Physics

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Maybe it’s signal. Maybe it’s noise. Maybe it’s Maybelline?

Well, it’s Tuesday, and I don’t know that I have anything of use or substance to say, or anything to say that isn’t mostly just noise.  Perhaps I’m just some peculiar source of radio static in the background of the universe.  Or perhaps…perhaps I’m just pretending that what I do is unplanned, when in fact everything is calculated and subversive.

Ha!  I wish.  My brain doesn’t work like that, and I’m not sure anyone else’s does, either.  Even John Von Neumann had to develop complex mathematics and sophisticated models to deal with the limited degree of uncertainty in highly simplified versions of one-on-one poker.  If he was so intrigued by what he‒possessing perhaps the highest general intelligence of which history is firmly aware‒could not fully model, then this is strong evidence that no one, now or ever, has really been in control of anything.

Of course, game theory has advanced since Von Neumann co-invented it, and it is certainly useful, but it is clear that, at best, it deals in probabilities and tendencies.  There is no Asimovian 2nd Foundation Hari Seldon psychohistory that can figure out the specific events of whole galactic civilizations well into the future, and I doubt there ever will be.

Of course, if we want to be trivial, we can predict the far future with some degree of confidence:  Eventually, unless our knowledge of the universe is deeply mistaken*, as entropy increases inexorably, new stars will stop forming, old stars will burn out (even red dwarfs), black holes will evaporate, and the universe will be a thin haze of elementary particles.  Indeed, if everything eventually reduces to massless bosons (e.g., photons) then in a very real sense, time will literally have no meaning, since photons, being massless particles, do not “experience” time.  From their point of view‒to speak very figuratively‒their entire existence is instantaneous.

Of course, going on to the very far future, given the nature of probability, new universes may arise.  Something like Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology may be the way things happen, or there may merely be a Poincaré recurrence of the universe.  Or maybe, as I’ve speculated previously, time is not one way, and our future might also be the future of another, far distant “big bang” but for which time/entropy increases in the opposite direction.

Also, of course, if civilization and intelligence persists and grows, which is not a small “if”, then who knows where technology will develop?  Our descendants could conceivably develop the capacity to do cosmic engineering, literally shaping the large-scale development of the universe, or even making new ones.

But I suspect they still will not be able to micromanage perfectly the interactions of innumerable agents in complex systems.  Some limits are fundamental, and I think this may be one.  This comes down to something related to my “Elessar’s First Conjecture/Theorem”, that no complex, intelligence can ever fully understand itself in detail, because to model a given complex system requires a system of greater complexity, which itself will need to be described, leading to an infinite regress.

And, of course, we know that in complex systems, in which interactions are stochastic and multivariate and nonlinear (and thus exhibit chaotic development) the specifics of future happenings will be unpredictable since to know them perfectly, we would need an infinite number of significant digits**, though in some cases‒like entropy‒we can make general predictions with high confidence.  

This is part of why “planned economies” fail, and almost certainly always will, unless they are stupendously lucky.  In any case, such luck will not last, just as neither strength nor good purpose will last in the presence of the One Ring.  This is also why most complex conspiracy theories are simply laughable.

People derive their models of the world to too great a degree from our ubiquitous visual entertainment, which has been around long enough to be deeply self-mimicking and self-derivative.  Gunshots and explosions don’t behave in real life the way they do in action movies, but action movies (and shows and videos) take their models of the world from previous action movies, much as an AI’s model of human speech and interaction, if derived from the internet, is going to be increasingly contaminated by the products of other AIs, and may end up veering far away from anything reminiscent of human interactions, at least if left to its own devices.

Maybe that’s an advantage of written fiction over movies and TV and other videos; it’s not presenting a simulation of some version of reality, it’s telling you a story, describing things, but you have to imagine them.  Meanwhile, if all your fiction is in words, your physical intuition of the real world‒and your psychological and sociological and economic intuition‒would be derived from real events, not the Machiavellian machinations of Manichean movie-based manipulators.

That was an interesting stream of consciousness, if I do say so myself (and I do).  Who could have predicted it?  Not I.  And I’m the one who wrote it.  Which goes to my point.

Please try to have a good day.

*This is always possible in principle, but for many aspects of cosmology, our credences can be justifiably high.

**I sometimes say that while knowledge can vary greatly, ignorance is always infinite.  This can be proven with a single, simple example:  the digits of pi.  There are an infinite number of them, and no matter how many we calculate, there will be an infinite number we don’t know.  Ditto for e and any other transcendental numbers, let alone all the other real numbers that have no specific designation, of which there exist an uncountable infinity.  And this is just one place where infinite information dwells, of which we will always have only finite knowledge.

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We skipped the light fandango…

Well, here I am, writing a blog post again on Tuesday, Batman* only knows why.  I don’t really have anything of substance to say.  Not that I had anything of substance to say yesterday.

Actually, come to think of it, I did encounter a neat fact last week.

One morning I decided to get in a bit of reading in one of the textbooks I keep in my office‒Classical Electrodynamics by John David Jackson.  I employed a technique I’ve often used for reviewing:  I flipped a coin to increasingly winnow down the textbook‒heads is first half, tails is second half, etc.‒and pick a random section to start reading.

I knew that much of the mathematical formalism and at least some of the technical matters in the book would be unfamiliar, so I didn’t expect to understand fully what I was reading.  But I also know that the stuff I do and don’t understand will linger in my brain, and as I’m exposed to other things that go with it or explain it or link up with it, the picture will form.  I don’t read or learn especially quickly, but I do learn deeply, and in a way that connects ideas and principles together in the end.

There was much of this brief section (which was about refraction and/or absorption of light** by water) that was slightly over my head.  Nevertheless, it was interesting, and the author introduced a graph (see below) showing at the top the refraction of light by water across wavelengths, and how it tends to vary.  I assume we’re all at least implicitly aware of the fact that different wavelengths are refracted by water differently‒thus the phenomenon of rainbows.

Below this is a table showing the absorption of electromagnetic radiation by water across frequencies.  Here there is a steep upward slope when coming in toward the center from highest and lowest frequencies.  It peaks at around the microwave/infrared wavelengths from the left and around the ultraviolet from the right.

Then a striking thing happens.  There is a sudden, precipitous drop in absorption down to very low levels in a fairly narrow range of frequencies in the “middle” of the graph, meaning that in this range, light passes through water with relatively little absorption.  This is the range we know as visible light.

