Summer

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And the mazèd blog, by their increase, now knows not which is which.

Hello and good morning.

I’m writing today’s blog post on my smartphone, because I walked to the train this morning.  That’s not quite the non sequitur it might seem to be.  Given the new train schedule, I arrived here only a few minutes before the 6:20 train is due to arrive, whereas on the old schedule, I would have just missed the 6:10 and sat down to wait for the 6:30.  Of course, I could simply let the 6:20 pass and wait for the 6:50 and pull out my laptop to write my post while I wait.  Perhaps, in the future, I will do that.  Today, though, I don’t want to push back my departure any further.

I’m now on (actually, in) the train, and I was surprised to find my preferred, relatively isolated seat on the older style car free.  Combined with the feeling of achievement from already having walked about five miles today, that’s pretty nice.

Today is the Winter Solstice, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, meaning it’s the day of longest night, if you will.  Going forward, now, the nights will become shorter, though the change will be hard to notice at first, since, near their maxima and minima, the derivative of sine and cosine curves (well, any smooth curve, really) is around zero, meaning the rate of change of the function is very small.  For one brief instant‒one infinitesimal moment of time‒during this 24-hour period, that rate of change will be exactly zero.

But, of course, the rate of change itself is constantly changing.  This isn’t true of all functions, obviously.  The rate of change in a linear function is a constant, and the rate of change of a constant is zero.  That’s why it’s called a “constant”.  And the rate of change of zero is still zero, no matter how many times you would like to take that derivative.

Sine waves, however, are cyclical, and their derivatives are also cyclical.  The derivative (i.e., the rate of change) of a sine is a cosine…and the derivative of a cosine is a sine (inverted, I think, if memory serves, but that changes nothing fundamental).  So, even the derivatives of such cyclical functions are eternally cyclical.  There’s something very pleasing about that, at least to me.

Oh, by the way, it is the Summer Solstice today for those who live in the southern hemisphere.  This has been a smaller number of people than live in the northern hemisphere for as long as human civilization has existed, I think, largely because there simply is more land in the northern hemisphere.  Nevertheless, there are now many millions of people south of the equator, and so there are oodles of those for whom Christmas and New Year’s are summer holidays.

Summer ought to be slightly warmer for those in the southern hemisphere than for those in the north, since technically the Earth is at its closest approach to the sun in January.  However, the Earth’s orbit is very nearly circular, so the difference between aphelion and perihelion is tiny, fortunately for us.  Also, there is much less land in the south, and land heats up much more rapidly and noticeably than water, so that may completely swamp the effects of slightly different nearness to the sun.  I’m not sure.  If anyone out there has that information, please let me know.

It’s a bit interesting to think of those people who have grown up in the southern hemisphere, seeing all the movies and shows (and before that, books and legends) that associate snow and cold and the like with Christmas time and New Year’s.  Of course, the reasons would not be a mystery, but it still might feel peculiar, just as it might feel rather alien for a northerner to hear of someone going to the beach to celebrate Christmas.

Instead of building a snowman, maybe such people might build a sandman.  Actually, given the old horror short story about the Sandman‒not to be mistaken for Neil Gaiman’s admittedly also quite dark creation‒it might not be great to make a sandman as part of a joyous celebration.

Although, being rather dark myself, I consider the notion somewhat amusing.  Maybe there could be a kids’ story called Gritty the Sandman, instead of Frosty the Snowman (Anakin Skywalker would hate that).  But Gritty would be much harder to destroy than Frosty.  It takes serious heat to cause sand to melt, and even then it just becomes glass.  Imagine that:  they try to kill Gritty with heat and fire, and he just turns into a misshapen blob of living glass, with razor sharp shards for fingers‒more deadly even than he was before!

Wait, that was supposed to be a kids’ story, wasn’t it?  Sorry, I got distracted.  Still it would be fun to hear a song with the lyric, “There must have been some madness in that old silk hat they found.  For when they placed it on his head, he began to…”

…who knows what?

Anyway, I’ve reached the office now.  My pedometer seems to have accidentally reset while I was on the train, as it’s only showing one mile of walking, which is the distance between the station and the office.  That’s a bit frustrating, but I know that the distance to the station from the house is almost exactly five miles, so I’ve walked six miles so far, and I’ve now reset the little bastard, so we’ll see what I’ll do for the rest of the day.  Maybe I’ll have the gumption to walk back to the house from the train in the evening.  I feel okay now, from my walk, but I don’t want to overdo things and set myself back.

I’ll sign off for the moment.  Have a lovely solstice if you can, be it your summer or your winter.  But if you’re in the south, and you make a sandman, try not to bring it to life.  Quite apart from it having the nefarious power to put you to sleep at will, remember that sand is basically just ground glass, and that can have dreadful effects on bare skin or on your mucus membranes.  And you certainly don’t want it in your eyes!

I think I’m imagining a new kind of horror story here, albeit a spoofy more than spooky one.  We’ll see what comes of it.

