writing

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‘Tis all men’s office to speak patience to those that blog under the load of sorrow

Hello and good morning.

I’m back on the smartphone again today, so hopefully I can at least avoid going on and on and on like I did yesterday.  That ought to be easy enough, but apparently, it is not.  I don’t know why I get so “talkative” here all the time, but it doesn’t seem to be because I have anything important to say.

As I’ve noted before, typing on a QWERTY keyboard feels almost more natural than speaking to me (and I do it far more often now) but that’s definitely not true for using the smartphone, and it probably never will be.

For one thing, I haven’t stopped having arthralgia/tendinopathy in and around the bases of my thumbs related to such use.  It’s not severe discomfort, certainly not compared to my chronic pain, but it is there and it is annoying.  It seems, however, to interfere with playing guitar more than with using my smartphone (or anyone else’s, I would guess).

Yesterday, I wasn’t sure I wanted to play any, so I figured I’d give fate a hand in things.  I carry four dollar coins with me every day‒two Susan B. Anthonys and two Sacagaweas‒and I use them to help make decisions when I feel no particular pull in a given direction.  I also use them to clarify my own inclinations:  if I get a result and dislike it, I know that I really want to do the alternate thing.  I’m told that my son has adopted this sort of habit as well.

Anyway, I flipped all four coins and got a unanimous set of heads*, so I played guitar and sang some.  I did it somewhat reluctantly, but when all four ladies agree, I find it hard to ignore them.

It wasn’t anything fancy, I just mainly went through a series of songs I know by heart, plus I think I played through Desperado using the pdf I have of a printout of the chords.  There were a lot of twinges in both thumbs/wrists while I was playing, though.  Still, I’ve come to realize that I have a decent repertoire of songs that I can do off the cuff, so if I needed to do some busking, I could probably do it.

I also recently realized that the Radiohead song(s) Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2) ends with the same chord on which their song Fake Plastic Trees begins.  That was too funny a coincidence (given the subject matter/titles of the songs, especially), so I’ve taken to playing them as one combined song, a sort of mini-medley.

Several days ago, I even tried taking a video of me playing and singing (not those songs), using the desktop’s camera, and I discovered something:  if I ever do want to record myself doing music again, then I need a new microphone, probably more than one.  The sound quality was terrible, full of clipping and distortion and such.  Also, I need a new face, but that’s a separate matter.

I have also been working on learning Bach’s Two Part Invention number 13 for the guitar (mainly the right hand part so far‒the left hand had to be restranscribed and brought up an octave and I don’t enjoy it quite as much).  This has long been one of my favorite piano pieces to play, though I am way too rusty to play it now on a keyboard.  I used to like it so much that, whenever I was antsy, I would find a surface with an edge and “play” that Bach piece.  I guess I have always been a “stimmer”.

Anyway, all this crap isn’t really here or there, it’s just silly trivia that I’m spouting in lieu of having anything substantive to say.  I’m sorry if it’s boring or all over the place.  My mind has not been doing well lately, in case you haven’t noticed (or just haven’t read my blog lately).

I was just thinking recently about whether it would be workable for me to start going back to writing fiction maybe say two or three days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday for instance) and blogging only on the other days.  I don’t know if that would lose me readers on the blog or perhaps bring more people in, but it’s not as though I ever have more than a few dozen people coming to the blog in the first place.

Then again, no one’s exactly champing at the bit to read any of my fiction, either.  This is mainly just a self-indulgent, foolish exercise, a lab sample of concentrated futility.  Come to think of it, that could actually be said about pretty much my entire life since roughly 2013 (at the latest).  Trying to find any meaningfulness in my life since then is like wandering through the ruins of an ancient Egyptian city, looking for a 7-11.

Anyway, that’s enough of my stupidity for now.  Not that my stupidity will stop, but at least I won’t spew any more of it on you for the moment.  I hope you have a day that improves after you finish reading this; it’s unlikely to be much worse, right?

TTFN

*This is not terribly improbable; it will happen in one out of 2 to the 4th, or 1 in 16, runs of four coin flips.

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“With the lights out, it’s less dangerous”

Well, I’m writing today on the lapcom, not for any particular specific reason, but just because, as of yesterday afternoon when I was preparing to leave the office, the various strengths (or magnitudes) and directions of the vectors in my brain came together and produced enough impetus for me to pack and then carry the lapcom with me.  After that, there’s much less of an energy barrier in the way of actually writing using the lapcom in the morning.  If I have it with me, I prefer to write using the lapcom rather than the smartphone.

As for the subject/topic of this blog post, well…I don’t know.  I have no idea what to write or what to say, other than to say whatever comes out of my (figurative) mouth here.  I don’t know what I’m going to write ahead of the actual writing any more than you know what my next word will be before you read it.

I guess that’s how conversation happens in real life as well.  People (at least, neurotypical people) don’t tend to script their conversations.  They just start talking, and the process of talking is identical with (or at least part of) the process of forming the ideas in the first place.

You don’t think about that to say before you think and say it, nor do your think about what to think about and say before you think about thinking about and saying things.  One cannot in any literal sense fully plan ahead what one says or thinks, because it would imply an infinite regress.

No, most of the time, expressing one’s thoughts is the first circumstance in which one formulates those thoughts (though of course it might well not be the first time one has had the same or similar ones).  Ideas, and even memories, do not exist fully formed within the brain, as if on some SSD drive; they must be reformed every time they are brought up.

This is part of why memory in humans is so malleable.  All memories bring out not just information from the past, but also color it with whatever information is leading to the memory being recalled at a particular moment.  This feeds back on and can alter the memory over time.

The things that happen with neural nets/deep learning systems/LLMs is teaching us at least some things about how thoughts and minds work in non-linear ways, though it’s important not to draw too many or too literal parallels to actual brains.  For one thing, brains are vastly more efficient than any kind of software/hardware we have.

