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Who hast not in thy blogs an eye discerning thine honor from thy suffering

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 13th of August.  Somehow, “Thursday the 13th” feels less punchy, less interesting, than “Friday the 13th”, but I strongly suspect this is just a cultural artifact of, originally, the day being considered by some to be unlucky, and then of course of the very successful and long-running series of slasher/horror films bearing that title, which took root from that superstition.

This sort of thing can be called more sharply to attention by comparing differences in cultures that do not have very strong shared histories*.  For instance, in the US (and the UK, I believe), ghost stories are generally most associated with mid-autumn, especially around Halloween time.  Whereas, in Japan, telling ghost stories is more associated with the summertime, especially the latter part of it.

I don’t know why that’s the case in Japan, but there are surely causes.  There are causes for all things at some level (probably even of causality itself, though we’re getting into uncharted territory with that speculation).  But, contrary to popular opinion. there are not always reasons.  I actually despise the notion so many people espouse, that “everything happens for a reason”.

Of course, if by “reason” you mean what I would call “cause”, then I cannot quibble with you without engaging in rank hypocrisy, which I try not to do.  But what most people seem to mean by reason in this case has to do with telos, with “purpose”, with “goals”.  In other words, they imagine some personal explanation for things, some willed intention, somewhere.

This is no doubt related to religion‒sometimes it is caused by it, sometimes it probably contributes to causing it, and sometimes it may merely be parallel‒but that doesn’t make it any better.  Deep down, below the façade of piety and orthodoxy, this type of thought seems just to be a kind of self-consolation, like sucking one’s thumb to soothe oneself.

I cannot in good conscience fault all types of self-soothing behavior.  I probably have dozens of what are now called “stims” that I do just to have stuff to do with my hands and feet (and brain, etc.), especially when I feel tense.  But I don’t take them as some hint about the ontology of reality.  I take them as things done by a nervous system trying to cope with a world for which it is perforce imperfectly adapted.

They’re not terrible things, by any means.  Some of them are even kind of cool (I can roll coins across the backs of my fingers, for instance).  But it would be silly of me to imagine or to assume them to have any deeper or broader significance.

What’s the big deal?  Why not let people console themselves with the notion that everything happens for a reason, though it may be an “ineffable” one?  What’s the harm?

Well, there’s always my general recognition that when one fights reality, one always loses.  The course of reality is strict and surrounded by impassable walls; if you don’t maintain your local parallel course to that of reality, sooner or later you will collide with those walls, and it is you who will break, while they will show not so much as a scuff mark.  

If it’s just you who suffers the consequences of this crash, that’s sad but not tragic.  But you may not be the only casualty of your poor steering, and it’s the innocent victims I lament far more than the idiots who drove themselves willfully (or at least willingly) into ruin.

But more specifically, saying that everything happens for “a reason” is a moral “get out of jail free” card.  It lets people look at cases of even terrible suffering and shrug and imagine that the suffering is there for “a reason” and so is “okay”, like Mother Theresa wallowing in the misery of the sick and dying poor as a way to get closer to Jesus.  This sort of thing is easiest when one is not suffering personally.

Now, there is often not much one can do to change a particular case of suffering, but I don’t think that makes it worthwhile to allow oneself to be delusional about it.  It’s better to admit that some entirely unnecessary suffering happens and that it sucks, because that leaves the option open of actually doing something to correct or prevent it, at some point.

It’s better than dismissing it (or worse, embracing it) because of delusions about “God’s plan”, or “karma”, or some Marxist delusion about an inevitable course of history, or any other magical thinking idea, all of which seem to center on an implicit notion of humans being (at least part of) the “purpose” of the cosmos.

Purpose is an invention, something that came into existence in human (and possibly other) brains.  If things in the universe are to be purposeful, it will be up to those who believe in that purpose to make it happen.  This is harder than just imagining that such a purpose is already there, but it actually has the potential to turn out to be made true, at least eventually.