TTFN

stonehenge solstice merged

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It’s the end of the week as I know it, and I feel…

It’s Friday.  This week, that means that I have the next two days off work.  I wish I had something fun to do tomorrow or Sunday, but really, my only goal is getting my laundry done on Sunday morning and trying to get a little bit of extra sleep if I can.

I don’t have any friends with whom to do anything fun, and I don’t want to try to achieve anything interesting or useful with anyone.  And if someone were to surprise me with anything other than, for instance, a trip to some kind of inpatient psychiatric facility (pre-paid), I would not be terribly happy about it, though I guess if it were someone I haven’t seen in a long time I might be happy, depending on who the person is.  But that’s not going to happen, anyway.  Actually, neither of those things is going to happen.  As far as I can see, I’m just going to continue as before.

I guess it’s somewhat noteworthy that this is the last day of June in 2023.  Tomorrow begins a new month, the month of Julius Caesar, huzzah (If June had 31 days, then July would begin on Sunday, and we would have a Friday the 13th in July, but alas, this is not to be).  Rent and power and water and other bills are all coming due.  I don’t really care about all that.  It’s not like I have anything else to do with my money, other than get new Kindle books or what have you.

Even that’s getting harder as time passes.  There just aren’t really any new books in which I’m interested.  I still can’t seem to read any new fiction—or old fiction for that matter, not even my old favorites.  There are no shows I want to watch, and no shows that I really want to rewatch, and very few movies.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind seeing The Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but I don’t want to tempt myself with movie theater popcorn and whatnot.  Going to the movies and not getting popcorn and maybe Goobers and such would just feel terribly sad, quite apart from going alone.  Anyway, I’m trying to avoid such foods.  They tend to make my overall energy and health feel worse, and that’s not something I need, obviously.

I rather wish I had been familiar with Uber and Lyft on that first weekend, when I was considering going to the theater to see GotG, and before I had made my current dietary changes.  At that time, I meant to ride my bike there.  However, I had increasing trouble with my back when using my bike, and then the front tire went flat and everything, and now it’s just sitting there upside down under the overhang, a little way outside my door.  It was yet another waste of money and time and effort.  And it’s too far to walk to any theater to see the movie without arriving sweaty and gross—and, again, right now I’m avoiding movie theater type foods.

I was thinking of walking to the train this morning, but I’m really not up to it.  I’m getting a better handle on shoes for walking—or, technically, boots in this case—at least, and I now have three pairs of identical black lightweight hiking boots, which are good for the ankle support and for the general feeling of having my feet in armor.

But walking is a bit unpleasant just because it’s so very hot and humid right now in south Florida.  This probably comes as no surprise to anyone out there.

I regret coming to Florida, to be honest, though I think the state is quite beautiful, physically, in a great many ways.  I like all the plants and the reptiles and birds and amphibians, and even some of the arthropods (I like spiders, and dragonflies are also very nifty).  But most of the worst things that have happened in my entire life have happened since I’ve come here.

Not to say that there aren’t compensations, of course.  My daughter was born in Florida, and I wouldn’t change her existence or nature for anything.  But it would have been nice, once she was born, to have gone back north.  Imagine if my kids had been able to be in White Plains (where I lived before moving to Florida) and so had been able to go to one of the best public school systems around.

Actually, they’ve both done quite well with respect to their education, as they desire it, and maybe the added pressure of being in a more competitive system would have been unpleasant.  I don’t know.

Anyway, the past is done, so it’s pointless to dwell on changes to it.  And I cannot change the present, obviously, since it’s actually already happened/happening in each given moment.  And the best anyone can do is try to steer toward preferred futures, but it may be, as a matter of physical law, that the future is set and inevitable and/or partially random and unpredictable.

As far as the experience of limited minds and beings such as we are, though, the future feels like something over which we have at least some degree of control, or at least through which we have some ability to steer.  It’s limited steering, of course.  It’s not as if we were in a car and driving; it’s not even as though we’re in a sailboat with a rudder.  It’s more as if we’re surfing, and if we do it as skillfully as we can, we might be able to surf in the direction we more or less would prefer to go.

Me, I think those reefs up ahead look inviting.  There are lots of sharks in the surrounding waters, too.  It would at least be a bit exciting, though perhaps painful and frightening at the time, to go there.  Then again, there’s also that whirlpool over yonder; that might be interesting, too, and probably a bit quicker.

I’m not much of a surfer, however, even metaphorically (non-metaphorically, I’m not a surfer at all).  I don’t think I’m surfing on the chaos of reality anymore, anyway, and I don’t think I have been for a long time.  I think I’m just treading water.  And it’s not as though I can just build myself a surf board, or a raft, or a boat or a ship, or anything else, out of the water in which I’m floundering.  And there are no vessels on the (admittedly quite limited*) horizon (though I do keep trying to send up flares).  So, I’m kind of just stuck here, treading away, until I finally tire out and go under.  I don’t know what else to do, but I’m already terribly fatigued.  I guess it’s “good” that the ocean water is salty**, or else it would be harder work to stay afloat.  Or maybe it would be better if it weren’t, so I could tire out more quickly and just have everything done.

