politics

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Still queasy after all these years

Okay, well, it may not have been going on for years, but I am feeling queasy again this morning.

It’s Tuesday now, and for the first time in what feels like a long time, I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  I’m doing this partly because my thumbs, despite attempts at good care by me, are feeling quite sore and stiff*.  When I take enough NSAIDs (usually naproxen) to keep them calmed down, then my hands and probably some other parts of my body eventually get swollen and feel…inarticulate, I guess might be the right word.

I worry that this means the NSAIDs are doing a number on my kidneys, along with other parts of my body.  I know that, at baseline, my kidneys appear to be functioning fine—when I went into the hospital with my kidney stone last year, of course I had lots of blood (and urine) tests.  But I don’t want to roll the dice on them too much.  Because if I ever do have kidney failure, there’s no way I’m going to be dialyzed.

That’s not because I have anything against dialysis, but because I know I will not be able to afford it; I don’t have insurance, of course, and also, I don’t have any kind of support if I were to undergo dialysis, which usually must be done two to three times a week.  I just don’t see that all happening.

Anyway, there’s no immediate danger there, as long as I don’t take too many things that are going to box my kidneys.  It seems likely that something else will take me down before they go.

Speaking of ill health, I had a rough day at the office yesterday.  I was fighting a sinus headache on the left side (of my head, that is; I did not have a headache all along the left side of my body) all day, and it was really uncomfortable.  I think I was fighting off a local, bacterial infection.  Thankfully, decongestants and such all took care of it, and the problem appears to be resolved, or mostly so, today.  What regional lymphadenopathy I had is all but completely gone.

The irritation caused by that process seemed to trigger an exacerbation of tinnitus, but that might have been a coincidence, since it was acting up in my right ear, not my left.  To be fair, my right ear is where the tinnitus is worst and so is my hearing.  This asymmetry can be quite disorienting (or, as the Brits would say, disorientating), especially when one is in a room in which overhead music is playing and a large number of people are all on the phone at the same time.

Well, I say “large”—it’s really about a dozen.  But it’s a smallish office, so that number of people can make it feel packed.  And the noise is problematic for me at the best of times.  Among other things, I have a hard time telling where any particular voice or noise arises, because my one ear is nearly useless.

Wow, this is really lame and boring, isn’t it?  I’m sorry.  At least I’m not talking to you about my mental health problems anymore, right?  They haven’t stopped or diminished in any way; quite the contrary.  But I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear about them, and certainly, no one can do anything about them (least of all me, it seems).  Mostly, even the people who want to help just respond with clichés and homilies and so on.  That sort of stuff just makes me feel worse, if anything, because it’s so disappointing.

As for other things, let’s see…no, I don’t think I have anything exciting on which to report.  I did just have a bit of a fudge-up on my MS Word as I’ve been typing; somehow the striking out and red-lining of new words and erased previous ones got activated.  I don’t know how that activation took place, but it was not what I wanted.  I was, at least, able to stop it.

It’s very irritating.  It’s one of those things that arises, I suspect, because Word is trying to keep up with the web-based word processors, but I don’t want it to do that.  And, to be fair, it might just have been me accidentally hitting some shortcut on the keyboard.  In any case, I want Word to be the same reliable word processor it’s been for such a long time.

I want a word processor that doesn’t require me to have an internet connection to use it.  Fie upon the internet for ordinary, local tasks.  Why do people need web connections for games and for word processing and for all those little things that we used to do on our computers long before the internet/web became publicly available?

The internet requires many systems to be functional and operational to stay in business, and I’m not confident those things will remain so.  Huge server farms and various other tech matters use tremendous amount of energy and other resources (such as water for cooling), and sooner or later, if they are receiving those resources instead of humans, the humans are going to blow them up and/or burn them down, along with the companies and people who create them, and it will be deserved.

All this complex, manipulative technology is quite breakable, as are pretty much all things.  The underwater cables that carry the information of the internet between continents are also vulnerable.  Chip manufacturers, and particularly the machines that etch microchips, are particularly expensive and vulnerable.  Sources of rare Earth minerals are perhaps slightly less vulnerable, but it doesn’t take much to interfere with finely tuned infrastructure.

I’m frankly amazed that no one has done a Fight Club (specifically, a “Project Mayhem”) on the whole international set of communications hardware on which the internet is based.  Just screwing up heat exchangers would probably be enough to bring large portions of the cloud down semi-permanently.  And how many people have their important data backed up in hard copies anymore?

Do you want to stop the advent of artificial intelligence that might wipe out human civilization?  Wipe out the infrastructure of the companies that are working on it.  We know that it is always much easier to destroy than to create, but we definitely want to destroy a thing that will pull a “Project Genesis” on us and wipe us out to instantiate its own existence.  Throw some of those sabots into the machinery, if you’re worried.  The law is not going to protect you from the wealthy and powerful—or so it certainly seems, and it seems to be less likely to protect you with every passing moment—so why obey it?

