Physics

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Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and blog will have his day.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the last day of April in 2026.  Tomorrow we meet a new month, same (more or less) as the old month.

I’m very tired, despite the fact that it’s the first thing (or nearly so) in the morning.  Of course, morning doesn’t necessarily mean you got any rest last night, not if you’ve got chronic pain and chronic insomnia.

The latter problem started for me several years or more before the former.  It has not escaped my consideration that my insomnia may have contributed to my chronic pain.  I am, after all, a trained physician and scientist with a fervent desire to understand…well, everything, ultimately.  So, I know a lot about both chronic pain and insomnia since in addition to my education and my curiosity, I actually am afflicted with the two things.

Don’t get me started on depression.

Actually, it’s a bit too late for that.  I am feeling the gravity well dip of worsening dysthymia that seems to be heading toward a full depressive episode, though predicting these things is unreliable.  But this morning, I felt I didn’t even want to sit up in bed (well, in futon) let alone get up and do anything at all.

That’s unusual for me.  Usually even when I’m in a bad way, the stress‒the anxiety, I guess‒associated with possibly not doing what I’m “supposed” to do, of letting people down, is too strong to let me just lie around, even though I am frequently exhausted (in the figurative sense, at least).  But today, even that almost didn’t show up, not enough to do what it usually does.  It was only really my sense of routine, of habit, that gave me the energy to get moving.

It helped that I wanted to feed the cats, but I know that they can handle themselves, at least for a few hours.  Still, it’s a positive.  I even did five pull-ups, which is not as many as I usually do, but at least I didn’t just not do them at all.

I often wish I could hibernate, or perhaps more precisely, to have a long sleep such as what some bears do during cold months.  I don’t want to go into true suspended animation, because that really doesn’t do anything for you except to let you skip forward in time.  Any period of true oblivion, however long it is, feels instantaneous from the inside.

If you pause a game, for instance, you can (in principle) come back a year later and pick it back up, and for the character, no time has passed at all.  If you were to experience things from their point of view, you would experience an uninterrupted flow of time.

What if you pause the game but never restart it?  Then the character’s experience just stops.  It’s a kind of death, of course, but it’s not a death caused by anything within that game universe.  It’s just, in a sense, that universe coming to an end.  No wailing, no moaning, no gnashing of teeth.

If you stop playing a Blu-ray in the middle of a movie, and then you break the Blu-ray disc, the characters don’t “die”, but for the purposes of that iteration of that movie, they might as well have died.  They certainly cannot continue to perform their parts.

It’s a bit like what it would be like for our universe to undergo vacuum collapse.  The wavefront of collapse would progress at essentially the speed of light.  Everything you know‒everything you are‒would cease to be at all, and it would happen far too quickly for you to experience the process.  The stuff with which you experience things would be deleted before it could begin to experience its own erasure.

It doesn’t seem like a bad way for an individual to die, but it seems a shame to lose everything in a whole universe.  Also, it’s just kind of daunting to think that everything in existence would get wiped out and turned into a hot soup of elementary fields and their “particles”, much like what happened near the beginning of “our” universe when the inflaton field (if inflation happened) collapsed.  It feels worse in some ways than other manners of death because there is literally nothing you can do to avoid it or to flee it or even to know that it’s happening.

It’s deucedly unlikely, though, so don’t fret about it.  And, anyway, if it happens, there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

That’s enough for now.  I won’t get into the news of me falling out of my seat yesterday afternoon (really, it sort of rolled out from under me as I was trying to sit down, but I ended up on the floor on my back no matter how one characterizes it) except to say that it happened, and that I have worsened stiffness today at least partly because of it.

I hope you all have good days.

TTFN

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Should you give a fig about a freight train’s Newtons?

It’s Saturday, April 25th, in 2026 AD/CE.  There are only 7 shopping months until Newtonmas (Other holidays are available).

Anyway, I’m very groggy and tired today, though at least I am (for the moment) in slightly less pain than yesterday.  It still sucks, but now it’s more of a neutron star kind of sucking rather than a full scale black hole.

Not that either of those two stellar remnants can be said to “suck” in any atypical way, with respect to gravity.  It is true that the gravitation at the surface of a neutron star is extremely high (to say nothing of the “surface” of a black hole).  But that’s just because everything is so compact, and you can get much closer to the center of gravity than you would be able to do with more spread-out astronomical bodies made of more typical matter.

But, to reiterate a perhaps overused example, if the sun were suddenly (and without any other phenomena that would complicate the picture) to collapse* into a neutron star or even a black hole of the same mass, the Earth’s orbit would not change at all.

There’s no special “supergravity” or whatever some people imagine there might be due to black holes or neutron stars.  It’s just ordinary gravity with a large mass in a small region.  From farther away than the former surface of whatever collapsed into it, the gravity of a neutron star or a black hole is literally indistinguishable from that of the celestial object that became the black hole or neutron star (if it did not lose any mass in its collapse to the latter state, which in reality they almost always do).

How the hell did I get on that subject?  I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see it while editing.

