writing

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That was a weird tangent dot com?

Well, it’s Friday, the 30th of January.  We’re almost done with the first month of the year (2026).  Has it been an auspicious month?  Has it been inauspicious?  I suppose the answer to such questions will vary from person to person depending upon how their personal month has gone.  And I suppose that points toward the notion that actual auspices are certainly not any kind of reliable indicator of how the future might go, at least not without great care to separate true patterns from false ones.

On the other hand, it’s not entirely mad to try to draw some potential conclusions about the near future from what’s happening in the present and what has happened in the recent past.  That’s one of the useful skills that’s available to minds that have the capacity to note patterns‒one can try to anticipate the future based on patterns one has noticed over time, and potentially, one can try thereby to avoid outcomes that are undesirable.

Of course, humans do tend to notice patterns that aren’t actually there a lot more than ones that really are there*.  This is usually‒probably‒related to the notion of the differential detriments of different types of errors:  It’s usually more useful to see potential threats that aren’t there than it is not to see potential threats that are there.

I think anyone who stops to think about such things will recognize that the first type of organism will be somewhat more likely to live long enough to reproduce than the second type, though they may be much less comfortable and content in the meantime.  Jumping at shadows can certainly be maladaptive, and too much of it can have a net negative effect on general outcomes, but not jumping at hyenas and lions (for instance) tends to be a very short-lived habit.

This goes back to my frequent talking point that fear, the ability (and it is an ability) to become alarmed and unhappy but energized and driven to fight or flee is going to be present in nearly every lifeform capable of movement over time.  Variations who feel less fear, or none, will not tend to reproduce as much because they are more likely to be killed in any given finite stretch of time, so whatever genetic makeup they have that leads them to lack a fear response, or to be prone to lack it, will not tend to propagate down the generations.

“Genetic makeup”, the term I used in that last sentence (go look, it’s there), made me think of a possible future technology in which people use some CRISPR-style techniques to achieve the effects that hitherto require the use of cosmetics.  They could insert genes into the cells of their cheeks, for instance, to lead them to have more pinkish pigment, or perhaps to make local blood vessels dilate for a nice blushing look, instead of having to use rouge (which is what I think the stuff is called that one applies to make one’s cheeks look pinker).  Or one could generate actual pigments in the cells of one’s upper eyelids, or increase the thickness of one’s eyelashes, all that sort of stuff.

Of course, doing this might entail risks.  Presumably, altering the genes of a given population of cells, even at the local level, could increase the risk of developing cancers, because one cannot perfectly control where genes will insert (at least not so far), and there will always be a chance of mucking up genes that regulate cell division rates.

Once one cell becomes more rapidly reproducing than its companion cells, it will tend to overpower them, in numbers anyway, over time***.  And with rapid and persistently higher rates of reproduction, there come more chances for new mutations to happen.  Those mutations that kill their cells obviously just go away more or less immediately.  Even the ones that revert their cells’ division rates back to “normal” will be quickly locally overwhelmed by the faster growing ones.  But a mutation that encourages even faster division/reproduction will quickly take hold as the dominant cell type, ceteris paribus.

And then, of course, this even more rapidly dividing population of cells will have that many more chances to develop mutations.  And so, down the line, given the billions of cells present in just one’s face, we find the chance for skin cancers to develop, once a cell line becomes so prone to reproduce itself that it cannot be constrained by any local hormonal or immune processes.

That was a weird tangent, wasn’t it?  Although, frankly, I could change the title of my blog from “robertelessar.com” to “thatwasaweirdtangent.com” and it would not be inappropriate.

I’ll finish up today with just some basic housekeeping style stuff:

I will probably not work tomorrow, so I will probably not be writing a blog post.  But if I do write one, it will show up here.  I will certainly not be sleeping in the office tonight, but I did sleep here last night.  I had a terrible day yesterday, pain-wise, and after work I went to the train station but the train was badly crowded and there were no relatively comfortable seats available, so I gave up and trudged back to the office.

I just felt worn out, and I feared that if I did go back to the house, I might not come to the office today.  And today is payday, of course, and Sunday is the first of a new month, so rent is due (Wouldn’t it be nice if rent was dew?  Maybe not if you lived in the Atacama Desert.  Though a little dew might be very strong currency there, come to think of it, relative to most of the rest of the world). 

Hopefully today will be a better day than yesterday with respect to pain.  So far, at least, it doesn’t feel any worse.  The hard office floor can help a bit sometimes with my back pain.  That makes a certain amount of sense, or at least it may do so.  After all, our ancestral environment did not include mattresses.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to, that’s my life.  I mean that seriously.  That’s pretty much all there is to my life:  Getting up and getting to work (while writing a blog post), doing office stuff while dealing with noise and people and tinnitus, not getting long enough breaks because people seem incapable of watching the time, being the last to leave the office, commuting back to the house, trying to get at least a bit of sleep, and then repeating.  There appears to be nothing more than that coming my way until I’m dead.  Which, I think you might be able to understand, becomes more attractive and less frightening as the tedious, exhausted, and painful days go by.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  As for me, I hope at least to be able to sedate myself enough to have a longer-than-usual sleep tonight.  It’s not ideal (pharmacologically induced sleep being generally and significantly less beneficial than natural sleep), but it’s what I have to use.

*Think of the constellations**.

**Won’t someone please think of the constellations!?!?

***It’s like the difference between exponential functions. ab will grow much more rapidly**** when b is 3, for instance, than when b is 2 or 1.5 or 1.1, and so on.

****Stop looking at the negative side of the number line, dammit.  Just stipulate that a is always a positive number.  Or make the function the absolute value of ab, in other words, |ab|.

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Should I write on Substack? Should I not write at all?

Well, first, today’s date is a bit boring; it’s just riddled with even numbers.  Even numbers, of course, are almost never prime‒out of all the infinite prime numbers that exist, only one is an even number, and that’s the even number:  2.  Likewise, out of all the infinite even numbers, only 2 is prime.

