writing

by

Not A Blog Post…

…it’s just a quick update/bit of bragging.  I wrote about 1600 words this morning on Extra Body, and then I even played a bit of guitar for about half an hour (and sang with it).  I’m extremely rusty, particularly the singing, but it’s nice that some things come back seeming easier than they did the last time I played.  I guess I didn’t lose those learned skills, which is nice.  Writing is always relatively easy, though it’s not as if I’ve ever really stopped doing that.

No posts or updates this weekend unless things change.  I will write fiction on Monday, and if you want, I can leave little updates like this afterwards.

by

This is not an altered Shakespearean quote, in case you couldn’t tell

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the first time in quite a while, this is my weekly blog post, the way I used to do things.

I’ve not been very well lately, even by my standards.  By which I do not mean that I haven’t been writing.  Monday morning I wrote just under 1400 words on Extra Body, which I guess is a good thing.

Then, Tuesday I did not go into the office.

I’ve had a particularly bad time lately regarding my insomnia.  Since Friday night, I haven’t had a single night with as much as four hours of sleep, and many of the nights have seen significantly less.  On Tuesday morning, I just stayed home and took some Benadryl, which only made me doze off for about two hours.  Then, Tuesday night I got another few hours, and went to work Wednesday.  I felt a little loopy during the day yesterday, to be honest, and occasionally I even acted a bit silly.  I suppose everyone at the office thought I was feeling better.

But even my pain has been worse than usual, too, probably largely because of the sleep deprivation.  I don’t think that the causality works in the other direction, because it’s usually not pain that wakes me up; it’s the semi-panicked feeling that I must have overslept by hours and hours, even though it’s only been about five minutes or so since I dropped off.

In any case, I have some kind of feeling of anxiety or vulnerability while I’m asleep.  You’d think I was a Vietnam veteran or something, except I was born in 1969, so I would have been very young indeed to serve.  Whatever it is, I don’t feel safe, or at least secure, when I’m asleep.

Still, it’s not as though I’m safe when I’m awake.  The thing is, no one is safe, not entirely, and no one ever has been (as evidence, note that almost all people who have ever lived are currently dead).  And I frankly find life mostly painful and stressful and exhausting and lonely and dreary, so I don’t know what exactly I’m afraid of such that I’d feel worried about having anything taken away from me.  It’s weird.

Anyway, I didn’t even bring the little laptop computer with me on Monday when I left the office, so I didn’t have it when I was on my way to the office (extremely early) on Wednesday morning.  Instead, I decided to use the Word app, which I’ve mentioned before, and I started to write the beginning of HELIOS.  I did not plan to go far, and I didn’t, writing just over five hundred words‒just beginning to introduce the setting, really.  Then I got to the office and wrote a bit over 800 words on Extra Body, bringing my total new words that day up to nearly the same as on Monday.

On Monday morning, I even strummed the guitar just a little bit.

Unfortunately, there has been no joy in writing fiction‒nor in playing guitar, come to think of it‒since I’ve restarted doing it.  I don’t blame the fiction, of course.  Nor do I blame the guitar.  The problem is my own faulty hardware and/or software, my operating system or particular programs or I don’t know what.  To quote C3PO, “He’s faulty!  Malfunctioning!”

I wish I could get some kind of system update that would fix some of the bugs.  Or at the very least, I wish I could reboot from time to time‒in other words, that I could just get a restful night’s sleep.  I feel that if I could get just a good night’s sleep, it might be almost like a little resurrection.  I still recall how good it felt on that day in the nineties when I had my last (or at least my most recent) good night of sleep, from which I awoke refreshed and rested the next day.  I don’t recall what I did that day, but I felt amazing.

I don’t know how I could accomplish that, though.  I’ve tried medications of various kinds, but they’ve tended just to make things worse.  I can force myself unconscious with Benadryl, for instance, but I awaken feeling groggy and confused and more out of it than when I went to sleep.  I’ve tried getting massages of various kinds, from real massage therapists and so on, but I guess I can’t really relax with a stranger.  And massage chairs, unfortunately, just don’t do it.

So it sucks, and I’m tired, and I’m in pain, and I see no light at the end of the tunnel, not even a glimmer, not even a glint.  All I see is a vague sort of swamp-light haze, a sort of sickly phosphorescence.  There’s just enough light to be able to take in the dreariness of my surroundings.

Blackness would be better, honestly.  Black, silent, empty oblivion seems quite preferable to my life, in which the only joys I know are the guilty (and steadily diminishing) reward of food, and‒as Steve Martin said‒a dishwashing liquid.

I need just to opt out.  I need just to work up my nerve.  That’s the hard part.  Fighting against those ingrained drives to stay alive even though it’s not merely utterly pointless but almost entirely without joy (yet almost never without pain, both physical and psychological).

It’s been getting old for a long time.  I’m sure you’ll all agree.  From within, I feel about a thousand years old, or a million, or a billion‒but I’m not an organism built to live that long.  So, again, I’m faulty and malfunctioning, held together by gaffer tape and twine and mud and twigs and clothes-hanger wire and paper clips, with modeling clay stuck in some of the holes to keep the damp from getting in.

Anyway, that’s my status for now, which is nothing new, just more (and gradually worse) of the same.  I hope you’re all feeling much better than I am.  At the very least, you deserve it for being patient enough to read my blog.  That’s a definite trial by ordeal.

I will do my best to keep writing fiction tomorrow, and I plan to do next week what I planned to do this week, though hopefully with at least a little bit more sleep.  By which I mean, I want to try to write fiction every day but Thursday.

If you see a post go up on some other day, it means I lost my resolve for that plan, at least temporarily.

If you don’t see a blog post at all, not even next Thursday, then either I’ve gotten sick, or I’m dead.  The longer time passes with no posts, the more likely it is to be the latter.  We can always hope, right?  I don’t know, maybe you think it would be a negative thing for me to die.  I’ll even admit that I am afraid of dying, by which I mean the process.  I don’t so much want to die as I want, most days, to be dead.

Silence.  Oblivion.  These things so often seem so much better than the noise and stress and tension and pain of awareness.  If I could just become “comfortably numb” it would be a vast improvement.  But that’s not likely.