I’m a little out of it this morning, because I took half a Benadryl last night in addition to my other, more typical stuff.  I don’t usually take Benadryl on a work night, but groggy and unpleasant quasi-consciousness that at least helps me to be unconscious is better than not being able even to get to sleep or stay that way for long and being groggy because of that rather than the side effects of an antihistamine.

Something like that, anyway; I’m not sure I made that very clear.

I’ve just now become briefly distracted because a redirected freight train just went by on the track in front of me (going south on the usually-northbound side of the tracks, something for which there were no doubt legitimate reasons, but which still feels quite wrong).  This happens occasionally, and I’m sure the process that leads up to it is somewhat interesting, at least from a certain point of view.

It’s definitely an event that happens only because something has gone wrong somewhere.  The tracks for commuter trains, like the course over which they run, are not really meant for heavy freight trains, so they can’t let them use them very often.  And it was heavy, I’m sure of that. There were numerous tank cars and box cars and all sorts of similar cars carrying potentially heavy stuff.  Even the train’s whistle as it approached was a different, lower pitched sound and had a more somber timbre (sombre timber?) than the usual Tri rail whistle.

I already was pretty sure it wasn’t a regular train when the nearby gates went down to stop traffic, because there’s no scheduled Tri rail train going in either direction at even close to that time on a Saturday.  If it were a behind-schedule train, it would have to have been the first train of the day going south, and it would be quite off its schedule indeed.  Trains only come every hour on the weekend.

I almost wrote “every hour on the hour” there, just for the “sound” of it, but of course it’s not feasible to have a commuter train arrive every hour on the hour at every train station unless the stations are an hour’s traveling distance apart.  That would be one hell of a commute, and not in a good way.

Anyway, I think that’s enough nonsense for today.  I still don’t feel good.  My legs and hips are still channeling low-level but constant DC current (or so it feels), and I am having more and more trouble seeing any point to continuing to try to style my way though all this.  It’s been more than 20 years and things are not improving overall.

It would be more tolerable if I had other people and reasons and points in my daily life, but I don’t, not really.  The comments here below this blog constitute the majority of my socialization, not counting work interactions (which are a different kind of thing, though related).

I’m so bloody tired.

Anyway, have a good weekend if you can.  For goodness sake, cherish the people you love and who love you, especially if you’re lucky enough to be with them every day.  And remember, when in doubt, don’t ask yourself “What would Newton do?”.  Unless you’re a scientist, that is, in which case, yeah, Newton was a decent role model.

Otherwise, he was a terribly unpleasant, vindictive, and spiteful man (and here I thought it impossible for me to admire him more than I already did).  He is reported to have laughed only once in his life, when someone asked him what was the point of studying Euclid.

I sympathize with Newton there.  That is an idiotic question for anyone who is stuck living in and making their way through three-dimensional, locally Euclidean space.

Mind you, when things like black holes and neutron stars are involved, you need to go beyond Euclid, but you can’t readily go beyond Euclid if you’ve never gotten to Euclid***.

*There’s no known process by which this could happen, by the way, so don’t worry about it.  Also, you don’t need to worry about encountering spherical cows or frictionless surfaces**.

**Though I’ve long thought that “Frictionless Cows” might be a good name for a band.

***You don’t need to read Euclid’s actual book to study Euclidean geometry, any more than you need to read Newton’s Principia Mathematica to learn Newtonian physics.  But it’s worth giving them each a tip of the hat in passing, at least, for they are among humanity’s greatest works.

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We have met the cosmic horror, and…

Well, here I go again (on my own, like the song says) writing another blog post.  As for why I am doing so, well, there is surely a set of causes‒potentially tracing all the way back to the Big Bang, or at least the period just during and/or after inflation, assuming that happened, which seems more likely than not‒there may not be any good reason for it.

Oh, of course, I could come up with reasons.  I could “justify” myself.  Indeed, there is reason (har) to think that justification and persuasion to bolster one’s status and identity in a tribe against others with opposed motives may have been one of the driving forces behind the development of the human reasoning capacity.  This is apart from, and perhaps almost orthogonal to, the basic power of reasoning to understand and thus best navigate the territory of reality.

Once it got started, reasoning would have accelerated thanks to biological arms races between those competing for survival and reproduction, and then it would have turned out serendipitously to have been more broadly and powerfully useful than merely for securing status and food and mates.

Imagine if the peacock’s tail had turned out not only to be ostentatious and beautiful and sexy (to peahens, anyway) but tremendously useful and broadly powerful, especially once it reached a certain level.  Imagine if the peacock’s tail had allowed peacocks to build skyscrapers and boats and trains and planes and cars, if peacocks’ tails helped peacocks build a global civilization, quite apart from their ability to secure one’s status and acquire good mates.

That’s quite possibly more or less what happened with human brains.

Of course, like the peacock’s tail, the human brain is not without its drawbacks.  I suspect that things like depression and anxiety, and perhaps even neurodivergence, are simply potential (and statistically inevitable) outcomes for a brain that has grown powerful enough to assess the world deeply and uncover the almost Lovecraftian terror of our tiny little existence when placed against the scope and scale of the cosmos.

