reading

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How now, you secret, black, and midnight blogs!

Hello.  Good morning.

It’s Thursday.  It is, in fact, the 2nd Thursday in November, which means that, from the point of view of Thursdays in November, we are halfway to Thanksgiving (which in the US is the 4th Thursday in November).

Of course, we are not precisely halfway to Thanksgiving from the point of view of the days of the month of November overall.  Thanksgiving falls on the 27th of November this year‒14 days from today, of course‒so we are not quite halfway there as far as the days of November are concerned, but we are close to it.  If the month had started on a Friday, the halfway point in days versus Thursdays would be the same.

I think that the maximum disjunction would happen if the month began on a Thursday.  The 8th would then be the 2nd Thursday, and Thanksgiving would fall on the 22nd, which is quite a bit larger than 2 x 8.

Mind you, all this depends on starting one’s count in November.  That is not too unreasonable, but one could just as sensibly start counting Thursdays right at or after January 1st (let’s see, this year that’s 46/48 Thursdays, or about 95.833%).  If we did that, we would already be practically at Thanksgiving.  If we counted all days, we might be even closer still, percentage-wise.  Let’s see, 317/331, or about 95.770%.  Whataya know?  I was wrong, the Thursday one is “closer”.  I suspect this varies from year to year, but I’m not interested enough to check.

We could also begin our count at the beginning of autumn, which sort of seems appropriate.  Or, perhaps most sensibly still, we could start right after the previous Thanksgiving, beginning our counting on “Black Friday”.

Jeez Louise, I think I’m losing my mind, here.  Why am I writing about such nonsense?  I mean, yes, it’s interesting to notice how arbitrary and artificial human ways of counting days and things and so on are, so I suppose it’s somewhat edifying, and even could be mildly interesting for a moment.  But I nevertheless feel bad for wasting my readers’ time.

Though, I suppose, in a certain sense, one could say that all time is wasted‒“Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines” and all that.

“Where do we come from?  The dust.  Where do we go to?  The grave.”

Of course, that last quote was not meant to be a general description of the human condition, but refers to Ray Bradbury’s “October People” in Something Wicked This Way Comes.  I’ve always thought that I’m an October person, since I was born in October.  Like Macduff, in the play from which Bradbury’s title above is taken, I was a C-section, though it would be a hyperbolic* to say that I was “ripped untimely” from the womb.  (Still, does my manner of birth mean I could defeat Macbeth?)

October is over now, in any case, and who** knows if I shall see another.

I don’t know if anyone has ever written about “November People”, but they don’t sound particularly scary nor particularly inspiring.  This assessment is not meant to refer to people born in November!  Several of my favorite people were born in November.

In other news, I did receive my Principles of Neural Science yesterday.  I used my dollar coins to choose a section, and I read it in the afternoon:  it was about neural firing and muscular activation during locomotion, briefly comparing lamprey with vertebrate, especially mammalian, locomotion patterns.

It may seem trivial, and I didn’t learn much that I didn’t at least implicitly know before, but the specifics are new, and all information has the potential to be useful.  We cannot know for certain ahead of time what knowledge might be most beneficial, just as we cannot predict the specifics of progress and invention.

As I said, I chose the textbook page via my coin-flipping process, using my three Sacagawea coins.  I keep a few dollar coins with Susan B. Anthony and/or the aforementioned Sacagawea with me at all times.

I carry such coins not so much for decision-making but because I like to roll them across my fingers when I want to “stop my hands feeling busy”.  I guess it’s a form of “stimming”, and I’ve been doing that particular one since college.  I taught myself to do it after I saw Val Kilmer, as Chris Knight, doing it in the movie Real Genius, which was one of my favorite movies.

Well, this has been a lot of pointless nonsense today, hasn’t it?  I apologize, and I guess I can try to mitigate my offense by at least trying not to produce too much of nothing***.  So I will draw this post to a close now.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will very likely write a post tomorrow, so you can look forward to that, if it’s the sort of thing to which you look forward.

TTFN

*You know, like non-Euclidean geometry.

**The WHO does not know, though with a bit of background information they could probably make reasonable predictions.

***According to the song, that can make a man feel ill at ease.  It can also, according to the same song, make a man abuse a king, which seems like it would be quite a rare situation.

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“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t”

Well, first let me apologize for yesterday’s blog that largely concerned the weather, and in a trivial sense at that.  It was rather lamentable, I know, with emphasis on the first four letters of that adjective.

On the other hand, I don’t apologize for having had my little bit of fun with the date.  That may have been even less interesting to most of you than my jabbering on about the weather, but I like it.  I fully expect that I will do such things again.  For instance, in a similar vein, today is a bit fun because it is 11-12*, so the numbers are in appropriate ordinal sequence with no gaps.

That’s not very fun.  More fun will be had (by me, anyway) on Friday, when it will be 11-14-25.  If you don’t immediately see the fun there, it may help that a similar fun date next month will be available on 12-13-25.  This fun also works with the European date order (but in both you have to leave out the digits that denote the century).  Also, there were no equivalently fun dates in any month before October.

