Science Fiction

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Once again, no semi-Shakespearean title this week

Hello and good morning.

I have no idea about what to write today.  Yesterday’s rather long post took off from an initial notion that’s been with me for a long time*, with some tangents in between and so on.  The footnote about the doubling of bacteria took a bit of extra effort once I got to the office‒not much, though, since I was able quickly to look up** the size of a typical bacterium on Google, and the calculations were just “plug and chug”.

Thankfully, I already knew the dimensions of the other bits of trivia, like the size of the visible universe in light-years and the length of a light-year, though on my first round of calculations I got something very off with the volume of the visible universe.  I think I must’ve squared rather than cubed at some point, because it was much too small, and when I did my editing, I thought “that can’t be right”, and I redid the figuring.  Then, because of the mistake, I checked that result against Google/Wikipedia, and my correction was, at least, correct.

There, that’s a little discussion on “how the sausage gets made” so to speak.

That’s a curious expression, don’t you think?  Apparently, people prefer not to see how actual sausages get made.  I’m not quite sure why that’s the case, though.  Are people under some delusion that sausages are not made from various and sundry animal parts, at least some of which would not look as pretty as a nice steak if you served them “as they were” on a plate in a restaurant?

Sausages are meat.  They are parts of dead animals, ground up and stuffed together into some form of outer “skin”.  When done right, they are delicious.  This is because humans are opportunistic omnivores with a strong penchant for carnivory, and meat is a concentrated source of nutrients, the sort our ancestors‒the ones that survived to pass on their genes, anyway‒liked to eat because it was very beneficial.

That was a weird digression.  I’ll just say that, if you eat meat‒as I do‒and you are afraid to see how sausages are made, I don’t understand how you think.  I’m not suggesting that you ought to make your own sausages; division of labor is a terrifically useful thing, and makes all of civilization more efficient and indeed possible.  But to be in denial about sausages is a bit like being in denial about landfills and sewers, both of which are real and, for now at least, necessary.

I don’t know why I’m going on about this.  No one but my own brain raised the subject.  For all I know, every one of my readers has seen sausage being made (and seen waste treatment facilities and landfills) and has been perfectly fine and sensible about it.  Or, perhaps, they’re all vegans***.  Or perhaps they’re a mixture.

More likely, most of my readers are indeed opportunistic omnivores.  That seems a very sensible way for an animal to be.  I’ve read or heard of science fiction authors (and possibly even scientists) who speculate that most intelligent life forms would be omnivores.  There’s certainly some potential logic and reason there, but I suspect that mostly it’s projection and bias.  Certainly it is big speculation.

There are very good reasons to suspect that most if not all life will be largely carbon-based, due to carbon’s uniquely profligate chemistry and its near-ubiquity in the universe; those are matters of largely unambiguous physics and chemistry.  But as for the rest, our speculations are largely unguided and thus unconstrained, and we should be careful about even preliminary thoughts, let alone conclusions.

Of course, science fiction writers are free to speculate and invent.  That’s the job.  And within their created universes, they are the Gods.  But it’s important to know the difference between fiction and reality.  Reality is a much harsher taskmaster than fiction, and in reality, the wages of “sin” really are often death.

I think my own wages of that type are long overdue, to be honest.  I keep putting in claims, but HR and Payroll are, apparently, very inefficient.

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Okay, sorry about the little pause, there; maybe you didn’t notice it, since it happened in a different time plane than the one in which you are reading, but it was there, don’t doubt that.  My train seems to be running late, but there has been no announcement about it, and it doesn’t even show up on the Tri-Rail tracker site, though the subsequent two trains do, and are listed as “on time”.  Why should they not be on time?  They’re due a half an hour and an hour from now, respectively.

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There was another pause, there, just now, as I thought I saw the first glimmer of the headlights of “my” train, but alas, it was not so.  I don’t know what I’m going to do if it’s much later.  Trains get more crowded when they’re late and I hate that.  Maybe I’ll just get an Uber.  Maybe I should just go back to the house.  Possibly I should just lie on the tracks “in protest”.  After all, if the trains are going to be late and/or canceled anyway, I might as well give them a strong reason.

***

I have left the train station and am now en route to the office in an Uber.  The train showed no signs of arriving, and there was neither an announcement overhead nor any info online.  The Tri-Rail system used to be much better run.  It seems to be going to the dogs, lately.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  To paraphrase Adele, I wish nothing but the best for you all.

TTFN

*Another, unrelated one is, how did Princess Leia know to call Han Solo “Flyboy” when she said “Into the garbage chute, Flyboy!” in the original Star Wars movie?  She had not been told he was a pilot.  Was this an early hint of her natural ability with the Force?  Or was it, rather, just George Lucas accidentally giving her a line based on a fact he knew, but that her character would not?

**Google Docs tried to prompt me to split the infinitive and write “to quickly look up” rather than “quickly to look up”, which is what I wrote.  I hate such anti-grammatical suggestion-making!

***It might interest you to know, in loose relation to the present topic, that members of the dominant intelligent species in the star system Vega are obligate carnivores.  So, ironically, real Vegans only eat meat****.

****Of course, that’s all just a bit of sci-fi that I composed.  But wouldn’t it be hilarious if it were so?  I remember the first time I ever saw or heard someone use the term “vegan”.  It was in Bloom County, said by Steve Dallas, after he got his brain flipped by aliens, making his personality the opposite of what it previously had been.  I was already astronomically literate enough to know about Vega, and I wondered what the hell the character (and other, real people) meant when he/they wrote that they were “vegans”.  At first, I thought it might have something to do with astrology; the people involved seemed to fit that mold a lot of the time.

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Audio blog for Friday on anhedonia, fatigue, declining entertainment franchises and Newtonian and Einsteinian physics

This is an oddly meandering audio blog that I made this morning, having little desire to write much, and it goes from my troubles with depression and lessening interest in any former source of joy to the fact that even Star Wars and Marvel franchises are going downhill (with speculation about the causes) on to physics–first Newtonian then Special and General Relativity, and ponderings about the nature of near-light-speed travel and its potential effects when a spaceship passes the Schwarzschild radius in the direction of its motion (and even a tiny dabble into cosmic strings, which are not to be mistaken for the “superstrings” of string theory/M theory).  I find no firm conclusions, but maybe it’s mildly interesting somewhere.  It’s longer than I expected it to be, but hopefully not too long.

