time

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Top o’ the workweek to ye.

It’s Monday, and I’m writing this blog post at the train station after having walked here from the house.  I did a bit of working up to the trek over the weekend, walking about four miles wearing my boots on Saturday (and getting a modest sunburn in the process), then a shorter distance yesterday, wearing lighter shoes, all to try to counteract some possible deconditioning.  It seems to have worked at least to some extent, because I was able to walk the whole way this morning without stopping to rest.

Of course, it’s possible, in principle, that my preparations over the weekend were of no help whatsoever.  It’s even possible (in principle) that I would have found it easier to walk this morning if I had not prepared at all.  However, given what I know about the nature of adaptive physiology in humans (and humanoid creatures like me), I give both of those possibilities fairly low credence.

I downloaded the MS Word app onto my smartphone over the weekend, hoping that thereby I will make it easier to work on my fiction even if I don’t bring my laptop computer with me.  The app is linked to my OneDrive account, as is the program on my computer, so I can use the phone to write and update not just Extra Body but also, if I so choose, Outlaw’s Mind or even The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I think no one is interested in having me work on either of those stories (possibly ever again), but please, correct me if I’m wrong.

I am considering changing my blogging pattern, especially if I can keep up my regimen of walking to (and also, at least part of the time, from) the train station.  I plan to cut back on the blogging to Tuesdays, Thursdays, and on the Saturdays on which I work, which will be every other Saturday.  That way, I’ll keep getting at least some new fiction writing done three days a week.  Thursday and Friday (also Wednesday, if I recall) of last week, I got no work done on my new short story once I’d written my extremely gloomy blog posts.

Much of this, like other plans, depends on me getting a minimally tolerable amount of sleep.  My sleep was still fragmented quite a lot this weekend, but I took two Benadryl tablets on Friday night and one and a half on Saturday night, so I slept relatively well, at least for me.  The Benadryl has unpleasant ill-effects on my ability to concentrate, so I took none last night.

Interestingly enough (to me, anyway) the time adjustment this weekend was somewhat useful.  When I started waking up on Sunday, quite early even after the Benadryl, I looked at the computer clock and thought that, well, at least I wasn’t waking up too early.  Of course then I looked at the microwave clock and realized that it was “spring forward”* time, and I was waking up really quite early for a Sunday, especially after 1.5 Benadryl.

Still, given the shifted time, that particular “early” isn’t quite as early relative to everyone else as it might have otherwise been.  I still started waking up well before my intended time to get up this morning, but not as much before it as it would have been before the “time change”.

I’m hoping that the walking and such will help me be prone to rest (or supine to rest depending on how I lie down, ha ha) a little better.  I think a lot of what prevents me from being able to do what I mean to do a lot of the time is my lack of sleep.  If I can manage to improve that, things may seem better.

I remember, when I was young and even more foolish than I am now, I used to wish I didn’t need to sleep, or at least not to sleep much, envying the people I’d heard of‒truthfully or not‒who didn’t need to sleep as much as others.  I didn’t quite recognize that I was already beginning to be that way, myself.  After a certain age, I was almost always the first person to get up in the morning at home, and even when my friends and I would stay up very late, I was almost always the first of us to awaken.

Sleep doesn’t actually feel enjoyable or even pleasant to me.  It’s not something to which I look forward; there’s no reward sensation associated with it, and if anything it is filled with stress and tension, partly my dread of how early I’ll awaken and how tired (but not sleepy) I’ll feel when I wake up.

I know there are people who really like and enjoy sleep.  I am not one of them.  I simply become tired, and that’s unpleasant, and so I go to bed and go to sleep, and eventually start to wake up, usually not feeling good, not feeling rested, but feeling perhaps a bit less tired than I had‒though not always.

The only time I ever enjoyed the prospect of going to sleep and felt good going to sleep was when I was on Paxil for depression.  Unfortunately, that came with a host of side effects that made it not a great answer for me and my depression.  But it was interesting to have the subjective experience of looking forward to sleep and really feeling good about the prospect.  Weird, isn’t it?

All right, that’s enough for now.  I’ll write another post tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll have had a tolerable amount of rest and so won’t be too depressed.  Then, maybe, Wednesday I’ll just write fiction.  I guess we’ll see.

*It’s annoying that the new paradigm for “Daylight Savings Time” is set to have the jump back forward so early, because now the mnemonic “spring forward, fall back” is technically inaccurate, because it’s not spring yet for more another week and a half.  If they’re going to squeeze the time change in so close together, why don’t they just get rid of it completely?  It doesn’t actually change time, after all.  Within any given inertial reference frame, time is conserved; gaining an hour now entails losing an hour later.

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Top o’ the work week to ye!

I was going to title this post “top o’ the week to ye”, but I realize that many people consider the week proper to begin on Sunday; standard calendars in places such as the US and Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth and so on look at it that way.  In Japan, on the other hand, I’m led to understand that the week officially starts on Monday, since that’s the day work starts, and Saturday and Sunday (Doyōbi and Nichiyōbi) are the weekend.

Though Japan has individually named weekdays referring to esoteric things much as we do in the West, the Japanese months‒at least their current, standard names‒are basically just numbered (though I understand there are older, more traditional names).  It seems pretty sensible just to number the months‒and the days, for that matter‒rather than give them names.

