Science

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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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“Sleep”, writing, and studying physics–report for June 5, 2024 AD/CE

Well, I got almost 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night, plus 20 minutes or so of on and off dozing.  While that sucks big-time, it’s better than it’s been lately.  At least I’m not seeing bugs on the walls out the corners of my eyes right now–though I still keep briefly thinking there’s a cat waiting by any door that I open, until I look down and see that there isn’t.

What can you do?  Not much right now, it seems.

Anyway, I produced a decent amount of work this morning.  I wrote 1,373 “block” words and 1,388 “net” words, with a difference then of just barely over 1% no matter which number you take as your denominator.  The total word count of this would-be short story is now 54,327 words, and it is 83 pages long in the format I described yesterday (I think).  It’s definitely more of a novella.

I’ve been doing a bit of reading these last few days, skipping between Sean Carroll’s two Biggest Ideas in the Universe books and the first volume of Feynman’s lectures and Jordan Ellenberg’s Shape*.  As you know, I’ve been trying to teach myself more of the physics on which I missed out by switching majors after my heart surgery, especially General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics/Quantum Field Theory.  Sean Carroll’s** “Biggest Ideas” books are focused on explaining those things for interested laypersons without avoiding the mathematics, but not practicing teaching/practicing how to do the math, so it’s a good beginning.  Of course, in a perfect world, I intend to beyond the overviews and actually to get comfortable with using the mathematics, particularly because I want to understand the cosmological constant at the level of the mathematics of General Relativity, because that’s the only part that I don’t quite get intuitively.  But really, I want to understand and be able to use all of it, and to be able to read all the papers on arXiv and understand them at the level of a professional, like I can with medrXiv and bioRxiv.

I doubt that I will live that long.  But, in the meantime, at least I’m learning new things.

Tomorrow is Thursday, so of course, I will be doing my more standard Thursday blog.  It’s silly to call it a “weekly” blog, since I’ve been writing these reports almost every day; once I’ve started a habit it’s hard for me to deviate from it.  But I don’t plan to write any fiction tomorrow, but instead will just focus on the blog post.  I’ll see you then (so to speak).

*I’ve not yet encountered a better teacher of mathematics than Professor Ellenberg.  He captures and conveys the fun and beauty of math as well as anyone I’ve encountered and better than the vast majority.  He narrates his own audio book versions, too.  If you want to review general mathematical ideas and then general geometric ideas (and their surprising applications) in an accessible and enjoyable way, you could not do much better than reading (and/or listening to) his books.

**Professor Carroll is another great teacher, though he deals with slightly more high-falutin’ stuff than Professor Ellenberg in his books, so the subject matter can be denser.

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By medicine life may be prolong’d, yet death will blog the doctor too.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so—as I mentioned yesterday that I would—I’m writing a standard blog post.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber right now, but I’m using my laptop, and that combination is a first for me, I think.  I know that taking Ubers is probably an unjustifiable expense, and I mean to cut back on them, but this week I’ve had very little useful energy*, and anyway, I’m only too happy just to burn through the quite small amount of money that I have, since I have no reason to save for the future.

I was briefly puzzled as I did the initial “save” for this document, since I save my blogs by date and day of the week, when I saw that last year the 23rd of May fell on a Tuesday, not a Wednesday.  Each year generally shifts the day (of the week) of any given date one day later than the previous year, since a standard year is one day longer than a multiple of 7: [52 x 7 = 364].  I think that the official mathematical term is “modulo” when you’re just looking at the remainder.  And I vaguely recall noting, earlier this year, that the dates this year were one day later.

But, of course, this is a leap year, in which we “add” a day to the year, specifically on February 29th.  So it makes sense:  early in the year, this year’s dates are one weekday later than they were last year, but after the end of February, they are two days later.  I suppose that means that next January and February will be two days later than they were this year, but after that things will revert to one day later.

Hold on to your hats, folks!  If the whole blog post is this exciting, goodness knows how you’re going to be able to stand it.

It’s a bit tricky writing in the back seat here, because my laptop computer doesn’t have illuminated keys.  When the bouncing around of the car throws me off too much, I have to re-find my typing location by trial and error.  Once I do, I don’t really need to be able to see; I know my way around the keyboard pretty much by proprioception.  After all, I’ve been typing at least since I was eleven.

Not to say that I don’t make plenty of typos.  My coordination isn’t all that great, and I often get ahead of myself.  But at least with modern word processors, it’s so easy to correct for errors that it’s not a big deal.

Actually, I suspect that if I’d been forced to keep using my grandmother’s typewriter, which is what I used to start my typing career, and on which I needed to use correction film to erase mistakes, I would probably be a better, or at least cleaner, typist than I am now.  Once word processing programs came into play, there was no longer as much of a price to pay for minor errors, and so there was less pressure to be more accurate.  As I’ve noted many times, everything responds to local pressures and incentives and disincentives.