Anyway, that’s enough of all that.  I’m sorry, it’s not an interesting blog post.  I think I’ll head out now.  Maybe I’ll get an Uber or Lyft to the train station.  I feel too lazy even for the bus.  We’ll see.

Have a good weekend, please, if you’re able.  If you’re with friends and family, for goodness sake, don’t take them for granted.  Not that you probably do.  Anyway, thanks for reading.

*I say this because, if one were treading water, one’s head would only be a foot or so above sea level, and so the horizon is very short, being a function of the height above the surface and the radius of the Earth.  Thus, as your height above the surface goes to infinity, your horizon asymptotically approaches half of the planet, though of course you would be having trouble with the limits of angular resolution and the amount of light dropping off as the distance squared and so on.  If the Earth were flat—which it is not—the horizon, even from a foot above the ocean, would be indefinitely large, limited only by structures that got in the way, and any haziness that attenuates light.  If the Earth were flat, then from the top of Mount Everest, with a good enough telescope, you could see everywhere on the planet.  You can’t, of course.  The world is round.  This has been understood for thousands of years, contrary to popular conceptions about the ignorance of people in the past.  Eratosthenes knew it 2200 years ago, and even used clever geometry to measure the Earth’s circumference, to within a few percent of the modern best measurement.

**Oh, by the way, did you see the recent reports about the shifting of Earth’s axis (a very small one, but real and measurable) that’s been caused by redistribution both from melting of glaciers and from the extensive pumping of ground water and the redistribution of that and the glacier water into the ocean?  It’s interesting that I was just talking about the changing angular momentum of the Earth by such things shortly before that report came out.  It makes me feel almost clever, though I did have a bit of a self-deprecating (though far from unhappy) head-slap moment when they mentioned the changes due to depletion and redistribution of ground water.  That had not occurred to me.  It’s always nice to have new facts and notions pointed out that make such sense.

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What are the odds that I’ll get out of this tunnel?

Well, it’s now Saturday‒the first Saturday of official summer in the northern hemisphere, (and of winter, in the southern).  I hope you readers out there have something fun planned with your families today and/or tomorrow.  You might as well.  If you can find an excuse to celebrate together, you should do it.

I am writing this post‒the first draft, at least‒on my smartphone, because I didn’t bring my laptop computer to the house with me.  Instead, I brought my hardcover copy of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible.  It was an odd decision, I think.  Recent history has not shown me prone to reading real books at the house when I’m off work.

I think maybe it’s wishful thinking.  I guess I figure that, if I want to read any of it at the office during my down time, I can fire up the desktop version of the Kindle App* and read it there.  Since it’s basically a pdf, the limitations of the desktop app won’t matter much, and it should be big enough to see and read on the desktop screen (though I haven’t tried yet).

If that doesn’t work‒assuming I even try it‒I can always just bring the book back.

Anyway, that’s not really what I want to write about today, but I’m not sure how much I should write about what I feel like discussing, because I worry about the possible reaction.  I also, oddly, worry about a lack of reaction.  Maybe part of me is hoping to raise an alarm.  Maybe this is yet another of my hundreds of cries for help, this one a bit more strident, since the others haven’t worked.  My mind is in a peculiar state, even for me.

Anyway, that thing I briefly mentioned near the end of the post yesterday…well, I decided to do some minor trial runs of it, with slightly live ammo, so to speak.  At moments when something particularly stressed me out, I just quietly did that little thing.

I won’t get into details.  It’s nothing very dramatic, really.  If it were a game of Russian Roulette (which it isn’t, at least not literally), it would be one using a single loaded chamber in a revolver with, I don’t know, maybe a hundred chambers in the cylinder.  Probably more, maybe slightly less, it’s hard to say.  But the risk involved right now isn’t very high.  Still, it accumulates, as risk does, when iterations are independent.

If the chance of something happening on the first try is 1%, or .01 (or 1-.99, which is the chance of it not happening) then if you spin the cylinder twice, the total chance of the thing happening is 1-(the cumulative chance of it not happening), or 1-(.99 x .99), or 1-.9801, or .0199.  That’s close to 2%, but it’s not quite there, and the new, added increments get smaller and smaller.  Otherwise, after a hundred goes you’d be certain to have something happen, and with independently randomized iterations, that isn’t the way it works.  After a hundred random tries at something in which each attempt gives a 1% chance of the event, your actual likelihood of the event happening once is about 63%, if my figuring is correct.  Someone please check my math**.

Now, if one is playing traditional Russian Roulette without spinning the barrel between each trigger pull, then by the end of six pulls, the odds are essentially certain‒barring misfires‒that someone will “win”.  Whereas if you spin the cylinder (randomly and fairly) each time, the odds are, let me see…about 66.5% after 6 tries.