Though your brain is certainly the most energy-hungry portion of your body, using about 20% of all the calories you burn, this still is only about 20 watts or so.  That’s less than your typical lapcom uses, and far, far less than any LLM or similar system uses.

The brain is also more complex on many levels.  Synapses are not simple binary switches, like transistors; they are more or less continuously variable in the amount of neurotransmitter they release into a synapse, and the number of receptors in the receiving synapse, and the degree to which activation (or inhibition) of those receptors affects the functions of the postsynaptic neuron and how that interacts with other inputs and the basic metabolism and chemistry of the next level of nerve cells.

Those functions are also affected by hormones of various kinds, from peptides to steroid hormones to things like histamine and glutamate that are neurotransmitters and hormones and (some of them) even amino acids.

Then, of course, there are the inputs from the many and various “glial” cells, which are not neurons, but which “support” neurons in the brain, and which (among other things) create the myelin sheaths that allow nerve transmission to happen much more quickly in “white matter”, and so on.  These things can alter and tweak the “weights” in any particular neuron “node” in ways that are more complicated than the nodes and weights in neural nets.

And of course, the scale is daunting.  You have about a hundred billion neurons in your brain (give or take), and each one has connections with 1,000 to 10,000 other neurons, making the total number of synaptic connections in the brain on the order of a hundred trillion to a quadrillion.

Just imagine if every star in the Milky Way galaxy had some kind of hyperspace links to 1,000 to 10,000 other stars.  That would be a complex galactic network.  The brain is this scale of network.  And the synapses, again, are not binary switches like transistors, but are more or less continuously variable within a given range.  Likewise, the impulses traveling down an axon, though binary in a sense (each nerve impulse either happens or does not), actually vary continuously, because it’s the rate of impulses arriving that affects the release of neurotransmitters.  But it’s not the only thing that affects it.

Anyway, this is all interesting stuff, I guess.  Learning about neural nets is fascinating, and is yet another use of linear algebra, matrices and the like (which are also good for General Relativity).  And learning about how gradient descent works in machine learning and so on is interesting and thought-provoking (an amusing coincidence, not an irony).

I’m reading some things about this and trying to pick up on it, just for general understanding.  I doubt that I’ll ever do anything with any of it other than maybe “talk” about it here (which is nearly the only place I talk about much of anything).  But at least it’s interesting.

It’s futile, of course.  But nearly everything I do or have done is or has been futile.  And that’s not just on a cosmic scale, but on a human, day-to-day, interpersonal scale.  Almost all my efforts are either wasted or fully counter-productive.  This is the outcome of something like me trying to do and be good as much as he can; it just tends to be pointless or worse.

None of it matters, though.

Anyway, as often happens with the lapcom, I’ve written too much of nothing today, and that’s irritating to me.  I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to my readers.  At least, the rest of your day will probably be less annoying by comparison with this post, right?

Right?

I guess maybe it doesn’t really work that way.  It’s all just irritating, isn’t it?  It’s irritating that I don’t catch a terminal illness, some kind of deadly but not-too-quick infection or cancer or something.  It would be good to be able to have people know that I was dying, so that if anyone out there is mad enough to want to see me or greet me or say goodbye to me before I die, they could.  I think I would appreciate that.

Odds are, though, I’ll just disappear and be gone someday, perhaps very soon, and almost no one in the world will notice.  Those who do notice will only do so vaguely, because there is practically no one to whom my life is integral or even very strongly connected.  I’m just background static for the most part.  When I go, it will just be good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.  There’s really no sensibly available better alternative of which I am able to avail myself.

As Kurt Cobain sang, “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”  He had some good ideas, did Cobain-sensei, and he carried them out.

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Sleep! Sleep like your life depended on it!

Well, it’s Friday, and it’s a slightly fun date to write out:  6-26-2026 or (slightly more fun) 6-26-26 or, in the European way, 26-6-2026 or 26-6-26 (which sounds a bit like a quarterback calling plays in American football, which is slightly ironic for the European format).

I’m writing this post on the lapcom, by the way, because I decided I didn’t want to let an entire week go by without using it, and it just feels better, more “natural” for me to write with it.

I wonder how many words I’ve written on this mini lapcom or one nearly identical to it.  Unanimity (books 1 and 2) was more than half a million words just by itself, and I don’t know how many words I’ve written in all my blog posts that I’ve done on one or another mini lapcom.  I suppose I could figure it out, but it seems like tedious work.  If anyone wants to check it for themselves, you can try, but don’t ask for access to my smartphone or lapcom.

I have a small bit of what is, for me, momentous news:  I slept almost five and a half hours last night!  That was more or less uninterrupted sleep, as far as I know.  If I woke up during the night, I don’t remember it, and I certainly needed to rush to the euphemism as if I had not gotten up during the night.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s the most sleep—certainly the longest uninterrupted sleep—that I’ve had in a long, long time without significant use of things that make me sleepy*, like Benadryl®.  However, though I have tried to use the aforementioned antihistamine on non-weekend days in the past, I’ve learned that it actually does me more harm than good the next day if I need to work.

The hangover/persistent effects of that stuff make me slow and stupid (even more so than usual!) and I don’t feel mentally very rested after it.  This makes sense, neurologically, given that sleep is not merely a lack of consciousness but a very involved, active, and utterly crucial** process we still understand only somewhat, and almost all sedatives disrupt it.

I have some hypotheses about why last night’s exceptional sleep happened.  Of course, it could well be just a random outlier—they happen if you wait long enough in pretty much all intrinsically variable systems that produce bell-curve distributions of outcomes—but there are a few contenders for possible, more causal, reasons.

