politics

by

It might be the pate of a politician, which this blog now o’erreaches

Hello and good morning, o dedicated reader(s).

I honestly don’t feel very much like writing today‒I feel extremely low even for me, very gloomy, very pain-riddled and dysthymic, my mood made worse by the diminishing daytime in the northern hemisphere‒but since I did my little throw-away non-blog last Thursday, I figured I might as well do something today.  I don’t know if anyone truly looks forward to my blogs‒it’s hard to imagine someone’s day being worse because they didn’t get any input from my thoughts‒but just in case someone does, I will write.  Or, rather, I am writing.

I don’t want anyone to think that my depression is unusually bad due to political events, and certainly not for anything parochial, provincial, local in time and space.  Cat forbid!

I’m sure that people throughout history have thought that whatever local politics was happening just then, at that moment, was Earth-shattering and of monumental importance.  But, of course, as Ozymandius reminds us, all the great people and events of the past, all the presidents and emperors and warlords and whatnots, are but headless, trunkless, disintegrating statues in a featureless desert.

Actually, most of them are never even that.  During the Cold War, admittedly, especially the latter part during maximum arms race and belligerence between the US and the USSR, it was possible for politics to engender the destruction of much of civilization (and I truly didn’t think the odds were good that we would avoid thermonuclear war for very long*) but even then the moment-to-moment politics was almost incidental.

The Cold War and its existential dangers lasted through numerous presidents and premiers, the former of various political parties‒Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Kennedy (D), Johnson (D), Nixon (R), Ford (R), Carter (D), Reagan (R), all the way up to George H. W. Bush (R).  And, of course, on the other side, we had Stalin (C), Khrushchev (C), Brezhnev (C), Chernenko et al (C), and Gorbachev (C).  One might imagine that Bush, Sr. and Gorbachev would be truly celebrated historical figures, given their leadership positions at the end of the Cold War, but I don’t see a lot of evidence thereof.

Now, political stupidity** has, of course, caused havoc locally on many an occasion.  More people were killed thanks to the ideological idiocy of Stalin and Mao, for instance, than were killed in wars in the 20th century, despite the immensity of those wars.

But, of course, nearly all the people who died in and around the first world war at least (and most of those alive during the second) would have been dead by now, anyway.  And certainly, everyone who died unnecessarily during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars would definitely be dead by now, whatever might have happened.  And all the people slaughtered by the hordes of Genghis Khan would be dead now, no matter what.  And certainly anyone killed due to the mismanagement of even the worst of the Caesars would be dead now‒as dead as Julius Caesar, as they say.  And the people of Greece and Macedon and “Asia Minor” and Egypt and Persia and all those other areas would be dead now whether Alexander the Great had conquered his known world or not.

I recall a column that Michael Shermer wrote in Scientific American (back when it used to be worthy of his writing) called “Remember the 6 billion” (roughly the population of the world at that time).  His point was that, within the following 120 years at most, every single person then alive would die…and for the most part it would go entirely unnoticed, because new people are constantly sporulating to take the place of the ones that fall by the wayside.

The “Great Men” (and women) of history are mostly just names and caricatures; they have no effect on the long term structure of civilization.  We recall that Alexander was a brilliant military leader‒an artist in that realm, perhaps‒but his contributions to that field have no major bearing on modern life.

The ideas of Archimedes, for instance, have had much more durable effects, but that’s because they are discoveries about the nature of the universe, of reality and its underlying rules or tendencies, and so they are, in a sense, universal and universally discoverable by any intelligent civilization anywhere in the cosmos.  Ditto for Galileo and Newton, for Maxwell and Einstein and Schrodinger and Planck and their compatriots.

Not that we should not celebrate those achievements and discoveries, but they are in some senses nonspecific to any individual.  Even the work of Darwin, which may seem both specific (har!) and provincial, since it refers to life on Earth, is probably at least as universal as the work of Newton or Dirac or even Emmy Noether.  Natural selection applies to numerous things even within the higher orders of civilization‒languages, political systems, forms of transportation, the durability and character of bureaucracies, etc.  A form of it may apply to the formation of planetary systems and the potential origin of life therein, and even to the possible bubble universes of the hypothetical inflationary multiverse (or more specifically in Lee Smolin’s speculative notion of universe natural selection through black hole related cosmogenesis).

But politics‒well, it’s provincial in pretty much every way.  Can you imagine any truly alien race caring who got elected president or which party ran the poorer campaign, why one did better or the other worse?  Go canvas the dolphins for their opinions, or the octopuses, or the corvids, or ask a beehive or a termite mound or an ant colony.  Try to get them to give flying fuck at a tiny little that’s ass*** about the minutiae of human politics.

No, my depression, like my pain, is endogenous, or at least it is not trivially reactive.  It is always with me, a truly dark passenger (who often takes the wheel).  It’s probably a product of my atypical, alien neurology, but of course, I’m not anything like as alien as a cephalopod or hymenopteran or a cetacean.  I’m just humanlike enough to exist in the uncanny valley:  weird enough to be unsettling, but not weird enough to be interesting or cute or “beautiful” because of it.

So go ahead, catastrophize or hyper-celebrate about the latest political farce, not recognizing that a lot of what went wrong on all sides was that very tendency to demonize, to catastrophize, to overreact and to be self-righteous.

There is a saying that came into prominence sometime in my teens to twenties (I don’t recall the first time I heard it).  I initially found it irritating just because it was such a “new thing”, but I think its message has endured and even grown in value:  get over yourself.

Everyone needs to take this admonition to heart.  We are all just virtual particles, not-quite-really-real bosons that can carry some degree of information or “force” when there are enough of us around, but which all ultimately pop back out of existence before our presence can even really be noticed by any outside observer.

That’s okay.  It had better be okay, because it’s not optional****.  And if that state of the world, that nature of reality, is unnerving to you, don’t mind it too much.  It won’t trouble you for very long.  No one here gets out alive.

TTFN

*We still haven’t avoided it for very long.  It’s only been a danger for about, what, 70 years?  Really, it’s a little less than that since we’ve had truly civilization-ending amounts of sufficiently powerful nuclear weapons.  So, since I’m just now 55 years old, the threat of global thermonuclear war is only about a decade-ish older than I am.  It could almost be thought of as my eldest sibling.

**Redundant?

***I would not put it past dolphins to try such a thing.

****It’s a bit like free will:  You either have it or you don’t, but you don’t have any choice in the matter.

by

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.

by

I must have liberty withal, as large a charter as the wind, to blog on whom I please

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another of my weekly blog posts.

It’s also the 4th of July, which in the USA is Independence Day, the day on which we celebrate the official founding of the country, the date on which the Declaration of Independence was signed and “published”.

