Science

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If thou hast no name to be blogged by, let us call thee devil.

Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, the day of the week on which I wrote blog posts even when I was spending my other days writing fiction.  I tended to start those posts with some variation of “Hello and good morning”, and the title was always a slightly altered quote from Shakespeare.  I’ve kept up that Thursday template even now that I blog daily, because I like to stick to a pattern or routine once I’ve established it.

The above information is provided for the sake* of any new readers of this blog.  Apologies to any long-time readers for the redundancy.

I walked to the train station this morning, after having rested a bit yesterday (I only walked a total of about 3 miles overall), since I’d walked almost 16 miles over the previous 2 days.  Thus far, including this morning’s walk, I’ve done about 24 miles this week.  That’s not too bad.

It would be faster if I could jog the distance; maybe I’ll eventually be able to do that.  I used to really like jogging/running, and even when I was in residency I used to run on the treadmill in the mornings.  I had to stop eventually, as I went into practice and had a growing family; time just wasn’t really available.  And since my back problem began, running has tended to exacerbate it.  Maybe, if I were to get back into shape and lose a bit of weight, that wouldn’t be an issue.

(And maybe if we all wish hard enough, there will be world peace and happiness, and unicorns will appear that poop ice cream that provides all nutrients humans need without any health detriments, and they’ll also pee sweet tea with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol but none of the negative toxicity.)

I’m sorry that my posts have been such downers lately (if they don’t come across that way to you readers, then I’m really not expressing myself well).  I’ve just been feeling steadily and persistently more despondent as time has proceeded.  My optimism, such as it ever was, has declined and declined, and my hope even of the possibility of any rescue or revitalization is diminishing.  I don’t see how my life is ever going to turn around and improve.

I’m just tired, you know?  I’m really quite worn down and nearly out.  Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily keep me from walking to the train despite the heat, and sometimes walking back from the train in the heat, but some of that fact is because I’m able to think of it as a kind of self-harm.

Of course, it’s self-harm that could backfire and end up doing me good, but that’s the chance a person takes when doing such things.  The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.  Which just goes to show that it’s really not a great idea to try to get mice and men together to make plans for things.  Their priorities just don’t mesh.

As for my own plans, I guess I don’t really have any.

I’m getting close to my train stop, and I haven’t written much yet today, and I certainly haven’t written anything of consequence.  I haven’t even reached 600 words yet, let alone 800 or 1000.  Should I try to push for more?  Or is this enough?  Is it already too much?

My life has almost certainly already been “too much”, by any reasonable, objective measure.  I really should do something about that.  But, of course, I don’t really want to make too big a mess for other people to clean up‒though why I should be so considerate is sometimes beyond me.

Also, I have the faintest, residual hope that somewhere out there, someone has some answers, some purpose or meaning that I can learn, or that I can discover.  But it is a faint hope.  I’ve sampled most of the popular, ready-made suggestions and ideas, from religion to philosophy to psychology and psychiatry, and so far have been thoroughly disappointed.  But, as I’ve said before, I don’t want to want to die.  But I also don’t want facile, delusional, banal pseudo-motivation.

Oh, well.  The universe wasn’t made for me‒nor was it made for you, or for any or all of us put together, as far as anyone can tell‒so I don’t expect it necessarily to fit my preferences.  Honestly, I don’t know what I would ask of a universe if I were given the opportunity to special-order one.  Any change I might request would likely have unexpected consequences, much in the way that any pharmaceutical intervention in the human body brings side-effects that can be quite unpredictable.

Now, take that to a cosmic scale.  Everything in the universe has to fit with everything else without producing any actual contradictions.  No part can contradict the whole, nor can it contradict other, actual parts.  You can speak a contradiction‒the rules of grammar allow it‒but you cannot instantiate one.  It’s analogous to the way you can write a computer program with a syntax error or an endless loop or an old “return without gosub” error, but the program will not run.

I guess that’s enough for today.  I don’t know what I’ll title this, or what picture I’ll add to it, but of course, if you’re reading this, you know, which is kind of cool in its way, showing as it does a form of temporal relativity and multidimensionality that has nothing to do with Einstein.  I hope you all are feeling reasonably well and trying not to get too overheated (in any sense).  With that in mind, I’ll close with a rather “chilling” but pithy statement I heard from a climate scientist in a WIRED YouTube video:  “On average, this is the hottest summer you’ve ever experienced.  It’s also the coolest summer for the rest of your life.”***

TTFN

for your own sake

*That’s “sake” with a long A and a silent E, not the transliteration of the Japanese word  酒, which means, in Japan, more or less any alcoholic beverage, but which in the West is how we think of Nihon-shu (日本酒), the Japanese so-called rice “wine”…which would actually be more a kind of a beer, since it’s made of grain, whereas wines are made from fruit (interesting side note:  originally the fermentation was begun after the rice was chewed and then spit into a container, because salivary amylase starts breaking the starches into sugar**).  “Sake” is one of the few Japanese things that doesn’t really do much for me.  I’ve yet to try Japanese whiskey, but since it’s based on Scotch whiskey, and produced with typical Japanese attention to detail, it’s probably pretty darn good.

**You can test this for yourself.  If you take an unsweetened white cracker (no pun intended) or, say, a bit of potato in your mouth and just kind of keep it there, perhaps chewing it, it will eventually start to become noticeably sweet…unless you’re so overexposed to sugary foods that your taste buds are too insensitive to notice.  Don’t do this experiment around other people, though‒you’re likely to get some odd looks.

***Of course, he is basing his predictions on current technology.  And though, as he pointed out during the video, our current carbon capture technology is woefully inadequate to turn things around on any reasonable scale, one must not underestimate the power of human ingenuity when Mother Necessity is standing over the world with a ruler, ready to rap everyone on the knuckles until they bleed.  The next Manhattan Project may well be geared toward developing newer, much more potent, means of carbon capture that could be effective on a scale big enough to correct climate change in a sensible time frame.  This won’t happen on its own and it won’t be cheap, but as more and more‒and richer and more powerful‒people start suffering from the effects of climate change, distractions will tend to fall by the wayside.  If they don’t, then I guess the human race will get what it deserves.

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Bouncing tangents on walking, boots, pain, technology, science, politics, and probably other random stuff

Well, here I am again, writing this blog post at the train station after having walked here this morning.  I had intended to do this wearing a new pair of shoes of the same make and model (so to speak) as the pair I wore yesterday, but that pair, which was supposed to have been delivered yesterday evening, is instead delayed until this morning, after 8 am, which doesn’t do me any good whatsoever.  Anyway, it forced me to do an experiment walking in my boots this morning, which is what I did.

I had switched from my boots because I feared that they might have been responsible for last week’s rather extreme flare-up of my pain.  However, as I changed from them, I also changed chairs in my office.  That’s not a good way to do science, obviously:  varying two parameters at the same time.  It makes it hard to tell which one‒if either‒is having the dominant effect, if indeed there is one.  However, when dealing with severe exacerbations of already-maddening chronic pain, one can easily become impatient.

I’m not excusing it, but I am explaining it.