I am always trying various things to see if they improve my health, my sleep, my pain, my mood, etc.  I don’t tend to be as scientific as I would prefer to be about such things, alas.  I tend to be in a constant state of low-level desperation (rather like the “low-flying panic attack” in Radiohead’s Burn the Witch), because I feel so uncomfortable in so many ways so much of the time, and so it’s all but impossible not to try as many things as one can try at any given time.

When you have a bad itch in the middle of your back that you cannot reach directly, and there is no one around to help, you can probably be pretty clever (and desperate) in how you’ll scratch that itch.  Well, itches are a kind of pain—they’re mediated similarly but not identically in the nervous system—they’re just a low-level kind.  That’s part of why scratching works to provide temporary relief:  the local receptors get drowned out by the surrounding inputs.

Now, if itching in your back can be so impossible to ignore that it drives you to scramble madly for a pencil or the corner of a wall or a tree trunk or whatever, no matter what you’re doing—and yet it can be countered by just locally running your fingernails over the surrounding area—well, just think how much more difficult it is to ignore a serious, deep and persistent pain, as well as general, persistent (largely social) anxiety, and depression.  Even when it’s been going on for years, for decades, the very hardware of your nervous system does not let you simply ignore it.

So, yeah, I’m cautiously glad about my night’s sleep.  I don’t want to get too excited.  It may not ever happen again.  What follows the vast majority of outliers in statistical distributions is a subsequent regression toward the mean.  This applies not just to good outliers but also to bad ones, though, so it’s not all bleak.

Anyway, maybe I’ll sleep well this weekend.  I’ll certainly sleep longer, because notwithstanding my above admissions about the drawbacks of antihistamines, it’s nice to be unconscious and physically resting for longer than usual, if the consequences are not significant.  So, long live diphenhydramine (so to speak).

I will not be working this weekend, so I don’t expect to produce another blog post before Monday.  I hope you all have a good weekend.

*It does make me sleepy—very much so.  I found that out the first time I had to take it in response to an attack of hives I got (apparently) from using Irish Spring™ soap.

**How crucial?  As far as we can tell, every animal with a nervous system needs to sleep a significant portion of its time.  This includes aquatic and marine mammals and reptiles, a fact that engenders some amazing adaptive creativity, such as creatures sleeping in one half of their brains at a time.  Evolution may be the true blind, idiot god, but it has a lot of time (much of it in parallel to itself) to explore innovation-space, and it does produce some amazing things.  But it does not seem able to select for simply not sleeping in any creature.  But sleep makes an animal vulnerable, tremendously so.  So, it must be really crucial—life and death crucial—for there to be no yet-discovered alternative.

 

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Cool it with a baboon’s blog, then the charm is firm and good

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 25th of June.  This means we are at the more or less exact temporal antipode of Christmas, which was six months ago and will be six months from now.  Does that imply that we might all be feeling the “anti-Christmas spirit”?

Maybe the cycle acts something like a half-integer spin quantum entity, such as electron, and it takes two full rotations to bring it back to its initial state.  Or, rather, it could be like a spin 2 particle (e.g., the hypothetical graviton), rotating ½ times and being the same as where it started.

No, I guess it really seems like just a spin 1 particle, where half a rotation leaves it 180 degrees (or pi radians) different.  So:  Merry Anti-Christmas (you filthy animals).

I know, that’s rather silly.  But that’s okay, so was Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Mind you, they were much funnier than I am.  That’s no real shame on me, though.  It’s rather like saying that the Beatles were much better song-writers overall than I am.  It’s true, but it’s also true of nearly everyone else in the world (that the Beatles were better song-writers than they are, or that Monty Python was funnier than they are, not that they are funnier or better song-writers than I am).

I’m also not as accomplished a scientist as Newton or Darwin or Einstein or as good a mathematician as Noether or Ramanujan or Euler.  This is nothing about which I (or you) should feel ashamed.  These are among the finest minds the world has yet produced.

On the other hand, none of them has a publication credit in the scientific journal Mycoses, do they?  No, they do not.  But I do.

Also, I have literally and directly saved people’s lives and helped ease and even prevent their suffering, whereas I don’t know that any of the above people ever did that, not directly* anyway.  So, neener neener neener!

Oh, by the way‒or by the by, or by Grabthar’s** hammer and by the suns of Worvan‒I have written all my posts this week so far on the smartphone, not on the lapcom.  And I am trying very hard to avoid writing too long a post.  I have seen that I can really write a lot with either the lapcom or the smartphone, though it’s easier in a sense to do so on the lapcom; it’s also easier and quicker for me to lose track of how much I have written thereon.

Oh, and another “by the fill-in-the-blank”:  I wanted to point out that yesterday’s voice recording thing was recorded using my smartphone, not any kind of fancy mic (those are fancy mics on smartphones, really, but not in a pertinent way), so unfortunately, it’s hard to keep breath sounds out of it.  And the tunnel kind of sound is probably because I (injudiciously, it seems) added a wee bit of reverb in post, to try to counter the flatness produced by the “noise reduction” function.  Sorry about that.

I tried a goofy little thing on the phone yesterday (speaking of such things) where I took a brief video, but with a thin cloth over the camera, so it was a video that was really just audio, but in principle it could have been uploaded without trouble directly to YouTube, etc., but no one would need to see me.

I don’t really like my face, so I don’t like to have to see it, let alone to inflict it on the world.  If you look at my relatively sparse YouTube videos, you’ll see that even when my face is shown, I usually try to cover it at least partially.

The exceptions, I guess, are the music-playing videos, but in those it just wouldn’t make as much sense to cover my face, since my singing would probably suffer.  Though, who knows, maybe I could become famous as a performer who always wears a mask and sunglasses.  M F Doom wore a mask.  Daft Punk wore their weird space uniforms.

