time

by

I haven’t had a drink or two, but I don’t care

It’s Tuesday now, the 29th of September—the 2nd to last day of the month—and I am writing this post on my lapcom, for the second time in three days.  Well, okay, it’s four days if you count Sunday, but with respect to blog posts, I don’t count that.

It seems that the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom on the 29th of September was back in 2022, based on the saved files on the lapcom.

I know, I know, I need to slow down with all this craziness or some of you readers are going to have trouble with your blood pressure or asthma or generalized anxiety or what have you.  It’s all so very…exciting, isn’t it?  Sometimes you have to step back and take a slow breath, just to keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed.

Anyway, I’m writing this on the lapcom today because I slept in the office last night.  It wasn’t any bad thing, though, don’t worry about that.  I just stayed late in the office doing a Discord call with my youngest so we could watch a couple of episodes of Doctor Who together.  That’s definitely a good thing, at least from my point of view.

But it did get to be late enough that there was no real point in heading back to the house for the night just to come back here in the morning.  It’s expensive, relatively speaking, it’s time-consuming, and frankly there’s nothing very interesting about the house.  It’s only real benefit is the shower (but I’m pretty good at doing “bird baths” in the office bathroom).  It’s not particularly comfortable nor welcoming nor personal.  It certainly doesn’t feel like home to me.

I guess the cats will have to scrounge a bit for their food for the extra 24 hours, but they’re cats.  They’re good at stuff like that, believe me.  They’ll be fine.

So, yeah, anyway, I slept on the floor on the office again, using my hoody as a blanket and the backpack as a pillow, and it was fine.  I slept no worse than I usually do (though admittedly, I didn’t really sleep any better than usual, either).

And that’s about all that can be said about my life.  I go to work, I go back to the house, I write this blog on workdays, I watch YouTube videos which are becoming increasingly uninteresting on average (though there are intermittent ones that are good).  I’m reminded of the line from the Beatles song I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party:  “There’s nothing for me here, so I will disappear.”

There really is nothing in my daily life that’s worth sticking around to experience.  Only things like watching Doctor Who with my youngest over Discord are of any real interest to me.

I suppose writing this blog is somewhat interesting.  Certainly, I keep doing it (so far).  I’m not sure whether that’s particularly good or not terribly good or what.  I suppose that depends very much on one’s criteria, doesn’t it?  After all, for something to be sensibly called “good”, one must first lay out one’s standards, because goodness very much depends on the purpose for which one is evaluating something.

A particular car may be a very good car, but might be lamentably bad at being a paperweight, and even worse at being a dining room centerpiece for a dinner party.  And someone can be quite a good doctor but a terrible administrator of a medical practice.  And of course, one can be a good singer-keyboardist but a terrible physicist.  Or one can be good at both, like Brian Cox (the physicist, not the actor).

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that goodness must be good according to some relatively objective and coherent measure, otherwise it’s just a vague adjective (or noun in the case of “goodness”).  As far as I’m aware, there’s no large-scale, global, ultimate measure of Goodness, despite what various religions and other dogmas might claim.

I’ve yet to encounter such a notion that’s even approaching coherence.  And goodness really ought to be coherent, if it’s claiming to be something universal and crucial.  But the real moral world is messy, even when compared to the world of myths and fairy tales, so there are no clear-cut absolute criteria.  Such things are just not terribly useful.

Maybe usefulness is the criterion that should be applied in the real world when speaking of goodness.  And usefulness implies a purpose, which implies some kind of criteria.  Maybe we would all be better off if we stopped worrying about Good and Evil with capital letters as if they were titles or offices or forces of nature.  The laws of physics themselves apply locally; maybe we’d be better off with a slightly utilitarian approach that evaluates goodness versus badness relating to the specific, local circumstances.

I don’t know, I haven’t thought all this through very carefully; I’m just thinking out loud as it were.  So don’t expect me to have arrived at some finished outcome, some theorem or system of thought.  I’m just spit balling as they say, or brainstorming, or…well, thinking out loud, like I said.  Though, of course, this is not literally out loud, unless you count the very faint sound of the keys being pressed as I type.

All right, that’s enough.  I’m tired, so I’m not going to push it too much to try to say anything profound.  I hope you all have a good day today, on this penultimate day in September of 2026 (AD or CE).  You might as well have a good day, by whatever criteria you measure such goodness, if you can.

by

“Now far ahead the road has gone…”

First and most importantly for today, I want to say, “Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.”  So, I will say it:  Happy Birthday, Bilbo and Frodo.

Yes, though the movies were inexcusably unclear about the fact, Bilbo and Frodo were both born on September 22nd (Shire reckoning).  Mind you, they were born 78 years apart (Bilbo first, in case that was not obvious).  So the big party at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring was a joint celebration of Bilbo’s 111th birthday and Frodo’s 33rd birthday (the year in which one officially comes of age in Hobbit culture).

Also, the people inside the tent in the big dinner at the party were chosen to total 144, matching their hosts’ combined age, a number also called (by hobbits and by us) a gross.  Many of the guests were quite miffed when they learned of that system, but as usual, Bilbo DGAF.