This is the most fun I’ve had on any kind of date in at least 16 years, I would guess.  That’s an easy call, because I haven’t been on any date at all in at least that long.  See what I did there with the multiple meanings of the word “date”?  Of course you did.  What do I think you are, a moron?

No, I do not think that.  You are reading a blog post, so you are a reader, which gives you a serious leg-up, moronia-wise.  You draw from the well of that greatest of all human inventions:  written language.  Your taste in reading material may be somewhat questionable, but I cannot legitimately complain about that.

Wow, I feel like I ought to be almost done with this post, but I’ve barely passed 300 words.

On to other things.  I’m going to try to do a better job about science reading during my downtime in the office.  It’s not that I’m completely slacking; I’m reading Shape by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, and I just read his earlier book How Not to Be Wrong.  I’ve read both before and/or listened to the audio books, but they are well worth rereading.  He’s a great math professor, and has a gift for explaining potentially abstract concepts.  I think he’s slightly better at this than Steven Strogatz, the author of The Joy of X and Infinite Powers, but they’re all good.

I also just yesterday gave in to an urge I’ve had for some time:  I ordered a textbook I liked in med school but which we didn’t really get into as deeply as I would like:  Principles of Neural Science, by Kandel et al.  The edition I had was by Kandel and Schwartz, if memory serves, but Dr. Schwartz is no longer involved, it seems.

It’s a textbook, so it’s pricey, even in paperback, but I discovered that I could put it on a payment plan through Amazon, so that’s what I did.  It arrives today.

I’ve also resolved, at least tentatively, to try to take the heat off my reading of my science books‒including the above newcomer‒by doing something I did when reviewing/studying in med school:  I would get a text that I was reviewing, and I would pick a section to read/review by flipping a coin.

Actually, it was a series of flips, each one dividing the “remaining” part of the book in half.  In other words, for the first flip, heads would mean I would look in the front half of the book, tails would mean the back half.  Then the next flip would decide to which half of that half I would narrow things down further.

Anyone who has spent any time dealing with computers and/or binary numbers can readily recognize that, with 10 flips of the coin, one could choose a specific page in a 1024 page book.  I guess every flip would count as a kind of “half-life” for the book’s pages.  If one wanted, one could even choose one’s pages not with a coin flip, which is not truly random, but with a quantum event that has a 50-50 chance, like measuring whether a given electron’s spin is up or down.

Of course, I don’t have a Stern-Gerlach gate, so I would have to “farm out” that process.  But I understand that there are apps that you can use that have their sources at labs where each decision is truly made by a quantum measurement.

It’s not terribly practical nor more useful for pickling book pages than is a coin flip, but if you’re a convinced advocate of the Everettian, “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, it has the added “benefit” that each “flip” will divide the universe into two “worlds”, one where you choose from the earlier half, another where you choose from the latter.

Coin flips do not enact such splitting, not in anything but the trivial sense that every quantum level interaction potentially does so.  The experience will be the same for you, though, except whatever glee you might derive from splitting the universe to choose a section to read.

Anyway, I’ll be trying to read my books, random section by random section.  Believe it or not, this works for me.  I don’t have to learn things in order, usually, and this method avoids me feeling bored while trying to trudge through a text in order.

Perhaps I do have some aspects of ADHD up in there in my brain.

Well, I’ve now passed my target length for this post by some margin, so I’ll call this enough for today.  I expect to be writing another post tomorrow, but like everything else**, it is not absolutely certain.  I hope you have a very good day.

*Only in the American style Month-Day-Year format, though.  It is less fun in the European Day-Month-Year format.

**Yes, even death and taxes, in principle.

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Neither jot nor tittle, but just a title

It is Friday.  Friday it is.  I do not, though, plan to eat any green eggs and ham, nor do I intend to train Jedi.  I merely like to fiddle around with words.  I have also even been known to write and speak about cellos and violins and violas and basses‒wording around with fiddles, that is.

Anyway, this should be the end of the work week for me, so don’t expect a blog post tomorrow.  I’m not saying that there definitely won’t be one; it’s an outcome with a low probability, but it’s not zero.  In principle, the probability of any physically possible event happening is never zero.  But the odds can be so vanishingly small as to be zero for all practical purposes.

For instance, it’s physically possible for the entire Earth (the Moon included) to quantum tunnel to the Andromeda Galaxy, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.  I suspect that the odds of it happening are so low that the time scale between now and the evaporation of the largest black holes due to Hawking radiation (roughly a googol* years) would not even begin to make it likely to happen, even if it weren’t for the fact that the Earth and the Moon will have been so dead and so disintegrated by then that even the memory of their memory’s memories would have been long since lost to any mind that might still exist at that time…probably.

So, you can treat that Earth-Moon Andromeda tunneling as “impossible” for all practical purposes, but in principle, it could happen…

…right…

…NOW!