And maybe, here and there, from time to time, when the wind is fair and the stars are right, if one sees suffering but doesn’t imagine that the suffering serves some “greater good”, one might just occasionally take action to relieve it rather than simply to slap on one’s epistemological blinders and go on one’s way.

TTFN

*This is rather akin to finding what processes are biologically fundamental, or at least old, by comparing genomes of organisms that are quite distant relatives**.

**One cannot compare truly unrelated organisms, because on this planet, there are no such things.  All life clearly shows the imprint of common ancestry.  To pick a frequently used example, most of your genes are shared (roughly) with bananas, and far more with banana slugs.

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This post is about 900 words long; other than that I don’t know what it’s about

It’s yet another day‒this time it’s Wednesday, the third day of the work week.  This is as expected and probably does not truly merit or at least require my pointing it out.  That’s fine, though; nearly everything that I do is without merit, let alone necessity.

Of course, merit and necessity tend to depend very much upon one’s point of view.  This is not to say nor to imply that such merit or necessity is entirely subjective and relative.  Some things have an intrinsic necessity in that, if one does not satisfy the need for them, one will suffer and/or die.

Think of food.  A person can, in principle, decide that they don’t ever want to eat again, and they may even be able to carry out that intention, but they will not be able to do so for long.  It’s not just an evolutionarily unstable strategy, it’s an individually unstable strategy.

The fact that suicide happens does not refute the drives and requirements for survival.  It just means that some organisms will be sieved from the rest of the biosphere and from the future.  Just because some buildings are destroyed in earthquakes does not mean that they should all be abandoned or that buildings are overall a bad or useless thing.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make with this.

My audio yesterday seemed to work okay.  I guess the sound quality was decent using the mic from my headphones.  That’s kind of nice.  I don’t know how often I’ll be doing that, or if people will like it or not, but I feel that there are some subjects about which it feels more natural for me simply to speak rather than to write, if only because of the discomfort in my hands.

It still uses up a lot of memory for the amount of useful data conveyed.  I certainly have no intention to do videos of me speaking any time soon.  The notion of using tons of memory to store and share images of me is worse than useless, to me and to the world.

Indeed, if I could find a mask that I could wear all the time and that would be tolerably comfortable even in Florida (and wouldn’t lead to horrible fungal rashes, like what led me to have to stop wearing watches) I would probably use it.  But people would probably think I was weird if I wore a mask all the time.  I wouldn’t want that.

That’s a joke, of course.  People think I’m weird already, and they always have.  This consistency of opinion probably points to a clear underlying common fact:  I am weird.

I want to make it clear that I don’t hate myself because I’m weird.  I’m okay with being weird.  That’s not why I hate myself.  But I am also very, very dark inside.  There’s a reason that I tend to write horror (even when I’m not writing an “official” horror story) and that I have a blog subsection called “My heroes have always been villains”*.

I just seem to have a tremendous fount of anger inside, a fierce urge to lash out and destroy, and it’s been there as long as I can clearly recall.  I don’t know why it’s there.  Probably it’s at least partly related to my ASD (not the heart one, the other one), but there may be other psychological processes behind it.

I’ve gone to therapy a lot, in several different places and times, and I don’t recall getting any insight into the whole thing.  If any of you know any real subject matter experts who are willing to give me therapy for free‒or if you’re willing to pay for it‒then by all means, let’s hear the pitch.

Or, of course, if you think you have some insight that might be revelatory or just useful for me, I suppose you should feel free to leave it in the comments.  But remember, I’ve been trying to sort through myself for a long time, and I’m pretty bright and tenacious, so obvious sorts of things are unlikely to have escaped my notice.

Then again, I’m on the inside, and that sometimes hampers the clarity of one’s vision.  If you honestly, and not just out of hubris, think that might be the case and, given that, you think you have some useful insight, by all means, have at you.  Don’t get your hopes up, though.

