time

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There’s some ill planet reigns: I must be patient till the heavens blog with an aspect more favourable.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as you probably know if you’re reading this on the date of its initial publication.

If you’re reading this at some later time, my first estimate is that there is only roughly a one in seven chance that you’re reading this on a Thursday.  But that’s an initial estimate, assuming equal odds of you reading this on any day of the week, and while that’s hardly a crazy estimate*, it’s probably not quite that simple.

For instance, people may be less likely to read blog posts on the weekend, or perhaps especially on Sunday, making the distribution of probability uneven.  Or it may be more likely that someone reads this post on some future Thursday, because they will have just read a Thursday blog post and be inclined to go back and read previous Thursday blog posts.  I doubt that’s a phenomenon that actually exists, but it’s not ridiculously implausible.

Anyway, Thursday it is, as Yoda might say.  Though, it’s quite unclear if they have any standard galactic week in Star Wars, let alone one that matches ours and our day names.

It is a point rarely addressed that, in Star Wars, there are many inhabited planets, and though all inhabitable planets are likely to share some key characteristics‒amount of surface gravity, temperature range allowing for liquid water, thick enough atmosphere, etc.‒the length of a day and the length of a year and such are likely to vary quite a bit.

Of course, the specific length of a week, galactic or otherwise, is entirely arbitrary.  Nevertheless, weeks are still composed of days, and days are not consistent from planet to planet.

One also wonders if there is some standard galactic clock in use, some extreme version of our UTC (formerly Greenwich Meant Time, or GMT).  At least, this one wonders.

And how do they avoid running afoul of the paradoxes of faster than light travel?  Of course, I know that they use hyperdrive‒traveling through “hyperspace”‒to bypass the restrictions on motion through space at no faster than light speed.  But there can be paradoxes involved in even such circumstances, with signals that arrive before they are sent and so on, at least from the point of view of those outside.

Also, the sublight engines in ships, while not crazy, do seem to provide the vessels with relativistic speeds.  Otherwise, the Millennium Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back would never have left the Hoth system in the time we see passing.

Even if Luke was weeks and weeks on Dagobah, which had to be the case at least for him to make as much progress as he did, the Falcon couldn’t have gone that far unless it was going pretty close to the speed of light.  It certainly couldn’t have reached other star systems, as it did.

I mean, we launched Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977, I think, and it’s taken those probes, which are among the fastest things we have ever created, nearly 50 years to reach the edge of our solar system.  They will take 10,000 years or so to go as far as the nearest star system to ours, and they’re not even headed in that direction.

Also, how come, given how long Luke had to have been on Dagobah, didn’t Han and Leia change their clothes (or hair)?

I don’t know, maybe this stuff can be conveniently placed at the feet of the time paradoxes and mismatches created by travel through hyperspace.  I don’t see how, but I don’t see any better explanations.

By the way, please don’t draw the conclusion here that I am disparaging Star Wars or that I dislike it.  I am a Star Wars fan, and have been since 1977 (and not because of the launch of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2).

When The Phantom Menace first came out, I was in my second year of medical residency‒not a situation in which one finds oneself with an abundance of free time.  Nevertheless, I saw it 7 times at the theater during its first run.  I was not the only one in my residency program who saw it, either; many doctors, perhaps all, are nerds of one kind or another.

What did my then-wife think of this childish indulgence?  She was furious.  As was I.  She was unable to get tickets to the midnight showing, the very first one on the night of the movie’s release, despite seeking them as soon as she knew about it.  We had to go to the 1215 show.

Yeah, she had no problem with Star Wars.  She was as big a fan as I was, and for more or less just as long.  She had (I’m told (by her)) put her hair up in Princess Leia buns when she first went to see The Empire Strikes Back.  She said she was rather devastated that Leia had done her hair differently in that movie.

You should have seen us when the Peter Jackson The Lord of the Rings movies were coming out.  After all, we had first connected with each other through our mutual love of Tolkien.

Which brings me to an important point:  There’s no real need to look too hard for scientific pseudo-explanations for everything in Star Wars, because Star Wars is not science fiction.  It wears the trappings of science fiction, but it is a fantasy adventure.  I mean, come on, it’s got wizards and ghosts and magic swords!