Okay, well, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t happened.  The sky is too hazy for me to see if the stars have changed, but I don’t think they have.  It would be quite something to experience the local stars of a different galaxy, but of course, if we tunneled into Andromeda, we might be in a relative star desert, or we might be in a place with too many stars for our long-term safety.  Also, if our solar system’s net momentum persisted, we would be unlikely to arrive in any kind of stable orbit of the center of that galaxy.

And, of course, I did not say the sun would come with us‒that would make the whole thing even more vanishingly unlikely‒so we’d all freeze in fairly short order, apart from organisms that use geothermal sources as the base of their food chains and energy cycles.  Those might survive for eons.

Anyway, it’s vastly more likely that I’ll work and write a blog post tomorrow than that we will quantum tunnel to Andromeda**, but it is still a very small likelihood***.  It may be less than one percent, I don’t know.  But it’s quite unlikely.

So, though it might be worth a quick glance to check in come the morning, especially if you were going to do that sort of thing anyway, I would not go out of your way, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.  I don’t think even a sperm whale could hold its breath that long, and I think they have the longest breath-holding record of any mammal (if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know).

In other news‒not that I’ve really given you any news so far‒my keyboard arrived safe and sound (so to speak) yesterday afternoon, so hopefully this morning I’ll be able to finalize the chords to Native Alien.  Then, maybe this weekend, I’ll record a little guitar-chord and voice demo so I don’t lose track of the song.

Then, next week, I can start working on a song based on the trigger “humility”.  I still have no clear conscious notion of an idea for such a song, but I’m not worried about that.  I know I can produce something (not the Beatles song).

I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t need to produce anything great as far as lyrics go‒I think the lyrics I have for Native Alien, which I shared the other day, are okay but not terrific‒I just need to get some words down.  I can always edit and alter things as the process evolves, just as the first draft of a story (or to a lesser degree a blog post) is just the beginning.

I’m also continuing with the circuit course on Brilliant, and I’m alternating reading that book Vector and The Lord of the Rings (yet again) and my own book, The Chasm and the Collision (also yet again, though LotR still holds the 2nd place record for my number of reads, well ahead of CatC and only bested in number of readings by The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever).

All these are things that I can do alone, of course.  If there’s something to do that would require someone else’s participation, well, I’m shit out of luck.

I think that’s a phrase that applies fairly well to me, come to think of it.  And the word “alone” might as well have my picture next to it in the dictionary.  Though that might be confusing, since I can think of other words that would merit my picture even more than “alone” would‒words that would do their part to explicate just why I am alone, no doubt.

Batman knows I don’t want to hang around with me.

Anyway, I hope you all have a nice weekend, and if anything truly improbable happens to you, I hope it’s a very good improbable thing.

*That’s 10 to the 100th power, or a 1 followed by 100 zeros, in case you’ve forgotten whence the software company cribbed their name.

**Quantum tunneling is not rare on small enough scales, though.  It happens countless times every second in the heart of the sun, for instance.  If it did not, there would not be enough heat and pressure to overcome the coulomb barrier to fusion, and the sun would be some very large equivalent of a brown dwarf…or maybe it would contract more and get hot enough for fusion to take place without tunneling, but then I think the sun would be hotter and brighter and more short-lived, and I think it’s unlikely that the Earth would have produced any life, let alone humans.

***Think about it:  if you took something with odds of ten to the minus 120‒that’s 119 zeroes between the decimal point and the first non-zero digit‒and then made it a billion times more likely than it is, you’d still have odds of 10 to the negative 111th power, or 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001.  This is a good reminder that relative risk (or probability) is not the same as absolute risk (or probability).

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Monday morning, wearing down

Well, it’s Monday again.  Time keeps marching on without respite, as it is apparently wont to do, “progressing” in the direction of increasing entropy, whether time is a fundamental aspect of the universe or an emergent phenomenon.  In either case, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of time stream or time vortex like in Doctor Who, but rather a process that simply is a linear dimension with some “entanglement” (not to be confused with quantum entanglement) with the dimensions of space, such that motion and acceleration in space changes one’s “motion” in time, in an updated version of the Pythagorean Theorem.

For those of you who like to share the joke about “Yet another day when I didn’t use a2 + b2 = c2” you’re really depriving yourself of a deep understanding of something that turns up in and governs a ridiculous number of the things and processes in the physical reality in which you live.  Consciousness—despite clever but tortured sophistry (in my opinion) by some prominent philosophers of mind—in no way appears fundamental to the universe*.  On the other hand, the Pythagorean Theorem, which was neither invented nor discovered by Pythagoras, applies in all levels of dimensions, however many you might conjure, and with the modification to make it reflect velocities, it applies to spacetime as well.

There can be no readily conceivable brains** in two spatial dimensions, but Pythagoras nevertheless applies.  In one dimension, it doesn’t really apply, but in one dimension there are no triangles of any kind, so it doesn’t make much difference.  It’s difficult to imagine how consciousness could possibly occur in one dimension (notwithstanding the seemingly one-dimensional paucity of ideas held by so many people, especially in politics).

