reading

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Tuesday for the price of one day

Okay, well…it’s Tuesday morning, and this is the first of two planned blog posts for this week.  If there is any person out there in Hell’s creation who really used to look forward to starting his or her week with my Monday morning blog post, I apologize.  I regret causing you any disappointment.  On the other hand, causing disappointment is one of my greatest talents, so at least you’ve been exposed to that facet of my character.  I don’t know if one could properly call it a creative ability, but it is something for which I have a knack.

I did do some fiction writing yesterday, after walking to the train.  In fact, I mistook how much I had written, feeling that I hadn’t gotten even one page done, so I continued to the top of the following page only to realize it was the second page of the day.  I wrote over 1400 words; I’m at least making progress.

As I said, I walked to the train yesterday, and in addition, I walked back to the house in the evening.  Indeed, according to my pedometer, I walked about 14.7 miles yesterday in total.  I did not walk this morning because I have developed a modest blister on the bottom of my right big toe.  It’s quite annoying, because it’s not as though I just started walking again.  Last week I walked well over thirty miles in total, wearing the same effing make and model of shoes I wore yesterday.  Why should I have just yesterday developed a blister?  It seems absurd, but reality, for better or worse, is not amenable to appeals.

I suppose it’s good for me to take a break after a day that included nearly three fifths of a marathon worth of walking, though apart from the blister and my left knee soreness‒the latter of which is almost chronic‒I don’t feel particularly worn down.  I did have trouble getting to sleep last night after having walked so much in the evening, which was somewhat annoying, since I had already gotten back to the house later than usual.  It would have been nice if at least I could have slept more deeply once I did fall asleep, but that was of course not going to happen.  So, I’m quite tired.

What else is new, right?

I don’t know what else to discuss today.  The equinox is coming this week, but I figure Thursday would be a better day to talk about that.  It’s not exactly exciting, to be honest.  Up north, the coming of Spring is a positive thing, but in Florida, mostly it just presages the bulk of the year during which the heat and humidity are stultifyingly intense.  Believe me, when you walk 6 miles in Florida most of the year, you look as if you’d just gone swimming, because your sweat does not evaporate.

There’s a bit of a cool and rather strong breeze blowing this morning, which is a surprise, and I did not wear a jacket or a heavy shirt.  That’s okay.  The train will be here within the next 5 minutes according to the schedule and the announcement.  By evening, unless prior weather reports have been completely superseded, it will be plenty warm.

Oh, I did stumble upon an interesting book yesterday while skimming through recommendations based on a decision-theory book I bought.  It was a computer science book, geared toward undergrads and grad students but not really requiring that one be in that situation.  Its purpose is to teach a broad primer on computer science from the bottom up by walking through the process of building a (fairly simple) computer, writing and setting up an operating system, and then making it able to play games such as Tetris.  The authors even provide links to resources so the reader can actually do that building, so it’s not just an intellectual exercise.  They start with logic gates and go to the end, so the overall system is called “Nand to Tetris”, though that isn’t the title of the book.

I think this is great, because modern computers have become so sophisticated and complex that most people who program probably learn to do it without getting educated in the underlying systems and how they work, how Boolean Logic works and is instantiated, up to machine code and the like.  But these are the things I have always wanted to understand better.  My CS 100 class in college just taught us how to program in Pascal.  That was fine, as far as it went, but that kind of programming is just following more ordinary kinds of logic and instruction-giving.

If I had taken extensive coursework in computer science and electrical engineering, I’m sure I would have gotten into such things.  But that wasn’t my major, and I didn’t have time to take a boatload of electives.  If I could have taken courses in all the possible areas in which I might have been interested, I would probably still be in college, and my educational costs would probably have reached a level comparable to the price of an aircraft carrier, or at least of one of the military planes that uses them.

Anyway, I got the Kindle edition of the book.  Being a book by and about computers, it is well formatted to work with the e-book reader format, which is itself a good sign.  Also, the reviews in general are glowing, and the comments they make seem to demonstrate that this is exactly the sort of book I’d like to bring my basic understanding to a better level, from my point of view.  Who knows, maybe I’ll end up doing the project?

If I’m going to be a supervillain, I’m going to need to be able to build my own doomsday devices and robot servants, after all!

Of course, I have a whole slew of books I want to read in addition to this, and I haven’t gone any farther on Quantum Field Theory.  The audio files in which I read aloud just take up so much memory when I use them, and Google starts trying to entice me to buy more storage because (gasp!) I’ve now reached 80% of present capacity.  That’s only taken, what, seven or eight years?  Better send Google more money or before I know it I’ll be at 85%.

Anyway, I don’t think the audio has made me read any better or improved my understanding.  It nudged me a little, but not enough.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I mean to do some walking tomorrow, and some fiction writing, and I keep dreaming that I might write something more topical here in the afternoon and post it, but with the noise and nonsense at work, that often becomes all but impossible.

I guess we’ll find out what happens together.

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“It’s like…writing on the surface of a lake”

It’s Saturday, and hopefully most of you reading this are doing so from your homes, relaxing‒sipping your favorite beverage, perhaps‒and enjoying your weekend.

As I begin writing this, I am at the train station, waiting for the first morning train to bring me to the office.  This is my third Tuesday-Thursday-every-other-Saturday blog post.  It seems that, so far, fewer people are reading the blog on the days when I post it than usually had read it when I posted “daily”*.  I don’t know whether this trend will continue‒three data points is not a great basis from which to extrapolate, unless you’re picking out a plane by getting three non-collinear points.  I am not doing that, so it would be premature of me to pay too much attention to the statistics that WordPress throws in my face when I log in.

I walked to the station yesterday, and then‒since I had brought my laptop computer with me‒I wrote a bit on Extra Body while on the train.  It felt like a very small amount, but it was about 750 words, which is not terrible for the length of a train ride.  I get the idea that only writing roughly a page at a time, especially only three days a week, really will make me write faster stories, because I’m impatient to get to the end.  But I’m not sure it’ll make the story any better.  I don’t know if maybe I should try to write fiction every day and then, during the day, write blog posts on my phone, the way I’m writing this one.  It’s hard for me to do fiction on my phone**, largely because of indentations and quotation marks and all that stuff.  But these blog posts seem okay, more or less.

I don’t know what the best thing to do is.  This blog is really my sole daily communication with the outside world; it’s not as though I have any friends with whom I hang out, and I cannot do online groups or what have you.  I considered joining some “autism related” groups, though I am not at all sure I even merit the diagnosis, but they all seem to be run by and populated by people who are much more comfortable with other people they don’t already know, at least online, than I am.