Now, you might point out that there is a 2 in today’s date; in fact there is more than one (har):  1-28-2026.  However, each of those twos reads, almost inescapably, as part of a larger, non-prime* number‒28, 20 (or 2000), 26.  So, they lose their charm.

And that’s my weird, number-related nonsense out of the way for now.

It’s Wednesday, which is payroll day, but I’ve done my best to get a head start on that this week, to the degree possible.  We’ll see whether or not that does me any good.  Well, I will see.  I doubt any of you will see, and you probably won’t know in any sense.  I guess I might share it here on this blog, if it sticks in my mind enough for me to mention it, but I doubt that will happen.  It seems unlikely that anyone would care, anyway.

The cliché thing to add at the end there wanted to be “but never say never”.  However, that expression annoys me, partly because it includes the word “never” twice while admonishing others not to use it.  Of course, I recognize that to be deliberate verbal irony, but I don’t find it very clever.

My preference is to say something like “never is a long time” when admonishing someone against making sweeping, “never”-related statements.  Or, if someone says something like, “they were supposed to get back to me, but they never did,” I will often say, “Never hasn’t happened yet.  They just haven’t gotten back to you so far.”

No, actually, I don’t have any (local) friends.  Why do you ask?

I still haven’t received any feedback regarding the Substack question.  In fact, the only feedback I’ve received of any kind has been from the two people who are basically the only people who comment on my blog.  It’s nice to get feedback from them, of course, but I would welcome others as well.  And I would really appreciate someone’s thoughts about the Substack and/or monetization idea.

I don’t know.  Maybe to be able to monetize one’s (nonfiction) writing, one needs to have some consistent shtick or something‒a focus on politics or medicine or philosophy or what have you.  Whereas I don’t even know what I’m going to discuss until I’m already discussing it**.  Is that the sort of thing that could sustain a paying audience?  I don’t know.

I would like to get some broader feedback on this, but I don’t know how to elicit that feedback except by asking here.  It’s not as though I have anyone else to whom I can talk about this kind of thing.  I barely have anyone to whom I can talk about anything.

I guess I could just try to “fake it until I make it” with a more focused blog, obeying an idiotic admonition that people recall only because it rhymes.

Now, I’m fond of lyrics and good poetry so I appreciate rhymes, but rhyme does not equal reason; in other words, don’t fall for someone saying something like, “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”

If anything, if someone tries to convince you using a rhyme, veer in the other direction from accepting what they say.  When people have good reasons for something, they don’t require clever verbosity to persuade a reasonable person.  I say “persuade”, but that’s really being a bit disrespectful to the notion of true persuasion.  Using the “rhyme as reason” fallacy is really a form of dishonest manipulation, as is the willful application of many fallacies when trying to influence another’s thoughts.

Anyway, I don’t want to fake it with respect to having a particular focus or agenda in a blog or other series of writing.  I’ve been faking being human all my life, and that’s more than exhausting enough.  Also, as time goes by, and I see more and more of the things humans do and the ways that humans do things, I’m thinking maybe trying to act like one of them isn’t such a well-advised undertaking.  Maybe humans are vastly overrated.

Then again, so are most other life forms on the planet.  Perhaps phytoplankton/cyanobacteria are the only innocent life forms on Earth (and I’m far from certain of their innocence).  Of course, since no being had any choice in being the being that it’s being, one could say that every life form is innocent, and that’s fair enough, but then the very concepts of innocence and guilt become nearly useless.  Maybe they should be.  Maybe they tend to mislead and muddle people’s thinking.

I don’t know what I’m on about with all this.  I suppose I’ll see how I got to this point when I edit the post.  I doubt it will be terribly enlightening, but it’s not impossible.

That’s enough for today, though.  If any readers do have any thoughts about the Substack idea or anything else, I would be interested to hear them.  And, yes, I would hear them even if they are just written on the page (or, rather, the screen), because when I read, I hear what I’m reading in my head; that’s how I read.  So there.

I hope you have a very good day.

*I think the official term is “composite number” but I don’t think they need (or deserve) a special name.  They are just non-primes.

**I’m using the word “discuss” fairly broadly here, since usually I’m the only one “talking”, and it’s not clear whether or not that counts as a discussion.

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I’m having difficulty coming up with a headline

Well, it’s Monday, 1-26-2026 (in the American ordering of dates), a sequence which is mildly but not very interesting because of the repeated “26”.  Now, come February 26th, writing the date in the more European fashion would be 26-02-2026, which will be almost palindromic, but not quite.  So that would be a sort of tease date, in a way.

None of it matters, of course.  Now, if there were a 62nd of February I would be somewhat tickled on that day.  Of course, in a way, you could say that the 3rd of April is the 62nd of February, if my math is correct.  I think that’s right.  Let’s see, there are 28 days in February (no more than that this year), then 31 days in March, which adds up to 59 days.  Then 3 more days will get you 62, so yeah, April 3rd.

Sorry, I know that’s probably terribly uninteresting to anyone but me.  A lot of things are like that.

I was able to get a decent night’s sleep on Saturday night by sedating myself with a combination of three (or so) different (legal and “over the counter”) medications.  Of course, I cannot do that on a weeknight or I will be useless the next day*.

Not to say that I’m particularly useful at any other time, but at least I can think with some clarity.  My emotions may tumble about‒though evidently they rarely if ever show on my face‒but at least I have a sharp mentality most of the time.  In fact, if I were able to bring myself into more durable focus, I think I could be more mentally acute than I’ve ever been in the past.

That’s because, although I’ve been through a lot of failures over time, I am at least always trying to learn, and I succeed in that quite often.  Whether or not I learn the things that are most interesting and/or most useful is another question.  But it’s hard to know for sure ahead of time what will be most useful to know, so it’s probably best to try to learn as much, about as many things, as well as you possibly can.

That’s probably as wise as I ever get.  Enjoy.