Anyway, I have come to the suspicion that, just maybe, it wasn’t the footwear at all but mainly the chair that was making things worse.  And now I’ve been forced into doing a better experiment.  If, after today, my pain gets significantly worse, that increases the credence that the boots are the problem.  However, if my pain level is stable‒and certainly yesterday’s walking didn’t seem to exacerbate it‒then maybe the boots aren’t causing any trouble.

I will say one thing about how quickly I’ve gotten into a state of readiness:  though I wore boots, which are heavier than the shoes I wore yesterday, I made slightly better time on my walk today.

Oh, I forgot to note that today is the first day of August‒named for Caesar Augustus (Née Octavian) who followed Julius Caesar (after whom July was named).  Welcome.  Summer is almost half over, at least by dates.  There’s nothing particularly interesting about the start of this month, other than rent and other bills being due, and the prospect of facing another long, dreary month with nothing interesting happening, other than bad things out in the world, which always seem to happen, anyway.

Of course, the US is more and more comically and tragically stupid than it used to be, but that’s been happening for a long time.  I remember when they canceled the Superconducting Supercollider in the late nineties, and I thought to myself, “That’s it, the United States’ days of being an intellectual and scientific and progress-oriented world leader are coming to an end.”

It wasn’t just my physics bias that led me to that conclusion, though that had its impact.  It was mainly the idea that, before, a large part of the ethos of the country seemed focused on constant improvement and leadership, in the sciences, in the arts, in technology, and in prosperity in general, including the traditional “American dream”.  But it turns out‒or so it seems‒that all of that seemingly intrinsic love of education and innovation and hard work was simply born of the post WWII era Cold War competition with the USSR.  We didn’t love these things for their own sake, not in general, not on average.  We just wanted to outcompete the “Godless Communists”.

Indeed, after the Soviet Union fell, the religious right poisoned the Republican Party more and more‒or so it seemed to me‒and turned their hostility inward on their own nation.  And some of the people on the left, without having to worry about being compared to the US’ enemies, became more leftish and pseudo-religious in their own Orwellian ideas.

Of course, most people were, and probably still are, much more centrist/moderate than you would guess, based on people in the news.  But now that we have no opponent against whom to unite, ideologically and physically, we can turn on ourselves more and more, and the most extreme voices aren’t curtailed out of the necessity of unity against a serious enemy.

China doesn’t present the same kind of opposition as the Soviets did, at least in our collective mind, probably because they’re far away and also they are our trading partners, and aren’t of European descent and are culturally different enough to avoid a metaphorical uncanny valley problem.  Also, they’ve not really openly declared any ideologically motivated intention to “take over the world” or to “bury the West”, at least not as far as I’ve heard.

That’s good, as far as it goes, of course.  The Cold War was dreadful;  I honestly grew up thinking that civilization was going to be destroyed by nuclear war at any moment.  When I was a teenager, my friends and I honestly and seriously thought about what we might do to survive after WWIII.  It wasn’t a joke.  And in my late teens, as part of a youth orchestra, I traveled to Lübeck, on the East/West German border, and got to see the fence line, the barbed wire, the mined “no man’s land” area and the machine-gun towers on the Eastern side‒not for keeping people out, but for preventing people from leaving.

That was pretty scary.

I don’t have high hopes for the future of the USA, but I don’t have high hopes for the rest of the world, either.  Our greater technology and abilities haven’t left the average person more respectful of science, because they don’t even understand the basics of the science that dominates almost every aspect of their lives.  Clarke’s Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but I wouldn’t have thought it would apply to the technology we have today.  Yet many people seem as incurious about real science‒and mathematics, and philosophy, and other fields of intellect‒as they would be about a world run by wizards.

There are flat-Earthers out there, for crying out loud, even though the refutations of that hypothesis are trivially easy to recognize, and many have been known for thousands of years!  There are people who have been so protected from deadly diseases by successful programs of vaccination (and sanitation and so on) that they actually think vaccines, and those who create them, are the enemy.

It really is depressing.  It’s like the fall of Camelot‒and I don’t refer to the JFK White House culture that people called Camelot, but the mythological Camelot related to the legend of King Arthur.  Though, come to think of it, RFK, Jr is a worthy spiritual heir of Mordred, in being the nephew of the man who declared the intention to have America land on the moon and yet who himself is now working toward the corruption and downfall of all for which his progenitors stood.

Oh, well.  I guess if the people in America and the rest of the world don’t wake up and drink some strong, black coffee and take responsibility for knowledge and growth and improvement, they will get what they deserve.  If they don’t change direction, they will end up where they’re going.  Unfortunately, they will take helpless innocents in vast numbers along with them.

Anyway, that’s my series of tangents for today, like a random plot of the scattering of elementary particles.  I hope it’s been worth your time.  Have a good day.

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Here we go again.

It’s Monday again.

I don’t know how we keep allowing this to happen, but it keeps on doing it, over and over again, from the Monday on or immediately after the day we’re born until the last Monday on or before the day we die.  I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t really want to go back to work.

I’ll try to make this a comparatively short blog post if I can, unlike the weird one I did on Saturday, where I got off on a tangent about the number of possible blog posts one could write given a thousand words of length and a limited number of potential words after each previous one.  If you like that sort of thing, and you didn’t read it yet because you don’t read blogs on the weekend, do feel free to check it out.  I was writing off the top of my head, and I only briefly fact checked a few quick items, so there could be errors in specifics, but I think the reasoning was okay.

Yesterday, on the other hand, I suffered from ill-effects of something I had eaten Saturday, or perhaps some combination of things.  Anyway, I was feeling quite poorly, though thankfully whatever it was seems mostly to have worked its way through my system.  Fingers crossed!

Oh, and I don’t know if anyone anywhere has noticed, but for my last two blog posts, I added “tags” which are supposed to help people find what you write if they’re looking for material on given subjects.  It’s a part of that whole “search engine optimization” thing that’s been a big deal on and off, but which must surely change faster than even fashion and politics, given how the various things operating and interacting on the internet and the web are changing so quickly, and how new things become a big deal so quickly, and presumably will be altered and will warp and distort and mutate if they survive at all.  Remember Myspace?

And, of course, the advent of the various GPT-type things and their use in searching and in creating will no doubt change not only the structure but the content of the cyber-world.  Heck, soon most of the internet and web could be things written by LLMs having cobbled stuff together by interacting with other LLMs, and the humans who still go there won’t even realize that the base of the structure, founded in reality initially, has long since washed away, leaving only a cobweb of nonsense built on earlier layers of nonsense built on earlier layers of nonsense and so on.  And, unless there is some collision with actual, practical requirements of reality that forces natural selection to act on such things, it could go on existing for a very long time, all the while signifying nothing.

Of course, unless it is forced to solve problems for which there can be real world right and wrong answers, with consequences, I don’t know how it could develop into any kind of actual general, self-directed intelligence.  But I haven’t really thought about it all that much, and I am no expert.  I have read and listened to some of the experts in the area, and some of them impress me with their reasoning, and some strike me as rather foolish and simple-minded,  seeming to miss many points about how things can and do go wrong in reality.