Also, the whole thing feels almost faddish and cliquey, like “all the cool kids are joining autistic support groups”, which is fairly ironic, when you think about it.  Anyway, I’ve never really been good at “defining” myself by any group membership, other than my core group of friends, back when I had such a thing, and of course my original family, and then, of course, even more strongly by my married family, with my wife and kids.  But I’m no longer a member of that latter group, and the first group doesn’t exist anymore, and unfortunately, though I do talk to my sister on the phone and text and stuff with my brother, they live 1100 and 1300 miles away, roughly, so my original family is rather scattered.

I used to feel almost like a member of the community at Jerry Coyne’s website, Why Evolution is True, but that site’s parameters have changed, and it’s not possible to read and like and comment all from the WordPress “reader function”, so I have to open each post in at least 2 tabs to be able to interact with the site fully, and that discourages me a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve long had the impression that PCC(E) found my comments irritating.  Likewise, I almost always find any comments I make on that site or anyplace else to be stupid and embarrassing if I look back on them, unless they’re just jokey throw-aways, like a funny-oid response to someone’s tweet.

I’m not sure what to do about all this.  No matter what, I feel like I’m spitting into the ocean or shouting in a hurricane.  Maybe I’m not even shouting; maybe I’m whispering.  Anyway, I don’t think it’s reaching very far or having any benefit, whether for me or for anyone else.  I guess I occasionally get to “show off” my familiarity with a very broad array of concepts and ideas and fields of study; that’s ego-syntonic in and of itself, I suppose, though the fact that it is ego-syntonic for me is rather embarrassing and even humiliating.  I mean, just how pathetic am I that I need to show off online in some blog that barely a dozen or so people even look at when I post it?

Still, it’s not as though I’m in some academic setting, where I could bounce ideas off colleagues and so on.  I guess I could try to get back into doing my “audio blogs” which are sort of mini-podcasts, but the process of dealing with audio and converting it to video is a pain in the ass.  I don’t think many people “watch” them, anyway.

Speaking of audio recordings, I have done audio recordings of two “chapters” (so far) of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible.  I guess that’s good.  It’s at least “forced” me to muscle through part of the book.  It’s not that the subject matter is hard‒so far it’s old hat, really, since he’s laying the foundations‒it’s that the print is small on the hardcover edition, and the Kindle version is just a PDF of that, so you can’t adjust the type size to suit your smartphone, not without expanding the page until most of it is off your screen.  That’s no way to read a book, especially one about a relatively complex subject.

Anyway, if I can keep it up and finish it, I may do something similar for some of my other books that don’t have audio versions, like Spacetime and Geometry and Gravitation and so on.  I don’t think doing audio for mathematics texts would be terribly useful, but maybe it would.  Maybe I’m fooling myself about all of it.

Oh, but I’m pleased to report that there’s now an Audible version of Rationality from AI to Zombies, and I used my credit this month to get it.  I’m in the midst of rereading the Kindle version of the book even now‒about 75% of the way through.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about the other stuff, but then, I don’t really know why I’m doing anything at all.  I have no particular goal or purpose in mind.  I certainly don’t look forward to anything, beyond just trying to find new stuff to learn about or to learn better, but it’s not as though I’m making any contribution to the world, or doing any good of any kind.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m just “a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics”, but I certainly don’t have much more consequence than any solitary wild pig.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t need to write a post that’s twice as long just because I’m writing it half as frequently.  Also, I’m getting close to my stop.  I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you’re celebrating it, a happy Saint Patrick’s Day tomorrow.  I mean to write fiction on Monday, but maybe I’ll do a blog on the phone afterwards, sometime during the day.  I’m making no promises, so don’t act in reliance.

*I used scare quotes because I effectively never post on Sundays.  There were a few times, way back in the day, when I posted on Iterations of Zero on Sundays, because that was supposed to be my blog that was not related to promoting my creative writing, but was to be about my various thoughts on science, philosophy, politics, psychology, and so on.  I haven’t written very many posts on it over time, especially since this blog took over being a catch-all for whatever thoughts come to me on any given day after I just start writing and see what happens.

**Though I wrote a significant part of Son of Man on my first, tiny little smartphone, because I had no other choice.  That was a great little phone, an LG from back when they still made them.  Once, it fell about 12 feet onto concrete and the back popped off and the battery fell out, but that was it.  It ran perfectly afterward, and the screen didn’t crack at all.  Some of that is just down to physics‒smaller screens have less local torque and also can only resonate at higher pitched frequencies.  Also, the back popping off and the battery popping out absorbed a lot of kinetic energy, so that was dissipated away from more sensitive things.

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One of a new pair o’ digms

Hello again.  This is hopefully going to be the first event in a new pattern of behavior in which I write blog posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday and write fiction on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  The future is always in motion, of course, at least from our “worm’s eye view” of the universe without any access to enough information (let alone computing power) to make us anything like Laplace’s Demon, so things may not turn out according to plan‒but it is the plan.

I used the MS Word app on my phone to take a look at Outlaw’s Mind yesterday, just to see whether it looked like I might want to work on it again sometime.  I think it might benefit from eliminating the opening portion, which has an adult Timothy Outlaw approaching what will be (according to the original story idea) the climax of his tale.

I wrote this based on a story idea that I had written down in my “Story Ideas” file (appropriately enough), and the rest of the tale took off from there.  But I think‒perhaps‒that it has changed into a slightly different story than the opening idea, and I think it might be better if I just throw that little concept away and focus instead on the account of Timothy’s difficulties with rage and his exploration of his mind and its nature and the real or imagined horrific forces that plague him.  For one thing, this story connects with ideas that involve the larger Omniverse of my stories, including everything from The Chasm and the Collision and my potential story Changeling in a Shadow World, all the way back to my first completed (and now lost) book, Ends of the Maelstrom.

I like the process and concept of joining disparate fictional universes together, as in Stephen King’s whole Dark Tower concept, to say nothing of the (earlier) multiversal connections in comic books and graphic novels such as, for instance, Marvel/DC crossovers, and even, on a less “meta” scale, the merger of Asimov’s Foundation novels with his robot and empire novels and so on.  I’ve certainly done this on smaller scales myself already; careful and committed readers of my stories (if such people exist other than I) will know that the world of Unanimity is the same as the world of Hole for a Heart.

I guess that’s all still up in the air in many senses.  Extra Body, the story I’m ostensibly working on “now”, has some references‒highly speculative ones‒to a particular world of light-hearted, classic sci-fi.  It will be a rather nerdy sort of speculative connection, but I have no trouble with that.  I am certainly a nerd.

In other news, I did indeed walk to the train station again this morning, and I feel reasonably well, physically.  Yesterday I walked a total of about seven or eight miles, roughly, and I feel fairly okay.  I considered walking back to the house from the train in the evening, but my boss‒quite correctly, I think‒warned me against overdoing it.  This is quite sensible.  I think for most of this week I will stick with just the morning walk, but then next week I intend to add the return journey and eventually work my way along from there.

