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Brownian motion, eat your heart out

Okay, well, it’s Tuesday.

Ummm…

I’m not sure what to say now.  I have probably already used all the potential plays on words based on the fact that Tuesday sounds like “twos-day” or similar.  I suppose I could invoke something like a “too’s” day, suggesting the notion that this is too many days in the work week already, or that there are too many weeks, or other similar ideas.  But that doesn’t seem too clever, let alone funny.  It’s certainly neither insightful nor thought-provoking.

So, I’ll leave that be for now.

I was thinking this morning about the time when I used to write my fiction in the morning, back before I did this blog every day (it used to be something I did only on Thursdays, partly in homage to DentArthurDent).  One of the things that made that process perhaps a bit more streamlined‒or less clunky or however you want to characterize it‒than this blog was that I was either editing or I was writing first draft stuff, but I wasn’t publishing what I wrote every day.  So, I would either write my four pages (roughly) of new stuff or edit for a certain period of time, and then I would just save my work (in two places) and then close the lapcom and get on with something else‒often working on music or summat.

This blog is not as seamless to produce as writing fiction was day-to-day.  I have to edit every post and then post it and share it every day*.  That can involve a fair bit of extra time.  On the other hand, at least some people actually read this blog.  It’s not as good as my stories (in my judgment) but it comes in smaller chunks, which allows it to fit into the stunted attention span of the modern adult human.

I don’t refer just to the latter generations in that statement.  Attention span seems to be a bit like muscle tone; it’s not a fixed thing, it’s a neurological habit (or, well, its set-point is influenceable through neurological habit).  It can be made stronger with exercise, and a lack thereof will tend to lead it to atrophy**.  On average, I suspect that everyone’s attention span is not what it would have been in the past.

I don’t know what I’m trying to do or what point I’m trying to make right now, with this post.  It feels like it’s just all over the place, though perhaps that’s merely me projecting the experience of my own attention-fatigued state onto the experience of other people reading my blog.  I don’t know.

I’m having difficulty deciding what to write.  And yet, I’ve already written more than 500 words (counting footnotes).  I feel, as I said, very much all over the place, and pretty stressed out‒not by anything in particular, just as a kind of baseline.  I’m also tired, of course, since nothing about my insomnia or my chronic pain has changed.  And other than talking to people at work, this blog is the only social interaction I have during the week, so I guess I have some pent up conversational or interactional urge in me.

I do feed some neighborhood cats‒so that’s a bit of social interaction of a sort‒but the ones who seemed to like me and let me pet them and sometimes even sat on my lap are all long gone.  The ones who hang around now are just self-serving opportunists.  That’s not a surprise; they are cats.  They are all unabashed, self-serving opportunists.  It is, as they say, the nature of the beast.

They are not solely self-serving opportunists, of course.  But it is always at least part of their character.  Probably, it’s also always part of ours.

The world is complicated.  The fundamental building blocks are‒duh!‒fundamental, but if simple water molecules stacking together stochastically, following precise, local laws can produce all the variegations*** of frost on a window pane, think what the possibilities are for all of reality, with its Planck-scale interactions happening at astonishing rates and in inconceivable numbers.  The possibilities include all that is around you, but also (almost certainly) much, much more.

What if our reality were a simulation, but a fully simulated one, down to the quantum state.  Perhaps it could merely be simulated as those quantum states, with no eye to any larger patterns.  To calculate each next Planck time “frame” of that simulation could require a billion years of processing time in the simulators’ world, and so to them their simulation would plod at a ridiculously slow rate.  And yet, for us‒the simulated‒time would proceed as it always has and does, since our experience of time is internal to our universe and based on interaction rates within our universe.

Okay, that was a severe tangent, sorry.  I don’t know that it actually made sense relative to what I was trying to discuss (if such a thing really exists).  So, I think I’ll wrap this up for today.  I hope you all have a good one.

*I can no longer share it to Meta♣-based platforms, so a fair few people who occasionally stumbled upon it before (and people I knew from back in the day) won’t see it now.  That’s frustrating.  If anyone out there wants to share my posts to those platforms, I would be grateful.  I know it won’t reach the same specific people, but that’s okay.  I don’t have much choice, anyway.