I could probably give that as general advice to everyone about everything, come to think of it:  Don’t get your hopes up.

Speaking thereof, I expect I’ll write posts again tomorrow and Friday and Saturday this week, exclusis improvisis.  I’m not telling you not to look forward to those by saying “don’t get your hopes up”.  On the contrary, I’m advising you against getting your hopes up that you’ll get a break from my vitriol any time soon.

Of course, you are free not to read this any time you choose to stop.  But then again, we are not the pure authors of our actions, nor of ourselves, so I know you may be compelled by forces that you find inscrutable.  I can sympathize.

Please have a good day.

*I am here parodying the old Willy Nelson song, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.  No one seems to get that reference.  It must be a less well known song than I imagined.

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Does the tread on a Mobius tire last twice as long?

“And it must follow as the night the day” that the second day of the work week (today) follows the first (yesterday).  This is what happens with ordinal numbers; they delineate (if that’s the word I want) the order of things.

Of course, as with numbers on the standard clock, or cycles of days of the week, or months of the year, the first day (or whatever) also follows the second day.  Indeed, in a small enough cycle, they can follow each other by exactly the same amount.  This is what happens in a binary cycle, like soldiers marching (or any biped walking).  The left foot starts off, and the right foot follows immediately after.  But then the left foot follows the right foot immediately after that.  And so on.

Of course, the weekdays have seven members, so that cycle may be more akin to the movement of the heptapods from Arrival.  And there are more months still, and more days in months than that, but the cycles still cycle.

Some cycles are surprising, of course.  For instance, if you go for one 360-degree turn around a Mobius strip, you’re not back where you started; you’re on the opposite side of the strip, “underneath” where you began.  To return to your starting point, you must take another 360 degree (or 2 pi radians, if you prefer) run around the strip.

This is a good analogy with (and a way of making some intuitive sense of) the spins of fermions, i.e., particles with half-integer spins, such as electrons and quarks.  When we say they have half-integer spins, we mean if you “rotate” one 360 degrees, it will end up in the opposite spin configuration to where it started; it requires another 360 degrees to return to its beginning.

That’s in contrast to the integer-spin bosons, which behave more “intuitively” in that they require 360 degrees to come back to where they started, like numbers on a clock.  Photons are probably the most obvious examples of spin-1 particles.

There is also a hypothetical spin-2 particle, the graviton (still a boson, because it has an integer spin).  This is easier to model in one’s head, because it “looks” the same after a 180 degree rotation.  It’s pretty easy to imagine 3-dimensional shapes to model that.  Think of football shapes, or even just rectangles.

Of course, it would be even easier to imagine “spin 3” or “spin 4” things:  think of equilateral triangles and of squares.  One can even quite easily imagine a spin-infinity object.  That’s just a circle; no matter how you spin it (maintaining its center point) it looks the same.

Of course, if you’re Archimedes (you’re not; I checked), you get closer and closer to finding out the value of pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter) by bounding a circle’s circumference between regular polygons that fit exactly within and exactly around the circle and taking their perimeters.  It’s hard to do that for a triangle, or at least it’s hard for me to do in my head, but a set of squares*, one nested in a unit circle**, the other in which is nested a unit circle, can be done.

The perimeter of a square in which is nested a unit circle is easy, because each side of the square is length 1, just like the diameter, so the perimeter is 4.  The interior square has diagonal length 1.  So any two sides make the legs of a right triangle, and a^2 + b^2 = c^2.  So side^2 plus side^2 equals 1^2.  Or, 2 times the side-length squared equals 1, or a single side squared is 1 over 2, and the length of a side is 1/√2 (we only use the positive root, since we’re talking about physically realizable lengths).  Thus, the perimeter of that square is 4 x (1/√2), or 4/√2, which is 2√2.  That ends up being around 2.8 ish.