The author took the time to point out that this fact about the nature of water‒that it is more or less transparent in this very narrow range of frequencies‒is exactly why we Earthlings tend to see only in that range.  It’s not an accident of evolution, some ancient, stochastic occurrence that is thenceforward cemented, unchangeable, into all descendants, like the DNA code and ribosomes and the chirality of biological molecules.  It is instead a fundamental fact of physics that determines where creatures will be able to see if they first developed vision while living in water and then developed eyes that, like the rest of them, were mainly made of water.

There’s no point in making retinal proteins that react to wavelengths of EM radiation that are almost entirely absorbed by water.

That simple fact‒simple in summary, at least‒is enough to explain a huge swath of the nature of our visual perception, and it doesn’t require any further explaining to understand why we see in the range of light we do.

That was just a randomly chosen section of a textbook that reputedly is extremely difficult.  I don’t disagree with that assessment of difficulty; it was a very dense bunch of material even in just 4 or 5 pages.  But to think that one can find such remarkable facts while just trying to read and learn in random order from a textbook!

So, that’s an interesting little tidbit that seems worth sharing, at least to me.  It’s far more interesting than anything going on in the human world right now.  What’s more, this is a fact that has existed as long as water itself has existed‒and implicitly, it existed even before that, lying there waiting in the fundamental laws of nature.  And it will be there long after everything but those fundamental laws is gone.

If you want to embrace eternity, and things like Hilbert’s Hotel and Cantor’s diagonal proof make you worry about your sanity (this happens to many of us, so don’t feel bad) then focus on this fact about visible light.  It’s there, it’s real, it’s quasi-eternal, and it’s concrete.

Though the absorption spectrum for concrete is…quite different.

*This harkens back to the reference from Batman Begins, when Flass says “I swear to God,” and Batman snarls “Swear to me!”  It seems fun to use Batman when one would normally say God.

**By “light” I mean all electromagnetic radiation, from radio waves to gamma rays.

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In the voids between galaxies, it’s already next year, but there’s still no life there.

It’s Tuesday, now‒the first Tuesday of the new year.  This is not anything particularly interesting, of course.  It’s really just another day.  But it is also the last day of the first week of the new year, the 7th day of the year, as indicated by the fact that it is January 7th.

“Brilliant, Holmes!” I hear you say.

In this case, though, it truly is elementary.  It’s also pretty boring, so I’m sorry to go on about it.

There have been troubling things in national news, of course:  the terroristic suicide attack-by-vehicle in New Orleans; the guy who blew up his cyber truck; severe cold weather striking large swaths of the eastern US; and, of course, no one has yet yelled “Psych!!” regarding Donald Trump’s election for a second term as president.

I’m not as rabidly anti-Trump as many; he’s just a man, of soft and squishy flesh and blood, like everyone else.  He’s also just one more incompetent government official on a world stage that might as well be a collection of (poor quality) Three Stooges clones.

It would be remarkable and praiseworthy if humans actually elected smart, calm, intellectually honest government officials with personal integrity.  Alas, when holding elections, humans seem unable to be as rigorous in their evaluation of candidates as they would be when screening babysitters or even gardeners.  And, of course, since few people are in the habit of reflecting on themselves in any way to improve on their own flaws in judgment, it seems unlikely that things will change very quickly.

This is all nothing new, of course.  The modern shape of cyberspace and the borderline-antisocial media add little twists and peculiarities, introducing new dynamics to the system.  But the dominating principles of primate social and sexual dominance hierarchies and displays have not changed much, if at all.

The only really interesting thing I’ve found in the news is the statement about a new study‒an elaboration of a first theoretical paper from some years ago‒that proposes a potential alternative explanation for the fact that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating that doesn’t require “dark energy”.

The cosmological principle, which underlies the usefulness of standard model, lambda-CDM cosmology, states that, on the largest of scales, the universe is uniform and homogeneous.  However, on anything other than the largest scales, the universe is decidedly clumpy.  This is because of gravity, of course, pulling things together in regions where things are more dense (making them still denser) and making the spaces in between ever more rarefied and so on.

But, of course, gravity is not just a simple attractive force; it works its effects through the warping of spacetime, and in ordinary circumstances (so to speak) its effect on time is far more significant than those on space.  This is a very real effect, one for which we have to adjust when using GPS satellites for instance, so while general understanding of it may be relatively rare, it is not an esoteric bit of physics.  It’s textbook stuff.

The point being made by this new hypothesis is that perhaps there is no real dark energy, but instead, in regions where more mass exists, time slows down.  This is a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s quite true, and indeed, to a large extent, all the apparent physical effects of gravity are produced by the differential flow of time between places where the manifold is more vs. less curved.

So, in the places where matter/energy is relatively scarce, time moves “more quickly”.  So, since the universe is definitely expanding (due to the Big Bang), those regions are going forward through their expansion more quickly than regions with more matter, and so the space between galaxies and clusters appears to expand more quickly, and as the comparative difference, the contrast, in energy concentration increases, the difference in passage of time will tend to increase, too, producing an apparent accelerated expansion.

[Note to self:  how would this model be expected to affect the extreme measured uniformity of the Cosmic Microwave Background?  Is this going to be a point of evidence against it?]

This is not a definitive, tested hypothesis, but it rests on sound principles.  It probably won’t supersede lambda-CDM, but it has the potential to do so.  This is no crank, RFK Jr. style hypothesis by any means.  I haven’t read the papers involved yet; rather I read articles and watched some videos about it; I will try to learn more.

But, since the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe in the late ‘90s was the single most exciting (non-personal) event in my life, the idea that there is a new approach that might change that again is also truly exciting.

It makes me wish I had just gone into physics as I had originally intended.  However, post-open heart surgery, transient cognitive impairment, and an exacerbation of depression triggered by the same thing, made it too difficult, in the short term, to keep up with my physics and math classes in the semester after my heart surgery, so to English I went.

But as I picture the large-scale universe differentially flowing through time and thus expanding at relatively different seeming rates, producing this wonderful, higher-dimensional twisty-bulgy-filamentous shape, I can at least feel a little twinge of the joy of contemplating science.  My only real contribution to science was in studying the effects of gliotoxin on naked DNA in vitro, and though that’s quite interesting, it’s not exactly cosmology.

Oh, I also wrote a pretty decent review article about the various effects on cognition and other neurological functions of heart-lung bypass as done during open-heart surgery.  Clearly, that was motivated by personal experience.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  Tomorrow begins the second week of the year, but I don’t expect to write again before Thursday.