TTFN

by

I hope you all have a good Friday (get it?)

It’s Friday, and for those of you for whom this is the last workday of the week, I hope you have a good weekend; I work tomorrow, so this is not a TGIF sort of Friday for me.  I am obviously writing a blog post today, and I plan to write one tomorrow, as well.  Aren’t you lucky?

However…

…my current plan after that is to bring my small laptop computer with me when I leave the office tomorrow and then, next week, write fiction in the morning every day except Thursday, on which day I will revert to my old, once-weekly blogging.  I don’t know how long this pattern will last; I’m not making promises, merely predictions.  Still, I want to try to finish Extra Body and publish it, and maybe even start writing HELIOS afterwards, though that’s a longer term prediction, and so, like the weather forecast, it becomes inherently less reliable.

I already reverted to the old form of blog title yesterday, that of using a Shakespearean quote, altered to insert some form of the word “blog”.  I hadn’t planned to do so, but since I discussed some matters about which I wished I could take vengeance, I naturally thought of Shylock’s little speech in The Merchant of Venice.  I had to have a title anyway, and it was Thursday, so, to quote Doc Brown**, “I figured…what the hell.”

(Had it been Saturday night, I might have thought it all right to say, “What have I got to lose?”)

I didn’t include a picture, as I often used to do for my Thursday posts (imagining that this would garner me more readers).  That’s because finding a usable picture, then modifying it to suit my needs, was always very effortful.  I could do it pretty quickly, and some of the results were even fairly creative and artistic (in my opinion), but they were not worth the effort.  And if they drew more attention, they drew the attention of people who were more interested in pictures than in words, which is not my intended audience, at least not for this blog.

Oh, my!  I just realized that this is “Good Friday”.  It seems odd to call “good” the day memorializing someone’s crucifixion, especially if it’s the crucifixion of a good person.  Still, “good” is a fairly protean concept in any case, and I understand the reasoning behind it, such as it is, for the day, but it still seems slightly perverse to me.

It first occurred to me to check if it was indeed that traditional Christian holiday because there seem to be slightly fewer people at the train station at this time than there usually are.  As far as I know, the train schedule is a standard weekday one, and on Sunday it will be, as always, on a Sunday schedule, so there’s no need to modify it for Easter.

I don’t think I’ve ever ridden the Tri-Rail on a Sunday, come to think of it.  But I have ridden it on many a “holiday”, when it was on a restricted schedule, because my office, like so many businesses in the modern world, is much less likely to take national holidays off than used to be the case for most organizations a few decades ago.

The businesses of the modern world are stuck in a Nash equilibrium (of sorts) in which were any of them to change and improve their practices (in the sense of being less aggressively competitive and allowing employees more days off), they would be outcompeted, would lose business, might go out of business, in which case their employees would also be harmed by losing jobs, which would affect the overall job market, dogs and cats would live together…mass hysteria!  In such situations, there is no way for individuals to change their practices without harm to themselves and even to the system, even if those practices are plainly not optimal.

It is for these reasons, among others, that governments are instituted among the peoples of the Earth (“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”), to try to act upon situations that will not correct themselves.  Unfortunately, governments too can fall into perverse equilibria of various kinds, and once they do, getting them out of it can require significant, sometimes catastrophic, upheavals.

Think of having to pull the power cord on your computer to restart it because it’s gotten bogged down or frozen, and Ctrl-Alt-Del isn’t doing anything at all.  If they haven’t been auto-saved, you might lose some files on which you were working, but at least the computer can be useful again.

That’s a strained metaphor, I know, and I apologize.  But sometimes one does have sympathy (albeit not full agreement) with Jefferson’s notion that, for people to remain free, and presumably for governments to do what they are supposed to do, there should be a literal revolution/rebellion every twenty years or so:  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.”

That’s a bit extreme, perhaps, but maybe it would be interesting if, say, once every twenty years or so, everyone in government had to be replaced.  This is beyond the concept of term limits, and it would not be a staggered affair but would happen all at once.

I know, I know, there would be many detriments, including harms due to the fact that, ceteris paribus, people tend to get better at jobs the longer they work at them.  There would be real losses and setbacks associated with everyone being new to the government.

But then again, when people do politics as a career, they often learn bad habits, and the system can develop unplanned but subsequently entrenched and self-reinforcing negative patterns, equilibria that cry out for punctuation***.  These lead to losses of opportunity, economic losses, the loss of lives, and the occurrence of needless suffering‒but these costs are usually unnoticed because they are diffuse and scattered.  It’s related to the way we don’t recognize antacids as genuinely life-saving drugs, because we’re not aware of the many people who would have died‒who used to die, and often quite young‒from ulcers and perforations and gastric and esophageal cancers.

It’s also related to the fact that, environmentally and public health wise, nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels for the world and for people’s health.  The number of illnesses and premature deaths per capita caused by even the worst nuclear disasters, even if they were scaled up to account for the greater preponderance of fossil fuel based power, is probably little more than a rounding error compared to the respiratory illnesses and other causes of suffering and premature death due to airborne particulates and similar problems from fossil fuels.

Well, there I go again, swerving all over the shop from one tangent to another, like a space probe passing near a bunch of unrealistically closely packed planets and having its trajectory repeatedly altered as it does so.

Speaking of such things, I do wish I could find a way to keep the energy I tend to have on Monday mornings for physics and mathematics and make it last through the rest of the week.  But my mental energy and clarity seems to be swiftly diminished by the slings and arrows of outrageous stupidity throughout the working days, so even by Tuesdays, I am usually significantly enervated.

Well, whataya gonna do?  This post has gotten too long already, anyway, and we’re getting close to my train stop.  I hope those of you who celebrate this holiday have a truly good Friday, and the rest of you as well.  Tomorrow, I’ll probably wish you a happy Easter.

*An interesting phrase combining a present tense verb with a future-oriented adverb in a way.

**That’s the one from Back to the Future, not the one who makes the really great canned sodas you can get in good delis and similar places.