So, yeah, I think that makes my point about Thursdays pretty clear.  Whatever day you’re experiencing as you read this, I hope it’s a good one for you.

TTFN

*A crazy estimate might be if I said I think there’s a 99% chance that you’re reading this on New Years Eve in some year that is a multiple of 7.  Why the heck would I think such a thing?  What is wrong with me?  You get the idea, I imagine.

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It is an heretic that makes the fire, not she which blogs in ‘t.

Hello and good morning.  I hope you all (or “y’all”) are having an excellent set of coterminous, parallel days.

Of course, the day proper, that passage of time between one midnight and the next (in your time zone) is just one day, in that prosaic sense, no matter how many people it carries along through time with it.  On the other hand, from a certain point of view, each person goes through a separate (but parallel) individual day, which no one else experiences in exactly the same way.

It’s a bit like comparing the spacetime interval between two points (events) in spacetime‒a measure on which every observer will agree, if they are measuring it correctly‒and the “proper” time and individual spacetime path followed by a traveler through spacetime, such as we all are.

Or, to put it perhaps more prosaically:  One can get from the base of a hill/mountain to its summit by hiking, by ATVing, by mountain biking, by donkey, by free solo climbing, by being brought to the peak by helicopter, etc.  There is only one summit, and its absolute distance from the base (assuming one common starting point) is a fixed fact.  But each person’s experience in going from one to the other will be different, each path of slightly different length, taking different amounts of time, with different sights and sounds and smells along the way.

Such is life.  Such is reality.  There are many possible paths to any given destination.  Likewise, there are many different destinations from any given starting point.  I guess these are some reasons why it’s usually best not to get too hung up on trying to go as straight as possible toward your goal.

If you look only into the distance, you will fail to see the possible obstacles in your path (until they make themselves unmissable) and so will fail to steer around them.  Likewise, you may fail to notice an alternative path that will lead you to an alternative, better destination than the one you had in mind.

Look at me, talking as if I were wise.  Well, I suppose I do have some wisdom, and at least when one shares what seem like good ideas with other people, one can get different perspectives that might improve one’s own understanding.

As Forrest Gump said, though, stupid is as stupid does.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, in other words.  One may have terrific innate ability, one may have a capacity for greatness such as would stagger the most phlegmatic observer, but if one wastes one’s life in predictably destructive and self-destructive pursuits, bringing little but misery to oneself and others before dying in a gutter, one hardly merits the term “genius”, except perhaps if it is being used ironically.

Of course, all of our journeys finally end in the same place, unless there is some loophole to bypass the second law of thermodynamics*, so it’s probably worthwhile just trying to get the most you can out of whatever path you happen to take.  And if doing so were entirely and readily in our own power, then having a good life would be so common as to be trivial.

Alas, evolution has no clear tendency or basis to select for creatures readily able to have a “good” life; it just tends to create situations in which the things that replicate best (in whatever the local circumstances) replicate most.  This requires no intention on the part of evolution‒which is good, because it shows no signs of having intention, nor is there any reason to suspect that it has any.  It’s simply what actually happens when things are left to themselves.  That which replicates best and most often comes to dominate over things that do so less well and less often.  The rest, as Hillel said, is commentary.

Okay, anyway, that’s a lot of water drawn from the stream of my consciousness.  I make no guarantees that drinking from it will not poison you.  But I can honestly say that I do not intend to poison you; I am merely expressing my thoughts as they happen, speaking my mind as it were.

In other news, today is Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, commemorating the failure of Guy Fawkes to blow up the houses of Parliament on “this day” way back in 1605 (Julian calendar).  Of course, many modern people, especially those outside of the UK, know of Guy Fawkes mainly thanks to the excellent graphic novel (and movie) V for Vendetta**.

But in that work, we are given a different perspective on the Guy and his like than is central to “Bonfire Night”, and we see how one person’s “terrorist” can be another person’s legitimate “freedom fighter”.  Not all terrorists, of course, are real-life analogues of V.  Many, perhaps most (including the original Guy Fawkes, probably) are self-important, self-righteous dogmatists who want to try to force their ways onto others or to eliminate those they see as evil or inferior.

