Science

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Sprechen sie David Deutsch? How about Japanese?

I’m writing this blog post on the laptop computer, which I brought back to the house yesterday with just that intent.  I did not walk to the train this morning, though I feel that I could have done so, had I chosen.  The weather is even more pleasant and cool than it was yesterday—62 degrees (F) out, which is even better for walking than 69 degrees.  I’m even wearing my hoodie to sit at the train station!

I’m also wearing my boots.  I thought that I might be lacing them too tightly—I might have mentioned that yesterday—particularly on the left foot, but also potentially on the right, which might explain the increased torque that’s caused strain on my right Achilles tendon.  If everything is reasonably well during the day today, and I’m able to resist the temptation to tighten the boots up too much, I mean to try to walk back from the train station to the house this evening.

I’m at the station very early, right now.  I woke up early, of course, and I had too much nervous energy even just to loll around, so I got up, did my things, took out some garbage, put out food for the stray cats, and then got to the train station well in time for the first train of the day, which should arrive in 3 minutes.  It’s all very exciting.

I’ve been packing some coats and a raincoat that I have in bottom of a large, hiking-style backpack, with a somewhat crazy idea in mind.  It’s relatively heavy, so far, but certainly not too heavy.  I’m going to need to get myself a new belt, though.  I had to punch a new hole in the one I’m wearing, since it’s tightened up a bit, but the next size (supposedly) of the same make and model belt—the one that I like—doesn’t quite reach to the first hole.

This doesn’t quite make sense to me, since there’s not supposed to be that much difference in their maximum length.  Something’s gone awry.  When I ordered that belt, maybe they sent me one that had been mislabeled.  But I don’t want to order another one of that kind to find out, because if it’s not an error, then I’ll have two belts that both don’t quite work yet.

So, I mean to get a fully adjustable belt, like the ones I wore in the Boy Scouts and then in the Navy.  To be honest, they were always a good style of belt, and if I make sure to pick one with good Amazon ratings (or similar) it should work well.

It looks like the first train is running approximately six minutes behind schedule.  I’m not sure quite how that happens as often as it does; the schedule is the same every day except Sundays and holidays.

I thought of an idea for a very short, rather gruesome story yesterday, when I was approaching the last bus stop (on foot) right before the train station.  Someone was sitting at the stop, wearing bright sneakers but otherwise dark clothes.  There are a fair few trees shading that bus stop, and it looked almost as though there was only the lower half of a person sitting there, until I got quite close.  That triggered an idea for what would be a very short story—especially for me—but might be fun.

We’ll see whether I write it or not, I guess*.  Well, you guys all might not see, even if I do write it, but I guess if I do, and if I find the time and the inclination to edit it, I may post it here, or I may just publish it direct to Kindle.

When I was first working on Mark Red and even The Chasm and the Collision, I intended just to publish them as serials via Kindle.  I think that’s not entirely unheard-of, and it’s almost the way Japanese “light novels” get published.  Each volume of such things—the truly “light” ones, anyway—are too brief to be full novels, and the story, like that of a manga, is expected to continue through a number of volumes.  Sometimes each novel is really a separate “adventure”, as in the Haruhi Suzumiya series, and sometimes they are truly ongoing, single overall stories chopped into sub-events, like Toradora.

I wish I could find the full, English translation of the Shakugan no Shana series.  I loved that anime, and have read what there is of the manga; it’s one of the most original fantasy stories (set in the modern world) that I have encountered.  But they only ever seemed to have released the first two volumes in English.  If it had come out after the advent of the light novel availability on Amazon (Kindle and otherwise) and the readily available purchase form thereof, I think it would have done well.  But I got mine at good ol’ Borders, back in the day, and of course, my copies are long gone.  I can reorder them from used book sellers via Amazon, but it won’t get me the later volumes.

Had I but world enough and time, I would seriously consider just getting the whole series in Japanese and honing my skills with the language by slogging through them, “translating” as I go, and trying to get the most out of them.  It wouldn’t make as much sense as, for instance, getting the Harry Potter books in Japanese, since I know those practically by heart, but it might still be useful.  Maybe I could get the English translations of the first two novels, just so I could get going.

I think I threw away my Kodansha Kanji Leaner’s Dictionary in a fit of pique a while back, but with the advances in Google Translate, one can draw (sort of) the Kanji one is trying to translate.  Also, Japanese books geared toward younger readers tend to have hiragana characters next to the kanji, so that readers can pronounce the words and recognize the meaning (since they probably know the words by sound), and can learn their Kanji in the meantime.

This is all pipe dream stuff, anyway.  I mean, I could do it, and I’m sure it would be interesting, but I don’t know that I could sustain my interest.  I can barely sustain interest in anything.  Robert Sapolsky’s new book, Determined, should have come out overnight**—I preordered it months ago—and I don’t have much desire to read it yet, though he’s a very interesting and wonderful writer and scientist (a behavioral biologist and neuroendocrinology professor, who himself has struggled with depression, apparently, and for which reason he too has been leery of things like psychedelics and so on).

Maybe he’ll be on Sam Harris’s podcast again now that he’s coming out with the new book, though with recent horrible “political” events, Sam may be distracted a lot in coming weeks.  Well, “distracted” is probably not the right word; but his attention will likely be elsewhere.

I have been listening to Sean Carroll talking to David Deutsch on the former’s podcast, and that’s good, though it’s lamentably under two hours long.  Still, one of my favorite physicist/writers is talking with another that I like even more in some ways—what’s not to like?

I wish Deutsch would write another “popular” science book, but he doesn’t crank them out quite like Carroll does (the latter’s books do not disappoint, at least).

Maybe I should start looking for some of Deutsch’s academic stuff.  Some of it may still be on arXiv or similar, and there may be public domain editions of the non-preprint material.  He is a terrifically original and deep and quick thinker, one of the first pioneers of quantum computing, an advocate of Everettian quantum mechanics, founder of what he calls Constructor theory (an approach to how knowledge and explanation work in intelligent life forms), and a guarded optimist.

He thinks, following Turing’s mathematical demonstrations about the universality of computation (which he fleshed out himself regarding quantum computation) that there is, ultimately, only one “form” of intelligent computation.  He sees, therefore, intelligent extraterrestrials, human beings, and potential AGIs all as “people” or “persons” in the same right.  The only real differences would be due to specific “software” and memory and processing speed.

Trust me, he makes very convincing cases for these things.  He is a rigorous thinker.

Again, though, I don’t expect really to make any progress in exploring more of any of this.  But it’s interesting to think about for them moment.

And now, my stop is coming up, so I’ll draw this post to a close.  Please have a good day.

deutsch Deutsch

nihon deutsch

*I doubt it.

**It did.

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Feel free to imagine your own illustration to accompany this post

As so often seems to happen, I arrived at the station this morning just in time to see the first train of the day arrive and pull out.  That’s fine; I hadn’t been planning to take it, anyway, and there was really no possible way for me to have done so.  If I had gotten up and left five minutes earlier, I very likely would have caught that one, but of course, there’s no true point to getting on that earliest train, since I’ll either be killing time at the office or at the train station or at the house.

I prefer to leave early, since I’m awake anyway, and have been for hours, and traveling early means things are less crowded.  I used to spend time in the morning practicing guitar after writing, but I don’t do that anymore, so there’s no huge benefit to being at the office.

Now, I’m sitting at the station and writing this post on my smartphone.  I’ve been writing all my posts on the phone, lately, since it’s just so convenient.  In fact, I took my little 11-inch laptop back to the house with me last night and I left it there.  I don’t think I’m going to be writing on it again.  I may, possibly, use it for something else, but that’s an iffy possibility.  I guess I’ll have to see.  Anyway, there isn’t much point in keeping it at the office.