This subject calls to mind the fact that yesterday evening I received a package from my sister.  It contained, among other things, some old stuff of mine, including a big print of my high school senior picture, which I didn’t know still existed.  I didn’t think to get a picture or a scan of it before writing this, but maybe I’ll do so later, so you can see it and I can learn if you agree that I resemble a certain character (not the hero) from a very popular movie franchise.

Anyway, as one of the spirits summoned by the three wyrd sisters said in Macbeth, “Dismiss me.  Enough.”

Tyler:  This conversation…

Narrator:  This conversation…

Tyler:  …is over.

Narrator:  …is over.

TTFN

*Of course, their various contributions have shaped all of modern science, and thus technology, and have thus indirectly saved many lives and relieved much suffering, far more than my little, localized efforts have done.  Still, let me throw myself a bone, okay?

**I initially wrote, going from memory, “by Frothgar’s hammer”, but then I realized that was a slightly bastardized name from Beowulf, i.e., Hrothgar, the Danish “king” whom Beowulf rescues from the depredations of Grendel, not the line from Galaxy Quest.

 

[Aside:  it would be cool if someone made a simulated spin-½ coin, with inertial sensors within and LCD faces, so that it could start, say, at heads, flip once and be intermediate, flip twice and be tails, flip three times and be oppositely intermediate, and flip a fourth time to come back to heads!]

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This is today’s blog post.  There are many others like it, but this one is today’s.

I have no real idea what to write about, so I just picked an opening line (which has now become the first sentence of the headline) and then waited to see what would happen.  That led me to think of a series of lines from a movie showing men in boot camp or basic training.  It was not, I think, the chant from Full Metal Jacket that came to my mind; I think that one went, “This is my rifle, this is my gun.  This one’s for killing.  This one’s for fun.”  The latter is somewhat funny, but the one I recall was much more serious about the subject, i.e., “This is my rifle.  There are many others like it, but this one is mine.”

It was something like that, anyway.  If anyone reading recognizes the line (or the correct line, as the case may be) please do chime in in the comments below.  Or, if you can recall any related, interesting, and similar quotes, that would be welcome, too.  Heck, just feel free to make a comment about whatever.

Parenthetical:  the thing that bothered me most about Full Metal Jacket was probably that they called their drill sergeant “sir”.  You don’t call NCOs “sir”, they work for a living!  Forrest Gump got that right.

As you can probably tell, this post is very much stream of consciousness style, probably more so than most.  Of course, that’s the way my blog posts almost always manifest themselves.  In fact “stream of consciousness” sometimes seems entirely too tame a term in general.  I think it’s usually much more of a serious river of consciousness, one that runs deep, and which is cloudy with silt and other contaminants, with way more going on below the surface than can be discerned from above and outside‒or even from the privileged place of being that surface layer consciousness.

I was tempted just now to refer to someone swimming on the surface as representing the person whose consciousness is described by the river.  But that’s not a good metaphor for consciousness, because it implies that consciousness is somehow separate from the flow of the rest of the mind‒only watching the game, controlling it*, as it were‒when in fact a person’s consciousness is that surface, that visible, barely more than two-dimensional, portion of the top of a river that dwarfs the Mississippi or the Nile or the Amazon or the River effing Styx.

Or, to use Sam Harris’s storm metaphor from his excellent book Free Will, “You are not controlling the storm, and you are you lost in it.  You are the storm.” (Emphasis added).

Back to the river analogy.

The river of consciousness is not always smoothly flowing, as I think you would agree. There are places where it goes into one of those river-lakes where the flow can be very slow.  But then there are also terrifying rapids, where all is turbulent and chaotic and perilous for anyone trying to ride it out (my readers may be able to sympathize) as well as for the mind itself.  There may even be waterfalls, though I’m not sure what situation that would metaphorically describe‒perhaps a mental breakdown?  Oh, well, metaphors (like similes) are always imperfect.  The only thing exactly like a thing is the thing itself.

I guess that’s pretty obvious.

Drat!  I realized while writing this that I forgot to share audio that I mentioned earlier this week.  I’ve set it to auto-publish today, so I don’t have to worry about that same thing happening again, but I am not going to do it at the same time as this post.  I don’t want to oversaturate the “market” for my thoughts, such as it is.

I just now erased a pointless digression about floods and a river again, relating to the immediately preceding sentence.  I really do seem to go all over the place, don’t I?  I guess that’s just one of those things that happens with some people.

I don’t mean to imply thereby that it is an unsolvable mystery.  There is an underlying causality, a system of interactions, that properly explains everything that happens regarding such streams of consciousness, but it is so involved that‒even if we can ignore quantum mechanics at the level of neural interactions, which we probably can do‒we are a loooong way from understanding it fully.

And, of course, a mind can never fully “understand” itself, because it cannot perfectly model itself within itself (see Elessar’s Conjecture) except to the extent of simply being itself.  And simply being a mind clearly does not imply that one understands oneself.  In fact, it is, I suspect, an absolute, mathematical law that no mind can ever fully and completely understand itself.  Again, see Elessar’s Conjecture.

Okay, that’s enough of this for now.  I’m sure I could gabble on and on and on for hours‒and it’s not as though my thoughts stop meandering, like that restless wind inside a letterbox, after I stop writing.  But you all don’t need to deal with that.  How nice for you.

Seriously, though, I hope you all have a good day.

*To quote One Night in Bangkok, one of the most unpredictable hit songs ever, in my opinion.  I mean it’s a white guy rapping about a chess tournament in Thailand in a musical about chess, called…Chess.

[I thought of a very stupid and sophomoric joke, inspired by a typo I made while editing.  Mamifestation:  when breasts are suddenly and unexpectedly revealed.]

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Summertime, and the living is…

Well, it’s Monday‒one day after the Summer Solstice, and thus the 2nd day of official summer‒and here I am writing another blog post.

It’s funny how weird the perception of time can be.  Why, it seems like just yesterday that I was writing my abnormally long blog post from Saturday, when in fact it was a full two days ago.  Weird, huh?

