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Oblivion is cold comfort, but it’s all the comfort I have to offer

Well, it’s Monday.  Meet the new week‒same as the old week.  There is nothing new or interesting happening, as far as I can see.  Nothing is new in my personal interactions with the world, and nothing is new in the world at large.  There may seem to be new things, and there are probably some details that are unique.  But then again, every snowflake is supposedly unique, but they’re all just flakes of snow, airborne ice crystals, and the overall behavior is nothing different despite all the trivially new specific flakes.  The phenomenon of snowfall is still just overall the same.

“So in the world,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar said.  “‘Tis furnished well with men.  And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive.”  He goes on the claim that he is unique in the next sentence, but immediately thereafter, Brutus, Cassius, et al, demonstrate that he too is merely flesh and blood like all the rest.

All the heroes, all the villains, all the ordinary people‒they are all functionally identical, despite all their trivial differences.  What percentage of the people who have ever lived are remembered at all?  A smattering, a handful, if that‒not even a rounding error compared to the total of all people who have lived.  And many of those we do remember are probably highly fictionalized and may not have actually existed at all.

What are the odds that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were real people?  How about Achilles and Hector?  For crying out loud, we know that even Richard III, presented as Shakespeare’s most thoroughgoing villain (perhaps matched by Iago) and deformed as well, was pretty much nothing of either sort in real life (or that’s what the historical evidence suggests).  He was simply defeated and then vilified by those who had defeated him, presumably to help justify their own actions.

And, by the way, who remembers them?

This sort of fact is part of why I sometimes refer to people (and other lifeforms) as virtual particles.  They pop into existence, persist for an infinitesimal period of time, and then literally vanish again, without a proverbial trace.

Well, actually, as with all virtual particles (which are not actually a thing but are merely mathematical and pedagogical tools) the collective effects of us virtual particles‒aka living things‒can have impacts on the world as a whole.  It’s even conceivable that, in just the right circumstances, as with the “real” virtual particles*, a virtual personicle can become actual.  I’m not sure what that would mean in the real world, though, and I’m not convinced that it has ever yet happened.

All this is part of why I have no patience for people who become fanatical about their particular ideologies and such.  They’re all just equivalent to some fanciful imaginary imaginings by a group of photons or neutrinos or what have you.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to approach their current affairs and ideas as “important” in their local** transient bailiwick, for some things to be important to them.  But it would be silly in a pronounced (but unfortunately not funny) sense for anyone to imagine that they had access to some final, consequential knowledge about the nature of the world and particularly about how people should behave.  If someone had such knowledge, I suspect it would be obvious to any intellectually honest person, including intelligent but disinterested aliens.

Humans and their dogmas are transient and transitory and ephemeral (and other synonyms as well) as are all other specific forms of life and ways of life.  Life overall is transient; as far as we can tell, it cannot even in principle go on forever.  That’s not just referring to individual lives, but to life as a phenomenon.  We could be wrong about this; there is much we don’t know, and in principle, our descendants could discover ways around the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  But that’s quite a big “if”, as it were.

Sorry to be such a downer; it’s just my nature, apparently.  Look not for comfort from me, as the ghost of Marley said.  It comes from other regions and is delivered by other ministers to other sorts of people.  Though, in this case, I’m not sure about what sorts of ministers and people would be involved, let alone what “regions” might produce such comfort.

In any case, I have no comfort, so I can offer none to anyone else; I cannot give what I do not have and what I do not even hope to have.  The best I can offer is to say that, well, oblivion seems to be the only viable alternative to discomfort offered by this universe.  It’s not much to offer, I admit, but it’s the best I have.  And, as pointed out above, as far as we can tell, it’s waiting for us all, eventually.

I won’t say that I look forward to it, because that really doesn’t make much sense.  But I am tired of trying to continue despite having almost no good reason to do so.

I hope you, the average reader, feel better than I do.  Batman help you if you feel worse.

*There’s an oxymoron.

**That “local” can, in principle, include the entire planet.  The point is merely that it is quite finite and limited.

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Only the truly continuous is infinitely divisible

Well, it’s Friday, the last day of another work week—the first full week of August (or Sexember, if you prefer) in 2025.  And here I am writing things that, so far, are not only trivial but banal.  Perhaps, as I go along, I will write something more interesting and surprising, but so far, I’m not impressed with myself.  I guess these things happen.

I did not end up riding my new bike back to the house last night, because there were thunderstorms in the area, particularly down by where I live.  I’m not too intimidated by riding a bike in the rain, but it’s a new bike, and its configuration is different than the type to which I am used, and it is slightly wobblier than my normal, so I felt it wasn’t a great idea to ride it five miles in the rain.  It turned out the rain was almost over by the time I got to my train stop, but it was nevertheless still quite wet and puddly, and I probably was wise-ish to avoid riding in it.

Still, it’s slightly frustrating.  Hopefully, today it won’t be an issue, because it would be a shame to miss the whole weekend with it by the house.  There are supposed to be thunderstorms today again, but they are expected earlier in the day than yesterday, and the weather is predicted to clear by early evening.  That should be fine, at least.

Of course, weather prediction is never perfectly precise—Chaos Theory being applicable and all that—but forecasts done for only twelve hours or so in the future are likely to be much more accurate than those for a day or a few days or a week ahead of time.  After about five days, trying to get too specific a forecast is a bit of a waste of effort, and it may always be.  One cannot, with finite computing power, calculate things to infinite precision, and without infinite precision, in the long term, Chaos makes one’s predictions ever more inaccurate.