I suppose it doesn’t make much difference what I think.  Anyway, servers produce so much waste heat and they use so much power, the whole WWW may become increasingly unworkable as temperatures rise and use of resources needs to be curtailed.  It may be more energy efficient and climate-friendly to build artificial intelligence using actual nerves, genetically engineered and powered by photosynthetic cells that remove carbon dioxide from the environment and are vastly more energy efficient than electronic circuits.

What are the odds that humans will avoid total catastrophe long enough for those few, those happy few, creative and intelligent individuals to figure out solutions to various problems and implement them?  Will the demagogues and the polarizing political fashionistas wreck everything too soon for it to be saved?

The clever and creative people are very impressive, and they never stop trying if they can help it, but it is much easier to destroy than to create.  The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics makes it just so easy for things to fail.

That’s not because the second law is some force acting on everything, some quantum field or curvature of spacetime.  It’s much more fundamental than that.  It’s simply the mathematics of probability and statistics, and it will apply in any system in which mathematics applies, which seems likely to be any possible universe.  There are simply vastly more ways for any system to be “disordered” than there are for things to be ordered in any particular way one might desire.  So, even the most well-constructed things will fall apart; even the most carefully balanced center cannot hold forever.

I guess I’m not an optimist, am I?  Nevertheless, I’m not a complete pessimist.  I think it is possible for the clever, creative people to create faster than what they create is destroyed, and to carry the mass of humanity and life itself forward into a future of cosmic consequence, the nature of which we cannot predict, because to predict it, we’d have to already know the things we’ll need to know to get there.  It’s possible.  But there are no guarantees, and there are so many ways for it not to happen.  It will require tremendous care by so many people‒as it has all along‒to avoid utter dissolution.

I don’t know if the odds make it worth the effort. But the clever people often don’t let that stop them.  And though most will fail, it doesn’t take very many clever, creative successes to move the world along.  They are just that powerful.

Maybe I’m more optimistic than I like to let myself believe.  That would be disgusting, wouldn’t it?  But I’m not dead yet, even though I often wish I were; I haven’t killed myself yet, though I think about it so very often and feel so bad so much of the time.  I’m stubborn, I guess.

I could really use some help with that‒not the stubbornness, but the depression and anxiety and pain stuff‒but I don’t have the energy and I don’t like myself enough to seek it out and to do anything more than cursorily try to help myself.  We’ll see how long I last.  Not long, I’ll bet.  But I’ve been wrong before.

With that, let’s quit this post.  Have a good week.  If I’m still alive tomorrow morning and going to work, I will grudgingly and grumpily write another blog post.  Damn it.

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“People have this power–the numbers don’t decide”

It’s Saturday again, as I warned everyone would happen if we didn’t do something to stop it.  Unfortunately, no one appears to have listened, so, well…here we are again.

Of course, as I also warned you all, I am working today, and so, here I am writing another blog post, just like all the others.

Except it’s not quite exactly the same as all the others.  And, given the 1000 or so words per blog post, and the number of possible words there are available, even avoiding random jumbles of characters, the number of possible blog posts that I could write is probably far greater than the number of potential days I have left in any plausible human lifetime…or any plausible universal lifetime short of infinity, probably.

Let’s do some quick and dirty math.

I’m going to estimate very roughly, because I only have vague (but educated) intuitions, but let’s assume I start any given blog post with a choice from a list of maybe twenty words.  That seems like a decent ballpark figure.  After that, there are only a limited number of potential next words that would make any sense and that I might be inclined to use.  I’m going to cull that down to 10 options per each next word, and I’m going to ignore individual word probabilities and predominances relative to other words.  I’m also going to ignore the fact that I often write more than 1000 words per post.  We’re just being quick and dirty here.

So, with 20 first words, then ten to choose from for each next word, if we assumed more or less random sorting among those, we’d have a potential number of blog posts of roughly 20 x 10 to the 999th power, or 2 x 101000 possible blog posts.  That’s a staggering number of possible posts, each just a thousand words long.

How staggering is it?  Well, the famous number “googol”, is 10100 (ten to the hundredth power, or 10 times 10 times 10…repeated a hundred times).  It can be written as a 1 followed by 100 zeroes.  That number itself is roughly 10 to the 19th times as large as the number of baryons in the entire visible universe.  In other words, that’s ten billion billion times as many.  That’s more than a billion times the number of people alive on Earth now times the number of baryons in the universe.

But that’s just a googol.  A googol is so small compared to 2 x 101000 that if you subtracted a googol from 2 x 101000 the change would be so unnoticeably small that to notice it, one would require a precision far beyond the most precise measurement humans have ever made.  We’re talking about one part in about 10 to the 900th power.  That’s rounding off!

The best we’ve done as far as comparing experiment and theory goes is the magnetic moment of an electron‒or maybe it’s the fine structure constant, I’ll have to check on that (no, it’s the electron one).  That has been measured to agree with theory out to about the 12th decimal place, if I remember correctly.  As Feynman has said, that’s like measuring the distance between NYC and LA to the precision of the width of a human hair (which is far more precise than would in any case be useful or even applicable for such a distance measurement).

Anyway, the point I’m making is that the number of possible blog posts that can be a thousand words long with a few‒admittedly somewhat overgenerous‒constraints is staggering.  If I could write a blog post every Planck time for the rest of the life of the sun* I wouldn’t even make a dent, not a noticeable scratch or scuff in that number.  And you can’t really do more than one quantum event in any given Planck time, if I understand correctly, anyway.

So, I’m not going to run out of possible blog posts any time soon.  Even though I’ve probably overestimated the number of words I’m likely to use following any given previous word‒and I haven’t weighted the odds as would some GPT-like language model that creates text without thinking, based on huge numbers of things other people have written‒it’s still such a huge number that it’s too large really even to contemplate seriously.

And yet, time after weary time, I write blog posts about very similar things, such as my pain and my depression and the fact that I could really use some help from someone.  It’s very boring, I guess.  I apologize.  If you’re looking to diverge very much, I guess my blog might not be the ideal place for you.  But, of course, the huge majority of all possible blogs that would fit my above-listed criteria would be gibberish**, so we don’t want to get too caught up in those numbers.

It’s a bit like thinking about the human genome.  There are, I think, on the order of a billion base pairs in the human genome, and each “slot” has 4 potential nucleotide “letters” (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) so the number of possible genomes is about 4 to the billionth power, or 2 to the 2 billionth power…and every 210 is roughly 103 (210 being 1024),and 21000 is about 10300 so 2 to the billionth is about…1027,000,000, if my calculations are correct.  I’m not sure they are, but you get the idea.  It’s a big f*cking number!

Most of these orders of base pairs would not designate a human, nor even anything that could live at all.  So let’s whittle things down in truly draconian fashion and say only 10 to the 90th are potentially viable***.  That’s still far more potential humans than the number of baryons in the visible universe.

I think you can see that we’re never actually going to instantiate that number of humans, since each human is made of a substantial number of baryons…it’s something like 1027, but that’s just a ballpark figure****.  So, unless we find a way to generate a lot of new baryons, and fit them into the visible universe without causing the whole thing to collapse upon itself due to gravitational effects, the whole of actual humanity will always be a sea of unimaginably untapped potential.