Anyway, enough of this nonsense.  Well, it’s not nonsense, but it is rather pointless meandering of random thoughts that interest no one but me, and will probably lose me readers.  Weirdly enough, people seem to come and read more often when I write about my depression and self-hatred and anxiety and ASD and how there’s absolutely nothing going on in my life that makes it worth living.

Well, rest assured, all those things are still present and active and driving me toward an early grave, which in some senses will be a release, or at least an escape of sorts.

I keep trying to think of things to engage myself and my interests, but so far to no avail.  I think about asking my boss to give me back my black Strat to play at the office, or I consider bringing in another guitar, or maybe even getting a portable keyboard or something, but when I think of any of them, I cannot even imagine doing anything but sort of staring at them as if I don’t even know what their purpose is.  I don’t play my guitars or my keyboard at the house, either.

It’s likewise with even fiction, other than silly Japanese light novels that take a day or so to read (not continuous time).  I think I like them mainly because of the social interactions of the characters, many of the main ones of whom are somewhat socially awkward.  It can feel, however briefly, that I have a social group of some sort, as I read the stories.  Of course, that means that once I’m done reading there is a comparative let down, which sometimes makes me feel worse than I did before.

I tried to read some of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, but I lost interest almost immediately, though he was a brilliant and engaging teacher.  I also tried to read some of Anthony Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, which is also very good and fun; if you’re interested in who he is, you can check out the YouTube channel Sixty Symbols, and sometimes Numberphile.  He shows up in both places fairly often.  But in any case, though I like his book (I’ve read it before) it has not been able to grip me.

I’ve also tried to start reading Stephen King’s novella The Life of Chuck, since it’s now a movie and is getting positive reviews.  At least Stephen King is almost always an engaging read.  But I’m not sure I’m getting into the story.  Quite a while ago, I started the first story in If It Bleeds, the collection in which the above novella appears, but I couldn’t get into it at all.  When I can’t even get into reading Stephen King***, things are looking bleak.

I did watch the rest of the latest series of Doctor Who, and it was pretty good, and quite surprising at the end, but Batman only knows when the next series is going to happen, and there will only be a handful of episodes if it keeps up as it has been.  That’s too little too late for me to use as motivation for continued existence.

I don’t know what to do.  I really don’t know.  I feel very lost and, more importantly, very much without any internal impetus.  I can’t even listen to songs I like, let alone try to sing along (or play) without feeling like I’m going to cry, though I don’t understand why.  I’m at the end of my rope (I have two, and both are tied into nooses, just for “fun”).

Anyway, that’s enough.  Sorry to bother you with my crap again, but in my mind, you asked for it by complaining about my tedious math and science stuff.  I hope you have a good day.  Unless you’re lucky (or I am) I’m sure to be back again tomorrow with another blog post.

*The only reason I can discern why some people think consciousness is fundamental to the universe is that consciousness is fundamental to human experience—indeed, one could say that it is human experience—and of course, such people seem tacitly or implicitly to think humans are the measure of all things simply because that is what they are.

**The degree of interconnectivity is just too low.  Connections between 2D neurons would be terribly limited, as would room for such things.  I suppose that, since we can always map anything three-dimensional onto some two-dimensional surface, à la Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy and the holographic principle, we could construct a sort of brain in 2D, but that’s a tortuous process, and seems quite unlikely.  Of course, 4D would give us even more available connectivity than 3D—also there are no knots or tangles in 4 spatial dimensions—but there are other issues with 4 (macroscopic) spatial dimensions that would seem to get in the way of life as we know it, such as the nature of gravity (and other forces) and the rate of such forces’ diminishment.  For instance, the force of gravity (and electromagnetism, etc.) in four dimensions would fall off at a rate proportional to r3 rather than r2, and there are apparently no stable orbits in such situations.

***What’s worse, I cannot even get into reading Tolkien.  I’ve tried.  When neither Stephen King nor Tolkien, nor even well-written science books, can engage me, something indeed has happened.

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Curse us and crush us, my Precious

It’s Friday, and even though I brought my mini laptop computer back to the house with me yesterday, I’m writing this on my smartphone.  This is partly just because I don’t feel like getting the computer out, and partly because I feel no one really likes my longer posts, which are more likely to happen when I write using a real keyboard.  I also get the feeling that people, weirdly enough, don’t seem to like it when I write non-introverted things about external, real-world matters and ideas like I did yesterday.

I may be misinterpreting things, of course.  Goodness knows that my readership is a small enough sample size that drawing any kind of overall conclusions is fraught with danger (epistemologically sparking).  A regional storm that draws a few people’s attention away from reading blogs might well be enough to cut my usual number of readers in half.

I wish I could find the energy to read more science, like I used to do.  I’ve been saying that I would like to bone up on the latest neuroscience and to learn more about neural networks and deep learning programs.  I suppose I could learn more about quantum computing, but though it is largely the brainchild of one of my favorite minds (David Deutsch) it just doesn’t seem like as much of a big deal as it might be.  I get the concepts, broadly speaking, but it seems like a cumbersome and very fiddly kind of thing‒maintaining states of quantum superposition long enough to carry out a quantum algorithm is difficult even for only a few qubits at a time.