***To bastardize a concept from Gould and Eldredge.

by

If you prick us, do we not blog?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.  At least, I think it’s Thursday.  I’m fairly sure it’s Thursday.  I have on my Thursday trousers*, at least.

Yep, it’s Thursday; I checked my phone’s readout.  I was pretty sure anyway, but when my memory jibes with an external measure of which I have no current reason to be suspicious, that drives my credence even higher than it already was.  Most days I don’t need to double-check.  Most days, my internal experience of reality is persistent and consistent enough that I’m well aware of what day it is, usually even when I “first” wake up, to such a degree that if my smartphone’s readout gainsaid that, I would suspect that the phone was malfunctioning.

Today, though, I am mildly fuzzy-headed, relative to how I usually am.  I spent most of yesterday with some manner of persistent and non-peristaltic abdominal pain that left me very grumpy; it was good that I got started on payroll early and finished it early.

I didn’t leave the office early.  No, no.  I didn’t leave until nearly 7 pm, though it was different people who kept me late this time.

That’s part of the problem with things being so lax for my coworkers:  I have to be at the office first every morning (I do get there earlier than absolutely necessary, since I can’t sleep in the morning, anyway, and it’s better to travel before rush hour).  And I am also the last to leave at night, since I lock up the office.  Yet I live farther away than almost everyone else who works there, and I don’t drive.  So I am subject to the vagaries of each day’s least time-sensitive person, whoever it might be on any given day.  Often, the people who stay late do not arrive on time in the morning.  They are often also the people who work into and sometimes through lunch.

I ought to find a way to punish these people.  I ought to take extreme vengeance upon them, “in this life or the next”.  But I probably will do no such thing.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m a bit fuzzier than usual because I didn’t even start eating any dinner or winding down until 9 o’clock or so last night.  And here I am at the train station slightly less than eight hours later.  So, plainly I did not have a full night’s sleep‒but that never happens, anyway.

On to other matters.

I still don’t know what to do about my fiction writing.  Writing this blog every day increases the daily readership by a significant margin, such that, in the few weeks in which I was doing 2 days a week, there were only about two thirds as many visits per day that I posted.  But, of course, it’s not as though I reach very many people even on my best days.

I am probably wasting my time doing this, both in potentially boosting the reach of my fiction, and in trying to improve my mental health by talking about it (there’s no sign of that making any difference, is there?).

I don’t know.  I suspect that if I suddenly just stopped writing this blog, there are only maybe two people in the world who would notice quickly, and they are both family members.  A few others might eventually vaguely realize that they were no longer getting posts from that weird guy who has insomnia and depression and goes on and on and on about it all the time.  Perhaps they’d wonder whether I just stopped blogging, or if I died, and if so, whether that was due to accident or illness or suicide

Actually, it’s reasonable in many‒perhaps most‒cases to call suicide a death due to illness.  It’s just a kind of illness that hasn’t been recognized as such throughout most of history, and still is not met with the attitude that would be useful from most people who interact with its sufferers.  Of course, it isn’t caused by any virus or bacteria (as far as we know) and so is not contagious in any straightforward sense (though memetic contagion cannot be ruled out in all cases).

Then again, people have only known about the contagious nature of things like smallpox and typhoid fever and the black death and the flu and various other infectious and parasitic diseases for a very short time.  But those are the comparative low-hanging fruit of illnesses, prevention and treatment-wise.  When a disease is caused by a definitive pathogen, an invader, there is a target that can be eliminated, if possible, to the unmitigated benefit of the one invaded.  It was a clear and definitive good for people when, for instance, smallpox was eradicated.

Problems related to malfunction or dysfunction or conflicting function of the organism itself, on the other hand, are much trickier.  The structure and function of a biological organism is akin to a vast and vastly complicated Rube Goldberg machine, where interventions in one region can have hard-to-predict effects elsewhere.  And, of course, once we’ve eliminated or at least significantly curtailed all the “easier” targets, then only harder ones remain.

Then people will complain about the slow pace of medical progress and the fact that some people must take lifelong medications to treat things like diabetes and high blood pressure, imagining that this fact is only and entirely due to, say, profiteering on the part of pharmaceutical companies.  Meanwhile, some of them will actually complain about and even resist the use of such things as vaccines, which have given them the luxury of being able to worry about things other than, say, how many of their children will die of measles encephalitis or will be crippled by polio.

It’s enough to make one want to paraphrase Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, and remind people that they rise and sleep under the blanket of the health and longevity provided by medical science and then question the manner in which it has been provided**.

I don’t know how I got onto that tangent.  Neither do I know why I got onto that tangent.  It’s all pointless, anyway.  I hope this hasn’t been too disjointed a blog post.  I also hope that you all have a good day, and a good rest of the week, and a good upcoming month, and a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives, and a good rest of eternity.

As for me, I’d be pleased just to get a good rest.  But I don’t expect that to happen any time before I die.

TTFN

*Yes, I have a pair that I wear specifically and only on Thursdays.

**But they don’t question it in any honest, serious, intellectual sense, such as would entail actually studying and deeply understanding even basic undergraduate level biology (to pick up a  weapon and stand a post, so to speak).  It’s remarkable how many problems seem so simple to those who don’t really, actually know Jack Shit about them.

by

Be sure to warm up before kipling

Here I am at the train station, to which I arrived quite a bit later than I ought to have done, because Uber switched drivers on me twice, meaning I was assigned to 3 different people, resetting the waiting clock each time.  Then the last driver didn’t follow the route recommended by his own company’s app, apparently thinking that taking the interstate would be faster.  Long experience with the area leaves me with the knowledge that the route that the app recommended really is the fastest route, especially at this time of day.  I was very tempted to give the driver a low tip and a low rating, but since I recognized that some of my animosity is due to matters outside his control‒specifically, the changed drivers‒I would not let him bear the brunt of the consequences.

I need to quit taking Uber.  I’ve curtailed my morning walk for now‒working on a different form of exercise‒because it’s been causing my left knee to act up with greater and greater severity.  But taking the bus to the other train station adds nearly an hour to my commute, or at least it makes me get to the office an hour later.  It’s very frustrating.