So, anyway, yeah, it’s Frodo’s and Bilbo’s birthday.

It’s also the day of the Autumnal Equinox, when the sine curve of daylight versus nighttime crosses the x-axis toward negative territory.  In other words, from now until spring, the nights will be longer than the daylight‒in the northern hemisphere, anyway.  In the southern hemisphere it is the opposite.

And, of course, it is the first day of Autumn, which is my favorite season and always has been (well, it has been for as long as I can remember, though certainly not longer than I’ve been alive).  It’s the time of most of my favorite holidays and so on (including Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday) and it was the time when school started again (which was a good thing to me).

Unfortunately, in south Florida, most of the physical charms of Autumn are almost completely effaced.  And the charms of south Florida have long since been almost completely blunted for me.  Unfortunately, I really don’t have anywhere else to go, at least not anyplace I could go in good conscience.

It would be nice to spend at least one more Autumn-Winter-Spring up north, to experience the change of the seasons again, before I die.  I’m not that optimistic about my chances, though.  I don’t see how it’s going to happen.

I often think about just…leaving here, on foot, and walking towards Michigan, just seeing if I can make it all the way back to the house in which I grew up, or if I would die trying.  Either outcome would be acceptable to me.  And I often feel that September 22nd would be an excellent day to start such a trek, since that’s when Frodo left Bag End to begin his own long journey.

Right now, though, I don’t know that I am in good enough shape for such a trip.  Though, of course, the trip would do at least a bit of working me into shape as I went along (or it might completely wreck me).

I think I have said here before that just going off for a very long walk would not be a terrible way to end myself, not least because nobody can intervene to try to stop you or hospitalize you, because you’re not doing anything that’s definitely life-threatening or associated with self harm or self-destruction.  It’s just walking.

That’s much more ambiguous than, say, nooses or blades or gallons of flammable liquids or big bags of rat poison or even bottles of analgesics of various kinds, all of which (and more) I have ready and set to go.  But those all make a mess, at least potentially.

Of course, I’ve also mused‒here as well as elsewhere, I think‒that maybe an ideal thing would be just to swim out into the Atlantic and keep going until it kills me one way or the other.  That way there really is no cleanup required.  Bury my body in Davy Jones’s Locker, you might say.

But swimming out into the ocean is more or less irreducibly frightening, at least to me.  I don’t think I could get past the activation energy required to start that process.  I’m definitely a good enough swimmer, but I’m not a comfortable swimmer, especially not in deep water.

Mind you, I’m also not exactly comfortable with poisoning myself with one or more things, nor with immolating myself, nor with hanging.  Those things are daunting, and I wouldn’t claim otherwise.

Cutting is less intimidating, interestingly enough.  It hurts, of course, but I’m pretty well used to that much of it (a face which can be frustrating in and of itself), and I have various topical lidocaine preparations that would make that process at least slightly easier.

But blood is messy, and I wouldn’t like to have someone need to clean up such a mess on my account.  This is also a problem with jumping from a high hotel balcony, which is another available option.  Maybe if I were ever to get to the point where I just hate everyone so much that I don’t mind inconveniencing anyone, even strangers, I might be willing to do one of those messy things.

Walking is still probably the best thing, though.  One might even see it as a test of a kind, a sorting process:  will one gain new self-respect and maybe even some contemplative insight on a very long walk, or will one die in the process?  Either outcome is not too bad.

Alas, I need to get in somewhat better shape before starting such a quest, and that’s frustrating.  My chronic pain doesn’t help, either, though there are interventions that can help that, at least a little, and it might even improve over the length of a long enough walk.

It would be nice to see the seasons change at a slightly accelerated rate while walking north.  But it may be too late for that this year.

Anyway, if I do such a thing, I’m unlikely to announce it here at the time.  I would likely just leave, and only maybe send intermittent reports as I go along, but with some built in delay such that, by the time people could see how far I had gone, I would have been well past that point.

Ironically, if I were suddenly to do that, I think almost nobody would even realize it.  No one tends to notice when I’m not around, as it were, except perhaps to feel a slight lightening in the air in rooms I used to inhabit.

Whatever.  Happy first day of autumn (in the northern hemisphere).  Happy equinox.  And a most joyous Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday.

by

Meet the new year, same as the old year

L’shana tovah!  It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, so for those of you who celebrate it, I hope you have a good one.

It’s Saturday, also, of course, and I am going in to the office.  I can hardly claim to feel slighted to be working on Rosh Hashanah, since if I were actually observant, I would never be working on any Saturday, since that is Shabbat.  I would be hypocritical to try to claim the day off by some form of religious right.

It is also rather sad and frustrating that I just have no one with whom to celebrate this and other important days.  Tomorrow is another very important day, and of course next weekend begins Yom Kippur, which is the so-called highest of the holy days.

Anyway, all that’s neither here nor there.  It has nothing to do with me other than memories.  I can’t even share well-wishes with people on Facebook as I used to do, thanks to my weird expulsion from Meta’s sites.