I think we all kind of knew that, anyway, didn’t we?

Likewise, the number of actual blog posts I‒or anyone else‒will ever write before the heat death of the universe (assuming that’s the way things end) is embarrassingly negligible.  But we work with what we have.

And speaking of that, I guess I’d better mentally prepare myself for work, since I am already on the train.  I hope you all have a good weekend.  Whatever you do, it will probably be more interesting than anything I’m going to do.  Believe it or not, I find some consolation in that fact.

*It’s about 1060 Planck times:  1043 Planck times per second times 60 seconds per minute times 60 minutes per hour times 24 hours per day times 365.25 days per year times about 5 billion years.

**I mean even more so than my actual blog posts are.

***Don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s a reduction by 26,999,910/27,000,000. It’s way more of a reduction than that.  Don’t be fooled by the comparatively small numbers in exponents.  We’re taking a number that was 27 million digits long and making it only ninety digits long.  If you subtracted the second number from the first, it would be such a small change you’d have to look out well past the 26 millionth digit even to see a difference.

****Again, don’t be confused by the relative closeness of the exponents and worry that we’ll run out of baryons soon.  10 to the 27th is vanishingly small compared to 10 to the 81st.  In fact, curiously, 1027 x 1027 x 1027 = 1081.  Every single gram of hydrogen contains 6 x 1022 atoms, and obviously the number of grams of hydrogen in the universe is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay bigger than that!

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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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Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell, blogging to each his thunder, rain and wind

Hello and good morning.

I decided yesterday afternoon that I would try to write something a bit different for today’s post, rather than just another litany of my depression and despair, since I’m sure any dedicated readers are probably getting almost as tired of reading them as I am of experiencing them.  I cannot directly alter the fact that I experience them—if I could, I would—but I don’t have to make it an uninterrupted trail of goo for you all to slog through on a daily basis.

I came up with two, more or less unrelated, ideas, but I’m only going to focus on the first, which is nearer and dearer to my heart and mind, in any case.  It’s also been something I’ve thought about on and off for some time.  I do wonder what pertinent quote from Shakespeare I’ll find to alter to make the title, but of course, you who are reading will already know the answer.

Don’t spoil it for me, okay?  I want to be surprised.

Anyway, the idea I wanted to bounce around today has to do with the question of the discontinuity of reality at a mathematical level.

I’m sure many of you are aware that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, there is no sensible differentiation in, for instance, location at any scale smaller than the Planck length, which is about 1.6 x 10-35 meters, or in time below the Planck time, which is roughly 10-43 seconds.

There are various reasons for this, and I won’t try to get into them, but this is generally agreed upon by all the scientists who work in the field.  It’s part of why there is an upper limit to the number of possible quantum states within any given region of spacetime, defined, thanks to Bekenstein and Hawking, as the surface area of an event horizon surrounding that region as measured in units of square Planck length.

Thus, based on the best current understanding of the micro-world, the universe is not so much pixelated as blurry at the smallest scales.  Admittedly, these are very small scales—far smaller than we can probe currently, so we may, in principle, be wrong about some of it, and quantum gravity might change our understanding, but there are strong reasons for this assessment.

Now, mathematics—thanks to work threshed out by Newton and Leibniz, building on ground first broken (though no one quite realized it at the time) by Archimedes about two millennia earlier*—can deal with things that are truly continuously divisible.

Those of you who took high school level calculus (or higher) probably recall that a derivative involves finding the instantaneous slope, or rate of change, of a curve describing some function, such as the instantaneous acceleration being the rate of change of the “speed”.  The idea of it had to do with taking the slope of a line connecting any two nearby points on the curve and bringing them closer and closer together, taking the limit as that distance goes toward zero.

Analogously, integrating a function involves finding the area under a curve, and is in a way the opposite of a derivative.  This involves splitting the area under the curve into rectangles of fixed width at any given point along the curve (the height defined by the value of the curve at that point) and adding them together, then taking the width between the points to be smaller and smaller, until one approaches the limit of an infinite sum of “infinitesimally” narrow rectangles.

These processes are tremendously useful, and can describe the orbits of astronomical objects and the trajectories of ballistic materials, just to take two simple examples.  They are good for describing the universe in many ways, and they often produce useful and accurate answers and predictions to the best of anyone’s ability to measure.

But that raises my question.  Do we currently have the capacity to tell the difference between processes in the universe—say, for instance, acceleration due to gravity—being truly continuous or them being in a sense discontinuous?

We know that the Real Numbers are uncountably infinite, as a matter of pure mathematics.  Between any two nonidentical real numbers, however arbitrarily close together, exists an uncountably infinite number of more real numbers, as large—so to speak—as the number of real numbers themselves, a Russian doll in which every new doll revealed by opening the previous one has just as many dolls inside it as there were inside the original Russian doll…but even more unlimited than that.

This is, however, not necessarily relevant to reality**.  Just to demonstrate that fact:  we can calculate Pi (π), the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to any number of decimal points we might choose, but it will never come to an end—it’s an infinite, non-repeating decimal number, one of the “transcendental” numbers.  Pi has been calculated to 62.8 trillion digits (as of 2021) but that’s not a number we could ever measure as the ratio of the circumference of any actual circle to its diameter.

I’ve read (from a reliable source) that only 39 digits of Pi are necessary to calculate the circumference of the visible universe*** to the fineness of a single hydrogen atom.  Now, a hydrogen atom is about 1033 Planck lengths across, according to a quick search, so that means, in principle, we’d only need Pi to 72 digits or so to calculate the diameter of the universe to the nearest Planck length.  That’s a fairly large number of digits, but it’s smaller than the order of magnitude of, for instance, the estimated number of baryons in the visible universe, and is smaller than the entropy “contained” in even a solar mass black hole****, unless I’m seriously misremembering.

So, finally, my question is, how well have mathematicians ascertained that aspects of reality can in truth be described by equations that are actually continuously variable, or whether we could ever tell the difference?

A computer, for instance, could simulate some model of a continuously varying system to a high degree of precision by taking each current state and then applying an approximation of the applicable equations to the next state, iterating each step in sequence, as if recapitulating the steps that led to the limit defining the derivative or the integral of a function.  This would be considered an approximation of the true function, of course, but one could, in principle, get arbitrarily close to the true function by taking one’s intervals to be arbitrarily small—solving, for instance, or at least simulating, the three (or more) body gravitational problem, by calculating, at each instant, the net effect of each object on all the others, calculating the acceleration, applying it, moving each thing a tiny step, then recalculating.

But what if it’s not the step-wise approach that’s the approximation?  What if the continuously differentiable functions we use to describe things like gravity and electromagnetism and the various quantum mechanical matters are the approximations?  What if reality is more Δx/Δt than dx/dt?

Obviously this is a simple enough concept to come up with, and I’m far from the first one to think of it.