I threw out some other things at the office that I don’t need, so it’s getting a little less cluttered.  That’s good, I guess.  It’s probably more pleasant for everyone else.  I still need to clear out some more of the crap there, and even more at the house.  I live in a small room, but there’s still too much useless drek in it, stuff that no one is ever going to want or need.  Better to do my part to contribute to the unsustainability of landfills.

I tried out a corrected-size pair of boots yesterday, since I think part of the issue with the others was that the sizes made by Timberland might be a bit larger than my usual.  Anyway, half a size down seems very good.  I had no adverse effects, and I plan to try a longer walk today, heading back to the house from the train after work.  I wasn’t going to do that yesterday, after a 24 hour food and water fast.  The food wouldn’t be an issue, but I might have become a bit too dehydrated.

The fast yesterday was interesting, as it always is.  I moved rather slowly and was not quite as mentally sharp as I normally am, though that was more due to lower caffeine levels than anything else.  I had one incidence of “head rush” when rising from a seated position, but it was pleasant and a good sign that I’m probably losing weight, which I want to do.

I’ve had head rushes before, and I’ve even had them bad enough to make me lose consciousness completely, including once while in jail.  I didn’t like smacking my head on the concrete (I didn’t feel it at the time; I definitely did afterwards), but passing out suddenly is not a bad feeling.  Indeed, it’s more or less no feeling at all.  That’s what’s great about it.  There’s just that hint of a head-rushy sensation, then everything goes white and then blank.  Even those sensations are probably reconstructed memories after the fact.

I suspect, based on actual expertise, that this is what it “feels” like to die of a sudden ventricular fibrillation arrest.  I don’t mean a heart attack; heart attacks are almost always quite painful and unpleasant, and in and of themselves, they don’t usually cause one to lose consciousness.  Though they can induce dangerous arrhythmias such as ventricular fibrillation, the process leading up to it is decidedly uncomfortable and generally terrifying for the person involved. Trust me; I’ve seen it many times, and I have a very good memory.

But in a V-fib arrest or similar process, the heart basically stops pumping blood all of a sudden, and the brain stops getting perfused‒it’s much like what happens in a sudden fainting spell, but more persistent‒and when the brain suddenly loses all blood flow, it pretty much suddenly blanks out, or at least consciousness does.

There’s no fear, there’s no pain, there’s not any experience of what’s happening.  One isn’t confronted by the threat of permanent cessation*, and there is no potential to “rage, rage, against the dying of the light”, anymore than a computer that is abruptly deprived of all power can struggle to stay “on”.  It simply doesn’t work that way.  The thing that does the raging is what is shut down, and quite abruptly.

Your brain (i.e., you) can no more fight to stay conscious or alive when suddenly deprived of blood flow than your lungs can successfully draw in oxygen if you suddenly find yourself in outer space without a space suit.  Though, even that seems likely to be less unpleasant than movies make it seem, because while you can’t get oxygen, you will still be able to expel carbon dioxide, and it’s the CO2 in your blood that drives your sense of needing to breathe.

So, you won’t feel like you’re suffocating; you’ll just get rapidly light-headed from the lack of oxygen.  Some of the other effects of vacuum might be unpleasant‒your saliva and mucus bubbling into gas phase, perhaps some bubbles forming within your eyes, some other outgassing here and there, but you won’t experience them for long, if at all, because the lack of oxygen will deliver a slightly slower version of the effect of the V-fib arrest.

Oh, by the way, you will not suddenly freeze or even accumulate frost in seconds, like in some movies.  Space is very cold, yes‒the overall temperature of the vacuum is about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero‒but there’s nothing there to conduct your heat away from you, so you only lose it through radiation (mostly infrared and such, but humans do give off a tiny amount of “visible” light), and that is a very slow process.

Think about it.  You can survive indefinitely and even feel pretty comfortable in 70 degree (Fahrenheit)** air, even without much clothing, and that is far from vacuum.  But if you are dropped in water at the same temperature without a wetsuit or similar, you will probably die from hypothermia before long.  And that probably would be quite unpleasant.

Anyway, that’s all quite a digression, but it does reinforce a point I sometimes make:  if you have a choice of how to die, do it by some means that suddenly and completely cuts the blood flow to your brain.

As for other fasting-related matters, well, there was, as always, a slight feeling of detachment from my body by the and of the day, not quite like my numerous experiences of depersonalization***.  It’s a good sort of feeling, a sense of being slightly out of sync with the physical world, but not in a confusing or disturbing way.  Maybe it’s akin to a much slower version of the fainting/V-fib experience.  Anyway, the less I experience being me, usually the better, from my point of view.  Not that I want to be someone else!  That would be even worse.

So, I’ve learned nothing new from fasting, really‒certainly there were no epiphanies‒but I have re-experienced things I’ve experienced before that I found worth repeating.

And now, we’re nearing my train destination, so I’ll let you all go, at least for now.  Have a good day, if you can.

*Or “death” as it is sometimes referred to in the medical literature…but I wanted to avoid too much jargon.

**70 degrees Centigrade/Celsius would be another matter entirely.

**I think that’s the term.

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Songs, weather, depression/pain, AI, the subjectivity of time, and the apparent inevitability of entropy

It’s Monday, Monday, like the Mama’s and the Papa’s sang.  I’ve never quite known what that song was about in any deep sense, since I’ve never paid too much attention to the lyrics, other than “Monday morning couldn’t guarantee / that Monday evening you would still be here with me.”  Could it be about the tenuousness of joy or something?  Maybe it’s a sort of Buddhist message.  Of course, no morning can guarantee (so to speak) that by the evening anything at all will be the same, apart from the fundamental laws of physics (whatever they may ultimately be).

One wonders:  has Monday morning, in some anthropomorphic sense, ever guaranteed anything to anyone?  It’s a weird notion.  Maybe I’m thinking too much about this.

Anyway, I’ve always thought the song had a pleasant melody, and the harmonies were good, as tended to be the case with that group.  I like California Dreamin’ better, and not just because the meaning is a little less opaque.  However, I do have sort of the opposite feeling to the singer(s) of the latter song.

In that song, they lament the fact that all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray, and they dream of being in California, “safe and warm”, even on a winter’s day.  Well, I’ve been for plenty of winter walks here in south Florida when I didn’t need to wear a jacket or long sleeves, and could go barefoot, and could even have worn shorts if it weren’t for the fact that my lower legs are kind of scarred up and embarrassing.

But growing up, I’ve always liked autumn best of all the seasons.  Halloween is my favorite holiday, and winter, frankly, was never too hard a problem.  At least I could enjoy a hot cup of coffee in a way that I just can’t here in Florida.  Here, I’m sitting motionless at the train station and literally dripping with sweat just from…I don’t know, just from being alive, I guess (I don’t recommend it).  And then, most of the time, trains and buses and stores are all over air conditioned, so when you’re sweaty from being outdoors you feel seriously chilly when you enter them.  And then, when you go back outside, your glasses instantly mist up, because their surfaces are so cold and the air is so humid.

I know, I know, these are not exactly the trials of Hercules.  But they are annoyances to which I wish I had never chosen to subject myself.  Now, however, as the man said, “I am in blood, stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, to turn back would be as difficult as go o’er”.  Mind you, I have never done anything as horrible as Macbeth did in the play, but that doesn’t mean the metaphor can’t still apply.  One of the brilliant aspects of Shakespeare’s writing is that his lines can be used not merely in context, but to examine, explore, and describe so many things in life.

Anyway, knowing me, I probably would be just as unhappy had I stayed up north somewhere.  I think the fundamental problem is an internal one‒well, I mean, that’s clear and plain, since I started having trouble with dysthymia and depression long before I ever moved south.  The problem is with me.  I am faulty.  And when the problem is fundamental to oneself, one cannot avoid it by going elsewhere, because, as many have pointed out, from Ralph Waldo Emerson* on, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

If one’s own nature is the problem‒or some aspect of it, anyway, or some damage that is permanent, a wound that goes too deep, that has taken hold‒there is little that one can do about it.  If there is no therapy that seems to help, whether medical or psychological, and there are no lands to the west in which to seek healing, what is one to do?