I also haven’t done any kind of music in quite a while.  This is partly because of my still-lingering respiratory illness, which makes it hard to sing, and I don’t enjoy playing guitar without singing*. 

Maybe I could work on playing guitar without singing and it would make me a better guitar player.  But even when I’m practicing the lead guitar part for Knives Out (the song by Radiohead, not the fun and funny murder mystery movie that was named after it) I like to sing along.  I don’t know how many of you have ever tried, but it can be very hard to play lead and sing simultaneously; I’m no Mark Knopfler.  As for piano, I don’t know how people like Elton John and Billy Joel do it, but I’ve never really tried.

Ha ha, I was just mentioning Billy Joel and his song The Longest Time came on the radio.  Of course, ironically, that song is almost completely a cappella, with no accompaniment by either guitar or piano.

I don’t know what to do, about anything.  I have no goal, no expectations of anything good happening in my life, nor of any future achievements.  Also, of course, even if I do something and create something, like a new song or a new book/story, it’s pretty much spitting in a high wind to try to water a flower bed that’s somewhere behind me.  I’m not likely to have any effect on anyone or even to be noticed.

Maybe I should send some of my songs or stories to some of the people currently screwing up the world’s economies and politics and environment.  Then, perhaps, some of them will really like my work, and that will then lead them to personal catastrophes and illnesses and death, as seems to happen to people who like my stuff (other than actual family members, though there is some precedent for that).

It would be wild to have a power like that, wouldn’t it?  It might make a good, weird story:  someone finds that the things he loves to do most, creatively, always end up causing harm to those who enjoy them, and so, despite himself, he decides to start using his gifts in a sort of Death Note kind of way, to eliminate dangerous people from the world.  He could almost be a very strange kind of superhero, perhaps called The Bard or The Minstrel.  He would do good, but he would also be chronically sad that he can’t just play music (or sing or write or whatever) and have people safely enjoy it.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch about the funniest joke in the world, which contains what I think is one of the funniest (but most underrated) lines ever:  Terry Jones as a TV reporter, standing outside the house where the deadly joke was written, opens with something along the lines of “Comedy struck this quiet, suburban neighborhood this morning…sudden, violent comedy.”

With that, I’ll draw this, my own pointless escapade, to a close, probably for the week.  I hope all of you have a good day and a good weekend and a good whatever comes after.  At least, I hope they are all as good as they can possibly be.  Which they will be, since everything cannot but be what it is once it is, quantum mechanics notwithstanding.

Bye.

*I can play piano without feeling the urge to sing, but I have no keyboard at the office‒I gave my cheapish one to a former coworker who used to be a serious professional musician, but he subsequently died of a heart attack, which is the sort of thing that happens to people to whom I try to give support, or to people who really like my singing/music.  I appear to be some type of curse.

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This is the title, not a deed

It’s Monday morning again, despite popular demand, and here I am again, writing a blog post to start the week (despite lack of more or less any demand).  Welcome!

It’s already stupidly muggy here in south Florida, even though it’s only the last day of the first week (the first seven day stretch, not the first Sunday through Saturday period) of April.  And, of course, the world is stupid overall.

But what else is new?  Individual humans can be quite intelligent (in my experience, often far more so than they would credit themselves to be) but humans in large numbers tend to be dragged down by the lowest common denominators or the weakest links or whatever other metaphor you want to use for the least impressive aspects of human beings, either between or within individuals (or both).

As for anything else, well, I’m steadily getting better from my bronchitis, which is certainly something I prefer to continuing to have it.  I’m also trying some newish shoes (not a new make or model, but a slightly tweaked size) that seems to be better for walking than some of my prior ones.

I haven’t read anything from any books in the last 10 days or so‒more or less since I started getting sick‒and though it’s weird, it may be a useful mental break.  To be honest, I’ve had a hard time getting into any books recently, whether fiction or nonfiction, and maybe I just need to clear my head before starting back into things.

Of course, I could go and do some Brilliant dot org stuff and really bone up on my STEM* knowledge.  I could also work on learning some new languages using Babbel, of which I am a subscriber.  I had thought about learning Russian‒women speaking Russian just sound really…good for some reason, and I thought it might be nice to be able to converse with such women‒but given recent politics and conflicts, it’s slightly awkward to be learning Russian right now.  I’d also love to learn more German, or maybe French, and I could use a bit of refreshing on my Spanish, which is rusty.

Unfortunately, Babbel doesn’t really have any Asian languages, or I’d want to use it to improve my Japanese.  I’m a fan and proponent of learning other languages‒I think doing so helps one understand one’s own native language better and to grasp the structure and nature of languages and of thought itself, or at least the logical conveyance thereof.

More likely and more seriously, I’ve been thinking about doing some more deep learning on, well, deep learning, neural nets, as well as general neuroscience and computer science.  I have some background in many of these areas‒for instance, we had a truly wonderful neuroscience textbook in med school that I really loved‒but I would like to understand more.  I’m also interested in complexity and chaos theory and information theory in general.