Oh well, whatever.  Happy Guy Fawkes Day, wherever you are.

TTFN

*Such luminaries as Einstein and Eddington, as well as countless other thinkers besides, consider this the law of nature that is least likely ever to be overthrown.  This is partly because it is based, ultimately, on basic probability, on mathematics, and is not dependent upon the specific trivia of nature in any given universe, e.g., the fine structure constant, the gravitational constant, the speed of light/causality, the mass ratio of the electron to the proton, etc.  Probability and statistics apply to essentially all sufficiently complex systems.

**And, to a lesser extent, from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories, in which Dumbledore has a phoenix named Fawkes (a nod to the fact that Guys Fawkes Day is celebrated with bonfires in which effigies of Fawkes are burned, as was the original man).  Rowling tends not to explain her jokes‒a very refreshing habit in an author‒she just puts them there for those to see who are able.

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‘Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a blog-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

Well, hello and good morning to you, too.  It’s Thursday, and so I have used a version of my “traditional” Thursday blog post opening, and I will use a traditional Thursday ending.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m glad that at least some people liked my rather atypical* blog post yesterday, in which I basically just described what I had played (and sung) the morning before.  Somewhat ironically, I did not play, nor did I sing, yesterday morning, and I don’t expect that I will do so today.  This is mainly, or at least pivotally, due to my chronic pain.

I don’t tend to talk that much about my chronic pain anymore, or at least not as often as I think I used to talk about it.  I don’t know, maybe I talk about it roughly just as much as I have all along, at least in the time since this stopped being a Thursday-only blog.  Still, it feels to me that I’ve been discussing it less, because I fear it’s not only boring for people but also depressing, and I am depressing enough without talking about pain.

But my chronic pain has not diminished, though it is variable from day to day and moment to moment.  There are times when I feel that something I’m doing is making it improve, but it usually ends up just to have been a normal part of whatever complicated cycle the pain intensity and character undergoes.

There are cyclical and periodic phenomena at nearly all levels of the cosmos, it seems.  Biological processes, which often involve thermostat-style feedback controls, are far from being an exception.  So, chronic pain goes up and down‒in a complex pattern that has differing periods and amplitudes overlapping** each other‒in ways that can be particularly misleading if you’re also trying to reduce it by various means.  Also, the things you try, even if they don’t truly work, can nevertheless affect the periods and amplitudes of one’s pain cycles.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’ve been having a lot of pain over the last several days‒more than average, though I am almost never not in pain.  I have also been eating an unusual number of legal CBD/delta 9 gummies.  They don’t seem to make the pain go away, but they change how I respond to it a bit, decreasing the amount of spasm and disordered walking and posture and tension and grumpiness that I experience, at least a bit.

But they make me groggy, if that’s the right word.  They also make my time sense rather weird, though that’s rather interesting, since it calls attention to the subjectivity of the experience of time*** which I discussed the other day, I think.  They also engender some minor perceptual illusions, especially auditory ones, possibly because of my poor hearing, but that is also rather interesting.

So, they make my pain experience a bit less intense and maddening, and they make it feel less as though one or the other side of my body is being forcibly twisted and contorted as I move, which is often how this shit feels.  At least, they make that sensation less stressful, and they seem to decrease some of the muscle spasms.

They also make my mathematical figuring and other mental processes feel less reliable.  I already have a seemingly deficient sense of being right‒for instance, no matter how often my mental figuring of sales amounts and so on is shown to be correct, I never for a moment feel secure enough about it not to check a few times using the computer.

Even then, I feel somewhat worried and uncomfortable, but sooner or later, I have just to go on to the next thing, because I will never be able to convince myself that I am correct beyond even a reasonable doubt, let alone to mathematical certainty.  It’s like the classic OCD thing where one has to keep going back to the house to check that one hasn’t left the stove on even though one empirically knows they have, or things along those lines.