Of course, that raises (not “begs”!) the question of whether reality is actually defined in any meaningful sense down to the level where limitless precision would apply.  In other words, are Real Numbers actually a thing that exists in reality?  That may seem a strange question, given that they are called “Real Numbers”, but that’s just a name, given by humans as a file heading if you will, a way to index the subject.  It doesn’t actually signify the reality of the real numbers, any more than those who call themselves “Conservative” in the current US are in any legitimate sense conservative by most agreed upon uses of that word.

Of course, all non-complex numbers are Real numbers, and all Real numbers can be considered complex numbers (just with a zero i component if they are only Real).  The counting numbers are still Real numbers, as are all the integers and fractions, and of course, all our best known “irrational”* numbers, like π and e.  But the vast majority of Real numbers cannot be specified by any reductive formula or algorithm, but have do be described digit by digit, forever—maximum information-type entropy.

So, to describe fully a “typical” specific Real number usually requires infinite information, with infinite precision.  But there’s a real (haha) question whether any portion of reality is defined so precisely, or whether that could even have any meaning.  As far as we currently know, the smallest distance that has physical meaning is the Planck Length (about 1.6×10−35 m), and the shortest time that makes physical sense is the Planck Time (about 5.4×10−44 s), and so on.  These are very tiny numbers, but they are finite, not infinitesimal, and are certainly not infinitely non-repeating decimals.

But does the Planck Length (and Time) apply to actual, bottom-level reality, or is that merely a limit within the constraints of our current understanding?  We don’t know, for instance, how such things apply to gravity when it becomes strong enough for such scales to apply.

It’s mind-boggling, or at least wildly stimulating of probably inexpressible thought, that reality may be only finitely defined at every given point in space (which “points” themselves would only be finitely packed, so to speak, such that below a certain scale, the distance between two points would have no meaning) or that it may in fact be infinitely defined, down to the fully expressed Real Number level, and that indeed it may be infinitely divisible in the same sense Real Numbers are—and thus there would be, between any two points in spacetime, as many points as there are in ALL of spacetime.

Either possibility is wildly cool and difficult to represent internally—indeed, impossible to represent perfectly internally, but difficult even to contemplate roughly at any very deep level.  Is it any wonder that people like Cantor and Gödel were mentally ill, given the kinds of things they contemplated and explored?  I’m not saying those things were the reason for their illness; that would be a cheesy sort of magical thinking, redolent of an H. P. Lovecraft story.  But the contemplation of infinities and complexity and chaos is both sobering and intoxicating at the same time.

What do you know, I drifted into less banal areas after all.  I guess that’s a decent way to end the work week of blog posts.  I hope you all have an interesting and good weekend, without too many utterly unpredictable events (unless they’re good ones for you).

*Just to remind you, this does not refer to numbers that are in some sense crazy, just that they cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers, no matter how large the integers.  That’s the original meaning of the word irrational, but the very fact that there existed such numbers seemed so horrifying to the old Pythagoreans—or so I’ve heard—that it almost immediately acquired it’s secondary, now more common, usage.

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True hope is swift, and blogs with swallow’s wings: kings it makes gods and meaner creatures kings

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and against popular demand (or at least orthogonal to it) I am writing another blog post.  I don’t know how you feel about that, but you’re reading it, so I guess you can’t complain too much.

I had a rough day again yesterday, pain-wise.  I basically took everything that was safe to take, and then a bit more, but it did not do a great job of getting the pain under control.  However, I did take delivery of my latest attempt at lifestyle change:  a new, folding bicycle, which is quite a lot smaller (and has a smaller wheel base) than my other one.  It’s also lighter, and so it is easier to transport, and starting this afternoon, I mean to ride it from and to the train in the morning and evening‒or, well, in the evening and morning, to keep the order consistent.

I tried it for a little ride-around in the afternoon, and while the smaller wheels make it feel slightly less stable (thanks to a smaller moment of inertia, proportional to the mass times the square of the radius of rotation, if memory serves), it’s still comfortable, and it is also easier to get on for me, since I can step through it rather than having to raise my stupid, stiff old legs and hip.

Hopefully, it will help me get around faster and get stronger/healthier again.  Even my little test ride yesterday seemed to loosen my back up a bit, which was a bonus.  I think the lower-impact movement of a bicycle is much easier on my joints* than, say, running, which I’ve otherwise always really liked.  It’s also just faster to get around on a bike than by walking, but you don’t completely lose out on the experience of being in the midst of the places through which you are traveling.

So, yeah, that’s my reason for guarded optimism today.  I have a hard time being optimistic even at the best of times, though.  It feels like I’m setting myself up to fall into a trap.

That reminds me, I rather like something I heard David Frum say recently.  I can’t reproduce his exact words at the moment, but he basically said he tries to follow the guideline:  think like a pessimist but act like an optimist.  Or,  as Mel Brooks put it in the theme song** for his early movie The Twelve Chairs, “Hope for the best, expect the worst”.

In some ways, I feel that’s almost become my default setting, because when I’m at my current clearest state of headedness, I am definitely depressive and gloomy and neither expect nor feel that I deserve anything good.  But I still keep moving forward (well, if you’re moving at all, then “forward” can be defined as just going in the direction in which you are, in fact, going) and trying new things.

With respect to everything else, well, because my pain flare has been so distracting this week, I haven’t done any music of any kind (even listening, really) nor have I written any fiction.  I also haven’t worked on any lyrics for a song taking off from the word “humility”.  Hopefully, if I can feel better from riding the new bike, it will help me have more energy to do things.  Of course, it will be physically taxing at first, at least a little bit, but that’s okay.