Let’s see, what else should I talk about?  I don’t know.  Is there anything you’re interested in discussing?  Do you have any questions for me that you would like answered**?

I suppose today I shall have to deal with the new format for entering the blog onto WordPress, which is somewhat irritating, because it is more difficult to read as I’m editing, and it is less user friendly.  I am at least half heartedly considering moving my blog to Substack (or something).  I have an account there, anyway, and quite a few of the people whose ideas interest me seem to publish there.

It’s a bit of a no-frills site, where you don’t make your page into a fancy-looking thing, you just publish your stuff, but it has its own sort of built-in social media thing where you can make the equivalent of tweets and respond to those of other people.  And, of course, it has a built-in capacity to set up paid subscriptions for people who want them, and one can choose which things are paywalled and which are not.

To be fair, WordPress has that capacity now, as well, but I’ve never seen it used nor looked too much into using it.  If any of my readers know about it and how it stacks up against other things, such as Patreon (and Substack) please let me know about your experience.  I would greatly appreciate it.

Of course, this is all pie in the sky thinking on my part.  I doubt that anyone cares either way, in any case.  And I don’t know if I’m going to crash and burn sometime in the near future.  I feel that the event is approaching rapidly, but I’ve felt that way often and for a long time, and yet against all odds (and certainly not by popular demand) I am still here.  I’m sort of like the world’s most verbose toenail fungus, in a way.

Anyway, I think this is enough for today.  Again, if any of you have experience with Substack, or with Patreon, or even with the subscription models on WordPress (this site is hosted through WordPress), I would appreciate your feedback.

In any case, I do hope that you have a good day.

*I will not, though, sleep more if I use this on weeknights‒I know this from bitter experience.  Something in my mind overrides even medication (within reason) and still wakes me up stupidly early on any day that I have anything to do, whether it’s work or laundry or what have you.  But the cumulative effects of pharmacological intervention nevertheless dull and slow my mind, so I feel worse very quickly.  Believe me, I’ve tried.

**I make no promise that I will answer just any question you might ask, but I will try to be forthcoming if I can.  I wouldn’t want to discourage someone who is taking an interest; such people are rare.

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Saturday.  Blog post.  Work.  Why am I doing this?

Okay, well, if we must, then let’s go.  I’ll try to write something that’s at least intelligible (which may or may not correlate with being intelligent) so that people won’t feel they’ve completely wasted their time reading my blog today-or hopefully any day that they read my blog, though I cannot guarantee that.

Obviously, as noted, I am working today, though I’m not happy about it.  I’m very tired.  I’m still well within my latest flare-up of my chronic pain, and I was so uncomfortable yesterday that I couldn’t even find any interest in eating comfort food to try to distract me.

The boss actually bought lunch for the office, but I didn’t really want what they were getting.  He offered to get me whatever I wanted, and told me to order from Uber Eats and he would pay me for it.  But nothing, not even ice cream or tacos or burgers or pizza or anything appealed to me.  So I didn’t have lunch.  I had some corn chips in the afternoon, but not very many, and I had a bit of bacon in the evening, because even when you’re not really interested in it, bacon is fairly tasty.

Anyway, this morning is already starting out annoyingly, and that’s not counting the fact that I am getting up to go to work on a Saturday after working Monday through Friday*.  Not that I was asleep.  I woke up more than two hours before I got up, partly because of pain, but also because of just my chronic insomnia/low grade feeling of lack of safety in the jungle at night.

To be clear, though I am living in a subtropical region, I do not actually sleep out in the jungle.  That’s just the feeling I have, that inability to rest and stay asleep, as if I might be attacked at any instant.

I won’t get into the specifics of what is so annoying.  It’s the sort of thing that would annoy pretty much anyone, though it is not life-threatening nor is it life-deranging, in and of itself.  It is, however, one more thing, another little weirdly heavy straw placed on the camel’s back, added to the already all but crippling pile.  Also, there seems to be some kind of fungus or caustic toxin in this pile of straw, because it itches and burns like nobody’s business**.  This is metaphorical, of course, but not far from reality.

Anyway, I don’t feel well.  I’m tired, I’m in pain, I’m exhausted but can’t sleep, and even the things that often tend to give me some degree of joy are not catching my attention.  I feel chaos and decay and dysfunction everywhere, in the world and in myself, and now even in the (paid!) service I use to post my blog.

I feel almost as if I’m sliding along on a zip line over a field of lava far below, and the rope on which I’m hanging is frayed and unraveling.  I can’t tell how long it will last.  Nor can I tell how far it is to my destination.

Maybe there is no destination.  Maybe the zip line just keeps going until the rope finally gives way.  Or maybe, at the far end, you just run out of rope and your zip line rig‒whatever the proper term for it is‒zips off the end, off the top of that final pole, and you go slinging into the lava anyway.

I certainly see nothing that gives me any indication of even any relatively pleasant end to the trip.  It’s just dangling over lava until I eventually fall in, the scent of sulfur and other foul odors rising up to entertain me along the way.  But I’m strapped to the zip line, and to get free prematurely would require unbuckling the harness or cutting the line or perhaps bouncing on it to increase the rate of fraying.  It can be done, but it is intimidating because of the damnable instincts baked into my hardware.

I’m so tired.  And I have no future to which to look forward.  I wish I could just find the courage to take my exit, to unbuckle from or cut the line.  I’m all alone here, anyway, so there’s no one depending on me‒other than the people at the office to a limited degree, I guess.  But one cannot stay alive merely to continue to do a job that one does merely to be able to stay alive.

It’s not as though anyone is anxiously awaiting my next book or my next song, and even the people who read my blog every time I write it are surely not eagerly awaiting it.  No one will be significantly bereft when I’m gone.  They can’t be, because no one is significantly in my presence.  For the most part, with respect to other people, I’m just a concept, a theoretical entity.  I’m not really a person someone could look at and spend time with and potentially touch (let alone help).  I’m an idea‒and not a cool one like the idea of Batman, as discussed in Batman Begins.  Thus, any idea anyone has of me now, they can still have after I die.