I warned you that this might be exciting, didn’t I?

I almost didn’t go in to work today.  That was why I let myself get the Uber:  to help me to clear that activation energy barrier.  I am not particularly physically sick, though I feel a bit of a tickle in the back of my throat.  I just didn’t want to go in.  Yesterday, all day, I was extremely tense and stressed out, and the noise was particularly irksome, and I had payroll to do, and I was always just sliding along what felt like the razor edge of a true breakdown or explosion.  Yet no one seems to have noticed.

I banged my head on the wall quite hard at one point, and did several other things to cause myself pain throughout the day.  I don’t want to go into specifics too much; I don’t want people to think I’m a weirdo or something.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

Anyway, I’ve actually just arrived at the office.  I hope my hands and thumbs won’t feel too sore, today.  Yesterday, my thumb bases were painfully tight, and most of the rest of my finger joints were sore and stiff, albeit to a lesser degree than the thumbs.  It made it quite difficult to try to play guitar, so I didn’t do much of that.

Actually, because of the trouble with my hands, and my shoulders, and of course, the ongoing issues with my back and hips and knees and ankles—especially with my back—I decided to buy a huge bottle of Ibuprofen, and I’ve taken some of them starting yesterday afternoon.

I have been “off” Ibuprofen for quite some time, now, though it was my go-to anti-inflammatory for many years.  I started to avoid it when its use was associated on two or three occasions—possibly just by coincidence—with a relatively high occurrence of what I presume were premature atrial contractions, with associated palpitations.  It was nothing terribly severe, of course, but at the time, I wanted to live, so I switched mainly to naproxen.

I also use some aspirin, as well as acetaminophen for headaches and other things that don’t benefit from any suppression of cyclooxygenase.  But, despite its longer action, naproxen has never worked quite as well as ibuprofen seemed to work, though perhaps that’s been confounded by other variables.  It’s hard to do a double-blind test on oneself.

In any case, at this point, I don’t much care if I get palpitations, although if they happen, maybe I’ll find them unpleasant enough that I’ll change my mind.  Frankly, I don’t mind if I have a full-fledged arrhythmia.  Sudden cardiac death due to ventricular fibrillation, for instance, is probably one of the best ways to die.  You basically just faint, since your brain is no longer getting blood flow, and that’s that.  If no one defibrillates you, and if the arrhythmia doesn’t spontaneously resolve, you’re done.

It’s probably not quite as quick a death as being at ground zero of a thermonuclear explosion, and it’s certainly not as quick as being obliterated when the vacuum energy of the universe quantum tunnels down to a lower level**, since that process would spread throughout the cosmos at the speed of light, and no information within spacetime can exceed the speed of light, so it’s fundamentally impossible to know such an event is happening before it arrives.  It’s also impossible to know about it once it arrives, since everything currently existing in our universe, right down to fundamental particles, would by obliterated by the vacuum state decay—again, at the speed of light, which is far faster than the rate at which the nervous system can experience anything.

Unfortunately, even more than the thermonuclear explosion possibility, vacuum decay would involve taking other, “innocent” people along with me, at least some of whom both wish and deserve to continue living.  That seems a bit unethical—or at least rude, which I sometimes think is worse—and anyway, it’s not as though anyone knows how to make it happen.

It’s better to keep things confined to my person.

I guess even a hemorrhagic stroke wouldn’t be too bad, to be honest, and given my tendency to bang my head against the wall when I get too frazzled and stressed, it seems immensely more likely than vacuum state collapse.  I suppose I could even tolerate death by bleeding ulcer, though I really don’t like nausea***.

Probably, though, in the end, I’m going to have to take a more active and deliberate hand in things.  I suppose we’ll see.  It’s hard to work up the courage to face the discomfort and even frank pain associated with most such interventions, but practice makes better, and I already have a fair amount of experience deliberately causing myself pain, as noted above.

That’s enough blog post for now.  I’ve already droned on and on.  My tentative plan is to do some fiction writing tomorrow morning, and if I do (or even if I don’t) I plan to leave a little report about it here.  I am off work this weekend, so I won’t be writing anything on Saturday (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I truly, honestly, and fervently hope that each and every one of you feels better than I do right now, and I mean substantially better.  You probably do; it seems likely that, in the phase space of physical and emotional states, there are many more possibilities in that direction than in the other.  But I could be wrong.

TTFN

Addendum:  While editing, I found that MS Word had underlined a sentence in the draft above, in which I wrote, “I think that the official mathematical term is….”  The editor gave the comment that “expressing opinions with certainty adds formality”.  I don’t think I could possibly disagree more than I do with that sentence. 

Bad advice in editor marked up

 PLEASE DON’T DO THAT, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!  Opinions are opinions.  Expressing them with certainty when you are not certain is tantamount to outright lying, and is a huge problem with human discourse!  I’m ashamed of MS Word for making that suggestion.  What a horrible, horrible recommendation!  What a nightmarish thing to say!