As for sleep:  well, I didn’t seem to get any worse a night’s sleep than usual, though it wasn’t particularly better.  I still started waking up very early, but knowing that I was going to be walking allowed me at least to put a decent spin on that fact, since I could just tell myself that, if I was unable to go back to sleep, I would just get up sooner and start walking sooner.  I did finally leave about five minutes earlier than yesterday, and I took a slightly different route, just to keep things fresh.

Yesterday while walking I listened to the audiobook of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, volume 1, whereas today I listened to some of Sean Carroll’s latest AMA podcast.  I highly recommend this; it’s both enjoyable and educational.  In the book, yesterday, I had to rewind and relisten to portions a number of times when I realized I had zoned out on some things he said (or wrote).  That’s fine.  It helps me learn better.

I wish there were an audio version of Quantum Field Theory, as Simply as Possible, and some others.  I suppose I could offer to do the audio myself, and by doing it, would learn the subject better.  It’s something to consider.

We’ll see.  I’m going to call this to a halt for the moment because my train stop is approaching and‒funnily‒I’m dozing off while writing.  That doesn’t happen very often, but maybe I’m getting into a relaxed state because of the exercise.  Either way, I don’t want to miss my stop, so this’ll be it for today.  Talk to you Thursday.

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How many times must a man wake up before he can sleep through the night?

What a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sleep I had last night*.  I have said before, and I will repeat it in all honesty here:  my last good night’s sleep that I can recall happened in the mid-1990s.  So, I never seen to get a very good night’s sleep anymore, and this either contributes to or is a consequence of my dysthymia and apparent “neurodivergence”**.

Last night, however, was a bit of an outlier even for me.  For much of the night I would drop off to sleep and then awaken in stress, wondering what the time was and if I had overslept, only to discover that it was a mere five minutes since I had last looked at the clock.  I don’t know how often that happened, but we can work out the theoretical maximum just by taking the number of hours between when I first dropped off and when I finally gave up and got up, and multiplying that by the number of five-minute intervals (a rough but reasonably accurate average) per hour, which is twelve.

Given this, there was a theoretical maximum of between sixty and sixty-six awakenings during the night.  I’m sure I had quite a bit fewer than that, though.  for instance, I had a period of relatively long sleep during the early night, lasting about an hour to an hour and a half.  So, there were no more than 48 awakenings, and still probably significantly fewer than that.  Misery tends to amplify and magnify the subjective impression of these kinds of occurrences.  It’s probably a perverse version of the peak-end rule, described by Fredrickson and  Kahneman, which was used in colonoscopies before the general practice of doing conscious sedation, which ensures that people don’t tend to remember what happens during the actual test.

As one who has been present when colonoscopies were performed, I can tell you that patients are often semi-awake and even somewhat responsive to interactions during the test, but they do not remember it.  Such conscious sedation can give one the appearance of rest, but it doesn’t actually allow for effective sleep, though one may feel that one has slept during that time.  It’s also not the sort of thing to use outside of careful clinical monitoring, as the death of Michael Jackson demonstrated.

Anyway, I had a moment‒subjectively‒of relatively deep sleep quite early in the night followed by a very prolonged period of miserable and stress-filled, anxiety-ridden sleep throughout the remaining hours, until I gave up and got showered and dressed and ready and came to the train station quite early for the train.  That’s where I am now.

It’s not too cold here, but the wind is relatively strong, making it feel colder, and so I have my hood up.  I imagine I look a bit like a poor man’s Ringwraith from a distance, dressed all in back as I always am.  Or maybe I seem to be a would-be Sith Lord.  Neither is a pleasant state in which to be, of course, but at least they have powers.  My powers, if that’s the right word, are mainly just mental abilities, and unfortunately, my best ones are not really put to much use, other than in this blog.

I’m so tired all the time.  Nothing is very much fun anymore, as Pink Floyd sang in One of My Turns, from The Wall, disc one, side B, fourth song from the end.  Don’t Leave Me Now*** has already become an obsolete, already-too-late situation for me, which leaves only Another Brick in the Wall Part 3, and then Goodbye Cruel World to finish up the first half of that album.

I did get some new reading glasses yesterday, somewhat stronger than the previous ones, and I’m pleased to relate that they seem to allow me to read a normal, printed page (without adjustable type size) adequately.  I even read three or four pages of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible yesterday, and maybe that will be the beginning of something more.  Right now, I probably wouldn’t read it even if I had it in front of me.  But hopefully, with that one barrier reduced, the vector sum of that system in phase space will change, and I’ll do some more reading.

This leads me to wonder if it might be better if I overshot the vision target and got reading glasses that are stronger than the ones I have now.  Maybe I should try that experiment.  Thankfully, reading glasses are pretty cheap, so even if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be out too much money.

Perhaps I would even rekindle (no pun intended) my ability to read and enjoy print books of various kinds if I did that.  It’s probably a lot to ask or expect, let alone hope for, but it might be worth a try.  My life post-FSP is unrecognizable even to myself compared to the one before it.  I’ve said many times that I feel that I’m like a Nazgul, or some other mortal who keeps a “great ring”.  I have not died, but neither am I growing or obtaining new life; I’m merely continuing, until at least every breath is a weariness.  “…thin and stretched out, like butter scraped over too much bread,” indeed.

Anyway, that’s more than enough of that.  I mean the blog post, of course, but I also mean the other‒that drawn out, continued existence that has no true life to it.  I’m just weary, and I have no hope for anything good in my future.  I need to get to the end of that first disc.  I can see no real point in anything else; it’s all just trudging through an endless, primordial desert with no oases.

*Unfortunately, I don’t think that moving to Australia would make a difference, and they probably wouldn’t let me in the country, anyway.

**Most likely it’s a complex system that interacts with itself, with each aspect feeding back on the other, the sleep trouble exacerbating the depression and other issues, and those issues further worsening the sleep, until some relative dynamic equilibrium is reached.

***And I want to make it clear that I never did the abusive stuff mentioned by “Pink” in that song.  I am certainly an unpleasant person, but I never was one to put my spouse “through the shredder in front of my friends” let alone “to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night”.  If anything, being the recipient of such things would be more likely for me.  But even if she had been so inclined, my ex-wife was not capable of beating me to a pulp.  Not that she would have been so inclined, anyway.  Though I suspect that most people who spend very much time with me entertain that notion at least occasionally.  Goodness knows I do.

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Learning about science, troubles with reading and socialization, and (not) writing fiction

It’s Saturday morning, and boy was yesterday’s audio blog a little weird.  I think it’s not so much that I said anything particularly weird—certainly not for me—but rather the odd meanderings thing took, from musing on the fact that I’ve been losing any joy of any kind in my life, becoming more and more bored or even irritated by more and more things that used to be interesting, on to the various declining cinematic universes and finally to thoughts about General Relativity.