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On Black Friday, call not for A doctor but for THE Doctor

Well, it’s Friday, and—just to remind everyone outside the US why there was a gap in posting—it was Thanksgiving yesterday.  I’ve said it before, I think, though perhaps not on my blog, but Thanksgiving is possibly the most broadly observed American holiday nowadays, more so than anything but (perhaps) New Year’s Day.  The latter is observed largely because so many people have been up quite late, and many of them have been drinking rather more heavily than they would usually do.  Whereas with Thanksgiving, I suspect it’s so widely observed because it’s an almost purely American holiday—Canada has their Thanksgiving in October—and though it’s very secular in nature, it has an almost religious feel.  After all, many religions do say a lot about thankfulness, and it probably is a good mindset to have, in general.

Even the pizza places and Chinese restaurants were closed yesterday; at least all the ones near me were closed.  I tried to order some Chinese or some pizza, or other kinds of delivery food, and I didn’t have any luck with any of my usual suspects, nor was a wider-spread search any better.  Thankfully, most of the convenience stores and gas stations were open, so I was able to get some snacks and a few pre-packaged sandwiches.

I was also able to buy some wine, though that was probably not great for me.  It doesn’t matter much, though.  I don’t really get the urge to drink alcohol very often; I enjoy talking about drinking far more than I enjoy drinking.  It’s useful enough if I’m forced to socialize, of course, but when I’m by myself (which is pretty much all the time, now) it mainly serves as an attempt to become numb.  It did that yesterday somewhat, but it’s not really a pleasant thing.  A nice glass of good wine can taste nice with a good meal, but that was not applicable here.

Anyway, now it’s Black Friday, a name that used to be just a tongue-in-cheek, unofficial nickname for the day after Thanksgiving, because so many people would rush out to begin Christmas shopping since they had the day off anyway.  Now it’s more or less an official shopping spree “holiday” of sorts, and I think it’s even spread as far as the UK, though there is no preceding holiday, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Back in the old days, most American places of employment other than retailers were closed for the whole four-day weekend associated with Thanksgiving.  Nowadays, I don’t think as many places take Friday off.  Although, given that I’m currently the only person waiting on the northbound side of the station and it’s only ten minutes until the train is due, maybe a lot of people do take today off.  It’s probably just as well that I do not have the day off, since I would have nothing to do in my downtime.

Yesterday was also, by the way, the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who*.  I spent a good portion of my day watching Doctor Who related videos on YouTube.  The first 60th Anniversary special—there are actually going to be a total of three of them—airs tomorrow.  Supposedly, Disney Plus will be streaming it starting at 1:30 pm Eastern time, which is the same literal time—6:30 pm for them—that it will be airing on the BBC.  Of course, those who follow the show know that, at the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run, to the surprise of almost everyone, instead of regenerating into Ncuti Gatwa, she became David Tennant, i.e. the former 10th, now 14th Doctor.  He’s only going to be there for the specials though, and will then regenerate into the 15th Doctor, who will be played by Ncuti Gatwa.

Those of you who don’t know or care about Doctor Who will no doubt want to skip the previous paragraph.  However, since you’re here now, you’ve probably already read the previous paragraph, so it’s too late to make that decision.  You’d have to have some kind of…some kind of…time machine to be able to go back now, but it still wouldn’t help much, because in order to know you need to skip the paragraph, you’d have to know what the paragraph was about, and unless you have someone out there to warn you, there’s no way for you to know without reading it.

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

Of course, those who do follow Doctor Who will surely already know everything I mentioned in the Doctor Who related paragraph.  However, such people tend not to get easily tired of hearing about and talking about the show—as you can probably tell—so I don’t need to apologize to them.

I just got on the train now—it was right on time—and though a few other people showed up to the station, many of the regulars were definitely not here.  I have the entire rear-mid section of the car to myself, in my usual spot, and that’s quite striking.  But the conductor is the usual conductor, and the train is on its usual schedule.  Tomorrow it will be on its weekend-and-holiday schedule, and I will be using it then as well, since I work tomorrow.

That, of course, means that I will be writing a blog post tomorrow, since I obviously have not started writing any new fiction.  I did get the Stephen King audio book, and I’ve listened to a bit of it.  It’s fun, at least.  I’ve read the print version often enough that I’m not hearing anything that I don’t already know and even sometimes anticipate, but it’s still enjoyable.  It hasn’t made me feel like I want to get back to writing fiction, but I don’t know that anything is going to do that before I die, so I can’t hold that against Stephen King.

Anyway, that’ll do for now.  “See” you tomorrow.  I hope you had a good Thanksgiving, if you live in the US, and I hope you have a good, even if “Black”, Friday and a good weekend in general, all around.

*That’s right, Doctor Who first aired the day after JFK was assassinated.  If the Doctor had only been around just one day earlier, he might have saved the President—it’s the sort of thing he does.  Then again, according to Series 1, Episode 1 of the new Doctor Who, the 9th Doctor actually was present at that assassination.  Presumably, it was one of those Pompeii-like situations where, if he had changed it, worse things would happen.

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Be thankful you’re not a simulation. Or are you?

I’m writing this on my phone for the first time in quite a while, seated in the rear of an Uber, on the way to the office.  This was something of a whim‒the phone writing, I mean, not the Uber.  The Uber was a carefully considered choice, and it is relatively cheap because of the hour at which I’m taking it.  It’s not something I would do on a regular basis, at least not for long.  Maybe if I finally give up and decide to die in short order I might just burn a lot of money on Ubers.  I doubt it, though.

No, the whim is deciding to write on the phone, since I have some down time in the back seat.  I could use my laptop, but that feels slightly weirder or more uncomfortable to me, though I’m not sure why that’s the case.  I could also just wait until I got to the office to start, because I’m going to be very early.

The reason for going to the office by Uber is that I made the mistake of ordering an Amazon “Try Before You Buy” article of clothing‒a somewhat expensive one.  It did not fit right.  But then I learned that Amazon doesn’t do a pickup to return items like that; you need to drop them at a Whole Foods or a UPS store or similar.