My more immediate question is, has anyone demonstrated mathematically just how fine our measurements would have to be to tell whether, for instance, the orbit of a planet around a star follow a truly continuously differentiable path, or if it is just a step-wise, iterated process?  If one were able, for instance, to simulate the orbit of a planet, say, by iterating an approximation each Planck time, and reconfiguring the system at each step to the nearest Planck length, how long, in principle, would it take to be able to tell the difference between that simulation and a truly continuously differentiable motion?  Could there, given the constraints upon the nature of reality applied by our best understanding of quantum mechanics and the like, ever be any measurable difference?

I don’t know if this has been addressed by mathematicians.  It may not have any practical implications, since we’re a long way from being able to measure reality precisely enough—or so I suspect—to tell that difference.  But I wonder if it’s been worked out just how finely we would need to be able to measure to tell if reality is truly continuously differentiable.

If anyone reading is a mathematician familiar enough with this sort of question to give me an answer, I would love to hear it.  Or if you know a mathematician with appropriate expertise, or a physicist of similar expertise, I would dearly like to know if anyone has done any explorations from the mathematical (not simply the practical) point of view regarding this.

That’s it, that’s my subject for the day.  I feel that I’ve been very ham handed and brutally quick in the way I’ve gotten into the subject, and for that, I apologize.  I only have the time to write this between my shower and when I leave to go to the train station, so it’s a bit quick and dirty, as they say.

Obviously, I don’t have time or space today to address my other, unrelated question, which is about whether the legality and ubiquity of large-jackpot lotteries of various kinds has changed the general psychology of, for instance, the American people in a way that has decreased “average” ambition and work ethic, providing “bread and circuses” to the masses in a way that has at least contributed to the greater economic disparity between socio-economic levels in the nation (and the world) and the gradual dissolution of the middle class?

I wouldn’t dream of thinking it the only or even the dispositive factor, but I wonder if it might have contributed.

Maybe I’ll write about that tomorrow.  Weirdly enough, we may have a harder time coming up with definitive answers for that question than the one I tried to discuss today.  Mathematics and physics are easy, in a sense.  Biology, psychology, sociology, economics…these things are truly hard to model and describe in useful, predictive ways, because the systems are so complex, with so many variables, both dependent and independent.  Even weather, the quintessentially chaotic system, may be more tractable.

I hope this has been more interesting than my usual reflections and projections of gloom.  I also hope you all have a very good day, and maybe that you think a bit about what I’ve written.

TTFN

Domenico-Fetti_Archimedes fractal tiles

*What a Mary-Sue that guy was!  I mean, forget the whole acrimonious debate on priority between Newton and Leibniz regarding calculus, these guys were about two thousand years behind the Eureka Man!

**Though it could be, even if distance and time and not limitlessly divisible.  For instance, if the Everettian “Many Worlds” description of quantum mechanics is correct, the overall “space” of “universes” created at points of decoherence/branching could be infinitely and continuously divisible, making it a no-brainer as to how many potentially different worlds there might be in that space—not “real” space, but the orthogonal space that contains all the branches of the many worlds.  However, that might not be infinitely divisible, either.

***That’s everything that can, even in principle, be seen given the finite time light has had to reach us since the Big Bang.

****The Entropy is about 1077, but Entropy is proportional to the natural log (basically, taking a log is the opposite of raising something to a power) of the number of possible microstates in a system, so that number of states is e to the 1077 power, or e multiplied by itself 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times.

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“And everything under the sun is in tune, but…”

It’s Wednesday, June 21, 2023 (AD or CE, as you prefer), and I’m writing this on my laptop, but it’s not on my lap.  It’s resting on my desktop at the office, because I stayed here overnight last night.  I had a bad day—personally, not professionally—at the office, yesterday.  I felt just rotten, partly due to how poor a sleep I had, even for me, the night before.

I considered leaving early, but we were rather busy, and I didn’t feel I could justify cutting out on everyone.  Also, I had the nagging concern that, if I left early, I might never come back, because I really felt at my wits end, and though I had no specific plan in mind, I thought I might take some kind of drastic action to make it impossible for me ever to do anything again.  I just wanted to go to sleep and to sleep and to sleep and perhaps never to wake up.

Anyway, it really started to thunderstorm rather badly near the end of the work day, so I decided I would just stay at the office.  I’ve had a hard time getting up to my usual status on the payroll this week so far, and it has to be finished by today, so eliminating the commute time will better allow me to finish that.

But everything is getting too onerous for me.  I’m so tired, and I have no internal drive or purpose of significance, just habit and stubbornness, which can’t really ever make up for the real thing in the long run.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I need help, but I doubt I’ll get any, and I don’t think I’m capable of seeking it.

I can’t make myself believe that I deserve or am worthy of any help.

Speaking of long runs (I was, you can go back and check) today is the Solstice—the summer one in the northern hemisphere, and the winter one in the southern hemisphere.  Thus, it is the “longest” or the “shortest” day of the year, depending on one’s location.  I use scare quotes because it’s not the actual length of the day that varies on this date, or from day to day in any kind of steady way, but the duration of daylight, the time in which the sun is overhead, or at least visible in the sky (barring clouds).

But, of course, the length of a day really does change a bit from time to time, though not in anything like as regular, nor as dramatic, a fashion as daylight does regarding solstices and equinoxes and all that.  The earth is a rotating mass, and is subject to the laws of angular momentum.  Thus, when enough mass changes position on the surface of the planet, it can have an effect on the overall rate of rotation of the planet.

The stereotypical “demonstration” of this process is a skater spinning on the ice, who speeds up when bringing his or her arms close to the body and slows down when extending them.  This is because, crudely, the angular momentum is mvr, the mass times the “tangential” velocity (of the mass), i.e. the speed at which it goes around the center of rotation, times the distance from the center of rotation.  Thus, since angular momentum is conserved, if the radius shortens, the velocity around the center of rotation increases proportionately, and vice versa.

The instantiation of this is somewhat complex, as is usually the case, but this really is the gist of it.  The conservation of angular momentum is related to the rotational symmetry of the universe, as per Noether’s Theorem—i.e., the laws of physics aren’t dependent upon which direction you happen to be facing.  This is similar to how conservation of linear momentum is related to symmetry of translation—i.e., the laws of physics don’t depend upon where you happen to be along any linear direction.  And conservation of energy (locally) has to do with the symmetry of time.  This last one can be tricky when taking the universe as a whole, because conservation of energy doesn’t necessarily apply to the whole cosmos, nor is time fully symmetrical on the largest of scales, or so it seems, but locally it is true.

Physicists, please correct me if I made any gross errors there.

Anyway, back to the rotation of the Earth and the length of days.  Movement of significant amounts of mass on the surface of the planet (or within the planet) can change the rate of rotation of the planet.  I’m led to understand by the program QI* that a massive hydroelectric project in China cause the “elevation” of a large enough mass of water to slow the rotation of the Earth by a measurable—if inconsequential and utterly unnoticeable—amount.

I sometimes wonder if the periodic gathering of millions of people near the mouth of the Ganges has any potentially measurable effect on the momentary rate of the Earth’s rotation.  I’m not aware of anyone having made such a measurement.  Even if it’s true that it changes the rotation rate, it may be too small to detect.