The point I’m making is that it’s not a high chance, but it gives me some sense of control and possible “escape” each time, and I think that helped calm me a bit yesterday.  I even think I might have slept a bit better last night.  That might be just because I was feeling physically a little improved since the previous day, though.

I did wake up quite a number of times throughout the night, each time filled with frankly absurd anxiety about something, but I have no idea what.  That’s just what usually happens, though.  I also woke up once coughing my brains out from a reflux/regurgitation event, but I think I know the dietary indiscretion behind that, and I don’t mean to repeat it.  That’s a horrible feeling.

Anyway, I think I feel slightly more level…though it’s still very early in the day, and just thinking about it while (now) waiting for the train seems to belie that possibility, as I feel tension and anxiety building rather quickly.

It’s so frustrating.  I just can’t ever seem to feel in any way at ease or relaxed or at home.  I really do feel sometimes like I don’t belong on this planet, or even in this universe, like there’s been some meta-cosmic mix-up.  You would think that one would get more used to the world after one had been in it for a longer period of time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Possibly at least some of my former ability to handle it was due to the presence of my family and friends, who could provide good examples and smooth out rough edges and act as allies who helped when I was at a loss.  When needing to rely solely my own resources, I think I just get worn down.  It also doesn’t help that, despite my having worked quite hard all my life to succeed and thrive in this place, and having achieved quite a lot, it just wasn’t enough, and everything all went to shit, largely due to me just not seeming to get other people and what they meant or needed or intended or what.

Maybe I was just unlucky.  My back injury and chronic consequent pain really set the boulder rolling downhill.  Without that, maybe I would have been fine.

That boulder has been rolling for a long time, now.  I’m on more level-ish ground than I was, but only because it’s nearing the bottom of the valley; most of its prior, impressive height has long since been lost.  If this were a metaphor for energy states of quantum fields, I’d say it’s approaching the vacuum state, or at least a pseudo-vacuum; I can’t see the shape of the whole curve.  Maybe at this point I’m effectively already in the vacuum state, and any seeming movement is just quantum jitters.

Sorry, I’m skipping from metaphor to metaphor like a grade-schooler playing metaphor hopscotch.  How’s that for a meta-metaphor***?  

Anyway, I’m not getting anywhere with this right now, except heading toward the office.  But maybe, just maybe, I’ve put in motion things that will give me a higher chance of quantum-tunneling to a lower, true ground state, where I can rest, or at least stop being constantly in pain and anxious and depressed and lonely and futile.  Or maybe‒there’s always that foolish hope‒someone will help me.  Though it’s hard to blame anyone for not doing so.  I’m a rotten person who isn’t really worth the effort.  I know I don’t like me.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I hope, again, that you all have a nice first weekend of summer.  Or winter.  Either way, if you have friends and/or family with whom to spend your time, please make the most of your opportunity.

*Which, by the way, sucks compared to the smartphone/tablet version, and is very frustrating.  If any of you out there are on the development team at Amazon for this, or have access to those who are, please let them know that they need to improve their product relative to the other versions.

**Don’t bother accounting for the possibilities of more than one occasion of the outcome happening.  We’re talking about Russian Roulette‒if one “event” happens, there will be no more spins.

***Since I used the word “like” I guess it’s technically a simile about metaphors.  That’s not as much fun, though.

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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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When we shall hear the rain and wind blog dark December?

Hello and good morning, everyone.

It’s not only Thursday—and thus time for my “weekly” blog post, which goes back to when I was writing this blog only one day of the week and working on fiction every other morning.  It’s also the first day of June in 2023 (and thus, inescapably, also the first Thursday of June).  So, we begin a new month.

Before the end of this month, we will have the Solstice—the summer one in the northern hemisphere and the winter one in the southern hemisphere.  After that, officially, the season either of summer or of winter will begin, and the days, having reached either a maximum or minimum of the sine curve of their “daylight” length, will begin to head in the other direction.

Of course, the change will be very gradual at first, since the derivative of a sine curve—its rate of change—is a cosine curve, and where a sine is either at a maximum or a minimum, the cosine is at zero, albeit only instantaneously.  It’s at the equinox that the rate of change hits a maximum (or, technically it could also be a minimum, but when we’re discussing absolute rates of change, a minimum and a maximum are interchangeable, |x| being a positive number at any time, and all).  Anyway, that’s enough of that minimal review of the rates of change of seasons and the nature of sine curves and cosine curves.

Sines and cosines are well-behaved curves, at least.  Tangents and secants and so on are not so well-behaved, at least if by “well-behaved” you mean, “staying between a specified range of the y-axis instead of tending towards infinity in multiple places on that axis”.  Of course, a sine or cosine do go to infinity in both directions on the x-axis, come to think of it.  I don’t think I’ve considered it quite the way ever before.

Wow, talk about going off on a tangent*.

Anyway, not much else is new currently, not that I was just discussing anything new other than my new way of looking at the infinities of sine curves and, of course, the new month, which isn’t really all that new when you get right down to it.  Is June named for Jupiter (i.e. Juno)?  I should look that up.