All joking aside, it was quite a long post that I wrote on Saturday.  I wonder if anyone actually read the whole thing.  I mean, I read it, course; I wrote and then edited it, after all.  I don’t remember it all that well right now, but that’s because I wrote it down and I know where I can find it if I want to revisit it.

Working memory and narrative memory and all that are useful, powerful attributes of human minds, and my own copy of both of those systems is better than those of the majority of people I have encountered.  But I do still have fundamentally limited internal memory, so there’s no need to clutter my hard drive with the contents of all of my blog posts.  I know where I can find them, in general.

Though this triggers a thought that I’ve had before:  I was thinking of doing some audio recordings of me reading some of my blog posts and sharing the audio here and as videos on YouTube.  What do you think?  I would love to hear input from any long term (or short term) readers as to which posts they might nominate for such a treatment.

Oh, yeah, in the latter part of last week I did a voice recording, this time about AI as an attribute-weakener for humans.  It’s somewhat related to what I said recently about humans becoming‒in what is nearly the best case possible scenario‒the “pets” of future AI.  Anyway, it’s pretty short, so I’ll probably edit it rather quickly and share it here and maybe do a “video”.

The annoying thing is, it ought to be quick and easy to use Microsoft’s basic video editor just to add a picture to the audio for the video, but now they have it where you need to sign in to your Microsoft account to use the program.  That means mucking about with accounts on the work computer, and that’s stressful.  So, I don’t know.  I’ll try to think of some other solution.

Speaking of solutions and things not necessarily working the way they ought to work, my smartphone‒on which, by the way, I am writing this post‒is starting to be a bit laggy and somewhat herky-jerky* in its operations.  It may be that it just needs a restart‒I haven’t done that in a while, because it consistently slips my mind.

On the other hand, the phone has a finite time of operation, meaning it will eventually stop working, as will all things that are not constantly maintained (and even they will almost certainly all fail eventually).  At that point, I would need to get a new smartphone.

I really hoped not to need to do that ever again.  It’s such a pain.  I really hoped that I would not live long enough to need to get a new smartphone.  I had various intentions regarding that, but so far they have not yet come to fruition‒as witness, the fact that I am writing this blog post.

I’m certainly feeling much less verbose right now than I was on Saturday morning.  I don’t know what circumstances and local forces are behind that, but of course, I’m pretty darn sure that there are good explanations available.  It’s just hard to gather and trace all the innumerable threads of the web of causality even for the tiniest of behaviors in any given moment or event.  I’m no Laplace’s demon (nor is anyone or anything else, as far as I can see).  All I can say for sure is that all of those events lie in the past light cone of the event itself.

Okay, well, this is getting to feel tedious to me, though I don’t know how it is for you, so I’m going to wrap it up and leave this blog post near the left end of the bell curve for word length of posts, whereas Saturday’s was nearer the right end**.

I hope you all have a good day and a good remainder of the week.

*Please excuse the technical jargon.

**That tail of the curve can’t really go off toward infinity, even if a mathematical description of such a curve does, because I cannot actually write an infinite number of words…though I fear sometimes it might feel that way to my readers.  On the other end, the low end of the curve cannot get below zero, since a blog post with a negative number of words is like a house whose rooms have negative lengths and widths.

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I’m back, but not to save the universe

It’s Friday now and I’m writing this post on the lapcom*.  According to the list of my saved blog posts that auto-fills as I write in the new file name, I wrote a post using the lapcom on this date last year, though that was a Thursday and this is a Friday.  That day mismatch by one is the sort of thing that tends to happen, since the “normal” year is 365 days, which gives 52 with a remainder of 1 if you divide it by 7 (the number of days in a week, in case that was unclear).

That’s a bit interesting (though only just) because of my tendency in recent time to write mostly on my smartphone; it’s relatively uncommon for the same dates to appear on the smartphone’s saved list two years in a row.  I think my smartphone-writing tendency was well in place since at least last year, but I am far from sure.  I have not been keeping track of that development precisely over time, so I’d be building my impression de novo if I were trying to recall the specifics.

Of course, I could just look through my list of “blog post for x-x-xxxx Xday” from the last years, sorted by date, and I would see how many posts I wrote on the lapcom in 2025 versus the number I wrote on the smartphone, which are saved to Google Drive.  That’s not exactly a difficult task, but it’s also not very interesting, so I don’t intend to do it.

I’m sure it’s also not very interesting for you all to read about, presumably**, so I’ll drop that topic now.

I did not write a post yesterday, in case you were wondering, because I did not go to work.  I was not “ill” in the sense of having a contagious disease; rather, I was in very severe pain and the meds I was taking to try to combat it were making me feel physically ill at various levels, so I tried to stay back at the house and rest.

It’s not very comfortable there, and I don’t especially like being there, but at least I don’t have to try to do work while feeling crappy, and I can lie down to rest my back and try to nap a bit.  I can also try to pass time doing some distracting things, though nothing really entertains me or even catches much of my interest anymore.  I’m just passing time all the time.

I haven’t played guitar or keyboard (nor sang) in over a week, maybe almost two weeks.  My left hand fingertip calluses haven’t significantly faded, but if this goes on too long, they will.  Of course, guitar calluses aren’t as impressive as cello-related ones, which I had for probably nearly twenty years back in the day.  Sometimes you could see those without even having to look too closely.

My cello calluses are long gone—though there’s a “ship of Theseus” style question of whether one should consider my current calluses to be anything but the same ones, or on the other hand (no pun intended) if one can consider any calluses the same ones over time, since the skin cells turn over and so do the very atoms in the underlying living cells.

It doesn’t matter, but sometimes such philosophical questions can stimulate thought and train one to be careful and rigorous in the way one thinks, and so perhaps make one less prone to certain kinds of mental errors.  They are probably worth your time if you’re interested.