As for anything else, well, I still occasionally toy with the notion of adding a Patreon account or something to this blog, just to see if it does anything at all.  But one is expected to give perks to one’s patrons, and I’m not sure what I have to offer.  Of course, I could write special posts that are only available to patrons, but I don’t know how exciting that would be.

Maybe I could ask patrons to suggest topics or subjects for blog posts, or do some manner of “ask me anything” posts, open to patrons only.  I don’t really know what on Earth people on Patreon could possibly want to learn from or about me, but maybe there would be interest.  I don’t know what else might entice someone.  If any of you out there have any ideas, I would love to hear them.

See what I mean by “think like a pessimist, act like an optimist”?  It’s hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to pay to read my writing, since I barely want to read my own stuff for free***.  And yet, I would consider trying to start making money from even my non-fiction writing, because what have I got to lose by trying that, other than an expenditure of time and energy?

Well, we’ll see what happens.  I would greatly welcome your input on such things, O Reader of My Blog.  In the meantime, please have a good day.

TTFN

*As long as I can avoid repeating any of my two prior major bike accidents, which each did harm to one of my shoulder joints‒first the left then the right, first a connective tissue injury, then a fracture.

**Which, yes, he wrote himself, both the song and the movie.

***Okay, that’s a lie.  I tend to enjoy rereading my own fiction quite a bit.  Is that narcissistic?  If it is, I’m a very peculiar kind of self-hating narcissist:  I think I’m the most annoying, disgusting being this side of a palmetto bug, and yet I think my stories (and my songs) are pretty good, and I enjoy them even if no one else does.

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I have no title today (other than “doctor”)

I don’t think I’ll probably write very much today‒though I’ve been wrong about that many times before, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see.  I feel particularly tired already this morning, but that didn’t let me sleep uninterrupted for more than a few hours.  So far today I’m not in as much pain as I was the previous two days, but then again, on neither of those two days was my pain as prominent in the morning as it became during the day, so I cannot be too optimistic.

I am, of course, trying all my various adjustments and interventions and so on to try to improve things, and they have limited and temporary success in general.  But I will keep trying, until the day that I finally give up and/or die.  I suppose, of course, that I might even get better.  It’s physically possible.  But I’m not going to hold my breath, because I’ve tried many, many things to improve my pain, and they have not had much success.

With that in mind, unless you have something truly esoteric that you think I, a physician with a broadly curious mind and with chronic pain, will not have encountered or considered, I don’t encourage recommending or suggesting pain treatments to me.  You can of course, and I truly appreciate the sentiments involved in such offers, but they are often frustrating.  Also, when people recommend things that I know are just woo, it’s additionally frustrating to have to remind myself not to respond impolitely.  Good intentions aren’t enough to make good things actually happen, but they are worth taking into consideration and appreciating.  You shouldn’t be rude to people who are trying to help, even if they aren’t succeeding.

Anyway, my new thing that I mentioned yesterday did not arrive; it’s supposed to arrive today, now, having been delayed.  I won’t get into it yet, but I maintain my stupid pseudo-optimism, which I cannot explain nor justify, except to say that I’m stubborn.  But I have my limits.

It’s been a string of rather frustrating days, lately, and though none of the frustrations are catastrophic, in some ways that makes them more pernicious.  With major setbacks, one is allowed and expected to need a real recovery process, a bit of time, a bit of rest, or maybe just some sympathy.  One gets a break.  With more minor setbacks, one gets no respite, but they can nonetheless pile up, especially if one has chronic issues already.  But one will gain little ease from others with respect to them.

For instance, when I mentioned to a coworker that I was having a lot of frustrating things happen over the past several days, I got a reply that everyone was having a rough time‒based on what data, I don’t know.  His rough times apparently have to do with taking his daughter to the doctor for a thankfully not too severe issue and his wife being sick and so on.  I would give almost anything possible to have such “problems” again, or just to be able to be with my children in a significant way again.

Anyway, I was not terribly pleased, and in response to his statement about the claimed recent local preponderance of irritations, I said, “Well, that makes everything all right, then, doesn’t it?”

It wasn’t the cleverest of replies, but at least I was channeling the Toymaker a bit.

Anyway, I’m sure few or none of you readers are particularly sympathetic, either.  Why would you be?  I’m no one and nothing, just a weird little “voice” on the internet/web.  I’m a wisp of marsh gas, a flicker of movement in the corner of your vision, an occasionally annoying afterthought, like the water that gets on your shirt at the waist from doing the dishes, but that you don’t notice until you’re done.  I’m a tiny little grain of rock that gets on the bottom of your foot inside your shoe; it’s not quite bad enough to force you to stop, take off your shoe, and clear it out, but it’s there all the while, and you end up with a blister and other aches at the end of the day, from changing the way you walk.

So, yeah, that’s me.  That’s how I feel today.  I know, it doesn’t matter to anyone, but there it is.  Maybe today will be better than yesterday.

I wish I could say it couldn’t be worse, but that’s never true.  Reality has no lowest level.  Things can always deteriorate.

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You flocks, you shoals, you fine emergent things

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and I’m feeling a bit beat up and wrung out from yesterday, which was an extremely bad day, pain wise.  I really felt quite stiff and sore all day, and I couldn’t help walking with a limp.  It’s quite frustrating.  I do have potential assistance of a kind coming today, and hopefully that might make a difference.  We shall see.  I’ll tell you more when I have more information.