…Okay, I did, and reminded myself that Juno was the Roman name for the goddess equivalent to Hera, the wife of Zeus/Jupiter, so it’s indirectly related to Jupiter, not directly.  That was an embarrassing mix-up of names and ideas in my head.  Good thing I didn’t write it down and publish it for everyone to see!

Of course, July and August are named after Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus (née Octavian).  Then we have months that used to be named for their ordinal place in the calendar:  September (7), October (8), November (9), December (10), but I guess they all got shifted over two spaces at some point after they were originally named, though I don’t recall quite when and why that happened, and that isn’t something in which I’m interested enough right now to look it up.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this sort of stuff today.  I’m just following whatever random—or at least stochastic—impulse occurs based on the preceding thought or statement or whatever.  It’s not as though there’s any reason for me to do anything different.

I had a brief moment or two of “inspiration” yesterday evening, during which, on the train heading back to the house, I wrote a poem/song lyrics on the notepad function of my smartphone.  Having been written by me, it’s a very gloomy sort of poem/song, and I don’t have even an inkling of a melody for it.  I just felt a bit of a dip in my mood, even relative to baseline, and decided to express that the way I sometimes used to do.  That’s how I wrote what turned into the lyrics of my song Come Back Again, and something related to it was responsible for Catechism and Breaking Me Down, though the latter two were semi-deliberately written as song lyrics from the start.

A little later, I was watching someone on YouTube reacting to the “unplugged” performance of a few Nirvana songs, and I decided to look up the chords to Come As You Are; I downloaded a PDF of those.  It’s not a very complicated song, but it sounds quite good.  Kurt Cobain had a way of writing melodies that were unlike anything just about anyone else ever wrote.  Though, I also like his/their performance of The Man Who Sold The World, which is originally a David Bowie song.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard Bowie’s version of it, though.  I should have looked up the chords to that; maybe I will today.

But, of course, the odds of me ever doing anything with such chords, let alone writing a tune to and making a new song of my own seem vanishingly small.  Right now—by which I mean “now in general” not “now this very moment”—I’m just meandering through each day rather thoughtlessly, certainly pointlessly, with no goal or aspiration or anything of the sort.  There isn’t any point to anything I do.

I do really miss my kids.  I miss everyone else, too—my old friends, my immediate and more distant family, living and dead, all those people—but especially my kids.  I’m very lonely, but I’m also very socially withdrawn and incapable/incompetent.  I don’t think it’s at all possible for me to seek out and meet with or connect with anyone, new or old, in the world—except for my kids.

If they wanted to meet with me, I would do it.  I don’t even think it would be a struggle.  As far as everyone and everything else goes, though…well, I’ve lost my communication/connection hardware and software or whatever, or maybe I just didn’t get the updates, and so my system is hopelessly outdated, and when I even think about such things, the application crashes.

That’s a pretty weird couple of metaphors.

Anyway, I’m not capable of reaching out to people, other than through here, even when I want to do it.  I’m also not capable of trying to take care of myself (medically, psychologically, whatever), or take care of any other proactive business of life.  Life isn’t my domain anymore, I think.  Nevertheless, I can’t be darkly cool and quote the Bhagavad Gita like Oppenheimer:  “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  It would probably be more appropriate for me to say something like, “I am become Drizzle, the dampener of spirits.”

That was sort of the subject of the poem/song I wrote yesterday.  But most people don’t like to drink watered-down spirits—though I do, sometimes.  I also like watered down soda, I’ve come to realize.  Go figure.

Anyway, that’s enough of all that.  I think it’s time to head off to go to the train, thence to the office.  If I get there early enough, maybe I’ll play some guitar.  I doubt it.

TTFN

sine and cosinetwistedanddistorted

*Ba-dump-bump.

by

His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller blogs.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the “traditional” day for my “traditional” weekly blog post, and so I began with one of the variations of my traditional “Hello and good morning” greetings.  I’m probably the only person even to notice such things, let alone to care, but I can’t seem to help but do both.

I don’t have many interesting things to report about myself lately, as you probably know, since I’m still not writing any fiction, and I haven’t played any music—either in the sense of playing an instrument, such as a guitar or cello or keyboard, or playing music on a device just to listen to it—in recent weeks, either.

Yesterday, though, when I was taking out garbage from the office, I encountered the little owl below, of whom I got a few grainy pictures and even a grainy video (it was still pretty dim out, and I didn’t want to try to get too close and scare the creature).  The video is silent because my phone, due to the humidity, had done as it often does and gone into headphones mode, even though there were no headphones attached to it.

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The owl and I startled each other nicely, because when I came out, it was barely three feet from me.  We both jumped a little, almost identically and simultaneously.  I’m pretty sure, after doing some Google searching, that it’s an Eastern Screech Owl, perhaps a juvenile one.  It didn’t fly away from me, just sort of hopped and trotted, but its wings appeared functional and symmetrical from what I could see, with no clear sign of injury.  After I made the video, it let me get about 4 feet away, where I knelt down and said hello.  It looked healthy and not terribly alarmed.