I’m often led to wonder how many—or should I say, how few—people in the US have actually read the Declaration of Independence even once.  It’s really not a very long document.  It’s not.  There are, so I’m told, 1320 words in the document proper, which goes up to 1458 words if you count the title and all the signatures*.  I’ve written many blog posts longer than that!  And yet, I wonder how many of the most vociferous “patriots” have actually read it.  There are even YouTube videos of someone else reading it to you, if that’s easier than reading it yourself.

Most of the loud and proud advocates of one or another political affiliation aren’t really people who have first evaluated and then adopted a particular set of ideals.  They are sports fans, rooting for their arbitrarily chosen team, angry when a coach or player they don’t like is seeing prominence, happy when their team is winning for the moment, imagining that they have some effect on the game—and perhaps they do have some effect—deluding themselves that they really understand or intuit their sport well.

Ironically, of course, many actual sports fans really do have deep knowledge of their sport.  They know a bit about its history, they study actual statistics, they recognize hidden complexities, all in fields where there is almost literally nothing important at stake—beyond the salaries and careers of athletes, coaches, and commentators, and the joy of fans.

But in areas where it can potentially, truly matter to them, most people accept random streams of noise from various websites and social media platforms and pundits and—Cat help them—Fox News as more than enough data for them to use to choose political candidates.  Except, they don’t really, actually even  use any of that information, at least not any pertinent information, to pick and choose candidates.  That would require effort.

Cat forbid any of them read the Constitution.  That’s a little longer than the Declaration of Independence**, but unlike the Declaration, it is an actual, legal document—the operating system of the United States of America, if you will.  To read the whole thing, once a year—or even once in a lifetime—doesn’t seem too high a bar even for the average person to clear.  Again, I believe there are YouTube videos that basically consist of someone reading the document aloud.

And Schoolhouse Rock did such a lovely and catchy song version of the preamble to the Constitution when I was young that I don’t think I’ll ever forget it while I am alive.  Indeed, it may be that, if I ever haunt some location after death, unlucky visitors to that place after midnight on moonless nights will hear a hollow, chilling voice singing, “We the people…in order to form a more perfect union…”

Given that people read all sorts of stupidities and absurdities on social media, one might think that familiarizing themselves with the documents that underlie the society in which they live might be not just useful but doable.  It might even be useful to study something of the political and moral philosophy behind these documents, and the jurisprudence that has grown up around them since the country began.

I’m tilting at windmills, I guess.  Still, if you live in the US and haven’t read the Declaration of Independence in a while, I encourage you to do so.  Even atheists often sing carols on Christmas; if they can do that, how hard can the other thing be?

Remaining in nation-level politics:  today is also the day of a General Election in the UK.  It’s apparently expected that the Labor Party will win the majority of seats in parliament and that the Tories will be ousted from power after quite a long time “in charge”***.  I suspect it will just be another instance of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, but we shall see.  While no one actually runs or controls anything, there are actions and laws that can have effects on patterns and outcomes in the short and long-term.

It’s not as straightforward to achieve any given end as politicians and pundits would like to believe, or would like you to believe, but it does happen.  This is one reason I think we should treat all new laws and regulations literally as experiments, with pre-chosen measures of outcomes upon which to evaluate the successes and/or failures, as well as side-effects, of any given act of legislature.

It’s simply not enough to have good intentions.  It never has been, and it never will be.  Good intentions are merely the beginning of actually doing good, and they are barely even that.  They are more akin to the very first, mild early pangs of hunger that eventually must be turned into actions such as hunting and gathering and starting fires and cooking food and then chewing and eating it, or the modern equivalents thereof.

In other news, I wrote only 3,752 net new words on Extra Body this week, since I had last Saturday off.  It’s now 107 pages long (in current format), and yes, it really, honestly, is nearly done—at least the first draft is nearly done.

I’m not sure why it’s taking me so long to finish.  Maybe it’s because it’s not in any sense a horror story, so I can’t bring my darker self to bear upon it; darkness is, after all, my dominant aspect.  I don’t think that’s really the cause, though.  I think it’s really just because I am nearly out of gas, with no thoughts or hopes for any future worth having for myself.

I’ve had very bad pain this week, and my insomnia continues, and my tinnitus and disequilibria continue, and the noise and not-infrequent idiocy is no more bearable than before.  And I have very little in my life to counterbalance the negatives, to make up for the minor tortures of daily life, not least among which is the willful human stupidity to which I alluded above.

I probably ought to expunge myself from the world before I decide to try to expunge the world itself.  It’s always a temptation.  I frequently brainstorm ideas for relatively modest interventions that could destabilize the world, both politically and physically, just to try to put it out of its misery and mine.

Speaking of misery:  does anyone actually like the new Aptos font that Microsoft has made its current default?  I find it repulsive, and it makes me lean toward preferring Google’s alternatives to the Microsoft word processing and spreadsheet programs.  To whomever designed this font, I say:  I’m sorry, I’m sure you put significant effort into it, and that you did your best given the circumstances and your innate abilities and all the various vectors impinging on your state at the time…but you fucked up.

Oh, well.  That’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  In the UK, I hope you have a good General Election, with outcomes that are overall beneficial or at least not detrimental.  Keir Starmer may be a bit lackluster, but it’s not as though Sunak and his eighty-three or so immediate predecessors over the last several years have been all that impressive.

In the US, I hope you all have a nice holiday, and I encourage you to take a moment to read at the least the beginning and ending of the Declaration of Independence—you can skip the list of grievances if you must.  If nothing else, you’ll encounter compound complex sentences that would be daunting even for me to write.

TTFN

happy independence day

*I haven’t counted them myself, so I make no guarantee, but those numbers certainly seem about right, so I don’t really doubt them.

**Excluding the Amendments, it is apparently 4,543 words long—or 334 words fewer than the net new words I wrote on Extra Body before last week’s blog.  That’s far from an insurmountable task to read.  With the Amendments included, it’s still only 7,591 words.  That’s only twice as long as my shortest short story, Solitaire, and it’s far less dark and horrifying.

***No one is ever really in charge of anything, not on any significant scale.  Also, queen ants don’t actually organize ant hills, and queen bees don’t run their hives, and queen termites don’t design and manage the construction of termite mounds.  Get over it.

by

Brief Wednesday writing report and digressions

Today’s writing on Extra Body:

“Block” words:  738

Net words: 698

Evidently, I cut a fair few words (40 overall) in my rereading/editing of previous writing, making the difference about 5.7% today, an unusually large disparity, at least since I’ve started keeping track.  The total number of words in the story as of today is 48,422, and it is 71 pages long (single-spaced on Word in Calibri 11-point).