As for anything else, well, there’s really nothing else going on in my life.  I still haven’t done any work on new song lyrics, nor have I played the guitar or keyboard at all, nor sang.  I don’t even know what kind of shape my voice might be in at this point, but it’s probably pretty rough.

I think maybe I should drink more coffee during the day.  I used to drink it regularly when I was up north, but I’ve fallen off a lot since coming to Florida.  A big part of that is just that coffee is a hot drink, and hot drinks in Florida can be quite unpleasant.

But also, if I can reevaluate my own internal workings and decision-making memory‒which I can‒I tried to cut back on caffeine because I feared it was a major contributor to my tension and hostility and anxiety.  Well, you’ve read my blogs before (unless this is your first time), so it should be fairly clear that that particular intervention was not fit for purpose.  And one thing coffee has always done for me has been to be something to put in my mouth and stomach other than food.  That’s certainly worth a lot in my case.

Anyway, in the new office we have two refrigerators‒the boss brought in one from his garage that was not being used much‒and though neither has an ice maker, ice trays are easy.  So I can make iced coffee to take the sting off coffee’s hot nature.  I can’t directly take the sting off Florida’s hot and muggy nature, of course, but it’s bearable most of the time.

And in the long run, who knows how Florida’s specific climate will alter as the world’s overall surface temperature increases?  One might assume it will just get hotter and more humid*, but it’s best not to jump to conclusions.  Weather patterns are the archetypal chaotic system, and though climate and weather are not synonyms, there is a relation.

Many things interact to maintain specific local climates.  For instance, the Gulf Stream keeps the British Isles much warmer than they would be otherwise, being so far north, but it is not a fixed pattern in the Atlantic, but a product of confluences of various forces and feedback loops (as well as probably feed-sideways paths).  It has not existed forever.  It just feels like it has because human lives are so short, and human minds tend to be woefully parochial and provincial.  This is a source of so many human problems, not least the failure to learn obvious lessons from history.

But I guess there’s not much point in moaning about that lamentable fact right now.  I try to do my little part by writing about what I think are occasionally interesting and thought-provoking ideas, and by trying to learn about all sorts of things myself, from history and philosophy to biology and physics and mathematics‒and, of course, I’m technically an expert on medicine.  It’s as if I hope that by increasing my own knowledge about as many things as I can, I’ll be able to bring up the average and perhaps have some magical diffusion effect.

I don’t actually think that, of course, nor is that really my motivation for learning about various things and stuff.  I just like to understand and know things, to the degree possible, and I enjoy the process of learning them.  Physics is the most interesting subject to me in many ways because it is the study of the workings out of physical reality.  Everything else that happens is “simply” chaotic, emergent murmurations that happen on the surface of the underlying processes.

There is a question whether mathematics is even more fundamental than physics or is rather an invention of humans to describe and work with the patterns that are happening that are not guided by mathematics, perhaps, but simply produce it as an epiphenomenon.

I think Stephen Wolfram proposed something along those lines, based on “cellular automata”**, but though I have his book A New Kind of Science, I have not read it, because I have the Kindle edition.  It’s not really formatted for Kindle, so it’s basically just a PDF of the original book, and that can make it very difficult to read on one’s smartphone.

Such thoughts are quite entertaining and they can sometimes be productive.  I often wish more people were interested in them rather than, for instance, what some particular celebrity did to some other celebrity, or whether some particular advertisement can, with tortured logic, be “judged” to be inherently offensive and even evil, or just how horrifically to punish someone who agrees with only 99% of the things you believe, but disagrees on 1%.

Okay, I need to avoid getting started on that train of thought.  So, I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, by tomorrow I will have some relatively better news than I’ve had recently.  If so, I will probably share it with you.  In the meantime, try your best to have a good day.

*Particularly if sea level rises enough for a lot of the state to become submarine‒now that would be high humidity.

**The most well-known case probably being John Conway’s Game of Life, which is a “game” on a 2-dimensional grid of squares, with particular, simple rules about what happens to any given square depending on whether its neighbors are empty or not.  Remarkable, self-sustaining, and even traveling patterns form from these basic notions, similar to the way the flocking*** behavior of birds can be described with a few basic rules followed by each bird individually, requiring no communications other than just seeing where one’s nearest neighborings are.

***That sound like an epithet, does it not?

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A random, walk-in blog post

It’s Monday again, despite popular demand, and I am here writing another blog post‒not necessarily against or by popular demand.  It’s really more or less orthogonal to such things.

I had a weekend full of little setbacks, and it was quite frustrating.  I had committed to riding my bike four times this weekend, and I started in good form.  I got out relatively early and went riding.  It felt pretty good, pretty comfortable, but I decided not to push too hard, only riding out about 3 miles.  Walking 3 miles is relatively far if it’s hot, but biking 3 miles is not bad at all.

Then, of course, just after I turned around, my rear tire lost pressure.  I don’t know where the puncture was, but I had to walk the bike back to the house.  And 3 miles walking a bike is much more unpleasant than riding or even walking without a bike.

I ordered some Slime brand tire repair stuff for same day delivery, but then it got delayed till Sunday (it actually arrived very late Saturday night).  Then, on Sunday, in between loads of laundry, I tried to repair the tire (so to speak) but at first I had trouble getting it to work, and it wouldn’t stay inflated.  Finally, though, it seemed to stabilize, at least without my fat ass on it.

