so feel free to put that in the comments, but don’t waste my time with nonsense, please.

Anyway, as I like to say, I either have free will or I don’t, but I don’t have any choice in the matter.

It’s a bit like when people say absurd things such as “I wouldn’t want to live in a world without a God”.  My response, usually internal, to such statements is, “I don’t recall being given a choice about which kind of universe I would live in.  Did I miss some prenatal, preconceptual meeting where people were given the various options regarding into which universe they would be born?”

Anyway, it is whatever it is.  In a certain sense, it can of course be useful to consider what the nature of reality most truly and completely is, so we can navigate it in the best available way.  But in another sense, the ability to learn about a deterministic universe is just baked in.  And like everything else, it is permanent, albeit not in the usual, prosaic sense of enduring through time unchanging, since time itself is one of the permanent things.  Does this imply some “meta-time”***?  Not necessarily, but it could in principle.

I don’t think we know enough about the deep roots of reality to do more than speculate about such things.  The speculation can be fun, though, and occasionally it can briefly distract one from the unbearable shittiness of being.  Alas, that distraction never lasts for long; mine is fading rapidly even now, and I don’t feel like writing or even breathing any more.  I can’t do much about the latter process without causing a big to-do, but the writing I can stop any…

*Whatever that even means.

**This is not a typo or a misunderstanding or misspelling.  This is my (apparent) neologism for a truly and realistically ideal place.  The word “utopia” means essentially “no place”, highlighting the fact that such a place does not exist, even potentially.  Whereas my term uses the prefix “eu-” which means “true or good or well” as in eukaryote or eugenics or my middle name “Eugene”.

***This term has nothing to do with Facebook or Instagram or whatever else to which Z*ckerberg has tried to arrogate the term “meta”.