Who knows whether any of this will ever come to fruition or if I will ever learn enough for it to matter?  It would be nice to make some contribution to human knowledge in some way, and not just by random pontifications here on a blog that’s read by maybe 30 people on a good day.

This is probably all pie in the sky stuff, anyway.  I don’t know what I’m actually going to do, except that if I’m not able to improve my chronic pain significantly, then all other bets are off.  In the meantime, I almost want to put out an appeal for requests (or a request for appeals) from readers.  It’s the sort of thing people with YouTube channels (and similar) do by getting Patreon accounts, where people pay some nominal amount to be patrons and are supposed to get some form of extra benefits through that, like recommending movies to which to react, or asking “ask me anything” type questions, that sort of thing.

I guess I wouldn’t mind people asking me to write about certain topics or subjects‒it might be better than just shouting into the vacuum, hoping someone notices.  Maybe it would get me more readers.

So , if any of you have any requests about things you want me to discuss‒within reason, of course‒then feel free to mention it in the comments below.  And by below, I mean below here on the website robertelessar.com, not on the website formerly known as Twitter or on Facebook or Bluesky or Threads or whatever.  Maybe if I were doing this as a full time job, I could commit to monitoring such venues thoroughly, but unless there is someone out there who really does want to be my patron, then I can only do this in my spare time‒like now, while I’m commuting to the office.  So please, if you actually want to give me feedback, come here to do it.

Thanks.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good week.

*I recently saw someone recommend the STEM acronym be changed to STEAM in one video from Computerphile, I think‒maybe it was Bill Maher‒because the person was pointing out that we need to have exposure to the “arts” (and humanities in general) if we want people to get exposed to interesting ideas and creativity to apply to their science, technology, engineering, and math stuff.  The argument was well made, and I’m not going to do it justice here, just bringing it up.

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No links to famous people’s works here. They don’t link to ME, after all.

I thought for a moment that someone had been listening to me, because when I started this new Word file from the last blog post I wrote on my mini-laptop computer, it was in Calibri font right from the beginning!  Then I went and closed the earlier file/blog post, and when I had returned to this one, the base font had reverted to Aptos (which I like to call “craptos” because I don’t think it merits a more sophisticated insult).

So, it turns out that no one was listening to me, of course.

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer as indicated above.  This will probably make it faster to write, but whether it’s any better written than yesterday’s post, I cannot say.  I felt that yesterday’s writing was fairly erratic and disjointed and borderline incoherent, but I often have a difficult time judging how my writing will be perceived by other people.

If it’s fiction, I can only care up to a certain point, because I write fiction that I want to read, so I cannot try to adjust it for others too much.  I can only guess that somewhere out there exists at least one other person whose reading taste is similar to mine, and who might enjoy my stories.  So far, not counting my sister*, I don’t know of more than three people who have read any of my fiction, so it’s hard to tell.

But, of course, though my tastes have been esoteric at times—especially when it comes to my love of relatively deep scientific and mathematical and philosophical reading—I have also enjoyed some massively popular books of certain kinds.  For instance, my very favorite book of all time is The Lord of the Rings (taking it as one large book, as it was initially written), and that’s hardly a rare choice.  Similarly, I’m a great fan of Shakespeare, and it’s not as though no one else ever reads or otherwise enjoys his plays.

There have also been popular series of books for which I waited eagerly and excitedly as each volume came out, including The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Belgariad, the various Dragonlance books**, and of course the Harry Potter books.  I’m sure I’ve written here somewhere about how I read Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince seven times while waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to come out.  All of these books have been quite popular, and I enjoyed them, too.

Then again, I had no interest whatsoever in any of the Twilight books, though I have written about vampires (and a demi-vampire) in one of my own books.  Likewise, I had no interest in Fifty Shades of Grey or the various Dan Brown books, and I haven’t read any new science fiction or fantasy in years, not counting Japanese light novels.

Speaking of that, I am very much impatient for some new volumes in a few light novel series I have read so far, but being light novels, they are much quicker to read than they are to publish.

In any case, I mean to say that just because I write to my own taste doesn’t mean that my stories are particularly esoteric in their nature and character.  I may be an alien in disguise, even to myself, but that doesn’t mean that stories that are bad are going to interest me.  Good stories have at least some degree of universality.  Even the Klingons love Shakespeare!***

My point is that, though I know I am a peculiar bean, I also think there are probably a lot of people (maybe not a majority, but a lot) who would enjoy at least some of my books and short stories.  But I am not good at promoting myself and making other people aware of my work.  This is probably related to my ASD and the related social anxiety, but also to my general self-hatred.  I tried to do a little promoting of my stuff at first, but it quickly became too stressful and irritating for me to tolerate.

So, if anyone out there has it in them—and so desires—to promote my stuff, even if just by sharing links and references in your own social media, that would be appreciated very much.  And while we’re at it, if anyone out there has a quick and easy cure for chronic pain*****, let me know.  Also, I want a unicorn.  (Actually, I want a dragon, but that might be harder to keep safely.)

