time

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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.

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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.”

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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.