There is quite a lot of wildlife in south Florida, and particularly there are many birds and reptiles.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the owl and its ilk are gorging themselves on the many lizards, including the unusually large number of young iguanas we’ve had lately.

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Earlier this week, I saw the subject of this picture outside in the back, and it ran and ran, then I went past a construction dumpster, carrying garbage destined for a more standard dumpster, past where it had been.  I thought it might have already headed toward the little, wooded seating area in the shopping plaza, but then I realized it had tried to climb away only to find itself in the pictured basket, apparently puzzled about what it should do next.

Iguanas don’t seem to tend to be that all that bright.

We’ve had some other life in the long alley behind the office, including some good-sized frogs and their tadpoles, and what I think is a Cuban Knight Anole, pictured below, and one of which I saw quite a while back on the fence beside the house in which I live.

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But perhaps the most interesting—in some senses—life form encountered was that seen in this video, in a wooden fence behind the aforementioned slightly wooded, rather pleasant, outdoor seating area in the shopping plaza/strip mall.

There was a time in my life when I would have been terrified even to get this close to such a swarm, but nowadays I just find it fascinating, and I wasn’t the only one.  I’m not sure what I meant when I asked about where the bears are in the video—apparently it was a sensible joke, because my coworker laughed about it.  But all I can think of now is fictional bears trying to get honey from beehives, a la Winnie the Pooh or similar.  And I don’t know why I should have thought of such a thing, even for comical purposes.

Oh, well.  I say and think a lot of things that are bizarre and peculiar, even to myself.

Of course, there is other “wildlife” in south Florida, both native species, like the owl, and invasive species, like the iguanas, the anole, and the humans.  There are other mammals besides humans, as well.  Around the house in which I currently live, there are of course quite a few semi-stray cats, and last night when going out back, I encountered a youngish male raccoon, who was at first nervous of me, though he hadn’t even realized I was there until he practically walked into me, at which time he retreated a bit—apparently I’m pretty quiet.  I spoke calmly to him, and he seemed reassured enough to come back past me to go wherever he was going, through a gap in the fences.  I took no photos, but who hasn’t seen raccoons before?

There’s plenty of food in the neighborhood for an enterprising raccoon or twelve, so I’m not surprised he looked quite healthy.  I know he has older kin, because I’ve seen other, chunkier relatives (presumably) of his in the area in the past, including once what I believe was a mother with her child.  There are also at least two opossums, probably a mother and child based on their relative sizes.

It’s all rather interesting, I suppose.  Unfortunately, nothing about me or my life is nearly as interesting as these animals, except perhaps in the “Chinese curse”* sense.  I still have my usual chronic pain, and this morning my back and side were quite stiff, so before I got dressed I rolled on lots and lots of “Icy Hot”.  I don’t think that was a good idea, because all I have now is that irritating, burning sensation all around my skin in the left half of my midsection, overlaying the stiffness and pain that was already there and persists.

Maybe such products do their work by making you feel relief when they fade away, so you think you feel better when you’ve just reverted to baseline.  It would be a pretty good joke by way of a pain-treating product.

Icy Hot does actually tend to help when I’ve got inflammation and soreness in joints, such as the base of my thumb, so I don’t want to denigrate it too much.  I’m just speaking tongue in cheek—which is a good way to set yourself up to bite your tongue badly if you hit a bump or just forget what you’re doing with your tongue.

That’s about all I have for today.  At least there are some interesting animals, and some exceptionally mediocre pictures and videos of some of them.  If it weren’t for all the people (me included) south Florida would be a really cool—though actually quite muggy and hot—place to be.

Wherever you are, please take care of yourselves and your loved ones.  Relish the time you have with them; it is finite, and you will not necessarily have any warning before it comes to an end.  Revel in your time, as Tyrel said to Roy.

TTFN

*I.e., “May you live in interesting times.”

by

O heaven! that one might read the blog of fate, and see the revolution of the times.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and so it’s time for what is, “historically”, my weekly blog post, though in fact it’s merely another iteration of my now-nearly-daily blog post.

It’s getting harder at times to think of what to write about.  I’m more or less committed to doing this whole thing stream-of-consciousness style, since I’m hoping that—just maybe—it might act at least as a form of “talk therapy”, though there are fewer questions and less feedback than one receives from real, usual therapy sessions.  Still, maybe just expressing my thoughts in this fashion will help me to organize them in some way.  I’m certainly not writing fiction or playing music, so I don’t have anything to speak about with respect to those subjects now.

It’s the first Thursday in August 2022, now that I think about it.  That doesn’t seem particularly noteworthy; I can’t think of any major holidays in August, though I suppose I could be forgetting about something.  August is one of those comparatively dull months, though it is a month of “pure” summer, in the sense that, in the northern hemisphere, it’s all in summer, like July, not split up into two seasons like June and September.