Obviously, I’m not writing any fiction today.  I’m not really doing much of anything that matters at all to me today (except, perhaps to a small extent, this blog).  I don’t think I’ll write fiction or play guitar or sing or study any interesting subject today.  By yesterday already, I was too drained and distracted to be able to consider focusing on studying any mathematics or physics or whatever, even just by watching videos.  Ear plugs and hearing protectors don’t help noticeably.

Today, I think I’m going to use double ear plugs in each ear.  They’re the little squishy, compressible, throw-away earplugs, so they can be rolled down to small enough size to insert even when doubled, I’ll wager.  I’m not terribly fond of having crap stuck in my ear canals, but it’s better than being exposed to all the loud voices and noises.  At least, I suspect it is.

You’re probably wondering why I keep going to the office and back and all that.  It’s a fair question, but the answer is neither profound nor very interesting:  it’s just all I have.  I can’t see myself trying to find a different job.  At least I know the people at this job, and I even like most of them.  And I’m at least used to the place where I live.  It’s decent.

I am frustrated about the fiction writing thing, though.  I haven’t even bothered taking the laptop computer back with me at the end of the day so far this week.  I know I’m not going to use it.

I sometimes wish I’d never started doing this daily blog, but it seems I don’t want not to do it.  It’s my pathetic little scent-marking on the world, I guess, though it’s probably not very interesting most of the time.  For instance, I doubt many people enjoyed my weird asides about cosmology yesterday.

It’s hard to remember writing much of Son of Man on my tiny old smartphone back in the day, but I know I did.  I think I didn’t do indenting, but instead just did double line breaks for paragraphs and then corrected the layout after the draft was done.  I suppose, in principle, I could do that here also, but I fiddled with it last week at one point using the Word mobile app, and found it very unsatisfying.

Of course, I did not use Word to write the initial part of Son of Man.  I used the notepad function on my smartphone at the time, which is reasonably impressive, even to me.  But it would seem a shame not to use my laptop computer, now that I have it.  I suppose I could bring it with me and write fiction in the morning before even leaving the house, and take the southbound bus to catch the northbound train‒that bus route doesn’t begin until far too late for the early trains.  I hate the idea of arriving so late, though, especially since I’m awake anyway in the very early morning, no matter how much trouble I have falling and staying asleep.

I really hate my life, to be honest.  I’m sure you picked that up by now; it’s not as though I’m being particularly subtle.  I’m just so tired.  I’ve lost almost everything that ever mattered to me.  What is it Kipling wrote, “If you can bear to hear the truths you’ve spoken / twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools / or watch the things you gave your life to, broken / and stoop build ’em up with worn-out tools…”?

If so, then…well, you’re probably just a stubborn idiot, I don’t know.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice poem, very stirring and well-written, and obviously quite memorable.  But at the end, your big reward for all the listed attributes is, “you’ll be a man, my son”.  That’s it?  You get to be “a man” according to the criteria set by Rudyard Kipling?  Well, bully for you, I guess.  I don’t even feel human, let alone that I’m a man according to a nineteenth century author and poet’s* judgment.  I frankly feel dishonest when I have to check the Captcha box that says I’m not a robot, for crying out loud.

Anyway, that’s enough of my shit for today.  Unless we’re all lucky and something kills me or severely injures me between now and then, I guess I’ll write another blog post tomorrow, and I’ll probably be no closer to solving my difficulty with fiction writing than I am today.

I hope you’re all doing as well as you can do.

*He was a good one, though.  Gunga Din, The Jungle Book, all that kind of stuff was not half bad.

by

Would YOU eat Zel’dovich pancakes for breakfast?

It’s Tuesday, and I’m writing another blog post rather than throwing some kind of curve ball and doing my fiction writing today, since I wrote a blog post yesterday, when I had scheduled myself to write some fiction.  I don’t know if that counts as a double curve ball or as a capitulation to a simple, over-the-plate, none-too-fast soft pitch.  It’s probably the latter, but I suppose there is no absolute right answer, and the judgment would depend upon one’s point of view.

I’ve realized that, contrary to what I wrote yesterday‒to what I honestly thought was the case‒I did not bring my small laptop computer with me when I left the office on Thursday.  I had unplugged it with the intention to pack it, but then I had left without it.  I can’t recall ever having done that before.  It goes to show just how crappy I felt on Thursday, I guess.

I really want to keep writing fiction.  It would be a shame to take this new story that I’ve well begun, with over 10,000 words written so far, and let it just fall by the wayside.  Then again, I’ve left The Dark Fairy and the Desperado hanging, and more egregiously, I’ve left Outlaw’s Mind hanging, so it’s not as though there is no precedent.  And, of course, in the past I’ve left stories incomplete many, many times.  But it seems particularly sad, now that I’ve published 5 novels and 2 collections of “short” stories, to fall back into that pattern.

But I need to find a way to be able to work fiction writing into my daily routines without messing up habits that have become somewhat compulsory for me.  I’ve tried to find ways to block out the noise in the office, so far without much success.  Yesterday I bought a rather inexpensive pair of noise-canceling headphones.  They didn’t do that good a job at the noise canceling; they reduced it a bit, but it was still there, though if I put in earplugs as well and then also played a YouTube video about field theories and similar stuff, if helped, but that is certainly not a combination of measures I could take while trying to write fiction.

I’m of two minds (at least) about the headphones.  I’m glad I didn’t spend very much on them, since they don’t turn out to be as effective as my more old-fashioned, gun-range and airport style ear defenders (when combined with ear plugs).  They can also play music or the sound from videos, but I didn’t get them for that.  I already have things that can do that.  But I wonder if more expensive ones would do any better.

It’s a shame that no high-powered movie executive has read any of my books or stories and approached me to option them for movies or shows or anything, but it’s obviously not surprising.  I’m terrible at self-promotion, more by temperament than merely due to lack of skill.  This blog is my closest approach to self-promotion, and I spend most of my time here spewing my random and often depressed and depressing thoughts in some wishful, pseudo-Freudian free association kind of exercise.

Of course, it’s about as useful to me as Freudian psychoanalysis* ever has been clinically demonstrated to be for anyone, which is to say, very little, if at all.  Nevertheless‒and also like psychoanalysis for many of its patients‒it has been habit forming, and I feel awkward and disjointed without it.