Anyway, I’m going to work today, and I should also be working tomorrow, so you’ll get probably five posts this week, at least, though not contiguously.  You also won’t be getting one of my altered Shakespeare quote headlines.  I do those on Thursdays, out of a sense of…nostalgia, I guess, for the times when my blog was only posted on Thursdays, and was meant as a promotion/author’s note on what was going on with my fiction writing.  I’m not doing any fiction writing now—and I don’t just mean “at this very moment” because that’s all too obvious—and I don’t know whether I will ever again, any more than whether I’ll ever sing or play an instrument or anything like that again.

Oh, but I did come up with and write down a rather silly story idea yesterday, for the first time in a while.  It concerned the expression “time flies when you’re having fun”, but takes the point of view that “time flies” could be some form of supernatural insect.  The main character could be someone who is cursed such that, whenever he was becoming joyful or satisfied with his life, these supernatural insects would begin to swarm him and eventually transport him through time to some random place whence he’d have to start all over.

It’s a goofy notion, I know.

I actually prefer the idea I had apparently written down most recently before that.  It concerned a scientist who invents a truth serum or device or combination thereof that makes a person under its influence always tell the truth—even truths that they did not know before.  For instance, you can ask them what the weather is like in Kuala Lumpur at the moment and they will tell you and it will be correct, even if they are in Jakarta or Tannu Tuva or Massachusetts or Poughkeepsie or some other entertainingly named place.

But the more rarefied the information is, the greater toll it takes on the mind being questioned.  I proposed the possibility of asking someone what the next day’s winning lottery numbers would be, but the sheer improbability of specific answers and the fact that they are in the future overstrains and severely damages the brain of the person involved.  But they would get the numbers right if they survived the process.  I wonder what might come of such an invention.

I am not, by the way, giving anyone permission to use those ideas by sharing them here.  You do not have permission, and I might well be inclined to bring down truly horrific vengeance upon you if you steal them in any sense.  However, if I should die without ever writing either story, then after that, you should feel absolutely free to use them.  You don’t even have to give me credit; I’ll be dead, I won’t care (though the present person I am thinks it pleasant to imagine being given such credit, so do with that what you will).

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  As I said, I expect to write a post tomorrow, barring (as always) the unforeseen***.  I hope you all have a good day today, and that you have a good weekend and so on.  Heck, carry that forward as far as you can.

*I wrote Tuesday’s post on the smartphone, by the way, for those who took up my challenge to try to see if they could tell whether that had been the case or I had written on my lapcom.

**Though we must be careful with such presumption, because as we all know, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”.  In the past, being a “pres” could have been a good thing, at least to some degree, but that time is gone.  Nowadays, I’d rather assume than presume, since I’m often an ass entirely on my own, anyway.

***I tried to find a pithy Latin phrase that would encapsulate that expression, since I use it so often—you know, something like ceteris paribus for “all other things being equal”—but the attempts I have made so far produced cumbersome phrases that didn’t quite truly mean what I had intended when I reversed the translation process.  Alas.

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Since “Evian” is “naive” spelled backwards, are its drinkers wise and sophisticated?

(This post has nothing to do with the headline, just in case you’re wondering.)

I’m not quite ready to reveal the truth about yesterday’s blog post; I’m kind of hoping that someone who doesn’t usually comment might throw their hat into the ring* and make a guess.  I don’t know who such a person might be, but it would be nice to have ever more comments.

For this post, though, I will reveal that it is being written on my smartphone.  I didn’t bring along the lapcom because I was very fatigued by the end of the day yesterday.  This was mainly mental fatigue, but that translates into low physical energy as well, since it’s the functions of the brain that largely determine the movement of the body.

Which is not meant to imply that the brain is not part of the body; it very much is.  I am no dualist in any sense of the word.  The brain is an organ, and like all other organs, it has its attributes and vulnerabilities and dysfunctions.  Trust me on that last score.

Or don’t trust me, that’s entirely up to you.  I wouldn’t be inclined to try to cajole someone into trusting me.  I’m not a huge fan of presumptive trust anymore than of giving someone presumptive “respect”.  To me, respect, like trust, has to be earned, through the outcomes of interactions, and it can never really, reasonably, be complete.

Everything is always a calculated risk, including trust, even if the calculations are…not very rigorous or conscious, and even if people claim to have it absolutely.  Those who make such claims are wrong or lying or both.  One cannot even trust oneself absolutely.  Trust me on that.  Ha ha.

Anyway…

That’s just some typical nonsense or bullshit or whatever you want to call it from me.  I don’t have any intention here‒not one of which I am aware‒other than just “to write another blog post”.  How’s that for a positive, beneficial purpose or undertaking?  How’s that for something to try to give oneself a sense of purpose or meaning or belonging?  It’s pretty unimpressive, really.

As for belonging, in particular, it’s a fairly laughable notion for me.  I don’t belong anywhere.  Maybe no one does.  Maybe the very notion of “belonging” in the social sense is and has always been a cognitive and emotional illusion.

Like individual atoms that exist within water molecules in the ocean, a person can technically be part of something bigger without any actual real involvement in that bigger thing, and without losing any nature of separateness.

Any electron in the outer portion of any atom, or anywhere else, is just an electron and‒barring highly energetic interactions‒is going to remain an electron** forever, as far as we can tell.  And it is literally identical in characteristics to every other electron that exists, and they are all entirely fungible, just like the individual cents in your electronically recorded and maintained bank account.

Of course, people, despite being composed of countless numbers of such tiny, fungible particles, are not fungible.  They are too complicated, there are too many ways to put electrons and quarks together to make a person for any two to have even a nanoscopically tiny chance to be identical in all pertinent senses.