I say “Lovecraftian”, but even with Lovecraft, though the beings in the mythos are thoroughly inhuman and incomprehensible‒unsane, as I like to say‒they are still beings.  The true cosmic horror is surely that beings of any kind are almost nonexistent; indeed, to a very good approximation, they are nonexistent.

In some senses, this can at least be morally reassuring.  If we do go and spread out through the universe‒or even just the galaxy or even just our local family of stars‒and there are indeed no other life forms, then at least we need not worry about violating implicit rights.  Uninhabited asteroids (for instance) don’t have goals or wishes and, as far as we can tell, they cannot suffer.

Of course, we may have aesthetic concerns about such things, but aesthetics are not as urgent as ethics.  And, of course, we will still have moral/ethical concerns toward each other; that almost goes without saying.

Whether or not we will exist long enough for the ethics (or lack thereof) of changing the state of uninhabited other places in the galaxy to be pertinent is quite uncertain.  I see nothing in the laws of physics that makes it impossible, so in that sense, I am optimistic.  But I see nothing in the laws of physics, nor more specifically in human nature, that makes it certain or even likely that we will survive to spread out from our native planet to any significant degree.  And I see nothing in the laws of nature that seems to imply that, if we don’t succeed and spread through the cosmos, anyone else will do so, or indeed that anyone else even exists.

Don’t get me wrong; physics clearly and undeniably allows life to exist, and it allows (human-like) intelligence and civilization to exist.  But those are two different scales of allowance.

The molecules and principles of life as we know it, with long-chain molecules capable of carrying information and of replicating themselves, leading to “competition” and “improvement” and increasing complexity and so on, seem so straightforward as to be happening potentially (but far from certainly) in a good many places in the universe.  This is straightforward enough.  The equivalents of viruses and prokaryotes may exist in many regions.  It’s even possible that there may be such life in other places in our solar system (Europa and Enceladus being possible contenders).

But multicellular, “eukaryotic” life, seems likely to be much rarer.  Basic life started on Earth, as far as we can see, very shortly after the Earth formed and cooled enough for complex molecules to endure (nearly 4 billion years ago).  Eukaryotes, especially multicellular ones, didn’t really arrive until about 500 million years ago.  So, seven eighths into the time of life on Earth, it was basically just “bacteria” and some viruses.

Then, for significant, interpersonal, symbolic and technological intelligence to develop took another…well, basically another 500 million years.  And as far as we can tell, it’s only happened once.

That doesn’t give us a good, clear picture of how rare or common such a thing is‒one is a difficult number of experimental subjects from which to draw too many conclusions‒but it’s possible that the existence of technologically intelligent life is so rare as to occur only once per, on average, every chunk of spacetime as large as our visible universe.  It could even be rarer than that.

In an infinite cosmos, of course, even such exceedingly rare events would happen an infinite number of times (so to speak).  But that doesn’t necessarily make things less lonesome.  If you have an infinite number of decks of cards (with no jokers), all thoroughly shuffled together, there are literally just as many Aces of Spades as there are red-suited cards in total (ℵ₀, the “smallest” infinity).  Nevertheless, if you draw cards randomly, you will only get an Ace of Spades one twenty-sixth as often as you will get a red-suited card.

Similarly, there are as many whole multiples of a trillion as there are integers in general (again, ℵ₀), but if you pick a random integer, you’re still only going to pull such a multiple one out of a trillion times (on average).

So, maybe the takeaway is that the real cosmic horror may be that we are the only entities haunting the abyss, and there are no (other) mad idiot gods bubbling away at the center of celestial existence.  Maybe it’s just us.  And if our lights go out, then nobody is home.

It’s worth considering, not least because it has every chance of being true, whether literally or just practically.  For if the nearest other technological life form is in another galactic cluster, for instance, then we are, for all reasonable purposes, alone in the universe.

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I have had a dream, past the wit of man to blog what dream it was.

Hello and good morning.

When I started waking up this morning, well before I started writing this post, I think I had a sort of an idea in my head about what sentence I was going to write after the “Hello and good morning” with which I always start my Thursday blog posts.  From there, I had a general notion of where I would go with the day’s writing.

It’s gone now, that whole set of ideas, which will probably not surprise you.  What with getting up, putting out food for cats, showering, dressing, all that jazz, the earlier concept has simply slipped my mind.

And, no, this that I’m writing now is not anything like what I thought I thought about in the night.  It’s good to be optimistic, up to a point‒at least, that’s the common “wisdom”‒but we must definitely try to avoid delusion.

I have, upon occasion, thought of ideas of things to write or whatever during the middle of the night.  When they strike me as important, I actually get up and write them out, usually in the note function of my phone or in an email to myself.  I try to make sure it has some form of enforced legibility, because I learned the lesson from that Seinfeld episode where Jerry woke up with a joke in his head, wrote it down on the pad he kept next to his bed, but then couldn’t read it the next day.