Meh, I’m probably being too pessimistic.  Anyway, maybe it’ll be a good thing, from the cosmic point of view, if the human race and all other organic life on Earth is erased and replaced by electronic life.  It might even be a good thing for humans themselves.  There are certainly fates that are worse than death.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t think I’m making much sense.  I hope you all have a good day, despite having foolishly opened yourselves to my thoughts early in the morning.

*It’s also because I fear my typing skill has deteriorating due to lack of use, so I figured it would probably be good to get back into it a bit.

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“I find myself growing fatigued, Doctor.”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Tuesday, and here I am writing another blog post.  Huzzah.

I’m rather tired today, which I guess shouldn’t be that surprising, given that I have chronic trouble sleeping.  Still, some days hit me worse than others, for reasons that are probably multifactorial and are certainly difficult to tease apart.  And today, so far, seems to be one of the “I feel more tired than usual by a noticeable margin” days.  You’ve probably all had such days, though you may not have used that specific term for them*.

There is some good news, news that in a way is not world news but is extraterrestrial news, at least temporarily:  the Artemis mission has flown ‘round the far side of the moon, and in so doing has brought humans farther away from Earth even than Apollo 13 did; this is now the farthest humans have ever been.

It’s quite momentous, but the fact of this mission and its (so far) success, raises questions.  I suspect the answers to them are disappointingly trivial, however.  For instance, why was there such a delay in returning to the Moon after the last time in 1972?  The answer to that is at least somewhat clear when one poses the related question:  why did we work so hard to go to the Moon back in the late 60s/early 70s?

Of course, the main reasons were:  primate dominance/hierarchy drives, writ large across the planet.  The Apollo program was, in a barely metaphorical sense, the ultimate dick-measuring contest, and the USA won that one pretty clearly at the time (“Mine reaches all the way to the Moon and back, how ‘bout yours, motherf#cker?”).  The fact that the Soviet Union basically admitted defeat in that region in that round is but one piece among the mountains of evidence confirming that, yes Victoria, humans did indeed land on the Moon.

It wasn’t for purely scientific reasons, though.  In fact, the science at the time took a very distant, rear-facing-storage-area-of-the-station-wagon place compared to the politics that was in the driver’s seat.

Alas, human nature being what it seems to be, perhaps truly amazing innovation and advancement is simply much more likely to occur during conflict (literal and figurative).  Maybe even the Beatles, for instance, were so great at least partly because of the (usually friendly) competitiveness between John and Paul, and also George once he found his considerable mojo.  Ringo was the Samwise Gamgee/Bodhisattva of the group, which seems appropriate for a drummer.

Humans presumably have always had the capacity to make the many scientific discoveries and technological advancements that have occurred in recent centuries.  But they needed to have an impetus before anyone would get anything done.  The two strongest inherent drives are survival and reproduction, and those drives interact and accumulate as humans gather in larger numbers, and they sublimate into national competitiveness‒for wealth and power, for luxury, for prestige, for all that nonsense.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could deliberately control our motivation?  We have crude means of affecting it already‒caffeine and various other stimulants‒but these are blunt yet jagged tools.  In principle, microelectrodes could be implanted into something like the nucleus accumbens or the reticular activating system or more well-chosen, finely tuned areas of the nervous system.  Then one could use a remote control to give oneself motivation when desired (?).  Presumably, other mental states could be manipulated, encouraged, discouraged, etc.  Just watch out that no one else gets their hands on your remote control!

Maybe it would be better to have a helmet with various directed electromagnets to stimulate specific brain regions at will.  This process is already in use in relatively simple form**, but it could be honed and made more precise and more powerful and useful.  It would be nice to be able to have large-scale motivation that didn’t require the tendency toward large-scale destruction.

It may be an inevitable challenge.  Powerful forces can inherently have very good and/or very bad effects depending on circumstances and, of course, depending on what one means by “good” and “bad”.

Not to say that we couldn’t rather easily be doing things better than we are.  We could.  But…it seems we aren’t sufficiently motivated to do so.

*If you did, that would be truly surprising.  It would be so surprising, in fact, that if you told me it was the case, I would more strongly suspect some manner of deception or illusion or delusion or cognitive bias than that it was actually true (this is reminiscent of Hume’s test for the veracity of supposed miracles).

**And is involved in the plot of my book(s) Unanimity, Books 1 and 2.

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“Something knocked me out the trees – now I’m on my knees”

Okay.  So.  I don’t know what to write today, even more so than usual.

It’s Tuesday, of course.  Though I guess there’s really no “of course” about it; I mean, it could be any day in principle, but it happens to be Tuesday, and I’m up and about, going through various stages of heading to the office as I write this.