But it’s not as though anyone has a right to Facebook.  Not even the people who created it have a right to it.  It can all be taken from them at any moment by the whims of fate, and sooner or later, it all will be taken from them, just as everything else will be taken from everyone else as well.

Again, happy new year.

Each day is the beginning of a new year depending on one’s point of view.  And every second is the beginning of a new day, and so on.  Likewise, each day is the end of a year, and each second is the end of a day.

And each moment is the end of some noteworthy number of lives.  Every day is the last day some parent out there will lift and carry their child.  Every day is the last day some parent will ever see their child, and every day is the last day some child will see their parent.

Every moment is, for someone out there, the last moment they will spend with the person they love the most.

This is not even counting the suffering, the fear, and the deaths of non-human animals and other forms of life.

So, yeah.  Happy, happy.  Joy, joy.

Sorry, I know I’m being perhaps even more of a downer than usual.  It’s what I’m best at, I suspect.  I should charge for my services; after all, like the Joker said, if you’re good at something you should never do it for free.

I don’t know if there’s actually a market for what I’m selling, though.  I’m down to about a dozen or fewer regular readers here, and it’s not as though anyone’s sharing my posts or calling them to the attention of friends as being entertaining or insightful.  That’s not surprising.

I am quite creative in many ways, but those ways all tend toward the dark and horrible.  Way back when I was writing the first science fiction/fantasy* novel I ever completed, some of the best parts in it were the “horror” elements, which just crept in as I wrote the type of story I liked to write.

I seem mainly to be a source of darkness in the world‒though I’ve been part of bringing some wonderful things into the world as well.  I’ve even done my share of good deeds, and possibly more than my share.  That’s pretty much over now, though.

Of course, darkness doesn’t require me to bring it into existence.  It makes no difference to the universe if one declares oneself, say, an Agent of Chaos or of Entropy.  That’s about as sensible as someone claiming to be an agent of gravity or of the electromagnetic force.

Real things, fundamental things, don’t require human (or other) agents to carry them out.  They simply are, they happen, there is no avoiding them.  They happen with or without anyone even knowing they happen.  This is one of the things that should make everyone suspicious of every religion, really:  why would real omnipotent force require agents?

So yeah, like I said, every moment is laden with loss and suffering and death, and ironically, this will only ever end if and when everyone and everything is dead.

Happy New Year.

*Yes, it counted as science fiction and fantasy.  That was one of the points of it:  it told of an ultra-high tech, space faring civilization that also used “magic”.

by

Complex clocks, misleading DNA, and signs (not sines) of support

Well, it’s Wednesday, which follows Tuesday, which follows Monday, which follows Sunday, which follows Saturday, which follows Friday, which follows Thursday, which follows…

…that’s right, it brings us right back to Wednesday again.  It’s a little bit reminiscent of the Doe, a Deer song from The Sound of Music.  Or, maybe you could say it’s a little like Rock Around the Clock.  All these cyclical things are amusing in that each member of the closed, recursive group both precedes and follows itself.

That gives me an interesting idea.  At least, it’s interesting to me.  I’ve seen clocks (dial style clocks obviously, not digital ones) that designate the hours with radians, such that in place of the 12, for instance, there would be π/2, since the whole circumference of any circle is 2 π radians.

Six o’clock is then 3 π/2, nine o’clock is then π, and three o’clock is just 0 (or 2π).  The order of these numbers uses the tradition of beginning counting radians (or degrees) at the 3 o’clock position as it were.  The other numbers (1, 2, 4, 5, etc.) are various ratios of π, using the trig functions that give us the results for what we would think of (typically) as 30 degrees, 60 degrees, and so on.

Well, why not do a novelty clock with the hour markings represented by complex numbers?  In engineering and in physics, they are very frequently used because they are excellent ways of calculating cyclical things, using a unit circle (in this case, a circle with radius 1, centered on the origin of the complex plane).  Using such an arrangement, multiplying any complex number by i results in a 90 degree rotation (counterclockwise).

In the case of a complex number clock, the 3 o’clock position is just 1 + 0i, 6 o’clock is 0 – i, 9 o’clock is -1 + 0i, and 12 o’clock is 0 + i.  I’ll work out the specific complex numbers for the other hours, and I’ll put them in a footnote* below, but I don’t think I can do it off the top of my head while commuting.  For one thing, I don’t recall the sine and cosine of 30 degrees…

Wait!  The sine of 30 degrees (aka pi over 6 radians) is just ½.  And since we can take that as a leg of a right triangle with hypotenuse length 1 (since it’s a unit circle) then the Pythagorean theorem tells us 1^2  = ½^2  plus the cosine^2 of 30 degrees, so the cosine equals the square root of 1 – ¼ or the square root of ¾, in other words √3/2.  So 2 o’clock would be √3/2 + (½)i.

One o’clock (or 60 degrees) just reverses the ordering of the parts of the complex number:  ½ + (√3/2)i.  Then 4 o’clock is √3/2 – i, five o’clock is ½ – (√3/2)i, 7 o’clock is -½ – (√3/2)i, 8 o’clock is -√3/2 – (½)i, 10 o’clock is then -√3/2 + (½)i, and and 11 o’clock is -½ + (√3/2)i.  Neat and tidy!