Don’t try idly to persuade me that this is not true.  The evidence is strongly against you, so convincing me otherwise is going to be a serious task.

I hope you have a good day, though.

*Oh, and now it turns out the WordPress has changed the way their classic editor works, making it less user-friendly, with a smaller and less clear type-face, so there’s yet another irritating thing, this one involving something with which I deal every single working day.  Perhaps this is a sign that I should just call this blog, and everything else, quits.  I don’t know if I can stand this anymore.  Living in this world is like rolling around naked in a field of nettles and brambles.

**That’s a peculiar expression, isn’t it, “like nobody’s business”?

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“I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.”

I’m going to try to keep this short today, because my energy level is petering out.  Although, ironically, depending upon one’s tendencies as a writer, it can take more effort to be brief than to ramble on*.  Still, my communication urge feels quite low.  I don’t think this will probably be all that long.

For the last several days, I’ve been striving to keep my discussions upbeat, though the topics I’ve chosen haven’t been as naturally uplifting as, say, sunflowers and hummingbirds**.  Still, for me they’ve been pretty positive (unlike the “time” component of the Pythagorean-style formula used to calculate the spacetime interval between two events).

But being positive is something that requires deliberate effort for me.  It’s not as much effort as is required for socializing in person, trying to be expressive, gregarious, and pleasant, but it is close.  And alcohol generally does not make it easier to be positive (in contrast to its helpful effects for socializing).

That’s probably good.  If alcohol were not such a very mixed and often unpleasant bag for me, I would probably be prone to have a problem with it.  As it is, its ill-effects almost always, and very quickly, overshadow its benefits.

I’ve had Valium™ I think twice or three times, all in medical circumstances, in my life, and that was revelatory.  Even though I had taken it for procedures such as wisdom teeth removal and cardiac catheterization (both happened when I was a teenager), its effects made me feel normal for maybe the only times in my life.

Normal is not necessarily better than abnormal, either practically or morally; it would probably be better to be an abnormally good and clever orc than to be a “normal” one.  But to feel at ease in one’s skin is a truly remarkable experience for someone who never has felt that way at any other time.

Maybe feeling at ease is not a good thing.  People don’t tend to accomplish much without at least a little tension and dissatisfaction.  I’ve written about the evolutionary inevitability of fear and pain before.  Well, for highly social mammals like humans, social anxiety can be a similarly inevitable tendency.  It can vary from person to person, of course, with some having it to such a degree that it becomes debilitating and some having too little, though what specifically appears as dysfunctional will depend on the overall circumstances.

Speaking of anxiety and pain, my own chronic pain has been flaring up severely for most of the last 48 hours, though I’m not sure what set it into overdrive.  Even if it’s merely some inherent cyclicity to the syndrome, there is still an underlying cause, or set of causes, as there is always a cause or causes for even the basic cycles in nature.  And if one can understand the causes of something, one has a far better chance to do something about them than if one does not.

There is not always a “why” to things, but there is always a “how” to everything that happens.  Telos (τέλος) is almost always misperceived, in the sense that it is almost always not even there (though there is a human bias to perceive it nearly everywhere, seemingly a byproduct of the human tendency, as social animals, to attempt always to read the intentions of others).  But it seems never to be utterly useless to look for ananke (ἀνάγκη) “force, constraint, necessity”.

I don’t know what I’m even getting at right now.  Probably, I’m not getting at anything, right?  I mean, think about what I just said about “how” versus “why”.  

Whatever.  I’m very tired, and not just physically‒except in the sense that everything that actually exists is physical‒but at a deep mental, one might say a “spiritual”, level.  Reality is too noisy and irritating and distracting and often disgusting.  I need some rest from it all, from everything, and probably even from myself.  If “need” is too extreme a word choice (after all, I can survive without it, so in some sense I do not need it) than I want it, and not just idly.

I crave rest from everything, I’m practically jonesing for it.  My metaphorical stomach is growling and my hands are shaking with hunger for it.  If I saw the prospect of a simple, painless, peaceful rest before me, I would probably drool.

Alas, I have merely the ongoing, ever-shifting flare-up of my always irritating chronic pain.  This doesn’t help my insomnia, of course, nor my depression.

And don’t even talk to me about my tinnitus and hearing difficulties.  No, seriously, don’t talk to me about them; I can’t hear you very well.  Just send me an email or a text or something.

Ha ha.  Okay, I guess I’m almost never grim and disheartened enough not to make stupid jokes.

Anyway, I hope you all have a better time than I’ve been having.  I think I’m going to be working tomorrow, and if I do, I will probably write a blog post.

*Thus the famous quote, attributed variously to Mark Twain or to Charles Dickens or to Pascal or even to Cicero:  “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

**The reality of which pair is probably more brutal than anything I could say about the irreversibility of time or the nature of stupidity.

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Minding primes and priming minds

It’s Monday the 19th of January (in 2026 CA or AD).  19 is a nice prime number, but it’s one people don’t think about very often.  Stephen King turned it into an “evil” number in his extended universe, which is much less obvious and predictable than using the unjustly maligned number 13.  I’ve always* liked that he did that.  It was clearly chosen at least partly because it was (and remains, and always will be) a prime number.  But it’s not an obvious one.  So, nice job King-sensei (not that he needs my moral support, though I would welcome such support from him).

I occasionally think about mailing Stephen King a copy of one of my books just on the off chance that he might read it some day when he’s bored.  If I were to develop the chutzpah to do such a thing, what do those of you who have read my stories think would be the best one to send him?

Take your time, and don’t be shy.  I’d love to hear from all…what, one of you?  Two?

I don’t think there could be three, but I could be wrong.

Returning to the topic of prime numbers, I had a cool thing happen on Friday:  I bought some stuff at the local convenience store, and my total was $19.07.  I looked at it for a moment and thought that it was a cool-seeming number.  I know 19 and 7 are both prime, and the digits don’t add up to a multiple of 3, nor is the total number a multiple of 4 or 5, obviously.  I wondered if it might be prime.