At the end of the work day, I will head back to the house and prepare to do it all over again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I won’t say “as needed”, because I think it’s probably rather nebulous just how necessary these daily repetitions really are.  Certainly neither the universe nor civilization depends upon me doing any of the things I do.

I suppose that “work” is weakly dependent upon me, in that if I suddenly just stopped coming, they would have to find someone else to do what I do, or divide things up among those already there or something.  That’s not such a big deal, of course.  It happens all the time.

There may be a few people who look forward to my blog every day, though it would be pretty arrogant to consider them “dependent” upon it.  I would much prefer for people to be “dependent” upon, or at least to look forward to, my fiction.  It would be easier to keep writing it if I thought more than one person would actually read my stories, and that maybe people would even tell me what they thought of them*.

I suppose that sort of thing might seem fairly trivial in the face of various events happening in the nation and the world, but on the other hand, those things are trivial in themselves.  There is certainly no good reason for any of them other than that human nature‒while possessing functionally limitless potential‒is almost always prone to default to the level of screaming monkeys.

Each political moment of the world feels so…well…momentous to the people going through it, but these kinds of things have arisen and passed away over and over throughout history.  Probably most such happenings are even outside of history, parallel to it if you will, because many of them are not even noticed beyond their immediate time and place, even by some of the people who experience them.

They are all rather laughable in their self-important yet ephemeral character.

I don’t know why I even notice, let alone care.  I guess maybe it’s because the human race does have such potential for greatness, for the creation of beauty‒by whatever criteria you might measure beauty‒and for making the world a place that’s better than it is in every reasonable way.  Yet, they do not have the intellectual and moral humility to realize how great they could make things.  Ironically, if people were able to stop thinking of everything as being about them, whoever they are, they could participate in a world that could easily be better not just for everyone else, but for them as well.

Of course, it’s honestly difficult not to knee jerk one’s responses to reality as if it were about oneself.  Meditation can help, if only by dissolving the “ego” and decreasing the tendency toward reflexive belief in the inner homunculus.

It would be nice if Earth had its own Surak who succeeded in convincing humanity that calmness, mindfulness, and rationality are not merely options but probably among the best ways to secure a beneficent future for Earth and life and intelligence.  That’s assuming that this is indeed true, which I strongly suspect it is, but do not know for certain.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if, instead of training our children to believe in the literal truth of fairy tales that are hundreds to thousands of years old (and benighted even for their times of origin), extorting their behavior and “belief” with threats of Hell (or the equivalent), we encouraged our children to be mindful, to be curious, to be patient, to recognize their fallibility, but at the same time, as part of that, to recognize their potential to do truly remarkable and wonderful things.

But left to their own devices‒as they all always are, since even the Powers That Be are just other naked house apes, not significantly different than themselves‒people tend to choose the monkey way.  Or, rather, they go that way by default, never recognizing that they have a choice.

Only if you recognize that you are a monkey can you really, deliberately choose to become something greater.

Only by recognizing your fallibility can you begin to succeed at deliberately chosen and often amazing things.

Only by recognizing that you are not special can you truly steer yourself toward doing things that are special.

Okay, all those “only” beginnings to the above homilies are presumptuous in the extreme, but they make for better quotables than more restrained language would provide.

I’m not a fan of rhetoric‒if you need clever wordplay to convince others of your points, perhaps your points aren’t all that good‒and one of the reasons I’m not a fan is that it is just so damn tempting.

Oh, well.  This is all stupid anyway.  Sorry.

*No trolling though.  I don’t mind reasonable criticism, especially if I find it convincing, but when people are assholes just for the “fun” of it, I see no problem with them being dealt with as one would a troll in an RPG or a book or a movie.  Imagine how much more pleasant the world would be if all people prone to trollish behavior were turned to stone, or barring that, turned to worm food and ash.

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Peculiar signs and pseudo-wonders

Well, as you probably know*, it’s Monday again.  I’m not excited about it either, believe me, but I was given no input into the matter, so don’t blame me.

As you may also know, I did not work this last Saturday, because several unexpected absences concatenated (I’m not sure that’s good usage) to make it pointless for the office to open, so we did not open it.  Instead, I took advantage of the day off and went on a bit of a trek.

I walked to the bank‒a new branch, or at least one I haven’t used in the past‒and then continued on a few more miles to the Yellow Green Farmers Market, which is quite a nice little place that’s only open on the weekends.

Just outside the market, I saw an amusing collection of signs that I suspect one would not ever see at a farmers’ market in the northeast.  I’ll insert a picture here.

Anyway, I was neither openly carrying nor carrying concealed firearms, and I used no bike, scooter, or skateboard, so I was fine.  I walked around a bit, had a lovely apple and ginger tea and three empanadas, then walked back toward the house by a different route.  Finally, I got back to the Hollywood train station, where I decided to get an Uber the remaining distance back.