At least that latter part encouraged me to read some material and watch some relatively hard-core YouTube videos about General Relativity and its mathematics.  By “hard-core”, I don’t mean there was any graphic sex involved.  First of all, I don’t think they allow stuff like that on YouTube, but even more to the point, I don’t see how one could work such a thing into an educational video about matrices and tensors and stuff like that.  I mean “hard-core” as in being more in-depth than just a general information, analogy kind of educational presentation, and especially that it talked about the mathematics underlying the science.

Not that I’m against the more general stuff.  I certainly began all of my interest in science with general knowledge/information.  When I was a kid, growing up (which is what kids do if things go well), I had a whole bookshelf I called my “science shelf” full of various kid-level books about everything from biology to paleontology (there were lots of dinosaur books—my first career ambition was to be a paleontologist) to “how things work” kinds of books and so on.

I didn’t really start to have as much physics and astronomy related material until after Cosmos came out.  That show was the reason our family got our first color TV.  I also asked for (and received) a hardcover copy of the book for my 10th or 11th birthday (it came out in 1980, I think, so it should have been 10th), and I was very pleased.  That book and show really triggered my love of space-oriented and physics-oriented science, including—of course—cosmology.

I chose my undergraduate college precisely because it was where Carl Sagan was a professor, though I never did meet him.  I would have thought it presumptuous and appalling to try to seek him out and bother him with gestures of my admiration and thanks.  I tend to feel that way about inflicting myself upon anybody—friend, foe, or stranger.  I just feel that I don’t have any right to intrude upon anyone else’s life or time, and also that I frankly don’t know what to say if I do meet them.

It’s a bit sad, though.  By most accounts, Professor Sagan tended to be quite pleasant and positive toward people who liked his work, and he considered himself—according to him—first and foremost a teacher.  He certainly taught me a great deal.  Though his books are now somewhat out of date, they are mostly still great repositories of fact and interest, and they remain overflowing founts of wonder.  I feel confident in recommending them to anyone, most prominently Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot, and especially The Demon-Haunted World.

Of course, I’ve read a lot of his intellectual descendants since then, and his cousins as well in other fields (Stephen Jay Gould’s and Richard Dawkins’s books and collections about biology are wonderful, too, for instance).  One thing I like about listening to podcasts that focus on ideas is that the guests are often people who have recently (or not-so-recently) written books, and if the subject is interesting I can read their books to get more deeply into their work.  I first encountered David Deutsch and Max Tegmark (and many others) on Sam Harris’s podcast, for instance.

And, of course, I have also read books by Brian Greene and Sean Carroll (and others) about physics in general.  It was to The Big Picture that I turned yesterday after my audio blog, in addition to the aforementioned video, to review some of the mathematical basics of General Relativity.  From there, maybe I’ll go on to the YouTube videos of Leonard Susskind’s* real graduate level lectures at Stanford, and to reading Sean Carroll’s textbook.  I’d also like to read through Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, which I’ve mentioned before (with the thought of going on to his textbook if I can).

I have Zee’s layperson-oriented book in hardcover, but the print is small, and it’s difficult to read.  Still, I took delivery yesterday of a new set of reading glasses that are slightly stronger than the ones I was using, so I hope they’ll make it easier.  I’d really prefer to learn by reading than even by watching videos.

Of course, all this is probably just “pie in the sky” thinking.  My biggest difficulty is just summoning the will, the energy, to do these things.  It’s similar to the trouble I have with writing fiction.  I have quite a few story ideas I could write, but I have no drive, no desire to do the writing.  There’s no percentage in it, so to speak.  It’s not as though I have any fans out there telling me how much they like my books and want more.  I mean, my sister has read them all, and she liked at least most of them, and says she really liked The Chasm and the Collision.  That’s very nice, and I do appreciate it.  Apparently, though, it’s not the required stimulus for me to want to write more fiction.

Perhaps nothing would be.  Perhaps I’m just deteriorating too much, or have deteriorated too much.

Or perhaps it’s that I feel that a truly tiny minority even of people who engage with fiction do so in written form nowadays.  There’s too much competing immediate gratification out there, and primates—probably almost all life forms—are prone to fall for immediate gratification, and to someone else doing the imaginative work for them.

I fear that much of the general population has allowed their personal imaginations to atrophy, much as physical health atrophies when someone goes everywhere by car.  People even play Dungeons & Dragons online now, apparently.  That seems weird to me.  I don’t think I could really stand to play role playing games with strangers.  Playing them with my friends, as I did back in junior high and high school, for countless hours, was greatly enjoyable, and I think it did exercise and improve my imagination and my story-telling and story-creating “muscles”.

Oh, well.  I don’t have anyone with whom to do any of that stuff now, and I can’t even really imagine trying to find new people with whom to do it—see my above discussion about inflicting myself on people for part of the reason, but that’s not the only one.  I also don’t want to invest the considerable necessary stress and effort and anxiety into trying to find friends with whom I actually share interests—if such people even exist—and then have it all go sour or just go away as nearly every other relationship of any kind that I’ve ever had has done.  The juice, however delicious, is not worth that old vice-grip-on-the-testicles (and on all the joints and tips of one’s fingers) level squeeze.  The juice doesn’t last, anyway.

I’m on the train now, and I’m not exactly producing anything edifying, am I?  I’ll bring this week’s writing to an end, but I hope I’ll have the will to keep studying, at least.  And, of course, I hope most fervently and sincerely that all of you have a very good weekend.

*I also have his series The Theoretical Minimum in kindle and/or paperback and/or hardback form; his most recent one was about GR.  But I’ve had trouble reading physical books of any kind (let alone the Suss kind…ha ha) lately; I’m hoping my new reading glasses will help that.

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My gruntlement is low today

It’s Tuesday morning.  I wasn’t actually planning to write anything when I got up today, but then I remembered that, more or less on a whim, I had brought my little laptop computer with me, so I figured I might as well write something.

For one thing, I’ll embed the “video” of my last audio blog—the one about Morgoth and whatnot—below, so if anyone prefers to do their listening via YouTube, they can do so.  Evidently, the Google podcast app is going to be phased out, and one is going to have to listen to podcasts via YouTube Music at some point in the future (or use some other service/app).  That’s a bit frustrating, because there’s at least one podcast that I get via subscription that one cannot get in its entirety on YouTube, but can get through the app.  I guess they’ll figure out a way to deliver that, but it’s irritating to have to change my settings once again.

I guess it shouldn’t matter.  I should just cancel all my subscriptions and services and platforms and even cable and internet.  They’re not really doing me any good, and they cost money, and honestly, I really would expect not to be alive starting sometime soon.  I’ve been expecting that for a long time, now, though, and I haven’t really been able to work up the gumption to bring it about.