**This is the general tendency of most biological traits or functions or attributes.  In the sieve of natural selection, if one wastes one’s energy and other resources maintaining functions at peak strength that are not actively used, one uses resources that could go to things that are actively useful, and resources are always finite.  Genes that tend to create bodies that tend to do such things will be less likely to get through the filter to the next generation.

***That’s not quite the right word, but it sounds so nice that I’m leaving it.

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I am near the end of my rope with this

Well, here we are again.  It’s Saturday, and as I warned you, I am writing/have written/will have written a blog post.

Is this a good thing?  Is it a bad thing?  I suppose that’s all in the mind of the reader (or the avoider as the case may be).  I don’t think there’s any final, objective assessment of the goodness or badness of me writing (or having written) this blog post.  Everything happens as it must, I suppose.

There’s nothing deep about that.  I’m not saying that everything happens for a reason, as if there is some telos to reality; as far as I can see, there’s no reason (ha!) to suspect that there’s any deep meaning to things other than simply that they are.  The universe does what it does, physics does what it does, and once it’s done, it doesn’t change and could not in any sensible way have been otherwise.  Thus, everything happens as it must, in the sense that it had no choice.

I’ve gone over this ground many times before, I’m sure.  There must be figurative ruts in this thought path deep enough to be able to fit the Loch Ness monster, if you flooded the ruts with water, and if there were a real monster (other than humans) associated with Loch Ness.

Sorry.  I had a very bad sleep last night, even for me, and here I think we can bring an objective measure of badness to bear.  Sleep that doesn’t last and doesn’t bring any refreshment is sleep that’s not doing what is expected of it, and that’s bad.

I don’t think I got a single uninterrupted hour of sleep last night.  That doesn’t mean I slept only less than an hour overall; I slept in fits and starts, as it were, but the total was probably a few hours.  I have been fully awake for about three or so hours already as I write this‒since a little after one in the morning.  So, it’s been quite a poor night, because I certainly didn’t go to sleep very early.

[Aside:  doesn’t the word “manifesto” sound like something a stage magician might say when apparently conjuring something out of midair?  Alternatively, perhaps it could be the name of a breakfast cereal:  Try new Manifest-Os!  Part of this complete breakfast!  Sorry, that thought came to me as I was briefly recalling a video I watched last night.]

Such is my life now, or my “life” as I ought to write, with scare quotes (or should that be “scare” quotes?).  Of course, life is life; it is what it is, like Popeye and the God of Exodus.  My life is no more meaningless than that of the dead “palmetto bug” I flushed down the toilet this morning.

It’s not all that much more meaningful either.  Yes, I write a blog and I go to work, and I’ve written books and songs and such like, and most importantly, I have two children who are awesome*.  But maybe that giant cockroach had done the equivalent in its own millicosm**.  For all I know, its importance to the world of coprophages is unparalleled, and will be remembered for many generations, perhaps forever.

Well…“forever” is quite a heavy lift, as they say.  But maybe its memory will live as long as cockroaches endure, which is likely to be longer than humans endure, unless humans proceed very carefully.  Of course, human records and so on tend to deteriorate over time, being recopied, adjusted, edited, lost and found, reinterpreted through the lens of later ideas that did not exist when original events took place, and gradually just eroded by entropy.

Perhaps palmetto bugs have more relatively durable means of keeping records‒it seems quite unlikely, but it’s not literally impossible.  Even so, they cannot be exempted from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  As Saruman said (in the movie, not the book) to Gandalf about the prospect of anyone standing against Sauron:  “There are none who can.”

Okay, well, I’m veering from the imagined lives and memories of the good and great among cockroaches to quoting the movie version of The Fellowship of the Ring.  My chronic and acute lack of sleep is definitely having its effects.

I truly don’t know whether this post has been worth writing, let alone reading.  I guess that latter part will be for each of you to judge.  But, to make your judgement, you must actually read the post‒if you want your judgement to have any reasonable basis‒and then it’s too late for you to decide it wasn’t worth it, except perhaps as a lamentation.

Well, I hope the rest of your weekend has no further causes of potential rue.  Thank you for reading my blog.