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Oh what a tangled web weaves itself

Good day, everyone.  It’s now the last Saturday before both Christmas and Hanukkah in 2024.  The office is open today, and I am on my way to work (quite early, because, you know, it’s me, and I don’t sleep very well).

Sometimes I wonder if writing this blog, in which I basically share my random thoughts, is somehow narcissistic.  Maybe it’s just because narcissism is in the news so much lately, especially with regard to politics*, but I do worry about it.  After all, when one is as gifted and skilled and brilliant and creative as I am, there’s always a danger of losing one’s truly exceptional humility.

I’m kidding, sort of to make a point and sort of just because I like to screw around with things that way.  Don’t worry, an overabundance of self-love has rarely been an issue for me.  Sometimes I pretend to be egotistical, mostly for amusement, and in my teenage years, it also helped stave off my already developing self-loathing and depression a bit**.

Still, with all the people on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, etc., to say nothing of podcasts, and blogs such as this one, and so forth, one might think that the modern world is beset by a pandemic of narcissism.  I think this is not correct, however.  Although there are divas out there, I think there are more innocent reasons for a lot of what we see.

Humans‒bless ‘em‒are extremely social critters.  They are by far the most social of primates, and really, given the power of language and shared “fictions”, they are the most social species the planet has seen.  They are highly interdependent, and they must not merely cultivate but tend to and nurture many relationships.

When a creature’s survival is strongly dependent on certain behaviors, those behaviors tend over time to become pleasurable; they can even become part of play, and creatures will engage in them purely for their own enjoyment.  Many predators, for instance, will hunt and kill even when they don’t need to do it.  (That’s right, plenty of other animals in the world kill for pleasure, sorry to break anyone’s illusion that this is a feature (or a bug) solely of humans.)

Of course, with ultra-social creatures who need constantly to reinforce existing interpersonal threads as well as to cultivate new beneficial ones and to prune detrimental ones, the exchange of goods or even favors cannot possibly be enough to satisfy.  There’s just not enough time and only one body each to go around.

But when one can share information (even seemingly pointless or banal information) with multiple others, one can develop and strengthen numerous threads, cultivating them even from afar, and one can make oneself seem a useful potential connection for others who are themselves useful, and with minimal cost.  After all, information shared is not lost from its source, it is merely reproduced.

Take a moment to ponder that last sentence‒that fact is a big part of what makes life possible at all.

Anyway, now people can share thoughts and jokes and amusing pictures and helpful tips and even serious, high-level expertise, with millions and even billions of other people, and they can get rapid feedback as well.  Of course people are going to do it, especially since it can even be “monetized” in an almost baroque/rococo**** arrangement of fictions and networks, real and virtual, all interacting in astonishingly complex ways, each entity operating entirely under “local” pressures, which change from instant to instant depending on all the other forces at work, spontaneously forming into a structure of tremendous complexity, a thing not merely unplanned but probably unplannable.

So, although narcissists can thrive online, I think they are a minority, and they seem often to self-destruct.  I think most of the various personae telarum are just humans (and other somewhat similar creatures, like me) responding to instinctual drives and enjoying the process.  One should not think of them in the same way one does those dangerously insecure narcissists who seek great political power.

*Though politics has always been a great bastion of narcissistic pathology.  Not everyone who wants to try to contribute to governing their community, state, nation, etc., is a flagrant narcissist; some are surely well-meaning and even humble.  Nevertheless, the field of politics attracts narcissists like the priesthood attracts pedophiles.

**I don’t remember how old I was when I first experienced true depression, but I know that I first started having suicidal thoughts no later than my first trip to music camp (which I loved, by the way, but the separation from all my usual settings didn’t help my depression, which makes sense if I truly do have the second version of ASD***).

***The first ASD, which I definitely had, was an Atrial Septal Defect, a congenital heart defect that required surgical correction when I was 18.  The second, rather amusingly to me, is Autism Spectrum Disorder, the criteria of which I very likely meet, though I have no official diagnosis.  This overlapping of acronyms‒because there are far fewer combinations of, say, 3 letters than of 3 words‒is an example of a problem inherent in all forms of data compression.

****Barococo?

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But darkness and the gloomy blog of death environ you…

Hello and good morning.

If you’re a regular reader, you know what day it must be if I’m using that opening phrase.  It’s Thursday, the third one in December of 2024 AD (or CE if you prefer).  There’s only one more week until Boxing Day, so keep your training up!

You should probably take a rest on the day before Boxing Day‒“Boxing Eve”, if you will, though there are other names for the day, I’m led to understand.  In many places, people take Boxing Eve off from work, so it might be a good time to kick back and relax your body, to let it recover from your training.  Get a decent meal with plenty of protein, but abstain from alcoholic beverages* entirely.  And keep the refined carbs to a minimum.

Also, of course, you should not listen to songs like Baker Street, or Careless Whisper, or Turn the Page.  While it’s slightly controversial, many experts agree that one should avoid sax before a fight.  You might even want to avoid Feels So Good, by Chuck Mangione, for though he plays the flugelhorn, not the saxophone, the sound is similar, and science is not entirely certain which aspect of the sax’s sound interferes with boxing ability.

It may simply be that it leaves a person too relaxed and at ease to be at their fiercest.  So, perhaps one should just avoid soothing music altogether, and stick with environments that keep one hostile and alert.  Remember what Palatine said about anger:  “It gives you focus…makes you stronger.”

Fortunately, many people find the traditional Boxing Eve celebrations with family quite stressful and irritating.  You gotta hold on to that fury.

All right, enough of that silliness.

Next week is also the beginning of Hanukkah, the first night of which begins on Boxing Eve (also known as “Christmas”, which is a curious amalgam of Saturnalia and the Nordic Yule grafted onto the celebration of the birth of the founder of an obscure Jewish sect).  None of this stuff is really of any consequence to me, though; I’m not celebrating anything.  What cause would I have to celebrate, and with whom would I do so?  Nothing and no one.

I’m frankly discouraged that it looks like I’m going to be around to see a new year.  Of course, every day is, in principle, the beginning of a new year, just as every second begins a new hour, and every day is the last day of your life so far, for whatever that’s worth.  I wouldn’t think it would be worth very much, but who knows?  Worth is a very subjective thing.  It can be intersubjective, but unless you’re talking about things like food, water, air, and shelter, most values are related to the valuer and the culture such a valuer shares with other valuers.