As I wrote today, I came to worry that I had given my character a work-week that was now almost eight days long, because I had the character mention that the weekend was coming, but it seemed a long time since the previous weekend.  So, I scrolled back up through the story, noting the day of the week in any given scene, and realized that in the moment of the story that I wrote today, it was Thursday evening.  The weekend was indeed just about to arrive.

Apparently, somewhere in my mind, I had kept track of the days in the story better than I thought I had.

This sort of thing happens to me a lot.  I seem underdeveloped in the usual tendency toward mental self-confidence, and so I frequently check and recheck things to make sure they are as I thought they were.  I check my pockets to make sure my keys are there probably several dozen times a day or more, for instance.  I’m pretty good at mental arithmetic–I do it as part of my job, for one thing, and I can total up the sales numbers as they happen faster than other people can when they use calculators, but then I always recheck the totals three different ways using Excel, and when they are all the same and agree with my numbers, I consider it tolerably likely that I’m correct.  But I never feel certain.  Even though mathematics is the realm of theorems, and once proven, such theorem-laden information should be epistemologically final, I don’t ever feel final about it.  Perhaps this is part of why I am incapable of being religious; faith doesn’t even make any sense to me.

I also find that confidence, as expressed by other people, especially strong confidence, is almost always distasteful, in a powerful, visceral way.  I have severe contempt for people who make declarative statements about things they cannot know for sure, especially about the states of mind of other people, and about other people’s intentions.  Observing discourse about politics is almost always nauseating and infuriating.

The more confident someone is, the less I trust them, because I’ve noted that most people are far more confident than they are justified in being about most things.  And yet, many humans respond to the confident people positively, granting them pseudo-authority, even when–perhaps especially when–their confidence is not based upon anything testable or peer-reviewed or reliable.  This is part of why I hate thinking of those who hold political office as “leaders”.  They are almost always not leaders in any meaningful sense of the term, or they should not be.  I think it would be much better to think of them as employees, and to treat them accordingly.

Oh, well.  Perhaps this sense of uncertainty and the lack of reliability of people who nevertheless have outsized impacts on the lives of others is part of why I have trouble sleeping (though I think it’s mainly inherent and neuro-humoral, and related to what I suspect is ASD).

I slept a little better last night than the night before or the night before that, though it’s not saying much.  I felt vague and punchy all day yesterday, and I pseudo-jokingly said to my coworker that I wondered if anyone knows how to get in touch with Michael Jackson’s former doctor, because I could really use some Propofol.  It’s a pseudo-joke because, while I said it as if it were a joke, if someone offered me the option of being put under with it, even given the risk of death, I might take that offer.  I would certainly consider it.  Though I would have to feel reasonably confident that I was getting what I thought I was getting.  I suppose that’s part of why I wouldn’t really ever want to use illicit drugs–I would never feel comfortable that I was actually getting what I thought I was getting, let alone in any kind of reliable dose.

I hope you all feel vastly better than I feel.  It would be at least some crumb of comfort to be reasonably convinced that the large majority of people in the world tend to be much happier and healthier than I am.  If not, then what’s the point of bothering with the world?

by

And writers say, the most forward bud is eaten by the canker ere it blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my Thursday blog post.  There will be no fiction from me today, other than such ordinary, day-to-day fiction as pretending to be doing better than I really am, as well as using money to buy things*.

I’m writing this on my phone, since I didn’t bring the laptop computer back to the house yesterday.  I was wiped out, and stressed out, and I didn’t feel like carrying any more than necessary.  I did get a bit of walking in, since I had to stop at the store on the way back.  I guess that was good, though something in the way I moved caused a blister on the medial side of my right big toe.  It’s not too bad, but I’ll probably not do any serious walking today.

It’s often questionable why I bother.  Of course, I would like to lose weight and whatnot; I would rather not die the physical travesty that I currently am.  But the best way to do that would be to stop eating completely.  That would be a win-win situation, as the cliché goes.  But that is very difficult to do in ordinary, day-to-day life in the modern United States.

I got a terrible night’s sleep again last night.  It wasn’t as bad as my one-hour night earlier in the week, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.  I’ve been trying to restrict my caffeine intake to the relatively early morning, just to make sure that doesn’t interfere with my sleep, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

I haven’t read anything much in quite a while.  I think it’s been over a month since I read any book, fiction or nonfiction.  I have been doing some stuff on Brilliant dot org, as I’ve mentioned here, but yesterday I didn’t even feel like extending my “streak” by doing some simple work in their computer programming course.  For one thing, the constant prods to “extend one’s streak” are thoroughly irritating.

I really despise all the manipulative tactics undertaken by these companies to get people to keep using their sites.  Even Kindle does it.  I had a “streak” of something like 170 or more weeks of reading pretty much every day on my Kindle app, but that’s now been broken, and already Amazon isn’t even recommending any e-books to me.

Still, it’s not as though I ever read to maintain a “streak”.  I read because I want to read.  Except right now I don’t.  I don’t even want to read my own stuff.

I did practice a little on the guitar yesterday.  I guess that’s something.  And, as you all know, I’ve been writing fiction now for a total of over twenty days (counting only writing days).  But it feels almost disloyal to be writing without reading, though it’s only myself that I’m betraying, and I don’t like myself, anyway.  Still, reading has been a fundamental part of my identity for literally as long as I can remember, and not being able to do it makes me feel very much adrift and puzzled.

It’s getting seriously hot and muggy down here in Florida.  I’m sweating significantly and quite visibly just sitting at the train station.  I suppose, if climate change persists, Florida will at least reap what it has politically sown, since both the heat and the sea levels are likely to drive quite a lot of people out of the state, and make much of the coveted ocean-front property into literal and figurative underwater real estate.

I’m not the sort to laugh in malicious glee when people get their comeuppances; I’m much more the type to tighten my lips grimly and nod in affirmative contempt.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not ego-syntonic for me when people get fucked over because of their own arrogant stupidity.

I don’t expect to be around to see any of it happen.  And, honestly, I would not be disappointed if people actually make headway at fixing the problems and correct them in time to save even people who don’t necessarily deserve to be saved, because innocent and beneficent people will be saved along with them.

Human ingenuity is much rarer than people probably think; however, it is so incredibly powerful that it doesn’t take much of it to accomplish wonders.  I guess it’s worth it for there to be so much arrogant stupidity if that’s necessary or unavoidable in order for the occasional sparks of cleverness and even genius to be found.  But it would be nice if stupidity were more sexually unappealing than it is.  Regrettably, though, stupid people seem more likely to breed than smart ones, especially since the smart ones understand about planning and delaying reproduction, or even choosing not to reproduce at all.