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the complex numbers for the various minutes of the clock face**.  And, of course, if I’ve made any errors above, please let me know.

But anyway, I think you can see that this might make for a novelty clock every bit as exciting as the ones that just show you the hours as radians.  It might be slightly more rarefied than the other, but then again, engineers might prefer it (though they tend to use j rather than i to represent √-1, because i already stands for electrical current****, if memory serves.

Wow, how’s that been for some weird digressing?

Is “digressing” a word?  Google Docs seems to “think” it is.

Hopefully those quotation marks don’t offend Google Docs if it really does actually think.  If it’s any consolation (and even if it isn’t), I would be inclined to use such “scare” quotes when referring to the hypothetical thought processes of many a human.

On to another digression:  I had a weird thought just now, while my mind briefly wandered to imagining a potential crime thriller, maybe about a serial killer.  What if the killer, anticipating the potential for DNA evidence to be used to try to catch him*****, makes it a habit to pick up strands of hair, discarded tissues, used Band-aids, and various other things from various places such as public (pubic?) restrooms, barber shops, and so on.  He then leaves them randomly chosen and scattered at his various crime scenes to throw off investigators.

Of course, he’d want to be careful to get his DNA samples from widely chosen and semi-random places, such as maybe rest areas on major highways.  Otherwise the very pattern of those sources might give investigators something with which to work.  The FBI, for instance, can be impressively clever about such things.  At least, well, they were under previous administrations.

Jeez Louise, I’m really losing my mind, am I not?  Certainly it seems to have slipped its leash.  My apologies for this chaotic brain sneezing; I hope you don’t catch any mental viruses from me.

With that, I’ll bring this to a close.  I hope I end up feeling better today than I did yesterday, though so far it doesn’t seem promising.  More importantly, as always, I hope all of you have very good days.

*Well, there’s no point in doing this in a footnote now; I worked it out in the main body of the post.  See above.

**Just kidding.  Seriously, please don’t feel obligated to do this***.  I’m not going to do it (or might I say, “i is not going to do it”?)

***On the other hand, if one of you feels compelled to do the figuring, please share your results with me.

****That could almost be like someone’s protest sign, perhaps one that is held up and shaken outside a courthouse:

*****The vast majority of serial killers are men.  It’s a travesty, this wild gender/sex disparity; it’s the last bastion of unrepentant, unapologetic misogyny!  We need social programs to try to get more women out there serial killing!  Maybe we should provide subsidized child care services, so single moms won’t have as hard a time getting into the field…or wherever they might want to dump the bodies of their victims.

by

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the blog of him that makes it

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days.  I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.

But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such.  But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.

There is no lapcom involved in this post today.  I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before.  There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.

Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long.  That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting.  Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose.  So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.

In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me.  It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.

I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs.  But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me.  It’s probably a stupid notion anyway.  I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction.  That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.

I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon.  Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.

But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer).  It’s so irritating and so uninteresting.  I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.

Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.

Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment:  I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****.  I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.

I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way.  It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome:  I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.

Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me.  I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me.  Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing.  And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.

Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course.  I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters.   But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.

I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably).  If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so.  In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day.  Don’t stop laughing on my account.

TTFN

[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head:  If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them.  After all, there’s nothing you can’t do.  To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades.  Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines.  Who would have guessed?]

*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”.  How’s that for a weird mistake?  I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio.  But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me.  Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.

**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything.  But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.

***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.

****I.e., a period of time.

by

Memento mori

Well, it’s the first day of a new month today.  September is that new month, of course, and despite its seven-related name, it is our ninth month, pushed back partly because of the egotism of two ancient dictators and those who revered them.

Not to say there weren’t things to admire about Julius Caesar or even Octavian (AKA Augustus, whose earlier name meant “eighth”, which at least suits the current month order).  But it is a fact that they are both just as dead as the veriest plebian or slave in their “empire”; their bodies are dust in the wind, if that.

Yes, we remember them‒a bit‒but that does them absolutely no good.  They returned to their initial state, as Mark Twain discussed at least once:  that he had been dead for millions of years before he was conceived, and it had not inconvenienced him in the slightest, so there was little to fear about returning to that state.

If you want to be remembered as a Roman Emperor (it’s probably too late for you to do that now, but let’s consider it for the sake of argument), be remembered like Marcus Aurelius, whose contributions to Stoic philosophy and the nature of a good life are still guiding and inspiring people today.  Aurelius continues actually to have effects even millennia after his death‒real ones, consequential ones, not just having people know the names of months that are named after him*.

Marcus Aurelius’s words continue to help stimulate thought and to help with psychological equanimity, and they do so in more logically defensible ways than those of most religious patriarchs (largely because the vast majority of religions are mere hodgepodges of various kinds of bullshit).