I was going to go for a short ride to test it, but I couldn’t stand the idea that I might have to walk it back again.  So I went for about a 2 mile walk instead, which is really not very far, but then overnight and into now my back really flared up and is annoying the heck out of me.  Also, my right ankle is sore again.

So I’m frustrated in my attempt to develop better habits and health.  I also had some failures by Uber Eats that were annoying, but that’s a minor issue.  Then yesterday my internet went out and I had to deal with their customer service people to help get it going again, which took way longer than it should have taken.

I suppose all this is really minor stuff, so-called first world problems.  But things accumulate and interact with each other, especially when you don’t really have any outlet for anything and nothing to counteract them.  It might be better if I had someone with whom I could just hang out on a regular basis, but I feel like a different species than the people around me, and no one is offering, in any case.

This is all boring for all of you, I strongly suspect, so I apologize.  It’s bad enough for me to be unpleasant to myself, but I should try not to bring misery upon other people, especially people who are kind enough to read my blog.

Last week was certainly a miss with respect to getting anything done on any music or songs.  I didn’t so much as sing or play keyboard or play guitar at all last week, not once.  I did some reading, including finishing rereading The Chasm and the Collision, which is the book of which I am proudest.  If anyone out there knows people who enjoy fantasy/sci-fi adventures involving middle-schoolers, you should consider suggesting that they check it out.

I don’t know how this week is going to be.  I’m starting it in well-above-average pain, for me, and with worse sleep than usual (though that was the case most of last week as well).  I don’t think this guarantees that it will be a particularly bad week.  The world is complicated, and small things can make relatively large changes, and large things can sometimes be surprisingly ineffectual*.

Maybe I would get started writing fiction again and do it better if I did the first draft of a story by hand (as I did with CatC as well as Mark Red and the title story in Welcome to Paradox City).  As long-time readers will know, I go back and forth about this all the time, and I think I’m probably just chasing my tail.

I have all these dreams and ambitions, and I know I have the ability to carry them out, in some sense, but it’s very hard to keep the will, the motivation.

I’ve said before, I’m sure, that depression itself seems almost to be an illness of the will, a sort of muscular dystrophy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis of the mind, though I think its causes and complications are much more intricate and multivariate than at least the first of those two comparisons.

I think for a fair amount of those who suffer badly from it, depression makes them want to kill themselves, but depression is also what keeps them from killing themselves; they cannot bring the effort to bear.  This is part of why the beginning of antidepressant therapy in a depressed person with suicidal ideation can be dangerous.  Such a person may begin to feel capable of getting things done, but not optimistic enough to avoid suicidal ideation, so they can sometimes use that new energy to act to kill themselves.

In any case, that’s not really the subject on which I was focused during this post.  I don’t think I’ve really been focused at all in writing this.  I don’t really know what subjects and topics I’ve raised.  I suppose you will know, more or less, having read this far.  And I guess, by the time I edit this, I will know.  But I don’t know right now.

It’s not important.  But one thing that is important is that I hope you all do your best to have a good day.

 *In the movie version of The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel says to Frodo that even the smallest person can change the course of the future, espousing a sort of rudimentary Chaos Theory.  But what does it mean to “change the course of the future”?  If the future has a course, it is defined and determined by the laws of physics, and any seeming “changes” were part of that process, so the course of the future is not “changed”, it is merely instantiated in whatever way it always is.

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Try to remember the kind of Sexember…

Well, first of all:  TBIF (Thank Batman it’s Friday).  I’ve been feeling particularly poorly this week, with sleep that’s even worse than my usual, and that is not good to start with.  At least, on the weekend, I can knock myself out at night with Benadryl and not really care that I will be groggy the next day.

I’m basically going to call this week a loss.  I haven’t gotten much of anything done that I had intended to do, and that’s discouraging.  But it’s a new month now, so there may be some psychological* tendency to think of it as a potential new beginning of sorts.  Mind you, there’s really nothing special about this day relative to any other; the length of a month is related to the lunar cycle and the length of the year, but only roughly, and the specific divisions are fairly arbitrary.

Of course, we know that August is named for Augustus Caesar, née Octavian, who succeeded in taking control of Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar (after whom July was renamed).  But it’s interesting, at least to me, to consider what it would have been named otherwise.  September, after all, is named after the fact that it was “originally” the seventh month, as October was the eighth, November the ninth, and December the tenth.

So, would August originally have been named Sexember (the sixth month)?  I think that would be the correct form, though Latin scholars among my readers should please correct me if I’ve used the wrong prefix**.  If I’m correct, I would like to propose a global change of name for this month back to the potential previous name.

“Sexember” sounds like a much more fun month than “August”, with its dog day connotations and so on.  Although, the prefix “sex-” referring to six has, as far as I know, nothing at all to do with the word “sex” relating to the reproductive divisions among animals, nor to the process involved, which‒for good, sound, biological reasons‒is something dwelt upon and enjoyed and even obsessed over by so many.  But I’m not worried about etymological purity here.

Imagine the antics on the various social media as oodles of young people of all ages geared up to celebrate “Sexember” and talked about how they planned to celebrate it.  Of course, I suspect most people would exaggerate their planned exploits, as people tend to do.  Social media is a supremely fertile ground for hyperbole and posturing and pretense and performative outrage, whether about political matters or just how “hot” one is and how perfect one’s life is.  I wrote a song about this topic a few years ago:  Like and Share.  Here, I’ll embed it in this post.