Addendum: I have discovered that WordPress has changed their shit again, and I cannot access the editor I used to use. I don’t know why, and they cannot seem to figure out how to reactivate it, but it is TOO MUCH RIGHT NOW. I don’t know if I am going to keep doing this. They call themselves “Happiness Engineers”, but if so, they’re rather comparable to the engineers that made the Tay Bridge in Scotland. It all comes crashing down. I’m already at my wits’ end this morning, as you can probably tell. This blog is one of the only little bits of satisfaction I have on a regular day, and they’ve screwed that up. Fuck WordPress, fuck this blog, and fuck this whole stupid planet.

*They got the “awe” part from my “aw(e)ful” nature, and the “some” part from their mother’s “fearsome” character.  Thank goodness they didn’t inherit the full “awful” (the full aw?) from me, nor did they inherit the other two half-words and end up just fearful.

**This is a new word I just made up.  I thought “microcosm” isn’t the right term‒a roach is not on a millionth of the scale on which I live.  I don’t think even its mass is that relatively small, but I’ll look it up***.  So, I thought, “A thousandth scale seems better, and we have micro and nano and pico scales, so why not ‘millicosm’?”

***Its mass is nearly that small relative to me, but its other dimensions are nowhere close, and since the “micro” in “microscopic” generally refers to one-dimensional measures, my choice still can apply.

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I have had a dream, past the wit of man to blog what dream it was.

Hello and good morning.

When I started waking up this morning, well before I started writing this post, I think I had a sort of an idea in my head about what sentence I was going to write after the “Hello and good morning” with which I always start my Thursday blog posts.  From there, I had a general notion of where I would go with the day’s writing.

It’s gone now, that whole set of ideas, which will probably not surprise you.  What with getting up, putting out food for cats, showering, dressing, all that jazz, the earlier concept has simply slipped my mind.

And, no, this that I’m writing now is not anything like what I thought I thought about in the night.  It’s good to be optimistic, up to a point‒at least, that’s the common “wisdom”‒but we must definitely try to avoid delusion.

I have, upon occasion, thought of ideas of things to write or whatever during the middle of the night.  When they strike me as important, I actually get up and write them out, usually in the note function of my phone or in an email to myself.  I try to make sure it has some form of enforced legibility, because I learned the lesson from that Seinfeld episode where Jerry woke up with a joke in his head, wrote it down on the pad he kept next to his bed, but then couldn’t read it the next day.

In my case, last night’s/this morning’s thought may well have suffered from the dream illusion of meaning and substance.  There was, as far as I can recall*, no actual content to what I thought I was going to write.  It’s possible, and even probably common, for the brain modules that indicate salience to become active during dreams, while the brain is presumably just sort of sweeping up after the day’s mess, but not in response to any object of one’s attention.

It’s rather akin to déjà vu.  Such free-floating feelings of memory or significance can happen sometimes in people with atypical forms of seizure disorders, but more commonly (though less frequently) they happen in brains without seizure disorders that just hit occasional blips of increased local activation.

This is a bit like what I suspect happens with “rogue waves”, those rare, truly gigantic swells that occur and are reported by sailors and oil rig workers.  I think that, in an ocean that’s vast and full of various waves of various amplitudes and frequencies, every now and then, local constructive interference happens to pile together in a small area and produce a wave of immense combined amplitude, ending up well toward the right end of whatever bell-like curve describes the amplitudes of ordinary ocean waves.  Then the waves separate and the rogue wave is gone**.  There is no specific cause other than just a lot of waves passing through each other in a very large medium (no pun intended).

The workings of a brain can be a large medium indeed, despite being in a rather small space (this time it was deliberate).  Sometimes the neurons just throw out a blip of higher-than-usual activation of, say, a salience module or a memory module, or even a meaning/certainty module.  It is of such stochastic regional hyperactivations that I suspect many, or at least some, religious experiences are born.

So, anyway, though I cannot remember if there was any substance to the half-dream idea for today’s blog post that occurred to me during my way-too-early awakening, let alone what such substance might have been, nevertheless it has conjured a subject for this post, as if by bootstrap levitation.

Such are the functionally unpredictable and chaotic workings of the human brain, or at least whatever kind of brain I have.  I don’t know if other people have similar experiences or not.  Maybe I’m the only one who experiences anything like all of this.