Of course, it’s almost certainly all futile.  All of it will be entirely effaced in all but the most theoretical sense (e.g., the law of conservation of quantum information) by the passage of time, as everything returns to the state mentioned by good ol’ Samuel Clemens, who is just as dead as Julius Caesar, himself.

I mean all this even if somehow “intelligent” life on Earth survives and advances long enough and successfully enough to become cosmically noticeable or even cosmically important (not a very high likelihood) and even if they discover or create ways to make the universe survive indefinitely or to make new universes or whatever.  There is still simply the matter of the signal and the noise.

This is the counter to the sometimes-heard claim that “the internet is forever”.  Well…maybe, but I doubt it.  Even if it is, though, your most embarrassing upload is already long-since unnoticeable amidst the cacophony.  You are merely one face in a crowd of billions, most of whom spend most of their time merely looking at themselves.

We live in troubled times, as the saying goes, and it is certainly true now.  But it has always been true, since the very origin of life itself.  Life is trouble, it has always been trouble, and I strongly suspect that it will always be trouble.  C’est la vie, c’est la guerre, c’est la mort.

The only state in which there is no suffering is death.  The state of Nevada may try to claim that spot, what with Las Vegas and Reno, legal gambling, legal prostitution, and whatnot, but just go wander out into the desert for a bit and see how it feels.  Don’t even get me started on California or New York or Florida as being states without suffering!

Okay, enough with the stupid, homonym-based jokes.

It is, whatever you call it, the beginning of the month in which, in the northern hemisphere, summer transitions into autumn (or fall).  Autumn is my favorite season, and not just because of the autumn people and Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show**.

No, there are many things I like about autumn, aesthetically.  It has my favorite holiday, and it has my birthday, and up north it has the lovely changing of the leaves and so on.  In Florida, of course, the good things about autumn are strongly attenuated, but Florida has that effect on many of the pleasant things in life.  At least the weather begins to moderate in Florida in the autumn.

Of course, one of the two most important events in my life happened in September, shortly before the beginning of autumn.  And, less important, but still fun, September 22nd is the day Frodo set off on his journey in The Lord of the Rings.  It’s also his (and Bilbo’s birthday).

Frodo and Bilbo are fictional characters, of course.  Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that many millions of people know far more about them than they know about Julius Caesar or his nephew.  Those two imperators are at least as “fictional” now as entirely made-up characters.  Not much cop, this Roman Emperor lark, is it?

Well, have an enjoyable day if you can.  You might as well.

*I wonder how many people in the Western world even know where the names of August and July originate.  I would not be surprised if I learned that a higher percentage of Japanese people know about the etymology of those two fully summer months (or those two fully winter months in the southern hemisphere).  But what proportion of westerners know anything about Amaterasu or Tsukuyomi?  I’d bet it’s higher now than at any time in the past, but I’d also bet that it’s still mighty low.

**”We are the hungry ones.  We are drawn by your torments like dogs in the night, and we do feed…and feed well.”

by

Who hast not in thy blogs an eye discerning thine honor from thy suffering

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 13th of August.  Somehow, “Thursday the 13th” feels less punchy, less interesting, than “Friday the 13th”, but I strongly suspect this is just a cultural artifact of, originally, the day being considered by some to be unlucky, and then of course of the very successful and long-running series of slasher/horror films bearing that title, which took root from that superstition.

This sort of thing can be called more sharply to attention by comparing differences in cultures that do not have very strong shared histories*.  For instance, in the US (and the UK, I believe), ghost stories are generally most associated with mid-autumn, especially around Halloween time.  Whereas, in Japan, telling ghost stories is more associated with the summertime, especially the latter part of it.

I don’t know why that’s the case in Japan, but there are surely causes.  There are causes for all things at some level (probably even of causality itself, though we’re getting into uncharted territory with that speculation).  But, contrary to popular opinion. there are not always reasons.  I actually despise the notion so many people espouse, that “everything happens for a reason”.

Of course, if by “reason” you mean what I would call “cause”, then I cannot quibble with you without engaging in rank hypocrisy, which I try not to do.  But what most people seem to mean by reason in this case has to do with telos, with “purpose”, with “goals”.  In other words, they imagine some personal explanation for things, some willed intention, somewhere.

This is no doubt related to religion‒sometimes it is caused by it, sometimes it probably contributes to causing it, and sometimes it may merely be parallel‒but that doesn’t make it any better.  Deep down, below the façade of piety and orthodoxy, this type of thought seems just to be a kind of self-consolation, like sucking one’s thumb to soothe oneself.

I cannot in good conscience fault all types of self-soothing behavior.  I probably have dozens of what are now called “stims” that I do just to have stuff to do with my hands and feet (and brain, etc.), especially when I feel tense.  But I don’t take them as some hint about the ontology of reality.  I take them as things done by a nervous system trying to cope with a world for which it is perforce imperfectly adapted.

They’re not terrible things, by any means.  Some of them are even kind of cool (I can roll coins across the backs of my fingers, for instance).  But it would be silly of me to imagine or to assume them to have any deeper or broader significance.