*And yet, my level of tension has been exceptionally high.  That’s a frustrating bit of irony, as I probably don’t need to tell you.

**This is purely a hypothetical possibility.  The vacuum energy of the universe may well be at its lowest/ground state, though it is patently not quite zero.  If it were, cosmic expansion would not be accelerating.  Indeed, I often say that cosmic inflation is happening now, based on all the data we have.  That’s what “dark energy” is doing, albeit at a slower rate than what is proposed to have happened 13.7 billion years ago.

***Weird, right?  I don’t like nausea?  How unusual!

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Numbers of words and words of thoughts and thoughts of consciousnesses

Since I came up with the idea and mentioned it in my blog on Saturday, I could not fail to put the idea into practice of keeping count of both the number of words in the new “block” of fiction writing I did today and to keep track of the change in the total word count, to compare them.  This was especially true since, on rereading what I had written on Saturday, I realized that I had started a conversation between two characters rather abruptly, and so I added in a more natural beginning to that interaction while I was editing.

This didn’t have as big an impact as it might have, since I also pruned things slightly while rereading.  In any case, I kept track of the net total word change and the word count in the new block of writing, and those numbers are:  1,228 words in the new block written today, but a net increase in word count of 1,264.

I don’t know how representative this is of the typical disparity, but it’s less than a 3% difference whether you use the larger or the smaller number as your denominator, so it’s not huge.  Still, I’ll probably keep this up, at least for a while.

After I had finished writing and gotten up to get ready to get off the train, I had a weird train (ha ha) of thought that led from me thinking about the fact that one can no longer readily stream series A through I of the British show QI in the US, to how I had needed to order the DVDs for those seasons through Amazon UK, which I did quite some time ago.  This led me to think about the shipping process, and how seamless and rapid it had been–it was not as fast as ordering something that’s sourced locally, but nevertheless it was impressively rapid.

And I thought of the various people involved, and how not one of them had been aware of the whole process from beginning to end, and indeed, possibly not one of them had thought about what was being sent and to where.  Each part of the process was more or less automated, or at least occurred “locally”, in a phase-space sense*.  And yet, the whole has become a process that takes place with remarkable efficiency, despite no member of the chain of the process really knowing too much beyond their own part of the job.

And I thought, the whole economy is like this, locally, nationally, and globally.  Indeed, all of civilization is like this; everyone simply acts in response to local forces and events and incentives and disincentives, and the process turns into a self-sustained, much larger entity that has not been created by anyone, and is certainly not run by anyone (any more than a bee hive or an ant hill is “run” by the queen insect).  Nor should it be, since no human mind is capable even of grasping very precisely and in detail anything beyond a tiny part of the thing itself–this is probably part of why “planned economies” always fail, and until there is a super-intelligent AI (and perhaps even then) they always will.  It’s like trying to put one single nerve cell in charge of the entire human brain and body.  It simply doesn’t have the capacity to do such a thing.  When one nerve cell’s activity spreads with relatively little impediment through the brain, you get what we call a seizure.

Anyway, all that led me to thinking about whether it would ever be possible for a civilization, in the aggregate, to become truly sentient and self-aware.  I don’t mean that the members are self-aware; obviously they are already (at least some of them, and to varying degrees).  I mean, could the civilization as a whole develop self-awareness, develop what the philosophers of mind call “qualia“.

Our civilization is probably far too small to instantiate such a thing, currently.  There are after all “only” about 8 billion humans on Earth, compared to, for instance, the roughly hundred billion neurons in each individual human brain (mileage may vary) and tens of trillions of cells in an entire human body.  But perhaps, someday, if a civilization becomes large enough and remains interconnected enough, the lights may come on, so to speak–actually it would probably be a gradual process, rather like those European, “energy-saving” lights; it’s unlikely to be an instantaneous change.  But it could, in principle, happen.

Of course, those who espouse the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness™, might say that it could never happen, that qualia, that true consciousness requires some other ingredient or process.  I’ve never encountered an argument from any of them that impresses me, though.  Even Roger Penrose’s ideas about quantum mechanical processes being necessary for human consciousness–in denial of the Church-Turing Thesis and related ideas of universal computation–seems to me to be pure motivated reasoning, albeit by one of the great minds of the modern world, so it’s still worth exploring his ideas.  Even when he’s wrong, Penrose’s thought is more fruitful than that of the vast majority of people when they right, yours truly included.

I’ve arrived at no conclusions, of course.  It was just an interesting mental diversion that I thought I would share with you readers, since I have no one else with whom to share such things.  If any of you have any thoughts or ideas about them, please feel free to leave a comment below, here on my blog proper, not on other social media–I would prefer a forum in which other people who read comments on my blog could comment, too, and that’s not likely to happen on Facebook or on “the site formerly known as Twitter”.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I’m not going to edit this much before posting, so apologies if there is any persistently awkward wording or if there are any unnoticed typos.  Have a good “Not Memorial Day” day**.