I also wonder whether, as glaciers on mountains and across Greenland and similar melt, with the water thus previously elevated seeking a level closer to the center of the Earth, the planet’s rotation might well speed up.  I wouldn’t expect glacier melt in Antarctica to speed up the rotation in quite the same way, because those glaciers are all far closer to the axis of rotation in the first place, and so might have limited effect in shortening the “lever arm” of rotation.  Indeed, if they raise sea levels significantly enough, I could imagine the “center of mass” of the Earth’s rotation moving slightly outward, especially as the seas bulge more at the equator, thus slowing the motion of the planet down.

The odds of this perfectly balancing seem small, but I imagine it would require very complex calculations and—more importantly—quite fine measurement to ascertain the net balance.  And, of course, the balance is likely to shift over time.

In comparison, it’s relatively** easy to calculate the balance between special and general relativity required to keep GPS satellites in synchrony with the ground.  In this case, the speed of the motion of the GPS satellites slows down their local passage of time relative to the surface of the Earth, by a calculable and quite constant amount, but their greater distance from the center of the “gravity well” makes their time go faster relative to the surface of the Earth, again in a quite calculable and rather constant rate.

It’s the latter effect that predominates, and this is routinely accounted for in the GPS process.  If it were not, GPS would have huge and increasing errors as the timing in the satellites and of ground-based clocks diverged steadily, and the errors would very rapidly become far too great to be useful.  So, your use of smartphones to find where you are and how to get where you’re going depend on both of Einstein’s theories of relativity.

I guess you all already knew all that.  Sorry to be boring.

Anyway, that’s my bit*** of trivia for the day.  It will probably be the most interesting thing to happen to me in this particular Earthy rotation, but I hope all of you are having more interesting days than I am.  I’m just very tired, and discouraged, and worn out…and it’s only a little after five in the morning.

I’ve been in pain for twenty years, and I haven’t seen my kids (in person) nor interacted with my son at all (barring one email) in over ten years, and my last remembered restful night’s sleep happened in the mid-1990s.

If I could just find way to get restful nights’ sleeps, that would be a start.  Everything else would be easier, or so I suspect, if I could find a way to make that happen.  Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t help, and I would simply be faced with the tragic irony of having that wish come true only to find that it didn’t make the other things better, and might even make them worse.

Never underestimate the potential for things to get worse.  Reality has no bottom.

There’s that symmetry of translation that implies, by Noether’s Theorem, that momentum will be conserved.  Which brings me full circle, thus recapitulating the conservation of momentum/symmetry of rotation.  It’s neat, isn’t it?  Time, however, is a trickier bit of possible symmetry, as Pink Floyd recognized only too well.  But at least after Time has passed, when on The Dark Side of the Moon, one can look forward to the beauty of The Great Gig in the Sky.

If you haven’t listened to that album in a while, why not listen to it today?  Or if you’ve never listened to it, treat yourself.  It’s well worth it.  What the hell, it’s the longest day (or night) of the year.  Indulge yourself.  And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear—you shout and no one seems to hear—and if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

Summer-Solstice-Stonehenge-860x540

*Which has, upon occasion, been incorrect, but it does, in the long run, try to correct prior errors, often in hilarious ways, usually at the expense of Alan Davies, as in the running conflict over the number of moons the Earth actually has.

**Ba-dump-bump.

***Well, actually, probably a few thousand bits, albeit redundantly encoded.

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Blog Post for June 20, 2023 (AD) – Tuesday

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m beginning this post at the train station rather than on the train, because this time I timed things so that I arrived a few minutes after the 6:10 train passed.  That way, I didn’t feel the urge to chase after it, like what I described the other day.

This was somewhat deliberate, but it also had a lot to do with just how tired I already am.  I don’t talk about my insomnia all that often, probably for the same reason most of you don’t talk about breathing very often.  It’s just always there.  But last night was worse than many; starting at a bit before two, I “woke up” every five to ten minutes, looking up at the clock, as if I were worried that I might have overslept.  I don’t know what I’m worried about in such situations, honestly‒it’s not as though there would be any objective, dire consequences if I were late.  But, of course, the real problem is that I would be distressed and upset if I were to miss my schedule.  And because of that, I can’t seem to sleep.

So, this morning, I already feel fatigued and mentally worn down, and the day is just getting started.  Of course, yesterday by noon or so I was already mentally crashing at the office, and that was Monday after a full, two-day weekend!  The crash was acutely due to my usual frustration with the nominal rules of the way we do things in the office being ignored when convenient in the short term, but it’s really all a cumulative and complex process.  By the end of each day I’m worn down more than I was at the beginning, and by the next morning I haven’t really gotten quite back up to the level I was at the start of the previous day, perhaps partly due to my insomnia.

It’s not a precise, smooth curve, of course; there are day to day fluctuations, and even I am not always in my worst state of mind.  But overall, the trend is downward, and I think it’s fair to say that I am now palpably lower than I have been in a very long time, if not ever.

It’s a good thing that I can at least talk to my sister on the phone for an hour or so once a week.  But I’m so annoyingly stressed by social interactions that, even with my sister‒whom I’ve literally known all my life, and with whom I get along as well as pretty much anyone‒I have to schedule and plan the phone conversations ahead of time, and generally on weekend days when I’ve at least had a mental break.

It’s ridiculous and pathetic, I know.  I can’t give it any kind of noble or even sympathetic spin.  I’m disgusted by myself…but then, that’s my general attitude toward myself, anyway.  Not to say that there’s nothing about myself that I like, of course.  I like that I’m very curious, and that I can understand science and math and all that stuff rather well, and that I have a good memory, and that I can learn things well and more easily than many other people seem to be able to do.

Even when very depressed and moriphilious* I’ll find myself inescapably driven toward ordering‒or at least to consider ordering‒some book or audio book, perhaps by someone I’ve heard speaking on a science and/or philosophy podcast, or similar.  Also, as I think I mentioned yesterday that I was considering, I did order the hardcover copy of Quantum Field Theory as Simply as Possible.  I almost ordered the author’s textbook (especially when I saw that, among many other places, Cornell uses it), but I decided I would start with the bird’s eye view before going deeper, partly because I’m not sure I have the mathematics expertise really to grasp the deeper stuff in a strict fashion.

I may.  I’m pretty good at stuff like that, and I can build on my prior understanding with more ease than some can, because I don’t tend to learn things by rote.  I learn by a sort of model-building in my head, which means it can take me longer to prepare for a test, for instance, but once I understand something, I don’t tend to lose that understanding very quickly, and can apply it elsewhere and merge it with other matters.  So, if I can get the concepts of some physical theory, and the concepts of the pertinent mathematics, then the nitty-gritty, nuts and bolts of it is much easier then to master.  That’s nice.  I do like that about myself.

But I don’t really have anyone around with whom to talk about the things in which I’m interested at any very deep level.  And it’s hard to contemplate even seeking out such people.  I would be stressed out worrying that dealing with other, new, and potentially frustrating people would be too much effort, but also‒perhaps more so‒that I myself am an irritating person, and I can’t quite bring myself readily to inflict myself on other people.