To be clear, the gummies don’t appear to affect the quality of my mental work‒as far as I can tell, I can do mental figuring and other, similar processes as quickly and as accurately with it as without it.  But it makes me feel less sure, if anything, than without it, though I guess it also makes me slightly less anxious about being wrong.

It also takes away some of my mental focus, and also generally makes me feel a bit less motivated.  Perhaps, if I were able fully to embrace that lack of motivation, I might eventually come out the other side of the phenomenon and have a new, purer kind of motivation, one not born of constant tension and anxiety (and even some paranoia).  But I don’t know how to accomplish that, and even if I did, my credence in the possibility of it working is not nearly high enough to make me willing to try it.

Anyway, so, these are some of my thoughts on why I didn’t play or sing yesterday, and why I almost certainly won’t play or sing today.  It’s also part of why I don’t write fiction or draw or paint, and also part of why I don’t finish teaching myself professional level general relativity and quantum mechanics.  Yes, my interests tend to go all over the place and get in each other’s way even when I am at my best.  But even I know that I could accomplish so much more, so many more interesting things, if I were not in significant pain every fucking day.

So, yeah.  I’m out of it more than usual, which I don’t like, since mental acuity is my primary strength, and the thing I like most about myself.  That may not be a high bar to clear, but still, it’s what I have.  And I’m enervated and discouraged, and I’m tired of bothering to do anything, but I can’t seem to convince myself that, no, the stove is not still on, it doesn’t need to keep being checked.

What a pain.

TTFN

*I’m not sure if there really is a typical blog post type for me, so maybe “atypical” isn’t a very useful adjective here.

**Fourier (I think he was the one) famously showed how any kind of waveform can be produced by the superposition of sine waves of various periods and amplitudes, and this insight has tremendous impact on the nature of quantum mechanics and its particular types of superpositions.  It’s also the deeper explanation of the Uncertainty Principle.

***This has no effect on actual time itself, of course, at least based on all the best information we have about such things.  It’s just a perfectly understandable product of the nature of a biological computer’s (multiple) means of keeping track of time and reporting on that process to the rest of that biological computer (i.e., the brain).  It’s simply not true that experience is reality.  One’s experience is part of reality, of course, and need not be treated dismissively, but while toilets are necessary in any office skyscraper, it would be absurd to say “toilets are skyscrapers”.  Unless, of course, one built a toilet 50 stories tall.  Even then, that’s just one edifice.  So one could say, “that toilet is a skyscraper” legitimately, but that doesn’t make it any more sensible to speak categorically about toilets being skyscrapers.

This is not about buildings and plumbing.

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“But we don’t reckon time the same way, do we, Clarice?”

Well, ten-six, good buddy, it’s the sixth of October, and we’re already almost a fifth of the way through the month.  It’s curious how, while one is trying to get through things that one must do, one feels real sympathy with Gandalf’s line, “each day was as long as a life-age of the Earth”, and yet the overall passage of days, weeks, and months rockets on so quickly that one is almost unable to keep up.

Pink Floyd really was/were* insightful in their song Time.  And consider how young they were when they did it!  Roger Waters‒arguably the greatest lyricist since, I don’t know, W. S. Gilbert‒was only 29 when he wrote it, and he worried he was getting on in years, I guess.  Poor child, if only he knew.

Still, he was a brilliant child.

Time can feel very flexible and stretchable and squeezable, because the clock rate of our processors (aka brains) varies somewhat.  Maybe someone should study the subjective topology of time, how the experience can be fascinatingly inconsistent, even within the same person, within the same day, and yet the overall thing is fundamentally unchanged‒it has, you might say, the same, unchanging number of holes.

It’s an important thing to recall:  our subjective experience of time can be highly variable intrapersonally and interpersonally, but that’s just a perception.  Time itself is progressing as it always does‒which may well be “not at all” from a 4+ dimensional viewpoint.  Yes, relativity says that time “passes” at differing rates in different situations.  That difference is the main producer of what we experience as gravity, here on Earth.  But the space-time interval between any two events will be the same no matter who is measuring it, like the speed of light itself.