I have at least been creeping my way in that direction.  I have flammable liquids for potential immolation—useful for other, more traditional things as well, of course.  I have scalpels and utility knives, useful for cutting various things, including oneself, but of course, they’re also generally useful for many things.  And recently I bought a nice length of rope—too long, really—and learned how to tie a hangman’s knot.  That last bit is rather surprisingly easy, and it’s a pleasant and useful knot, it turns out, especially to someone who used to be in the Boy Scouts a lifetime ago.  Ironically, it has many similarities to an informal necktie knot.

But, I’m still alive for the moment, though I’m very uncomfortable and unhappy in general, and I still haven’t gotten health insurance.  I get a near-panic feeling when I even think seriously about getting insurance.  I’m not entirely sure why that is.

Yesterday morning I felt really horrible, and I think it’s because I was trying to reintroduce some things I like into my diet to see if I can tolerate them.  I guess I can’t, at least not in the state I’m in (Florida).  It seems I can’t even enjoy the things I like to eat, but then again, I can’t expect nature to be there for my convenience.

I could try to work against nature’s convenience, in return, I guess.  At the very least, I could do my best to add to global warming and disrupt the biosphere and cause toxins and pollutants to accumulate, as a silly sort of revenge.  It might be fun.

I did feel less bad as the afternoon wore on and I avoided any indulgences, to the point where, near the end of the day, in idle moments, I got out Spacetime and Geometry, Gravitation, Euclidean Quantum Gravity, and even the old Thomas and Finney calculus text—the latter because sometimes I feel like I want to re-hone and improve my skills with mathematics, and Brilliant, for all that it’s a wonderful site, just doesn’t seem to work for me for some things.

I did find the two physics texts (which I opened in the middle, since I was looking for rather specific information relating to Λ, the cosmological constant) much more accessible and relatively easy to follow compared to what I was expecting.  Gravitation, in particular, is an intimidatingly large tome, but is nevertheless a bit of a “my first reader” in overall impression when compared to Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine.  I didn’t get very far in any of them in the time I had yesterday, but it was nice to realize that—though some mathematical formalisms are beyond my current expertise (thus the Thomas and Finney)—all of it made sense to me.  Credit the writers as much as my own cleverness, but I do give myself some credit.

Maybe I should get a biology textbook, just to reinvigorate my interest in that general subject as well.  I’m more of a literal expert in that subject than I am in GR or quantum mechanics or mathematics, though, so maybe a basic college text would be too repetitive?  I don’t know.

I’m having a bit of trouble with my laptop today; Word has frozen up on me twice this morning, which is a bit frustrating.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’m not sure how long I’ve had this laptop, but it’s been a few years, at least.  Ordinarily, I would think of getting a new one to replace it, but that seems like entirely too much work, and is rather pointless.  I don’t expect to write any more fiction.

The thing that led me to bring the laptop computer back with me last night was the thought of maybe at least rereading what I have so far of Outlaw’s Mind and maybe even DFandD.  I talked to my sister on Sunday and gave her a bit of a (probably rather tedious) rundown of how those stories, especially the former, interconnect with the larger universe of my books, including particularly The Chasm and the Collision, and the potential novel Changeling in a Shadow World, and other stories, all going back to the first novel I ever “finished”, back in high school—Ends of the Maelstrom—which I could probably recreate* if I had the gumption.  I certainly still know all the main characters’ names and stories and arcs and all.  I even remember my opening line:  “Horraban was happy now.”  I also remember my rather ominous ending, though not the precise words.

Many of the universes of my stories are connected to each other.  In effect, I suppose, they’re all connected via what the wizard in DFandD refers to as the “omniverse”.  I had long thought of it as the metaverse, but then Mark Fuckerberg arrogated that term to his pathetic attempt at virtual reality, and so I had to find another term.  I guess “omniverse” is actually more accurate and descriptive, but I thought the other sounded cooler.  Now it doesn’t.

Anyway, I have scads of potential stories I could write, some interconnected and some stand-alone, but I doubt that I will ever write any of them.  I just don’t have the energy nor do I have the motivation.  Merely going to work and getting back to the house uses up all the mental energy I have, and then some; much of my mental energy I need is sucked from my future, shortening my potential span of mental life as I go.

I suppose if some wealthy benefactor were to show up and offer to pay my expenses in return for getting me to write full time, I might do so.  Perhaps that could happen, but I won’t hold my breath, and I don’t encourage you to do so either.

In the meantime, though, here is the “video” from my last audio blog.  If you watch it on YouTube, please give a thumbs up, and subscribe, and share, and all that, if you’re at all willing to do so.  Thanks.

*It was 574 pages (and roughly 250,000 words, I think), handwritten on thin-ruled notebook paper, with many additions that ran into the margins, though some of these were tattered because I habitually ate paper from the edges of notebook sheets back then.  Anyway, I lost that original book when I lost all my belongings thanks to the depredations of the counties and state of Florida.  For that, I hold at least something of a grudge.

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Peculiar thoughts prior to the 1st of 2 holiday weekends

It’s Friday morning, and I did not walk to the train today.  Neither did I walk back from the train yesterday evening.  I didn’t really think I was going to do the “yesterday evening” thing, and I didn’t really intend to do the “this morning” thing, because I didn’t want to push it after having taken a long time off since doing any longish walking.

I don’t feel fatigued or sore or anything, but there is some chafing here and there that tends to happen when I restart walking seriously, but which I somehow forget every time until it happens again.  There’s some flaw there in the code I’m running in my brain, it seems.  Then again, there are many flaws in my brain code, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

I’m scheduled to work tomorrow, so I will be writing a blog post unless they cancel the work day because no one is going to show up.  As far as I know, though, I will be working, so keep a weather eye on the horizon.  If the workday is canceled, then I guess the next blog post I will write will be on Tuesday morning, since I think even our office is going to be closed on Monday.

I’m writing on my laptop computer today, since I have the time before the train comes, and I’m not sweaty and there are plenty of seats.  I’ve been trying to be upbeat and whimsical and so on in my recent blog posts, but I don’t think I’m going to do that today.  For one thing, those posts don’t seem to garner as much attention and readership as my despondent and despairing and hateful blog posts.

I’m not sure why that is.  Perhaps the things which I find interesting and entertaining and “positive” to discuss are not what most readers find engaging.  If one is to base one’s assessment on the “reels” that are shown on Facebook, which I’ve been sort of auditing lately out of (rapidly dwindling) curiosity, then people’s interests are very silly and rather pathetic, though they can often be quite funny.  Of course, it’s probably rather silly and very pathetic that I’m even indulging my morbid curiosity by looking at them.