So, it seems pi is between 2.8 and 4.  Which it is.  That doesn’t narrow it down much, but if you go from there to ever-increasing numbers of (equal) sides in nested/nesting figures, as Archimedes did, you can get arbitrarily close to the actual value of pi.

That’s all you can do, since pi is an irrational number.  There is an infinite amount of information encoded in the digits of pi, and indeed in any irrational number (making each irrational number its own version of the Library of Babel in a sense).  But pi is a fundamental geometrical number, so that fact hits home with it perhaps more than with any other specific number.

If the universe really is continuously divisible (this possibility is far from certain), then each spot in the universe contains a potential uncountable infinity of info.  If that is the case, nothing can truly, fully simulate the universe in detail.  But we can still make useful models.

I could get into the restrictions imposed by the Planck length and the Planck time and so on, but that’s a whole can of bees I don’t want to open just now.  Instead, I’ll call this to a close for today.  I hope you have a good one.

*A very crude starting point, but it’s good for demonstration.

**In this case I’m using that to mean a circle with diameter 1.  Sometimes one sees it used to refer to a radius-1 circle.  It doesn’t matter that much, but it’s very important to be clear which one you mean.  Just as it’s useful, even crucial, to define terms before beginning a discussion to avoid arguments over nonissues***.

***For instance, if you get two people to agree on what they mean by “sound” before you ask them, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it does it make a sound?” then there is unlikely to be any disagreement, because the answer will be trivial (either way).  Thus, this is not actually a philosophical conundrum, despite its reputation; it is merely a demonstration of the folly of poor communication.

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This is today’s blog post, in case you were wondering

Well, it’s the start of a new work week.  I hope you all had a good weekend.  Mine was…well, idle, I guess, if nothing else.  Certainly there were no significant activities involved in it, beyond watching various kinds of reaction videos online, because that almost feels like watching something with friends.

I’m sorry to have to say that my one slightly longer than usual night’s sleep (see last week) was indeed a fluke and a rather extreme outlier.  I wonder whether ibuprofen even had anything to do with it after all.  It could have been something I ate for all I can tell.

I’m continuing to use the ibuprofen, but I think it’s just doing its usual thing, because I certainly am not getting the response I got when I took it after ten or so days without NSAIDs.  I did get some similar feelings of fleeting but global relief of some kind since then, which makes me suspect that I really do have some chronic inflammation going on, but that’s really not very surprising.

I would have liked to do more walking this weekend, but it’s been very hot and seriously humid, so the heat index rises to well over a hundred starting quite early in the day.  Also, it was pretty sunny, and that adds to trouble, especially if one doesn’t own any non-black clothes.

I know, of course, that it’s been my decision to buy only black clothes, so one could say that it’s entirely my fault.  And that’s even accurate, if one uses the term fault in the sense of “something wrong or badly designed or badly put together” or even “a crack running through the crust or surface or structure of something”.  I’m definitely a faulty device.  That should be obvious.

But it’s not a fault about which I have the wherewithal to make a difference.  I just can’t stand to wear any colors anymore; they irritate my eyes, or some part of my sensory apparatus.  I can’t change my own bad wiring, so to speak, anymore than a computer can improve its own operating system.

I suppose, in principle, AIs may eventually be able to do so, but though I often feel like a replicant, I am not, as far as I know, actually (or virtually) artificial.  I can alter my programming only the “old fashioned way”, by which I mean, trying to learn new things and master new skills and so on.

And I have tried, and I am trying, and I will probably continue to try, to improve myself, to gain new skills, to get past my mental (and physical) issues.  But though I may have made progress‒who knows how bad I might be, otherwise‒I feel very much like an ant trying to scramble up the side of an ant-lion’s trap.

The shifting sand underneath makes the experience much like trying to go up a fast moving downward escalator.  It’s taking all the effort I’m able to muster to keep myself from going rapidly down to whatever predator or basement or whatever lies at the bottom of the course.  Or, maybe there is no bottom.  Maybe it’s possible to keep sliding down and down, forever, never making any headway at all.