What’s the big deal?  Why not let people console themselves with the notion that everything happens for a reason, though it may be an “ineffable” one?  What’s the harm?

Well, there’s always my general recognition that when one fights reality, one always loses.  The course of reality is strict and surrounded by impassable walls; if you don’t maintain your local parallel course to that of reality, sooner or later you will collide with those walls, and it is you who will break, while they will show not so much as a scuff mark.  

If it’s just you who suffers the consequences of this crash, that’s sad but not tragic.  But you may not be the only casualty of your poor steering, and it’s the innocent victims I lament far more than the idiots who drove themselves willfully (or at least willingly) into ruin.

But more specifically, saying that everything happens for “a reason” is a moral “get out of jail free” card.  It lets people look at cases of even terrible suffering and shrug and imagine that the suffering is there for “a reason” and so is “okay”, like Mother Theresa wallowing in the misery of the sick and dying poor as a way to get closer to Jesus.  This sort of thing is easiest when one is not suffering personally.

Now, there is often not much one can do to change a particular case of suffering, but I don’t think that makes it worthwhile to allow oneself to be delusional about it.  It’s better to admit that some entirely unnecessary suffering happens and that it sucks, because that leaves the option open of actually doing something to correct or prevent it, at some point.

It’s better than dismissing it (or worse, embracing it) because of delusions about “God’s plan”, or “karma”, or some Marxist delusion about an inevitable course of history, or any other magical thinking idea, all of which seem to center on an implicit notion of humans being (at least part of) the “purpose” of the cosmos.

Purpose is an invention, something that came into existence in human (and possibly other) brains.  If things in the universe are to be purposeful, it will be up to those who believe in that purpose to make it happen.  This is harder than just imagining that such a purpose is already there, but it actually has the potential to turn out to be made true, at least eventually.

And maybe, here and there, from time to time, when the wind is fair and the stars are right, if one sees suffering but doesn’t imagine that the suffering serves some “greater good”, one might just occasionally take action to relieve it rather than simply to slap on one’s epistemological blinders and go on one’s way.

TTFN

*This is rather akin to finding what processes are biologically fundamental, or at least old, by comparing genomes of organisms that are quite distant relatives**.

**One cannot compare truly unrelated organisms, because on this planet, there are no such things.  All life clearly shows the imprint of common ancestry.  To pick a frequently used example, most of your genes are shared (roughly) with bananas, and far more with banana slugs.

by

My morose, meandering Monday musings

It’s Monday again, of course.  I won’t get into any of the usual stuff I discuss about Mondays, except to note that, outside of the minds and artifacts of humans*, Monday doesn’t exist.  It’s just another day, and each day is not fundamentally different from another day.  Wild creatures do not get the weekend off, for they have no such concept.  On the other hand, they don’t exactly have enforced workdays or work weeks and all the many artificial but very real stressors that humans have created.

I am still off NSAIDs except for some limited aspirin, and I am quite stiff and sore, a fact which is particularly difficult to ignore in my thumbs as I write this.  My urinary signs may be improving; certainly I’ve been working on intervening in the issues, not least of which intervention is the aforementioned curtailment of NSAIDs.  I’m not sure how this will go, but I guess I will find out, one way or another.

I haven’t read any books of any kind‒including audio books‒in almost a week now.  There are several processes behind this fact, but a big part of it seems to be a general anhedonia.  Nothing is very interesting to me.  I don’t even feel any particular interest in the new Spider-Man movie, which would normally engender excitement.

Heck, I honestly don’t even feel much about Avengers: Doomsday, and Doctor Doom is probably my very favorite villain (and one of my favorite overall characters).  Podcasts also seem boring, and so do various videos and shows, educational, fictional, or anywhere in between.

I don’t really do anything in my spare time, to be honest, other than try to distract myself, and that’s becoming more difficult.

My boss, on Saturday, suggested that maybe after work, before I go “home”, I should stop somewhere and get the urinary stuff checked out, and I said, “Yeah, I don’t see that happening.”  The prospect of taking care of such things in my “spare” time is about as natural a feeling as the prospect of spontaneously levitating.

It’s not in my nature to be much good at taking care of myself.  I’m not really inclined to take care of much of anything administrative in my life, to be honest**.  I pay rent and electric and water and cable/internet bills, because not doing so would be a great and immediate inconvenience, but other things are not in my wheelhouse.  They are not salient to me, and I don’t know how to make them salient without them already being salient.

So, yeah, if the issues I’m having are precursors to, or symptoms and signs of, some more serious problem, well…that’ll be that, won’t it?  As I said to my boss a few sentences after my above reply about seeking help, “Basically, I’m just waiting for something to kill me, anyway.”

That’s the state of my life now, and it has been that way to varying degrees for quite some time.  I believe this qualifies for the term “passive suicidal ideation”.  I don’t just experience the passive form, of course, but it is more common, or more frequent, and slightly more persistent than the active version.

Make no mistake, though:  for the last dozen years or so, not a day has gone by, as far as I can remember, that I didn’t have at least some moments of active SI.  And, of course, I have many methods available; I make sure to keep things that way.