Also, as I noted yesterday, it’s the only means by which I keep contact with anyone other than my sister in the world outside of the office.  I’ve really become a shell of my former self, and the fact that there is physically more of me now than there has ever been before only makes that more biting, the irony enhancing the contrast with the past, when I used to relieve suffering and save lives and be beneficial to the world.

Ah, well.  From a cosmic perspective, all such benefits will probably be transitory, or effectively be nonexistent.

Which reminds me:  yesterday I was looking at the abstracts of some recent papers on “quantum cosmology” uploaded onto arXiv, the preprint server.  Obviously, most of these subjects were well beyond my expertise truly to be able to follow, but I get the concepts involved in most of them.  Also, exposure to the mathematical formalism when I don’t know how to manipulate it often makes it easier to understand later, as there is familiarity and applicability that helps add to the more complete picture I gradually build in my mind about such things.

This has happened to me more than once in the past.  I don’t learn by rote, I learn by building mental models and maps and structures that link areas of knowledge and understanding together.  So, I don’t learn quickly, but I learn deeply and durably.  I think this is a much better way to go.

Anyway, that’s tangential.  What was amusing is, I read about a paper involving some deSitter** models of inflation in a universe which (if I recall the abstract correctly) was matter-dominated in early moments and so had no uniform pressure (unlike radiation-dominated situations, which, if I’m remembering correctly, is pressure intensive and homogeneous, and is how our early universe probably was).  In such models, if I understood the point correctly, you could find more noteworthy inhomogeneities than seen in radiation-dominated phases, which makes sense, since the radiation pressure works against gravitational collapse.

So, the model discussed would be unlike our universe, in which the CMB demonstrates extreme homogeneity, down to a few parts in a hundred thousand, even from one edge of the cosmic horizon to the opposite edge, encompassing regions that could never possibly have been in any form of direct causal contact at least since the hypothetical time of inflation.  The light from each side has only just now reached us, and so is only halfway across to the other side, and may well never reach it if the universe expands quickly enough.  Yet the temperatures are the same to a few parts in a hundred thousand, which is probably more than can be said about the room you’re sitting in now.

One type of this theoretical homogeneity in the model in the abstract had apparently been previously described as a “Zel’dovich pancake”.  This is apparently nothing new (first described in the 1970s), but is a really amusing way to think of a cosmic structure, and I kind of want to look into it and see what it describes, to see if I can understand, at least superficially, the math behind it.

Wow, that was a whole ‘nother tangent of much greater departure than before.  I think I’ll call that good for now for this day’s blog.  I’m kind of all over the place, and if I’m not too careful, I might undergo decoherence and split into multiple versions of myself.  That seems all too possible, since I’ve never been naturally inclined to very impressive coherence in the first place.

I will probably be writing here tomorrow.

*Not to be confused with the more general term “psychotherapy”, which can be useful depending on the type of therapy and the person receiving it.  CBT is one of the most effective of these; it didn’t work all that well for me, but I’m annoying and perverse, so that’s no surprise.

**DeSitter spacetimes are just spacetimes with positive cosmological constants‒like our universe, with its apparent “dark energy”‒which will tend to drive accelerating expansion.  The whole “holographic universe” concept was motivated, or perhaps inspired, partly by the Bekenstein-Hawking recognition that the maximal entropy of any region of spacetime is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of that region.  Any greater entropy in the region would add to the mass of the black hole associated with that horizon, and so would make the horizon larger; thus that is the maximal entropy for that initial region.  QED (Quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics) if you will.  The holographic principle regarding a universe has only ever been worked out for anti-deSitter spaces, with negative cosmological constants, which we know is not the case for the universe in which we live because…well, because we’re alive, and those spacetimes tend to collapse rapidly.

by

Surprise! It’s a Monday morning blog post

It’s Monday, March 25th‒only 9 more shopping months remain until Christmas‒and I’m writing a blog post today (on my smartphone) instead of working on my short story, even though I brought my laptop with me when I last left the office.  I left (slightly) early on Thursday, and did not go in on Friday, because I was feeling quite ill.  I don’t know exactly what the nature of the illness was/is, but it was probably a respiratory virus.  I’m mostly over it now.

I’m still at the house while beginning this, because I’m waiting for Uber/Lyft rates to come down to reasonable levels before I accept one.  It should not cost all that much to get a ride less than 5 miles away, especially when I tip generously*.  I also have a bus pass available, which is quite a bit cheaper, but that would take quite a bit longer, whether I use it to get to the train or all the way to the office.  So, I’m not going to do that today, probably, but I may do so in the near future (Also, there are no bathrooms on the buses, but there are ones on the trains; this, for me, can be a serious concern).

I decided to write a post today mainly because I feel that I’m releasing most of my connection, such as it is, to the larger world by writing fewer posts.  Certainly, my readership has declined by a significant percent per post already.  Of course, I doubt that more than a handful of people would notice that I was gone even if I stopped completely.  I don’t know if I’ll keep this up or not, but I don’t think I can keep going back and forth.  I have to have some kind of mental momentum/inertia** to keep doing one thing; bouncing from one to another doesn’t seem to work well for me.

Obviously I would like to keep writing my stories, but if I go back to that 4 to 5 days (or more) per week, I would lose practically all sense of connection with the outside world other than weekly calls with my sister.  I like those weekly calls, of course, but at least when I write my blog posts, I know that a dozen or two people are, in principle, aware of my existence, and at least some of them actually read my stuff.

I guess that’s the sort of immediate feedback with activation of dopaminergic centers of the brain (the nucleus accumbens and related structures) upon which social media and similar situations depend, and of which they take advantage.  But it is (almost) all that I have, really, so that’s that.  It’s not as though I have any friends.

My sister lives in the path of the upcoming solar eclipse (which doesn’t narrow her location down by much, so I don’t think I’m being indiscreet for saying so), and she invited me to come visit to see it.  I really was going to try; I renewed my state ID to make travel easier, and I looked into bus and train and airfare, and they all seemed not too unreasonably expensive (unless you want a private compartment on a train, which would be cool, but would be ridiculously costly).  Unfortunately, I don’t think I can do it.  The prospect of traveling in cramped quarters for even the length of a plane ride seems just too unpleasant to tolerate.