That brings up an issue raised by a very old*** and good friend of mine.  He noted that, since the company which published my songs put things on YouTube with disabled comments, there’s no direct way for people to give me feedback on them, good or bad.  Of course, the songs are also on Spotify and iTunes and supposedly on TikTok and all those others, but many of those don’t allow comments, either.

My works are also among the various available background songs that one can choose for “reels” on Instagram and on Facebook.  I enabled that last bit, and even used one once.  You all should feel free to use them, too.  In principle, I get paid when you do****.

Anyway, the thought I had was that maybe I should embed the songs here, on my blog, as posts.  Or maybe I could create a new page, like the one I have for “my books”.  I could call it “my songs” and could put the officially released ones there, as well as ones in progress, and I could even share some of my covers.  If I shared them as blog posts, at least, comments would be always available, and are almost always welcome.

Of course, that covers and the incomplete stuff are already on my YouTube channel, such as it is, and I even have a created playlist with all of them in it.  Those are already available for comment and response on YouTube.  I’m a long way away from having a monetized YouTube channel, though, and this blog isn’t monetized, either (though I sometimes think maybe I ought to monetize it, at least partially, or make a Patreon account or something).

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

In the meantime, hopefully today will be better than yesterday, which was a day on which I quite literally wished to be dead, because I felt miserable and in pain and alone, to say nothing of failing to achieve what I’ve wanted to achieve this week (or in this life).  The thing that most prevented me from taking action on that wish was that the effort involved would have been too great.

I feel less bad today, which‒given the nature of number lines and greater than/less than meanings and equivalences*****‒means I feel better than I did.  I still haven’t crossed the origin into positive territory, though, and I don’t know if I ever will again.  That’s the consideration that leads to contemplation of death:  if one’s present and expected future wellbeing function is always in the negative, then a return to zero is a net gain.  It’s analogous to a jokey thing I used to say:  The one who dies with the most debt wins.

Enough of this nonsense.  I’ll call this post and this work week to an end now.  I wish you all an excellent weekend, and of course, enjoy the first of Sexember!

*I made an interesting typo when I wrote this word, one which I don’t think I’ve made before, though it would seem a very easy one to make, given the layout of the QWERTY keyboard:  I wrote it as “paychological”.  That seems almost like something that could be a new slang term, with related terms “paychopathology” and “paychopath”.

**Perhaps “Hexember” would be at least as proper or more so (though we don’t have “Heptember”).  I’m not sure.  That would surely please some of the many Goth people I tend to follow online, but it doesn’t have as broad an appeal as “Sex-” does.

***By which I mean he has been my friend from way back (starting freshman year of college), not that he is very old.  He’s roughly the same age I am, and‒though I often feel as if I’ve been kept alive by one of the great rings for centuries or even millennia beyond my natural time‒my real age, in proper time, is 55 years, soon to be 56.  Of course, there is no actual quantum leap in age at the anniversary of one’s birth.  Time is continuous‒or, well, it is quantized, but at the scale of 10-43 seconds.  So for all foreseeable, practical purposes within our lifetimes, it is continuous.

****Though the pay rate is nearly as miniscule as the Planck time mentioned in the previous footnote.

*****A pet peeve of mine is when some people denigrate the notion of choosing “the lesser of two evils”, particularly during elections, expressing such sentiments as “the lesser of two evils is still evil”.  This may be true in a simple-minded sense, but it misses the point entirely and expresses woefully clunky thinking.  Such a person might be expected to feel that owing a debt of $10 was not any better than owing a debt of $100,000, since both are debts.  But when you think about with which debt you’d prefer to be saddled, the difference is clear.  Money has a way of sharpening people’s intuitions regarding numbers.  Indeed, there’s some evidence that “negative numbers” were first invented to deal with debts.

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O, that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth! Then with a passion would I blog the world;

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and if I were still writing fiction, this would be the only day of the week on which I would write a blog post.  On every other workday, I would be either writing or editing my fiction.

I haven’t been doing that for a while.

Part of the issue is that I don’t think very many people had any interest in it.  Apart from my sister, I hardly got any feedback on my books, and very few “ratings” on Amazon.  I know of two people who have given reviews of my books on Amazon, and one of those people subsequently died.

I don’t know that liking my stories had anything to do with that, but I do have a weird history of a surprising number of people dying after expressing the fact that they really liked something I did‒in most prior cases, specifically, my singing.  No fewer than three people who expressed enthusiastic appreciation of my singing died shortly afterward.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to think that people suffered and/or died because they liked something creative that I had done.  It’s not just unscientific, it’s actually verging on frank delusion.  People just die, I know that.  It happens to us all at some point.  Sometimes, by chance, it coincides with certain other things, and that can seem spooky.

But what if…?

As a matter of principle, I cannot rule out with mathematical certainty the possibility that liking my books or my singing or my music or my other creative stuff might be dangerous.  It’s a pretty freaking low probability*.  But is it worth the risk?

I mean, sure, if I thought I had that power and it was reliable, there are certain political (and otherwise) figures I would try to get exposed to my music or writing in hopes that they would love it and so seal their doom.  But that’s a fantasy that’s not even good enough for one of my stories.

Coming back to that topic, even the stories I’ve started (or completed) and shared here** have gotten almost no feedback, and I doubt that anyone other than my sister has read any, let alone all, of them.  If I’m forgetting anyone’s feedback, I do apologize; I did not mean to insult you or dismiss your input.