*Of course, everything in the universe behaves locally–even quantum entanglement is “local” in a very specific sense.  Even gravity is local–the local gravitational “field” responds to the state of the nearby gravitational field, not literally to distant objects, which is part of why gravity can “escape” from black holes.  The larger-scale laws of nature emerge “spontaneously” from all these tiny, local interactions, or so it seems based on the best information I have.

**I mistakenly thought today was going to be Memorial Day because people at work kept talking as if it were.  However, that holiday is next Monday.  Sorry if I confused anyone, and thank you to my cousin for pointing it out to me.

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The great blog itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and even though I’ve been writing blog posts nearly all this week so far—since I haven’t been writing fiction—this is now my more “traditional” blog post for the week.

I apologize for not writing fiction yesterday and the day before.  I’ve been feeling terrible and horrible and no good and very bad and all that other stuff.  My coworker is still out, though he’ll probably be back sometime today, or possibly tomorrow at the latest, and anyway, that’s not the main problem.  The main problem is that I have been just terribly tense and anxious and have had terrible nights’ sleep even for me, despite trying to sedate myself and optimize my bedtime habits and so on.

Last night I got almost six hours of sleep, which for me is quite good, though it doesn’t feel close to enough.  It would be one thing if I slept six hours and awoke feeling refreshed and healthy; then I would know that I had gotten enough sleep, that six hours was just how much sleep my body needed.

Alas, things are not that simple.  My body’s optimal sleep time is probably pretty typical at around eight hours, but that particular “pressure” in the system is countered by whatever the various sources are of tension and stress and pain and depression.  When the sleep need gets too strong, it overpowers those other vectors, but as soon as it dips below some threshold, those other vectors dominate enough to push me into unpleasant wakefulness again.

I can literally remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep; I’ve probably mentioned it here, before.  I don’t know the specific date, but it was in the mid-1990s*.  (I’m being completely serious about this—as serious as a bloodcurdling scream for help.)

Last night, I walked about three-fifths of the way back from the train station in the evening—about three miles.  It was quite warm out, certainly in the high 80s, so I think I sweated a lot.  At least that meant I didn’t need to wake up to use the bathroom!  Also, I was physically fatigued enough to rest, and I’d been careful to try to balance my walking so that my left knee wasn’t acting up, which seems to have worked reasonably well for the time being.

I know that’s all very boring.  I just don’t have anyone else to whom to talk about these things, so I share them with all of you.  Aren’t you lucky?  I guess you can always just skim over the boring stuff.  I’m not sure how it is that we can tell what’s going to be boring before we literally read it, but people do seem able to do that, and it works.  I’ve done it myself.

I apologize for not writing any fiction since Monday morning.  I don’t know if any of you were angry at me for that, but I feel that I owe an apology.  I guess I really owe an apology for being a big annoyance and a downer, but I don’t know what to do to change those things.

I don’t want to be a blind optimist, of course.  I want to understand the world as clearly as I can, as objectively as I can, and as deeply and broadly as I can.  Maybe there’s no way to do that without being tense and depressive.  The universe is, after all, vast beyond intuitive understanding, and the realms at which fundamental physics applies are tiny and intricate, also beyond ready intuitive understanding, and time is old in the past and so much longer in the future than a person with a finite lifespan can truly take on board.

But I don’t think that must be despair-inducing.  I’m much more stressed out by how little humans seem even to contemplate how small they are, both individually and collectively, than I am by my own smallness.  As I learn more about how the world really works at deep levels, I don’t feel frightened or overwhelmed by it, like some Lovecraft protagonist who goes mad when confronted with the Great Old Ones or whatever.  I feel that I have grown larger—not literally, of course, but the phase space in which my mind exists takes more and more of reality into itself, and it’s really quite cool, if that’s the right word.

I think at least one thing that makes me feel despair is that so few other people seem even to want to understand the greater universe in any depth or breadth.  They would much rather imagine that the universe is very small and brief, as long as they are somewhere near the center of it.

But of course, to paraphrase Gandalf, they can shut themselves into their tiny little world, but they cannot shut the universe out.  And this in turn invokes not merely the old saw that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed (for indeed, one cannot do anything but obey nature).  But I would say, far more strongly, that nature, to be survived—even to have a chance of being survived—must be understood as well as possible.

If you don’t know the rules of chess, you’re unlikely to be able to win a game.  Likewise with any other game, including even simple video games.  But those games have rules that humans invented.  The rules of nature have to be probed and unlocked and discovered, and they are much more fine-grained and large and complex than any human-made game could be.  They must be so, for the entire human world is but a tiny little part of that game, one of the innumerable things it allows to come into being.