Stepping farther back, even the seemingly inherent value in things like food, water, air, and shelter is predicated entirely on the needs of living creatures‒subjects, if you will.  Life itself is an entirely subjective value, at least in that sense.

Please note that I’m not saying that reality is subjective!  One’s personal experience of reality is, to some degree, subjective, but reality itself is what it is, not what individual persons believe it to be…unless those persons happen to believe it to be as it is, whether through luck or discerning thought and perception.

Anyway, this is all pointless.  I tend to try to cloak my inner darkness in humor and whimsy for other people’s sake.  This might fool you into thinking you’re seeing someone who’s not really unwell, not really so down, not really doing all that badly.  Similarly, an active accretion disk might make you think a particular astronomical object is inherently bright, staggeringly so even.  But that radiance is merely the conflagration of all the matter spinning and colliding and accelerating and trying to squeeze into limited, rotating spacetime before passing the event horizon.

With the exception of Hawking radiation‒which is smaller and fainter the larger the black hole‒the event horizon is a surface of absolute darkness, at least from the outside.

You might ask why there could not be something even darker than a lack of light, perhaps some form of antilight.  But, no.  Photons are bosons, and bosons are, in a sense, their own antiparticles, so the opposite of light is just light.  Under normal circumstances, bosons don’t self-annihilate, though they can destructively interfere, in a fairly straightforward, wave dynamics kind of way.

This blog post, and the blog itself, is in a sense my accretion disk.  It may be hot and sometimes bright, in an ordinary incandescent way, but so many things burn and flare, hot and bright and fierce and beautiful, even as they fall to ashes, never then to shine again, reduced to a state of maximum local entropy.

And, at the heart of the black hole‒at least in GR, avoiding quantum mechanical concerns**‒lies the singularity.  It’s appropriate.  The center is a singular entity‒like a singular person‒which does not entail anything but an end to time itself, the complete obliteration of anything and everything and everyone that it encounters.

No wonder people stay away from such individuals.

TTFN

*In some cultures, people tend to drink alcoholic beverages on Boxing Eve.

**Which you can’t really do, to be honest; see my point about reality not being subjective.

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If I could write the beauty of your blogs, and in fresh numbers number all your graces…

Hello.  Good morning.

Aaahhh, doesn’t that feel better?  Now I can use my standard Thursday blog post opening phrases, because today is, in fact, Thursday.  It’s the 21st of November, the third Thursday of the month, so in the USA you only have seven shopping days until Thanksgiving.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, since next Thursday is that holiday, I probably will not be writing a blog post then.  It is one holiday on which our office is always closed.  We will be open on so-called Black Friday, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll write a post on that day.

Of course, in principle, I cannot guarantee that I’ll write anything at all ever again after this post.  I may not even survive to post this entry*‒I am in the back seat of a Lyft, on the highway (I-95) of the East Coast of the US, so goodness knows there’s a non-zero chance of a fatal accident.  I would even wish for one, but I know such a thing would involve harm and possibly death to other, more innocent, people.

Also, of course, wishes don’t actually directly affect reality‒thank goodness.  Imagine if even one percent of wishes came true as wished.  The world would be thoroughgoing chaos…and not in a good way.  I tend to say of wishes that “If wishes were horses, then we’d all be hip deep in horse shit,” but it would be even more terrifying if wishes worked.

The “if‒then” character of the wishes saying (my version or the more SFW one that involves beggars riding) often makes me think of lines of computer code in some generic programming language, like:

If wishes==horses then execute beggars.ride

Or maybe 

If wishes==horses then horseshit_level = “hip deep”

I wonder what that would look like in machine language.  Or, I wonder what it would look like in straight binary.  Really, though, I know part of the answer to the latter piece of wondering:  it would look, to the naked eye, like a random string of ones and zeros, perhaps the tally of some very long record of flipping a coin and marking heads as 1 and tails as 0 (or vice versa).

Actually, of course, given a binary-based computer language, one can literally generate every possible computer program just by flipping an ever-increasing number of coins.  Or, to be honest, one can do it just by counting in binary:  0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000…

This is why, if memory serves, computer science people and information theory people say that every program can literally be assigned (and described by) a number.  You could express that number in base ten if you wanted, to make it a bit more compact and familiar to the typical human.  Or, if you want to be more efficient and make conversion easier, you can use hexadecimal.  This is easier because a base-sixteen number system is more directly and easily converted to and from binary, since 16 is a power of 2 (2 to the 4th).

Even the human genome, or any genome in fact, could be fairly readily expressed in binary.  The DNA code is a 4 character language, so it wouldn’t take too much work to make it binary, however you wanted to code it.  Then, each person’s genome would have a single, unique number.  That’s kind of interesting.

It would be a bit unwieldy as an ID number, of course.  The human genome is roughly 3 billion nucleotides long, which means it would be roughly 6 billion binary digits (AKA bits).  And since every ten bits is roughly a thousand in base 10 (2^10 is 1024, which is very close to 10^3, aka 1000) then 6 billion bits should be roughly 2 billion decimal digits long (a bit less), which is much, much larger than the famously large number, a googol**.

It’s a big number.  This should give you at least some idea of just how unique each individual life form is at a fundamental level.  There are so many possible genomes that the expected time until the final heat death of the universe is unlikely to be long enough to have a randomly created duplication within the accessible cosmos.

Of course, within an infinite space‒which is the most probable truth about our universe as far as we can tell‒one will not only have every possible version that can exist, but will have infinite copies of every possible version.  Infinity makes things weird; I love it.

Of course, just as with the making of computer programs by simply counting in binary, the vast majority of genomes would not code for any lifeform in any kind of cellular environment, using any given kind of transcription code you might want (the one on Earth, found in essentially all creatures, uses three base pairs to code for a given amino acid in a protein, but that’s not all that DNA does).  Similarly, most of the counted up programs would not run on any given computer language platform, because they would not code for any coherent and consistent set of instructions.

But even so, you would still, eventually, get every possible working program, or every possible life form in any given biological system if you could just keep counting.

On related matters, there are things like the halting problem and so on, but we won’t get into that today, interesting though it may be (and is).

It’s quite fascinating, when one is dealing with information theory (and computer science) how quickly one encounters numbers so vast that they dwarf everything within the actual universe.

Mind you, the maximum possible information‒related to the entropy‒carried within any bounded 3-D region is constrained by the surface area (in square Planck lengths) of a black hole with that size event horizon.  For our universe, roughly 96 billion light years across, I think that’s something like 10 to the 124th bits, or at least it’s that many Planck areas.  That’s quite a bit*** smaller than the number of possible genomes, though I have a sinking feeling that I’m underestimating the number.