I don’t know what I’m getting at, here today.  Obviously, I wish more people had read and responded to my stories and/or my songs‒though I no longer sing as well as I used to sing, I think.  But, as you may know, I am not good at promoting myself.  I don’t really like myself, and I certainly don’t love myself.

Anyway, this is all nonsense.  I don’t know what I would do even if I were an international best-selling author or beloved star musician or whatever.  I would probably still hate myself.  Nothing really brings me any durable joy or well-being, let alone anything deeper.  Even the foods that I like seem uninteresting, as do most of the books I could read or programs and videos I could watch.  I can’t sleep (much), and I’m always in pain.

Also, right now, I have a bruise on the inner surface of my right upper arm that looks horrific‒it’s about two inches across‒that just appeared yesterday morning (at least that’s when I noticed it), but I don’t know how it happened.  At least it doesn’t hurt much.  I think I’ve had bruises there before, so perhaps I’m in the habit of slamming things I pick up into that area from time to time.  Or, perhaps I have an AV*** malformation in that region that occasionally bleeds.

It’s almost certainly not a sign of any impending life-threatening illness, unfortunately.

Oh, I also haven’t worked any on either the new song or the last song (Native Alien) so far this week.  I haven’t played any music at all, nor have I listened to any.  And I certainly haven’t been singing.  I haven’t been doing any significant walking, and I haven’t been able to whip myself into a bike-riding habit.

Part of that latter fact is because it’s summer in south Florida, so it’s very hot and very humid.  It’s discouraging, though.

Anyway, sorry about being such a bummer and a downer and all that.  It’s not you; it’s definitely me.  I’ll let you all go and have a hopefully better day for now, I guess.  Meanwhile I’ll go play in traffic or something.

TTFN

*Though I think I would not give it as low an estimated likelihood as I gave the possibility of the Earth and Moon abruptly quantum tunneling to the Andromeda Galaxy.

**Outlaw’s Mind, The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, and of course Extra Body.

***Arterio-venous.

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“I don’t think I’ll ever get over the hill; those wounds run…pretty deep.”

It’s the penultimate day of July in 2025, and I can’t honestly say I’ll be sad to see the month go‒nor the year, nor the life, for that matter.

The word “penultimate” does make me wonder if any stationery company ever marketed a writing implement as the “Pen Ultimate”.  If so, I’ve not heard of it.  I guess it’s not a terrific marketing idea, just a mildly amusing play on words.

Anyway, it’s Wednesday, the so-called hump day‒because presumably once one passes the midpoint of the week, one finds it easier to coast through the rest of the week, as if one had reached the top of some hill (or hump) and was now loping, or perhaps sledding or skiing or snowboarding, down the other side.

Of course, that metaphor presumes there’s something akin to gravity applicable here, which is the force that makes it hard to go up a hill and easier to go down it.  But there is no such force applicable to time (though time is affected by gravity).

As far as I can see, no matter what you do, the days of the week proceed at the same monotonous rate, whether one puts any effort into it or not.  Time passes at the same rate (ignoring tiiiiiiiny adjustments for relative speeds and altitudes) for the most active athlete or business tycoon or person in the grip of mania as it does for someone idle or even someone in a coma.  And even if one can slow down one’s time relative to others‒for instance by going some substantial portion of the speed of light relative to them or by going into an area of strong gravity‒one’s own “proper time”, the time one experiences, will still be the same*.

One might effectively travel into the future of the people one left behind on one’s high-speed voyage, but one will also skip and miss all those years that one is “away”, and there’s no way to get that time back.  The nature of causality appears to preclude it.

So, yeah, the concept of hump day is purely psychological, and like so much of human psychology, it is stupid.  I wish I could say that my impression of such things has become less negative as my own proper time has passed, but alas, the young provide no more basis for hope with their presumed energy and creativity than the older ones do with their presumed greater experience and knowledge.

Almost all humans are really quite pathetic and come despair-inducingly far from achieving anything like their potential in wisdom or intelligence or creativity.  They mostly just bounce around like air molecules in a closed chamber, achieving maximal local entropy.

And don’t delude yourself that any other creatures on the planet are any “better” than humans.  Even the relatively smart ones like chimpanzees and porpoises and cephalopods and corvids tend to be often vicious, selfish, and violent.  That’s not all they are, of course, but it’s plenty.  They’re certainly not pure or innocent or fundamentally beneficent creatures.

Neither are dogs or cats or other mammals, or reptiles of any kind, nor fishes, nor birds, nor arthropods, nor annelids, nor protozoa, and so on.  Nothing in the world is inherently beneficent.  Even plants fight and harm and kill each other; trees waste their resources by growing taller to outcompete each other for sunlight, when if they all stayed shorter, at some uniform height, they would all be better off.

And fungi eat everyone, using other life forms for their resources and sometimes for locomotion, and they wage constant war with bacteria and so on.

There’s no good reason to expect any form of alien intelligence to be any better, nor AI either.  No matter how much smarter one being is than another, the most powerful defining factor of each is its limits.  Every finite thing is equally far from infinity.

Unfortunately, beneficence overall is not really an evolutionarily stable strategy.  Even if all beings in a given ecosystem were mutually benevolent, all it would take would be for one mutant to instantiate a degree of selfishness and ruthlessness and it would have a tremendous advantage over its kindly brethren, and its genes would spread and become more and more prevalent.

Of course, universal malevolence and selfishness are not stable, either.  That’s a recipe for overall destruction, as much as anything else is.  Prey are necessary for a predator to survive.  As Porter said in Payback about nice guys:  You’ve gotta have somebody to take advantage of.  The food web has to have a base somewhere.