Oh, well.  What are you going to do?

I guess you’re going to write a blog about it, and in the meantime, try to learn as much about the world as you can, because it is interesting at many levels.  And, of course, you can write a bit of fiction, to which I’ll try to return tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, I hope the vast majority of you are getting better rest than I have been getting.  I hope you have a very good day.  And I hope you have friends and family with whom to spend your finite and precious time.

TTFN

*I remember waking up feeling absolutely refreshed, and though I was too young to think about feeling “ten years younger”, I did feel more alive than I had in some time, almost as if I’d gotten superpowers**.  I’ve known people who seem almost addicted to sleep, and if that’s how they tend to feel when they’ve slept, I can hardly blame them.

**Speaking of which, I have a stupid, joke superhero idea that I’ve been too embarrassed to share with anyone in person (I’m sure you’ll understand why):  “Bitten by a radioactive wildebeest, Anthony Edward Lopez finds himself with slightly-greater-than-human powers of strength and speed.  Deciding to use his new powers to fight crime, he becomes:  Gnu-man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complexity theory is still a very young science.

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

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

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

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

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

TTFN

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

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

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

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

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The moon may be a harsh mistress, but her eyes are nothing like the sun

I was going to write this post on my laptop computer, since I had brought it with me back from the office on Friday, thinking to write fiction this morning.  However, I am waiting for fares to go down to normal levels for Uber or Lyft this morning, so while I wait, I figured I might as well write this post on my smartphone.  It’s inconvenient to write on the laptop computer while waiting at the house, because to do so I need to set up a TV tray table type thing.  That’s not hard, of course, but it’s still more effort than I mean to put forth for something that will hopefully only entail a few minutes’ delay.

I should just have gotten up when I was awake‒well, okay, not when I was first awake.  There would be no point in going to the office in the literal middle of the night.  But if I had gone to the Tri-Rail station early enough, I might have gotten on the 4:20 train.  Still, who knows?  Maybe Uber rates were twice as high as usual even then.  I don’t know why the ride services are so busy at this hour on a Monday morning.

Whatever it is, I don’t see how it could have anything to do with the eclipse that will be coming today.  That phenomenon is cutting a line from the southwest to the northeast across the country, including up by my sister’s house.  I won’t be seeing it, of course, since I’m down here in south Florida, and there won’t be another opportunity to watch one in my lifetime from anywhere readily accessible to me.

I could have gone; I was invited to visit by my sister.  The people at work thought I should go.  But when I started looking into booking either buses or trains or planes‒even though I did renew my state ID to make things easier‒I felt tension bordering on dread at the prospect of traveling in any of those ways.  So I didn’t go.  And here I am.

***

Ride rates have now dropped to normal, and I’m outside waiting for my Uber.  I was hoping to be able to ride my bike to the train station; I changed up my upper body workout a bit last week, and it felt different enough that I thought I might be able to use the bike without issue.  I rode it a decent distance on Saturday, with minimal trouble, though I felt a bit stiff overnight.  Then I rode it some more yesterday, and while riding I felt fine.  I even felt rather good, if slightly breathless.  But then, overnight, the stiffness and splinting and spasms started up again, so I fear that’s just not going to work.  I also have soreness in my right Achilles tendon and significant pain in my left knee, and my left side feels like it’s been infused with hot metal.

***

I’m at the train station now, still in pain (of course) and seated on the ground because I was too late because of the Uber delays to get a good seat where I prefer to sit.  It’s annoying, but I guess I would have been even later if I had ridden my bicycle.  Then again, at least I would have had the good feeling of having gotten some exercise.

Oh, well.  I don’t know whom I think I’m fooling.  I don’t expect to get back in good shape any time before I die.  Every time I try to exercise (so far) it screws me up with worsening of my chronic pain.  I wish I could just shut the pain off, but biology is not readily amenable to compromises in that area.  Pain, like fear, is too essential.  All things that suppress either of them‒even when the pain and/or fear have become thoroughly dysfunctional‒cause terrible side effects.

I can’t go on much longer like this.  It’s almost too bad that the solar eclipse is not some harbinger of disaster, but of course, it is not.  It’s merely a consequence of the geometry of three bodies whose mutual orbits lie nearly in the same plane.  If the moon’s orbital plane were identical to the Earth’s around the sun, there would be a lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse with each orbit of the moon, and predicting such things would have been far less impressive to the native peoples of Hispaniola when Columbus used his knowledge thereof to dupe them into going along with his plans.

Some modern people seem barely less credulous, despite being avid users of the Internet and World Wide Web.  Why, the leading independent candidate for president is full of ideas so absurd that they would have been rejected as plot points in the later seasons of the X-files.  If you caught him at the right time, you could probably convince him that early vaccines had been used to mind-control him and that he had assassinated both his uncle and his father.