It’s enough to make one want just to stop trying and even to turn around and sit down on the escalator steps and just embrace whatever is waiting below.  I certainly don’t feel any signs that I’m even getting within sight of any next level up the moving stairs, let alone finding a potential exit.

All this is a metaphor, of course, and I suspect it’s a pretty tortured one.  I apologize for that.  I try to be creative, but sometimes it doesn’t work too well, and I come out with some equivalent of purple prose.

I think I try too hard to be clever, just as I try too hard to be funny.  I succeed a little bit, occasionally; it would be truly sad if I kept trying and always failed.  But enough people laugh at things I say that I think I have some intermittent success in the humor area.  I’ve even received compliments about some laughs in a review of my horror novel The Vagabond.

I wonder what I would be like if I were able to break the habit of trying to be funny or clever or whatever you want to call it.  Maybe that would be the equivalent of the aforementioned turning around and sitting down on the descending escalator and just watching as it brings me into whatever depths await.

I’m certainly very tired of trying.  I’m not getting anywhere‒not as far as I can tell‒and it’s just exhausting.  Maybe I need what they call a “grippy sock vacation”*.  Except I think I need more of a “dirt vacation”, which is like the proverbial dirt nap, but more welcome to the person taking it.

Okay, that’s enough out of me.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week.

*I’m not liable to be able to take one of those, because I do not have any medical insurance, and I don’t expect (or intend) ever to get any.  One doesn’t build fancy battlements and protective fortifications and set up infra-red and motion-sensing alarms around a poorly maintained outhouse.

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I buprofen, you buprofen, we all buprofen…

I feel that there’s something important about today’s date* (it’s August 7th in 2026 CE, but the year is not what feels familiar, it is the day and the month).  It’s not coming to me yet, but I think it will.  If it doesn’t, I guess I can always look it up, but that would be a shame to have to resort to that.

Please don’t think I have anything against looking things up; that would be quite untrue!  I’m a huge fan of looking things up, especially in ways that can lead one to learn about unexpected things while seeking the answer to one’s initial questions.  This is one of my big problems with LLM-assisted searches; they don’t tend to lead you to unexpected and tangential knowledge, or even to see a nearby entry in an encyclopedia that’s on a different but interesting subject.

But if I already “know” something, and sense that I know it, I feel that it’s a shame not to exercise my powers of recall.  We shall try to do that today.  Or, well, I will try to do that.  Y’all can do what you please.

It’s a weird morning for me, and if I seem stranger than usual or more incoherent (or less) than usual, try not to be alarmed.  Something rather remarkable happened to me last night:  I slept nearly six hours without any (remembered) awakenings.  I may even have slept slightly longer.

This did not just happen, though.  There was a series of circumstances that‒I strongly suspect‒led to this outcome.

Yesterday morning, I felt so crummy right from the start of the day that I took a CBD/Delta-9 gummy** first thing in the morning.  It made me groggy to some degree but at least it suppressed some tension.

Then, of course, I took some Tylenol and some aspirin in reasonable amounts, and they did whatever they do for me, which isn’t terribly much, but there it is.  Anyway, I felt kind of crappy and sleepy and low-energy and just miserable, even for me.

I also wasn’t sure that the curtailment of NSAIDs had actually been making any difference in the symptoms (signs, really) that had led me to stop them.  Anyway, I have a bottle of Ibuprofen (actually, I have two) at the office, and I finally gave in to pain and general stiffness and soreness and mental fatigue and just took three of them.

Not long after, I found myself getting pleasant chills all over my body, as well as a general feeling of relative euphoria, and I realized that it was the Ibuprofen fighting my inflammation‒or whatever specifically was having the effect I was experiencing‒and making me feel physically alive and rather well for the first time in a while.