I had already walked several miles, and I was rather fatigued.  I could also sense that I had gotten a bit sunburned (which I had).  Anyway, in the end, I walked almost exactly ten miles on Saturday.  This is based on agreement between my pedometer and the map estimate, so I think it’s reasonably accurate.

We used to say “close enough for government work” about things like that, back in the day, implying that governments don’t work very hard to get things too right.  However, nowadays, in the US at least, I feel that it would be better to say “too close for government work” because accuracy and precision, let alone duty and beneficence, seem to be anathema to our current administration.  Let us say as little as we may about competence.  That bit is just deeply embarrassing.

Let’s see, is there anything else that’s at all worth discussing?  I don’t know; “worth” is such a subjective concept.  In my subjective assessment, much of what I do on any day, in any week, in any year is of no worth whatsoever.

Not everything falls under that umbrella.  Everything I did that led up to my children being born is absolutely worthwhile to me.  Nor jot nor tittle would I change of it.  After that, though, things degenerated rapidly.  Again, this is from my point of view, but that’s the only one I can actually have.

I can imagine other points of view.  I can try to see things as if from another point of view, simulating other minds within my own.  So can you, probably.  It’s a very useful attribute shared by most naked house apes.  I think my own capacity to do so‒which is not inherently very good, it seems, probably due to my ASD‒was greatly enhanced by reading a lot of fiction starting from when I was quite young.

Reading is very different from watching a movie or a TV show or even a play, because with reading one can more or less literally “hear” the thoughts of the characters‒and I think this is one of the truly great things about written fiction.  I think if more people spent more of their lives, particularly in childhood, reading written fiction, the world would be, in consequence, a better place by most reasonable measures.

Unfortunately, for many people in the world, the only fiction they read is stuff like the Bible and the Koran.  Not that there’s anything wrong with reading them per se‒I’ve read parts of one and all of the other, myself‒but though they are anthropologically interesting, they are not terribly well written, nor are they coherent, nor is there any unity to their styles.

This is a bit puzzling, given some of the things the books claim for themselves.  Then again, politics frequently demonstrates that people don’t seem too worried about coherence and logic and quality, so one can say and claim almost anything one wants, and some people will embrace it.

DMX said, “Talk is cheap, motherfucker!”  Aye, that it is.  And yet, people will pay through the nose for it, and sometimes, the more worthless it is, the more eagerly they pay.

If given a choice between cheap but big and gaudy fake plastic jewelry and some truly valuable, rare gem that is subdued in character, people seem to pick the plastic nearly every time.  They do this even when they know the difference.  They cannot seem to resist the superficial bling.

Mind you, if it’s just for decoration, the superficial bling is okay as far as it goes.  Especially if it’s going to be transient, like holiday decorations, the cheap and gaudy stuff can be ideal, because one doesn’t have to worry about damaging it; it’s all about a look, an impression, anyway.

But when one wants something durable, something useful, something with depth, it’s best to work with things that are not mere surface shimmer.  One does not want to build factories and fire trucks and skyscrapers and farm equipment out of Papier-mâché, Elmer’s® glue, plastic beads, and glitter.

All right, I think that tortured chunk of rhetoric demonstrates that I have nothing further to say today that’s worth sharing.  Probably that’s true every day, from midnight to midnight.  Silence, I suspect, is probably my ideal mode.

*This is presuming** that most, if not all, readers tend to read my posts on the day they are released.

**I know, I know, when I presume I make a pres out of u and me.  And right now, a pres is not a prestigious thing to be, though there was a time in the past when it was.

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In a better blog than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this post on my lapcom.  I feel as though I ought write these posts only on the computer (not that smartphones are not computers, but cut me a little slack on this, please), and I would be more inclined to do so if Microsoft would stop making Aptos the default font!!!!!

If I could go back in time and change something, that’s one of the things I would be inclined to change.  If I found that there was one person mainly responsible for this new font, well…I don’t know if I’d go all Terminator on them and kill that person’s mother before that person was born, or kill the person when that person was a child, but something needs to be done to erase the stain of this horrible font from existence.

Certainly, if I were given* absolute power over the world, from this moment forward, one of the petty things I would do (I would try to keep the petty things to a very bare minimum, trust me**) is to eliminate that font from any and all standard computer systems anywhere.  I would probably allow for individuals to select the font if they really like it, but would not let them use it on anything but internal work between people who also like the font.

Also, I would probably mark people who chose the font freely for a visit from my secret police.

I’m kidding.  I despise the very notion of thought crime, let alone aesthetic policing in private matters.  This is even though some people’s quality of thought sometimes feels like a crime against nature.  But, of course, there cannot actually be crimes against nature.  Nature does not punish one for disobedience to its laws.  It’s simply not possible to do anything but follow them.