Sorry.  I’m grumpy.  My apologies.  I’m in a lot of pain‒more so than usual‒and of course my sleep has been horrible, though at least I napped some over the weekend.  I also replaced the shower-head in the bathroom, but that’s not very impressive, and I had the cable people out to replace the modem for the Wi-Fi, but though that was absurdly nerve-wracking, it’s hardly a big accomplishment.

I feel horrible and rotten and disgusting.  I wouldn’t give myself 5 stars even on an Uber or Lyft scale (in which, if someone doesn’t get 5 stars the app asks you what went wrong, but only gives you pre-programmed, simplistic options for explanation, eliminating the whole point of a 5 star rating system‒3 stars should be the average, but instead it’s something like 4.9).  I wouldn’t give myself an A even on the Yale grading scale (in which, it seems, the vast majority of students get As in the vast majority of their classes‒again, destroying the whole point of the grading system and eliminating any incentives to excel).

Maybe I should write a whole post about that issue, how (among other things) grade inflation makes the prestige of elite educational institutions evaporate, since in the real world, business is competitive, and a 4.0 from a school where everyone gets a 4.0 and there is no merit-based admission will gradually (but not necessarily slowly) come to be not worth the virtual paper on which it is written.

Again, I’m sorry.  I really don’t feel well at all, and I don’t feel good at all, either*.  I hope you all feel significantly better than I do, physically, emotionally, morally and otherwise.  I’m sure you all deserve it more than I do, though “deserves” is for the most part a vacuous term.

I hope you all have a very good day.  If you get a chance, and are in its path, observe the eclipse (but don’t do it directly, not with unprotected eyes).  It’s not an especially impressive cosmic phenomenon, but it’s still pretty cool.  It’s particularly cool that the human race understands the universe well enough that these phenomena, which confused our ancestors so mightily, are almost banal to us, and we can predict and plot them out centuries in advance.

It’s particularly uncool that despite how much is known and understood, there are people who live in the modern world and who constantly use devices that rely on quantum field theory and general relativity yet still think a solar eclipse might be some supernatural sign.

Heavy sigh.  What can you do?  The world is tragically comical and comically tragic.  It’s probably not worth the effort.  And I’m darn near sure that I am not.

*Yes, I mean two different things by those two words.

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

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

However…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Would YOU eat Zel’dovich pancakes for breakfast?

It’s Tuesday, and I’m writing another blog post rather than throwing some kind of curve ball and doing my fiction writing today, since I wrote a blog post yesterday, when I had scheduled myself to write some fiction.  I don’t know if that counts as a double curve ball or as a capitulation to a simple, over-the-plate, none-too-fast soft pitch.  It’s probably the latter, but I suppose there is no absolute right answer, and the judgment would depend upon one’s point of view.

I’ve realized that, contrary to what I wrote yesterday‒to what I honestly thought was the case‒I did not bring my small laptop computer with me when I left the office on Thursday.  I had unplugged it with the intention to pack it, but then I had left without it.  I can’t recall ever having done that before.  It goes to show just how crappy I felt on Thursday, I guess.

I really want to keep writing fiction.  It would be a shame to take this new story that I’ve well begun, with over 10,000 words written so far, and let it just fall by the wayside.  Then again, I’ve left The Dark Fairy and the Desperado hanging, and more egregiously, I’ve left Outlaw’s Mind hanging, so it’s not as though there is no precedent.  And, of course, in the past I’ve left stories incomplete many, many times.  But it seems particularly sad, now that I’ve published 5 novels and 2 collections of “short” stories, to fall back into that pattern.

But I need to find a way to be able to work fiction writing into my daily routines without messing up habits that have become somewhat compulsory for me.  I’ve tried to find ways to block out the noise in the office, so far without much success.  Yesterday I bought a rather inexpensive pair of noise-canceling headphones.  They didn’t do that good a job at the noise canceling; they reduced it a bit, but it was still there, though if I put in earplugs as well and then also played a YouTube video about field theories and similar stuff, if helped, but that is certainly not a combination of measures I could take while trying to write fiction.

I’m of two minds (at least) about the headphones.  I’m glad I didn’t spend very much on them, since they don’t turn out to be as effective as my more old-fashioned, gun-range and airport style ear defenders (when combined with ear plugs).  They can also play music or the sound from videos, but I didn’t get them for that.  I already have things that can do that.  But I wonder if more expensive ones would do any better.

It’s a shame that no high-powered movie executive has read any of my books or stories and approached me to option them for movies or shows or anything, but it’s obviously not surprising.  I’m terrible at self-promotion, more by temperament than merely due to lack of skill.  This blog is my closest approach to self-promotion, and I spend most of my time here spewing my random and often depressed and depressing thoughts in some wishful, pseudo-Freudian free association kind of exercise.