I’m sorry about it; it would be great to see my sister and neat to experience a solar eclipse.  But the neatness thereof would not outweigh the prospect of the trip.  It’s pretty pathetic, I know, but then I don’t think I’ve ever specifically claimed that I was not pathetic.  My frequent readers will probably agree that I have been wise not to so claim.

I’m not sure what to do about this writing situation.  I sometimes consider just writing my fiction and maybe trying to do voice recordings a little later in the day, then editing and posting those as YouTube videos and embedding those as posts here.  I had reasonably good positive feedback when I did that before, but I don’t know how long it would last.  Also, I don’t know if I would lose people who prefer to read rather than to listen to a “video”, what I call an audio blog.

It’s probably all pointless, anyway.  I don’t think many people will probably ever read my work, fiction or nonfiction, or listen to my talk or my songs.  Likewise, though I have technically done a small part to add to the scientific knowledge of humanity, specifically relating to gliotoxin***, I’m not likely ever to make any contributions to quantum field theory or particle physics or cosmology, because while I think I am capable of contributing to them, there’s too much catch-up necessary, and I am limited more in energy even than in time‒there’s too much to which I have to adapt myself from day to day, and that burns my willpower up like nobody’s business.

It’s not as though I can just stop working.  At the beginning of a week, I can find the energy to start reading texts and other things relating to the pertinent fields (not just quantum ones, ha ha), but by the end of any given Monday, I am already so mentally drained that, come Tuesday, I don’t usually crack a single text.

I am, regrettably, not independently wealthy, so I can’t just go off and study.  I am also not mentally suited to seeking out and applying to graduate programs in appropriate fields, nor would I know quite where to begin.  I’m also pretty old to start such a thing, though I consider that less of a concern.  Mainly it’s just an “executive function” issue, as they say.  Also, I don’t think I could in good conscience accept loans or grant money for education.  I don’t think I’m a good risk; I’m too likely to kill myself sometime before finishing any academic program.

It’s not impossible for an autodidact to achieve at least some things‒after all, everyone is really self-taught, since it’s not as though anyone can do the learning for someone else.  They can only point the way; everyone has to walk the path individually.

I’m very tired, though.  If I could sleep decently, it would be easier, I think, but maybe I’m wrong.  Like the fella once said, it would be a real kick in the head for me to develop good sleep and find that I didn’t feel any better, would it not?

It’s a test I’m unlikely to encounter.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I expect I’ll write another post tomorrow.  Have a good day.

*Of course, like restaurant owners in America, Uber et al rely on tips to make up a good portion of their drivers’ pay; that way they can keep a bigger chunk of the fees for themselves and pay less out of their own pockets.  I would say they should in good conscience do otherwise, but they’re in something like a Nash equilibrium (as are all the various American restaurateurs) in that if they change their practices, they will be outcompeted by others who do not, and no one will be helped overall.  It’s one of those situations in which true collective action or legislation would be required to correct the inadequacy.

**Remember, inertia doesn’t just refer to an object’s tendency to remain at rest, but also to its tendency to continue moving in a straight line (or at least along a geodesic) at a constant velocity.

***Don’t bother looking into it.  It’s esoteric and not terribly interesting for those not working in mycology.

by

Won’t you spring into silence with me?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the day of my old, traditional blog posts.  It’s also my second and the planned last blog post for this week.

In the morning, I entertained trying to write a post in the afternoon yesterday, and I even thought about it in the afternoon for a bit.  But there was just too much noise and irritation, and I couldn’t summon the concentration.  This is a bit similar to what often happens with my thoughts about studying during slow time at the office.  I consider it often, and in the morning, while I’m walking, if I’m listening to some science-oriented book, I think with truly eager anticipation about cracking open one of the texts I have at the office.

But the overhead noise and the people being late and saying silly things and all that just wears down my concentration.  I have to use all my energy just not to go berserk and/or leave the office.  Even when I am the one who chooses the overhead music playlist, as was the case on Monday and Tuesday, it’s not enough.  The only playlist I want is the original sound of silence, and I don’t mean the song by Simon and Garfunkel.  I mean silence, like that abyss between the stars I mentioned a few days ago.

There’s a reason Sailor Saturn is my favorite Sailor Senshi.  She’s the sailor of silence, the bringer of total destruction (and also rebirth, but no one’s perfect).

Anyway…

I walked to the train yesterday.  It was a good day for it, since it was relatively cool down here.  I also wrote a little over a thousand words on Extra Body, and that’s also good, of course.  I really find it tempting to want to write some on it every day, but I fear that I would lose my motivation if I did.  Also, as I’ve said before, this blog is my only frequent contact with the “outside world”, and my only personal “cry for help”, though that last part isn’t doing so well at its purpose‒which makes it pretty typical for things that I try, come to think of it.

The whole thing highlights one of the big problems with the various forms of serious mental illness:  The very nature of the problem significantly hinders the ability of the sufferer to seek or ask for, let alone to obtain, help.  If no outside person actually does anything, no assistance arrives, except perhaps after some true catastrophe, by which time it is often too late.

I suppose part of my problem in using this blog for that purpose is that I leave readers subject to the bystander effect.  Read about it.  It’s quite disheartening, and is yet another way the world sucks.  Basically, a person is more likely to help someone in need if he or she is the only one who can help.  When there are more people around, not only is each individual less likely to provide assistance, but the overall chance of anyone helping the person in need is less than if there was just one person to help.  At least, that’s if I recall the overall data about the effect well.

The most famous case of it turns out not to have been as clear-cut an instance as is often believed, so I won’t describe or link it here.  But there is some data demonstrating that people are less likely to offer aid to those in immediate need if there are other people around.

There’s at least a fair chance that someone will catch any events surrounding someone crashing and burning on their smartphone, though, and will share the video to social media.  If anyone ever wonders why I often express the sentiment that the human race ought to be destroyed, it’s these sorts of things that engender such a sentiment.