And information, at least when instantiated, has “mass” in a sense, and the upper limit of the amount of information in a region of spacetime is delineated by the Bekenstein entropy description.  So there’s only so many binary strings you can generate before you turn everything into a black hole.

Something like all that, anyway.

I may have been imprecise in some of what I said, but when you’re dealing with very large numbers, precision is only theoretically interesting.  For instance, we**** have found Pi to far more than the number of digits needed to calculate the circumference of the visible universe down to the Planck length.  It would require only about 40 digits of Pi to get to that precision to the size of a hydrogen atom, and those are only about 10^25 Planck lengths across, so we wouldn’t expect to need much more than 65 digits of Pi to get that precise, but let’s be generous and use 100 digits.

How many digits of Pi have actually been “discovered” by mathematicians?  Over 105 trillion digits.  Talk about angels dancing in the heads of pins!  It’s literally physically impossible, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, even to test whether that number precisely defines the ratio of any given circle to its diameter by measuring it.  One cannot, in principle, measure finely enough.

Still it just goes to show that mathematics is vastly larger in scope than any instantiated, superficial reality.  Information is deeper than one might think…so to speak.  But, then, so are minds themselves, vastly deeper.

As Idris/the TARDIS asked in Doctor Who, Series 6, episode 4, “Are all people like this?  So much bigger on the inside?”  Yes, Idris, I suspect they are, even those people we don’t like and feel the urge to denigrate.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve achieved nothing, really, other than write a Thursday blog post, but then again, that’s all I meant to do.  I hope you have among the better half of all the vast number of possible days available to you.

TTFN

*If you’re reading this, though, I clearly did survive.  I have mixed feelings about that.

**How much larger?  Soooo much larger that if you subtracted a googol of something from 10^1,800,000,000 of something, you would not change it to any extent measurable even by the most precise instruments humans have ever created.  And a googol is already something like 10 to the 19th times as large as the total estimated number of protons and neutrons in the accessible universe.

***No pun intended.

****Actually, I had nothing to do with it; it’s just the sort of “royal we”***** kind of thing everyone uses when discussing the accomplishments of humanity as a whole.

*****Not to be confused with royal wee.  That’s the sort of weird, niche thing one might find for sale in mason jars on the dark web.  Be careful if you’re into such things.  I wouldn’t buy it unless you’re sure of the source, so to speak.

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“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

And here…we…go, as the Joker said.

I’m writing something now on Wednesday on the way to work, in the back seat of a Lyft.  This time, I’m writing it on my little laptop computer, which has the disadvantage that its keys are not illuminated, and the back seat is dark, so I have to type by memory, to do my own bespoke version of touch-typing.  This isn’t too great of a burden, since I’ve been typing for more than 40 years*, but it does take away some degree of the advantage in speed that typing on a real keyboard otherwise gives me over the phone.

If I ever get another small laptop like this one, I mean to make sure that the keyboard lights up.  It’s just too useful.

Anyway, upon opening this laptop for the first time in a few weeks, I found that it was still at the point in Outlaw’s Mind where I had stopped when rereading through and further editing it.  It’s right after Timothy’s encounter with the policeman.  He’s about to be brought to the Vipassana Center, where things will begin to become stranger for him.

I really am more pleased with the nature of the story as it is than with the more straightforward idea that had sparked it initially and had been prefigured by the original opening, which I am removing.  Really, I have removed it, but it’s still there in my postings here on my blog, of course.  If I were ever to finish it and publish, I suppose I would take it down from here on my site, as would also be the case with Extra Body.

I doubt that any of that will ever happen, though.  I don’t have the impetus to do either thing, nor to start HELIOS, nor any of the oodles of other stories waiting in the back of my mind, some of which are already well-developed and involve an overall universe, linking to others in my stories’ omniverse.

I guess it would be nice to continue with them.  It would be nice not to have to worry about so many little things day by day that drain my hit points and my spirit points.  If I were to win a large lottery payoff**, I guess I would use it to move back up north and just write full time.  I could even spend my spare time studying mathematics and physics and other sciences, if I had the energy.  Why not?

It’s darned unlikely that anything like that is going to happen, unfortunately.  I have no rich relatives or friends, and even if I did, it’s hard to see one of them wanting to support me while I’m writing.

I have so many story ideas in the back of my mind, written down in quick notes in my phone and other systems, or just swimming through my brain.  And I still think of new little ideas for self-contained stories (I hesitate to call them “short” given past experience) as I go along, but unlike before, I don’t jot them down anywhere.  That’s a huge surrender on my part, but I have to be realistic.

If the Everettian quantum multiverse exists, then it’s likely that in some proportion of the wave function I succeed at doing all these things.  Likewise, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, there are certainly a fraction of the infinite copies of me out there who will have some inordinate luck and go on writing.  However, these possibilities are no consolation, as I have no experience of what they experience anymore than of some small, furry thing from Alpha Centauri.

I guess that’s also a good thing, though, since there are certainly versions of my life that are much, much worse than this one.  I wouldn’t want to experience them.  But, of course, experiencing is one of the functions of the individual, separate identities, not of the conglomerate of those that share some common characteristics or past.  No one should expect to be able to experience both worlds that split after some quantum “measurement”.  It’s not logical.

Once their cells have split, identical twins are separate beings, individuals each in his or her own right, and there is no mingling or superposition of their experiences.  Thank goodness.  Because we are all descendants of an unbroken line of cellular ancestors, and have common past with every living thing on the planet (and a few orbiting in space).  Imagine if we somehow were able to experience every other living thing at some level.  It would be a bit like that weird Gaia planet in the later Foundation novels.

Anyway, while I can dream of having some benefactor or patron who takes care of my living logistics while I write, and maybe even who helps me market and promote my books and related items, I can also, any time I like, dream about having superpowers, or being universally loved, or some other such nonsense.

Such dreams are nice (as the Radiohead song admits), but reality is not obligated to make any of our dreams come true, good or bad.  It doesn’t even make some aggregated average of people’s dreams come true.  It just does what it does, and it is what it is, and we are merely one little, evanescent—although relatively interesting—corner of a universe that may be infinite in space and in time, and perhaps in other ways beyond those.

*Man, are my fingers tired.