Of course, if one is convinced that the odds are, in the long run, that the good things in life will outweigh the pain (of all kinds), then one can choose simply to bear it as best one can.  After all, pain, of all kinds, is an inevitable (or at least inevitably potential) part of life, for good, sound biological and ecological and statistical reasons.  Pain keeps organisms alive, when it’s working best.  But it can reach a point where it’s not functioning optimally, where it’s not producing a net gain‒physically, psychologically, “spiritually”, or in any other clear way.  Then, what does one do?

I’m speaking mostly rhetorically here, but I guess if anyone thinks they have an idea I haven’t discovered, they are welcome to share.  I have thought long and hard about these issues, and I’ve read a lot of related material, and have tried many forms of treatment, but I can’t claim to have learned everything that could possibly be known about them.  I’m reasonably smart, but I have had finite time and finite energy and finite intelligence with which to explore.

Even a “deep learning” AI can often only “learn” so much, so quickly, because it trains on immense streams of data, beyond any human bandwidth.  And adversarial systems like Alpha Zero learned to play Go even better than previous systems by playing millions or billions of games against itself to develop its skills.  A human who was capable of that concentration and memory and above all, who had the time might well become just as good.

But human experiential time takes much more real time than does that of an electronic system**.  Also, humans were not built to be able to focus solely on one thing for such scales of time and experience.  There’s no net survival or reproductive advantage to it on any kind of ordinary, biological level.

AI’s have to be built and actively maintained.  They cannot yet sustain themselves.  Perhaps, when they can, there will occur an evolutionary arms race between and among such AIs, happening much more quickly than human biological or even cultural evolution.  But it seems difficult to speculate about what the outcome of such evolution might be, once it took the bit in its teeth and ran where it “wanted” to go.

Well, it’s fairly easy to speculate, but that speculation is probably going to be fruitless.  The phase space of possible states is too big to explore easily.  Even an AI evolution that proceeded at maximal possible speed might only explore the tiniest fraction of all possible forms and functions of intelligence before entropy led it to fall apart, like the rest of the universe.

Of course, it’s not in principle impossible that an AI (or other intelligence) could figure out ways around even the heat death of the universe, or the Big Crunch, or a Big Bounce, or whatever the future of the universe ends up being.  Even if the universe turns out to have been simulated (which I doubt mightily but don’t rule out completely), the simulation has to exist in some outer reality, and the mathematics of entropy seems likely to apply in all possible realities.  There are simply more ways, in general***, for a set of things to be put together in such a way that they do not achieve any given function or meet any given criteria of order, than for them to be put together in ways that do.

Anyway, I don’t know how I got on that topic.  I tend toward entropy in the subject of my thoughts as well as in reality, it seems.  (This is not ironic, by the way, lest someone mislabel it as such.  This is actually quite appropriate, and is a rather pleasing concordance.)

That’s enough for me for Monday morning.  I hope the morning is very good to you, and that Monday evening is even better.

time or not cropped png

*He didn’t put it in those exact words, but he certainly criticized his friend, Henry David Thoreau, for going into the woods to find himself.

**Which leads to potentially horrifying speculations about what it might be like for an artificial general intelligence trying to have interactions with biological intelligences and having to wait between interactions‒times that could be the subjective equivalent of a human waiting for decades or centuries or even millennia‒just to “hear” what the human says next at normal human speed.  Orson Scott Card explored a little of this notion in the interactions between Ender and “Jane” in the brilliant Speaker for the Dead, the first sequel to Ender’s Game.

***Here I’m using “in general” mainly in the physicist’s sense, meaning something that applies to every situation of a given kind, everywhere, as opposed to the more common, colloquial meaning which is roughly synonymous with “usually”.

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Despite some personal and global grumbles, today is a day worth celebrating

Well, it’s another morning, as usually happens at this time of day, and I’m sitting at the train station.

I did not walk to the station this morning.  I get too washed out if I do that too often in a row while it’s this hot and muggy.  If it were a bit cooler, I could walk back and forth, to and from the train station, and as long as I gave my ankle(s) and Achilles tendon a rest when needed, I think I wouldn’t bat an eye*.  But, as is generally the case at this time of year, the weather in south Florida is disgusting.

Don’t get me wrong; in winter, and especially in late fall and early spring, it’s quite pleasant here.  But at this time of year, it’s sticky and rather gross.

Enough of all that.  I’m here at the train station now, and I’m writing this on my miniature laptop computer.  I needed to give the base of my thumbs a rest—speaking of resting sore parts of one’s body—because they have really been acting up lately.

It also just feels so much more natural to write this on the computer.  This computer—most any such computer, really—feels like an extension of me when I’m using it, much more so than my phone ever feels.  I’m not a huge fan of the smartphones, though I would never deny that they are tremendously useful in many ways, and I do make such use of them.

But I don’t find them handy for talking on the phone; I cannot hear properly using the inbuilt speaker, unless it’s absolutely quiet around me, and even then I have to focus.  So I use earphones, which take care of that, but regular office phones are still easier.  Anyway, the only person I talk to on the phone is my sister, so I guess that’s only an issue in that circumstance.

I do find texting reasonably convenient, but of course, when my thumb bases are suffering from arthralgia**, texting is uncomfortable.  It’s also terribly irritating when one is part of a texting group and there are texts going back and forth and back and forth, so there are text alerts every few seconds, preventing one from doing anything that one is trying to do, because one can’t just ignore the texts—they might be important.

Usually they aren’t.  They’re often just the cyber equivalent of moronic small talk.  It’s maddening.

I do like being able to listen to podcasts and audiobooks on my phone—using the aforementioned headphones—so I can hardly complain about that.  And few people have used a phone for reading Kindle books more than I have.  I also play Sudoku or Euchre when I need to kill a bit of time.

Maybe I’m actually a big fan of the smartphone.  Or perhaps I’ve merely been ensnared, put under a spell, forced to become dependent upon a nefarious technology.  It is a tad annoying that there are more things I can readily do on the phone than on the laptop, when the latter really ought to be more versatile and useful.

The computer certainly has, for me, a much better user interface.  But it doesn’t have the ability to connect to any “phone” networks in and of itself, and using public Wi-Fi makes me slightly nervous, at least in principle.  Of course, I can set up my phone as a mobile hotspot to which the computer can link.  I have done that before, but it uses up a fair amount of phone data and—appropriately—makes the phone get literally quite hot.  After all, processing information generates quite a lot of high-entropy waste heat.

This is, of course, part of the reason why crypto-currency mining is more harmful for the environment than automobile exhaust (if I understand correctly).  “The cloud” is far from carbon-neutral, also.  All those servers running the internet and web, and all those GPUs running all the time to do the “mining” and so on use tremendous amounts of energy, and that has to be generated somehow.

And as far as alternatives to burning stuff:  people are illogically afraid of nuclear power***, and solar is not yet at full efficiency, though there are no big and obvious reasons that it cannot become so in reasonable time.  Mind you, solar power is just a form of fusion power—natural fusion, but fusion nonetheless—when you get right down to it.  But we obviously can only harness the tiniest fragment of the fusion power from the sun.

Still, there’s so much power coming from the sun that even getting a tiny amount is pretty good.

I don’t know why I’m writing about these particular random things at the moment.  I have to write about something though****.  So I just write whatever comes to mind, and since it’s my mind, it’s often rather peculiar.

It is an important, good day globally today, though I won’t get into the specifics.  I’ll just say that one of the two most positive events in the history of the universe happened on this date, twenty-two years ago.  So, if anyone out there has the opportunity to celebrate, you should certainly do so, in whatever way gives you greatest and most durable joy (without causing physical harm to others).  You have ample reason, even if you don’t know what it is.  It’s that good.