Of course, it’s about as useful to me as Freudian psychoanalysis* ever has been clinically demonstrated to be for anyone, which is to say, very little, if at all.  Nevertheless‒and also like psychoanalysis for many of its patients‒it has been habit forming, and I feel awkward and disjointed without it.

Also, as I noted yesterday, it’s the only means by which I keep contact with anyone other than my sister in the world outside of the office.  I’ve really become a shell of my former self, and the fact that there is physically more of me now than there has ever been before only makes that more biting, the irony enhancing the contrast with the past, when I used to relieve suffering and save lives and be beneficial to the world.

Ah, well.  From a cosmic perspective, all such benefits will probably be transitory, or effectively be nonexistent.

Which reminds me:  yesterday I was looking at the abstracts of some recent papers on “quantum cosmology” uploaded onto arXiv, the preprint server.  Obviously, most of these subjects were well beyond my expertise truly to be able to follow, but I get the concepts involved in most of them.  Also, exposure to the mathematical formalism when I don’t know how to manipulate it often makes it easier to understand later, as there is familiarity and applicability that helps add to the more complete picture I gradually build in my mind about such things.

This has happened to me more than once in the past.  I don’t learn by rote, I learn by building mental models and maps and structures that link areas of knowledge and understanding together.  So, I don’t learn quickly, but I learn deeply and durably.  I think this is a much better way to go.

Anyway, that’s tangential.  What was amusing is, I read about a paper involving some deSitter** models of inflation in a universe which (if I recall the abstract correctly) was matter-dominated in early moments and so had no uniform pressure (unlike radiation-dominated situations, which, if I’m remembering correctly, is pressure intensive and homogeneous, and is how our early universe probably was).  In such models, if I understood the point correctly, you could find more noteworthy inhomogeneities than seen in radiation-dominated phases, which makes sense, since the radiation pressure works against gravitational collapse.

So, the model discussed would be unlike our universe, in which the CMB demonstrates extreme homogeneity, down to a few parts in a hundred thousand, even from one edge of the cosmic horizon to the opposite edge, encompassing regions that could never possibly have been in any form of direct causal contact at least since the hypothetical time of inflation.  The light from each side has only just now reached us, and so is only halfway across to the other side, and may well never reach it if the universe expands quickly enough.  Yet the temperatures are the same to a few parts in a hundred thousand, which is probably more than can be said about the room you’re sitting in now.

One type of this theoretical homogeneity in the model in the abstract had apparently been previously described as a “Zel’dovich pancake”.  This is apparently nothing new (first described in the 1970s), but is a really amusing way to think of a cosmic structure, and I kind of want to look into it and see what it describes, to see if I can understand, at least superficially, the math behind it.

Wow, that was a whole ‘nother tangent of much greater departure than before.  I think I’ll call that good for now for this day’s blog.  I’m kind of all over the place, and if I’m not too careful, I might undergo decoherence and split into multiple versions of myself.  That seems all too possible, since I’ve never been naturally inclined to very impressive coherence in the first place.

I will probably be writing here tomorrow.

*Not to be confused with the more general term “psychotherapy”, which can be useful depending on the type of therapy and the person receiving it.  CBT is one of the most effective of these; it didn’t work all that well for me, but I’m annoying and perverse, so that’s no surprise.

**DeSitter spacetimes are just spacetimes with positive cosmological constants‒like our universe, with its apparent “dark energy”‒which will tend to drive accelerating expansion.  The whole “holographic universe” concept was motivated, or perhaps inspired, partly by the Bekenstein-Hawking recognition that the maximal entropy of any region of spacetime is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of that region.  Any greater entropy in the region would add to the mass of the black hole associated with that horizon, and so would make the horizon larger; thus that is the maximal entropy for that initial region.  QED (Quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics) if you will.  The holographic principle regarding a universe has only ever been worked out for anti-deSitter spaces, with negative cosmological constants, which we know is not the case for the universe in which we live because…well, because we’re alive, and those spacetimes tend to collapse rapidly.

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Surprise! It’s a Monday morning blog post

It’s Monday, March 25th‒only 9 more shopping months remain until Christmas‒and I’m writing a blog post today (on my smartphone) instead of working on my short story, even though I brought my laptop with me when I last left the office.  I left (slightly) early on Thursday, and did not go in on Friday, because I was feeling quite ill.  I don’t know exactly what the nature of the illness was/is, but it was probably a respiratory virus.  I’m mostly over it now.

I’m still at the house while beginning this, because I’m waiting for Uber/Lyft rates to come down to reasonable levels before I accept one.  It should not cost all that much to get a ride less than 5 miles away, especially when I tip generously*.  I also have a bus pass available, which is quite a bit cheaper, but that would take quite a bit longer, whether I use it to get to the train or all the way to the office.  So, I’m not going to do that today, probably, but I may do so in the near future (Also, there are no bathrooms on the buses, but there are ones on the trains; this, for me, can be a serious concern).