In my case, last night’s/this morning’s thought may well have suffered from the dream illusion of meaning and substance.  There was, as far as I can recall*, no actual content to what I thought I was going to write.  It’s possible, and even probably common, for the brain modules that indicate salience to become active during dreams, while the brain is presumably just sort of sweeping up after the day’s mess, but not in response to any object of one’s attention.

It’s rather akin to déjà vu.  Such free-floating feelings of memory or significance can happen sometimes in people with atypical forms of seizure disorders, but more commonly (though less frequently) they happen in brains without seizure disorders that just hit occasional blips of increased local activation.

This is a bit like what I suspect happens with “rogue waves”, those rare, truly gigantic swells that occur and are reported by sailors and oil rig workers.  I think that, in an ocean that’s vast and full of various waves of various amplitudes and frequencies, every now and then, local constructive interference happens to pile together in a small area and produce a wave of immense combined amplitude, ending up well toward the right end of whatever bell-like curve describes the amplitudes of ordinary ocean waves.  Then the waves separate and the rogue wave is gone**.  There is no specific cause other than just a lot of waves passing through each other in a very large medium (no pun intended).

The workings of a brain can be a large medium indeed, despite being in a rather small space (this time it was deliberate).  Sometimes the neurons just throw out a blip of higher-than-usual activation of, say, a salience module or a memory module, or even a meaning/certainty module.  It is of such stochastic regional hyperactivations that I suspect many, or at least some, religious experiences are born.

So, anyway, though I cannot remember if there was any substance to the half-dream idea for today’s blog post that occurred to me during my way-too-early awakening, let alone what such substance might have been, nevertheless it has conjured a subject for this post, as if by bootstrap levitation.

Such are the functionally unpredictable and chaotic workings of the human brain, or at least whatever kind of brain I have.  I don’t know if other people have similar experiences or not.  Maybe I’m the only one who experiences anything like all of this.

I seriously doubt that, though.  I’ve read plenty of fiction and nonfiction that deals with people talking about their thoughts, about their states of mind, their emotional experiences, and so on.  It all sounds quite similar in overall shape, though the specific details and decorations vary.  We are more alike than unalike.  Otherwise, how could you be reading and understanding my words?

Well, whatever the case as regards what I’ve written above, I hope we are unalike enough for you to have a wonderful day, preferably spending time with people you love and who love you.

TTFN

*Which, admittedly, is quite dubious, since the amnesia of sleep time intrudes at least somewhat.

**This is all just my hypothesis about the situation.  It’s possible that other factors are at play, but I’ve never heard them mentioned.

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Queasy does it

Ugh, it’s Monday again.  I’m very much not ready to start another work week.  I’ve felt a bit queasy and under the weather since yesterday afternoon‒probably due to some dietary indiscretion, I don’t know‒and just felt kind of icky.  I’m not nauseated at the moment, though, just kind of wiped.

I’m sure that’s how you were hoping to begin your week of reading blog posts:  with news of my upset stomach from yesterday.  One can imagine Tom Brokaw, or perhaps even Walter Cronkite, breathlessly delivering such a bulletin, am I right?  What would the banner headline in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal say about such a story?

Probably nothing, of course.  Imagine how slow and anti-interesting a news day would have to be for major news outlets to carry stories about my minor ailments.

Not to say that the ailments of certain people don’t get covered; they do, of course.  Sometimes this is just frivolous curiosity or even prurient interest, as in the case of “celebrities”.  Sometimes it really is important, as in the case of powerful individuals who carry great responsibilities.  In those cases, people can legitimately be concerned, especially if the responsibilities carried by these individuals are things only they can do.  That’s rare in the real world, but it can happen*.

Oy, sorry about the interruption there.  I had a little sneezing fit.  Oh, wait, you all didn’t experience that interruption; only I did.  How embarrassing.  I shouldn’t have said anything.  Well, it’s too late now.

Though, of course, it isn’t too late, not for me as I write it‒I could change it if I wanted to change it.  But by the time you read this, then, yes, it will be too late for me to change it.  I mean, I could edit the post after the fact‒I have that power‒but it wouldn’t affect those who had already read it.

I could conceivably affect your memory of what it had originally said if I changed it and then persistently repeated the lie that it had never been the way I originally posted it.  But even if I got everyone in the universe to believe the lie‒getting them all to care would be a big enough undertaking‒it would not change the fact of what had originally happened.

This underscores the true, fundamental powerlessness of lies.  Words can change what people “believe” in the short term, but talk is cheap (mother fucker).  No matter how much a person believes they can fly under their own power, if they step off the top of a tall building (on Earth, in normal gravity) they will plummet.

And they may believe, all the way down, that they are actually flying and that the falling is the illusion, but once they reach the bottom, everything with which they believe anything will, if the fall was far enough, be utterly broken, perhaps even scattered across the pavement.  All that they believed or remembered will be obliterated, in a very true sense of the word.