I don’t really know what else to write about today.  I’d love to discuss psychology and physics and math and economics and biology and philosophy, not to mention writing, but I’m frankly just exhausted.  I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, and I feel less well-rested after getting up than I did when I went to bed.  This is not unusual.

Also, the arthrosis in the base of my thumbs is getting worse, and I have not yet figured out any adequate therapeutic intervention.   Even doing the small amount of note-taking by hand that is required by my job is quite uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not horrific pain or anything like that.  I’ve had and continue to have far worse.  It’s just yet another straw laid across the dromedary’s hump, which would be fine if there were a good reason to keep carrying the load, but I have no such reason; I merely have the habit.

Life, for me, may be merely that:  a bad habit that I need to break.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week, and so on.  I hope you’re having a good first few days of Spring in the northern hemisphere; I hadn’t realized on Tuesday that the equinox was that day, slightly earlier (from a Gregorian calendrical point of view) than is typical, and by the time I did, the post had already been published.  Oh, well.  I’m probably the only one who cares, anyway.

TTFN

by

Tuesday for the price of one day

Okay, well…it’s Tuesday morning, and this is the first of two planned blog posts for this week.  If there is any person out there in Hell’s creation who really used to look forward to starting his or her week with my Monday morning blog post, I apologize.  I regret causing you any disappointment.  On the other hand, causing disappointment is one of my greatest talents, so at least you’ve been exposed to that facet of my character.  I don’t know if one could properly call it a creative ability, but it is something for which I have a knack.

I did do some fiction writing yesterday, after walking to the train.  In fact, I mistook how much I had written, feeling that I hadn’t gotten even one page done, so I continued to the top of the following page only to realize it was the second page of the day.  I wrote over 1400 words; I’m at least making progress.

As I said, I walked to the train yesterday, and in addition, I walked back to the house in the evening.  Indeed, according to my pedometer, I walked about 14.7 miles yesterday in total.  I did not walk this morning because I have developed a modest blister on the bottom of my right big toe.  It’s quite annoying, because it’s not as though I just started walking again.  Last week I walked well over thirty miles in total, wearing the same effing make and model of shoes I wore yesterday.  Why should I have just yesterday developed a blister?  It seems absurd, but reality, for better or worse, is not amenable to appeals.

I suppose it’s good for me to take a break after a day that included nearly three fifths of a marathon worth of walking, though apart from the blister and my left knee soreness‒the latter of which is almost chronic‒I don’t feel particularly worn down.  I did have trouble getting to sleep last night after having walked so much in the evening, which was somewhat annoying, since I had already gotten back to the house later than usual.  It would have been nice if at least I could have slept more deeply once I did fall asleep, but that was of course not going to happen.  So, I’m quite tired.

What else is new, right?

I don’t know what else to discuss today.  The equinox is coming this week, but I figure Thursday would be a better day to talk about that.  It’s not exactly exciting, to be honest.  Up north, the coming of Spring is a positive thing, but in Florida, mostly it just presages the bulk of the year during which the heat and humidity are stultifyingly intense.  Believe me, when you walk 6 miles in Florida most of the year, you look as if you’d just gone swimming, because your sweat does not evaporate.

There’s a bit of a cool and rather strong breeze blowing this morning, which is a surprise, and I did not wear a jacket or a heavy shirt.  That’s okay.  The train will be here within the next 5 minutes according to the schedule and the announcement.  By evening, unless prior weather reports have been completely superseded, it will be plenty warm.

Oh, I did stumble upon an interesting book yesterday while skimming through recommendations based on a decision-theory book I bought.  It was a computer science book, geared toward undergrads and grad students but not really requiring that one be in that situation.  Its purpose is to teach a broad primer on computer science from the bottom up by walking through the process of building a (fairly simple) computer, writing and setting up an operating system, and then making it able to play games such as Tetris.  The authors even provide links to resources so the reader can actually do that building, so it’s not just an intellectual exercise.  They start with logic gates and go to the end, so the overall system is called “Nand to Tetris”, though that isn’t the title of the book.

I think this is great, because modern computers have become so sophisticated and complex that most people who program probably learn to do it without getting educated in the underlying systems and how they work, how Boolean Logic works and is instantiated, up to machine code and the like.  But these are the things I have always wanted to understand better.  My CS 100 class in college just taught us how to program in Pascal.  That was fine, as far as it went, but that kind of programming is just following more ordinary kinds of logic and instruction-giving.

If I had taken extensive coursework in computer science and electrical engineering, I’m sure I would have gotten into such things.  But that wasn’t my major, and I didn’t have time to take a boatload of electives.  If I could have taken courses in all the possible areas in which I might have been interested, I would probably still be in college, and my educational costs would probably have reached a level comparable to the price of an aircraft carrier, or at least of one of the military planes that uses them.

Anyway, I got the Kindle edition of the book.  Being a book by and about computers, it is well formatted to work with the e-book reader format, which is itself a good sign.  Also, the reviews in general are glowing, and the comments they make seem to demonstrate that this is exactly the sort of book I’d like to bring my basic understanding to a better level, from my point of view.  Who knows, maybe I’ll end up doing the project?

If I’m going to be a supervillain, I’m going to need to be able to build my own doomsday devices and robot servants, after all!

Of course, I have a whole slew of books I want to read in addition to this, and I haven’t gone any farther on Quantum Field Theory.  The audio files in which I read aloud just take up so much memory when I use them, and Google starts trying to entice me to buy more storage because (gasp!) I’ve now reached 80% of present capacity.  That’s only taken, what, seven or eight years?  Better send Google more money or before I know it I’ll be at 85%.

Anyway, I don’t think the audio has made me read any better or improved my understanding.  It nudged me a little, but not enough.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I mean to do some walking tomorrow, and some fiction writing, and I keep dreaming that I might write something more topical here in the afternoon and post it, but with the noise and nonsense at work, that often becomes all but impossible.

I guess we’ll find out what happens together.

by

“It’s like…writing on the surface of a lake”

It’s Saturday, and hopefully most of you reading this are doing so from your homes, relaxing‒sipping your favorite beverage, perhaps‒and enjoying your weekend.