Back in the day, I would have had to check that more or less manually, but nowadays, I was able just to type into the search bar “Is 1907 prime?”

It is!  Or so claims Google.  If necessary, I could check it myself, by hand, though that would be laborious.  I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to write a quick computer program to check all the possible factors (among numbers less than 954**).  I doubt that I will do either thing, though.  I’m pretty confident in Google on this point.

And now, having said that, I’m starting to feel uncertain.  Could Google be wrong about this?  Am I really going to have to check for myself?

I remember when I realized I had never seen the Pythagorean Theorem proven mathematically (I grew up in a declining school system, sorry).  So, I had to prove it to myself to my own satisfaction, which I did.  Thankfully, it’s easier to prove something like that when the answer (so to speak) is well known.

Okay, enough numeracy, or whatever the best term for the preceding matters might be.

I did not work on Saturday, which is why I didn’t write a blog post on Saturday.  The office was open, but my coworker was able to come in, and the boss specifically told me to take the day off.  Apparently, my exhaustion really was beginning to show, even to other people, which seems not to be the usual case.

Of course, having one day of actual rest doesn’t cure my situation, but it is a minor respite.  I have more fundamental issues than mere rest or lack thereof, but I am not sure there is any way to fix them, at least not in practice.

In principle, of course, it must be possible at least to improve the settings in my brain‒tweak this set of synapses and adjust sensitivity to this or that neurotransmitter, increase (or decrease) the blood flow to this and that region of the brain, etc.  That sort of thing, done precisely and judiciously, could in principle correct or adjust any parameter of brain function one might want, in whatever ways lie within the realm of the brain’s potential.

We’re a long way from being able to carry out such manipulations, and it’s by no means certain that we will exist long enough for neuroscience to achieve such things.  But there’s no principle of nature that precludes it.

Of course, people might be quite leery of even researching such things, even when we finally know enough to do so.  After all, if we can adjust the brain specifically and precisely to make it less depressed or less anxious or less forgetful, we can adjust it in other ways, too.  One could adjust someone’s brain to make them fall in love with a particular other person, like the mythical old magic love potion.  I think most people would rather not fall in love that way (though there’s no reason to think such love would be any less delightful to experience than ordinary, clumsy, stochastic love such as what we have now).

Indeed, one could adjust human minds to make them happy, no matter what the circumstances.  Of course, this could well be used to dominate whole populations of people; one could keep them under constant control because they would be happy, and you could keep them motivated and loyal and satisfied with whatever their lot might be.  I think most people would find that notion repugnant, but it is at least somewhat morally ambiguous, because such people would be as legitimately happy as anyone who becomes happy “on their own”.  Indeed, they might well be happier than any person had ever been before, and more “well-adjusted”, and more creative, and more psychologically healthy.

I get near some of these concerns in my book(s) Unanimity:  Book 1 and Unanimity:  Book 2.  I wouldn’t say those specific ideas figure centrally, though matters of mind and free will and the nature of a person’s character and how it can be changed by physical events are a big part of it.  Also, all sorts of horrible things happen, since it is a horror novel.  And there’s a lot of room for all of it, since it’s as long (total) as the unabridged The Stand and It, to bring us back to Stephen King.

With that, I guess I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, I won’t already be exhausted by tomorrow.  I hope you have a good day.  And if any of you know Stephen King, please ask him which of my books he might think he would want to read.  I’d really appreciate it.

*Well, not always.  I didn’t like it before it happened or before I knew about it.

**Incidentally, 953, which is the rounded-down answer to 1907 divided by 2, is also a prime number.  That’s kind of nice.

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“The numbers don’t decide”

I don’t have any fun numerical trivia to notice about the numbers of the date today, which is Wednesday (1-14-2026), by the way.  It’s not that I’m saying there are no potential fun numerical comparisons or patterns or what have you in the numbers of the date today, just that there aren’t any that stuck out for me, which probably means that there aren’t any which I would think are fun.

Prime numbers and palindromic numbers are probably my favorites of these kinds of things.  But although the primes are considered the “atoms” of the number world by those who study such things specifically—I guess those would be number theorists—there are many situations in which there are no obvious prime numbers.  I suppose the same is true of actual atoms, come to think of it.  When was the last time you encountered a single, naked atom in the wild, so to speak?

Anyway, I’m not really interested in “talking” about that right now.  I’m not really all that interested in much of anything.  I know, I know, this is getting ridiculous, I keep writing one relatively upbeat or at least engaged* post, and then I turn somber and negative on the next one.  Well, rest assured, in case you weren’t already, I feel generally glum and somber during the day even on those days when I write posts in which I’m truly interested, like yesterday’s.  You just have the good fortune not to be around me.

Even among those who are around me, such as the people at work—actually, there’s no “such as”, these are the only people around me except on truly rare occasions—there’s probably not much of a clue as to my glumness.  Apparently, my moods and feelings don’t show on my face, even when I become aware of them consciously, which can tend to be rare (I appear to have a degree of alexithymia).

So, even when I feel that I’m not sure I can make it through the rest of a given day, let alone through any more significant time, no one seems to notice.  There are and have been people at the office who have dealt with drug and alcohol problems, legal issues, erratic life choices, sporadic attendance, stuff like that, and they get at least tacit moral support and even help; there are various resources in the community to assist them that are readily available, and our culture lionizes those who recover from drug problems, even as often as they might backslide.

I just have a dysfunctional brain, or so it seems, and the useful resources to help that (without insurance) are about as prevalent as icicles in Death Valley.  And unless you’ve truly gone down the tubes with those inherent mental health issues, no one gives seems to give you much moral support or encouragement, let alone congratulations, if you’re working on them.