Well, this post has probably been just as goofy and incoherent as yesterday’s.  My apologies.  That is, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case:  enjoy.  And try to have a good day.

*Not to imply that she doesn’t “count” in some important sense—she most certainly does—but just that it’s difficult to tease out the family relation from the other variables in the mix, so I cannot draw too many conclusions too easily.

**The ones that involved Raistlin, at least.  I didn’t have much interest in stories involving only the other characters of the stories.  Those of you who know those books can probably understand why this is so.

***Indeed, as the Klingon ambassador said in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country****, “You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

****The title itself is a Shakespearean reference, though in the movie, the undiscovered country is peace, whereas when Hamlet said it, he explicitly referred to death as the undiscovered country, one from whose bourn no traveler returns.

*****I don’t want to hear anyone saying “death” because that doesn’t count as a cure.  It makes the problem go away; it doesn’t solve it.  There is a difference.  And, don’t worry, as readers of my plan know, that is my own intended course of action if I cannot reduce my pain enough.

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A surprise Monday post

It’s Monday morning, and I didn’t bring my little laptop computer back to the house with me this weekend‒mainly just because I hadn’t brought it all week last week, and so I was just sort of “in that mode” when I left the office on Saturday‒and so I’m not doing any editing this morning on Extra Body.  It’s possible, of course, for me to edit it via the smartphone based Word app, but the few times I’ve used that, I found it cumbersome and unpleasant.  So, I decided I would write a random blog post on my smartphone, using Google Docs, for “old times’ sake”.

I’m already somewhat tired of editing and working on Extra Body, and I haven’t even finished the third edit (I’m about 20 pages from the end of that).  I will try to complete at least that much this week, but after that, I don’t know.  I just don’t feel that interested in it anymore.  I honestly don’t feel that interested in anything anymore.  Everything is boring or irritating or frustrating or some combination thereof.  Even reading nonfiction about topics in which I have long-standing interest is basically almost more of a chore than a pleasure.  If you know me at all, you know that’s a true departure, and is surely atypical.  I just have no interest in things in general.  That fact doesn’t even feel sad, to me.  It doesn’t feel like anything that’s being or been lost.  It feels like something that’s long since gone, if it ever existed in the first place.

This week will see the Autumnal equinox and the beginning of Fall/Autumn (in the northern hemisphere), but here in South Florida, it’s still so hot and muggy that I’m sweating just from sitting here and waiting for the train.  And I’m not talking about a little dampness in the armpits.  I’m talking about needing to wipe my eyes frequently because of the sweat dripping down into them, and sometimes dripping onto the inside surface of my reading glasses.  I’m wearing a shirt designed for athletes, with that cooling, “wicking” nature, and I have a change of shirt for the office.  Honestly, I wonder if I shouldn’t have brought a change of underwear.

I know, I complain about the hot, muggy weather here quite a lot, but it really is annoying.  There are long stretches of the year in which it is not just unpleasant to do any kind of exercise outdoors, but it is actually dangerous, because one overheats and dehydrates so quickly.  Presumably, it’s only going to get worse down here over the years, but at least that won’t apply to me.

In other weather related stuff, I’ve been trying to initiate the habit of riding my bicycle.  I’ve adjusted the seat to a better height for me (it required buying and using a pipe cutter, but that worked and it is much better now), and I got some new, high quality headlights and taillights, and I was all set to ride it some yesterday…and then, just as I was finishing up my laundry, thunderstorms rolled in, and they dominated the weather for the rest of the day.

It may take one much longer to get anywhere when walking‒or even jogging‒compared to biking, but at least it is less impacted by rain.  You can always carry an umbrella when walking, and you can avoid the worst puddles and such by stepping carefully.  And parkas work much better when on foot (at least in my experience) than when biking.  If you have a computer in your backpack and you’re caught in a serious rainfall, it’s much easier to protect that computer when on foot than when riding a bicycle.

Not that I have any experience with this.

Of course, walking has its own issues.  I did a bit of fairly serious walking last week, and I’m having some surprising and quite uncomfortable left heel/plantar fascia pain.  That’s extremely annoying, and it is probably the result of some relative postural mismatch on the length and/or configuration of my walking.  Certainly, based on the pattern of wear on my shoes, I put pressure on the outer ball of my right foot much more than the rest of that foot, and the heel of my left more than the ball.  This is a long-standing pattern, and may be produced by even very mild anatomic and/or gait-related asymmetry.

Still, I already had/have heel inserts for shoes, specifically intended to counter issues with the plantar fascia, and I have them in, today.  We shall see if and to what degree they soothe that problem.  If they do not, then I may have to revert to not wearing socks, which (to my surprise) seems to ease many of my foot and even leg problems, though it entails a significant temporary increase in blisters and, of course, given the heat and humidity of south Florida, makes shoes wear out quite a bit faster.  If you do it, I encourage generous use of Lysol; just pretend you’re a bowling alley attendant every time you take off your shoes.