Then again, while there is a certain logic to the number of months‒related both to the length of the year and to the moon’s orbital period, both of which are objective, external facts‒the number of days in a week is pretty much arbitrary.

It seems the sort of thing that, around the time of the Revolution, the French might have wanted to make decimal, with, say, three ten-day periods (decadi?  decamaines?) per month and 36.5 of those a year.  I mean, multiples of ten were justifiably popular with them.  For instance, they defined the units of distance so that a meter was one ten-millionth the distance from the pole to the equator at the arc passing through Greenwich, England.

Thus, there were 10,000 kilometers on that arc, making the Earth’s circumference a relatively easy to remember 40,000 kilometers (with variations depending on which great circle you’re measuring).  Then they defined their measures of volume accordingly (a liter as one cubic decimeter, for instance), and then their standard of mass based upon those volumes of water, which is surely the most “standard” substance for living creatures on the surface of the Earth.

Of course, now the meter is “officially” defined in terms of the speed of light, which is, as far as we can tell, absolutely constant in all reference frames.  So, a meter is defined as the distance light travels in 1 / 299,792,458 seconds exactly.

The second, by the way, is defined as the time taken by 9,192,631,770 cycles of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition in the electrons of Cesium-133, again exactly.

Of course, given General and Special Relativity, how long that takes can vary depending on one’s reference frame relative to other reference frames‒this is why the GPS system has to compensate both for velocity-based time slowing in the satellites relative to the Earth and gravity-based time slowing on the surface of the Earth relative to the satellites.  Ponder that when you use your GPS; it would not work at all without those constant corrections due to Einstein.

The specific numbers used to define the meter and the second are fairly arbitrary, but they are consistent, and so are useful.  They definitely make more sense than the choice of starting the week on “Sunday” in the part of the world formerly known as “Christendom”.

Think about it*.  Sunday is considered the Sabbath day in most Christian and formerly Christian cultures, certainly those influenced by the former British Empire.  But the Sabbath is supposed to be observed in remembrance of the seventh day of Creation, when God rested.

Leave aside the strange notion of an infinite being either reckoning days based on the cycles of one planet around one of hundreds of billions of stars in each of possibly trillions of galaxies.  We can accept that as a non-literal measure of time, since God is supposed to be outside of space and time, anyway**.  But why would an infinite being of infinite power need to rest?

Anyway, the original Sabbath, as observed in Judaism and a few of the sects**** of Christianity, is Saturday, the official end of the week according to that arbitrary choice.  Even the Spanish word for Saturday, for instance‒sábado‒is related to the word “Sabbath” or “Shabbat”, and Spain is traditionally a very Christian place.  I don’t know what’s behind the disjunction between the Sabbath and the end of the week occurred in the realm of “Christendom” when even some of the most Christian languages maintain the vestiges of a recognition that the sabbath day ought to be at the end of the week, according to their own “holy” book.

Oh, well.  It’s all arbitrary or at least stochastic.

Don’t get me wrong‒I like 7 for the number of days in a week.  It’s a prime number, for one thing.  It’s also the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies known in antiquity because they were visible to the naked eye (the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), which is probably why we have seven days.  Many of the days of the week in western languages retain traces of having been named for those bodies.

Also, 7 times 52 is 364, which means 7 divides into the days of a year with only one and a quarter days’ remainder, so the same date will fall one day “earlier” on each subsequent year (two days earlier after a “leap year” but not after the turn of three out of every four centuries, because of the adjustments made in the Gregorian calendar).  At least they don’t skip quasi-haphazardly through the days of the week every year.  Such would be the case in a decimal “week”*****, unless one made the 5 (or 6) remainder days of the year entirely separate, not ordinary days at all.

This is, apparently, how the Hobbit calendar works in Tolkien’s world, though they put their extra days in “mid-summer”, around the summer solstice rather than around the winter solstice.

Well, this has been much ado about not much of anything but random trivia about time and measure and the days of the week.  I suppose that’s appropriate for what is the beginning of at least the work week for most of us, depending on how you reckon it.

Try to have a good day, everyone, in any case.

*There must be higher love.

**So says Francis Collins, anyway, and he ought to know***.

***Well…no, he oughtn’t know.  No one ought to know, or has any way to know, or any justifiable claim to know such things.  It’s all conjecture and speculation, unsupported by any evidence that would stand up in even a kangaroo court, and what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.  But never mind; it can be fun to think about it.

****Christians often seem much more comfortable dealing with sects than dealing with sex.  Ba-dump-bump.

*****Although…on non-leap years, the dates would cycle between two “opposite” days of the “decamaine”, then would ratchet over to the next pair on leap years, so that might be fun.

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Once again, no semi-Shakespearean title this week

Hello and good morning.

I have no idea about what to write today.  Yesterday’s rather long post took off from an initial notion that’s been with me for a long time*, with some tangents in between and so on.  The footnote about the doubling of bacteria took a bit of extra effort once I got to the office‒not much, though, since I was able quickly to look up** the size of a typical bacterium on Google, and the calculations were just “plug and chug”.