By the way, speaking of drug problems, I was on constant opioids (including the dreaded fentanyl, the patch, in my case) for chronic pain for several years, .  I weaned myself off of them by myself, by my own choice, because I decided they were doing me more harm than good.  This is, of course, different from kicking an actual addiction—very different—but still, I have to try to find something about which I can brag.  Or wait, do I really have to do that?  Probably not.

I’m trying to do things to help myself mentally.  I’ve been reading a new (to me) book that deals with Adlerian psychology and philosophy, for instance.  So far it’s pretty good, but it’s not as insightful or useful (again, so far) as are things like Stoicism and Vipassana and the Tao Te Ching and so on.

I’m also trying to do more with brilliant dot org, which is a truly lovely app that can be used to study various STEM fields.  I did some problems on it in circuits yesterday—I had started that course months ago—but they are so far very basic.  There’s a lot of “drilling” on this app, but when it’s simple stuff it can get a bit tedious.  I guess that might be good.  Doing scales for piano practice is boring but very useful.

I want to get back into the math and science on the site.  I would love to complete every course they offer.  I would love to read every last bit of the textbooks and similar that I have in my mini-library at the office (I’ve added a few things since taking the latest picture).

I would love to learn everything that is learnable, to be honest, but to focus on the scientific before getting to things like literary and other criticism and such like.  As for political “science”, well…I think it’s probably still about at the stage of alchemy right now, and it may never get beyond that.

Unfortunately, my attention span is troublesome.  I get interested in one thing and/or idea and try to immerse myself in it, but then something distracts me soon enough, and some other interest draws me.  I do end up learning about a lot of esoteric subjects that way, though in bits and pieces**.  My ex-wife was always at least mildly annoyed by the number of books I had sitting on my bedside table, most either laid open or with numerous bookmarks.

Still, it would be good to do something until the “end” before moving on to the next thing.  At the very least, it would give me a sense of accomplishment.  I was doing that pretty well with my fiction, starting while I was a guest of the Florida DOC—I would finish a given book (or short story) completely, including editing and, once I was out, publishing before starting the next one.  This was a big deal, because my fiction writing used to suffer from the same issues of my scattered brain described above.

I have veered off that trajectory in recent years, alas.  I now have no fewer than three “begun” stories that I haven’t yet finished.  And no, I haven’t gotten any work done on any of them recently.  I’m too stressed out and worn out, and I am, at bottom, thoroughly alone here.  It’s really very difficult many days just to force myself to continue at all.  Also, disappointing and stupid events throughout the country and the world make that all the more difficult.

I hope you all are having a better time than I am.  I wish for you to be well, however useless such wishes may be.

P.S. Okay, well, if you look at (01-14-2026), you can make each of the digits of the year by adding digits of the month and date, without reusing any given month-date digit for any given year digit.  1 + 1 gives you the 2s, 0 gives you the 0, 4 + 1 + 1 gets you the 6.  That’s pretty lame though, even to me.

*I don’t know whether or not they are engaging posts (a phrase that sounds like an alternative expression for “hitching post”).

**Perhaps the fact that I seem to have to do things this way at least contributes to durability in my understanding, because I keep having to pick up where I left off months and even years ago.  Over time, I have gotten pretty good at being able to do that, and to be able very quickly, usually within the space of a paragraph or at most a page, to remember what was “going on” when I last was reading the book.  Yay, me.

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There’s an infinity that shapes our ends, despite having no end itself

It’s Friday now.  It will in fact be Friday now until midnight tonight, local time.  Indeed, one could argue it will be Friday now until finally midnight strikes at the international date line, when this Friday will finally be gone from the entire Earth, forever.  So, though as a matter of physics there is no universal “now”, and even for individuals, the “now” is an evanescent thing, a constantly moving and infinitesimal single frame of the movie of one’s existence, nevertheless that “now”, for me and for most others on Earth, will still be Friday for some time.

How many such “nows” are there, even for one individual?  Well, that depends a bit.  If the Planck time (5.39 x 10-44) is just an artifact of our lack of complete knowledge or ability to calculate, and time is truly continuous, then there is an uncountable infinity of such “nows” in any given day, or indeed in any given hour, or in any given second, or in any given picosecond, or indeed, in any given Planck time*.

Such is the nature of the uncountable infinity, as in the case of the real numbers:  between any two numbers, no matter how arbitrarily close you want to make them (as long as they are not identical) there is an uncountable infinity of numbers, larger than the number of possible quantum states in the visible universe, larger than the “countably” infinite number of integers.  In fact, that uncountable infinity between any two such real numbers is as large as the uncountable infinity of the set of real numbers itself, of which it is a subset.

Infinities are weird.  You need to be careful with them.  I doubt that contemplating them has actually driven anyone to madness‒though it’s easy enough to imagine that it might exacerbate depression‒but maybe minds somewhat prone to madness are more likely than others to contemplate infinities in the first place.  In any case, contemplating them can put other things into perspective.  For instance, no matter how arbitrarily large a number you might pick, it is just as far from infinity‒even the boring old “aleph nought” infinity‒as is the number one.

An interesting thing to contemplate is that, if you could pick a truly random number from, say, all positive integers, you would almost certainly get some number far huger than any number ever named or contemplated by humans, larger than a googolplex, larger than Graham’s number, larger than TREE(3), larger than the time required for a Poincare recurrence of the cosmos.  Graham’s number (for example) is big; the information required to state it precisely, if contained within the space equivalent to a human brain, would cause that space to collapse into a black hole!  But Graham’s number is nevertheless finite, and so there is a finite number of positive integers lower than Graham’s number but an infinite number of them larger than it.

It’s interesting to note the related fact that the chance of you randomly picking any particular integer is mathematically equivalent to zero‒so I’m told‒and yet you will pick some number.  Let that bake your noodle for a bit.