You can also celebrate the fact that I am now drawing this blog post to a close, since it’s getting a bit long by now, counting the footnotes.  Please, really, do have a very good day if you can manage it.  Thank you.

celebration scaled

*And I certainly wouldn’t eye a bat.

**Which literally just means “joint pain”.

***Not realizing, perhaps, that probably more people die every year from simple air-pollution-related causes due to traditional power generation than have died from nuclear events since nuclear power has existed.  I’m only guessing, but I do guess, that’s probably even counting the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But the deaths due to air pollution are covert deaths.  They happen in the background, they exist as an uptick in baseline mortality across populations, and each individual untimely death is all but unnoticeable, so it’s hard to recognize that large-scale tragedies are caused—or worsened—by pollution.  People aren’t good at statistics and probability, and they aren’t trained to become better, by and large.

****I really do.  It’s a compulsion.  Not to write on a given morning before work would be extremely stressful for me.  Imagine being forced to watch one of your loved ones (who perhaps has a bit of dyspraxia) trying for the very first time to snow-board, and doing so on a high mountain course with canyons and cliffs and numerous trees and very steep, treacherous paths, after having gotten quite drunk the night before.  It’s that kind of tension.  Or so I imagine.  I’m probably exaggerating.  But it isn’t good, that for certain.  Even thinking about not doing it makes me feel as if I’m in the presence of hostile others.

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Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what blog thou wilt.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and I walked to the train station this morning, but I did not walk back to the house from the train station last night.  It had just gotten so late, and I was tired, and I wanted to get back to the house early enough that I could relax and at least try to get to bed at a reasonable hour, even if I never do sleep through the night.  But I committed to walking this morning, and I fulfilled that commitment.  Bully for me!

I must be getting in better shape, or maybe I just left earlier or summat, because even though I stopped to get a beverage* and tried to take my time after that, I still arrived in time to catch the train that leaves twenty minutes earlier than the one I usually get when I walk.

My feet and knees and ankles are doing tolerably well, so the shoes I did choose seem unlikely to lose when it comes to my long-distance walking.  I also find‒curiously enough‒that wearing spandex knee braces helps keep my ankles, especially my right ankle, from acting up.  It seems that something in the way I move (ha ha) when my knee stability is not optimal is adding torsional, irregular forces to my right ankle and Achilles tendon.

It’s often quite surprising just how non-straightforward the source of damage or pain is in the body compared to where one feels the discomfort.  Spandex helps with some of this because it adds one’s sense of surface touch to one’s ongoing awareness of the position of one’s joints from within**.  The sense of surface touch is much more precise than many of our other senses, which makes sense***, since it has much more of a role to play in guiding our targeted moment to moment actions regarding injury, obstacles, insects that might bite, and so on.  It may also be that spandex helps decrease excess fluid accumulation in a joint by providing counter-pressure in a fairly uniform way, and this can certainly be expected to improve a joint’s stability.

I’m sure that’s all quite boring.  Apologies.  I don’t mean to be tedious; it’s just a talent I have.

Switching topics:  I like listening to good podcasts (or audiobooks) while I walk, and this morning I listened to the AMA (ask me anything) podcast for the month on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape.  Well…I listened to part of it.  His AMAs are usually three or four hours long, because he tries to get through as many questions as he can, and he tries to answer them as carefully as he can.  It makes for some very interesting listening, because he is a theoretical physicist who also works in philosophy.  Formerly at CalTech, he is now at Johns Hopkins and also works with the Santa Fe Institute and is just in general broadly interested and interesting and quite thoughtful.

I still like Sam Harris’s podcast (and his guests) a little bit better, but that’s not particularly important.  I like them both, and I learn a lot from them and their interlocutors.  I have noted that I like long podcasts but prefer short videos, which is interesting and seems on its face odd to me.  Perhaps it’s simply that one can listen to a podcast while doing any of a number of other things, but not so with videos.

Anyway, it’s nice to be able to hear about and potentially learn about interesting things while walking.  It’s also occasionally fun, in a rather silly way, when someone asks a reasonably complicated question to which I know the answer and then to hear Sean Carroll say the same thing I would have said (this is far from common, but it does happen).  Of course, people rarely ask him questions about medicine or biology, because he is not a specialist in those areas.  If they did, I would probably usually be able to give better answers than he, but that would hardly be particularly impressive.

It’s also hardly important.  I’d rather be listening to someone talking about things I know less about than they, because that’s how one learns.  I sometimes try to do brief “podcasts” or “audio blogs” of my own, but I don’t get the impression anyone ever really listens to any of them.  I don’t know.  Maybe they do.

Oh, I wanted to address the very nice comment left by a reader yesterday, in which‒among other things‒he said that he liked the idea of the manga that I had mentioned.  I just want to make clear, although HELIOS started out as a comic book idea, and then became a manga idea later (at around the same time I thought of mangas for Mark Red and for The Dark Fairy and the Desperado) I don’t see myself ever actually doing a manga now.

I think that the work involved in making a manga‒from the initial script to the storyboarding to the penciling to the inking to the screen tone‒would all be just too much and it would be difficult to work into my schedule.  Perhaps if someone were paying me to do it full time, I might try.  But I don’t think that’s very likely.

I really only have the notion of perhaps writing a “light novel” of HELIOS, rather akin to the light novels that are popular in Japan which are often turned into manga and or anime.  Mark Red and DFandD and HELIOS are probably stories that lend themselves more to manga/anime style settings, but I am much more of a prose fiction writer, even though I do draw sometimes.

Anyway, I think that’s probably enough for today.  I intend to keep doing my walking and hopefully that’ll help me be healthier overall.  I’m also trying very hard to completely eliminate sugar and most starches or refined carbohydrates from my diet; that certainly helps me feel physically better.  We’ll see how everything goes.

Maybe, if I do well and my mood starts to improve consistently, I will start to write fiction again, on HELIOS or on DFandD or on Outlaws Mind or on Changeling in a Shadow World or even on Neko/Neneko****.  Who knows?

I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*The water fountains at the Hollywood Tri-Rail station have been “temporarily out of service” for, I don’t know, it must be most of a year.  I would very much like to be able to get a drink of water when I get to the station after walking 5 miles, but I think the people who run the place are happy to try to coerce people into buying something from the ridiculously overpriced vending machines at the station.  I would not seriously consider doing that unless my life depended on it, and I might not do it then.  I’d even rather pay twice as much somewhere else than buy something to drink at the station when they have water fountains but just haven’t fixed them.

**This is called proprioception, as most of you probably know.  It’s not a very precise or reliable sense, being quite coarse grained, and it also seems to deteriorate with age and with damage to joints.

***Sorry, that wasn’t meant to be any form of pun, but it is the best way I can find to put it right now, so I won’t change it.

****The story of a cat (named Neko, the Japanese word for cat) who is devoted to her human, a lonely but upbeat and gainfully employed young man (who is fond of anime and manga and light novels, among other things).  When the man buys an odd, exotic fish, the cat intends to eat it, being a bit jealous and also just having the instinctive desire to do so.  But then, the fish reveals to the cat that it is magical (evidenced well by the fact that it can talk and that the cat can understand it), and if the cat spares its life, it will grant her a wish.  She agrees, and chooses to be able to become a human woman (at will) to be a potential companion for her human.  Surprised when she first encounters him, he asks her name, and she stammers, Ne…Neko.  He takes this as her having the Japanese name Neneko, and she accepts that.  Thus, the title.

Neko/Neneko

[The above is a concept drawing of a potential scene from Neko/Neneko]

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Moods and moons and musings on mythology and morality via Middle-earth

I’m mainly over my weekend gastroenterological difficulty, so physically I’m definitely doing better than I was.  That can’t help but bolster my mood at least a bit, though the elevation bears all the hallmarks of being a supremely temporary state*.  Perhaps you think I’m being pessimistic, but I know myself and my moods reasonably well‒although I will freely admit that it is impossible to be fully objective about such things, given their very nature.