Also, I would probably have to go through some online community‒perhaps some form of “discord” or whatever that app/system is, or some Facebook or Twitter group or some** such.  I’ve never been interested in trying to get into Reddit communities, and most of the other social media meetup type things are anathema to me.  I don’t even like gaming with strangers online.

Early on, back in the day, I got on a Yahoo! based depression support chat group, but mostly I just lurked, though I did make a very good online friend in one, who (among other things) introduced me to both Sailor Moon and Radiohead, so that was a tremendously lucky and great meeting.  I cannot thank that person enough, and we are still in occasional contact to this day.

But even things like that Yahoo! group have changed and no longer appeal to me.  And I have changed since then, too, of course.  I’ve been to prison, for one thing.  That’ll change you a bit.  Probably even a cushy minimum security Federal Prison changes people, and FSP West is most assuredly not such a place.

Anyway, enough nonsense for today.  Tomorrow is the Summer/Winter Solstice, for what it’s worth, so I’ll probably mention it then, unless I’m lucky enough to have something happen that makes me unable to write my blog post or anything else.  Or unless someone swoops in and rescues me from the verge of the event horizon.

That’s not gonna happen, is it?

Oh, well.  Have a good day.

*I just made that word up, I’m not sure if it really works.

**Here’s a mildly amusing typo:  I originally typed that as “sum such”.

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Aleph naughts, alphabets, infinite libraries, decks of cards, and monkeys

It’s Tuesday, the thirteenth day of the month of June.

I was going to try to avoid any commentary about the number two today—it gets to be two much, sometimes—but I do just want to start by saying that, if you subtract the digits in today’s date, the difference is two.

You could also, if you’re leaving out the first two digits of the year, look at 6-13-23 and say, “To get six, first you take one three, then a second three, and there you have six”.  I know, depending on how you read it (e.g. one three plus two threes), you might actually come out with nine, but that’s the risk you take with numerological interpretations.

This should hopefully alert any who might be susceptible that they should not to give credence to numerology or any other similar detected “codes” in unrelated things, like the old Bible code nonsense and so on.  The fact is, if you’re looking for patterns, especially if you’re not too picky about what patterns you seek, you can almost always find some.  It can be fun, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that there actually was some hidden message in the text or the number in the first place.  It’s all, almost certainly, in the eye (and mind) of the beholder.

Don’t feel too bad if you have occasionally fallen for such things.  No less than Isaac Newton himself, among the mightiest of minds the planet has yet known, got sucked into the whole notion of looking for hidden messages in the Bible.

Now, admittedly, he didn’t have the background of genius predecessors that we have nowadays from whom to learn lessons about signal and noise.  And though he worked out far better ways to calculate pi (than Archimedes’s method of exhaustion) and similar matters using infinite series, it may not have occurred to him that, since pi was an infinite, non-repeating number, if one looked far enough, long enough, one could find any given finite sequence of numbers one might want within it.  And that, of course, can be converted into any given sequence of letters, or whatever, using whatever translational code or cypher one might want.

I’m pretty sure I’m correct about that, but please correct me if there’s a flaw in my reasoning.  There’s certainly a ceiling*.

It’s a bit like the wonderful “Library of Babel”, based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the algorithm can generate every possible string of letters in the modern version of the Latin alphabet, (AKA the English alphabet).  Using the program, you can search for any expression possible in the library.  In principle, it encodes everything that could ever be written (up to a certain length), though they are not generated until you search.  In other words, every paragraph (or at least subparagraph) in this blog post is already, at least implicitly, written there.

Of course, the vast majority of what’s in there is utter gibberish, mere random collections of letters and spaces and so on that would mean nothing to anyone.  But it’s sobering to think sometimes that, in potential, everything that could possibly be written could be generated somewhere in that computer code.  Does that mean that it is, in a sense, already written?  I suppose if one is a mathematical Platonist, one would probably be forced to say that it is there, in a real, albeit fuzzy-ish, sense.

This is nothing new.  It’s like the old notion of an infinite number of monkeys writing on an infinite number of typewriters.  Eventually, not only will they produce the works of Shakespeare, but they will produce every possible work that could be produced by typing in this alphabet and associated characters.  Indeed, if there really is an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters, they will produce each possible work an infinite number of times—in fact, they already will have done so, and will continue to do so, over and over again (usually in different places by different monkeys) forever.

Still, the vast majority of what they produce will be gibberish.  You’d have to look for a long time to find a bit of writing that is even arguably coherent, and much longer if you sought something specific.

It’s a bit like the “level one multiverse” implicit in a spatially infinite universe in which in any given region there are only a finite (however large) number of possible quantum states:  everything possible will be instantiated not just somewhere, but an infinite number of times.

To think about such things in “smaller” terms:  if you have an infinite number of decks of cards (no jokers), and they are all shuffled—each random sorting being one of 52! (approximately 8.06581752 x 1067) possible orderings—there will still be only a finite number of ways to order them.  It’s a big number!  Don’t, get, me, wrong!  It’s BIG!  It’s so big you can know to a mathematical confidence much more than secure enough that you could comfortably bet your life on it** that if you shuffle a deck thoroughly it will be in an order that has never existed before in the world.

But the number of possible orderings of shuffled decks is no closer to infinity than is the number one.  So in an infinite collection of shuffled decks, every possible sorting will appear an infinite number of times.

In fact, if you think about it, every possible ordering will somewhere be sitting next to multiple iterations of identical orderings, somewhere in that infinite selection (say if you had your decks all floating in some 3-D matrix).  Depending on how many duplicates you want to find you may need to “look” farther and farther, but even if you want a huge number of duplicate shufflings next to each other, if the space of shuffles is infinite, and is sorted randomly, you will be able to find that group somewhere.

It may even be the case—and here I’m not on completely certain ground, so any mathematicians out there please give me some feedback—that you can find a “region” in which there are an infinite number of repeated shufflings “next to” each other.  How could this be possible, when the set of decks itself is only infinite?  Well, infinity is weird, and strange things happen when you’re contemplating it***.

Perhaps thinking of a similar but more straightforward notion might help.

Of all the integers, only every tenth one is a multiple of ten, so there should be only one out of ten integers that meet that criterion of being a multiple of ten, if you’re looking for them.  Yet, the number of multiples of ten is equal to the number of integers in total!  If you don’t believe me, just knock the final “zero” off each multiple of ten and take a look.  You will have reconstructed the original integers!  So in any infinity, you may be able to find an infinite subset—say all on one row if your infinity is grouped in rows and columns and levels—that meets any given criterion or criteria, depending on how you sort it.

This fact is part of what gives rise to the so-called “measure problem”, which I won’t address just now, but to which I have linked.

I could go on and on about this—almost by definition—but I don’t have any intention of writing an infinite blog post, even if such a thing were possible in a universe in which entropy is always increasing.  But it can be fun to think about arrangements of letters and numbers, and information, and signals versus noise.