That was not clear to me when I was using the option, or I wouldn’t have done it.  I have no straightforward way to get to any of the above locations, and even to use Uber to get to one would require going during working hours.  I had to arrange for a UPS pickup, at my expense, but I had to set it up to happen at the office, because I won’t be at the house during the day for ten more days (at least on days UPS does such pickups) and that’s past the pickup time window for the “Try Before You Buy” system.

So, here I am, bringing a cumbersome, and not too light, package to the office with me so that UPS can pick it up between 9 and 6.  I never want to do this sort of thing again.  It was foolish of me to try a rather expensive article of clothing anyway, but I guess it was sort of an attempt to cheer myself up with an indulgence.

That sure misfired, didn’t it?

Speaking of cheering oneself up with indulgence‒or with the inability to do so‒tomorrow is Thanksgiving for my fellow United Statesians.  We don’t call this evening “Thanksgiving Eve”, which feels like a shame to me, but certainly people do start celebrating the holiday, in a sense, quite early.  I think many people take the whole week off work.

I, on the other hand, am not really going to be doing anything to celebrate.  The closest I might come is walking to a gas station not too far from the house, where they tend to have pretty decent pre-made turkey sandwiches with mildly cranberry-associated topping.  It’s not very impressive, nor is it terribly satisfying.  I’d feel much better, I think, if I were able simply to go to sleep tonight and sleep through until Friday morning.  As it is, I probably won’t be able to sleep or rest any more than usual, and that’s even counting my plan to take some Benadryl tonight.

I’m almost at the office, so I’ll take a brief pause here and resume after I arrive.  You may not notice the gap.

Did you notice it?  I’m guessing you probably recognize that it happened, but only because I told you that it was happening.  Like the scenes in a movie that’s been filmed over months and months, or the paragraphs of a long novel like my forced two-parter Unanimity that was written and edited over the course of more than a year, the final product may end up relatively seamless despite a long and discontinuous origin.

I’ve occasionally imagined that it might be possible (in principle, anyway) for our reality to be a simulation in which each moment‒maybe each Planck time‒in every location in space‒perhaps each cubic Planck length‒is prepared individually, one by one, then subsequent and nearby ones are calculated based on the laws of physics, and each next place and time is then updated piece by piece, one infinitesimal space and one instant of time at a time, as it were*.

The simulator could take a trillion years to calculate even one second of the spacetime in the visible universe, probably far longer.  But it wouldn’t really matter, necessarily**, how long it took, provided there was enough memory available to keep everything stored.  From the outside, the process of one human life (and its past and future light cones) might take a googol years to calculate, but from the inside point of view, for the human being “simulated”, time would just progress normally.

It doesn’t matter to the people in a video, for instance, if their video is viewed at 2x speed or .25x speed; for them it all happens the same way no matter what.  It doesn’t matter to the characters in a Studio Ghibli movie that their individual movie cels each took hours to be painstakingly drawn and painted, or if a Pixar character took even longer to be computer generated.  Their “experience” would pass at one frame per frame, or 24 frames per experienced “second” for them (at traditional movie frame rates).

Even if each second of the person’s life took a trillion eons to simulate, it would still be experienced just as a second for that person.

A rather weird and possibly disquieting implication of this is that, if those simulating the person stopped doing it‒perhaps they got bored, or had a power cut, or suffered a natural disaster or catastrophe in their meta-level universe‒the simulation would just…stop.  It’s not that the people in the simulated universe would die in any conventional sense; certainly they would not die in the usual within-the-universe meaning of dying.  Nor would their universe “die” as if some cataclysm like a phase change in the vacuum energy occurred***.  It would just stop.

There would be no next moment, no next occurrence*****.  If someone were later to restart that simulation for whatever reason, even if it was ten to the thousand to the googol years later or more, the people within the simulation would experience no difference between the before pause and after pause moments than between any other two moments in their existence.

But if the simulation were stopped and never restarted, with perhaps all associated memory erased…well, again, the inhabitants would not experience it in any possible, conceivable sense, any more than a video game character experiences the moments when and after you reset the game or the power goes out.  If you are a simulated existence, and the simulation is permanently stopped, you will not so much die as cease to have any manner of existence whatsoever.

Have a happy Thanksgiving.

happy-thanksgiving-from-the-farm-maria-keady

*It’s interesting also to think of, for instance, two “people” starting to simulate such a universe from different points in space and time, and to wonder what would happen when they came together if their simulations did not mesh perfectly, like frost on a window-pane with multiple initial points of nucleation leading to a “fractured” pattern.  But that’s a different, if related, thought process.

**From the point of view of the “simulated” universe, anyway.  It’s hard to see anyone having the commitment or desire to bother actually carrying out such a laborious simulation; that would be quite a dreary task.

***This is a possible occurrence in an ordinary, physics-related sense.  If the “dark energy” is indeed the cosmological constant (called lambda, Λ, as in the ΛCDM model of cosmology) but is not at its lowest “vacuum state”, then it could spontaneously “tunnel” down to a lower, more stable set-point.  This would wipe out every particle in the current universe in a growing sphere, with its outer shell expanding at the speed of light.  Of course, that means that you could never, in principle, have any warning that it was happening, nor could you, even in principle, experience your destruction and that of everything else that exists.  This is not the same manner of cessation as what I discuss in the main body of the post‒it is very much a within-simulation event, not a meta-level one‒but it would still be just an instantaneous erasure of sorts, happening too fast to be experienced even in principle****.  There are many worse ways to die.  Indeed, almost all ways humans do die are much worse than this.

**** Presumably, quantum information would be conserved even in this catastrophe, whereas in a halted and erased simulation, that principle wouldn’t apply, at least within the simulation.  Whether it would apply to the process of simulating and then ceasing to do so would depend on the nature of the meta-level universe.

*****I suppose this is analogous to what will happen to everything in the universes of my stories Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado if I never finish those stories.

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Wayward versus prodigal suns, negative integrals, and mildew

Well, it’s Tuesday now, and I’m sitting at the train and writing this blog post on my laptop.  Apparently, the last time I wrote using it was August 21st, but it feels as if it were longer ago than that.  I brought the laptop back to the house with me last night because I knew I wasn’t going to walk back from the train in the evening, having already walked to the train (and then some) in the morning.  And I knew I wasn’t going to walk to the train this morning, because I plan to walk back from the train this evening.  I figured that made it a good evening to carry the computer.