It is a bit curious that we don’t start our years at the winter solstice.  People have known about the solstice, about it being the “shortest” day of the year, for who knows how many thousands of years, and many festivals worldwide have been associated with celebrating this renewal of the length of days, dominated in the west of the modern world by Christmas and then New Years.  I think it’s mildly weird that we don’t simply begin the next year on the solstice, or the day after it.  We do start it thereabouts, but why not right on that day?

Maybe the issue is that the solstice changes subtly over time, and occasionally happens closer to one day than another?  I don’t know quite enough about it to say for sure.  If anyone out there does know to what degree the solstices change, feel free to comment about it below—not on Facebook or Twitter, unless you don’t care about the comment being seen for a while, anyway.  I don’t interact much via Facebook anymore; it’s too stressful and depressing, though I miss knowing what many of the people I used to know are doing, seeing pictures of them and their families and whatnot.

Twitter is slightly less stressful, largely because I don’t feel personally involved in any of its stupider aspects and don’t tend to follow people who are.  Twitter, to me, is a good place for sharing links to articles and videos and for one-liners and “What’s your favorite of the ________ movies?” types of questions and answers.  Even with the “enhanced” 240 character limit, it’s simply not a venue for expressing or discussing any deep or complex thoughts.  No wonder “discussions” on the site almost inevitably devolve into monkey-style feces flinging (metaphorically).

Speaking of days and equinoxes*, I read recently that the rate of the Earth’s rotation has speeded up, and indeed, that we recently had the “shortest” day recorded—that’s not shortest in the sense that the winter solstice is the shortest “day” of the year, but that the actual period of the Earth’s rotation has decreased.  It’s not by a lot, of course—I think it was on the order of a microsecond or so, though I may be misremembering that order of magnitude.

It’s certainly not something a person would notice, but the international group that manages the Universal Time standards and sidereal versus solar days and the like needs to pay attention and note such changes.  And if they adjust years—adding leap seconds for instance—that all has to be coordinated with things like GPS satellites and so on, which already have to be managed with respect to General Relativity and Special Relativity; their function depends on highly precise time-keeping, and time is different farther up in “space” and at higher speeds.

As for why the Earth is speeding up, well, I haven’t read any speculation, but at first glance it seems odd.  One might expect that, over time, if anything, the Earth’s rotation might slow down, and I believe that has been the overall trend over billions of years, with tides and the like very, very slowly dissipating angular momentum.  For a rotating body to begin to rotate faster requires—by conservation of angular momentum—that its overall mass distribution gets closer to the center of rotation, like the proverbial spinning ice-skater pulling his or her arms in closer to his or her torso and thereby speeding up.

spinning skater

I wonder if, perhaps, there is some change in the distribution of the Earth’s mass in the form of water from glaciers, such as in Greenland**, and mountain glaciers in other places, decreasing the amount of mass that was higher up and away from the center of the planet and bringing that mass down into the sea, which by default is as close as things like water can get, since liquid water “seeks” the lowest level.  Of course, general erosion of mountains and even adjustments of the planet’s crust due to plate tectonics could have effects on rates of spin, but it seems to me that they would be too slow in their effects to be so noticeable—so to speak.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this phenomenon, particularly if it continues.  It’s unlikely to make a difference in our day to day lives that could possibly be noticeable to people who aren’t measuring with the most precise instruments science and technology can produce, but the information is a curiosity, and it could be at least a marker of the effects of climate change.  Or perhaps not.  There may be another explanation.

Maybe by sheer chance the Earth got hit with meteorites that, for this one small bit of time, happened to, on average, deliver their kinetic energy in the direction of the Earth’s rotation.  It’s not something that’s likely to be a trend, but it could, in principle, happen briefly just by chance.  It seems highly unlikely to happen in such a way as to cause a measurable change in the rotation rate, but what do I know?

Anyway, that’s about enough meandering thoughts for today.  I hope you are all having reasonably good days—even if they are shorter, and you have a microsecond or so less to get your daily chores done.  Please use that diminishing time by spending it with those you love and who love you, if you can.  Take advantage of the moments you have by doing things that are affirming for your relationships and families and so on.  Entropy is always increasing—that’s the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and it is as inexorable as any law we can imagine.

We could find someday that there are exceptions to the speed of causality (aka the speed of light), but no one who knows anything about thermodynamics thinks anything is ever going to overthrow the 2nd Law, since it’s based in the fundamental nature of mathematics and probability.  The universe might start again in a Poincaré recurrence, but that’s not going to be for another 10120 billion years or so, so don’t hold your breath.  Or do, if it pleases you; we’re all going to be long gone before any recurrent universe happens, anyway, even if nothing like the “big rip” makes such recurrence impossible.

As I said, don’t waste time.  Love your loved ones and spend time with them if you can—and if they want you around.  Don’t take such things for granted.

TTFN

whirling globe

*I was, you can go check for yourself.

**I feel that the ones in Antarctica might be less impressive in effect only because they are so much closer to the axis of rotation already.

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As you from blogs would pardon’d be, let your indulgence set me free.