**Difficult, since I don’t play.

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And nature, as it blogs again toward earth, is fashioned for the journey

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so:  here’s another blog post—meaning another regular, weekly, Thursday morning blog post.  Of course, people who receive notifications about my blog posts will have seen already that not only did I publish an impromptu entry on Monday, but also that, starting on Tuesday, I’ve been sharing a chapter at a time, three times a day, of Extra Body.

I finished the third editing run-through of that story by Tuesday morning, and I decided, “that’s good enough, I’m done with that, I’m tired of working on it, or on anything else”.  I considered just publishing it through Amazon, but that would have involved designing a cover and getting the formatting right for the paperback and e-book versions, and even then it would have been far from likely that anyone (except my sister) would read any of it, ever.  At least this way, maybe someone who is idly curious but wouldn’t go to the trouble of actually buying the book from Amazon (or other sources) might idly start reading it and even might read the whole thing.

Speaking of the whole thing, it will be completely published by Friday afternoon, which is when Chapter 12 is scheduled to go up.

I don’t know whether the story is any good or not.  I suppose that would depend upon the criteria one uses to judge the “goodness” of a story, and no two people would probably have precisely the same implicit criteria.  I say “implicit” because I doubt most people (or anyone, really) would actually apply any formal judgement criteria to such things.  I think it’s a much more “analog” process, a weighted neural network/high-dimension vector addition (or possibly vector calculus) sort of problem.  As such, it probably changes from day to day and even from moment to moment for every person.

It may be mathematically possible in principle for two people to have exactly the same judgment criteria about fiction*, but I suspect that there aren’t anything like enough people in all the universe—not just spatially but temporally, past and future—to have exactly the same mental state regarding how they judge and react to fiction at any given time, or even in their entire lifetimes (this discounts the potential “quilted multiverse”, if the universe is spatially infinite, in which all states would recur an infinite number of times).

I’m giving this more thought than it probably deserves.  I tend to do that.

On to other matters, or at least, let’s move away from that subject.

This Sunday will be the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the official beginning of Autumn in the northern hemisphere.  It’s also September 22nd (this is often the case with the Autumnal Equinox) and is thus the date of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’s birthdays (according to Shire reckoning, anyway—I’m not sure precisely how that lines up with the Gregorian calendar, but I suspect Tolkien just kind of took them as roughly aligning, though the hobbits apparently took the 5 (and a quarter-ish) extra days of the year as a non-month in midsummer and had 30-day months for all the rest of the year).  That was also the day on which Frodo left Bag End to begin his long and arduous and torturous path to destroy the One Ring.

So it is an auspicious day in more than one sense, a day on which momentous or portentous things may begin or end or begin to end.

Though Frodo survived, of course, he never was quite the same after his journey, having suffered from the stab of the Morgul blade on Weathertop, and the bite of Shelob, and—most of all—the terrible effects of the Ring itself when it was at its most perilous, its most awake, and its most desperate.

The voice-over near the end of the movie The Return of the King really expresses Frodo’s sense of enduring damage and suffering:  “How do you pick up the threads of an old life?  How do you go on when you begin to understand there is no going back?  There are some things that time cannot mend.  Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”  How, indeed?

Nietzsche is famously quoted as having said that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.  In response to that, I would simply say to him, “syphilis”**.

There are many things that do not kill us that nevertheless wear us down, leave scars and damage and dysfunction in their wake.  Of course, one could reply that such things are killing us, they are merely doing it slowly, in a cumulative and collective fashion.  But if one is going to reach for that linguistic/semantic escape clause from the dichotomy of Nietzsche’s statement, then one is merely engaging in tautology.  If one says that anything that doesn’t make us stronger is, by our definition, killing us (even if only slowly), then saying that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger is just saying the same thing.  No insight is gained.

In any case, things wear out and fall apart no matter what.  As far as we can see, that is a fundamental aspect of the nature of reality.  New things do arise, lives are born, stars form, perhaps new “universes” are constantly emerging in an eternal inflationary universe.  But mathematics dictates that all things eventually seek out the most entropic states—not out of any desire, any “telos”, just out of the tendency of the math of complex systems.

Things fall apart.  The center cannot hold.  And Darkness and Decay and the Second Law of Thermodynamics hold illimitable dominion over all***.

TTFN

*Though if the process is truly continuous, in the “real numbers” sense of continuous (quantum mechanics suggests this cannot be so), then there would be literally, uncountably infinite possible arrangements, and so it would be “infinitely improbable” for any two people ever to match exactly.  That seems appropriate, given the story being discussed.

**Perhaps the real “Montezuma’s Revenge”.

***This is a mashup of and paraphrasing of separate literary works, so I’m not surrounding it with quotation marks, but:  credit to Yeats and to Poe****.

****No, NOT the heroic pilot from the newer, Disney-Star-Wars films.  You Philistines*****.

*****This is, ultimately, a reference to the fact that the Philistines, according to legend, stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple of Solomon, and thus their name is used as an epithet referring to those who show no respect for sacred or artistic or cultural worth.

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There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another weekly blog post.  Last Thursday I was out sick, so I only posted a very brief, almost telegraphic announcement of the fact that I wasn’t going to write a “true” post that day, and I said that I might write a true post on Friday if I was feeling better.  Of course, I was not feeling better by Friday, so there was no such post.

I’ve nearly recovered from my acute illness—probably some respiratory virus, but nothing too terribly severe—and now I am more or less back on my normal schedule.

Speaking of being “back”, though, my back has been acting up severely this week, and in an atypical fashion.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  Possibly it’s just due to being sick, with the coughing and the lying around more than usual and so on.  Possibly it’s something else.  Anyway, I’ve had to go to a combination of near-overdoses on my various OTC pain medications, and that’s not wonderful.  It got so severe yesterday that I was actually saying out loud that, if it didn’t improve, I was going to have to find some relatively high parking garage nearby and jump off it.  I was not exaggerating, as I think was obvious to those around me.

It’s easy enough to wonder why I don’t do that anyway, given that there is very little in my life that’s positive, and what positivity exists is episodic, and it can’t make up for the constant negatives of pain and illness and sleeplessness and depression and so on.  The closest I come to any comradely activity is streaming YouTube videos of people reacting to songs or movies that I like.  It’s almost, but not quite, exactly unlike watching a movie with a friend who has never seen it before.

Speaking of paraphrasing or otherwise referring to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m most of the way through the first run of editing Extra Body.  There’s a long way to go, since I usually do as many as seven such iterations before considering my editing done.  I figure by that time I’ll usually have lost any proprietary affection for a story and it will begin to bore me, so it’ll be easier to cut out extraneous material.