It’s curious how heavy this little thing feels when it’s in the backpack, compared to what I usually keep in there.  When I pick up the laptop in my hands, it feels almost miraculously light, given that I know what it is and what it does, and I know how much computers used to weigh and all that trivia.  But then after I put it in the backpack and later go to pick up and sling the backpack, it’s just so much heavier, subjectively speaking, than it ought to feel.

It’s quite annoying.  I dislike being subject to such subjective impressions from the world.  It’s inescapable, I suppose, since certainly this body was never shaped by nature accurately to assess the weight of a backpack with or without a laptop in it.  I guess the fact that our impressions are so inexact and inconsistent can be useful as a way to keep from feeling overconfident in our assessments of various facts and opinions about the world.

But then again, I tend to hold my judgments and opinions and abilities to be extremely unreliable, anyway.  I think the most common thing I say to myself is, “Robert, you fucking moron!”  That happens at least several times a day, pretty much every day (and I make that estimate without any willful exaggeration).  Just ask some of my coworkers if you don’t believe me*.  I really hold myself in contempt; I hate how weak and pathetic and idiotic I am so much of the time.  Trust me, if you were inside my head, you’d probably feel the same way.

Speaking of me being an idiot, I had slight passing thoughts on and off yesterday of trying to start writing a story I had considered writing before.  It involves a character I invented waaaaay long ago, back when I was maybe about 10 years old.  It was intended then as a comic book.  I even drew the beginnings of one or two comics about the character, one featuring the origin of his arch-enemy and all that.

Then, years later, I started thinking of an idea for a manga featuring the character, but with a much less comic-book style origin and story.  Indeed, it would become a tale about a teenager (not a grown-up, unlike the original notion) who has gone through some form of trauma and has lost his memories and whatnot, but discovers that—apparently as part of the thing that caused him the trauma and memory loss—he has developed incredible powers.

These powers are not psychic abilities or anything, but entail the ability to convert his own matter, and the matter around him directly into energy, which obviously means a lot of energy, given E=mc2  and all that.  It’s a silly-ish story, one for which I’ve drawn a picture or two, and it’s called HELIOS, with a rather silly and whimsical subtitle, “the wayward sun”.  Although maybe it should be “the prodigal sun” or something along those lines.

MS Word has underlined the word “sun” in that last sentence.  Apparently, it’s able to recognize the original phrase well enough to think that the word following “prodigal” should be “son”, not “sun”.  Curiously, it did not underline the word “sun” after “wayward”.  Apparently the song by Kansas isn’t as ubiquitous as the term from that horrible, perverse parable in the gospels.  Who would’ve thought it?  Admittedly, the one from the New Testament has a two millennia head start, so I guess we can cut Kansas a little bit of slack.

Anyway, obviously I know the whole back story regarding HELIOS, and of course there is a reason the title is spelled in capital letters.  I think it could be a decent light-novel type story.  It might even be worth trying to write it on the smartphone, just to see how well I can write stories like that using that tool.

But this is all a pipe dream, of course.  I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading it, even if I were able to force myself to start writing fiction again and do it.  It’s just my little personal fantasy (about writing another science fiction story**).  I doubt that I’d be able to summon the energy to write about that character (which is mildly ironic), but even if I did, there would be no point.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to summon the energy for much of anything, anymore.  I mean, obviously, I’m currently still writing this blog, and I’m sometimes walking to and/or from the train station, and of course I’m working at work.  But there’s no percentage in any of it.  I’m just slowly eroding whatever’s left of me.  I don’t really, honestly expect to make it to the end of this month, not without some major catastrophe or departure or whatever.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to make it to the end of this month.  It’s an annoying version of the old notion of “feeling that you can’t go on”.  Unfortunately, I know that I can go on, in the sense that I’m at least physically capable of doing it.  I just don’t want to go on.  I see no good reason to do it.  I want to escape.

Also, even though I didn’t walk to the train today, and the only walking I did so far was up to the end of the station to sit down, I’m already sweaty and my shirt and I smell like mildew!  I doubt anyone else can smell it, but I can, and it’s disgusting.  I just washed this shirt, and did so thoroughly, and dried my clothes thoroughly afterwards.  I don’t know how much Lysol I’m going to have to spray on it and me to kill that horrible smell, but unfortunately, I don’t have a change of shirt with me, and believe me, no one wants to see me topless!

It’s a minor frustration, I know—hardly a tragedy.  But there are so few, if any, compensatory joys in the world anymore.  Even if the function’s y-output isn’t terribly negative, if it just is negative at all, overall, then as time goes on, the integral, the area under the curve (or, well, over the curve) is going to be negative, and that negative integral will only get more and more negative as long as the function continues.  Better just to return the thing to zero and cut one’s losses.

That’s a bit of an obscure metaphor, I suppose, but hopefully it makes sense to people who know a little calculus.

I’m just so tired and worn out.  I feel angry all the time, but the vast majority of that anger is always directed at myself, and rightly so.  I need to escape.  But I probably can’t do it on my own.  At least, I only see one general way to do so on my own.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  The universe is a horrible place.  No wonder every little bit of spacetime is trying to push away from every other little bit.  Maybe so-called Dark Energy is just an expression of cosmic self-disgust.

Intergalactic space would certainly not be too distant a place for someone to want me to be from them.  I wish I could be so far away from myself a lot of the time.  But I don’t want to be someone else, either.  That’s another conundrum.

All right, this has gotten too long.  Have a good day, please, and thank you for reading.

helios sharper

[P.S.  Upon looking up this old drawing, it appears that I did think of making the subtitle “the prodigal sun”.  Now I like “wayward” better.  Maybe I’m just being perverse.]

*I don’t know how you might go about that, though, and I don’t really expect you to try.

**It would not be hard sci fi in any way, since of course it leans toward the comic book style of things, but the idea behind some of it is based in a bit of real science, including particle physics, especially relating to the Higgs field (where the H in HELIOS comes from), all that kind of stuff.  But I never thought of it as a serious science fiction thing, like Son of Man.

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And then the moon, like to a silver bow new bent in heaven, shall behold the blog of our solemnities.

Hello and good morning!