It looks like the moon is very close to its full state this morning, so if it’s not truly “full” now, then it’s one day before or one day after.  If I were a werewolf, I suppose this would be bad news for people around me.  However, I clearly am not a werewolf.  Nor is anyone else**.

I’m also not one who follows all the supposed names of the full moons and all that.  There’s nothing wrong with it, and if paying attention to whether it’s a harvest moon, or a hunter’s moon, or a sun myung moon, or whatever, makes you happy, then do please enjoy yourself.  The whole “super moon” thing is a bit more laughable, though.  The difference in angular size between the moon at perigee and the moon at apogee is too small to be detectable by the naked eye.  Sorry.  Also, by the way, the fact that the moon looks bigger when near the horizon is not even an optical effect***, but is merely an optical illusion.

The weather is slightly more pleasant right now than it has been, because we have a good, strong breeze, thanks to Idalia.  Other parts of Florida are having much worse weather, with the aforementioned hurricane and all, but that’s hitting the northwestern coast of the state, and will cross farther north and east.  We are on the real outer periphery of the storm’s effects down here; we just have more wind than usual, some intermittent rain (not truly unusual) and the very nifty spectacle of the fast-moving clouds all traveling in the same direction, following their course counter-clockwise relative to the center of the storm, hundreds of miles away.

I guess, from a Tolkien-based mythological perspective, a hurricane is sort of a partnership/game between Manwë and Ulmo, though those two don’t ever really come across as overly playful, and I guess they probably wouldn’t willfully do something to cause grief to the Children of Ilúvatar.  That might be more Ossë’s thing; he was apparently associated with storms and whatnot.  Of course, most unfairly, Melkor gets blamed for all the negative stuff‒burning heat and bitter cold immoderate and all that‒but Eru himself plainly and clearly said that everything comes from him.  “Thou shalt prove but mine instrument…” and all that.

Really, Melkor is just a convenient scapegoat so that people don’t get ticked off at Ilúvatar, who gets the credit for the good stuff and gets to foist off blame for the bad stuff, even though he is the one responsible for all of it.  Indeed, he’s the only one**** who could be responsible.

From a certain point of view, Melkor is the being in Ilúvatar’s creation that suffers the most.  He is given the greatest gifts of knowledge and of power of all the created beings in that universe, but he is fated, by his creator, to be disconnected, to be alienated, to feel an emptiness that his brethren don’t seem to share‒he lacks something, he is different, his thoughts are unlike those of his brethren (I can sympathize), and that torments him into becoming the original Dark Lord, the supposed source of all evil in Arda.

But of course, as openly admitted by the being himself, Ilúvatar is the source of all evil in Arda.  It may be worthwhile‒perhaps the gain in beauty and heroism and triumph and courage gained by those who live in his creation more than makes up for the suffering caused by and to the evil creatures.  But those evil creatures are still victims‒perhaps the greatest victims.

Ilúvatar could just have repaired Melkor (and Sauron, etc.).  He could have shown them his wisdom, the error of their ways, could have cured their dysfunction.  But no, that would be boring; that wouldn’t make a good story.  How could he have a heroic and triumphant journey for Frodo and Sam without sacrificing the soul of Sauron to endless emptiness and loneliness and bitterness and fear and hatred, and finally to being blown away into the Void, to suffer there forever (or at least until Ilúvatar decides it’s time to remake the world)?

And let’s not forget Melkor, with his feet chopped off and his head chained between his knees, floating immortally in the Void, with no respite from pain and suffering, no treatment or correction for the flaws and lacks that made him what he was, that Ilúvatar put there to make him an instrument for devising things of greater beauty.  He’s the clay mold around a bronze statue, broken and cast away once the metal cools.

Melkor can’t die, can’t sleep, can’t even change his form anymore.  No wonder he has always hated and envied the favored golden Children.  No wonder he hates Ilúvatar.

Okay, that was a weird digression, and of course, it’s all fiction, though it’s great and wonderful fiction.  But it is a way of highlighting a conclusion that I think is inescapable:  if there is/were a universe created by an infinitely powerful, omniscient, omnipresent being, then that being, and that being alone, would be responsible for all suffering, for all evil.  Everyone else is just a puppet by commission or by omission.

Fortunately(?), there is no reason to suspect such a thing, and I give it quite a low Bayesian credence (though not, perhaps, as low as werewolves).  That doesn’t mean that “free will” and “blame” and “retribution” make any more ethical or moral sense than they would have made otherwise‒they don’t.  But at least we can all cut ourselves and the universe a bit of slack, all the while recognizing that we’re on our own, no one’s going to help us, and it’ll be up to us to sink or to swim…or, maybe, to try to swim but sink anyway.

I don’t know what I’m getting at, but thanks for your patience.  Have a good day, please, if you’re able.

*It was.  Even as I’m editing this, my mood is crashing.  I don’t think it was some manner of self-fulfilling prophecy, but even if it was, I don’t know what I could have done to avoid fulfilling it.  My nature is what it is, while I’m alive‒which doesn’t go a long way to making me attached to that state of existence.

**While, in principle, one cannot really assign absolute certainty to some given proposition, this is a case where my Bayesian prior‒if prior it really is‒is well above 99%.

***Unlike, for instance the fact that, due to atmospheric refraction, we see the sun in the morning before it would technically be directly in view without such refraction, and continue to see it longer than it is truly in line of sight in the evening.  That wouldn’t happen if the Earth had no atmosphere, but then we wouldn’t really care because we probably would all be dead.

****Apart from Tolkien (the author), but I’m approaching this from the point of view of Arda being real, so we’re not going to address that.  Of course, it is a fact that the bad guys in the story are used by the author to create beauty that would not exist if it were not for the hardships and struggles of the heroes.  I know all about this.  I’ve tortured the characters in my stories beyond anything any real people could ever experience.  I guess no creator of any but the simplest of things can ever be truly innocent.

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Apologies for a blogless Monday

I was out sick with some form of enteropathy* yesterday, so I didn’t write a blog post.  I frankly haven’t done much of anything that’s in any way productive since Friday, and I’m not sure I did anything productive then.  I hope no one was too bereft by not being able to read my writing for three days (ha ha).

I’m now sitting at the train station, waiting for the train to the office (well, it doesn’t actually go to the office, but I think you know what I mean), not looking forward to the fact that I’ll have to do extra catch-up work from both Saturday and yesterday.  I really don’t want to have to deal with any of it or with anything at all.

I don’t know why I keep doing anything whatsoever.  I can speculate on certain causes, of course‒habit, the evolved drive simply to continue to survive, a dislike for causing inconvenience to other people, all that sort of thing.  Also, I guess there is the idiotic hope that maybe, just maybe, I will find some answers, some meaning, or some solutions to at least some of my problems.

Honestly, when I get sick like over Sunday through yesterday, I get the wild hope that maybe I’ll need to be hospitalized, and while in the hospital, I’ll be able to get some help for my psychological issues as well as my physical ones.  It’s stupid, I know.  I need to stop hoping for anything.  Hope is a waste of my time.

Ironically, it’s hope that keeps me writing about the fact that I’m having problems going on, problems dealing with my issues and my loneliness and my depression and insomnia and pain and all that crap.  I hope that somehow, by talking about it, I’ll either arrive at some insight or ideas or some semblance of understanding that might lead to some modicum of peace.  Or I hope that someone out there in the WordPress world‒perhaps it should be called the WorldPress‒will have some new ideas or insights or some help to offer.  Or maybe some old friend of mine will read what I write and will reach out and offer a hand or something.  I don’t know what they could do, or what I could do.  But anyway, it is hope that keeps me writing, I guess.

But it’s getting old.  I’m getting tired of it.