Many things in the universe, in life, are like this.  For instance, we know that our basic color perception, with the semi-arbitrary delineation of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet**, is born of our way of seeing:  with three kinds of cone cells, each of which responds maximally to a certain set of wavelengths, and the measuring and balancing of the degrees of activation of these kinds of cells.  From 3 not-completely-independent measurement types, one can construct an astonishing array of shades as it were.

But the fundamental nature of the electromagnetic spectrum has no inherent blue or red or yellow.  It’s just a long stretch of continuously variable frequencies.

A threefold variable system is also used in describing quark and gluon interactions in quantum chromodynamics.  The guy who does the Highly Entropic Mind YouTube channel did a great video on (the mathematics of) quantum chromodynamics that gets into some of that, and I recommend it if you’ve ever been curious about such things.  I’ll embed it here.

Anyway, our 3-photoreceptor visual system is why any humanly perceived color can be “produced” digitally by using only three different pixels, the RGB (red, green, and blue) ones, and why printers can print (pretty much) any humanly perceived color using CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black).

But some alien race that perceives light using different specific means, even if they see the same visible spectrum, might think our various electronic and printed imagery, even our paintings, look very little like the things they are supposed to represent.  Probably there are even other terrestrial creatures who would think so; eyes have evolved independently dozens of times on Earth.  They are not all exactly the same, and vertebrate eyes are not necessarily the best ones.

Man, I’m all over the place this morning.  I’m so effing tired‒so tired that I’m not bothering to use profanity!‒that I don’t know if I’m making sense.  My sleep last night was particularly bad.

Have you ever been so fatigued from chronic sleeplessness that you honestly wished you would get hit by a (car or similar) just so you could get a break?  Even if the break is in your bones, even if it kills you, because at least you could rest in some sense.  If this is what Brahma feels like when dreaming the universe, it’s no wonder it has to dissolve it all into a dreamless sleep once every few hundred billion years, or however that legend/myth goes.

As for me and my house, I would really like to be able to rest so I can feel refreshed again someday, after what feels like many life ages of the Earth.  So far, though, I have not yet found the method for doing so.

Maybe music will help.  Today, I’m going to try to commit to playing guitar for at least a few minutes this morning.  It’s a shame not to do it for so long, and not just because my calluses are softening.  Maybe I’ll even sing (I have a hard time not singing when playing, honestly).

I hope you all (or “y’all”, a very sensible and useful contraction) are better rested than I am.  Cat forbid that any more people feel this way than necessary.

*This depends on whether you’re using the British plural form‒since it’s a band with multiple people in it‒or the American singular, since a band counts as a single unit despite being composed of multiple subunits, much as anything bigger than an elementary particle is.  It gives a new meaning or implication to e pluribus unum, doesn’t it?

**According to what I’ve read, Newton just threw in “indigo”, which does not actually constitute a separate kind of color like the other six, because he had a mystical notion about the number 7.  He was not alone in that, of course, but his influence was tremendous, so even when he had no real scientific reason for the divisions, his combination has persisted in the public consciousness for more than 300 years.

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Don’t bug me with your sophisticated Halloween ideas; it’s too rainy for that

There are only 29 shopping days until Halloween, so you might as well start preparing your costumes and decorations early…if you call this early.  I don’t recommend getting your candy this early, though.  It’s all too easy to succumb to the temptation to eat it early, and that candy ends up in various places in your body‒however, it tends not to go where you would like it to go.

Anyway, it’s Friday and (as the preceding paragraph implies) it’s the 2nd day of October‒October 2nd, you might be tempted to call it if you were hopelessly naïve*.

It’s now been raining here in south Florida for the entire month of October, so far.  That’s not saying a lot, of course (day-wise), since it’s only the 2nd day of October, as I said.  Rain-wise, however, it has most assuredly been a lot.  I’m actually mildly surprised that there’s not more flooding than there is, though there is some flooding.  Considering that most of the state is barely above water in the first place, flooding is practically the default setting.

Speaking of the physical nature of the state (Florida) and things to which it lends itself, I saw a white SUV yesterday going along that bore various illustrations and logos centered around “The Bug Lady”.  I think there was a dot TV thing there as well, and most amusingly and coolly, under the passenger side window was stenciled the word “Entomologist”.