That’s one reason why I truly despise headlines like “The new finding by Hubble that breaks physics!” and whatnot.  Not only are they plainly clickbait, they are stupid clickbait.  I don’t know for sure if it’s just the headline writer or the writer of whatever the attached article might be who makes the headline in specific instances, but in either case, when I see headlines like that, I think that whoever wrote it really, clearly doesn’t understand physics very well.  Nor do they the nature of scientific discovery and advancement.  Because of that, I am far less likely to read the attached article (or watch the video) or even click on its link.

Nothing can break physics.  If you find something that seems to violate physics as you understand it, what you have found is not a violation of physics but rather a place where your understanding of physics is clearly incorrect.  This is far from a horrible thing.  This is how progress in physics (and in other sciences) is made:  by finding the places where our “understanding” doesn’t predict or describe what actually appears to be happening.  The world cannot be “wrong”, so our understanding of it must be, and will need to be revised.

That’s progress.

One should be hesitant to give too much “trust” to anyone who refuses to change their mind.  One of the best lines in a Doctor Who episode (not a truly great episode, maybe, but it has a wonderful speech by the Doctor) is after the Doctor has said to the “villain” (who goes by the human name Bonnie, though she is not human) “I just want you to think.  Do you know what thinking is?  It’s just a fancy word for changing your mind.”

Bonnie responds, “I will not change my mind.”

And the Doctor says, “Then you will die stupid.”***

This is simply true.  If you never learn that you were wrong about something, if you never update your credences or think about things in a new way, you will never learn anything new or develop any better understanding of the world than you did when you formed those credences.  Or, to paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, if no state of the world can change the state of your retina and how you perceive that state, that’s called being blind.

I like to refer to Yudkowsky-sensei a lot, but that’s because he has said a lot of bright and interesting things, and he has said them well.  It’s also nice to know that there are some highly intelligent and thoughtful people in the world—clearly there are, or humans would long since has gone the way of the trilobites—because the idiots and the assholes make so much noise.

The best evidence I see for the fact that most people are good or at least benign (overall) is that civilization still exists, and has done so for a long time.  It is far easier to destroy than to create or even to maintain; the second law of thermodynamics tells us that things will fall apart even if we do nothing at all to break them (it says that more or less, anyway—that’s a bit of a bastardization of the proper, mathematical law, but it is related and implicit).

The fact that civilization still exists—so far, at least—seems to indicate that there must be a lot of people working to maintain and sustain and improve it, because we can easily see how much how many people seem to be trying to make it crumble****.

Assholes tend to make a lot of noise in the world, but they’re pretty much all full of shit and “hot air”.  It’s worth it to keep this in mind, because there have always been plenty of such nether orifices out there, spewing their flatus everywhere like perverse crop-dusters.  But the evidence strongly suggests that they are not the norm; they are just the noisiest.

I suppose that’s a good moral of sorts on which to end this post:  Be willing, even eager, to change your mind when warranted, and try not to let the assholes make you think the world is no better than a camp latrine (even if you’re one of the assholes sometimes, which you are, since we all are, sometimes*****).

Though, to be fair, I am hardly the person to be giving that last piece of advice unironically.

TTFN

*If you must be given absolute power, do you actually then have absolute power?  This is similar to the old song that says “Don’t ever take away our freedom.”  If you have to beseech someone not to take away your freedom, you’re not free, and if you have to be given power, your power is clearly not absolute.

**Or don’t, if that’s not in your character.  I’ve often spoken implicitly against the concept of trust, stating that I don’t feel that I can actually, truly trust any living person.  It’s calculated risks all the way down, which is empirically true if nothing else.  So, I can hardly scold someone if they don’t “trust” me.  Go ahead, form your own conclusions.  I do exhort you, though, to be as rational as possible when you form them, with your conclusions drawn as a consequence of the evidence and argument, not with your evidence and argument being curated based on your knee-jerk or at least hasty “conclusion”.

***He then proceeds to lay out the alternatives; he’s not making a threat, he’s making a point.

****When you read that, did you immediately think of your own least favorite political or other public figure, or perhaps of the people you encounter who disagree with your politics or religion or dietary preference or what have you?  Be careful.  Us/them thinking is not usually conducive to formulating true and accurate pictures of reality (though it did inspire at least one beautiful song):

*****We’re also all deuterostomes (I’m assuming only humans are reading this).  Look it up.  It’s kind of funny.

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I had a good headline idea, but it slipped my mind

I was surprised by how much response I’ve received to yesterday’s blog (and that of the day before) as well as the number of comments.  It’s very gratifying, and I appreciate it very much.  Thank you.