When I don’t just dwell on morosity (I don’t know if that’s a proper word), I write about weird shit, like I did on Friday.  I could write about current events, I suppose, but most of those are discouraging and boring.  It’s basically about as fun as writing about the interactions of a very large colony of baboons from the baboons’ points of view.  Baboons don’t want to admit to themselves that most of their choices and motivations are almost entirely simple primate dominance, mating, and social jockeying behaviors.

Humans really are just baboons with delusions of grandeur, some of which are excusable, many (perhaps most) of which are not.  They’re weirdly built and strange to look at, with very rare exceptions.  They think their culture and society and civilization were made somehow, deliberately‒by them it sometimes seems they imagine, though that cannot be possible‒when really, it all just sort of happened and continues just to happen, like any weather phenomenon or termite mound.  This is nothing of which to be ashamed‒it’s the nature of everything as far as I can see‒I just find the hubris disgusting and inexcusable.

Even nature itself seems just weird and rather twisted and horrifying when I look at it these days.  Maybe part of it is that I’m down here in Florida, but when you look closely at the very ad hoc, cobbled together, misery-laden natural world, in which even green plants compete ruthlessly against each other, while insects gnaw the tree trunks, and birds eat the insects and cats eat the birds (when they can) and meanwhile ten thousand other such painful and fear-ridden interactions are taking place in every acre, at all levels, from viruses to bacteria, to yeast, to protozoa, to slime molds and lichen and moss and mold and mushrooms up to grasses and bushes and trees and worms and snails and arthropods and fish and amphibians and reptiles and birds and mammals…everything ultimately just churning away at low entropy energy and converting it into high entropy energy…well, it all seems horrifying and discouraging and very, very dark.

Everything in the world seems alien to me…which I guess must mean that I am alien, since everything else is just there, doing what it does, being what it is, and I’m the one that finds it all daunting and repulsive.

I often bring up the concept of Sisyphus, and it now occurs to me that, maybe, Sisyphus is gradually wearing away the mountain on which he rolls his ever-falling boulder, slowly grinding it down until, finally, it’s level, and the boulder will no longer roll but will stay where Sisyphus puts it, and that will be the state of the universe at very high entropy (I want to say at maximum entropy, but I don’t think there is a maximum overall entropy**).

Of course “maximal” entropy is a state that can go on for a very long time.  It’s like the fable (as told by the 12th Doctor) in which the Emperor asks a shepherd boy to tell him the meaning of eternity.  The shepherd boy says there is somewhere a mountain of pure diamond.  It takes an hour to climb and an hour to go around.  Once every hundred years, a tiny bird comes along and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain.  And when, after so many repetitions of that once-a-century sharpening happens that the diamond mountain is finally worn down to nothing…then the first second of eternity will have passed.

Even once the “heat death” of the universe comes to pass‒assuming that is what will come to pass‒and all is a haze of elementary particles, barely above absolute zero in an endlessly expanding but empty spacetime, which will come potentially after more than 10 to the 100th power years, that will only be an infinitesimal instant at the uttermost beginning of the eternity of nothingness.

In that quantum vacuum, even a direction of time will have less meaning than would any possible sense of up, down, left, right, forward, and backward in the heart of one of the intergalactic supervoids, in which not even a single distant star or galaxy could be seen with anything but the strongest telescope on long exposure.  To the human eye, in a supervoid, all would be blackness and emptiness in all directions, and in the heat death, that would apply to time as well.  With no change, the past and the future are indistinguishable.

Yet, eventually, new universes, or Boltzmann brains, or other esoterica might yet come to be.  Eternity is a long time.  Or maybe they will be found to have been in what seems to be the future but which is, eventually, the past of some universe with an opposite-pointing “arrow of time”.

Anyway, my point is, the universe is weird and harsh and the hubris of self-important creatures would be laughable if it were not so nauseating.

I don’t think I can do all this much longer.  My stop is coming up soon.  Have a good day.

*You can look it up.

**There is a maximum amount of entropy that can be fit into any given region of spacetime, and that is the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the area of an event horizon of a black hole that would enclose that region, expressed in square Planck lengths.  Actually, if memory serves, it’s the logarithm of that surface area (probably the natural logarithm).  If you tried to “add more entropy” to such a region, the black hole would grow, and the horizon would just get larger…you wouldn’t get more entropy “within” the given region.

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2 kinds of ASDs and an NTD called SBO all considered by a pitiful SOB

It’s Friday, and this weekend I am not working, which right now seems like a highly positive thing, because starting yesterday in the middle of the day, I suddenly had a huge flare-up of my back/hip/leg pain.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  I’m always trying to see if I can tease out (and test) the causality of such occurrences, but of course, it’s a tricky business, with so many possible variables.  I wondered if it was something I ate‒I had a specific type of food in mind, that I had not eaten for a while‒or was it partly because of my severely poor sleep the night before?  What was it?

It was frustrating in more than the usual sense because, after having walked to the train that morning and not having any problems from it or the previous few days’ longish walks, I was planning to walk in the evening again.  Unfortunately, I did not feel up to such a thing when the time came, so I took an Uber to the house‒after getting some comfort-oriented ice cream at the Cold Stone Creamery*, a place I’ve not visited in over a decade‒and then another one to the train this morning, since I still feel rotten.

It’s noteworthy that, when I am in more severe pain than usual, my willpower to resist indulgences that I want to resist gets quite a lot weaker.  I suppose that trying to compensate for and deal with the pain diverts mental resources that would otherwise be pointed toward self-discipline.  I had a big hot pastrami sandwich for lunch yesterday and then that ice cream, but they were both far less satisfying and pleasant than I would have expected.  I don’t think I’ll ever get either one again.

I’m always trying to think about my back pain and the things that trigger and assuage it and so on, and occasionally‒though for the most part it’s all well-trodden ground‒I come upon some possible connection that I hadn’t seen before.  Yesterday, while thinking about my then-present back pain, I thought back to my childhood leg pains, which I think I’ve mentioned here before.  When I began having my current problems (about 20+ years ago), they first presented as a recurrence of the kinds of pains that I had as a child, quite similar in character.  This led to various investigations to look for neuromuscular or myopathic processes, but I had no myopathy**.

Having more recently researched connections between autism spectrum disorders (which I might have) and congenital heart disease (which I certainly did have‒Atrial Septal Defect, secundum type‒because I had open heart surgery for it when I was 18), it yesterday occurred to me that there might be other associated anomalies.

I think it was while I was browsing biomedical news related to neurodevelopmental stuff on a site that’s linked with phys.org (which is a science news site that I enjoy and recommend) that I saw something about neural tube defects related to autism spectrum disorders.

Neural tube defects (NTDs) occur when the neural tube‒the embryonic infolding that creates the cavity that becomes the sort of scaffold and center of the spinal cord and central nervous system and its supporting structures‒fails to close completely on one or both ends.  It’s mainly to prevent these that potentially pregnant women in the modern world are encouraged to take daily folate supplements.  NTDs can be utterly catastrophic, producing forms of anencephaly and various types of severe and lifelong neurological impairment, or they can be comparatively mild, all the way down to spina bifida occulta.

neural tubeadjusted

That latter term describes the situation when, at the very lower end, the spinal bones and what not are not completely closed at the rear.  The “occulta” part refers to the fact that there are no noticeable external findings that show the presence of the incomplete closure.  The most commonly affected portion of the spine is in the L5 and S1 vertebral bodies (lumbar and sacral, that is) with somewhat incomplete rear closure.  These findings are, according to what I have read, not always noted on MRI unless it is looking for them specifically.

diagrams of sacral spina bifidaadjusted

It is noteworthy (to me) that when my back was investigated, including “provocative discography”, I had not just a bulging disc but a full thickness tear in the L5-S1 intervertebral disc, going all the way from the outer edge to the nucleus pulposus.  Imagine one of the pieces of Freshen Up gum, with the goo in the middle of each stick up gum, but torn inward from the edge so that the central liquid leaks out.  That’s the sort of thing I had.

annular-tearadjusted

And it was in the rear of the intervertebral disc, just where any SBO might have left poor structural support.  No one noticed SBO in my back when they were working me up, but they weren’t looking for it, nor even looking at the bones in particular.  No one (including me) suspected any skeletal issue.  And SBO can be very occult, and may present, conceivably, with only very minor, hard to notice changes.