Oh, well.  This is the tragic farce of life.  It can be funny if you like lowbrow slapstick in the vein of the Three Stooges.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a big fan of such things, so I don’t think I’m going to keep watching much longer.

All right.  Time to call this to an end.  My back is flaring up quite a lot, probably from yesterday’s walk, and it’s distracting me.  Please try to nurture cleverness and creativity at all levels, and please don’t feed the trolls in any sense.  They’re not worth it.

TTFN

*Yuval Harari famously pointed out that money is a “fiction”, though it is a useful and important one.  So is law and government and the very existence of rights and stuff like that.  Such things exist only in the minds and works of people.  Nature certainly recognizes no rights, unless you want to count the right to be wiped out if you don’t do what you need to survive.  Indeed, the world seems to promise only one thing:  eventually, you (as well as everything you would recognize as the universe) will die.  That’s probably a truly unalienable right.

by

And simple truth miscall’d simplicity, And captive blog attending captain ill

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and so it’s time for a more fully fledged blog post for the week, in the manner in which I used to write them when I was writing fiction the rest of the week (and playing some guitar in the time between writing and starting work most days).

I’ve been rather sick almost every day since last week’s post, except for Friday.  I don’t think it’s a virus of any kind, though that may be incorrect.  It’s mainly upper GI, and it’s taken a lot of the wind out of my sails.

I haven’t played guitar at all since last Friday.  I’ve also only written new fiction on a few of the days—Friday, Monday, and Wednesday, I think—since the last major post.  Still, on the days I wrote, I got a surprisingly good amount of work done, I guess.  It seems as though Extra Body is taking longer than it really ought to take, but once it’s done, I’m going to try to pare it down more than I have previous works, since my stuff tends to grow so rapidly.

I’ve been trying to get into doing more studying and “stuff” to correct the fact that I didn’t realize my plans to go into Physics when I started university.  I had good reasons for this non-realization, of course, the main one being the temporary cognitive impairment brought about by heart-lung bypass when I had open heart surgery when I was eighteen.

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about that before, but I didn’t know about it then, and I didn’t learn about it until I did the review paper I wrote for my fourth-year research project in medical school.  I just felt discouraged and stupid, though I consoled myself by studying some truly wonderful works of literature as an English major, including once taking two Shakespeare courses at the same time.  That was great!

It’s always nice to learn about things, all other things being equal.  I don’t think there are pieces of true information about the world that it is better not to know.  Our response to learning some intimidating truth about the greater cosmos may not be good, but the fault then lies not with the stars but with ourselves.  If you truly can’t handle the truth, then the problem is with you, not with the truth.

Of course, knowing what is true is generally not simple, except about simple things, and often not even about those.  This is the heart of epistemology, the philosophical branch that deals with how we know what we know when we know it, so to speak.  The subject may seem dry at times, especially when it gets weighed down by jargon that serves mainly just to keep lay people from chiming in on things—at least as far as I can see—but it is important and interesting at its root.

Not but what there can’t be good reasons for creating and using specific and precise and unique terms, such as to make sure that one knows exactly what is meant and doesn’t fall into the trap of linguistic fuzziness which often leads to misunderstanding and miscommunication.  That’s part of the reason most serious Physics involves mathematical formalism; one wants to deal with things precisely and algorithmically in ways that one can make testable and rigorous predictions.

Physicists will sometimes say that they can’t really convey some aspect of physics using ordinary language, that you have to use the math(s), but that can’t be true in any simplistic sense, or no one would ever be able to learn it in the first place.  Even the mathematics has to be taught via language, after all.  It’s just more cumbersome to try to work through the plain—or not so plain—language to get the precise and accurate concepts across.

And, of course, sometimes the person tasked with presenting an idea to someone else doesn’t really understand it in a way that would allow them to convey it in ordinary language.  This is not necessarily an insult to that person.  Richard Feynman apparently used to hold the opinion that if you truly understand some subject in Physics, you should be able to produce a freshman-level lecture about it that doesn’t require prior knowledge, but he admitted freely when he couldn’t do so, and was known to say that this indicated that we—or at least he—just didn’t understand the subject well enough yet.

I don’t know how I got to this point in this blog post, or indeed what point I’m trying to make, if there is any point to anything at all (I suppose a lot of that would depend on one’s point of view).  I think I got into it by saying that I was trying to catch up on Physics, so I can deal with it at a full level, because there are things I want to understand and be able to contemplate rigorously.

I particularly want to try to get all the way into General Relativity (also Quantum Field Theory), and the mathematics of that is stuff that I never learned specifically, and it is intricate—matrices and tensors and non-Euclidean geometry and similar stuff.  It’s all tremendously interesting, of course, but it requires effort, which requires time and energy.

And once other people have come into the office and the “music” has started, it’s very hard for me to maintain the required focus and the energy even in my down time, though I have many textbooks and pre-textbook level works available right there at my desk.  I’ve started, and I’m making progress, but it is very slow because of the drains on my energy and attention.

If anyone out there wants to sponsor my search for knowledge, so I wouldn’t have to do anything but study and write, I’d welcome the patronage.

But I’m not good at self-promotion, nor at asking for help in any serious way.  I tend to take the general attitude that I deserve neither health nor comfort in life, and I certainly don’t expect any of it.  I’m not my own biggest fan, probably not by a long shot.  In fact, it’s probably accurate to say that I am my own greatest enemy.

Unfortunately, I’m probably the only person who could reliably thwart me.  I’m sure I’m not unique in this.  Probably very few people have literal enemies out there in the world, but plenty of people—maybe nearly everyone—has an enemy or enemies within.  This is one of the things that happens to beings without one single, solitary terminal goal or drive or utility function, but rather with numerous ones, the strengths of which vary with time and with internal and external events.

I’ve said before that I see the motivations and drives of the mind as a vector sum in very much higher-dimensional phase space, but with input vectors that vary in response to outcomes of the immediately preceding sum perhaps even more than they do with inputs from the environment.  I don’t think there will ever be a strong way fully to describe the system algorithmically, though perhaps it may be modeled adequately and even reproduced.  This is the nature of “Elessar’s First Conjecture”:  No mind can ever be complex enough to understand itself fully and in detail*.

A combination of minds may understand it though—conceivably.  Biologists have mapped the entire nervous system of C elegans, a worm with a precisely defined nervous system with an exact number of neurons, and of course, progress is constantly being made on more advanced things.  But even individual neurons are not perfectly understood, even in worms, and the interactions between those nerves and the other cells of the body is a complex Rube Goldberg machine thrown together from pieces that were just laying around in the shed.