That’s the principle, at least.  I don’t know how well it’s worked hitherto; I’m too deep inside the process to trust my evaluation.  I did at least transcribe the material I had written so far, in passing, on HELIOS, so that if/when I’m ready, I’ll be able to pick up writing that by hand in its first draft.

Extra Body is my first non-horror story in a while (unless you count the beginning I made on writing The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which is certainly not horror, but is also certainly nowhere near done, if it ever will be).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s a good choice to have reverted to a sort of lighthearted science fiction story set in the modern world, but at least I was able to squeeze the first draft out.

Of course, I’m paring down the word count as I go.  As I’m sure is obvious to all of you, I get rather wordy when I write, especially when I’m using the computer keyboard, since I type quickly and usually can do so more readily even than I can speak out loud.

I’ve been reading some more books about quantum field theory (and related subjects) lately.  It’s still very intro level stuff, of course, but either because recurrent exposure to increasingly technical material is gradually sinking into my head, or because I’m just getting a tiny bit “smarter” overall over time, I’m actually finding some of it more familiar and understandable than before.

I must say that I was a little bit proud of myself not too long ago when I was thinking about how complex numbers are represented using a two-dimensional plane, with internally consistent mathematics and whatnot, and I wondered if one could have three-part complex numbers.  I soon realized that only even-numbered ones would work, and then I learned that these were indeed a thing (i.e., quaternions) and that indeed only even-numbered versions of such things can work.  Of course, it’s very difficult to visualize something that has four dimensions, so you just have to do the math, and I haven’t started to work on or learn that seriously, but I played with some “higher order” complex-number multiplications a few times, which was how I saw that only even-numbered ones, with separate “imaginary” roots would work.

On a vaguely related note:  I was listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast yesterday evening.  He was speaking to Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist who specializes in facial recognition and processing centers of the brain, and she mentioned that the attributes of a face can be thought of as many-dimensional, in the sense that there are numerous “variables” that can be represented about any given face, and that they effectively comprise a higher-dimensional space.

Then she turned the matter around and noted that there are apparently those who consider using such things as faces as ways of intuiting mathematical or related systems with higher dimensions, thus representing them in ways that the human mind is capable of visualizing.  I though that was a fascinating notion*.

It reminds me little bit of the concept of the “memory palace”, a mnemonic/rhetorical tool that originated in ancient Greece (so I understand) in which one associates the aspects of, say, a speech one is going to give with imagined artifacts or decorations in some imagined hall or room, so that the aspects of that speech can more readily be remembered and brought to mind when needed.

There are several fictional characters, most notably Hannibal Lecter and the BBC’s Sherlock, who use rather exaggerated versions of these memory palaces.  The one described in Hannibal is more coherent than the one in Sherlock, but they both take great liberties with how the concept was originally used.  Nevertheless, for the longest time, thanks to the amusing tableau** Thomas Harris described for how Hannibal Lecter had “stored” Clarice Starling’s (fictional) home address, I could readily reconstruct her address at will.  I think I may still be able to do it.  It should be something like “#33 Tindall Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22308”.  If anyone wants to check my recollection, that would be welcome.  I’m not certain I got it right.

I’ve usually found such mnemonics more trouble than they’re worth.  It’s easier for me to connect concepts in the real world, building mental models of the way things work rather than trying to memorize.  This means I probably don’t learn as quickly as some do, but I learn deeply when I do, and it’s easier to connect one model to another and to spot analogies and similarities and possible connections between systems that might at first seem unrelated.  That was quite useful in medical practice, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Oh, I almost forgot:  Welcome to the first day of August in 2024!

That’s all I have to say about that.

Apparently the summer Olympics are currently taking place, but I’ve been unable to muster any interest in them, though I used to love them, and I find that the manufactured controversies about some apparent misconstrual of the opening ceremony or some such (and the juvenile ripostes by political antagonists of the original misconstruers responding to the supposed offense) all serves simply to reinforce my feeling that not just the human race, but indeed all life of any kind, is a bad idea.  Thank goodness for the apparent inescapability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Anyway, I feel I’ve been meandering about here, randomly bouncing from topic to topic, without any consistency or coherency, so I’ll bring this to a close soon.  I fear that this once-weekly blog posting suffers from the fact that there are topics I probably would have brought up as solitary daily blog posts when I was doing them, but that I now want to try to squeeze in here.

I just can’t write (or edit) new fiction and write daily blog posts too, not while I’m forced to keep my day job.  If anyone out there wants to pay for my living expenses and support me so I can both write new fiction and write daily blog posts while still studying physics and programming and the like in the meantime, please, let yourself be known!  I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Otherwise, I’m pretty sure none of this is going to last very much longer.  My pain and dysthymia and alienation and insomnia are increasingly unpleasant, and there are fewer and fewer things in my life that compensate.

Here’s to Macbeth’s proverbial last syllable of recorded time.  L’mavet!***

TTFN

*It does come up against difficulties when considering the notion of orthogonal axes of vector spaces being able to be rotated into one-another.  It’s hard to see how one could intuitively consider rotating the variables of, say, eye size and cheek color into one another, or what an inner (or “dot”) product or cross product of two such variables could mean…though with the latter, it makes the use of the “right hand rule” an amusing invocation of a slap in the face…or at least poking someone’s cheek.

**Involving Jesus (age 33) marching along with a .308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms, followed by J. Edgar Hoover in a tutu, followed by Clarice driving a “Tin Lizzy” model T Ford, going past Arlington National Cemetery.  Something like that, anyway.

***This is an expression I invented this morning, the counter-toast to the famous L’chaim, which in Hebrew means “to life”.  Then, being me, I jotted down some words for the first verse of a parody song of “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof:


“To death!  To death!  L’mavet!

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death!

Here’s to the father I tried to be

Here’s to that travesty

Drink L’mavet, to death,

To death, L’mavet.

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death.

Death has a way of releasing us

Luring and teasing us

Drink L’mavet, to deeeeeaaaath…”

That’s as far as I got, but I did only work on it for about five minutes, so, it’s not too bad.

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If idle blog will once be necessary, I’ll not sleep neither. This mortal house I’ll ruin…

Good-o and hell morning.

It’s Thursday, so I’m writing my formerly standard (and potentially newly standard) weekly blog post today.  Huzzah.  Admittedly, I last wrote a blog post on Monday, so there have only been two blank days since I posted, but it still feels odd.  My daily blog posts are almost never worth reading, anyway, though, so it’s not a huge loss.