Unfortunately, after thinking about it, one can sometimes find the ordinary bits of everyday life rather silly and pointless and even worthy of despair—“the pale deaths that men miscall their lives”.  Maybe that’s part of why some great mathematicians were psychologically troubled.  Gödel, for instance, starved to death because he wouldn’t eat any food not prepared by his wife; he feared being poisoned, and eventually she either got sick or died (I don’t recall which).

His logic doesn’t seem very good—if you’re avoiding dying by poison but thereby inevitably die of starvation when your wife can no longer cook for you, you’re clearly not protecting yourself, except perhaps from a painful poisoning death, instead gaining a comparatively peaceful death by starvation.

Anyway, they say genius and madness are related.  They would say that, wouldn’t they, since they understand neither state.  But you lot are much smarter than they are.  And therefore, I hope you have a good, albeit finite, day.

*Ba-dump-bump.

**And you bet your life on MUCH riskier things every day, numerous times per day, make no mistake about that.

***And we’re just discussing the “smallest” infinity, Aleph Number Alef 0 Cardinality Mathematics Infinity, PNG, 565x580px ... AKA “Aleph nought” or “Aleph zero” or “Aleph null”.  It’s the so-called “countable” infinity, meaning not that you really could count the whole thing, but you could at least get started and make progress, as in “1, 2, 3, 4,…”.  When you turn to, for instance, the infinity of “real” numbers, you can’t even start counting, because between any two non-identical, arbitrarily chosen real numbers, no matter how close they are to each other, there is an uncountable infinity of real numbers between them!

by

The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to blog of.

Hello and good morning, all.  Though I suppose I should leave it up to each of your own individual intuitions and criteria about whether it really is a “good” morning, and indeed, what such a term even could mean.  But, really, it’s what they call “a polite nothing” I suppose, because it has no other purpose than being a ritual greeting.

Weird.

It’s June 8th.  In 10 days it will be “Fathers’ Day” (I’m not sure about the “official” placement of the apostrophe).  In 21 days it will be my wedding anniversary, so to speak; anyway, it will have been 32 years since I got married, and I will have been divorced for 2 years longer than I was married, which is a crappy, crappy milestone.  I’ve also already gone roughly 10 years without seeing my kids in person, which is getting close to being as long as I was a part of their lives.

What an utter waste of years and effort it has been for me to be alive since then.

I’m writing this on my phone still/again, at the house, before heading for the bus stop.  There’s not much going on so far today, except to note that I had an unusually bad sleep last night, even for me, so I’m starting the day already feeling exhausted.

As you may recall, yesterday I did not take any “antidepressant”, and I likewise have not taken any today.  I did feel less tense yesterday than I had the days before, and that was certainly a relief, but it’s the sort of thing that happens whenever I change something like that.  I had a brief elevation in my mood when I started the Wort, also.  I suspect it’s just a placebo effect, and/or a reverse version of the same.

Anyway, I can’t blame either starting or stopping the stuff for my sleep problems.  They were there before any meds and they’ll be there after them, probably for the rest of my life.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to keep having sleep problems after I die.

Well…yes, I would.  Both the fact of still having sleep problems and having the ability to be aware of them would be quite surprising to me after I’m dead.  In fact, the ability to be surprised would be quite a surprise after I’m dead.  It would certainly be intriguing, as would the fact of being capable of being intrigued.  In fact, it’s hard to see that, if one is capable of surprise or intrigue or any other emotion, one should actually be considered “dead” in any useful sense.

Of course, I don’t think any of that is possible, really.  I’m quite convinced (provisionally, as always) that death entails merely oblivion, which is one of the things that makes it so appealing.  Indeed, my “Bayesian Prior” on that is so high that I would, so to speak, be willing to bet my life on it.  Admittedly, that’s a cheap bet, from my point of view, but I don’t have any right to bet anyone else’s life, so it’s all I have, worthless and disgusting though it may be.

Almost none of the various antidepressants I’ve taken have ever seemed to help my sleep.  Tricyclics, Effexor, Trazodone, Wellbutrin, Celexa/Lexapro and most other SSRIs…they didn’t make it better and some made it worse.  Only Paxil seemed at least to make me enjoy sleeping, which had never happened to me before, but its other effects were not good.  One downside was that I gained a lot of weight, and that’s not good in someone like me, who is constitutionally prone to overweight and its related effects.  That wasn’t the only problem, either.

Anyway, I don’t know why, but my depression, after initially responding to meds and therapy, has become tougher to treat over the years.  I don’t know if this is partly related to my apparent ASD, or whatever form of atypical, non-human neurology I have, or to something about the nature of depression, or to these and other factors mixed together.

What’s more, I don’t think anyone else in the world could actually know, either.  At most, at best, hypotheses could be made and tested, by me and by other medical/scientific people.  But it’s simply a fact that “we”, meaning all consciousnesses of which any of us are actually aware, don’t know well enough the nature of the normal functioning of the brain, let alone the nature of things like depression, dysthymia, autism spectrum disorders, insomnia (or in fact what sleep really does at all levels) very deeply and/or causally.  It’s extremely complex, and not enough resources have been or are put into the study.

We do spend a lot of money on science, but still more on war, and on politics, and on sporting events and so on.  Actually, I don’t know which if any of those things receives a greater proportion of civilizational resources than science does, but it feels as though it would be nice to divert at least some of the resources away from such things and into science.  The advancement of science is something that can benefit everyone, current and subsequent, especially since, once the information is learned, is discovered, it can (in principle) be shared at vanishingly small cost, to the potential benefit of the whole planet and its future inhabitants.

Of course, the company Elsevier apparently owns many of the premier scientific journals‒it did not originate them, it just bought them and is now rent-seeking through them‒and it not only charges a frankly obscene amount for subscriptions, but it even charges scientists who want to publish in the journals.  That is, in a sense, an actual white-collar crime against humanity, against civilization.

Such people deserve to be strapped down onto tables and have one drop of liquid Drano applied to their skin every hour, or perhaps even just every day, or somewhere in between, until it finally dissolves them away enough for it to kill them.  They could be kept alive in the meantime, and suffering for as long as possible, by IV infusions and naso-gastric feeding.

It’s just a thought.  Probably, even if I were given the power and resources to do so without the risk of consequences for me, I wouldn’t actually torture such people.  They’re just monkeys doing what monkeys do, after all.  But I might take away all their wealth and make them work at subsistence level jobs for the rest of their days.  It’s not the worst punishment, maybe, but getting medical and scientific knowledge out of the control of such people would be the real goal.

Anyway, I’m going to need to head to the bus stop here in a moment.  I feel tired and grumpy, and I’m not looking forward to anything about today at all, not even to its end, since the end of each day is merely a prelude to the dismal cycle of the next day and the next and so on.

I never look forward to going to bed, because going to bed merely ushers in the beginning of the next dreary, worthless day, probably to be faced with too little, too fragmented sleep, and with ongoing pain, and without being around or with any of the people I love.  It’s not the sort of thing to which one would look forward with anything better than weary resignation, and often with frank horror and disgust…and sometimes, honestly, with something akin to terror.

What are you gonna do?  That’s life.  It’s not for the faint-hearted.  And I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it without significant caveats and reservations and misgivings.

TTFN

broken wine glasselectronic