Complexity theory is still a very young science.

And the public at large spends its energy doing things like making and then countering “deep fakes” and arguing partisan politics with all the fervor that no doubt the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and Romans and the ancient Chinese and Japanese and Celts and Huns and Iroquois and Inca and Aztecs and Mayans and everyone else in ancient, vanished, or changed, civilizations did.  They all surely imagined that their daily politics were supremely important, that the world, the very universe, pivoted on the specifics of their little, petty disagreements and plans and paranoias**.

And so often so many of them, especially the young “revolutionaries”, whose frontal lobes were far from fully developed, were willing to spill the blood of others (and were occasionally even willing to sacrifice themselves) in pursuit of their utopian*** imaginings.  This is true from the French Revolution to the Bolsheviks to the Maoists and the Killing Fields, and before them all the way back to the Puritans of Salem, and the Inquisition, and the Athenians who executed Socrates, and the killers of Pythagoras****, and the millions of perpetrators of no-longer-known atrocities in no-longer-known cultures and civilizations.

And then, of course, we have the current gaggle of fashionably ideological, privileged youth, who decry the very things that brought them all that they take for granted, and who will follow in the blood-soaked footsteps of those I mentioned above—l’dor v’dor, ad suf kul hadoroth, a-mayn.

In the meantime, I’ll try to keep writing my stories, and try to keep learning things, and if I’m able to develop an adequate (by my standards) understanding of General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory, it’s just remotely possible that I might even make legitimate contributions to the field(s).  But more likely I’ll self-destruct, literally, well before any of that happens.

I’ve probably gone on too long already, as has this blog post.  I thank you for your patience with my meanderings.  Please try to have a good day, and I hope those of you who celebrate it are having a good Passover.

TTFN

*This implies that Laplace’s Demon could not be within the universe about which it knows the position and momentum of every particle and the strength of every force.  It needs to be instantiated elsewhere.

**Should that be “paranoiae”?  It feels like that ought to be the formal way of putting it, but Word thinks it’s misspelled.

***Not to be confused with “eutopian”.  Utopia means “no place”, whereas Eutopia would mean “good place” or “pleasant place” or “well place”.

****He was caught despite a head start, so I’ve heard, because he refused to cross a bean field, believing that beans were evil.  He was a weird guy.  It’s apparently from his followers that the term “irrational”—which originally just meant a number that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers—developed its connotation as “crazy” or “insane”.  They didn’t like the fact that irrational numbers even existed.  Too bad for them; there are vastly more irrational numbers than rational ones…an uncountable infinity versus a “countable” infinity.  It’s not even close.

by

I hope you all have a good Friday (get it?)

It’s Friday, and for those of you for whom this is the last workday of the week, I hope you have a good weekend; I work tomorrow, so this is not a TGIF sort of Friday for me.  I am obviously writing a blog post today, and I plan to write one tomorrow, as well.  Aren’t you lucky?

However…

…my current plan after that is to bring my small laptop computer with me when I leave the office tomorrow and then, next week, write fiction in the morning every day except Thursday, on which day I will revert to my old, once-weekly blogging.  I don’t know how long this pattern will last; I’m not making promises, merely predictions.  Still, I want to try to finish Extra Body and publish it, and maybe even start writing HELIOS afterwards, though that’s a longer term prediction, and so, like the weather forecast, it becomes inherently less reliable.

I already reverted to the old form of blog title yesterday, that of using a Shakespearean quote, altered to insert some form of the word “blog”.  I hadn’t planned to do so, but since I discussed some matters about which I wished I could take vengeance, I naturally thought of Shylock’s little speech in The Merchant of Venice.  I had to have a title anyway, and it was Thursday, so, to quote Doc Brown**, “I figured…what the hell.”

(Had it been Saturday night, I might have thought it all right to say, “What have I got to lose?”)

I didn’t include a picture, as I often used to do for my Thursday posts (imagining that this would garner me more readers).  That’s because finding a usable picture, then modifying it to suit my needs, was always very effortful.  I could do it pretty quickly, and some of the results were even fairly creative and artistic (in my opinion), but they were not worth the effort.  And if they drew more attention, they drew the attention of people who were more interested in pictures than in words, which is not my intended audience, at least not for this blog.

Oh, my!  I just realized that this is “Good Friday”.  It seems odd to call “good” the day memorializing someone’s crucifixion, especially if it’s the crucifixion of a good person.  Still, “good” is a fairly protean concept in any case, and I understand the reasoning behind it, such as it is, for the day, but it still seems slightly perverse to me.

It first occurred to me to check if it was indeed that traditional Christian holiday because there seem to be slightly fewer people at the train station at this time than there usually are.  As far as I know, the train schedule is a standard weekday one, and on Sunday it will be, as always, on a Sunday schedule, so there’s no need to modify it for Easter.

I don’t think I’ve ever ridden the Tri-Rail on a Sunday, come to think of it.  But I have ridden it on many a “holiday”, when it was on a restricted schedule, because my office, like so many businesses in the modern world, is much less likely to take national holidays off than used to be the case for most organizations a few decades ago.

The businesses of the modern world are stuck in a Nash equilibrium (of sorts) in which were any of them to change and improve their practices (in the sense of being less aggressively competitive and allowing employees more days off), they would be outcompeted, would lose business, might go out of business, in which case their employees would also be harmed by losing jobs, which would affect the overall job market, dogs and cats would live together…mass hysteria!  In such situations, there is no way for individuals to change their practices without harm to themselves and even to the system, even if those practices are plainly not optimal.

It is for these reasons, among others, that governments are instituted among the peoples of the Earth (“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”), to try to act upon situations that will not correct themselves.  Unfortunately, governments too can fall into perverse equilibria of various kinds, and once they do, getting them out of it can require significant, sometimes catastrophic, upheavals.

Think of having to pull the power cord on your computer to restart it because it’s gotten bogged down or frozen, and Ctrl-Alt-Del isn’t doing anything at all.  If they haven’t been auto-saved, you might lose some files on which you were working, but at least the computer can be useful again.

That’s a strained metaphor, I know, and I apologize.  But sometimes one does have sympathy (albeit not full agreement) with Jefferson’s notion that, for people to remain free, and presumably for governments to do what they are supposed to do, there should be a literal revolution/rebellion every twenty years or so:  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.”

That’s a bit extreme, perhaps, but maybe it would be interesting if, say, once every twenty years or so, everyone in government had to be replaced.  This is beyond the concept of term limits, and it would not be a staggered affair but would happen all at once.

I know, I know, there would be many detriments, including harms due to the fact that, ceteris paribus, people tend to get better at jobs the longer they work at them.  There would be real losses and setbacks associated with everyone being new to the government.