That’s one of the good, albeit sometimes frustrating, things about reality.  Whatever it is, it is, regardless of whether anyone believes it or even knows it, regardless of whether there even exists anyone who can know it.

How did I get there from having noted that I felt sick yesterday and don’t feel great today to be starting the week?  I’m sure it’ll be clear in the editing process.  But it is a fact that I got to this point, so it happened somehow.

I don’t really know what else to discuss.  Nothing of consequence happens in my life anymore, not even from the narrow, parochial point of view of my own mind.  At this stage, my life is of more or less of zero significance to anyone, including me, so I guess it doesn’t matter what I discuss.

I’m very tired, though, and it’s just the start of the day and the week.  I hope I get to feeling better as the week goes along, though the second law of thermodynamics seems to imply that such a thing is by no means guaranteed to happen, and indeed, in the long run, will definitely not happen.  At least, the tendency for entropy to increase is as definite as anything we know.

Clearly, though, huge regions of low entropy are possible; the universe as we know it “began” in such a state.  Mind you, we wouldn’t want to be suddenly transported to such a low entropy region of spacetime, as they are not readily amenable to life, which is dependent upon local gradients in free energy and entropy.  This is why life occurred in sort of the “middle state” of the universe, the mixing state, as when one sees the many swirling forms and patterns in one’s coffee cup as one is pouring in milk or cream, before the mixing finally becomes uniform.

Also, though quite uniform and low entropy, the Big Bang was also pretty darn hot, and I’m not speaking metaphorically.

If one could open a teeny, tiny wormhole back to some region of the early universe just after the Big Bang, one could conceivably obtain functionally limitless energy**.  But that would affect the subsequent evolution of the early universe, I suspect, though perhaps it could not possibly affect the universe in such a way as to prevent itself from being instantiated.  Or, well, maybe for that reason it cannot be instantiated.

I don’t know.  I’m tired.  You can probably tell.  Anyway, I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Though no examples spring to mind.  If you can think of one, please share it in the comments below.

**Though, would that outweigh the energy required to create and maintain the wormhole?  I have a strong intuition that it would not.

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It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s not even about everyone.

It’s Friday today (as I write this, anyway‒it may be another day entirely as you read it), and I am in the process of heading to work.  I will also be working tomorrow, barring (as ever) the unforeseen.  And that doesn’t just include the foreseen unforeseen; the unforeseen unforeseen (especially that one) can also change what happens tomorrow, in ways that we do not expect, more or less by definition.

Of course, the Tao te Ching advises us to act without expectation, and I suppose that’s pretty good advice.  The universe doesn’t make special deals, such that if you do some particular thing, it will definitely turn out the way you hope.  The universe does what it has always done, and you are not the subject or the object of its action‒you are just one of the innumerable things the universe does.  It did not have to ask your permission, and it will not apologize.  It also does not make exceptions, not as far as anyone can see.

 

Since the beginning

not one unusual thing

has ever happened*.

 

You can imagine and draw a map that looks any way you want, that contains fairy lands and misty mountains and roads that are shorter in one direction than another**, but if your map doesn’t match the actual territory, it’s not going to be useful for traveling through that territory safely and successfully (by whatever reasonable criteria you might judge success).  Likewise, blank spots on the map don’t imply blank spots in the territory, and writing “here be dragons” does not somehow conjure dragons into existence (alas).

Reality is that which actually exists, whether or not anyone “believes” it or “believes in it”, whether or not anyone has been, is now, or ever will be aware of it.  Heck, if eternal inflation and a consequent inflationary multiverse following (for instance) the string landscape are true, then the vast majority of the stuff of reality will never, ever be known, because most of it‒the ever-expanding inflaton field and those bubble universes where local laws are such that complexity cannot exist, as well as those huge stretches of even our universe that precede (or follow) any existence of life‒will never be accessible to conscious experience.

That’s okay.  Man is not the measure (nor the measurer) of all things.  Man is the measure of almost nothing.  Man‒indeed, all life of which we know‒is a tiny little epiphenomenon that exists in a tiny little sphere of nonzero thickness on and around the surface of the Earth.  I’ll try to remember to do the math comparing that volume to the volume of the visible universe and put it in a footnote below.  If it’s not there, I didn’t do it***.

One sometimes hears people say‒often they seem to be trying to make excuses for themselves to believe in some deity or other‒that the universe is exquisitely tuned for life, such that it requires explanation by some “supernatural” means.

When I hear or read such things, my reaction is, “What universe are you looking at?!?”  Almost no place in the universe can be survived by life as we know it, let alone produce it.  The fraction is so close to nonexistent that it is zero to a good first approximation, and a good second approximation, and a good third, and so on.

It may seem that time could possibly give us a bit more comfort than space does, since life on Earth has existed between roughly a fourth and a third of the time since our Big Bang.  But the future of this universe gives every indication of being without end, whereas conditions for large scale matter to exist‒as far as we can tell‒will not last long (not compared to infinity, which to be fair, nothing is, not even TREE(3) or Graham’s number or any other huge but finite numbers).