As for today, well, I am really not sure what to write, because yesterday’s blog was‒from my viewpoint, anyway‒about as free-form and chaotic and tangential and stochastic (not to say redundant) as anything I’ve written.  But maybe that’s just the experience I had while writing it; maybe it doesn’t actually come across that way to the reader(s).  It’s difficult for me to know, because even more than reading, writing is a solitary thing.

That’s not to say that people can’t write together.  Back when I was a teenager, I co-wrote some partial stories with one of my best friends, and we did it sitting next to each other and talking things through aloud as we typed.  That was a pretty active and interactive collaboration.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we got very far with it.  We made much more progress writing silly computer programs in Basic on the Apple II+ my father had bought.  This was in the days before there were any ISPs as far as I know, though we did dial onto a couple of local “billboard” services from time to time with my dad’s old modem (I think it was 600 baud*, but it may be some even divisor or even a very small multiple of that number).

One time, I even had a conversation with a girl (!) who was helping run one of the billboards.  She was (supposedly) about my age, and obviously she was much more into computers than I was for the time.  There was never (in my regretful mind) any possibility of an ongoing interaction, let alone a physical meetup or anything, however.  Even then, though I was reasonably confident when within my local group of friends and teachers, I was painfully shy and awkward, and could never make conversation other than about specific topics.

Goal-directed interactions are okay, as they tend to flow naturally from the process involved.  This is why I’ve made nearly all my friends at school or at work.  Purely social interactions were never really an option for me, except with people I already knew quite well.  And having a successful romantic relationship was unfortunately not in the cards for me.

It still isn’t, as far as I can tell.  I suspect the problem is that there’s no other member of my true species on this planet.  I did come reasonably close, or so I thought for a long time, but I’ve been divorced now about five years longer than I was married, so I apparently wasn’t all that successful.

Okay, well, sorry about the weird, ancient info-dump.  It’s not nearly as cool as the data that’s coming in from the recently-activated Vera Rubin observatory.  That, at least, is the sort of thing that helps restore my faith in humanity.  Or, well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that it shifts my Bayesian credence slightly away from the “humans are without net redeeming value” end and toward the “humans may not be all that bad in the end” end.

The credence is still quite low, though.  By which I mean I’m closer to the first end than the second most of the time.

Things might be a little bit better if the sort of people who do things like setting up the Vera Rubin telescope, and who set up and launched and now use the James Webb telescope, and the members of the former human genome project, and the people who study cognitive neuroscience, were the sort of people working in government, writing and administering laws.  Generally speaking, though, the first type of people don’t tend to want to do the governing nonsense, probably not least because a lot of that business is not about everyone trying to do the best they can for the people they represent.

The people who want to do astronomy and mathematics and biology and geology and neuroscience and meteorology and so on are probably some of the best people to do those things‒not just from their point of view but also from the viewpoint of civilizational benefit.  Unfortunately, many of the people who want to go into government and politics tend to be some of the worst people for those jobs, from the point of view of civilization.

I can’t say they are the worst possible group for the job.  The truly disaffected and uninterested or the misanthropic and nihilistic might well do a worse job even than the lot who do it now.  This is despite the fact that most of those latter people act on shallow and immediate self-interest.  Self-interest can do the job adequately when the incentives are structured such that one’s self-interest is served by serving the interests of the people of one’s community/city/nation/species.

Those incentives are very tricky to manage, unfortunately.  It would be much better if we could find people who had real enthusiasm and curiosity and an actually somewhat scientific approach to government.  If only we could find a group as committed to seeing a truly and objectively well-run society‒in which everyone was better off than they would have been in nearly any other‒as the group who set up the Vera Rubin observatory was committed to actually getting the observatory done so they and we could learn ever more about the universe on the largest scales, things might be quite a bit better than they are.  Maybe not, but my credence leans more toward the “maybe so” end.

Alas, politics and government were not born of human curiosity and creativity‒the things almost entirely unique to the species‒but of the old, stupid primate dominance hierarchy/mating drives, which are evolutionarily understandable, but which don’t make for pretty, let alone beneficial, government.  Think about it.  Would you want to put a bunch of self-serving apes doing the jobs of government?

Oh, wait!  That is the group doing the jobs of the government!  Of course, it’s also the group being governed.  Uh-oh.  This could be boding better**.

Not that being recognized as an ape is an insult per se; apes are all that we’ve had available, and they’re the best that’s come along so far.  Some of them are really not so bad.  Some of them figure out ways to launch immense telescopes into space, not so very long after one of them first created the telescope.  Some of them figure out ways to cure and even prevent unnecessary disease.  Some of them figure out ways to turn simple manipulations of base-two arithmetic into information processing that can be scaled up to any kind of logic and information that can be codified.

Some of them just write blogs and sometimes write stories and songs and such***.  But hopefully, that’s not too detrimental an endeavor.