But then again, when people do politics as a career, they often learn bad habits, and the system can develop unplanned but subsequently entrenched and self-reinforcing negative patterns, equilibria that cry out for punctuation***.  These lead to losses of opportunity, economic losses, the loss of lives, and the occurrence of needless suffering‒but these costs are usually unnoticed because they are diffuse and scattered.  It’s related to the way we don’t recognize antacids as genuinely life-saving drugs, because we’re not aware of the many people who would have died‒who used to die, and often quite young‒from ulcers and perforations and gastric and esophageal cancers.

It’s also related to the fact that, environmentally and public health wise, nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels for the world and for people’s health.  The number of illnesses and premature deaths per capita caused by even the worst nuclear disasters, even if they were scaled up to account for the greater preponderance of fossil fuel based power, is probably little more than a rounding error compared to the respiratory illnesses and other causes of suffering and premature death due to airborne particulates and similar problems from fossil fuels.

Well, there I go again, swerving all over the shop from one tangent to another, like a space probe passing near a bunch of unrealistically closely packed planets and having its trajectory repeatedly altered as it does so.

Speaking of such things, I do wish I could find a way to keep the energy I tend to have on Monday mornings for physics and mathematics and make it last through the rest of the week.  But my mental energy and clarity seems to be swiftly diminished by the slings and arrows of outrageous stupidity throughout the working days, so even by Tuesdays, I am usually significantly enervated.

Well, whataya gonna do?  This post has gotten too long already, anyway, and we’re getting close to my train stop.  I hope those of you who celebrate this holiday have a truly good Friday, and the rest of you as well.  Tomorrow, I’ll probably wish you a happy Easter.

*An interesting phrase combining a present tense verb with a future-oriented adverb in a way.

**That’s the one from Back to the Future, not the one who makes the really great canned sodas you can get in good delis and similar places.

***To bastardize a concept from Gould and Eldredge.

by

Late-arriving, futile “justice” and reminders of a life that has been all but annihilated

I read the news yesterday, oh boy.  And yes, it was about a lucky man‒luckier than I am, anyway, at least in some ways.

There was a doctor in the heartland of America somewhere, I don’t recall where, who had been convicted of, apparently, inappropriately prescribing very large amounts of pain meds, the report quoting the number 500,000* (It seems unlikely that there were 500,000 prescriptions**, so it probably was that number of pills).

Anyway, his conviction was overturned on appeal, because apparently, in 2022, the SCOTUS handed down a ruling that the prosecution had to prove in such cases that there was “intentional or knowing” inappropriate prescription for it to rise to the level of a crime, and the jury hadn’t been appropriately instructed regarding that fact.

I looked up the case, and I’ve even downloaded the PDF of the case.  Although I haven’t read through it yet, the summaries make it clear that, yes indeed, this is a new and specific requirement.

Silly me, I had always thought that mens rea was a crucial requirement for nearly any criminal case, certainly one that rises to the level of a felony charge.  I brought that up with my (public) defense attorney, trying to point out that I shouldn’t be convicted of a crime since I literally had never intended to do anything but treat patients who had chronic pain‒which I did because I had chronic pain, and it had already severely harmed my life.  I knew how hard it was for even a physician, who at the time had good health insurance, to be able to get adequate treatment and even to get his prescriptions filled by often-judgmental pharmacists who looked at him as if he were a criminal just because he wanted to try to mitigate his pain with the most effective medicine that was available.

But no, apparently, according to my attorney, the prosecutor didn’t have to prove any such thing specifically; it could just be inferred.  And apparently I’m not exactly the sort of person to elicit sympathy from a jury in south Florida, because my voice tends to be monotone and my face tends to be expressionless and I don’t look like someone who is frankly worthy of sympathy.

All the charges against me were created by the PBSO, who sent in undercover people with (evidently) faked MRIs and fake complaints, who complained of chronic, severe pain and said they were in pain when I examined them***, and whose own secret recordings and records showed that there were often only one or two other patients in the whole office when they were there‒hardly what one would call a “pill mill” I should think.

Anyway, I was offered a plea bargain and I took it, because unless you’ve got a lot of money or you literally have nothing to lose, you will take a plea bargain in the right circumstances, even though you know you’re innocent.  I’ve written a blog post about how the plea bargain system is an extortionate game slanted against especially the underprivileged.

The statutes involved in my charges were designed by that <sarcasm> bastion of intelligentsia and morality, the Florida State Legislature </sarcasm>, to give judges no leeway, and to grind away maximally at anyone charged with “trafficking”.   If a jury decided that they should convict on at least one charge, since the state had created so many charges against me (each prescription being a charge, and twenty something having been conned out of me by various lying police officers over time) and the number seems impressive, I still could have faced a minimum of fifteen years in prison.

In retrospect, I think I would have been little worse off if I had, given the mockery and shambles my life has become.  But at the time, I hoped to see my kids again, perhaps sometime before they were adults.  Three years was better than fifteen (or potentially the rest of my life), and I had no one else to help me with a legal fight, and certainly no reservoir of money, so I took the deal.

The way things are now, though, I might not have been charged, or might have been offered some misdemeanor plea deal.  Or I might have gone to trial and won with relative ease, since the fact that I never knowingly or intentionally mis-prescribed medicine was a fact I knew for certain, at a Cartesian, cogito ergo sum sort of level, since it was a fact about my own mental state.

I may be naïve, and I often do not understand humans.  I am often easily misled and manipulated and used and misused and probably abused, because I am socially and emotionally very clueless and believe in giving other people the benefit of the doubt (to hold them innocent until proven guilty, in other words).  But I have never been greedy or unscrupulously opportunistic, and I took the practice of medicine and my duty and goal to relieve suffering very seriously.  I was never into making a lot of money, though it was good to be able to buy books I wanted and to take care of my kids.  I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and drove a ten-year-old Toyota Sienna.

Before yesterday, it had been a long time since I’d bothered thinking about what my life might have been like if things had not gone the way they did.  There didn’t seem to be any point.  I was a lost cause and that was that.  But this has made me feel acutely once again the cut of all the lost time with my kids and my lost ability to practice medicine, and all the other losses I’ve experienced as part of this debacle of a life.

What’s more, there’s been salt and vinegar rubbed into the wound by the fact that it took a Supreme Court dominated by many justices who’d been appointed by The Donald to require courts to require prosecutors to prove something that was supposed to be a necessary element of almost any serious criminal charge:  actual criminal intent.