By the way, when I earlier compared the moments between two points in a continuous time stream to the number of possible quantum states in the visible universe, I was being a bit contradictory.  After all, our designation of the maximum number of possible states in a given enclosed region of spacetime‒which is “equivalent” to the number of square Planck lengths (each such square being 1.6 x 10-35 meters, squared, or 2.6 x 10-70 square meters) in the surface area of a sphere surrounding such a region**‒is based on quantum mechanics, and thus implicitly entails time being only sensibly divisible down to the scale of the Planck time.  So comparing that to a continuous time is comparing two fundamentally incompatible realities.

Oh, incidentally, I’m writing this post on my smartphone today.  I just didn’t feel up to bringing the lapcom with me yesterday, and I didn’t expect to write any on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado today.  I did, however, have a bit of a thought, as I’m prone to do when conscious, whether I want to do it or not.

That thought was that, perhaps, I can try to write my blog posts in the evenings‒on the way back from work, say‒but set them up still to be published the following morning and work on fiction in the morning.  Writing fiction seems to give me a boost, mental health-wise, when I do it in the morning.  It’s quite ego syntonic, as they say, or at least it seems to be.  But I don’t really want to stop writing this blog.  Then I’d just be floating in the void all alone, writing fiction that I like but that almost no one else will ever read.  That is a discouraging thought.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll be writing a post (for) tomorrow, since I don’t think I’m going to be working tomorrow.  If I am, and if I cannot get out of it, I guess I will write a post, and it will likely be a grumpy one if it happens.  But I may start next week writing the following day’s blog post on the evening before and doing fiction in the morning.  One good aspect to writing fiction in the morning is that the initial writing and the editing process are separate.  I don’t have to edit what I write each day on that day, which I have to do with this blog.

We shall see what happens.

In closing, I leave you with this juxtaposition of two notions:

*If time is not sensibly divisible even in principle below the Planck time, then the maximum number of “nows” in a given day is just 24 hours divided by the Planck time, or about 1.6 x 1048 “nows”.

**See Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy calculations and the Holographic Principle.

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For the blog sees not itself, but by reflection, by some other things.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, of course, and so I began with my customary Thursday greeting, which takes some form of “Hello and good morning”.  I have occasionally varied the specifics of that a bit—at least once going so far as to write “Goodo and hell morning”—but it tends to stay the same.  Likewise, on Thursdays, I end my blog post with a farewell that I took from Tigger (not from the A. A. Milne stories but from the Disney adaptations):  TTFN, which stands for “Ta-ta for now”.

Anyone who has followed my blog for a while probably knows all this already.  Still, since I can at least have a little hope that maybe some new people will come to read my blog, it’s nice occasionally to let them know about some of the relatively consistent things I tend to do.

Speaking thereof, on Thursdays I also tend to title my blog with some quote from Shakespeare, altered to replace one of the words in the quote with some form of the word “blog”.  Sometimes I have to squeeze the word in pretty brutally, but other times it works really well.  Fortunately, Shakespeare had more quotable lines than pretty much anyone else or even any other relatively circumscribed collection of people, at least in English.

Now that we’re past that introduction of sorts, I should try to write about something more interesting.  I don’t know what that might be or whether I will succeed, but I will try.

I’m still not feeling very well, though I think I may be on an upward swing; I still have a bit of a sore throat and a bit of a cough and all that.  Also, my hearing is persistently hosed in the left ear as it has long been in the right*, with associated tinnitus.  I fear that may be permanent.  There’s not much to do about that.

Because of those issues, I’ve recently been avoiding using my earphones, so I haven’t listened to any podcasts, let alone audio books.  It’s possible I’ll avoid them for good, but I may return to them, or I may elect to go for headphones rather than insertable ear phones.  I prefer the wired kind to any possible wireless ear phones, partly because they tend to stay in place much better than free-floating little ear inserts, but more because they don’t have to be charged all the time.  It’s bad enough to have to keep recharging the stupid phone.

I really wish I could be less tense than I normally am without regressing into depression or having to rely on some manner of pharmaceutical.  I mean to try to get back into regular, daily (or more frequent) meditation.  I know that I’ve said—truthfully—that it often tends to make my depression flare when I start to meditate again, even as it truly helps my anxiety and the erratic, chaotic nature of my thoughts and emotions.  But perhaps I should just accept that and go with it.  I rarely find depression completely debilitating, though it is often life-threatening.  But that’s as may be.  Life is life-threatening.

But I do want to clarify my concentration back to earlier, better levels.  I’m full of ideas for things to do in my immediate future, such as meditating and working on my stories and adjusting my diet and walking more and learning more about all things, all that stuff.  They are good ideas.  But I almost always get distracted by some new thing from even a good preceding thing, much as I used to do when writing stories.

It’s been said that wisdom is the ability to follow the advice you would give yourself if you were someone else.  It’s not nearly as easy as it seems it ought to be.  That’s because humans—and humanoids—are still very much biological organisms with billions of years of potent evolutionary heritage that shapes the moment-to-moment states of the nervous system, rough hew them how we may.

But there are ways to have more control.  I used to do self-hypnotism/meditation every day, a couple of times a day, starting from when I was in junior high.  It was also starting at around that time that I began to do very well in school (to be fair, I was never a bad student, but my performance improved significantly after that).

Once I left that practice behind, becoming distracted by things like college and my soon-to-be-wife, I think my mental discipline and my ability to bring my mind to task as desired deteriorated.  I suppose it’s analogous to an athlete who stops exercising and gets out of shape.

But it’s possible to get back into shape, and the brain is more amenable to improvements—more “plastic” to use the biological/medical term—than are the muscles and connective tissues of the body; you’re never really too old to improve your mind until you’re dead.

So, I mean at least to try to get back into some habits that have been useful to me in the past.  And it cannot hurt to explore the reaches of my mind—though as I make clear in Outlaw’s Mind, this is not always guaranteed not to come with dangers.  Of course, that’s a fantasy/horror story, so there are occurrences in it that, as far as we know, cannot be encountered in real life.  But that doesn’t mean there are no dangers.  For instance, as I just pointed out, mediation sometimes triggers worsening depression for me, and that depression is dangerous (to me).