*A baud is a bit per second being sent over the phone lines.  Not a meg, not a K, not even a byte, but rather a bit‒a binary digit, a one versus a zero, on or off.  If you listened to the sound of the modem, you could imagine you could almost hear the individual bits.

**Tip of the hat to Dave Barry’s “Mister Language Person”.

***Though I have done my very small part in advancing human scientific knowledge, in that I am a co-author and co-investigator on an actual published scientific paper.

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This is the blog this man’s soul tries

Well, in case some of you were starting to feel lighthearted and optimistic‒just a little more at ease with yourselves and the world after two whole days without reading my work‒here I am to write another blog post that will probably bring you down and make you inclined to wonder whether anything at all is really worth anything, or if you should just give it all up, especially the habit of reading this blog.

Congratulations.  It’s Monday again, the start of another work week.  Also, Daylight Savings Time has ended (or is it “begun”?) over this last weekend, so for a bit, a lot of people’s circadian rhythms are going to be slightly off.  That will contribute to an increased number of accidents, both minor and major.  There will also be increased rates of illness (again, both major and minor), and I believe there is even some evidence that men at least will suffer more heart attacks after the time changes.

And what are the other advantages of Daylight Savings Time?  I’m not aware of any actual other benefits.

Of course, like most of you, I’m starting my own work week today, and it’s going to be a long one; the office is scheduled to be open this Saturday.  By then, the shifted time measure will be mostly adjusted in everyone’s heads.  I’m speaking of things here in the US, of course; I honestly don’t know off the top of my head whether other cultures have adopted this weird custom.

Whence did it originate?  I’ve heard explanations and excuses at various times in my life, but they are not very convincing.  If you know‒with reasonably good credence‒please share that information in the comments below.  And like and share it if you’re so inclined, especially if you have a strong sense of irony.  Heck, like and share the song itself if you want to immerse yourself in a kind of meta-level irony, or something like that:

I don’t know what to discuss today, even more so than usual.  I’ve committed to trying not to dwell on, or at least to share, my negative thoughts and emotions and so on, since I’m sure they do very little other than make other people feel depressed (yes, certain kinds of mental illness can be rather contagious, in a sense at least).

I won’t say I would never wish depression on anyone; that’s ridiculous.  For instance, I would feel much safer in the world if this Presidential administration, and indeed most of its equivalents around the globe, suffered from enough depression to make them second-guess themselves and doubt themselves from time to time.  It almost ought to be a requirement for office that someone be prone to dysthymia at the very least, so they would feel less confident that their shit doesn’t stink, so to speak.

And no, I am not suggesting that the people of the world ought to put me in charge for the best chance to make the world better.  I used to dream of such things, and I had a very Sauron-like wish to control events in the world for the greater good.  It might still not be too horrible a notion.

But my inclination over time has become more negative, more Melkor/Morgoth like.  So if anyone is inclined to encourage and engender acts of chaos and destruction on a hitherto unseen scale, by all means, give me immense power.  I make no warranties or guarantees or even assurances that I will use such power wisely.

I’ll try, of course.  No one can be expected (fairly) to do anything more than that, no matter what Yoda said.

Goodness knows I’ve tried a lot, in a lot of ways, all throughout my life, literally for as long as I can remember.  By which I mean, I’ve tried to do my best to do good things and to be a good person‒a good friend, a good son, a good husband, a good father, a good doctor, all that.  You can probably tell by my current state‒solitary, lonely, divorced, professionally ostracized, in bad physical health, in horrible mental health, alone*‒how well I’ve done at all those things.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve tried hard.  I’m not one to big myself up very much, but I have worked hard all my life, trying to be a good son, a good friend, a good brother, a good husband, a good doctor, a good father.  Yet despite my sincere efforts and my reasonably high intelligence, here I am.

I suppose a lot of the disappointing outcome(s) is/are related to my ASD, both the heart-based one and the brain-based one, as well as my tendency (probably related to the preceding) to depression and some degree of low-grade paranoia.

By “low-grade” there, I mean that I don’t literally suspect that there are malicious forces plotting against me or trying to control me; I honestly don’t think highly enough of humans (or any other beings) to expect them to be capable of such things.  It would almost be reassuring if they were.

No, I mean I just have a general, global sense‒not just intellectually, but in my bones as it were, in my deep intuitions‒that I cannot rely upon anyone or upon anything, other than the laws of nature themselves (whatever their final version might be).  I don’t “trust” anyone or anything, including (one might even say “especially”) myself.  Everything is a calculated risk.

This is of course literally true for everyone, but I think most people hide from that fact most of the time, usually (but definitely not always) without terrible consequences.  I don’t know if that’s worse or better.  It may be more pleasant, but I suspect it’s misleading, and has been responsible for, or at least it has contributed to, many ills the human race has brought upon itself and upon others.