That’s all leaving aside the un-ethics and illogic of the government of the “Land of the Free” dictating what people can put into their own bodies when it doesn’t directly harm other people in the first place.  I won’t get into that because it had no bearing on my medical practice‒I was not in the business of dealing in euphoriants, I was trying to relieve actual suffering.

One cannot really apply new jurisprudence to old cases in which a sentence has already been carried out and finished, and when the consequences thereof are already irrevocable.  I cannot regain the time I have lost with my children or the time I have lost when I could have been practicing medicine, or the time I spent at FSP West or in the Palm Beach County Main Detention Center, where even the people who worked there frequently asked why the hell I was there, or still there (I spent 8 months in the place, on the mental health floor, because I couldn’t make bail, but finally my former girlfriend’s mother helped secure it‒at least she got all her own back after I was sentenced, and I appreciate her very much, though I might as well just have stayed in jail, since at least the whole sentence would have ended earlier given “time served” and I was basically homeless when out on bail, having lost everything I owned and relying on the generosity and kindness of friends/former coworkers).

So I am stuck with a ruined life and a twisted mockery of myself.  The fruits of a considerable number of years of time and effort and thought and creativity on my part**** were all taken away by the mindless grinding of a huge stupid machine of “criminal justice” that has little to nothing to do with the latter part of the term.  I don’t claim not to be stupid or foolish or not to have ever made mistakes in the whole situation.  I make many mistakes.  But it is maddening to see how misapplied the law can be and to experience it for oneself, especially when one is now by oneself, partly thanks to that misapplication, and then to learn that now the law is changed (or correctly applied) such that I could have been in a better situation had that change come sooner.

I often consider the possibility of going to the Palm Beach courthouse, dousing myself in various flammable liquids, and turning myself into a “bonfire of the unsanities and inanities”, to bring attention to some of the costs of misapplied “justice” and to bring an end to my own mis-called life.  I even have two gallons of paraffin lamp oil and six liters of charcoal lighter fluid and a big enough backpack to carry them all, in case I decide to do it.

Death by fire is intimidating, though‒I am no Buddhist monk by any means.  And I also dislike causing inconvenience to other people, even those involved in an institution that had no qualms about recklessly “judging” me and ruining my life.  But it is tempting, and I feel right now even more than usual the utter pointlessness of continuing, even while stupidity in the office in which I work grinds away at me further (though, to give him credit, my boss tries hard to keep things as sane as he can).

I feel rotten enough and alien enough even at baseline, and all this doesn’t help.  I have lost almost all that mattered to me, and I live alone in a stupid one-room (plus bathroom) “in-law” suite that is smaller than many hotel rooms.  All my previous friends are far away, and most are doing much better with their lives than I am and don’t really have much in common with me anymore.  In any case, I don’t really talk or otherwise communicate with them, though it would be nice.

There are also plain few people where I am now who have anything in common with me.  Very few people have much in common with me:  a disgraced physician unable to practice, with a love of math and physics and biology and of Shakespeare and horror fiction and science fiction/fantasy (reading and writing it) and of science and rationality-oriented podcasts and books and videos, who wants to learn or relearn more about modern physics at a deep level and whose brain doesn’t seem to run the same operating system as most of the people around him‒a Linux in a world of iOS, or worse.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  Knowing me, I’ll probably just grind along until I’m worn to a nub and then tumble into the trash can, unmarked and largely unlamented.

I know that I won’t be sorry‒not about that.

*This sounds like an awful lot of pills, but it’s deliberately chosen to sound that way in a manipulative, rhetorical tactic as used by reporters and prosecutors alike.  Let’s run the numbers, as I am wont to do, to see how impressive they really are.

Now, if there were one patient, taking one pill per day‒perhaps the person only takes one prescription, say an antidepressant or a cholesterol med or a long-acting antihypertensive‒it would take nearly 1400 years to use that many pills.  Plain few patients live that long (see my recent blog post), and most pills would long since have expired and become inactive before the end of that time.

Still, the average physician is responsible for the care of 2,000 to 3,000 patients (see here and here), meaning that if, on average, their patients each only took one prescribed pill a day, they would go through 500,000 pills in 6 to 9 months.  But many prescriptions call for more than one pill per day, and uninsured patients cannot tend to afford the long-acting pain meds that claim to allow for steadier doses and thus slightly less risk of rebounds and escalations and all the horrors involved in that.

Now, presently, I take three to nine aspirin a day, sometimes more, and I also take two naproxen and some supplemental Tylenol as well, all of which are more directly toxic to the body than opioids, but are nonetheless over the counter (as they should be).  If I averaged ten total pills a day, then it would take me only 137 years or so to take 500,000 total pills.  That’s longer than I’m likely to be taking pills, but I’m only one person (that, as Dave Barry said, is the law).  An average practice of patients who took only six pills a day would go through 500,000 pills in one to one and a half months.  Many ordinary, non-pain-specific patients, especially those middle-aged and older, take that many and even more prescription meds a day.

In any case, an ordinary general practitioner with a light patient load of two thousand patients, each taking only an average of two pills a day, would prescribe 500,000 pills in 3 to 5 months.  So don’t be too impressed by the carefully curated numbers that prosecutors and media choose to elicit your alarm and disgust.

**Even 500,000 prescriptions, in a modest 2000 patient practice, would require only 250 prescriptions total per patient.  That would certainly take quite a bit longer than 500,000 pills would take, but given an average of only one prescription per patient per month (counting refills) it would only take a bit over 20 years, a decently short length of practice.  Many doctors see more than 2000 total patients and many patients get more than one prescription per month.  And, of course, one cannot even apply refills on “controlled substances”, they have to be literally re-written every month, and patients have to come to the doctor’s office to get them, assuming they can even get them filled.  Monthly doctor’s visits can be hard for someone trying to work a regular job while dealing with chronic pain.  Thus, the whole “mill” part of the “pill mill” trope is created by the law itself, leading to greater costs in time and fees for the patients who are trying to survive after job-related and other injuries or conditions that have caused them chronic pain and make it difficult for them to find consistent, gainful employment or to sustain health insurance.

***Pain is a symptom, not a sign, in medical terms.  We have no reliable ways of testing it, beyond patient report.  We try to find physical correlations when we can, often to see if we can find some treatable cause, but even Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine (I think it was on page 80 or 81 of the 14th or 15th edition, whichever one I had at the time) has clearly stated that, for instance, back pain does not correlate well even with specific injuries noted on MRIs and the like.  As large a number of people without pain will have nerve root impingements and bulging discs and the like seen on spinal MRIs as do have pain.  NO ONE KNOWS all the wherefores of this situation, but there is no serious doubt that such pain is quite real.