Thankfully, I already knew the dimensions of the other bits of trivia, like the size of the visible universe in light-years and the length of a light-year, though on my first round of calculations I got something very off with the volume of the visible universe.  I think I must’ve squared rather than cubed at some point, because it was much too small, and when I did my editing, I thought “that can’t be right”, and I redid the figuring.  Then, because of the mistake, I checked that result against Google/Wikipedia, and my correction was, at least, correct.

There, that’s a little discussion on “how the sausage gets made” so to speak.

That’s a curious expression, don’t you think?  Apparently, people prefer not to see how actual sausages get made.  I’m not quite sure why that’s the case, though.  Are people under some delusion that sausages are not made from various and sundry animal parts, at least some of which would not look as pretty as a nice steak if you served them “as they were” on a plate in a restaurant?

Sausages are meat.  They are parts of dead animals, ground up and stuffed together into some form of outer “skin”.  When done right, they are delicious.  This is because humans are opportunistic omnivores with a strong penchant for carnivory, and meat is a concentrated source of nutrients, the sort our ancestors‒the ones that survived to pass on their genes, anyway‒liked to eat because it was very beneficial.

That was a weird digression.  I’ll just say that, if you eat meat‒as I do‒and you are afraid to see how sausages are made, I don’t understand how you think.  I’m not suggesting that you ought to make your own sausages; division of labor is a terrifically useful thing, and makes all of civilization more efficient and indeed possible.  But to be in denial about sausages is a bit like being in denial about landfills and sewers, both of which are real and, for now at least, necessary.

I don’t know why I’m going on about this.  No one but my own brain raised the subject.  For all I know, every one of my readers has seen sausage being made (and seen waste treatment facilities and landfills) and has been perfectly fine and sensible about it.  Or, perhaps, they’re all vegans***.  Or perhaps they’re a mixture.

More likely, most of my readers are indeed opportunistic omnivores.  That seems a very sensible way for an animal to be.  I’ve read or heard of science fiction authors (and possibly even scientists) who speculate that most intelligent life forms would be omnivores.  There’s certainly some potential logic and reason there, but I suspect that mostly it’s projection and bias.  Certainly it is big speculation.

There are very good reasons to suspect that most if not all life will be largely carbon-based, due to carbon’s uniquely profligate chemistry and its near-ubiquity in the universe; those are matters of largely unambiguous physics and chemistry.  But as for the rest, our speculations are largely unguided and thus unconstrained, and we should be careful about even preliminary thoughts, let alone conclusions.

Of course, science fiction writers are free to speculate and invent.  That’s the job.  And within their created universes, they are the Gods.  But it’s important to know the difference between fiction and reality.  Reality is a much harsher taskmaster than fiction, and in reality, the wages of “sin” really are often death.

I think my own wages of that type are long overdue, to be honest.  I keep putting in claims, but HR and Payroll are, apparently, very inefficient.

.

Okay, sorry about the little pause, there; maybe you didn’t notice it, since it happened in a different time plane than the one in which you are reading, but it was there, don’t doubt that.  My train seems to be running late, but there has been no announcement about it, and it doesn’t even show up on the Tri-Rail tracker site, though the subsequent two trains do, and are listed as “on time”.  Why should they not be on time?  They’re due a half an hour and an hour from now, respectively.

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There was another pause, there, just now, as I thought I saw the first glimmer of the headlights of “my” train, but alas, it was not so.  I don’t know what I’m going to do if it’s much later.  Trains get more crowded when they’re late and I hate that.  Maybe I’ll just get an Uber.  Maybe I should just go back to the house.  Possibly I should just lie on the tracks “in protest”.  After all, if the trains are going to be late and/or canceled anyway, I might as well give them a strong reason.

***

I have left the train station and am now en route to the office in an Uber.  The train showed no signs of arriving, and there was neither an announcement overhead nor any info online.  The Tri-Rail system used to be much better run.  It seems to be going to the dogs, lately.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  To paraphrase Adele, I wish nothing but the best for you all.

TTFN

*Another, unrelated one is, how did Princess Leia know to call Han Solo “Flyboy” when she said “Into the garbage chute, Flyboy!” in the original Star Wars movie?  She had not been told he was a pilot.  Was this an early hint of her natural ability with the Force?  Or was it, rather, just George Lucas accidentally giving her a line based on a fact he knew, but that her character would not?

**Google Docs tried to prompt me to split the infinitive and write “to quickly look up” rather than “quickly to look up”, which is what I wrote.  I hate such anti-grammatical suggestion-making!

***It might interest you to know, in loose relation to the present topic, that members of the dominant intelligent species in the star system Vega are obligate carnivores.  So, ironically, real Vegans only eat meat****.

****Of course, that’s all just a bit of sci-fi that I composed.  But wouldn’t it be hilarious if it were so?  I remember the first time I ever saw or heard someone use the term “vegan”.  It was in Bloom County, said by Steve Dallas, after he got his brain flipped by aliens, making his personality the opposite of what it previously had been.  I was already astronomically literate enough to know about Vega, and I wondered what the hell the character (and other, real people) meant when he/they wrote that they were “vegans”.  At first, I thought it might have something to do with astrology; the people involved seemed to fit that mold a lot of the time.