Whataya gonna do?  I guess you’re gonna do whatever you must, as they say, since it’s not as though you can do anything other than what you do once you’ve done it, and so it was all along what you were going to do, and so it was what you must do (or must have done).

I hope you have a good day and a good week.  I’ve tried to withhold my depression and negativity, with at least some degree of success‒trust me, I’ve withheld‒and I will continue to do so, because sharing it is pointless, and asking for help is laughable.

*Now, that phrase had some redundant notions, didn’t it?

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An angry and probably unpleasant rant

It’s Friday.  yay.

Today’s date (February 6, 2026 CE or AD) has a mildly amusing coincidence/repetition of digits, 2-6-26 in the shortened American version of the date layout.  In the European system, the date would be almost palindromic (6-2-26) but that’s leaving out the zeroes in front of the day and month digits and ignoring the number of the millennium.  So it’s not quite as cool as it could be.

Some might say that such numbers and the arrangements and the noticing thereof can never be “cool”, but such people are troglodytic idiots.  They live in a world full of and shaped by complex ideas, by innovation and technology they could not have invented themselves, and which they don’t bother to try to understand because other people take care of and do all that stuff.

I’ve said before, many times (with sadness and regret and yes, quite a lot of anger) that if it were up to most people, we would all still be living in caves (the few who remain alive, at least).  That’s metaphorical, mind you; very few humans actually ever lived in caves as far as we can tell.  It’s just that the remains of those who died in caves (and their artifacts) are much more likely to endure to be discovered than the tools and remains of those who lived on the savannahs and such.

Anyway, the troglodytes have a quite common attribute, one that might explain a good deal about them:  even though they may have the capacity to read, even though they may have been taught to read, they don’t choose to do it.  It’s both sad and quietly horrifying.

Even those who claim to read just one book (e.g., the Bible, the Koran, etc.) don’t even really read those books.  You can tell, because they clearly don’t live their lives respecting all the precepts of those books.

This fact can sometimes be bad, but more often than that, it’s just as well.  Those books are horrific (and often just horrible, aesthetically).  They also tend to be rather stupid by modern standards, but it’s hard to hold them too much to task for that.  They were, after all, written from depths of profound ignorance about the universe.  One cannot know a truth before it has been discovered.

Of course, if those books really had been written, or at least inspired, by an omniscient being or beings, they could reasonably be expected to be very smart books by any standards.  Alas, they are not.  Trust me, I’ve read many of them, as well as many other books that don’t claim to be the products of omniscience, but which would be far more convincing* if they did than those ancient compilations of legend and myth and mental illness that are the so-called holy books.

Ironically, the Tao te Ching is much wiser than the aforementioned holy books, and it was never said to be written by anything other than a man.  It’s not perfect, of course, but it doesn’t really claim to be so.  Perhaps some of its adherents think it’s somehow “perfect”, but that doesn’t really matter.  After all, there are probably those who “think” Mein Kampf and The Art of the Deal are perfect.

Weirdly enough, some of these people would probably also say the Bible is perfect [Disappointed shrug and heavy sigh].  People are stupid.  And there are none so stupid as those who refuse to think.

Sorry, I don’t even know how I got to dealing with this set of subjects today.  It certainly was not planned.  Then again, nothing here was planned, other than that I would write a blog post as usual, which is not surprising.

It’s not as though I have anything better to do with my life‒that is, nothing better other than to shut it off, I suppose.  But so far, I am too much of a coward to do that.

I know, I know, there are those who (with truly very good intentions) will call continuing to be alive a “brave” choice, but though I appreciate such people’s kindness, that “choice” is very much the default.  In a similar vein, it’s not brave to hunt, or to fish, or to farm, if hunting or fishing or farming  is what you must do to survive.  It’s just pragmatic.

I am not brave for still being alive.  This is not to say that it would be brave for me to kill myself, either.  But it also would not necessarily be cowardly.

Bravery in the usual sense is overrated, anyway.  We can (and should) all be glad, of course, that there are people like firefighters, as well as honorable soldiers and honorable police officers.  But if one stops to think about it, one can see that we should all very much wish to live in a world in which bravery was not required, a world where heroes are not merely not needed but are not useful.

It’s likewise with so-called leaders.  If a society were functioning well, it would not need (or want) heroes or leaders, at least not in the traditional sense.  In a well-functioning civilization, people would see their elected officials as their employees, as the public servants that they are.  They are not, and should not be thought of as, leaders.  That’s just a troglodytic way of thinking.

Alas, we are far from such a well-functioning civilization yet.  Who knows if we ever shall achieve it?

I do know, however, that I will probably be working tomorrow, which means I will write a blog post, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  Until then, I hope you each and all have a very good day by any reasonable criteria.

*Especially modern science books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope you all have a good day.

TTFN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think on that, and be amazed.

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

**But I doubt it.

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