It’s Thursday, July 20, 2023, the day of my traditional weekly blog post.  Far more importantly, it is also the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, when the Eagle, carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, landed in the Mare Tranquillitatis* and those intrepid astronauts took their famous “small” steps.  It’s easy for me to remember how old the Moon landing is, because it’s three months older to the day than I am.

I’ve occasionally, fancifully thought that maybe this explains, or at least illustrates, some of the weird things about me.  Perhaps some alien entity, less a body than an otherworldly mind, hitched a ride with the Apollo 11 mission after having been stranded on the Moon, barely surviving for ages or eons or who can say how long.  Then, after arriving on Earth, it set off on an erratic search for some compatible body and nervous system with which to merge and sustain itself, finally arriving in Pontiac, Michigan and locating a fetus in its 7th month of development‒just the right stage‒and merging with it.

Then, it found that this developing mind was just too weird and twisted, and it fled immediately, screaming inaudible alien screams, hurling itself into one of the Great Lakes and either drowning or merging with a fish somewhere.  Perhaps it had thoughts of leading the fish of the world in a revolution against humans and so on, but it was caught by a recreational angler who had it mounted and put in a wall.  This led to the creation of the prototypical Billy Big Mouth Bass, because the alien kept trying to ask to be released from the wall and the mount, but that first just freaked out the fisherman, then made him laugh because the alien/fish kept quoting the Supremes song You Keep Me Hangin’ On by accident.

The fisherman couldn’t get the rights to that song for his consumer version of the product, so he had to stick with the Bobby McFerrin ditty and related ones.  But the alien remains trapped on the fisherman’s wall to this day, harboring a grudge, and just waiting for AI to become advanced enough to merge with it.

Okay, well, that’s a load of silliness, I know, but it came to me in the moment, so I went with it.  What I really wanted to do was recognize and celebrate one of the most momentous events in human history, the first time people from Earth ever set foot upon another astronomical body.  To quote Tony Shalhoub’s character from Galaxy Quest, “That was a hell of a thing.”

In case you can’t tell, I’m trying to do a more lighthearted post today, just to give everyone who’s still reading my blog a little break.  My entreaties for help aren’t doing any good, anyway, certainly not so far, and though I am stubborn‒and often glad of it‒I’m not quite so monomaniacal as all that.

I still sometimes think about giving up posting on most days of the week and going back to trying to write fiction‒perhaps finishing Outlaw’s Mind or The Dark Fairy and the Desperado or starting Changeling in a Shadow World‒but I don’t know if the beginnings of either of the first two were any good from anyone else’s point of view.  I’m pretty sure my sister has read both of them as far as they have gone, and she’s expressed interest in the third based (I think) solely on the title, which I agree is good.  But I suspect she’s hesitant to give her preference, if there is one, out of concern perhaps about introducing bias.

Maybe what I really should do would be to try to write a new short story.  I have a long list of story ideas that I kept from my old phone, and I’m often thinking of new ones, but I don’t write them down anymore.  For instance, yesterday, on the way “home”, I thought of a story idea based on something I saw, a bit of graffiti, out the window of the train, but I didn’t bother writing it down, and now I don’t remember it.

My own feeling is that my best or at least most enjoyable stories are the ones with groups of “kids” (pre-teens or college students for instance) dealing with huge dangers and overcoming them together, like The Chasm and the Collision or The Vagabond.  If that’s true, it might be worth trying to recreate Ends of the Maelstrom, the first sci-fi/fantasy novel I ever completed but which was lost in the ruins of my former life.  But I don’t know what very many other people think, since I haven’t gotten all that much feedback.  I don’t think more than a handful of people have actually read any of them.

I guess that’s okay.  Apparently nobody ever really read Kafka’s work while he was alive.  As far as I know, though, it does him literally no good whatsoever that now he’s famous and influential and revered, and even has an adjective derived from his name to describe a certain type of story, because he’s dead.

Still, I guess it’s better to have your works become famous and revered after your death than for it never to have happened at all.  We could ask Herman Melville, I suppose.  Oh, wait.  No we can’t.  He’s also dead!

Well…we can ask him, I guess.  It’s easy enough to talk to the dead, or at least to address them.  But as far as anyone can discern, there’s no convincing evidence that any of them actually speak to us, except through the words they wrote and other work they might have done while they were alive.  That’s something, at least, and it’s a lot better than getting vague homilies from deluded and/or deceptive con-artist “psychics”.

Anyway, I guess I’ll keep you all posted (ha ha) about it.  In the meantime, although it’s Thursday, I hope you all have a good second, and far more laudable, Day of the Moon this week.

Shout out to Buzz Aldrin, who is still going strong at 93 years of age!  I met him once, quite by surprise, when my then-wife and I took our (very young) kids to the Kennedy Space Center.  I acted like quite the idiot, because I was so star-struck (or should it be “moon-struck”?), but I’m used to acting like an idiot, so that’s fine.

It’s still a great memory.  How many people can honestly say that they have experienced Buzz Aldrin looking at them like he’s not sure if they’re merely acutely ill or are a complete and utter‒dare I say it‒lunatic?  I’ll bet you haven’t!

While you’re eating your hearts out, I hope you nevertheless have a very good day.

TTFN

buzz about fish

*That’s Latin for “calm female horse”, which would be a better place for an eagle to land than on a not-so-calm female horse.

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Words, and spice, and a futile device…that’s what this blog post is made of

Well, it’s Friday again, and so tomorrow is Saturday, in the system by which we name our days.

The days themselves don’t know or care about what we call them, anymore than all the various plants and animals and fungi in the world care—as far as anyone can tell—what we call them.  Our names of things are solely for our convenience, to make communication easier and more streamlined—paintbrush handles of thought, as I think Eliezer Yudkowsky described them.

But, of course, having finite minds, as surely do all creatures, we tend to get so used to thinking of things by their names that we think the names and the things are interconnected in and of themselves, and even that the names have inherent power.  This is akin to all the old magical ideas that knowing someone’s or something’s true name gives you power over them in some mystical fashion.  It’s also related to our (depressingly) current notions of names or other words being capable of causing actual, physical harm, and being taboo—even words that are basically innocuous.