It seems to me that there will never be any system that doesn’t have some such mixture of predators and prey‒even metaphorically within species and societies.  Of course, it makes sense to prevent and mitigate the depredations of the assholes and, if possible, to discourage them from existing at all.  That’s better for everyone.  But as with the trees**, it doesn’t happen on its own, and it is not self-sustaining.  The price of such freedom really is constant vigilance, and unerring vigilance of that kind is probably impossible in principle.

I’m not really trying to come to some point here.  Mostly I’m just expressing my frustration and despair and cynicism/nihilism.  There is not only horror in the world, but horror is always there and almost certainly always will be, at least until the ultimate (but at least peaceful) horror of universal heat death (or whatever) brings about the elimination of all experience of any kind in the universe.

The only enduring peace and freedom may be simple nonexistence.  But then there’s that damn Poincaré Recurrence!

Ah, well.  Have a day.  You can call it a hump day if it amuses you.  I don’t know why I care.

*And, of course, if one is traveling at a substantial portion of the speed of light, if one doesn’t have adequate shielding, one’s lifespan is liable to be shortened significantly due to exposure to induced cosmic rays:  When you travel at a very high speed through the elementary particles of open space, the elementary particles of open space travel at a very high speed through you.

**Think about it:  those beautiful California redwood trees are possibly the greatest, most glacially persistent testament to the “dog eat dog” nature of the non-human world; a centuries-long spectacle of cutthroat one-upsmanship, each tree fighting maniacally to outcompete the others for sunlight.  They are beautiful, of course, but so is a raging fire.

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This tue, tue sullied (or solid) day

Tuesday or not Tuesday?  That is the question.  And the answer, for today at least, is that today is Tuesday.

I don’t know when you’re reading this, though.  Odds are, if you aren’t reading this on the day I publish it, that you are not reading it on a Tuesday.  In fact, once we get out past the rest of this week* there should only be a roughly 1 in 7 chance that you are reading this on a Tuesday.

That’s probably pretty obvious, huh?  Still, it can be useful to be in the habit of thinking in terms of probability and statistics, since that’s the way nature sorts itself out, right on down to the level of quantum mechanics, to the best of our understanding.  If people had a better understanding of the nature of probability, many things in the world would run far better, or so I suspect.

I have written at least one previous post (on Iterations of Zero) about how I think probability and statistics should be emphasized far more in general math education at the secondary school level (even for non-college-prep students).

Imagine a world in which most people had grown up learning about the nature of probability with reasonable rigor.  There would be fewer headline-based scares about things that are unlikely enough to be irrelevant‒e.g., plane crashes‒and more appropriate understanding about things like vaccination and disease prevention of various kinds, among numerous other matters.

Imagine if the people of the world really understood the difference between absolute risk and relative risk, and if they grasped the difference between sensitivity and specificity for medical tests.  Heck, imagine if the public at large had a decent elementary grasp of Bayesian probability.  Bayes’s Theorem is not really all that difficult, when you get right down to it.  Veritasium did a nice video about it**.

Of course, as I’ve said before, if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horse shit, whereas that’s only figuratively the case as it is.  But it would be nice if politicians and other people with undue influence had to deal with a general public that was savvy about the legitimate use of statistics and why (and how) they are fundamental to a thorough understanding of the world itself.  It’s not an accident nor a mistake that Jaynes named his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

And science is not an esoteric thing.  It is not a high-falutin’ mode of thought that doesn’t pertain to the average person.  It comes from the Latin scire, meaning to know.  It is fundamental to the nature of our epistemology, to not just what we know about the world but how we come to know it, how complete and how incomplete is our understanding and what the nature of the world really is at deepest and broadest and finest and coarsest levels.

So, it’s fairly pertinent to everyone, really.  After all, if you want to win a game (or get your best score or whatever) you’re best off understanding the rules as well as you can.  A true novice is unlikely to win a game of chess, or of Go, or even of Mario Kart against someone who knows what they are doing.

Now, nature isn’t our adversary per se‒if it were, we would all be long gone‒but it “knows” its rules and always and only plays by those rules, by definition.  In fact, if you come upon a place where you think nature has broken its rules***, what’s really happened is that you’ve come to a place where you don’t understand the rules.  Nature cannot be “wrong”.  There is no such thing as the “supernatural” in reality, because anything that actually happens, that actually exists, is part of nature.

Even if you discovered that you were in a situation such as that described by Descartes or The Matrix, in which the reality you think you know is an illusion, that is simply a newly discovered fact about the nature of reality, and it raises**** the question of what is the nature of that illusion, what is behind it, and by what laws of physics do those entities operate?

So, anyway, it’s good to learn about how reality works if you want your best chance (never a guarantee) of doing what you want successfully and getting what you desire from life.  No one here gets out alive (at least it’s very unlikely) but you might as well make the game as rewarding as you can in the meantime.

*Which I suspect would be when most non-same-day readers would read this.

**He also did a really nice one about the logistic map and chaos and the Mandelbrot Set that will blow your mind if you haven’t thought about it before.

***I’m thinking of those stories with submoronic headlines such as “New discovery breaks physics!” which don’t make sense to anyone who knows anything, and which should embarrass those who write them.

****It does not beg the question.  To beg a question is not to raise the question, but rather to proceed as if it had already been asked and answered in a way that you’re presuming it to be answered.  It is a way of skirting fundamental issues and avoiding having to prove a case.  In other words, it is willfully or accidentally disingenuous.