Okay, I don’t know what point, if any, I’m trying to make here.  Probably there is none.  Or if there is, it is probably some desperate, quietly terrified attempt to connect somehow with some kindred spirit(s) somewhere.  However, I am getting weirder and weirder all the time, or so it seems to me, so it seems ever more unlikely that kindred spirits exist for me, if they ever did.

Like Melkor, I’m looking to find something or someone in the Void, but alas, it is just…void.  And my thoughts continue to be unlike those of my brethren, and, like Melkor, I become ever more dispirited and spiteful, though at least I’m not trying to conquer or destroy Arda.  I went through that phase back when I was a preteen and teenager.

I’m not saying I was necessarily wrong when I recognized that people are absolutely shit at trying to create and run civilization well.  I just don’t think it’s probably worth the effort to correct things, because it would be a neverending effort.

Oh, well.  That’s enough of my spewing words for the moment.  There seem to be brush fires down in south Florida‒we can all smell the smoke‒but it seems unlikely that they will contribute much to the destruction of current human society.

Is that good?  Is it bad?

I don’t know.

I hope you have a good day.

*Would such a hat become invisible?  Would it, if it were strong enough, gain the power to sense and dominate the wearers of all the other rings?  Would it inevitably become evil?

**The same cannot be said for muons, let alone taus, the two higher mass “species” in the electron family.  They are unstable and rapidly decay to smaller particles, but they have the same charge and spin as an electron.  Electrons, on the other hand, appear to be at some manner of ground state; they are too “light” to decay into anything smaller spontaneously, and any changes they do undergo cannot violate the conservation of charge, so they are limited.

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He reads the post with just his fist and still believes he gets the gist

Well, I said yesterday that there would be roughly a 50/50 chance whether today I would write on the lapcom or on the smartphone, and guess what:  today I am writing this either on the lapcom or on the smartphone!  How’s that for an accurate prediction?

But wait.  Which one am I using?  Can you tell just by reading this post?  Are you sure?

Of course, I know which one I’m using.  It would be most ‘passing strange if I did not know whether I am writing this on my lapcom or on my smartphone.

Is there a way for you, the reader, to tell?  Probably.  Almost certainly.

But do you know what that way is and how to apply it?  I doubt it very much.

That’s not an insult, by the way; I don’t know what it is or how to apply it, either.  I’m just pretty sure there is such a way.

Of course, from my own point of view, the metaphorical wavefunction has already collapsed, and there is only one possible remaining outcome, whereas before there were (at least) two.

I say “metaphorical wavefunction”, invoking the quantum mechanical notion of the collapse of previously superposed quantum states into one final state, but there are good reasons for us to doubt that notion’s accuracy even within quantum mechanics.  After all, it would be the only known physical process in the universe that is not time-reversible and which destroys information about prior states of reality.  That oughtta be a pretty big red flag for scientists.  It’s almost as bad as finding a process that seems to violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics*.

I find the Everettian approach to quantum foundations much more intuitive, personally.  That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more likely to be correct, but I think, I suspect, that it is.

Anyway, in the macroscopic world, the seemingly superposed possibilities that present themselves as we come to the point of a decision are not actual superpositions.  They are merely models we render in our minds of possible outcomes to try to improve our decisions.  In fact, in almost every case, it’s likely that the choice we make was “determined” ahead of time‒by the laws of physics, not by us.

I would guess that it was that way when Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics became so dominant despite its failings.  The problem is, Bohr and/or Heisenberg (I don’t recall which one) was by reputation exceptionally charismatic, and he was well able to ensure that his/their notion(s) became predominant, not because the ideas were more convincing, but because the people were (or the person was).

That’s not a good reason.

This is part of why I dislike the practice of public “debates” about controversial topics at pretty much any level.  When it becomes a contest in and of the moment, the “winner” of the debate is not necessarily the one with the best evidence and the most consistent and clear reasoning.  It is, often, the one more skilled at mere rhetoric, the better sophist, the one with the better ability to manipulate human cognitive biases, the one with the better speaking voice, the better looking one, the one who makes the best jokes (especially at the other’s expense).

This is not a good or reliable or useful way to measure empirical reality‒except that part of reality that tells us who is more superficially persuasive to Naked House Apes.

That’s part of why the court system in general is so bad:  the one who wins in court is not necessarily (or even probably) the one who is right, but rather the one who has the better lawyer with more resources.  This usually translates to “the one who happens to have more money.”  That’s not a good basis for any kind of system that refers to itself with the term “justice”.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?

Well, it would be nice if you could do your part toward at least improving these things in whatever way you might be able, especially if you are in any kind of influential position.  This here, this writing, is me doing at least some of my part, for whatever it’s worth.

In the meantime, I’d be interested to get your feedback:  do you think this post was written on the lapcom or on the smartphone?  Why do you think that?  Are those your real reasons?  Or are they the reasons you create‒some might say confabulate‒to justify a decision you made for reasons that are not clear to your conscious mind?

Please let me know in the comments.  And talk amongst yourselves there, too, if you like.

Also, please have a good day.

*This is not to say that it is impossible for net entropy to go down in a closed system.  It’s not only possible, but if you wait long enough, it’s going to happen somewhere, for the 2nd Law is statistical in character.  But for anything but the simplest situations, you’re going to have a wait for such an outcome.  Even if you’re just flipping 13 coins until you get all heads or all tails (or any other specific, ordered pattern you might want), then it’ll take a little while.  Getting all heads in a row (say) on 13 coins is a one in 8192 chance, if my mental arithmetic is right.  It would take some time, but you could pretty readily flip those 13 coins more than 8000 times, especially if you flip all 13 at once each time.  But anything much more involved than that (and just 2 more coins would require four times as many flips) becomes rapidly and astonishingly more unlikely.  If you’re waiting for any sensible region of, say, the Earth to experience spontaneously decreasing entropy, you’re going to be waiting such a long time that probably the current time (about 13.7 billion years) since our Big Bang would seem like an unnoticeably tiny fraction of the blink of an eye.  And, of course, the Earth is not going to be around that long‒not more than about another 4 or 5 billion years at most.  If that seems like a long time to you, you need to adjust your perspective.