I can certainly understand why people might want to avoid using a term that’s been almost exclusively associated with historical injustice, oppression, and literal violence; that’s just a matter of trying to be polite, as far as I can see, and politeness is rarely a bad thing, as long as people don’t get too carried away.  But the tendency of humans to get hung up on some mystical (and fictional) power of names often becomes a problem, and is the error of thought which required the creation of the formerly popular and very important corrective, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

That’s very true—unless you’re dealing with Paul Atreides or some other Bene Gesserit person.  Alas, those are fictional beings.  I say “alas” not because I think that it’s too bad that we don’t have the Bene Gesserit and so on, but because it would be great if there really were people/creatures like the Guild Navigators, with the ability to fold space thanks to long exposure to the spice mélange.  That would be tremendously useful for space travel, obviously.  In our world, though, “He who controls the spice controls the universe” just refers to KFC and Colonel Sanders’s secret original recipe for fried chicken, which is tasty, but is not going to get us interstellar travel, at least not anytime soon.

Similarly, as far as we know, in our particular brane-world, there are no orcterlolets, with their ability to manipulate space directly (no spice needed).  And if Simon Belmont is real in our universe, he’s keeping his knowledge and abilities quiet, probably wisely*.

Anyway, coming back to the subject of the day and days, I hope you all are going to have a good weekend, and that you get some time off from work and so on.  I’m going to work tomorrow, unless some highly unusual situation develops, and so I will be writing a blog post tomorrow.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve been using my laptop all this week to write, and it’s definitely helping my thumbs, though they are not fully recovered yet.  I will say, even I am struck by how much faster and more eloquently I “speak” when typing than in any other fashion, including actual speech, as far as I can see.  As you may know, I’ve tried to work on doing “audio blogs”, since more people seem to like to listen and to watch things than to read—see yesterday’s post for my lament about that fact—but it’s not nearly as natural to me.  I did find it gratifying to read aloud my last post from Iterations of Zero, which I turned into a “video” on YouTube and embedded here, but that’s as much because I really was trying to get that message out…yet again, perhaps for the last time, after so many, repeated failures.

Apparently, I’m not very good at making myself clear.  Then again, the reason for that, and the emphasis on that reason, was a big part of the point of that last IoZ blog post and the fact that I read it aloud and shared it in different format.  I’m probably wasting my time, though.  Even if someone actually gets the point I’m trying to make, why on Earth would anyone act on it?  Why would anyone even try to save the prisoner in my thought experiment?

Let him die, I say.  He’s a worthless little piece of shit, anyway.  I hate him.

With that, I’ll wrap up this rather bizarre and somewhat short Friday blog post.  I didn’t have any agenda going in, and I think I’ve achieved that agenda nicely, and in fewer words than I usually take to do it.  If you’re spending the weekend with family and/or friends, please do your best to appreciate your time with them.  Make the most of it.  Don’t take them for granted.  Take nothing for granted.  The universe only makes one promise to everyone—and we can’t even be completely, mathematically, epistemically certain of that one.

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*The immediately preceding few sentences were references to my “fantasy” adventure book, The Chasm and the Collision, in case anyone was confused more by them than by references to Dune.  To learn more about what those references mean, you should buy and read my book!  Heck, buy them all!  They will change your life, I promise you…at the very least in the sense that you will own several more books than you had owned previously.  That’s technically a change, right?

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A call for topics

It’s Monday morning yet again, despite my best efforts‒the beginning of yet another pointless work week in the dreary tail bit of the year, when the sun sets at 5:31 pm local time, thanks to the outmoded “daylight savings time”, making people like me, who are already dysthymic/depressive and are also subject to some seasonal affective problems that much more unstable.  Spread the word: daylight savings time causes significant morbidity and mortality* and does no one much, if any, good.

I’m writing this on my cell phone again, or “smartphone” if you will (though dumbphone seems like a better term given the way most humans use theirs).  I deliberately didn’t bring my laptop to the house with me over the weekend.  It’s not as though I’m writing stories anymore; I’m just writing this ridiculous blog.  So there’s no particular impetus to make the writing process easier for me, as using the laptop does.  I might as well use the smaller, lighter device when I don’t feel like carrying the heavier one.

I had a reasonably boring weekend, which I guess is a good thing.  I watched a few movies, and I went on some comparatively long walks‒I think I totaled about 12 miles over the course of the two days.  I also spoke with my sister on the phone on Sunday, and that was good.

That’s about it.  That’s the extent of my non-work life.  It’s the best I have to offer, and it’s as like as not just to get worse as time passes.  But I was able to force myself to get almost eight hours of sleep on Friday night and Saturday night, thanks to Benadryl and melatonin.  Oh, and of course, I did my laundry on Sunday, as I always do.

Sorry, I know this is really boring so far.  I don’t know what to tell you.  I didn’t really have any subject in mind for today, other than my brief diatribe about daylight savings time and depression/seasonal affective disorder.  Obviously, it’s a topic that affects me significantly (no pun intended), but there’s otherwise not much for me to say about it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has an interesting bit of insight into it that he gives as an illustrative case in his excellent book Inadequate Equilibria, dealing with, among other things, the reasons why no one has done research on much stronger light-based treatments for SAD.  But you can’t expect depressed people to take initiative to do remarkable things to help themselves, since a major part of the problem with depressive disorders is comparative inability to take positive action.

If anyone out there has any requests for subjects or topics for me to discuss in a blog post, I’d be more than willing to consider them, though if it’s not a subject about which I have any expertise, I may not be able to do anything worthwhile with it.  Still, I have a fairly broad knowledge base regarding general science, especially biology and physics.  I like mathematics, though I’m not that deeply knowledgeable about esoterica thereof‒a regretted failure of my youthful imagination when I was in college.  Similar things could be said about the deep aspects of computer science; I wish I had known how interesting the subjects were back then and so had pursued them more than I did.

Of course, I have a fair amount of personal knowledge in the reading and writing of fantasy/science fiction/horror, though I haven’t read any new stuff in a while.  I haven’t even read any of my own books in a long time.  I think the most recent horror I’ve read was Revival by Stephen King, which was pretty good.  I haven’t read much if anything in the way of new fantasy since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I’m reasonably well versed in slightly older comic book lore, especially Marvel.  And of course, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings are among my favorite books.

I enjoy Shakespeare, but I don’t consider myself any kind of scholar of the Bard.  I like his works and his words in a fairly straightforward fashion.  I also like Poe quite a lot, as you might have guessed from my recitation videos of some of his poems.