It was slightly nice to let myself not feel pressured to write a “report” on my progress these last few days.  I also didn’t push myself to write more than one page a day.  Historically, that has often nevertheless led to me writing quite a bit more per day, but not this time.  Over the last two days, I’ve written a total of 1,361 words on Extra Body, bringing it to its current total of 57,886 words (88 pages).  I just haven’t had much energy for writing, or for anything at all.  That’s even relative to my usual level of energy.

I say that, but I have been trying to study some mathematics and physics.  I’ve been doing the Brilliant course on intro to linear algebra, which is quite interesting, and should help prepare me for more in-depth work in quantum mechanics/quantum field theory and (most important to me) General Relativity.  I need to review and improve my calculus as well.  I also got the e-book (PDF) of Advanced Theoretical Physics by the guy who runs the Science Asylum YouTube channel.  He does a really good job explaining things on his channel‒including things I already understand well, so I know he’s rigorous and thorough.

I’ve also been reading Leonard Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum book on Special Relativity, with plans to move toward the subsequent one on General Relativity (and to circle back to the one on quantum mechanics).  And, of course, I’ve also been reading Sean Carroll’s two Biggest Ideas in the Universe books.  Basically, I want to ground myself in the concepts and renew and improve my mathematics skills before I get into real study of GR, using Sean Carroll’s textbook (I already own it and Gravitation) and possibly some other recommended texts, and also some university level quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

One reason for this is:  I’ve long wondered just what would happen if one were to accelerate a space ship to close enough to the speed of light that its relativistic length contraction and relativistic mass put it below its Schwarzschild radius (at least relative to outside observers), which should mean it should become a black hole.  But of course, it’s not a simple spherical mass, so the solutions for the equations might be much more complicated and lead to unexpected outcomes as in the Kerr solution for spinning black holes.  This is the most realistic black hole model, since basically all black holes spin, and often do so quite energetically.  Conservation of angular momentum applies to collapsed stars just as it does when a spinning skater spins faster as the skater’s arms are pulled in.

I have a secret fantasy that a spaceship situation such as I described above might allow a ship to turn itself into a wormhole instantaneously if everything is done right, and achieve something that is effectively faster-than-light travel.  But even if that’s not workable, I’d like to know what would happen in such a situation.  I know this is not idle thinking, because there was real curiosity whether, if there really were curled up dimensions that are large enough, particles at the LHC might achieve relativistic mass enough to become tiny black holes*.

This is far from the only question I would like to understand better about GR.  I want to understand, deeply, the mathematics that makes a cosmological constant produce “repulsive gravity” and thus expanding spacetime.  I’m actually starting to get a little inkling of how that works, but only an inkling**.  I need more.

I would like to understand everything, of course, everything that there is to know…but only through the dint of my own work.  I would never want just to be given knowledge.  How lame and boring that would be!

I also have been able to (re)read some fiction amidst all this‒The Belgariad, by David Eddings.  I picked up near the end of Queen of Sorcery and am now in the first half of Enchanter’s Endgame.  It’s nice to be able to read at least these fiction books that I haven’t read in a while 

Basically, I’m frantically grasping at straws‒panicking in my weird, quietish way‒trying to find something, some reason, to keep me going.  I fear it’s not working, though.  The downward pull is too strong; I’m orbiting in the inner accretion disk of my personal black hole, and unless I can be pulled out by someone or something‒for I cannot do it on my own‒I will soon enter the “plunging region” where orbit is no longer possible, and nothing remains but to cross the horizon.  Every single day I yearn for everything to be over.

It doesn’t help that my sleep has been rotten, even by my own standards.  And my chronic pain always interferes with everything.  And my tinnitus is just galling, keening away like a permanent near-the-ear mosquito, but higher in pitch, especially now that I have a bit in my left ear as well as the major tinnitus in my right ear.  It makes the various other noises of the world feel all the more chaotic.  And I’m very much alone in my head, and in my life.  I feel like the only member of my species, like that last passenger pigeon that lived, companionless, in the Cincinnati Zoo for a few years before dying.

Meanwhile, the weather down here in south Florida is thoroughly sloppy, with rain and flooding and everything that goes with them‒such as the Internet being out where I live‒leading to my long commute being more unpleasant than usual.  At least it’s cooler, though (in temperature, not in fashionableness).  There were a few times during the night last night in which, when I started awake‒as I do several times most nights‒I realized that the air conditioner wasn’t even running!  That’s rare in June in this part of the world.

Oh, and I mentioned Substack a few days ago.  Well, it turns out that, technically, I already have a Substack account, since I follow a few other writers and thinkers thereon.  So I guess, if I so chose, I could write stuff there and set it up with a paywall.  Of course, actually, I could do that here on WordPress already, I think, and loyalty would suggest that it would be the better choice.  Of course, I could set up a Patreon account and link it to my work here and to my YouTube channel and so on.

All these thoughts are pipe dreams, though.  I don’t honestly expect any of them to come to fruition‒they’ll just drop to the ground like most of the fifty-six trillion mangos in south Florida, merely to rot there and attract fruit flies.

We’ll see, I guess.

Meanwhile, I’m scheduled to work this weekend, so I’ll have two more days of fiction writing this week and three next week before my next scheduled blog post.  It’ll be almost the equinox next Thursday, and of course, this coming Sunday will be Father’s Day.  I wish that were a holiday I could enjoy; being a father is the most important and greatest thing I have ever done.  But that all went bitterly off-kilter, and I crashed and burned, and right now I’m just surviving in the wasteland near the wreckage, fantasizing about a rescue or an escape, but knowing more and more every day that such a thing is vanishingly unlikely.

Anyway, enough.  This is getting too long.  I hope you all have a good week and a good weekend.  If you’re a father, I hope you have a great day Sunday, and for those of you who have fathers who are still around and who deserve it, I hope you get in touch with them at least and make sure they know that they matter to you.  Men are expected to be stoic about love and other feelings…but men also die by suicide in about three or four times as great numbers as women.  Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but it sure doesn’t rule it out, either.

TTFN

*This was never a worry, just to be clear, even if it had happened.  A tiny black hole that size would decay almost instantly via Hawking radiation.  But that would (or should) produce an essentially random shower of particles, not the usual decay products of the original particle.  Alas, no such events (or event horizons) occurred, so if there are curled up extra dimensions, the LHC didn’t get energetic enough to probe them.

**That sounds like the word for a baby pen, doesn’t it?