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Most people are dead, and it will probably always be that way

I sometimes think about historically based films in which tragedies happen and deaths occur.  I know they’re highly fictionalized, but think of Braveheart and of Gladiator* and movies of that sort, where the loss of loved ones makes viewers sad but drives the protagonist to “great” deeds that change the course of local history‒or, well, that make the course of local history.  After all, one only knows history after it happens, and once it’s happened, one cannot change it.  One can be mistaken about it, one can misrecord it, one can lie about it, but one cannot actually change it.

Even if it were possible to time travel, going into the past to alter something, it wouldn’t change the history from which you came‒as even the Marvel movies have pointed out, you’d just have created a new future, a new history, local to you.  It wouldn’t change your previous one‒that would be paradoxical.

Yes, Back to the Future is bullshit.  This really shouldn’t surprise you.  It’s still a fun movie.

Anyway, that’s beside the point I planned to make.  I think of tragic deaths in historical dramas that we see and about which we feel heartbroken, or even about real historical horrors‒human made, like the vast slaughters of Genghis Khan’s hordes or natural, like earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis and the like‒and about all the deaths involved, and sometimes I think:  “They would all be dead now, anyway, no matter what.”

Not one single person who was born before 1900 is alive today, as far as I know.  If there is one, that human is an all-time record holder in longevity, and is unlikely to live much longer.  And I would probably bet my own life** on there being no one alive who was born before 1850.  Indeed, the majority of humans who have ever lived are dead.  It’s not as big a majority as it might be, given how long humanity has existed, but that’s only because of recent exponential population growth.

In principle, of course, with a fast enough exponential population growth, it would be possible for the majority of humans to be presently alive, even with current lifespans.  But that’s not sustainable in the real universe.  For it to be sustainable in the long run, eventually humans would have to expand their empire over matter and space at faster than the speed of light, and reach far beyond the cosmic horizon, which is impossible in principle, as far as we know.

I say “eventually”, but don’t let that mislead you.  It would happen with surprising speed.  There’s a well known fact that, given a typical doubling/generation time of about 20 minutes, and assuming enough resources, a single bacterium could multiply to a volume greater than that of the visible universe within a month.  I’ll try to check my math on that when I get to sit down with a pen and paper***, but whether the specific time of a month is not quite right, it’s in the right ballpark.

This is the sort of doubling that is thought to have happened‒at an even faster rate, of course‒during the “inflationary” stage of the universe, if inflation happened.  Of course, in a sense, if “dark energy” is really the cosmological constant, then we are still undergoing inflation even now, just with a slower doubling time.  That doesn’t help is with our exponentially growing human population, though; spacetime itself can expand at, functionally, faster than the speed of light****, but nothing travels through spacetime faster than light.

Anyway, we’re already slowing down our population growth rate, which is good, since Malthusian growth tends to be unpleasant for almost everyone.  Therefore, as time goes by, the fraction of all humans who are dead will probably more and more overtake the fraction who are living.  And all early deaths are, in hindsight, not too terribly early.

This is one reason I get slightly irritated by people who talk of “saving lives” or characterizing a person’s death, per se, as a tragedy.  If every death is a tragedy, then the anti-natalists are right, and each new life should be avoided.  But, of course, it’s not that death in and of itself is a tragedy‒or if it is, it’s an inevitable one that’s going to happen to us all, sooner rather than later.  Even a being that lived for thousands or billions or googols or googolplexes of years would come no closer to living eternally than does a mayfly.  This is a mathematical fact.

It’s suffering that is the tragedy, not death.  Death can be a decent shorthand, in certain circumstances, because‒as Carl Sagan pointed out‒if one is dead, there is very little one can do to be happy.  Then again, if one is dead, there is also very little that can happen to make one disappointed or sad or in pain or afraid.  And since these things are more common and sustainable, or at least more reliable, than joy is, life itself, as a shorthand, is at least as good an indicator of suffering as death is of loss of possible joy.

It’s possible, I think, to live without joy‒meaning that it can happen, not that it’s a state one can or should seek.  But I don’t know that it’s possible for any true living things, or at least any living things with any equivalent of a nervous system, to exist without suffering.

So, perhaps Dumbledore’s post-mortem***** admonition to Harry Potter could be truncated to “Do not pity the dead, Harry.  Pity the living.”  Full stop.

*Which should have been the title of the sequel to Jaws.

**That’s maybe not as impressive as it might seem, since much of the time I hate my life and myself.  But it’s the only life I have with which to bet.

***With a typical length of 1 micrometer (10-6 meters) and a doubling time of approximately 20 minutes (leading to 72 doublings a day), after only one day, a colony of bacteria would be roughly 4700 cubic meters in size, a cube more than 16 meters (just over 50 feet) on a side.  After 2 days, its volume would be about 2 x 1026 cubic meters, or a cube 280,000 kilometers long on a side.  That’s nearly the distance from the Earth to the Moon.  After the 2160 doublings involved in a month of doubling, that would yield a volume of 2 x 10632 cubic meters, or with a side length of about 5 x 10210 meters.  A light year is 10 trillion kilometers, or 10 quadrillion meters, which is “only” 1015 meters.  So that’s a cube with a side length of 5 x 10195 light years‒waaaaaay more than a googol light-years.  Indeed, if you subtracted a googol from that number, it would not change it to any degree measurable by any means known to humans (5 x 10195 minus 1 x 10100 is still, basically, 5 x 10195).  The visible universe is only about 92 billion light-years across, yielding a sphere with a volume of “only” 4 x 1080 cubic meters.  It’s not even close to the order of magnitude of a volume of 2 x 10632 cubic meters!  My estimate was far short of the mark.  But that only strengthens my point, doesn’t it?