As I begin writing this, I am at the train station, waiting for the first morning train to bring me to the office.  This is my third Tuesday-Thursday-every-other-Saturday blog post.  It seems that, so far, fewer people are reading the blog on the days when I post it than usually had read it when I posted “daily”*.  I don’t know whether this trend will continue‒three data points is not a great basis from which to extrapolate, unless you’re picking out a plane by getting three non-collinear points.  I am not doing that, so it would be premature of me to pay too much attention to the statistics that WordPress throws in my face when I log in.

I walked to the station yesterday, and then‒since I had brought my laptop computer with me‒I wrote a bit on Extra Body while on the train.  It felt like a very small amount, but it was about 750 words, which is not terrible for the length of a train ride.  I get the idea that only writing roughly a page at a time, especially only three days a week, really will make me write faster stories, because I’m impatient to get to the end.  But I’m not sure it’ll make the story any better.  I don’t know if maybe I should try to write fiction every day and then, during the day, write blog posts on my phone, the way I’m writing this one.  It’s hard for me to do fiction on my phone**, largely because of indentations and quotation marks and all that stuff.  But these blog posts seem okay, more or less.

I don’t know what the best thing to do is.  This blog is really my sole daily communication with the outside world; it’s not as though I have any friends with whom I hang out, and I cannot do online groups or what have you.  I considered joining some “autism related” groups, though I am not at all sure I even merit the diagnosis, but they all seem to be run by and populated by people who are much more comfortable with other people they don’t already know, at least online, than I am.

Also, the whole thing feels almost faddish and cliquey, like “all the cool kids are joining autistic support groups”, which is fairly ironic, when you think about it.  Anyway, I’ve never really been good at “defining” myself by any group membership, other than my core group of friends, back when I had such a thing, and of course my original family, and then, of course, even more strongly by my married family, with my wife and kids.  But I’m no longer a member of that latter group, and the first group doesn’t exist anymore, and unfortunately, though I do talk to my sister on the phone and text and stuff with my brother, they live 1100 and 1300 miles away, roughly, so my original family is rather scattered.

I used to feel almost like a member of the community at Jerry Coyne’s website, Why Evolution is True, but that site’s parameters have changed, and it’s not possible to read and like and comment all from the WordPress “reader function”, so I have to open each post in at least 2 tabs to be able to interact with the site fully, and that discourages me a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve long had the impression that PCC(E) found my comments irritating.  Likewise, I almost always find any comments I make on that site or anyplace else to be stupid and embarrassing if I look back on them, unless they’re just jokey throw-aways, like a funny-oid response to someone’s tweet.

I’m not sure what to do about all this.  No matter what, I feel like I’m spitting into the ocean or shouting in a hurricane.  Maybe I’m not even shouting; maybe I’m whispering.  Anyway, I don’t think it’s reaching very far or having any benefit, whether for me or for anyone else.  I guess I occasionally get to “show off” my familiarity with a very broad array of concepts and ideas and fields of study; that’s ego-syntonic in and of itself, I suppose, though the fact that it is ego-syntonic for me is rather embarrassing and even humiliating.  I mean, just how pathetic am I that I need to show off online in some blog that barely a dozen or so people even look at when I post it?

Still, it’s not as though I’m in some academic setting, where I could bounce ideas off colleagues and so on.  I guess I could try to get back into doing my “audio blogs” which are sort of mini-podcasts, but the process of dealing with audio and converting it to video is a pain in the ass.  I don’t think many people “watch” them, anyway.

Speaking of audio recordings, I have done audio recordings of two “chapters” (so far) of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible.  I guess that’s good.  It’s at least “forced” me to muscle through part of the book.  It’s not that the subject matter is hard‒so far it’s old hat, really, since he’s laying the foundations‒it’s that the print is small on the hardcover edition, and the Kindle version is just a PDF of that, so you can’t adjust the type size to suit your smartphone, not without expanding the page until most of it is off your screen.  That’s no way to read a book, especially one about a relatively complex subject.

Anyway, if I can keep it up and finish it, I may do something similar for some of my other books that don’t have audio versions, like Spacetime and Geometry and Gravitation and so on.  I don’t think doing audio for mathematics texts would be terribly useful, but maybe it would.  Maybe I’m fooling myself about all of it.

Oh, but I’m pleased to report that there’s now an Audible version of Rationality from AI to Zombies, and I used my credit this month to get it.  I’m in the midst of rereading the Kindle version of the book even now‒about 75% of the way through.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about the other stuff, but then, I don’t really know why I’m doing anything at all.  I have no particular goal or purpose in mind.  I certainly don’t look forward to anything, beyond just trying to find new stuff to learn about or to learn better, but it’s not as though I’m making any contribution to the world, or doing any good of any kind.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m just “a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics”, but I certainly don’t have much more consequence than any solitary wild pig.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t need to write a post that’s twice as long just because I’m writing it half as frequently.  Also, I’m getting close to my stop.  I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you’re celebrating it, a happy Saint Patrick’s Day tomorrow.  I mean to write fiction on Monday, but maybe I’ll do a blog on the phone afterwards, sometime during the day.  I’m making no promises, so don’t act in reliance.

*I used scare quotes because I effectively never post on Sundays.  There were a few times, way back in the day, when I posted on Iterations of Zero on Sundays, because that was supposed to be my blog that was not related to promoting my creative writing, but was to be about my various thoughts on science, philosophy, politics, psychology, and so on.  I haven’t written very many posts on it over time, especially since this blog took over being a catch-all for whatever thoughts come to me on any given day after I just start writing and see what happens.

**Though I wrote a significant part of Son of Man on my first, tiny little smartphone, because I had no other choice.  That was a great little phone, an LG from back when they still made them.  Once, it fell about 12 feet onto concrete and the back popped off and the battery fell out, but that was it.  It ran perfectly afterward, and the screen didn’t crack at all.  Some of that is just down to physics‒smaller screens have less local torque and also can only resonate at higher pitched frequencies.  Also, the back popping off and the battery popping out absorbed a lot of kinetic energy, so that was dissipated away from more sensitive things.