So, yeah, one of these days my blog may just stop, and if it does, there’s a good probability that it will have been because I stopped being so passive.

I make no predictions, and I certainly don’t engage in threats or warnings.  I’m just trying to clear the air, and explain why, left to my own devices, I’m not liable to seek any medical help for anything unless it is so acutely painful as to be impossible to ignore, like a kidney stone.

I figure that sooner or later, some infection or maybe some malignancy will come along and take everything out of my hands‒at least unless I take matters into my own hands before that time, which is eminently possible.  I’ve said before that it would be nice if I got some kind of final crisis that at least allowed me to say goodbye to the people I love, but I recognize that nature doesn’t promise nor owe me any such convenience.

It doesn’t matter.  Quite possibly‒probably‒no one would want to come say goodbye to me anyway.  It would not surprise me, I’ll admit.  It would be sad, but I would probably consider it entirely appropriate.  Why should anyone care if I am going to die, anyway?

Okay, well, on that chipper, cheery note, I’ll bring this post to a close.  It’s already too long, honestly.  But I do hope that you all have a good week collectively and good weeks individually.

*And humanoids, I suppose.

**That’s a weird expression, isn’t it?  Does it imply that if I don’t say it, you cannot assume that I am ever honest?  But surely, claims of honesty are just the sorts of things that liars would make, just as religious texts will claim to be true and infallible.  “You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to, so that when they turn their backs on you, you’ll get the chance to put the knife in.”

by

You’re in analysis, or something like that

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  As you may have guessed, I did not work yesterday, because I was out sick.

I think I mentioned the apparent URI I’ve had.  Really, it’s more of a middle respiratory infection, like bronchi to bronchiole level, but the acronym for that would be MRI and that might be confusing.  This is one of those issues with acronyms; when you shorten things enough, the code becomes ambiguous.

Anyway, I also had some weird urinary signs (not symptoms) that made me nervous that all the NSAIDS I’ve been taking have been starting to catch up with my kidneys.  So, I’ve taken a temporary NSAID sabbatical apart from aspirin.  I’m still taking some Tylenol (and CBD, which does at least some good).  Unfortunately, my pain level overall has predictably increased, and that certainly contributed to the fact that I stayed at the house yesterday.

Anyway, I’m trying to make sure to get lots of fluids and whatnot, and that process at least seems to be doing its thing.  I’ll do another UA today‒I have my own test strip bottle*.

Okay, enough of all that stuff.  I’m sure that nearly no one has any interest in reading about my adventures in analyzing my own bodily fluids.

Of course, I don’t have a lot else clawing its way out of me at the moment‒oh, those lazy xenomorph embryos!‒so I don’t know what I’ll use to fill the rest of this blog post.  But I do expect to be writing a post tomorrow, since the office should be open tomorrow, so maybe that will contain something interesting.

I guess today is the last day of July‒at least the last one in 2026 AD/CE.  Tomorrow will therefore be the first day of August in 2026 (AD or CE).  We go from one month named after the nominal first “emperor” of Rome to a month named after the first “official” emperor of Rome.  After that we start up with the ordinally named months, but they’ve all been pushed back two months because of the two dead Romans, so the nominal seventh month‒September‒is our official ninth month.

It would be slightly interesting if, when the calendar was changed from the Julian to the Gregorian, the month had also been changed.  Imagine if the months went May, June, Gregory, August, September…  That might be kind of funny.  Certainly there’s no less of a reason to give old Pope Gregory the Peccary (or whatever his official indicator was) a month named after him than Julius Caesar.

Okay, admittedly, Caesar was a more pivotal historical figure, but one feels (at least, this one does) that he was more a vessel for things that were happening through him and others rather than being the true author of any change.  And Shakespeare didn’t write any plays about the Pope, but then, he lived in Elizabethan England, so that was just a non-starter.  Imagine trying to write a play about a Pope during the reign of Henry VIII’s daughter.

Also, Shakespeare and Gregory the Nocturnal Gregarious Wild Swine were more or less contemporaries.  It’s hard to write popular plays about people who are still or were very recently alive, especially when they were part of a religious schism with one’s own country.  Whereas Julius Caesar was all but the stuff of legend by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century CE/AD.

It’s too bad Shakespeare didn’t really know anything about ancient Egypt or any of the other ancient civilizations (some of which were as ancient to the Romans as the Romans were to the British of Shakespeare’s time).  He wrote about Antony and Cleopatra, of course, but imagine William Shakespeare’s Ramses the Second (the Great).  Or perhaps consider The Tragedy of Xerxes, Emperor of Persia.

Well, I’m not going to write any plays about them.  I’ve written plays (of sorts) before and have started others, and I have written some (very bad) screenplays and such, but it’s not my area of best creative work.  I’ll just make passing reference to historical figures here, more or less randomly, and maybe someone out there will write a play or show or movie about them, inspired by the reference.