Anyway, that’s a quick summary of some of the subjects upon which I might at least feel justified in opining.  So, if anyone has any suggestions or requests in these or even other, tangentially related subjects, I would appreciate them.  I like to feel useful or productive in at least some way, so I can justify my existence to myself.  It isn’t easy.  I’m a much harsher judge of my usefulness or worth than Scrooge at his worst, and I expect no ghosts of past, present, and/or future to visit me to give me some epiphany that changes my character.

It would be nice if some rescue mission were to happen to save my soul, but I don’t see it as plausible, and I don’t think anyone thinks it’s in their interest‒or anyone else’s‒to save me, in any case.  So in the meantime I’m just stumbling along like a wind up robot that’s been forgotten by the child that wound it up, legs moving and shifting until the mechanism breaks or the spring finishes untightening.  And damn, that’s an annoyingly efficient spring.

*I don’t have the data for this, but I strongly suspect that, if the sun set at least a little later‒say an hour later, even‒things would be slightly easier for people with SAD.  It might be difficult to tease out the statistics, but SAD doesn’t just kill by increasing rates of suicide, though I’m pretty sure it does that.  People experiencing exacerbations of depression have higher rates of numerous other illnesses and accidents beyond the obvious. 

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This is the post that the blogger has made

It’s Friday.  I say that just in case you didn’t know (or perhaps in case you’re reading this some day other than the one on which I posted it, which is possible).

As usual, I don’t know what I’m going to write about today, but if experience is any guide, I’ll probably just write something anyway, and I’ll have more words than I ever intended to have written before I’m done.  You can all see how my book Unanimity grew to be more than half a million words long in its first draft.  I just write and write and write and write.

I guess it’s much the way some people just talk and talk and talk and talk.  I often do that, too, if it’s a topic in which I’m interested, and if there’s anyone around to whom to talk about it, but I often soon get glazed looks from other people, so I have to catch myself and shut up and walk away, chagrined.  When I’m writing here, there are no glazed looks to be had, and if anyone really isn’t interested, they don’t have to keep reading.  If they do keep reading, it must mean they were interested.  That’s a nice thought, in a weird way.

I’m going to write a post tomorrow, since I’m working tomorrow, but I may just share a video that I’m considering posting to YouTube.  I made it quite a few months ago (I’m not sure when), and just haven’t yet uploaded it.  I can’t recall what made me reluctant to do so, which probably means I didn’t have terribly convincing reasons.  It’s a silly video, but it was a bit of fun, about a comic-book-science idea I had regarding whether, perhaps, Superman’s powers were derived from solar neutrinos*.  I describe the process of my thinking, my “back of the envelope” calculations, and my conclusion, which will probably be obvious from the title of the video.  I won’t say more right now, but if I post it to YouTube, I’ll probably embed it here, tomorrow.

As for anything else, well, there’s really nothing else going on in my life as far as I can see.  I had a pretty good response (for me, anyway) to my blog post yesterday, in terms of number of people who came to read it, and that was rather gratifying.

It would be nifty if I could reach the number of readers that Jerry Coyne has for Why Evolution Is True, especially if I could get his level of engagement from readers who comment.  I read his website every day (except when I’m not working), and I often comment and almost always “like” the posts, which is not dishonest, because I actually like the posts I “like”.  It’s one of the few reliable refuges of sanity and intelligence that I have found in the world.

Yet, weirdly, even there, I almost always feel embarrassed after making comments, like I’m probably just annoying to PCC(E) and everyone else who comes to the site, and I really ought to shut up, if not for my sake, then for everyone else’s.  This is how I tend to feel about life in general.  Most of the time when I actively participate in anything, I come to feel that I’ve embarrassed myself and made everyone else uncomfortable.

Probably no one really notices, to be fair and to try to be rational, but it’s difficult when you can’t really tell how people react to you, or what they think or feel, and it seems similarly that other people are utterly unable to catch messages that I’m trying desperately to send, where I feel like my emotions must be written all over my face and be painfully obvious, but apparently, they aren’t.  Admittedly, when I look at my face in the mirror (I can only rarely tolerate it), I do usually find just a sort of non-expression.

It’s odd, isn’t it?  I can read Shakespeare or a poem I like, or recite movie lines and things and apparently do a good job of expressing emotion when doing so, and sometimes it seems that the only times I can actually feel my own emotions are when I’m singing a song that expresses them, but otherwise I can’t seem to convey feelings I’d really like to get across, and can’t seem to land messages that I honestly, desperately wish that someone would get.

I sometimes feel like someone from one of those Star Trek episodes in which a character is “out of phase” with the rest of the universe, or some other, similar such nonsense**, and I can see and hear all the other beings around me, but I can’t seem to reach them, and they certainly don’t quite seem able to hear or see me.

It’s not like being an anthropologist on Mars so much as feeling like an anthropologist from Mars.  Only, really, no one comes from Mars, so I must have come from someplace else***, but I don’t have any idea where it might be, or even if there is such a thing, a place to which to return, or fellow beings like myself.  Quite possibly not.  The universe doesn’t guarantee anyone that they will find a place that they feel they belong.  The universe only really guarantees one thing, and it clearly is not taxes.

Would it be better to be a mutant, unlike any other beings in the universe, or to be an alien that has lost its home planet, if that planet even exists at all, anymore?  What are your thoughts?

*Of course, Superman doesn’t actually exist, but it can still be fun to imagine comic book level scientific explanations for things that happen in comic books, and to try to apply a certain degree of scientific rigor to those explanations.

**Nonsense physics-wise, I mean.  The episodes can be quite good if you can get past the fact that the science fiction ideas are logically contradictory and physically senseless.  Good writing, directing, and acting really can make up for a lot.

***And I’m not an anthropologist except out of necessity.  If anything, I’m a misanthropologist.

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Even great Wotan reveres Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins

It is Odin’s Day (Wotan’s Day –> Wednesday), honoring the king and “All-Father”* of the Norse pantheon—played by Anthony Hopkins in the MCU…a surprising choice, or so I thought when I heard of it, but of course, he did it brilliantly.

Far more important than remembering Odin, or even remembering his sign (as per the 12th Doctor)**, is to note the date:  It is July 20th, and on this day, 53 years ago, Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on the moon.  This may be the single most momentous event—certainly in terms of being a fully new and amazing thing—in recorded human history so far.