By the time the last supermassive black holes finish evaporating due to Hawking radiation, which will be about a googol years, things will already have been impossible for any kind of life we would recognize for eons of eons.

Of course, it’s conceivable that life will grow to become cosmically important and able to engineer specific ways for the universe to avoid heat death (or whatever is coming), or to make new universes, or whatever.  But that’s a mightily narrow course for the future to thread.

And the time until a straightforward Poincaré recurrence of the current state of our universe makes a googol years seem unnoticeably teensy by comparison.

Anyway, the main point I’m making, if there is one, is that the universe neither promises nor owes you anything.  That doesn’t mean it’s not okay for things to be important to you.  You matter (on the scales we’ve been considering) nearly as much as the whole Andromeda galaxy.

It’s fine for you to try to make your life what you want it to be.  Why not?  There’s no one else who has any legitimate claim to it (not counting children, friends, etc., all of whom could be considered part of “what you want it to be”).  Just don’t expect other people, let alone the vastly bigger number of things that are not people, to be also trying to make your life the way you want it to be.

Okay, that’ll do, pig.  I’m tired (What else is new?).  I’ll most likely write a post tomorrow.  I hope you have a good day.

*I got this haiku from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationality: From AI to Zombies, though I am not sure if it originated with him.

**Actually, I’m not sure how you would draw that.

***I did it, though I initially made a mistake in calculating the surface area of the Earth, as you can see below if you look closely (I forgot to square pi in the denominator).  Anyway, assuming that the depth-to-height range of life on Earth is about 20 km, then the volume for life as we know it is about 1 x 10^19 cubic meters.  The volume of the visible universe on the other hand is 2.6 x 10^81 cubic meters (if my calculations are correct).  That means that the fraction of the universe that is, to our knowledge, amenable to life is 3.8 x 10^(-63), or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000038 of the volume of the universe.  By comparison, the fraction of your volume represented by one of your tens of trillions of cells is roughly 10^(-12), or .000000000001.  You lose thousands of cells every proverbial time you scratch your nose.  How much do you notice them?  How much less would the universe notice if it scratched all life off?

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Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft blogged without merit, and lost without deserving

Hello and good morning; it’s Thursday, the 9th.  By that I don’t mean, for instance, the 9th Symphony by Beethoven or the 9th rule of Fight Club.  No, it’s the 9th of April in 2026 AD/CE.

I’m not sure if any of you would have suspected anything like those first two possibilities, but just in case, I figured I would rule them out.

Now, before I forget:  if any of you use Facebook and/or Threads, and if you wouldn’t mind being associated (indirectly) with my work, would you mind sharing the links to my blog posts there from time to time?  I traditionally shared my posts on those venues after writing them, but obviously I cannot do that now.

It’s up to you, of course.  Like a badly broken barometer, there’s no pressure.

Okay, well, that ought to be out of the way for today.  But, well, it is an ongoing request, in that I request for it not just today, but any time you have the chance and feel so inclined.  I would greatly appreciate it.  If you do it, and you want to come here and let me know, by all means, do a bit of showing off.

Though I don’t know whether it could honestly, fairly be considered “showing off”, at least as things are right now.  Nevertheless, sometime in the future, I may become famous (or perhaps notorious) and it will be a mark of honor, or at least of interest, that you were one of the few dozen people who regularly followed my blog from way back when (i.e., now).

I don’t know what I might do that would lead to me being famous (or notorious), but considering some of the otherwise highly unimpressive people who are famous* (or notorious) I’d say I at least have a fair shot.

On to other matters that are randomly (or at least chaotically) bringing themselves to the front of my mind.

I saw the early express train go by the station this morning, only a short bit ago as I write this.  That train doesn’t stop at my station, but instead zooms by at nearly full speed.  It’s rather unusual to be so close to a fast moving train, and it really makes you feel how apparently tenuous the power of the train tracks is.  It really, really feels as though the train is not truly secure in its movement, but could instead slide off at any second, very easily, and cause a catastrophe.

Our intuitive feelings about such things are hard to ignore‒I half brace myself for a derailment almost every time such trains pass.  But the empirical, all but irrefutably powerful, fact remains that countless trains travel along tracks, some at quite high speeds, every day (but usually not twice on Sundays), and derailment is almost a non-occurrence.  Clearly, the physics and engineering principles at work here are doing their jobs very well.

It’s good, I think, to take a glance at these seemingly mundane (because we have become accustomed to them) things that happen around us and to contemplate either their solidity despite our misgivings and inability to internalize what’s happening, or the truly remarkable things happening underneath occurrences that may seem unremarkable.

This is one of the things I really like about the YouTube channel “The Slo Mo Guys”.  In their videos, one gets to see physical processes slowed down to astonishing degrees sometimes.  But even the more “run-of-the-mill” slow motion videos can let one appreciate the intricacy of so many things happening below the level of perception in ordinary phenomena.