****It doesn’t actually do so locally‒I suspect that is also impossible, since it would defy the speed of local causality.  It’s only the summation of all the local doublings spread across the entirety of space that can make distant points separate at faster than the speed of light.  Then again, can “traditional” inflation cause any kind of local superluminal expansion?  I don’t think so.  Could two points in space a Planck length apart separate at a local speed that exceeds c even during inflation?  I doubt it, though I’m not absolutely sure.  Of course, if space is mathematically continuous, then there are no two closest possible points, anyway.  Between any two points on the real number line, there exists an uncountable infinity of other points, no matter how arbitrarily close you make them.

*****Of course, if one can deliver admonitions, one is not really dead in any useful or meaningful sense.  But it’s fiction, and it’s magic within fiction, so leeway can be given.  We have no evidence nor have I encountered any even borderline convincing arguments for any “life after death” in the real world, unless you count things like multiverses or Poincaré recurrences or the like, and I don’t, since they really entail other versions of a person, not a continuity of personhood.

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Audio blog for Friday on anhedonia, fatigue, declining entertainment franchises and Newtonian and Einsteinian physics

This is an oddly meandering audio blog that I made this morning, having little desire to write much, and it goes from my troubles with depression and lessening interest in any former source of joy to the fact that even Star Wars and Marvel franchises are going downhill (with speculation about the causes) on to physics–first Newtonian then Special and General Relativity, and ponderings about the nature of near-light-speed travel and its potential effects when a spaceship passes the Schwarzschild radius in the direction of its motion (and even a tiny dabble into cosmic strings, which are not to be mistaken for the “superstrings” of string theory/M theory).  I find no firm conclusions, but maybe it’s mildly interesting somewhere.  It’s longer than I expected it to be, but hopefully not too long.

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Laptop computers and steroids in noses; rough economics and thoughts on typos-es; multiple footnotes with time travel zings; these are a few of…well, you know the rest

After yesterday’s brief discussion about the pitfalls of using the smartphone to write my blog posts, I decided to do this one on my laptop computer, so I brought it back with me at the end of the day.  So far, so good:  my typing speed is definitely faster, and though there are certainly mistakes being made (and, yes, by me…obviously), they are relatively easy**** and quick to correct, and are of a much more typical kind than the ones I make on the phone.

Mostly, these mistakes are the products of trying to type too fast and so not completely pressing down on some of the keys as I go along.  Occasionally, my brain finishes the wrong word once I start typing, because it’s used to typing that other word much more often than some word that begins with many of the same letters.

Shifting topics abruptly:  Last night, for the first time in several months, I did not take any nasal steroids at all.  I’ve been using them to treat my allergic rhinitis, and they seem to have helped some of the symptoms thereof, but unfortunately, I suspect—because I have been using the maximum dose for quite a while—that I’ve begun to have systemic corticosteroid effects, among which are weight gain, glucose intolerance, weakening of various tissues, and so on.

This would explain at least some of my physical travails.  Corticosteroids can, of course, have mental effects as well—the brain being a physical organ, after all—but these are more subtle and difficult to recognize, let alone ascertain.  It is, alas, not likely that stopping the fluticasone will have a significant effect on my depression.  That is something with which I’ve dealt* since I was a teenager, and probably is at least partly a consequence of my apparent ASD.  If someone wants, I can get into how I think that happens in my particular case, but otherwise, I won’t discuss it, at least for now.

I still haven’t done the “videos” for my last two audio blogs; I’m sorry if anyone is waiting with figuratively bated breath.  On the other hand, this means that, for the moment, those audio blogs are exclusively available for people who follow my blog directly.  That’s almost like the Patreon rewards people offer to their patrons, but I don’t use Patreon, so I don’t even charge you for them.  Aren’t you lucky?

I sometimes think that maybe I should sign up for Patreon—as a creator, I mean.  I do follow two creators on Patreon, so in that sense, I’m already signed up.  And, of course, episodically, Patreon tries to encourage me to start using it for my content.  I mean, they would, wouldn’t they?  It’s how they make their money.

Not that I hold that against them; I don’t.  We all have to make a living one way or another, and since none of us animals (or fungi) photosynthesize—even coral polyps need algal cells living within them for that kind of thing—we’re forced to scrape our continued existence out of the various resources and means and skills and whatnot in the world around us, which includes all the other people.  Economics is really a branch of both biology and thermodynamics.

It was easy enough for John Lennon to sing of imagining no possessions, but I wonder if even he could, sitting at his white grand piano in his very fancy place, with his rock star money***.  I don’t think he really imagined a plausible  world in which there were no possessions.  Hunter-gatherer societies might be the closest realistic version of such a thing, but I strongly suspect they were not the sort of society about which John was singing.  They certain do not entail any “brotherhood of man”, especially if other tribes were encountered—see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Soon, my train will come—though it’s running ten minutes late, it seems.  The auto announcement is calling it a southbound train, even though it’s northbound; at least it has the track correct.  This error has been going on for several days now, at least.  I’m guessing it’s a software problem, perhaps due to some virus.  If it were a simple mistake, I imagine they could have fixed it by now; I don’t think they’re that incompetent.  Also, the Wi-Fi on all the trains seems to be hosed, lately, as do at least some of the position signals for the Tri-rail tracker app.