It’s not as though I’m doing great otherwise, however.  And though it is true to say “all improvement is change, but most possible change is not improvement”, there are situations in which one is in the negative so far that there may be a greater chance of improvement that deterioration.  If one does a “drunkard’s walk” with a barrier preventing motion in one direction, like a figurative large brick wall one cannot get through or around or over or under, and one is already near that wall, random motion is unlikely to get one much closer to it, but can readily take one farther away.

That’s a ham-handed metaphor, I guess, but I suspect you know what I mean.  I’ll try to keep you all posted on whatever I do and what effects those actions have.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*That sounds almost biblical, doesn’t it?

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“In an interstellar burst, I’m back…”

I wish that I could honestly tell you that the reason I didn’t post a post yesterday was because I had been working on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and so I decided to leave the blog dormant.  Alas, that was not the reason for my absence yesterday.  Instead, it was something far more prosaic:  I was out sick.  The cold I’d been fighting for days worsened, and I was very worn out after going to work Monday, and my voice was pretty rough, and I was coughing a bit, and, well…you know, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all that.

I’m not feeling a whole lot better today, to be fully forthcoming, but I need to do payroll, and of course, when I’m gone for a day or longer, things pile up that I take care of gradually most days, and it can be that much more overwhelming to catch up with everything.  I suppose none of it really matters much.  It probably wouldn’t matter very much if I didn’t do any of the things I do at work.

Also, honestly, I still haven’t been paid last week’s pay.  I think it’s probably just an oversight on my boss’s part because of the chaos of recent weeks.  It’s unlikely that it’s a deliberate tactic to make me want to go away.  Nevertheless, the irrational, paranoid part of me—the part that assumes everyone else will eventually come to hate me, since I hate myself, and I know me better than anyone else does—is hyper alert for possible hostility.

Anyway, I haven’t actually gotten much done on my return to DFandD.  It was only in the evening yesterday that I started rereading it, but I’ve only gotten as far as the point where the Desperado looks into the well and suddenly hears the sound of rushing water.  If you don’t know what I mean, that’s just because you haven’t read any of what I’ve put up for you to read of that story, though it’s been available for months and months.

I wonder if anyone (other than my sister) has actually read it or any other fiction I’ve posted here.  I don’t recall getting any (non-sibling) feedback on any of it.

Maybe that’s to do with the short attention spans we all seem to have now, thanks to the overabundance of easy-to-consume-without-much-mental-effort-media.  Not only do we have all the easily consumable content on YouTube, which at least includes some very high-quality material, but we have little snippet “shorts” and “reels” on almost all sites now that are often heavily manipulative, but which perforce do not contain much information.

And the algorithms that try to steer us to things that will keep us on-site, or to steer those things toward us, seem to have become rather clunky and ham-handed, and they now push us (or at least me) away from things that would have been useful and interesting toward just boring shit that’s often absurd or stupid or at least just vapid.

Probably the lack of feedback on my stories is just because my stories are not that interesting to many people, or at least not to the sort of people who come to read my blog; I may be selecting for a group of readers who prefer nonfiction to fantastical fiction.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?  I started this blog as a way to promote my fiction writing by having a point of interaction with potential readers of my fiction, to give them some ”inside information” if they were interested in it.  Iterations of Zero was supposed to be the separate blog where I talked about my interests or concerns or issues related to science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, or what have you.

Of course, the phenomenon of such things evolving and changing in ways unforeseen during their inception is not unusual, online or in life.  Just look at early Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes (or even Dilbert) comics compared to later ones.  But it’s frustrating to see, in real time as it were, things evolving away from usefulness, evolving toward senescence.  I suppose, in a way, that’s the story of almost everything that evolves—most changes in any RNA world that predated what we would call true life, for instance, were prone to make things less useful.  And by “useful” here I mean just “liable to make many and good copies of itself”.

One would like to imagine that human society, or at least human technology, would be less prone toward changes that make things worse, since it’s guided by actual minds, and in the case of technology, some of these minds are quite high-quality.

And I think, when the technology was actual hardware and needed to compete against other hardware, the changes would tend to be good—not universally so, but pretty impressively so.  It was such technological advance guided by effective minds that led from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about 60 years.

However, computers have developed—and they have been prone to impressive improvement guided by some very fine minds indeed—and their products have become easier and more thoughtless to use, such that it required almost no mental skill or ability to interact with and consume those products.  And thus the tendency for things to head in good directions became less potent.

Even the finest associated minds, such as they are, don’t fully understand the specific inner workings of things like LLMs and other deep learning computer systems, which we loosely call AI.  And, of course, the computers don’t know how they work, either.  And the complex interactions of the millions and even billions of people who use social media every day and/or constantly is a complex system the dynamics of which can only be modeled for gross tendencies.  Chaos will always apply.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, other than that there seems to be no point, and that indeed there seem to be mostly anti-points, to so much of what happens in the world.  It’s terribly frustrating and pushes me toward full-on despair.  And I cannot seem to find interest in or derive joy from the things that used to make me at least temporarily joyous.  And that doesn’t really matter to anyone, to be honest.  Probably that’s appropriate.  I am probably not worth any effort from anyone at any level (though I would welcome it).

Or maybe I unconsciously drive people away, and that’s the problem.  Who knows?  I don’t.  And we can be sure that Socrates doesn’t and didn’t know, since reputedly the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and this marked him as the wisest person in the world.

As for me, I am not wise, or at least not very wise.  But I am about done, at least for today.  I feel almost done in general.  I’m very tired of going through these motions of pretending to be alive when really I am just a crude mockery of life.

As evidence of my mental stupidity:  When I wrote that last line, I could not help thinking of one of the female leads from Young Frankenstein singing, “Oh…crude mockery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

I hope you readers of my blog all have a good day, but that everyone who doesn’t read my blog has a bad day.  I don’t want them to have too bad a day—nothing tragic—but just enough for them to realize their mistake and come read my blog.