****It did not all happen during medical school or residency‒one does not coast along from K-12 and undergraduate college and only then start to work hard in med school, especially if one grew up in a blue-collar, factory town outside Detroit.

by

Thoughts on confident statements about scientific fallibility

This is some audio I recorded this morning trying to follow up on the subject I brought up near the end of my last “audio blog”.  It relates to overconfidence about scientific pronouncements and so on both by the experts and by those who think they know the “real” motivations of the experts, particularly relating to the issues in the pandemic and so on.  It was triggered by a snippet of a conversation between Bill Maher and Seth MacFarlane, but I’m not sure where to find the original snippet.

As you will note, I did NOT make it shorter than my last audio.

[There is an interruption in the middle–presaged and followed by three chirps–in which I say what I had meant to say upon bringing up a particular subject, but then distracted myself completely by discussing some excellent YouTube channels about science and math.]

Here are some links to the YouTube channels I mentioned (along with one or two I did not) and which distracted me.  I heartily endorse them:

PBS Spacetime

PBS Eons

PBS Infinite Series

Be Smart

Numberphile

Sixty Symbols

Deep Sky Videos

Periodic Videos

Computerphile

by

Let’s put the day in a box, or something

It’s Tuesday morning, the day after Christmas‒called Boxing Day in the UK and related places, though I’ve encountered no consistent, good explanation for that name‒and I’m sitting at the train station, waiting for the 2nd train of the day to bring me toward the office.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone because I semi-accidentally left my laptop computer at the office on Saturday.  I say “semi-accidentally” because although I realized that I hadn’t packed it in plenty of time to correct that oversight, I decided to give myself a wee break from carrying it.  It’s not that much of a chore, but considering how unenthusiastic I am regarding doing anything at all, I think it’s a tolerable reduction in load.

I haven’t yet signed up for health insurance.  I really ought to try to do it sometime this week.  My sister has offered to help me with it, since such processes are so unpleasant for me that I usually honestly feel I would rather sicken and die than do them‒I’m predisposed that way, anyway, so it’s not that big a leap‒but when I spoke with her on the phone yesterday, I completely forgot to ask how she might do that.  She’s over 1000 miles away, so I’m not sure what the help would entail.  I should check with her.

I certainly don’t want to go through any government services.  Quite apart from my own experiences of injustice at the hands of state and county and federal levels of government, the disgusting spectacle of how our government has run itself, and how our politics have become so moronically fractured, gives me not merely a lack of faith in their ability to carry out their roles, but a kind of anti-faith.  I believe, or at least suspect, that they will not merely fail to ensure justice and order but that they will actually engender and even enforce injustice and will, over time, make all things worse.

This is not a partisan position.  Though the specifics of their degeneracy and dysfunction differ, both political parties in the US have attributes ranging from the pathetic to the disgusting (and almost no remaining redeeming features).  They are mere mockeries of political parties that are supposed to represent the interests of the people of their communities and states and the nation.  Watching the misbegotten antics of the cretins in positions of power, it is only too obvious how much each and every one of them is but a baboon with delusions of grandeur, trying to work a machine which it has not even the capacity to understand.

All three branches of the federal government have become little better than frat boys from opposing universities at a college football game, chanting idiotic, drunken slogans at each other, getting into brawls, trying to show off for each other, painting their faces, going topless in below zero weather…not doing anything productive at all but definitely doing their best to prevent the “other side” from doing anything productive.  Meanwhile, the actual work that is supposed to be done by these people‒whose chosen and sought-after role was nominally to work for the good of the people they represent, regardless of party affiliation‒is not even addressed in anything but sound bite form.

Oh, asteroids and alien invaders, where are you?  We need a catastrophe that cannot be “blamed” on any other political affiliate to remind everyone of how government is a tool, not a fundamental entity, and that political parties are not-so-necessary evil.

The people in our local, state, and national governments are NOT our “leaders”.  They never have been.  Leaders create innovation, they march in front, they accept responsibility, and they put their personal well-being on the line in service of some (hopefully beneficial) goal.  We do not elect leaders‒that’s practically a contradictory notion.  At best, we elect managers.  These people are our servants, our employees, and we should treat them as such.  When they do a crappy job‒as almost all of them do‒we should fire them, not invent excuses to blame their poor performance on the “other side” or whatever.

It’s not really about “blame”.  It’s about actually getting the job done.  I don’t necessarily blame a person for being a bad carpenter, for instance‒maybe that person tries really hard but just doesn’t have the knack.  But once I realize they aren’t very good, I’m not going to use their services.  And even if I don’t know for certain how good a new person is going to be, if the current carpenter has less than a 20% approval rating, most random alternatives are likely to be better.  And we can keep trying new people until we find good ones.

I fear the system is going to have to burn itself down across the board before any better setup occurs.  That’s a shame, because at its root, the US Constitution has some pretty good ideas.  It’s a decent operating system*, and it has a built-in ability to be updated.  It’s certainly a better system than nearly all the people involved in elected positions based upon it, and that is the advantage of rule of law versus rule of person.

But of course, all laws have to be created and then carried out by naked house apes who are more driven by personal dominance hierarchy jockeying that serves inbuilt reproductive urges than by any higher brain functions.  Their cortexes** appear to be used almost entirely for making excuses, for post-hoc justification of actions they took on whims and urges of personal indulgence, instead of assessing reality and deciding what is honestly best to do.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed out, if you enter the final balance in the ledger (or list of pros and cons) before you begin to do any figuring, all your figuring is irrelevant.  It does not provide any information.  At most, it’s there to deceive, and the fact that it serves to deceive the deceiver as well provides no absolution for the deceiver.  Reality gives no free passes.

Anyway, I don’t know how that got started.  I certainly didn’t plan to write about it.  But there it is.  I guess it wasn’t far from the front of my mind.  Honestly, if it weren’t for my children, and the children of my sister and some of my friends, I would just as soon see the whole world literally burn.  It’s going to happen someday, in any case, and if humans are just going to be carrying out their dumbshow over and over, with rises and falls of cultural intelligence, but with the lowest common denominator always thoughtlessly sabotaging the higher, it may well be a net gain simply to head off decades or centuries or millennia or eons of net misery with a return to zero.

Hope you’re having a happy holiday season!

*Maybe part of the problem is that, though the operating system is good, there’s never been any chance to reboot or even “sleep” the system.  So, it has continued to accumulate errors, inefficiencies, conflicting bits of data, until they make every program unable to run efficiently, or at all.  We don’t need to change the Constitution, and probably not even the laws (at least not to start); we need to change all the people (and the political parties).  We should just sweep them away, clearing the browser history and the cookies and the RAM and all that, and restart with the operating system unchanged, but without all the baggage.

**Should that be “cortices”?