I’ll wrap this up for now.  By all means, give me feedback if you’re interested.  And “thank you” to those who already do so.  I’ll try to work on those “videos” I mentioned, but I make no promises.  Have a good day, if you can.

*That is an example of a word my brain often accidentally mixes with another.  When I start typing d-e-a-l-t, although my system finishes the intended word, it also seems to call up the subroutine that spells the word “death”, and so, frequently—maybe half the time—I add an “h” to the end of the word, producing “dealth”.  It’s odd**, but mildly interesting.

**And I often write “off” when I intend to write “odd”.  Indeed, I did it just now.  This typo, however, is at least partly due to the fact that “d” and “f” are adjacent on the keyboard.

***Don’t get me wrong; I revere John Lennon.  All the money he ever could have had in any reasonable version of reality could never have adequately compensated him for the beauty and joy he and his bandmates brought to the world.

****I only caught this typo on the edit, not while I was writing the first draft:  I had initially typed this word as “east”, an error at least partly due again to the position of the letters.  I left it as footnote four—with four asterisks—even though it will now be the first footnote in the linear reading of the blog post, because its content and subject matter make it, still, the logical fourth one.  Is this an analogy for time travel stories?  Perhaps.  Maybe I’ll write about that some other time*****.

*****Or maybe I already have.

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“Check it and see…”

Well, I’m writing a post today, again, for some unknown and unholy reason, and I’m doing it on my smartphone, because I did not bring my laptop computer back to the house with me last night.  I was not up to carrying it.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber that’s bringing me to the gas station near the office, because I am feeling quite under the weather and do not want to face any train travel today.  I spiked a fever overnight‒not a huge one, but my pulse really raced for a bit there (about 136 at rest).  I don’t have much in the way of specific symptoms, other than a general achiness and malaise that is different from the general elevated pain I’ve been having lately.  Also, I feel just a slight sense of breathlessness.  It’s not literally difficulty breathing, but just a feeling as if I were exerting myself even while sitting still.  My pulse ox is fine*.

You may wonder why I am going to the office at all, if I am sick, and you are not foolish to wonder this.  Unfortunately, my coworker who shares some of my roles was out yesterday because his wife and baby are both sick, so I had to pick up the slack, such as it is, despite exacerbations of chronic pain and being suicidally depressed.  And I don’t know if he’s going to be out again, today, but by the time I find out, it will be too late for me to get to the office on time from where I “live”.

I feel just a little bit queasy, now, also.  It’s not like I’m in danger of throwing up, as far as I can tell.  It’s just a bit unpleasant.

No matter what, I swear I am not going to switch and fill in tomorrow, even if my coworker cannot make it.  The boss will just have to figure something out.  Or he’ll have to close the office.

Sorry, I know this is all boring.  I don’t know what you’re hoping for from me, but this is probably not it.

Oh, I took delivery yesterday of a four part book collection compiled from the writers of the Less Wrong website.  Collectively, the set is called The Engines of Cognition, and their individual titles are: 

Trust

Modularity

Incentives

Failure

In the inside front of each book, on the first page, there is a little quote from some famous thinker, such as Richard Feynman.  This is particularly fun because, in the first volume, the quote is uncredited, but I knew right away Who had said it.  The quote was, “If I always told you the truth, I wouldn’t need you to trust me.”

That quote is from the 11th Doctor, in series 5, episode 5, “Flesh and Stone”.  I think it’s cool that the luminaries from Less Wrong chose a Doctor Who quote for the inside of this book.  There’s a bit of a spoiler associated with the quote in the show, so I won’t get into it any further.  Maybe some of you will eventually want to watch Doctor Who, and I wouldn’t want to mess you up with spoilers‒though that’s always a potential part of any time travel adventure, I guess.

Here’s a related thought:  I don’t understand why more of the companions in Doctor Who don’t ask to learn about the science of the TARDIS and the Time Lords in general.  The TARDIS is “bigger on the inside”’ thanks to “dimensional engineering” but how is that actually accomplished?  How does time travel work?  If the past can be rewritten, what does that say about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?  If the past can be changed and have within-universe consequences, just rewriting reality, then why (and how) are there parallel, nearly identical universes, such as the one to which Rose was sent?

I know, the writers have no idea of the answers to such questions.  But why aren’t the characters curious about them?

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I’ll just close by mentioning something related to health insurance.  My sister said (in a comment on Facebook instead of here‒I’m not sure why) that she would very kindly help me with filling out forms.  Unfortunately, the forms aren’t my issue, really.  It’s the actual starting of the process, the picking up of the phone and the calling of the insurance broker.  That’s the main barrier, partly due to social anxiety‒though that feels like too mild a term‒and partly just my resistance to taking care of my health.  I mean, think about it:  how hard would you work to help protect the worst person you know, your least favorite person in the world?

Those are rhetorical questions, of course.  But I would like to remind people that I prefer it if they leave comments here rather than on Facebook or other social media.  For one thing, it apparently helps boost my blog via whatever the WordPress algorithm is.  And I don’t really need my personal Facebook page boosted.