I decided to write a post today mainly because I feel that I’m releasing most of my connection, such as it is, to the larger world by writing fewer posts.  Certainly, my readership has declined by a significant percent per post already.  Of course, I doubt that more than a handful of people would notice that I was gone even if I stopped completely.  I don’t know if I’ll keep this up or not, but I don’t think I can keep going back and forth.  I have to have some kind of mental momentum/inertia** to keep doing one thing; bouncing from one to another doesn’t seem to work well for me.

Obviously I would like to keep writing my stories, but if I go back to that 4 to 5 days (or more) per week, I would lose practically all sense of connection with the outside world other than weekly calls with my sister.  I like those weekly calls, of course, but at least when I write my blog posts, I know that a dozen or two people are, in principle, aware of my existence, and at least some of them actually read my stuff.

I guess that’s the sort of immediate feedback with activation of dopaminergic centers of the brain (the nucleus accumbens and related structures) upon which social media and similar situations depend, and of which they take advantage.  But it is (almost) all that I have, really, so that’s that.  It’s not as though I have any friends.

My sister lives in the path of the upcoming solar eclipse (which doesn’t narrow her location down by much, so I don’t think I’m being indiscreet for saying so), and she invited me to come visit to see it.  I really was going to try; I renewed my state ID to make travel easier, and I looked into bus and train and airfare, and they all seemed not too unreasonably expensive (unless you want a private compartment on a train, which would be cool, but would be ridiculously costly).  Unfortunately, I don’t think I can do it.  The prospect of traveling in cramped quarters for even the length of a plane ride seems just too unpleasant to tolerate.

I’m sorry about it; it would be great to see my sister and neat to experience a solar eclipse.  But the neatness thereof would not outweigh the prospect of the trip.  It’s pretty pathetic, I know, but then I don’t think I’ve ever specifically claimed that I was not pathetic.  My frequent readers will probably agree that I have been wise not to so claim.

I’m not sure what to do about this writing situation.  I sometimes consider just writing my fiction and maybe trying to do voice recordings a little later in the day, then editing and posting those as YouTube videos and embedding those as posts here.  I had reasonably good positive feedback when I did that before, but I don’t know how long it would last.  Also, I don’t know if I would lose people who prefer to read rather than to listen to a “video”, what I call an audio blog.

It’s probably all pointless, anyway.  I don’t think many people will probably ever read my work, fiction or nonfiction, or listen to my talk or my songs.  Likewise, though I have technically done a small part to add to the scientific knowledge of humanity, specifically relating to gliotoxin***, I’m not likely ever to make any contributions to quantum field theory or particle physics or cosmology, because while I think I am capable of contributing to them, there’s too much catch-up necessary, and I am limited more in energy even than in time‒there’s too much to which I have to adapt myself from day to day, and that burns my willpower up like nobody’s business.

It’s not as though I can just stop working.  At the beginning of a week, I can find the energy to start reading texts and other things relating to the pertinent fields (not just quantum ones, ha ha), but by the end of any given Monday, I am already so mentally drained that, come Tuesday, I don’t usually crack a single text.

I am, regrettably, not independently wealthy, so I can’t just go off and study.  I am also not mentally suited to seeking out and applying to graduate programs in appropriate fields, nor would I know quite where to begin.  I’m also pretty old to start such a thing, though I consider that less of a concern.  Mainly it’s just an “executive function” issue, as they say.  Also, I don’t think I could in good conscience accept loans or grant money for education.  I don’t think I’m a good risk; I’m too likely to kill myself sometime before finishing any academic program.

It’s not impossible for an autodidact to achieve at least some things‒after all, everyone is really self-taught, since it’s not as though anyone can do the learning for someone else.  They can only point the way; everyone has to walk the path individually.

I’m very tired, though.  If I could sleep decently, it would be easier, I think, but maybe I’m wrong.  Like the fella once said, it would be a real kick in the head for me to develop good sleep and find that I didn’t feel any better, would it not?

It’s a test I’m unlikely to encounter.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I expect I’ll write another post tomorrow.  Have a good day.

*Of course, like restaurant owners in America, Uber et al rely on tips to make up a good portion of their drivers’ pay; that way they can keep a bigger chunk of the fees for themselves and pay less out of their own pockets.  I would say they should in good conscience do otherwise, but they’re in something like a Nash equilibrium (as are all the various American restaurateurs) in that if they change their practices, they will be outcompeted by others who do not, and no one will be helped overall.  It’s one of those situations in which true collective action or legislation would be required to correct the inadequacy.

**Remember, inertia doesn’t just refer to an object’s tendency to remain at rest, but also to its tendency to continue moving in a straight line (or at least along a geodesic) at a constant velocity.

***Don’t bother looking into it.  It’s esoteric and not terribly interesting for those not working in mycology.