I haven’t yet mentioned that one of the findings that can be associated with SBO is bed-wetting.  I had trouble with that, in addition to my frequent and rather severe childhood leg aches, far later than my siblings…in fact, I never heard of either of them having that trouble at all.

It turns out that the correlation between congenital heart disease and SBO is quite high as such things go, more so than either condition’s correlation with autism spectrum disorders.  Of course, most people with congenital heart problems do not have neural tube defects, and vice versa, but the existence of one involves a prevalence of the other that is quite a lot higher than in the general population.

So, though I cannot arrive at any firm conclusions, I know that I had congenital heart disease, I have lifelong neurological and psychological attributes that seem (to me) to be consistent with what would have been called Asperger’s Syndrome before about 2013, and I had symptoms (and signs) that could very well correlate with the presence of a minor form of Spina Bifida Occulta***.

Also, of course, my physical findings when my back was investigated for a resurgence of leg pain in mid-adulthood are consistent with a structural weakness in the posterior region of L5-S1, such that my disc damage or injury was markedly worse than most I’ve seen in patients with whom I’ve been associated, or in descriptions of disc disease.

Alas, I no longer have, nor have access to, my former radiographs of any kind, nor medical notes or surgical notes.  I could be incorrect in this assessment of possibility, and I certainly don’t put my credence very close to 100%.  But I think I’ve nudged myself at least past the 50% point.

Whatever the case, I have chronic pain now, and I’ve had surgery in my back and implanted matrix with bone growth factor there and a titanium cage, so it’s probably all too messy ever to discern if there used to be a very minor case of SBO in the past.  Until and unless someone develops a means of scanning the past such as the Father invented in my book Son of Man, which uses complex time (and a phenomenon I made up) to be able to scan the past of quantum fields without running afoul of the uncertainty principle, I’m unlikely ever to know with anything close to certainty.

I’m convinced that our firm credences of any of the facts of reality can never actually be 100%‒I personally don’t even consider “I think therefore I am” to be completely valid, since even my consciousness might be part of some much greater mind’s imagination…though I suppose in that case, it would still be valid to say that “I am”, just that what I am would be different than what I seem to myself to be.

But for all practical purposes, it’s reasonable to go with Descartes, though.  Most other aspects of reality are, as he pointed out, less certain than we often suspect them to be‒except when they are more certain than we expect them to be.  

I hope I haven’t bored you too much with these thoughts.  They seem interesting to me, of course, but I recognize that’s no guarantee that anyone else will find them anything but mind-numbing.

It would be nice if I could find a way to get better answers than I have on questions of personal neural tube defects or neurodevelopmental disorders, but even textbook findings of such disorders are somewhat misleading, because we don’t have MRIs (or similar) of everyone in a population and symptoms or signs to correlate with findings.  Indeed, almost by definition, the MRIs and CTs and X-rays of people with such issues are going to be those with the most obvious and glaring findings.

Oh, well.  Reality is often disappointing.  But at least thinking about these things is momentarily engaging.

I won’t be writing a blog post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen, so I hope you all have as good a weekend as you can have‒which you will, since whatever happens will be what has happened, and will not be subject to change once it has (It’s always the best, and the worst, of all possible worlds, in a sense).  So, I guess it might be worth it not to worry about it too much.  But, of course, you also don’t have any choice about whether you worry about it or not, once you’re worrying about it****.

Even if there are “many words” a la Hugh Everett, you still only will experience one version of your life.  The fact that another of you might have it better (or worse) has no bearing on your experience in any given Everettian branch, unless it’s possible for the wave function branches to interfere again after decoherence, which is, in principle, possible, but so vanishingly unlikely that it seems not worth considering.

Enough!  Please have a good weekend.

*It was disappointing.  My tastes seem to have changed over time, perhaps due to Covid or perhaps to other matters, but some things I used to like don’t seem to please me anymore.  In this case, that’s probably just as well.

**Myo- for muscle and -pathy for “something wrong with”.  It’s a fairly basic term that reveals almost nothing beyond its prima facie meaning, but it sounds impressive because of the Latin.

***I should note that leg pain is not part of the traditional symptom list of SBO, but intermittent leg weakness is definitely a part of it‒and my leg aches were associated with some radicular type symptoms, such as apparently being associated with notable temperature change in the affected extremities.  At least, it was notable by our family dog, Ernie, who would often unerringly come and lie on my affected leg when I was in pain, just in the right place, as if to provide warmth and comfort.  He was a good dog!  Anyway, disorders rarely exactly follow the textbook descriptions.  As I’ve often said, diseases don’t read the literature.

****Rush were simply wrong; you cannot choose free will.  It either is or it isn’t, but that’s not up to you.

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If I have veil’d my blog, I turn the trouble of my countenance merely upon myself

Hello.  Good morning.

I really wished that this would be the Thursday blog post that I would title with the unaltered Shakespeare quote, “The rest is silence”, which is Prince Hamlet’s last line before he dies.  Then maybe I would share a brief clip from the video for the Radiohead song No Surprises, the part where Thom Yorke sings, “I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide, and no alarms and no surprises.  No alarms and no surprises.  No alarms and no surprises.  Silent.  Silent.”

Unfortunately, this will probably not be my final fit nor my final bellyache.  I certainly still feel compelled to write this today.  I woke up quite early, as usual, and lay in my room just staring about, wondering if there was any excuse I could give for not going to the office, and whether staying at the house would be in any way better than just going in.  Neither seemed to be the case.  So, finally, I got up, showered, and decided to take an Uber to the train very early.  In fact, I arrived just as the first train of the day was pulling into the station, though I made no attempt to catch that one, since it was functionally impossible.

And now, here I am, sitting and sweating and writing.

A weird thing did happen as I was getting ready to go this morning.  I put in my earphones and pulled up YouTube Music and chose my playlist “Favorite Songs”, with YouTube doing its little self-promotion about some new, unrequested service it now provides or something, in which I had no interest.  Anyway, I tapped the “shuffle playlist” option, and the song/video that came up first was my own song, Schrodinger’s Head.  But the song that began playing was none other than the aforementioned No Surprises.  It continued to play, overtop of my own song’s logo and screen, even when I backed up to the beginning of the song.  It didn’t correct itself until I’d skipped to the next song and then came back, at which point it was my own song that started playing.

That’s a strange glitch.  Does it mean that the program loads “video” and “sound”, at least in YouTube Music, as two separate processes?  I usually just go for the song rather than the video option (when that’s available), but I have always guessed that doing so simply involved the suppression of the video portion of the file in some sense.  But I’ve not ever seen a mixed song and video from different sources.

Not that I’m bothered.  It’s far from insulting if a Radiohead song presents as if it were my own.  Well, it might be insulting to Radiohead, but not to me.

Anyway, I didn’t actually listen to either song at the time.  I realized that what I really wanted was actual silence, and just leaving the earphones in but not playing anything is the closest I can come to that.  Of course, tinnitus means I haven’t experienced full silence for about 15 years, at least not in my right ear, but I can try to come as close as possible.

My pain wasn’t as bad yesterday during the day as it had been on the previous two days, and that’s definitely a good thing, though now it’s acting up more severely again.  That’s not really anything new.

As I stood outside waiting for the Uber, the air was as usual in the morning lately:  stagnant and still in addition to being hot and humid.  But far up and away to the east and south were high clouds, and there was rather frequent lightning to be seen, then and when I was riding to the train.