I haven’t been reading any books at all for some time.  Just ask Kindle; it apparently keeps track of my “streaks” and “records” and whatnot.  That is ever-so-slightly disconcerting, but I know there are essentially no humans involved in keeping track of me personally—at least not with respect to my reading.  It’s all mindless, algorithmic stuff, and the algorithms aren’t all that good, it seems, because Amazon is pretty bad at recommending books in which I’m interested*.

Sean Carroll and Sam Harris are much better at finding people with ideas I want to explore; a good many of the books I’ve read in recent years have been by people I’ve first encountered in one of both of their podcasts.  I guess that’s not too surprising.  I’m interested in their thoughts, so I’m likely to be interested in people they find interesting.

I still haven’t set up my health insurance.  I have a real mental block about this, or an emotional block, or whatever.  I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, for one thing, but the real barrier is, I think, my self-hatred.  I worry that, if I get health insurance, I’m going to feel obligated in some strange way to take care of myself and try to maintain and then improve my overall health and lifespan.  But that’s only going to prolong my existence, which I don’t consider a win.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I have almost a fantasy of being diagnosed with some sort of inevitably terminal illness that will give me a short bit of time at least to try to connect with and say goodbye to people I love, and which will then kill me with relatively little mess.  It’s the sort of thing I think many people would want at the end of their lives (though they probably would want to put it off as long as possible) if the symptoms weren’t too unpleasant and could be palliated at reasonably low cost, so one wasn’t absolutely miserable in the time approaching one’s death.

Unfortunately, we usually do not get to choose, and we often get no warnings.

Well, actually, in a sense, we all get very long-term warnings.  Any sensible person is on constructive notice from an early age that someday death will come for them.  I suppose most people try to avoid thinking about it, but that doesn’t make it go away.

It’s interesting occasionally to think of the various other animals in the world and wonder how many of them ever recognize, at anything other than a rudimentary, acute, fight-or-flight response level, that they are going to die.  I think very few of them do.  Perhaps the cetaceans do, since many of them are both very intelligent and social, and they appear to communicate to some significant degree.  I’m not sure how much even the other great apes (apart from humans) actually recognize their own individual mortality.  I sometimes suspect that elephants know, but I’m not sure what gives me that impression.

If there are birds that are aware of mortality, I suppose it would probably be the corvids.  I guess it would be appropriate if ravens knew about death.

Huh.  That may end up being the substance of my pre-holiday message, ironically enough, though there really isn’t any substance or any point to what I’ve written today.  Of course, that’s probably entirely appropriate, since there is no apparent teleological substance to life itself.  It just happens, and then it stops.  This may be true even of the universe as a whole.

That’s okay.  Something doesn’t have to have some external purpose to be worth happening.  Just as one can enjoy reading a book or watching a movie or show, or listening to a song, that has no deep message or purpose or meaning other than itself, one can—potentially—enjoy a life without any meaning other than its own existence.

If only I could put that set of ideas into practice.  Alas, we here return to the faulty code I’m running.  If only I could update that more readily.  Goodness knows I’d do something more useful than Google and Microsoft and all the others do with most of their updates.  I may despise myself, but I do think comparatively highly of at least some of my capacities.

You would think that would give me at least some sense of satisfaction, but unfortunately it makes me feel worse about my character and nature.  And that seeming contradiction bring me back to lamenting my buggy code, and thus I appear to be stuck in a meta-level loop, or a perhaps in an old, Basic-style “Return without Gosub” error.

Oh, well.  Have a good day please, and if I don’t write anything else before then, I hope those of you who celebrate it have a Merry Christmas.

*YouTube has a better track record with video recommendations, but that’s deteriorating gradually, or I am, or both.

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Causality, relativity, uncertainty, and attractive versus repulsive gravity–these are worth celebrating

Okay, well, I’m writing this blog post from the office, because this is where I slept last night after the holiday party.  We did not have the party at the office, just to be clear.  We had it at a very decent restaurant called Maggiano’s, which may be part of a chain to some extent, I think.  It was a nice enough restaurant, food-wise, and the building and the outside lights were quite beautiful (see below).  However, inside, it was way too crowded and noisy, and we were seated at a very long, narrow table against a wall.

I felt incredibly stressed when we first arrived; I can hardly hear out of my right ear for one, and I have had tinnitus in it since about 2007 or so, and everything else was a tumult and commotion.  There was too much visual sensory overload also, and way too many people in too close quarters.  I miss the social mores of the pandemic, honestly.  I was barely able to endure long enough for our server to get me a drink so I could calm down a little.  I almost left and just walked back to the office.

My difficulties with such things have gotten worse over time, probably at least partly because I only ever used to go to restaurants and whatnot with people with whom I felt quite comfortable—my family, near and extended, then my wife, her family, our family, and so on—so there was always someone on whom I could focus, and with whom I could speak.

The drinks were rather weak, which may be good, since it was a work night, but I had to drink several to keep from tensing up.  Even so, at the end of the night, when they wanted to take a big group photo, I just walked away.  I had been dodging pictures all night already; there was a terribly annoying number of them, because everyone has their own little cameras in their smartphones, so instead of conversation—which was very difficult with anyone more than one seat away, and pretty hard even with those neighbors—people just took their little, instant, digital snaps, which I suspect will never really be used for recalling memories.

I’ve said it before, it’s not the case that things on the internet (or smartphones or whatever) are forever, as is sometimes claimed.  There is such a cacophony of data and images and whatnot, a good portion of it now not even being “real”, that most things will be swiftly lost like a drop of ink in a roiling, stormy ocean, or the quantum information of something that’s fallen in a black hole.  In principle it’s all there, but in practice it’s as lost as the echoes of Julius Caesar’s death rattle.

I guess it was a pretty nice evening, and the food was pretty good.  The salad was above average, and the broccoli I had on the side with my ziti dish was good.  It was all certainly well above the level of, for instance, the Olive Garden, but it was terribly noisy, literally and figuratively.  By the end, when we were the last party in the restaurant, it was still noisy, because our group was terribly noisy, and it was embarrassing and unpleasant.

I think I mostly at least prevented anyone from capturing my disgusting current face and form on camera in anything other than, perhaps, an oblique angle.  I really don’t like how I look, or how I feel, and certainly don’t want it memorialized, even if it’s evanescent and ephemeral*.

After the party, I was brought back to the office, which is only about four miles from the restaurant.  I could have walked, since the night was reasonably cool, but since I knew I wouldn’t be taking a shower, I decided not to do that.  I have washed up this morning and applied antiperspirant and aftershave (or whatever you call it when you haven’t actually shaved) and I brushed my teeth and everything.  I slept on the floor, with my backpack as my pillow, and it was about as comfortable as sleeping at the house, and I got about 3 hours of sleep.

This is the state in which my life is and has been for years now:  sleeping at the office and spending time here (by myself) is just as pleasant as being at the place where I nominally live.  That’s because I have no life, and I don’t expect one to occur again for me.  I’m really absolutely dismal and morose and unpleasant, even to myself.