I suppose it matters very little.  Maybe this illness I’m fighting now will end up killing me, and everything else will be moot.  🙂

I doubt it.  It just feels like an ordinary virus.  But who knows?  Maybe I’ll get lucky.  And, as part of that, maybe all of you who read my blog out of kindness and/or obligation, will get lucky and not have to do so anymore.  It would be appropriate for it to happen on the weekend of New Year’s.

Fingers crossed!

*Of course I have my own pulse oximeter.

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

Hello and good morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…who knows what?

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

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

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

TTFN

stonehenge solstice merged

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moans and whines and cries for help, doodah, doodah

It’s Monday morning again; it keeps doing that, even though I’ve made it clear that I think it’s a bad idea.

My back has really been acting up this weekend; it’s particularly uncomfortable right now, as I wait at the train station.  I would have just stayed “home” today, except that there is an office holiday party this evening, to which I said I would go.  Then again, I said I would get health insurance by last Friday, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do that, even though I know it’s not really all that hard.  Yet, when I try to bring myself to do it, it’s a bit like trying to force myself to lay my hand flat on a red hot stove top*.

Partly my resistance is because I feel like I’m being set up for something, though I know that’s paranoid and silly.  I’ve just had so many things blow up in my face when I thought I was doing perfectly reasonable, harmless, and even beneficial (and certainly well-intended) things.  It’s pretty ironic, when one has always felt affinity with the bad guys in many stories, but one recognizes that it’s not ethically justifiable to be a bad guy, so one tries very hard to be a good guy and to do good things in the world…and one ends up being punished as if one were a bad guy, and has one’s life shredded and pulped and jack-hammered into so much twisted rubble, maimed and deformed into a shambling, undead mockery of itself.

Maybe I should have just tried to be a bad guy.  I probably would have won the Nobel Peace Prize or something.

Anyway, I’m feeling very stressed and unsafe about all of it, more than I was already.  And it’s not as though my chronic depression is any better than usual, not at this time of the year, when it’s dark more than not.  I generally like darkness, of course, but a dearth of sunshine does seem to impact my mood.

Also, there’s that big holiday coming up in a week, which is sure to be just wonderful for my general outlook.  It comes right after the solstice, so by then the days will be creeping towards longer again, but it will be a very long time before the change is noticeable.

I say “very long time” but of course that’s scale-dependent.  On the scale of the age of the universe or even of Earth, it’s very tiny, and even on the scale of an ordinary human life, it’s pretty negligible.  But on the Planck time scale it’s an absurdly long period, way longer than any of the epochs of the immediately-post-inflationary universe (assuming inflation happened).  And on the scale of a person with chronic and exacerbating depression, with chronic tension and anxiety and anger and pain, and with very few social supports and no future to which to look forward, it is a very long time indeed.

I’ll be working this coming Saturday, though I rather expect that business will be quite slow.  I guess that’s a good day to work, but it’s also a bit dreary.  But lying around at the house or lolling about at work are equally bland and gray and stale.  At least this last weekend I got some rest.  I took a fair amount of Benadryl, since there was nothing that I needed to do.

This blog is getting really boring, too.  It’s better than many other things, of course—it’s the only thing arising from my internal motivation, though it’s never achieved any of its intentions, which included originally trying to promote my writing/books/stories, and then providing me some kind of therapeutic outlet, as well as a cry for help, as the expression goes.

None of these goals has been accomplished.  Well, I suppose I’ve succeeded in making a cry for help, but it’s turned out to be just that old biblical “voice crying out in the wilderness” thing.  So it’s basically been a really shitty and ineffectual cry for help.

That’s about par for my course, though.  I only seem to succeed really well at things that don’t matter much to me.  I don’t know why that is, whether it’s related to the whole hypothetical ASD thing, or to my depression, or some kind of pathological demand avoidance (or whatever that term is), or anxiety, or just my general self-loathing.  I seem to have a very strong tendency to fuck up the things that matter to me the most, and to alienate the people I love the most (this last isn’t a universal thing, though…I still get along fine with my sister and brother, but they are special cases, and they are also very far away).

Anyway, I’m tired of the blog.  I did a little recording on Friday of a few minutes of a rant about the useless updates that the various software sites keep undergoing.  I’ll embed the audio of that here for those to listen who wish to do so.  See if you agree with me, or if you think I’m being too much of a curmudgeon.

That’s enough for today.  I may come back to the office and sleep there after the work event tonight, since it’s a very long way back to the house just to lie down and get back up in a few hours to come back to the office.  I mean, I feel that way most days, but it’s going to be worse tonight.

I hope you’re all having a better holiday season than I’m having.  For anyone who’s having a worse one—and I’m sure there are far too many just people for anyone’s comfort—I can only offer my sympathy and good wishes.  Coming from me, that’s sure to be worthless or worse, but it’s all I have to offer.

*Knowing me, the stove thing might even be the easier of the two things.  Goodness knows I’ve deliberately burned myself quite a few times before.  Never on my palms, though.  Back of the hand, yes, but not the palms.  I don’t know why that feels psychologically different.