Hello and good morning and welcome to Thursday and to another edition of my weekly blog post.  Also, of course, welcome to Summer (in the northern hemisphere, anyway…in the southern one, welcome to Winter).  Tuesday was the Solstice, aka the longest day of the year (in the north), if by “day” you mean the time during which the sun is above the horizon.  Now, as always happens during Summer, the “days” are getting shorter.  That may seem counter-intuitive to some, but when you take a moment to think about it, it’s pretty clearly the case, just as during Winter the “days” are growing longer.  The solstice is the peak (or the nadir) of the sine curve of day length, from which there is nowhere to go but down (or up).

I haven’t written much this week.  Last Friday and then this Tuesday and Wednesday, I only wrote about 700 words each, and on Monday I didn’t write anything at all*.  Nor did I play any guitar.  I just didn’t have the energy for much of anything.  I still don’t have much energy, frankly, but it seems this blog is the place in which I’ll delay longest before slacking off.  It’s the Tom Bombadil of my resistance to the figurative assault by Sauron on my middle-earth…to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point.

I have written a few thousand words on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado this week (go ahead, do the math), but my writing has been so slow that even since last week, the protagonists haven’t formally met with Lucy, the extradimensional demi-god who adores the Beatles.  They’ve traveled through her world a bit more, at least, and I’ve thrown in lots of little references that only Beatles fans will get.  It might be amusing for eventual readers; it also might be irritating.  I suppose it could be both.

As those of you who are paying attention to such things will already know, on Tuesday I uploaded the rest of Outlaw’s Mind that I have written so far.  It stops abruptly during the middle of a scene, because that’s where I was when I took my hiatus from writing it; apologies for that.  As for why I posted the rest—well, I just wanted to get it “over with” up to the current point, in case anything prevents further uploads.  If circumstances permit (and if anyone so much as expresses even the tiniest interest) I may continue with it at some future date.  I doubt anyone will much care, however, one way or the other.

As I said in Tuesday’s pre-story comment, I may soon post what I’ve written so far of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, though any potential readers should bear in mind that it’s even more of a first draft than Outlaw’s Mind was.  If I do it, I’ll probably just post it all at once, though it’s over 60,000 words so far.  I don’t think there should be any upper limit to the length of a written blog post, though.  After all, even at so many words long, the file is only about 633 K in size, making it much shorter than the average video, even videos that are only a few minutes long.  So, data size at least shouldn’t get in the way.

Speaking of video files, I posted a silly little video last night on YouTube, which I’ll embed here, below.  It was, as I say in the video, a test of the function of using my phone to record and then upload videos to YouTube, and I think it went pretty well…though I suspect that the last few seconds of the video got cut off, just as I was about to stop “filming”.  I didn’t lose any content to speak of, and I wonder if YouTube just does that to such videos, or if the upload process did it (via WiFi, of course), or what exactly happened.  I uploaded it directly to YouTube, rather than, for instance, saving it to Google Drive and then uploading it from a laptop.  It was a trial in case I end up in situations where I want to upload videos but I’m not in good circumstances for using a laptop.

I can’t directly live-stream to YouTube** from my phone currently, because I don’t have enough subscribers to my YouTube channel.  That’s an interesting criterion for people to be able to live-stream from a phone.  I’m sure there was some quasi-logical decision-making process involved in setting the requirement, but I haven’t come up with any good hypotheses for what it might be (I also haven’t tried very hard to do so).  Of course, I could live-stream from a desktop or laptop if I wanted, because anyone can if they have a channel (or so I understand), but that wasn’t the point of my latest video.

Anyway, that’s about all there is to say about the video for now.  I did a few other test videos on two different computers earlier, and I uploaded them, but I haven’t made them public yet, and I may not ever do so.  I’m not sure.  I suppose we shall see.  Here’s the video in question above, though.

Don’t mind the sunglasses and the mask.  I was just playing around with the look, and frankly, I think it’s a lot better than my naked face.  Honestly, I could almost think I looked cool that way, which is a weird thought.  I’ll try not to get used to it.

With that, I don’t have much more to write in this week’s blog post.  Life is boring and unrewarding, and I don’t readily foresee any change to that, though I have something in mind that might do the trick.  Further bulletins on that as events warrant.  In the meantime, though, I hope you all are doing reasonably well—indeed, I would wish for you to be doing as well as it’s possible for you to be doing.  In fact, I will wish for it.  Why not?

There, I did it.

In a certain sense, of course, you already are doing as well as it’s possible for you to be doing right now, because once “now” has happened, it’s not as though you can do a mid-game reset and go back to try to do better.  I don’t know if that’s a comforting thought or a distressing one, though it could be both or either or neither, depending on the person.  But anyway, please try to make your present and your future as good as they can possibly be for you and for those you love.  You might as well—it’s not like you’ve got anything better to do with your time.

TTFN

summer dawn

*And, of course, I wrote nothing on the “weekend”.  I pretty much did nothing on the weekend.

**From my phone, anyway.