I’ve hardly even read anything in over three weeks now, which is very weird and rare for me.  The single thing to which I’m now looking forward is the Doctor Who Christmas special, and that’s not a huge draw, just a pleasant one.  It’s not as though I’m actually watching it with anyone or can talk about it with a friend or anything.

I got out the hardcover books Spacetime and Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible at the office.  I have them resting on the desk, hoping to entice myself during any downtime I might have at work.  So far it hasn’t paid off, but I would like to master the mathematics of GR well enough that I can understand intuitively why a uniform energy field permeating space generates “repulsive gravity”.  I understand that it does, but I don’t have a good picture of it in my head, whereas I do have a much clearer intuitive sense of why the curvature of spacetime (especially the time part) leads to the apparent force of attractive gravity.

In a way, that’s my only remaining unaccomplished (and reasonably achievable) goal.  Quantum field theory is interesting and all, but the basic concepts of it seem fairly straightforward to me**.  Contrary to what people often say, quantum mechanics (et al) are only really counter-intuitive if you insist upon trying to apply macroscopic and mesoscopic intuitions to phenomena that happen at much smaller scales.  It’s a bit like expecting one of your bathroom tiles to behave just like the Burj Khalifa, only the scale is much more disparate between the quantum and the macroscopic.

People seem somehow puzzled by the notion of how complementary pairs of one’s measurements of quantum “particles” can never be more accurate than a certain level, as if this is truly different from measurements of macroscopic phenomena.  I’m quite sure that the errors when measuring, say, the mass or velocity of something as large as an elephant, or a car, or what have you, are waaaaaay huger than the absolute uncertainty in measurement of the position and/or momentum of a particle.  They’re just not as noticeable because the thing itself is big, and so the percentage of the error might be smaller and less consequential.

But we know things change with scale, like surface to volume ratios and whatnot.  An uncertainty of a millimeter when measuring a blue whale is hardly relevant, but if you’re measuring an ant, it could easily be crucial, and if you’re measuring a dust mite that error would be larger than the organism.

I also don’t get the objection to the possible “many worlds” description of quantum mechanics that derives from the fact that we only ever see and experience one world.  I don’t know why that puzzles people.  It’s not as if you can see both the outside and the inside of all the solid objects around you.  If you touch the near surface of a basketball with one finger, you can’t feel the opposite side of the ball with the same finger at the same time.

Yet, there’s no real doubt that the inside and the other side of physical objects really exist.  We just can’t sense the whole of any given thing at once.  Any part of space that will never enter our future light cones is something we will never, ever see at all***, but we don’t have any good reason to doubt that far distant regions of spacetime exist.  Internal consistency of reality and logical coherence of the world seem to demand many things existing with which we will not, and sometimes cannot, ever interact.

Okay, that was a weird tangent.  My apologies.  Anyway, I doubt that I’m going to achieve my “dream” of getting an intuitive, mathematical understanding, something I can feel, about why spacetime expands in the presence of a uniform energy.  After all, it’s something about which I honestly care, and my track record with such things is abysmal.  I don’t expect to achieve anything else of value, even to me, in my life.

I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m depressed, I’m alone; the only person in whose presence I always find myself is a person I despise (me).  My catharsis via this blog isn’t working.  I’m getting no help, though I wish for it, but I’m not sure how well I would respond if some were to come.  Maybe, like the wonderful simile Sting used in Be Still My Beating Heart, I would wriggle like a fish caught on dry land, unable to tell the difference between help and danger, between an offer of comfort and a warning of pain.

Whatever.  Sorry, that’s all pathetic, isn’t it?

In closing, I wonder if anyone listened to my little audio snippet yesterday, and if anyone thought it was worth it for me to try to do such a thing more often.  Let me know in the comments (on WordPress) if you have any feedback to offer.  Thanks.

maggianos

*Performing together live, for the first time.

**Straightforward for quantum field theory type things, anyway, to be fair.  I don’t mean that it’s not complex (ha ha! it uses complex numbers all the time, get it?) but I have a sort of picture of how the processes work, and it makes sense.  The rest would just be building details and specifics on top of the basic framework, which is a lot, of course, but there’s no real intellectual hurdle to be cleared.

***Assuming we do not discover any exceptions or workarounds to special relativity and the speed-of-causality limit.  There could in principle be workarounds, but it seems unlikely that there are local exceptions to the cosmic speed limit.  In any case, even such exceptions shouldn’t violate chains of causality.

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At LEAST three thresholds

It’s Friday morning, and it really is the end of the work week for me this time.  I’m at the train station waiting for the first train of the day…

…aaaaaand now it’s arriving.

And now, I’m on the train.

It’s a bit strange—there were only four people waiting for the first train at Hollywood station this morning, and that’s counting the Tri-rail™ security guy who was just waiting there for his pickup to start his workday (I think that’s what he was doing).  Still, the train itself seems to have roughly as many passengers as it usually does, so I don’t think today’s some weird, low-usage day.

It is, of course, the first of December, and if one uses monthly passes, today is the day to get one*, so maybe some people put that off a couple of days, since they probably also have to pay rent and that sort of thing.  I don’t know.  Possibly I’m overthinking it.  It may be nothing more than ordinary fluctuations and ebbs and flows of numbers of people doing particular things.  Who knows?  Also, who cares?

(It seems that I do, at least in passing, though why I notice and bother to think about such things is not clear even to me.)

I’m going to try to keep this brief today, mainly because I’m very tired.  Of course I didn’t sleep well; that’s why I’m here on the first train.  At least this really is the end of the week for me, though it’s the beginning of a new month.  But it’s the month that’s at the end of the year, so that’s two to one in favor of ends over beginnings, at least for today.

I’m still having trouble seeing and commenting on, or at least following, the website I usually follow, and that’s very discouraging, though I have evidence that at least it is not about me, personally.  My paranoia wants to tell me not to believe that, though.  I mean, just because other people are suffering similar troubles, and they are certainly not being singled out, doesn’t mean that I couldn’t be having troubles and be singled out because I’m an annoying git.  They’re not mutually exclusive states of reality.

Anyway, that’s one daily source of assurance or comfort or whatever that isn’t working like it usually does.  I’m also getting pretty bored with a lot of the YouTube channels I watch.  I am also bored with almost all of the books in my Kindle library, though I’m rereading at least parts of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Rationality: From AI to Zombies.  It’s an excellent book—really it’s a collection of blog posts he did over quite a long time on a site called “Less Wrong”, or something like that.  I know the book has been published split into two parts as well.

I highly recommend the book, in whatever form.  Since it’s a collection of posts, each individual section is relatively brief and easily digestible, so to speak, so don’t worry that it’ll be a slog.  Yudkowsky is also an engaging and entertaining writer, and he’s really effing smart and knowledgeable.