Unfortunately, ibuprofen doesn’t last as long as naproxen.  I took another dose (of 2 tablets this time) later in the day, and then two just before I went to bed last night.  I can only conclude (provisionally) that it was at least part of what led to my relatively sound sleep.

This is, of course, immense, but it is also ever so slightly worrisome.

You see, I stopped using ibuprofen a while back when it seemed to start being associated with occasional palpitations (consistent with premature atrial contractions).  This was not at all certain.  They might have been related to something else I was taking or perhaps some interaction (the palpitations were real, in that they were not merely sensations but were associated with slightly irregular heartbeats; I checked my pulse).

But there are many other medications available, so I decided to switch to naproxen for regular use.  I usually didn’t take the maximum dose, because in my clinical experience, naproxen tends to be a bit more toxic than ibuprofen (possibly related to the latter’s relatively shorter duration of action).

So, anyway, yeah, I think that’s a big part of why I slept last night better than I’ve slept in a good while, or at least longer.  I don’t expect that to continue, necessarily (though I am unlikely to complain if it does).  After all, my rest has probably been quite a bit worse than usual these last ten days or so, because of the eliminated anti-inflammatory medications, so there’s some degree of making up for extra exhaustion, which temporarily overpowers whatever processes lead to my insomnia in the first place.

We’ll see, I guess.  Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.  If so, I’m sure I’ll let you all know.

In any case, I’m going to be paying attention to my liquid waste elimination systems, just to be sure I’m not experiencing major difficulties.  I’ll also keep a weather eye on my heart rhythm, but I need to try not to pay too much attention to it, since palpitations can be subjective.

Also, let’s be honest and clear, premature atrial contractions are generally benign, and are not associated with degeneration into worse rhythm disturbances.  I’m sure that I have some scar tissue in my heart‒I mean, I did have open heart surgery for crying out loud***‒and so I’m probably prone to some slight irritability in the conduction system from time to time.

I guess we’ll see what will happen.  I haven’t taken any ibuprofen yet today; despite the euphoria I felt yesterday, I don’t expect it to entail any addiction risk, because that “rush” was a rush of relief, not of intoxication.  But I need to be aware of the kidney and cardiac effects.  Of course, I also must keep protecting my stomach, but I’ve been doing that for a long time (and probably engendering some chronic issues related to the meds needed for it).

We’ll see how well I can engineer the workings of my body, I guess.  I’m pretty good at it, but the tools available are still blunt ones, and PPE for them is limited.  Hopefully, I will at least get a few night’s worth of relatively good sleep this weekend.

Speaking of which, I hope you all have a good day today and a good weekend, yourselves.  I expect I will next write a blog post Monday morning‒as always, exclusis improvisis.

*The more I think about it, the more I think that it might be the birthday of one of my best friends from when I grew up, named Andy Tabar.  If I were still allowed on Meta-related services, I could check, because I followed him on Facebook and Instagram, but alas that is no more.  If it is his birthday, and if any of my readers are in contact with him, please wish him Happy Birthday from me.  Thank you.

**Perfectly legal, OTC, hemp-derived.

***Actually, it was for an atrial septal defect, one that wasn’t discovered until I started working out for NROTC and running fairly long distances.

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Blog, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blog!

Hello. Also, good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 6th of August in 2026 AD (or CE if you prefer).  As you can see, I am writing (or I will have written) a blog post today.  This is only really noteworthy because last Thursday I didn’t write a post.  I stayed at the house and did not go to work.

I would say that I’m not completely recovered yet.  My respiratory symptoms are improving, but are not entirely back to normal (I guess “normal” for such symptoms means “nonexistent”).  My urinary issues appear mostly resolved, which may be because I have continued not to use any NSAIDs other than aspirin (in modest amounts), making up what difference I can with Tylenol.  It’s not ideal, and my thumbs and back and hips and cetera are having more stiffness and discomfort than usual.  Partly because of that, I have not been walking much this week.