Hey, they keep making movies based on the works of Homer (the Greek poet, not the Simpson).  Mind you, those works are highly fictionalized, if not entirely fictional; you can tell by the presence of things like gods and sirens and nearly invulnerable warriors who gained their protection by being dipped in the river Styx.  Achilles might as well have been bitten by a radioactive spider, for how realistic a figure he is.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Sorry if it’s weirder than usual.  Or, on the other hand, I’m sorry if it’s not weirder, but my blog is always this erratic.  I’m not sure about which of the two I ought to be sorrier.

Oh, well.  Please have a good day and a good weekend and a good month of August (but only once August starts‒if you try to have a good month of August on the last day of July, I think you’re setting yourself up for failure).

*It’s really more of a screw-top can, since it’s a cylinder, but because of the association with preserved food, it feels weird to say that I have a can of urinalysis test strips.

by

“Every year is getting shorter; never seem to find the time…”

It is time, once again, for me to write another blog post‒though, actually, for you reading this, that time has already passed; for you, it is time to read another blog post.  That temporal disjunction is mildly interesting, and I have probably long since dwelt on it beyond the level of anyone’s but my own interest.

Still, it does illustrate some of the weird directionality of time, for while the time between when I write and when you read can be, in principle, limitless, it is always and only in one direction.  You will never read one of my blog posts so much as a single Planck time before I write it.

This is the character of causality, and its speed is the real speed limit that we narrowly think of as “the speed of light”.  It is actually the speed limit of causal influence, and that’s a fundamental part of the restrictions entailed in special relativity.

There is, though, the longstanding question of why time is not merely one-dimensional but unidirectional, since at local scales, the laws of physics don’t appear to have an inherent directionality but are time-symmetric.

Spatial dimensions don’t work that way.  You can go up or down, back or forth, left or right, however you please, with equal ease (don’t be a tease).  At least…you can do all that provided there are no strong influences nearby.

One such influence might be, for instance, a planet.  I just happen to have such a planet, right here.  It’s called Earth, and it is quite dense and so produces quite significant curvature of spacetime (time more than space, interestingly enough) in its vicinity.

This has the effect of making space asymmetric locally.

So, near a strongly gravitating object, space acquires directionality.  That directionality is actually spherical, so it’s not a simple kind of one-dimensional directionality, but in local regions it looks linearly directional.  Wherever you may be on Earth, odds are you can move any combination of left-right and forward-backward with equal ease (more or less).  But the difference between up and down is quite another matter.

That difference would be even more pronounced near a much stronger gravitational source.  If you were near the surface of a neutron star, your capacity to go any direction but down (i.e. toward the surface of the neutron star) would be more or less nonexistent.  Space would have a profound and irresistible directionality.  Things seem to become even more inevitably directional beneath the event horizon of a black hole.

And, analogously, when one is not far from a highly energetic, very low-entropy region of spacetime, like our Big Bang, time is forcibly constrained to be directional, since change can only really happen in the direction of lower entropy in such a region, as dictated by sheer mathematics, if nothing else.

I’ve written about this before, about how, in principle time could have more than one dimension, like space, but be so forcibly constrained by the very strong local effects of the Big Bang to be pseudo-linear, just as space is pseudo-planar at the surface of the Earth or a neutron star, with free movement in only two of its three dimensions.

I won’t get into it too much now; I think there are posts both here and on Iterations of Zero that address it.  I will just quickly point out that, in the distant future‒much like when one is much farther from the surface of a gravitating body‒as entropy approaches local maxima, time will lose its directionality and forward and backward will be identical.

The fact that it takes so long for that to happen may point toward the geometry of time being less than three dimensional.  Three dimensional influences fall off as the square of the distance.  So, twice as far from a source, the influence is one quarter as strong, and ten times as far away, it is one one hundredth as strong.

The directionality of time doesn’t seem to be falling off at any notable rate since the Big Bang*.  It doesn’t even seem to be falling off linearly, as would be the case for a two-dimensional process (the circumference of a circle increases linearly with the radius, whereas a sphere’s surface area increases as the square of the radius).  Based on a fairly straightforward interpretation of this, it does seem to point to time being one-dimensional.

But we don’t know the scale of the thing.  We may be, compared to the scope of any higher dimensionality of time, vanishingly close to the Big Bang, still.  We may be like tiny, tiny mites on Earth’s surface (or that of a neutron star), unable to sense or travel a significant height to be able to detect even the local curvature of the planet, let alone the drop-off in the directionality of space (i.e., gravity).

Maybe the nature of time is similar.  Maybe we are too small, moving through time too slowly, too close to its local source of directionality, to be able to discern that it has more dimensions.  Certainly, spacetime around us appears “flat” as best we can measure.  But we recognize that, at much bigger scales, it may be curved.  And time, at those scales, may have more than one dimension.

Or maybe:

Maybe if we can wait long enough, it will be obvious.  Or maybe not.

Have a good bit of time over these next 24 hours if you can, please.

*Though there is the current significant question of the nature of the “Hubble tension”.  Maybe it’s a subtle change in the strength of the directionality of time itself that leads to the seeming disparity in the Hubble “constant” when measured by CMB as opposed to by supernova data.  Hmmm.