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Cosmic. Way out. I can relate.

Well, here we are beginning another Monday, and I’m writing this post—again—on the mini lapcom.

I say “again” not because I am writing this very post for a second (or more) time, nor because the last post I did was written on the lapcom, because it was not.  I mean “again” in the sense that last Monday I wrote my blog post on the lapcom.  I also did so on Tuesday and on Wednesday last week, but I cannot yet say that I will do so tomorrow and the next day.  I won’t even say “barring the unforeseen”, because I can rather easily imagine, and therefore foresee, situations in which I will not write those blog posts on the lapcom.

Of course, I also cannot predict whether, like last week, I will write Thursday’s and Friday’s posts on the smartphone.  It’s not that unlikely, but I don’t know ahead of time whether I will write them on the smartphone or the lapcom.  I could make predictions, but I think anything deviating terribly far from 50/50 would probably be very much a rectally sourced prediction.

I will say, though, that if I do write blog posts the rest of the days this week—which will include Saturday, alas—I will almost certainly write them either on the lapcom or the smartphone.  How’s that for a bold prediction?  It’s not a certainty, of course, but then again, pretty much nothing is.  It’s getting into the high 90 percentiles though, I’d guess.  I’m not skilled enough at probability/decision theory to get much finer in my estimation than that.

Anyway, that was about 250 words of utterly pointless drivel, wasn’t it?  It’s quite odd how much and how quickly I can write about more or less nothing of significance.  Mind you, from a certain point of view, nothing is really of significance.  Also nothing is of significance.  I mean two different things by those two different uses of the same words.

The first means that there is almost nothing in the universe that, in itself, is significant (cosmically speaking, of course—on different scales, significance has different requirements).  No individual, localized thing or fact can matter much on the largest scales.  On the other hand, nothing—the vacuum, absence, whatever you want to call it—is significant.  This partly refers to the fact that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerated rate, and this seems to be due to the vacuum energy, the energy of “empty” space.  A uniform energy density in space creates a negative pressure, which creates “negative gravity” in a sense, and that drives an expansion of spacetime.

The nature of this vacuum energy, or cosmological constant, is definitely significant in that it will determine, almost solely as far as we can tell, the future fate of the universe.

Of course, the term “vacuum” may be somewhat misleading given its ordinary usage (quite apart from when one refers to the household appliance).  The vacuum is never really “empty” despite what the usual meaning of the word is.  It’s full of all sorts of quantum fields as well as the gravitational field that is spacetime itself.  The vacuum is just when these fields are in their lowest possible states/energy levels*.

There’s also the famous Higgs Field, which actually is one of the quantum fields, but it is interesting in that it is a scalar field, meaning that it has magnitude at every point but not direction (like a map demonstrating local temperatures on Earth’s surface, as opposed to one detailing the wind, which will have magnitude and direction).

If this seems a peculiar distinction to you, think of the electromagnetic field, which has both magnitude and direction at every point.  It’s actually a little more complex even than just that, because of course, electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the electromagnetic field, but each one of them is a vector field (with magnitude and direction) which interacts with the other, so the combination of them is something more involved.

Also, when energies are high enough (changing the way the Higgs field interacts with other fields), the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force turn out to be part of the same thing, called the electroweak force.  And, of course, there is the question of whether all the fields are really just aspects of some “higher” field or structure.

This would be some form of “unified field theory” (not to be confused with GUTs, or “grand unified theories”, which are less grand and less unified than unified field theories).  Of course, we don’t know that there is a unified field.  There may not be.  There may just be a minimum number of fields that cannot be further reduced.

If M-theory (AKA string theory) is correct, then yes, there is a unified form from which all fields derive their character thanks to the shapes and resonances of their vibrations in high-dimensional spaces.  On the other hand, other versions of quantum gravity such as “loop quantum gravity” leave gravity (AKA spacetime itself) as a separate kind of field, composed of tiny, tiny parts (the “loops”) knitted together.

At least some versions of this theory have been disconfirmed, however, because it predicts a very, very slight difference in the speed of travel of electromagnetic waves depending on wavelength, and light from extremely distant quasars has been tested and found to be uniform in arrival time (based on variability in the quasars and specific catastrophic events, if memory serves) from wavelength the wavelength, even to tiny parts in billions of light years traveled.

Okay, well, that’s surely enough trivia for anyone early on a Monday morning.  I wish I didn’t have to work today, but then again, I wish I didn’t feel like I have to do anything.  But I do feel that way.  I guess it’s probably better than being inert.  Without a goal or goals—terminal, instrumental, or otherwise—there is no action.

You can call it a “drive” instead of a “goal” if you prefer.  That may be a more accurate term, since nature doesn’t act in a teleological way (outside of thinking minds) but instead generates drives/urges/impulses, some of which lead to increased genetic reproduction and some of which lead in the other direction.  Over time, the former are the ones that tend to accumulate, for what are probably obvious reasons.

Enough.  I already said it was enough, didn’t I?  Anyway, I hope you all have a good day.  And remember, if you tend to come to this blog via other social media, you can subscribe to it using your email, and then you’ll get emails sharing every new post with you directly.

Take care.

*There is also a thing called a false vacuum.  Spacetime itself could be in such a state, if the vacuum energy is capable of tunneling to an even lower energy level than the one at which it currently resides.  This would not be a good thing for the current inhabitants of the universe, but at least they would never know it if the drop-down happened, because everything that currently exists would be erased at the speed of light.  The universe as a whole would even be affected, but it wouldn’t be endangered per se.