I don’t really have anything interesting or uplifting to discuss today.  I appear usually only to be able to sustain an upbeat impression for about one day’s worth of posting, and then I’m exhausted and unable to maintain a normal or positive attitude.  It takes quite a bit of effort for me to pretend to be normal and human.  I used to be better at it‒I think‒but my endurance for such things has worn away.  Maybe there is some psychic equivalent of repetitive stress injury that grinds down that capacity over time.  Maybe I just never really had such a capacity and I was merely fooling myself.

I do know that I had longer stretches of positive mood in the past‒sometimes too positive, I suspect.  But that’s gone the way of the great white whale, as far as I can tell.  I certainly don’t feel positive.  Maybe I come across occasionally as positive, though.

Who knows?  Not me.  I never lost control.  You’re face to face with the man who sold the world.

Oh, wait, those are the lyrics to a David Bowie song that was covered brilliantly by Nirvana:

Sorry, I think I’m being a bit incoherent.  Perhaps I should try more to be on guard against madness, or at least to fear it like Lear did (that almost rhymes).  But I don’t, at least not really, because my type of madness is mainly mood related, not a cognitive dysfunction.

***

Sorry for that little discontinuity, there.  I got to the train station in the interim and lost my train of thought…ouch, no pun intended, sorry about that.

As I was approaching the northbound side of the station, I had to stop because the express train was coming through, and the gates were going down.  Actually, the gate just started going down as I approached; I could have rushed across, but it would have been a bit obnoxious, and there was nothing to gain by it.

I like being near the express train as it passes, anyway, because its slipstream creates a really nice breeze.

Does anyone else out there see such express trains go by and wonder what it would feel like if one threw oneself in front of it as it approached?  By which I mean, do you wonder if it would hurt, or if the concussive force would be too great and too fast for pain?  Would there even be time and nervous system input enough for one to register impact, let alone to suffer?

I wouldn’t do that sort of thing, of course (I think).  It would be very rude; it would spoil the commute for thousands of people at least, and it could traumatize the poor people who work on the train.  I suppose if I were to be fully hateful enough as well as self-destructive, I might stop caring about such things.  But that hasn’t happened yet.

It’s that wish to avoid discourtesy which makes things like self-immolation or jumping from high windows/balconies problematic to consider, too.  Similarly for just opening up some arteries in a bathroom (mine or that of a hotel or similar).  I would dislike causing such trauma (and mess) for other people.

This is one reason why the notion of just swimming out into the Atlantic seems appealing.  It’s a big old ocean, it’s right nearby, and if one can find the discipline to swim far enough out, there is unlikely to be much mess for anyone to clean up, other than fish and other marine life, who would get a bit of extra food.

However, the ocean is very frightening.  It is not my natural habitat.  I can swim well enough, and it’s easier to do so in salt water than in fresh water, but that vast, deep darkness is daunting.  Weirdly enough, immolation might be less frightening than swimming out into the sea.

On the other hand, there is the notion of just walking.  It’s summer in south Florida; walking more than a certain amount can and will kill you.  When the heat index is higher than body temperature (as it is most days for a substantial portion of the day at this time of year), it can kill you with surprising speed.

I suppose if one were hoping to be particularly fastidious, one could make sure to walk toward the Everglades‒they are never too far away around here, and there are a goodly number of organisms there that would not complain about disposing of one’s body.  They’re generous that way.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that subject for the moment, at least here in my blog.  It’s never very far from the front of my mind, but that’s my problem, not yours.

I work tomorrow, but not Saturday, so there should be one more post this week, exclusis improvisis.  I hope you all have a good day in the meantime.