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On the eighth day of Hanukkah…nothing much happened

It’s Friday morning, December 15th, and I’m waiting at the train station for the second train of the day, again.  It’s really quite windy this morning, even more so than it has been the past few days, but it’s not as rainy.  There’s just a slight bit of drizzle around, and some of even that is probably just the wind blowing former rain off the trees.

I’m not sure what I should write about today that won’t just be rehashing all the other crap I’ve been writing nearly every day.  It doesn’t seem to do me any good as therapy, and it certainly doesn’t seem to do you people any good as readers.

It also hasn’t really seemed to garner me any real help, other than perhaps being at some level the trigger for my ex-wife to ask me to sign up for health insurance.  That was, of course, a nice impulse on her part, although it’s very stressful for me, and I haven’t yet done it, though I’m supposed to try to get it done by today.  I keep hoping there will be a car accident or some health catastrophe that will take it all out of my hands before I have to go through with it, because I find the prospect ridiculously stressful.

I don’t trust “the government” if they’re involved in the process, but I also don’t trust private industry.  You may say that I have only myself to blame for my issues, then, to which I would reply…well, blame isn’t a very useful concept most of the time, but it’s definitely because of my own psychopathology that I am in my situation.  The only person who’s ever been able really to beat me is me, but that guy really is quite dedicated to the task.  I’m probably not too unusual in this.  I suspect it’s the case for a great many people.

My sister has also offered to help with getting the insurance together.  I’m not sure what she might be able to do from where she is.  She may know, but I’m not sure.  I’m hoping to go through a person who got a good deal on insurance for a work friend, and presumably that can be done over the phone.  I hate talking on the phone most of the time, partly because I have difficulty hearing, but also just because I am quite awkward, socially.  Still, I hope I can do it.

I really need some help, and with a lot of things.  It’s sad and painful to say it, but there are many aspects of life in human civilization that I find very uncomfortable and alien and anathema to me.  And though I have work friends, I have no real other friends of any kind, and as I’ve said, my family is scattered hundreds to thousands of miles away.  I don’t do online relationships very well, other than my ongoing relationship with the likes of Amazon.  Ha ha.

Incidentally, I have the weekend “off”, so I won’t be writing my blog either tomorrow or the next day.  The Sunday thing is nothing new; I almost never write a blog on Sunday, and when I was writing fiction, I never wrote fiction on Sunday.  I had to give myself some mental break, and it made sense to do it on the day when I never did have to work.

Today is the last day of Hanukkah, of course.  I’ve been neglecting lighting the candles at work, though I have a nice little menorah there.  After the first two days, it just felt sad.  Actually, it felt sad the first few days, too, since it’s the sort of thing one does with one’s family, especially with one’s kids.

It’s a weird thing to think of wanting to have medical care for myself.  Having been on the delivering end of much life-prolonging care, I know only too well how much we tend to strain to stretch out the latter portion of our days, even when all it really does is compound misery, or at least make it last longer.

Pediatric medicine makes more sense—we should prevent kids from suffering and/or dying young and from falling victim to illnesses that might harm their later life and joy.  But why do wasted, washed-up, older people like me*, who are alone and sad and depressed even want to stay alive, other than due to persistent but pointless biological drives?

I’m not saying that I’m drain on the world or anything; I earn a living and pay my rent and electricity and water and cable and food and everything.  But I have a chronic illness from which I’ve been suffering most of my life**, and though there are treatments for it, there is no known cure.  It has a fatality rate—just counting suicides, not addressing the manifold ways in which it wears away at general health—that is worse than many cancers.  And I possess several of the attributes that are associated with increased risk of suicide, including age, solitude, probable “neurodivergence”, chronic pain, all that good stuff.

Why is there no physician-assisted suicide available anywhere for chronic depression?  It’s certainly as miserable as just about any disease can be—it turns one into the spiteful Satan of one’s own personal Hell.  Of course, the real trouble with a physician-assisted suicide for depression is that, by definition (if you will) the person involved is suffering from mental illness that affects that person’s judgment about the process, so legitimate consent is troublesome.  I guess I can’t blame “the powers that be” for wanting to keep their fingers out of that particular pie.

Perhaps that’s evidence that they’re not entirely unethical.  Mostly, they’re just largely nonethical.

My train is going to be arriving in a few moments, so I’ll wrap up for the day, feeling no closer to any improvement in my situation than I was at the beginning of the week.  I am giving up on the dietary changes I recently began; my GI tract has gotten no better with it over several days, and it’s just not worth the suffering to try to sustain it.  I’ll try to go back to a more workable healthy solution.

What I really want is to be able to rest and to feel rested.  Obviously I didn’t do that last night, or the night before, or pretty much all the way back to the mid-nineties.  And then, there was only one night I can remember on which I slept and awoke refreshed.

It stands out because it was such a departure from the norm.

Oh, well.  Life is hard.  It’s also a cereal and a game and a magazine.  Time is just a magazine, as far as I know.  And Scientific American has become an ironic, contradictory insult to its former self.

Have a good day and a nice weekend, please.

Happy-Hanukkah-

*Yes, I’m “only” 54, but I have felt much older for quite a long time.  My subjective age has been increasing on an exponential growth curve for years.  Sadly, my wisdom does not appear to have been growing similarly, and it may actually be diminishing.

**Dysthymia/depression, in case that isn’t clear.