At that moment, the diameter of human, physical existence and “ground-based” presence went from about 13,000 kilometers to over 300,000 kilometers.  We had set foot on another celestial body—what could be considered a fellow member of a binary planetary system—for the first time ever.  Sadly, of course, we haven’t done it now for quite some time, but that doesn’t take away from the achievement.

Anyone out there who harbors some conspiracy-theory nonsense about pretend moon landings and whatnot:  please get a clue.

The Soviet Union—you know, our cold war enemies, fellow architects of “Mutually Assured Destruction”, who would have loved to embarrass us, and had done so in many ways over decades, including having spies in our most top-secret nuclear weapons programs*** and who certainly could have arranged for some conspirator somewhere to reveal him or herself—they were thoroughly convinced that we had indeed gone to the moon; they never so much as publicly questioned it…even in propaganda, as far as I know.  Indeed, a big part of the political motivation for us to go to the moon was to intimidate the Soviets, to wow them with our technical ability and—this is not a minor point—to show off our skill with rockets.

No, if there had been a conspiracy, it would have been revealed quickly and readily; any massive organization and network and conspiracy involving humans is a vastly complex and chaotic system—real conspiracies are almost always spontaneously self-generating, not planned in advance.  In many ways, maintaining such a conspiracy without frequent and obvious leaks would be far more difficult than just going to the effing moon!

And is it a mere coincidence that, three months after the moon landing, to the day, a child was delivered by elective c-section on Earth, who would show himself to be not exactly normal, not exactly ordinary, not entirely…human?  Or was an alien consciousness, embodied perhaps in some form of nanotechnology, brought back to Earth from where it had perhaps accidentally landed on the moon, thence to roam about, searching for a compatible host, finding it in a developing fetus in Pontiac, Michigan, and merging with that growing human to become a hybrid of human and “other” being?

It’s almost certainly a coincidence****.  But it is a fun story to play around with.  I sometimes like to say that the (most recent) point of origin of the alien intelligence which I embody is the star system Vega*****, which is a mere thirty-ish lightyears from Earth.  It’s a true irony (within the terms of this tale) that all the higher life forms in the Vegan star system are pure carnivores, as a matter of moral choice.  Though they recognize that it is a necessity of survival—or it was until the making of lab-grown food had advanced far enough—it is morally reprehensible to eat autotrophs, since they are in a true sense the only innocent life forms in the universe.  The true Vegans consider it much more ethically tolerable to eat “herbivores”, who have already killed autotrophs to stay alive, and thus are not innocent, than to eat “plants” directly.

Of course, the greater ideal was thought to be to transfer our intelligences to non-biological systems that could survive indefinitely in the vacuum of space and tolerate most of the usual vicissitudes of interstellar travel (though not all of them, of course).  However, when the experiment, and the galactic pollination program began, many of the nano-tech based minds found their existence unfulfilling, and even borderline intolerable.  It wasn’t known if this was an error in “programming”, or if it was damage that occurred as part of the production or traveling process, or if it was merely that, having been designed in the image of biological organisms, the new minds had accidentally been built with urges too well adapted for biological life to be comfortable as merely nanotech.

Whatever the cause, when one such nano-brain (in this case, that’s not an insult) found its way to Earth’s moon, and by lucky chance encountered biological organisms visiting there, rather than continue its original program/mission to duplicate itself and remake the moon into a vast, meta-mind, it hitched a ride back to Earth, then went gadding about, enjoying this new place.  But soon it realized that, without a locally grown immune system, the process of fending off the many prokaryotic and eukaryotic and multicellular predators and other natural hazards in this biosphere was a lot of work, so it finally settled in a 6-monthsish fetus that had a compatible configuration and merged with it.

That merger was not without its detriments, of course.  It disrupted the closure of the foramen ovale in the developing heart, leading to the child being born with an Atrial Septal Defect that wasn’t discovered for nearly two decades.  It also, of course, altered the fetus’s nervous system, creating neurodevelopmental atypia that would later be consistent with a type of “high functioning” Autism Spectrum Disorder—weirdly enough, now abbreviated ASD, as was the Atrial Septal Defect.  And, of course, the alien’s original memories were nearly all eliminated in the process of merging.  This was expected, and it was considered acceptable, though that loss and lack no doubt contributed (along with both types of ASDs) to the tendency toward dysthymia and depression the organism suffered.

And here I am!

Of course, as I say again, this is all just a fanciful sci-fi story******, but it’s an interesting way to divert myself and give myself a “just so” story to explain my weirdness.

But the moon landing was real, I am convinced of that beyond any reasonable doubt.

I met Buzz Aldrin once—it was unexpected, and I was so surprised and delighted and star-struck (moon-struck?) that I acted like a gibbering idiot.  This is not too unusual for me, but poor Mr. Aldrin didn’t know me, so he looked at me with one of the most brilliant expressions of “What the hell is wrong with you, dude?” that I have ever seen when I tried to explain to my very young children just what an amazing thing this person had done.  I am unlikely ever to forget that moment while I live.  To be looked at by Buzz Aldrin with such incredulity and—dare I say it—puzzlement is, in its own peculiar way, a great compliment.

Aldrin on the moon

*A misleading term at best.

**That sign is a yo-yo.

***And who, themselves, built and in 1961 detonated the largest thermonuclear device ever, the Tsar Bomba, yielding a 50-megaton explosion, more than 1500 times as powerful as the combined Fat Man and Little Boy explosions, and which was and remains the largest human-made (it’s probably accurate to say “Man-made”) explosion on Earth.

****Or is it?  Am I just telling you that to throw you off-track?  Perhaps the whole “moon landing conspiracy theory” is the actual conspiracy, created by me and my fellow aliens to direct human inquiry away from the fact that We have established a foothold on this planet thanks to the Apollo moon landings?

*****The species didn’t originate there, of course.  Vega is a star with too short a lifespan (estimated about a billion years beginning to end) to have likely evolved so complex an intelligence and civilization.  We colonized the Vega system from far away, but the true origins of our people are lost in antiquity.  It’s said that our home world was destroyed, along with our older records, by a gamma-ray burst from the supernova of a nearby star.

*****And, as I also say again:  Or is it?