TTFN

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The sun is the same in a relative way…but not as much as the CMB

Meet the new day; same as the old day.  Or at least, in everything but the trivial details, every new day is indistinguishable from the previous oodles of days.  It’s just a full rotation of the Earth around its axis, such that when it’s done, the same points on Earth are lined up with the same…

…well, okay, here there’s some variation depending on how you’re measuring the day.  There are solar days (our usual measure), which are reckoned when the same line of latitude points “directly” at the sun again.  But, of course, the Earth is moving relative to the sun, and at a noticeable rate:  it goes roughly one 365.25th of the way around the sun in one day, and so it takes slightly longer to get back to the original orientation toward the sun than it would otherwise.

Then there are sidereal days, in which we reset when the same point on Earth is aligned with the same relatively distant stars.  Such distance means the angular change to those stars caused by Earth’s motion is much smaller than the angular change to the sun.  So those day lengths are, I believe, more consistent, but they are actually slightly less than 24 hours long.

I suppose, at our current level of technology and understanding, the most consistent day measure would be Earth’s rotation relative to specific spots on the cosmic microwave background radiation, which would basically be as far away as anything we can measure.

The Milky way is moving slightly relative to the CMB though.  I think this is called proper motion*, but I may be misremembering that term.  Still, that rate of motion is tiny relative to the scales involved.  Although, come to think of it, since the Earth is moving within and along with the Milky Way, it’s possible that the Earth’s motion relative to the other, relatively distant stars within the galaxy may be smaller than its motion relative to the CMB.

I don’t know whether or not that is the case.  If anyone out there knows off the top of your head, I would be delighted if you would let me know.  But don’t bother Googling it, or asking some LLM about it; I can do that for myself if we’re going to resort to such tactics.

Speaking of relative motion and such, I did something relatively new yesterday afternoon with respect to reading.  Allow me to set the stage**.

I recently started dabbling (very inconsistently) in the online courses at MIT (and other universities) on their YouTube channel(s).  I started with Quantum Mechanics and then also started the General Relativity course, since I have some personal curiosities related to that subject that I’ve yet to see answered.

In the first lecture, the GR professor went over the main texts they would be using.  Well, I already have two of them, so I figured I would get the third.  I ordered it in paperback (the hardcover was ridiculously expensive, whereas the softcover was about the same price as any good-sized trade paperback).  After it arrived, it sat rather forlornly on my desk for some weeks.

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Now, as I’ve said, I’ve been having a hard time reading fiction or nonfiction lately.  But a softcover textbook is no heavier than my lapcom would be, unlike the two hardcover GR texts I own.  So I brought the text General Relativity, by Wald, with me when I left the office yesterday.

The cool thing is, I actually read from it while waiting for the train and then while on the train.  I completed the preface/introduction and chapter one!  It’s not a long chapter, of course, and it mostly reviewed concepts of special relativity and so on***, which I know relatively (har) well.

Still, I feel reasonably pleased to have done this, and I hope to continue the process.  Maybe once I get this book under my belt, I’ll feel more inclined to do similarly with Sean Carroll’s Spacetime and Geometry, which is hardcover but not too terribly heavy.  Gravitation, on the other hand, is a book comparable in scale to Harrison’s, the “bible” of internal medicine.  It’s not a book one tends to carry around (though it provides its own rather pointed example of the effects of gravitation).

Anyway, with any luck, maybe I’ll inaugurate a more useful commuter reading schedule.  And maybe I’ll achieve enough skill at GR that I might be able to explore my perennial question.  At least, I should be able to learn more stuff, and that’s always a good thing.

I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, no, in astronomy “proper motion” has to do with angular movement with respect to more distant stars, or something along those lines.  I don’t think it’s a great term for that.  The motion of a galaxy relative to the CMB is apparently called the “peculiar motion”, which seems like a rather peculiar choice to me.

**I don’t know how you could stop me even if you so wished.

***It has one practice problem, which is a version of the classic barn door paradox aka the ladder paradox, but I didn’t work the problem.  I know the basic answer already; it involves the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity, and the author asks us to draw a spacetime diagram demonstrating the basic issue.  I had no resources to do this on the train.