I don’t really know what I’m going to do this weekend, other than watching Doctor Who on Saturday and doing my laundry on Sunday.  I probably won’t really do much of anything.  Hopefully I can at least sleep a bit.  I plan to take some Benadryl® tonight.  I know its effects don’t engender truly healthy sleep, but even an increased amount of physical rest—even just an increased amount of oblivion—is worth quite a bit.

I’m very tired.  I think I said that before.  I’m also very discouraged and rather lost.  I feel increasingly like a ghost of myself, and I also feel increasingly that my hold on a superficially normal life and lifestyle is slipping.  I don’t think I’d want to go on, even if I could, but it’s a moot point, because I don’t think I’m going to be able to go on much longer.  I think I’ll end up in some type of hospital or the morgue or something similarly non-ideal soon.  At least the morgue would be a cool place (in the physical, temperature-related sense of the word).

I’m running on empty, running on fumes, near the end of my rope, teetering on the brink; I’m also running out of figures of speech.  Anyone who knows me well enough will know how unusual that is.

I wish I had something fun or funny or “clever” with which to leave you for this week.  Nothing’s coming to mind, though.  All I can say instead is, as always, I hope you have a good day, and a good weekend, and that you have a good beginning to the month of December.  Major Holiday Time® is coming, but try not to be too stressed about it.  If you can, try to look forward to spending some time with your friends and family.  Try to spend time with people you love and who love you.

I guess if you love yourself, that last bit is easy enough to accomplish, though I wouldn’t know from personal experience.

*Actually, today is the first day to get one for the month whether or not one uses them, but it’s not really a relevant fact for people who don’t.

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Blogs without all remedy should be without regard

Hello and good morning to everyone who is reading this.

And to everyone who is not reading this‒well, nothing, really.  It doesn’t matter what I say to the people not reading this, because, until and unless they actually read this, there will be no way for them to know what I am “saying” to them.

I suppose it’s possible that someone might read this blog post out loud to someone else, in which case the listener can know what I’ve written without literally reading it.  But, if you can consider listening to an audiobook to be “reading” the book‒and you can, though you’re not required to do so‒then that would count very much as the same thing.

It’s a bit like, for instance, the wave-front of the wave equation of a photon that was released from the last scattering surface of the early cosmos, just as the universe became cool enough for electrons and nuclei to join together and stop being plasma.

Imagine such a photon’s wave function progressing through the expanding universe, on and on, its wavelength increasing with the expansion of spacetime, red shifting and red shifting and red shifting.  What if it never interacts with anything else in the cosmos?  What if it’s never absorbed or scattered or reflected, “measured” by nothing but spacetime itself, on into the heat death of the universe, until there’s no longer even anything within its cosmic horizon with which it can interact?  Its wavelength stretches and stretches, perhaps eventually becoming light years in size*.  At some point it’s going to be completely swamped and washed out by the random quantum oscillations of the universe, even if that universe is immeasurably close to absolute zero in temperature.

Imagine such a photon given off by that last scattering surface and then traveling for a trillion years, a googol years, then for so long that a googol years seems as vanishing as a microsecond, never interacting, perhaps, until some version of a Poincare recurrence of the universe happens.  In principle, it might not interact even then***.  In what deep sense can that photon be said to be “light”?

It might even count as some manner of “virtual” photon, though certainly not the kind that is usually meant when that term is used.  It might seem lonely and depressing to be that photon, but we can console ourselves with the fact that, as far as any sensible notion of reality appears, photons have no subjective experience*****.  Even the absurd notions of panpsychism don’t literally imagine that photons are individually, actually conscious, in the sense of having internal “qualia“.

So, if I write something that no one reads, then what I have written cannot matter to those who have not read it.  Of course, in principle, all measurable remnants of even Shakespeare’s writing will someday be read and/or uttered for the very last time, but that’s different‒they will already have interacted immeasurably often before then.  The outcome will be nothingness‒or as near to it as possible‒but in the meantime, much will have happened.

Of course, according to quantum mechanics, quantum information is conserved, so everything from Hamlet to my imagined stray, lonely photon would be, in principle, recoverable.  But that’s a very rarefied “in principle”.

So, for those of you reading this, you really don’t have to worry about what people who have never read nor will ever read it will think about it.  They simply won’t have read it.  Likewise, I don’t have to worry about the reaction to my writing from people who don’t read it.

And, of course, if people “react” without ever having read a thing, which certainly does happen, those opinions are not worth considering.  I don’t need to take thought for some criticism of the Mona Lisa by a person who has never seen even any manner of reproduction or image of the painting.

Nor should I worry about being offended by the chattering of a squirrel in a nearby tree, or the noise arising from leaves stirred by the wind.  It’s merely noise, not too different from those quantum jitters that happen even in a region of the universe that’s as close to absolute zero as it can be.  There is always noise‒though it can become vanishingly close to silence (which sounds quite nice, so to speak).

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I had a long day of walking yesterday‒about 15 miles total distance, and my joints and muscles still feel pretty good, so the shoes are all right******.  I did not walk to the train this morning‒I figure just a bit of recovery time is warranted‒but I may walk this evening.  I hope you have a good day, and that all your metaphorical photons have lots of interesting and enjoyable interactions before they dissipate.

What more could you reasonably ask?

TTFN

Keds cartoon

*That seems an interesting possibility.  What does it mean for a photon to have a wavelength measured in light years**?  If one wavelength takes a year to pass, is it really even a wave anymore?

**Okay, one can literally measure any wavelength in light years if one is so inclined, but for ordinary wavelengths such as those of more usual light, on the scale of nanometers and such, it’s a bit absurd.  One might as well measure the energy output of an LED bulb in megatons of TNT per second.

***Though, if it arrives at another “Big Bang” coming from the other direction in time, as I speculate could be possible, then it’s hard to see it approaching a state of new, lowering entropy from an impending region of inflation and another “last scattering surface” without actually scattering off the dense plasma‒and then our photon would end as it had begun, a quantum event going from the remnant of one Big Bang to another, countless years “later”****

****Though the notion of “later” might be irrelevant, since the directionality of time is determined by the direction of increasing entropy, and that would be inconsistent and reverse itself in my conjectured scenario.  It’s a bit like floating in intergalactic space and saying one is trying to go “higher”.  You can say it if you want, but it’s not really apposite‒it may even be the opposite of apposite.  Higher from one point of view becomes lower from another, even if one is traveling from planet to planet within a solar system.  Likewise for “later” and “earlier” when moving from one inflating region to another…if such a thing can happen, of course.

*****And they also don’t “experience” any passage of time internally…from the point of view of a photon, so to speak, it starts and ends instantaneously.

******That makes me wish I were wearing Keds, so I could honestly say. “The Keds are alright.”