We used to call that “heat lightning” and I think people imagined it was something different than usual lightning, but my current understanding is that it is the same electrostatic phenomenon, merely much higher in the air (where I suspect the resistivity is lower, though I may be wrong about that…in any case, there would be more cosmic ray bombardment to seed ionization paths for lightning to follow).

Of course, one never hears thunder from heat lightning.  Maybe that’s because it’s so high and far that the sound is thin even to begin with, since sound travels more slowly and less effectively through less dense media.  And then, of course, as it hits the lower atmosphere, trying to enter a denser medium (with faster propagation speeds) it might be unable to penetrate.  Indeed, there might* be a phenomenon analogous to total internal reflection, the process that, among other things, allows fiber optic cables to work with essentially no signal loss.

When light is traveling through a dense medium, like glass or diamond, in which it moves much more slowly relative to its speed through air or vacuum, and it comes to an interface where it would pass out into a much less dense medium‒where it would travel much more quickly‒if it strikes at too shallow an angle, it will not exit its current medium at all, but will instead fully reflect, effectively without any loss.

My first thought was that it was the opposite situation for sound traveling from high, thin air to lower, much denser air.  But then it occurred to me that it’s not the density of the medium that directly causes total internal reflection, or any refraction, really.  It’s the differential speed of propagation that causes refraction and total internal reflection**.  And sound travels more quickly through a denser medium, not less quickly, whereas light does the opposite.  So, comparatively slow sound in thinner, upper air, coming to denser, lower air, might reflect if it arrives at a shallow enough angle.

It’s somewhat like being below the surface of a pool.  We know that sound travels much better and farther in water than air, but if your head is underwater, you may not be able at all to hear people talking who are standing near the pool, and you might not even be able to hear loud ambient music (unless a subwoofer is in contact with the ground/floor and thence to the pool).

I think I’m more or less on track with this as at least part of the explanation for the fact that one never hears the thunder that accompanies very, very high lightning.  Of course, some of it could simply be ordinary attenuation, since the intensity of sound falls off as the square of the distance (as with light, also…this is one of those physical facts of reality that is directly caused by the geometry of three-dimensional space, nothing more esoteric and nothing less profound).  But that doesn’t seem to me to be an adequate explanation for why one never hears the sound of “heat lightning”.

Well, that’s enough ado about nothing for today.  It’s more than I expected or wanted to write.  I mostly just wanted to write some form of goodbye.  But the horrible, terrible, inexorable pressure of habit and routine in someone with a particular type of nervous system can be nearly as potent and irresistible as the laws of reflection and refraction and geometry.  I can only seem to escape such habits when I am forced by external circumstances to do so, but then new habits and routines‒compulsions, really‒take the place of the old ones.  I try to procure useful habits when I can, but one cannot entirely pick and choose such things.

I fear my only escape will happen when I actually die.  Of course, if time and space are fixed and super-deterministic, then even that might not actually be an escape.  As far as my experience goes, it might just lead to me starting over at the beginning, like a video being played on a loop.

Nietzsche actually used that notion (obviously not based in Einsteinian concepts, but it doesn’t have to be) as the basis for a thought-provoking question:  if you knew for certain that, once you die, you would then live your life over and over again exactly as it happened this time around, how would you change your current and future behavior?  Is your life now one that would horrify you to repeat infinitely, or would it be okay?

Inquiring minds want to know, I guess.  Or maybe not.

TTFN

no surprise

*This is just me speculating in real time.  If anyone knows the correct answer, please let me know.

**Thus the frequent demonstrative analogy used to teach about refraction:  a row of soldiers marching side by side coming at an angle to a place where they leave hard, firm ground and enter deep mud, which will tend to change the angle of their movement.  Alternately, one often encounters the story of a lifeguard running across the beach to save someone drowning, needing to judge the best place to enter the ocean to minimize the overall time taken to reach the swimmer.  Too much time in the water slows the lifeguard too much, too much time on land makes the path longer, and thus also slows the lifeguard.  The lifeguard’s path of least time turns out to be exactly analogous to what light does when refracting through differing media.  A brilliant, “for-the-layperson” account of the quantum mechanics behind this is given in Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

by

Aqua sea foam shame and be all a pile of cheese

Okay, well, today I’m writing this blog post‒or at least I’m beginning it‒at the train station, having walked here, since I hadn’t done that walk yet this week.  Of course, I’m soaked with sweat and I will probably be in a lot of pain today, but I’ve been in a lot of pain anyway, so I might as well get some exercise.

I’ve had a terrible time with respect to pain, even worse than usual, lately.  Yesterday, after taking three aspirin and two Tylenol at once, about half an hour later‒and for all of less than twenty minutes‒my pain faded briefly away, and it was ecstasy.  It was better than a holiday and a great book and a good movie with one’s favorite person.  Then that effect went away and the pain resurged back to prior levels.  It’s quite frustrating, almost a tease, though I don’t think anyone or anything is actually, deliberately doing any teasing.

And of course, though my coworker was back yesterday, he did that same thing where, even if I just say that I feel tired and worn out, he says that he knows how I feel.  I want to say, “No.  You don’t.  Even assuming your current pain is as bad as mine, try having that for more than twenty years, try losing practically everything that was ever important to you partly because of that pain.”

I of course really don’t want him to do any of that.  I hope his pain steadily decreases and his life improves and his family prospers and so on.  I don’t think I would wish my subjective experience on anyone else, though I know to a near mathematical certainty that there are many people whose lives are far more unpleasant than mine.  Still, mine is unpleasant enough, and I don’t recommend it.

I keep wanting to warn people at the office that I really don’t feel that I’m going to survive for much longer.  That’s what I’ve been feeling particularly strongly over the past few days.  I also feel grumpy and angry and hateful and spiteful, so I dislike my own self more than usual, which is saying something indeed.  But if I say to others that I don’t think I will survive much longer, the few people who take it seriously‒locally, anyway‒are the people with whom I don’t really feel a connection at all, and indeed, are the people I find most irritating (which is unfair to them, but I can’t seem to do much about it).

It’s a bit analogous to this blog, though the analogy is very weak.  I air my depression and pain and despair here, hoping either to be told some new information and ideas or to receive some form of help, either from without or from within, but after a while, if you keep writing about the fact that you feel miserable and your pain is worsening and you have thoughts of killing yourself‒but you haven’t actually killed yourself or tried to kill yourself yet‒people stop taking it very seriously.  I suppose that’s not completely irrational or at all unfair, but it is rather frustrating.  It really makes everything one does feel even more futile than it would have felt otherwise.

That’s part of what makes me think I should just give up on blogging, and on anything and everything else.  I should stop blogging, and I should also just recognize that I am not going to do any more music, nor will I write any more fiction, nor will I do any more drawing or singing or anything else creative.  I will not master General Relativity or Quantum Field Theory to the degree I would like to, which is to a near-professional level.

And I will certainly not make any new friends or develop any new romantic relationships; I will not have any form of new life or family.  I won’t achieve anything else of value in my life, I won’t ever see or rekindle my closeness with any of my old friends, and they are surely all quite happy about that.

I should just stop trying.  I should stop blogging, I should put away, give away, burn or otherwise eliminate all the hallmarks of foolish pipe dreams, I should stop getting new books or manga, cancel my cable and internet and streaming services and Amazon and all that and just let go.  I’m hanging on by my fingernails, anyway, and it’s damned uncomfortable.

Sorry this post isn’t much fun.  I don’t recall the last time I did a post that I thought was probably fun for anyone to read.  I’m even sort of dozing off while writing this, even though I’m now on the train.  I can only imagine how boring it must be to read.

Anyway, this is all almost certainly a waste of my time and of yours.  Sorry.  I hope it hasn’t been too dreary.  Thank you for reading it, in any case.  I really appreciate your kindness and patience.  I wish I could be more worthy of them.

All apologies