We’ll see what ends up being the best option, at least for the time being.

And now, it’s almost time for my train to arrive, so I’ll call this all good for the day.

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

Good-o and hell morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll see, I guess.

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

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

TTFN

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

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

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My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they blog their watches on unto mine eyes

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again—indeed, it is the last Thursday in May of 2024, common era, and this day will never come again.  That is, it will not come again unless time turns out to be cyclical, in which case, I guess this day will come again over and over, an infinite number of times, though it would never feel that way from inside.

Certainly, in at least some sense, this day is permanent.  For instance, this is so if, based on Special and General Relativity, one can consider the universe to be a “block universe”, i.e., one in which each event and moment or whatever you want to call it in all of space and time is simply what it is and is “always” there, like a cosmic Blu-ray® that plays itself.  Except it doesn’t play itself.  Again, it simply is, and the sense of time passing is simply something experienced by tiny beings that comprise little four-dimensional braids of energy because of the way they are put together or rather the way they exist in local spacetime.

I’ve written about this before, considering the question, if we (and everything else) are permanent and unchanging local patterns in spacetime from the beginnings of our lives to the ends, might it be that, when we die, from an experiential point of view, we merely start over at the beginning, with everything in our lives happening over and over.  Or perhaps it’s more accurate to think that, in such a case, there is still a “me” that is living yesterday, experiencing it, and the day before and the year before and the decade before, and so on, in a possibly infinite continuum of moments.

If that were to be the case, then the best general advice would probably be to try to make your life such that, if you are going to live it over and over again for eternity, that will not be the equivalent to being condemned to Hell.  I think Nietzsche talked about something like this, but I may be misremembering.

Of course, each time one lives one’s life again is restarted from a local blank slate.  It’s not as though you would ever have any memory of having gone through all this before, any more than a character in a movie learns from the fact that you’ve played the movie before and behaves differently next time.  Anakin Skywalker will never avoid becoming Darth Vader, no matter how much we see that he suffered horribly and did horrific things that he regretted, all while failing to achieve what he had meant to achieve by going to the dark side in the first place.

So, however you were going to live your life is how you were going to live your life—from the outside perspective—and you should just try to do the best you can in any case, because…well, why would you do anything else?

Of course, whatever you end up doing is literally doing the best you can, since you cannot change what you do once it’s done.  See above regarding the permanence of time and so on.  Even if quantum mechanics in some way derails the “simple” spacetime block notion*, that doesn’t make the past any more amenable to adjustment.

Whatever the nature of reality ultimately is, it is, and we are not going to change that.  We can learn more and more about it and use that knowledge to our benefit, but we cannot ever escape whatever the meta-level rules of reality are, any more than a pawn can make any legal move that allows it then to change the rules of the game of chess.

Anyway, that was all good fun and we all had a jolly good laugh, but I feel that perhaps I’ve trodden such areas too often, and I’m probably boring my readers.  Apologies.

Junes is coming in two days, and it’s a relatively eventful month.  A close family member of mine has an important birthday; the Solstice will be here (Summer in the north, Winter in the south); and of course, Father’s Day comes in June.  That’s a bitter holiday for me, unfortunately, but there’s nothing I can do to change that preexisting fact; again, see above.

As for other things, well, I think I got a slightly better sleep last night than I’ve been getting lately.  I still began waking up at about 1:30 in the morning, but I was able to go back to sleep again until a little after 2 and then about 2:30 or so, and 3, and then started just giving up and fully waking up at about 3:20.  Even so, at least I was able to get to sleep somewhat earlier than I usually do, and that’s saying a lot.  It may be quite tragic that three and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep feels so much better than usual, but it does.

It’s not simply happening randomly, just to be clear.  I am making interventions and trials and seeing what helps and what doesn’t.  I’m not going to get into them for the moment, lest I cloud my own mind with the discussion.  But it’s not just that, hey, wow, I’m sleeping slightly better these last two nights, gosh I wish I knew why.  It’s the product of my always ongoing attempts to improve things when I can.

I’ve also been reading a bit for that past few days on and off—mainly Sean Carroll’s new book—but, while this is a good thing, it’s not an unadulterated good.  I won’t get into the reasons for that caveat, and in any case, from my perspective, it’s overall a positive.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to writing my one page (or possibly more) on Extra Body, and I will give a brief report on that (probably), though my brief reports are somewhat prone to digression into not-so-brief discussions of tangentially related subjects.  I am also going to be working Saturday, barring any changes, so I’ll probably rinse and repeat then.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a great rest of the week as May draws to an end and June arrives.

TTFN

*It need not do so.  The spacetime block might merely be more complex than our first, naïve notion of it, and actually be a spacetime block made of the universal wavefunction, with “branches” at every quantum decoherence and a level of splitting that may be as fine as the divisions of the real numbers, uncountably infinite.  Taken as a whole, though, these could all still be fixed and “permanent”; there would just be more of a fractal sort of character to it at the level of quantum interactions and the like.