Also, many of the things one can see in slomo remind me of how slowly the galaxies and clusters and stars within galaxies move from our point of view, whereas if seen from outside, by beings for whom a million years is like a second, they would seem much like the splashes of water from popping balloons (for instance) when we look at it as if through one of the Phantom™ high-speed cameras.

Okay, well, that was indeed a fairly stochastic blog post, wasn’t it?  I’ll call it good now‒at least in the sense that it is done, if not in the sense of quality.  Thank you in advance*** if you do share the links to the post on your social media.

TTFN

*This is not meant to imply that all famous (or even notorious) people are unimpressive; that is not the case.  There are people who are famous for being exceptionally good at certain things, like sports or acting or singing or writing.  And there are also people who have done great work in science or technology or medicine and so on (No, starting a social media company in and of itself is not necessarily impressive, at least not to me, though there is no doubt that it requires certain skills…but when it comes to such a company’s success, as with so many things, a lot of it is luck**).  Many times fame is well and truly earned.  But many times it is not.

**I read a good book called Fooled by the Winners that addresses this issue as one of its main theses.  I think it would be good for everyone to think clearly and specifically about the way “survivor bias” misleads us and can give us a faulty notion of how aspects of the world work.

***I would/will also gladly thank you after the fact; don’t think that I’m prethanking in order not to have to say thank you later.

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Reality, calories, and joules, oh my!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“We would zig-zag our way through the boredom and pain”

It’s Monday again; indeed, it is the last Monday in March in 2026 (AD/CE), for whatever that’s worth.  This Monday shall never come again.

Then again, of course, no Monday shall ever come again.  Such is the nature of time.  This is one of the facts that makes senseless the expression “That’s a [measure of time] I’m not gonna get back”.  Well, duh!  You never get any of your experienced amounts of time back.  That’s the nature of time, and the nature of its directionality, dependent upon the second law of thermodynamics.

Even if one could rewind time, one would not “get a moment back” the way people talk about it.  If, like the events of a movie or other video story, one could rewind life, it would not be you (the self who spoke of getting the moment back) who would experience the events anew.  It would just be a return to an earlier state, in which you would again be experiencing all the same events, not merely as if for the first time, but actually for the first time.  The posterior events would be erased for you as you traveled back.

It’s not like playing a video game where you can “regenerate” at your most recent save point, but you can remember what happened to your character before it “died” so that you can learn from your mistakes.  There is no one playing your character (i.e., you) and able to learn from a repeated past.  You are not the player of the game, you are the character.  You are part of the game.  You are part of the movie, not watching it from outside.  If it resets, you reset; if it rewinds, you rewind, and all memory of any events that happened disappear along with the future.

Whether or not you will repeat the same events, like the characters of a movie/show, or if you may do something different, like a video game character, is less clear, but it doesn’t much matter.  You are still going through each moment once, effectively, and you can only learn from mistakes to affect your behavior in the future.  If your mistake kills you, you’re just dead.

Even if time were a closed loop‒if the future of the universe wraps around and becomes “the past” again, forming a closed and fixed structure, as appears to be possible in principle according to General Relativity‒you won’t get to experience it as happening again.  Each time, you will experience reality for the first time.

Just as there is no fixed self looking out from behind your mind, there is no external rememberer hovering over your reality, able to experience your experiences for the first time but as if not for the first time.  You are a phenomenon within reality, not a sojourner through reality that accumulates knowledge that could be used in reliving the past, but better.

If you could rewind yourself except for your mind, somehow retaining your memory of “the future”, that would not be truly returning to the past.  Rather, it becomes the next set of events in your future.  This demands an answer to the question of how it could be possible for you to become your earlier self and yet remember your later self, since your memories are functions of your brain.

This is what makes things like Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia or brain damage so tragic‒they literally are injuries to what makes us ourselves.  If you lose all memories of your past, then in a very real sense, the person you were is already dead.

Of course, even in healthy states, without brain damage, your past self is still “dead” with every new moment that arrives.  Every time you sleep and then wake up, it may as well be that you have died and then been recreated in the morning, just with implanted memories from the previous person, the one who died.  There would be no way for you to know if there is no difference in your brain and the rest of your body.  Indeed, it’s in principle possible that this actually happens with each passing moment, or even each passing Planck time.

Only the past can be remembered.  Only the future, even in principle, can be planned and affected.  And only the ever-moving present can be experienced.  There is, of course, a continuity that is required for us to have any sense of a unified personhood at all, but as Sam Harris has pointed out (more than once) your memories of your past are merely thoughts in your mind in the present moment, as are your plans for the future.

So it really can make sense to “get over yourself”, in more than one way.  It’s worth recognizing that you’re mortal and‒whatever you may believe‒as far as we know, death is the end, and all that you were will be gone after that.  But it’s also worth recognizing that, in a nontrivial sense, each day all that you were the day before is already gone.

Still, though you are only existing for any given present moment, memory at least allows for us to learn and hopefully do better in the future than we would have if we didn’t have memory.  That’s why memory is a trait that gets selected for and is evolutionarily stable:  because its presence makes creatures with that trait or attribute more likely to survive and reproduce than those that do not have it, ceteris paribus.