How cool is that?  Presumably this person is an educator of some variety.  Possibly she has a YouTube or Instagram or TikTok channel, or maybe all three, or maybe only two of the three, or maybe others in addition or instead.  But I think it’s pretty neat for someone to go around in a vehicle that advertises that one is an entomologist and an unabashed “bug lady”.

South Florida must be one of the best places in the continental US to find and study insects and other land arthropods.  There are over a million described insect species in the three meter by three meter area right outside my door alone!

Okay, that last bit was (slightly) exaggerated, but there are a lot of them.  I wonder how the total biomass of arthropods in Florida compares to the biomass of humans in Florida.  I doubt that it’s greater, but the size of its fractional comparison might be impressive.  And, of course, before the modern era, there were almost no humans living in Florida, so the arthropods were the long-term champions.  It’s not a naturally human-oriented habitat.

It is, however, very good for creatures that eat arthropods, creatures like reptiles and amphibians and the occasional mammal that eats such things preferentially.  For instance, I think I remember that opossums eat a fair number of insects and arachnids, such as ticks, and are actually quite useful to humans and do us no harm.  They’re even relatively resistant to rabies because of their relatively low body temperature!

So, yeah, there are a fair few lizards and their relatives in south Florida, and that is one pretty cool thing about the state.  I wonder if, somewhere out there, there’s an SUV with “Snake lady” or “Lizard Lady” on the side, with the word “Herpetologist” under the passenger side window.  If so, I wonder if she’s single.

Now that I think about it, there are some fish that tend to eat insects that come near the surface of the water, and there is quite a lot of water surface around here (see above).   Also, dragonflies and their kin do quite well here, though technically they are also arthropods.  Still, they’re the good kinds of arthropods, the ones that eat the pests, and they and their ilk do well.  As evidence:  ordinary houseflies seem far less common around here than they ever did up north during the summertime.

Oh, and how could I forget spiders?  We’ve got some really cool spiders around here.  None of them are terribly big, alas, but some of them are quite remarkable, and they’re all pretty cool.

Though, when I accidentally walk through a nascent spider web because‒by nature‒they are often hard to see, I get a double shot of irritation.  First, I feel sad and somewhat guilty for having wrecked something some poor spider put its blood, sweat, and tears (or at least its silk) into.  Though, it’s an operational hazard for the spiders, since they want (so to speak) for their webs to be hard to see and thus hard to avoid.  But big clumsy things that are not potential prey can also have a hard time seeing and avoiding them.

I guess that’s the cost of doing business for spiders.  Maybe they can do a tax write-off with Mother Nature.

But the other problem with spider webs is that once you get them on you, it can be maddening to try to get them completely off, and despite being very fine and light, they are still quite palpable.  And I think I wrote here once about the time I accidentally walked through a spider web and got some in my eye.  I developed a mild case of irritant conjunctivitis from that, which lasted the rest of that day.

I don’t hold it against that particular spider nor against spiders in general.  After all, it was just doing what it does, and it was surely far more inconvenienced, both relatively and absolutely, than I was.  Imagine a giant tripping on your house and caving in an entire side of it.  Maybe the giant hurts its foot in the process, but you have to rebuild a substantial part of your house!

Okay, well, that’s enough for today, and for this week.  It’s Friday, and I do not work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so don’t expect a blog post from me before Monday.

I mean, well…you can expect one if that’s the way you roll, but your expectations are almost certain to be incorrect.  Why do that to yourself?  Instead, just try your best to have a good weekend.

*You would also be correct, in this case, but it’s not naïveté that makes you correct, that’s just a coincidence.  To be naïve is often to be at a higher risk of being incorrect.  It’s not always the case, however.  Sometimes when people become more “sophisticated”, it leads them to sophistry more than to philosophy**.

**Did you notice how “sophisticated”, “sophistry”, and “philosophy” are all related words, bearing the root sophia***, which is Greek for wisdom.  Philosophy, for instance, means “love of wisdom”.

***I recommend against looking into what the literal meaning of Sophia Vergara would be.

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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.

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“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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.