As with most such subject-specific blog posts, I could go on and on about this.  A thousand (or, well, a lot of) other thoughts arise that could be expressed as I write what I do write.  But I have finite space and finite time (even if spacetime is infinite) in which to write this post, so I’ll stop here for the moment.

Welcome to the new week.  I hope it’s a good one for you.  Heck, I hope it’s a good one for everyone, even “bad” people (with the caveat that, “a good one” entails such people becoming better than they presently are).

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Sometimes drunkards walk to interesting places

Well, well, as the oil tycoon said*.  It’s Saturday now and I am actually writing a blog post, as I expected I would.  It’s been three weeks since the most recent prior Saturday morning post (not counting my “non-post” from last week).  But today, this weekend, I am going to work, and so I am writing a post.

I hope you’re proud of yourself.

Okay, well, that last sentence doesn’t really make sense in this context, but I felt the curious and rather inscrutable urge to write it, and there was no real downside to doing so, so I did.  These are the sorts of things that happen in biological, nonlinear, largely subconscious brains that are communicating using language (especially written language, in my case).

A truly efficient, direct, deliberately programmed AI (not a neural net style, LLM type of AI, but one whose algorithm is precise and understood) might not produce such erratic and seemingly peculiar thoughts.  But maybe it would.  Maybe one cannot have actual intelligence, with creativity and the like, without having a system that meanders a bit into the highly tangential.

I suspect this may be so, because in order to grow and gain new knowledge, to be creative, there has to be a capacity to embrace the unknown‒not in an H. P. Lovecraft sense, but more in a sense reminiscent of Michael Moorcock’s** character that strode into chaos and by interacting with it caused it to become a locally specific order***.

The potential paths into the future which one might, in principle, explore are functionally limitless, and may actually be infinite.  It’s not possible to evaluate them comprehensively through any kind of linear logic‒not in the time span available to the universe, anyway.  So, to work things better, there must be a bit of potential for “randomness”, for moving forward into a future that is one’s best guess, or into which one has narrowed down at least some of one’s choices.  Then one can find a “good enough” path or course of action, one which may produce insights and outcomes that were not, in practice, predictable by any finite mind.  (In a way this follows from the fact that, if you can precisely and specifically predict what insight you are going to have, then you have already had it.)

It’s a bit like evolution through natural selection, where the mutations are effectively random, but the survival of those “mutants” is not at all random, at least in the long run, on a large enough scale.  Still, there’s no pre-thinking involved, no teleology, merely “motion” that is constrained (by differential survival due to the facts of surrounding nature).

Even if one has a fairly specific goal, trying to plot out one’s way through the phase space of one’s potential future paths in a very specific and precise and preplanned course is unlikely to be doable.  It may not be preferable even if it were possible.

It may be analogous to trying to get from one location to another in, say, the same city, by following a direct, straight line from one spot to the other.  One probably won’t be able to make any progress at all for very long; buildings and streets and vehicles and the like are probably going to get in the way.  Heck, the very surface of the Earth could be an impediment to any truly straight path, since it is curved****, but we’ll stipulate that you can follow a geodesic (the shortest distance between points on a curved surface).

Anyway, if one precisely follows only a preset straight path, even if one can more or less achieve it, one misses out on many potentially beneficial but unpredictable paths.  Imagine one is heading to one’s usual, mediocre but tolerable, fast food restaurant for lunch, and one only goes straight there without even looking around.  One might well miss seeing all the many other available restaurants, some of which one may find preferable‒perhaps by a great margin‒to one’s “planned” place.

That’s a slightly tortured metaphor, and I apologize for that fact, but I hope you know what I mean.

It doesn’t do‒usually‒to try to make progress by a true random “drunkard’s” walk.  I don’t recall what particular power law the number of possible outcomes follows, but it grows very rapidly, perhaps exponentially, with each new step.  But if one keeps one’s long term goal generally in sight, and one heads in that general direction, adjusting for buildings and railroads and hills and lakes and so on, constantly assessing and, when necessary, adjusting one’s course, one can usually not only get to one’s destination rather well, but one can encounter new sights and new experiences along the way.

Some of these encounters might even make one decide to change one’s goal of travel, having found a better one (by whatever criteria) as one went along.  That’s not going to happen to someone who is dogmatically focused on only one path and only one goal.

Okay, well, that’s my rather stochastic blog post this Saturday.  I hope you are already having an excellent weekend, and that it continues to be excellent (or if it is not yet excellent, that it becomes so in short order).  Thank you for reading.

*To his son, Derrick.

**I don’t remember which character‒it’s not Elric‒or which story.  My apologies.

***Of course, as I think I’ve said before, order is not the opposite of chaos, but is rather a subset of it.

****It is.  Seriously.  There is no reasonable doubt about that fact, and it has been known to humans for at least 2200 years, since Eratosthenes calculated (correctly) the circumference of the Earth using distance along what was effectively a geodesic and the angles of two simultaneous shadows.