I seriously doubt that, though.  I’ve read plenty of fiction and nonfiction that deals with people talking about their thoughts, about their states of mind, their emotional experiences, and so on.  It all sounds quite similar in overall shape, though the specific details and decorations vary.  We are more alike than unalike.  Otherwise, how could you be reading and understanding my words?

Well, whatever the case as regards what I’ve written above, I hope we are unalike enough for you to have a wonderful day, preferably spending time with people you love and who love you.

TTFN

*Which, admittedly, is quite dubious, since the amnesia of sleep time intrudes at least somewhat.

**This is all just my hypothesis about the situation.  It’s possible that other factors are at play, but I’ve never heard them mentioned.

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Still queasy after all these years

Okay, well, it may not have been going on for years, but I am feeling queasy again this morning.

It’s Tuesday now, and for the first time in what feels like a long time, I’m writing this post on the lapcom.  I’m doing this partly because my thumbs, despite attempts at good care by me, are feeling quite sore and stiff*.  When I take enough NSAIDs (usually naproxen) to keep them calmed down, then my hands and probably some other parts of my body eventually get swollen and feel…inarticulate, I guess might be the right word.

I worry that this means the NSAIDs are doing a number on my kidneys, along with other parts of my body.  I know that, at baseline, my kidneys appear to be functioning fine—when I went into the hospital with my kidney stone last year, of course I had lots of blood (and urine) tests.  But I don’t want to roll the dice on them too much.  Because if I ever do have kidney failure, there’s no way I’m going to be dialyzed.

That’s not because I have anything against dialysis, but because I know I will not be able to afford it; I don’t have insurance, of course, and also, I don’t have any kind of support if I were to undergo dialysis, which usually must be done two to three times a week.  I just don’t see that all happening.

Anyway, there’s no immediate danger there, as long as I don’t take too many things that are going to box my kidneys.  It seems likely that something else will take me down before they go.

Speaking of ill health, I had a rough day at the office yesterday.  I was fighting a sinus headache on the left side (of my head, that is; I did not have a headache all along the left side of my body) all day, and it was really uncomfortable.  I think I was fighting off a local, bacterial infection.  Thankfully, decongestants and such all took care of it, and the problem appears to be resolved, or mostly so, today.  What regional lymphadenopathy I had is all but completely gone.

The irritation caused by that process seemed to trigger an exacerbation of tinnitus, but that might have been a coincidence, since it was acting up in my right ear, not my left.  To be fair, my right ear is where the tinnitus is worst and so is my hearing.  This asymmetry can be quite disorienting (or, as the Brits would say, disorientating), especially when one is in a room in which overhead music is playing and a large number of people are all on the phone at the same time.

Well, I say “large”—it’s really about a dozen.  But it’s a smallish office, so that number of people can make it feel packed.  And the noise is problematic for me at the best of times.  Among other things, I have a hard time telling where any particular voice or noise arises, because my one ear is nearly useless.

Wow, this is really lame and boring, isn’t it?  I’m sorry.  At least I’m not talking to you about my mental health problems anymore, right?  They haven’t stopped or diminished in any way; quite the contrary.  But I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear about them, and certainly, no one can do anything about them (least of all me, it seems).  Mostly, even the people who want to help just respond with clichés and homilies and so on.  That sort of stuff just makes me feel worse, if anything, because it’s so disappointing.

As for other things, let’s see…no, I don’t think I have anything exciting on which to report.  I did just have a bit of a fudge-up on my MS Word as I’ve been typing; somehow the striking out and red-lining of new words and erased previous ones got activated.  I don’t know how that activation took place, but it was not what I wanted.  I was, at least, able to stop it.

It’s very irritating.  It’s one of those things that arises, I suspect, because Word is trying to keep up with the web-based word processors, but I don’t want it to do that.  And, to be fair, it might just have been me accidentally hitting some shortcut on the keyboard.  In any case, I want Word to be the same reliable word processor it’s been for such a long time.

I want a word processor that doesn’t require me to have an internet connection to use it.  Fie upon the internet for ordinary, local tasks.  Why do people need web connections for games and for word processing and for all those little things that we used to do on our computers long before the internet/web became publicly available?

The internet requires many systems to be functional and operational to stay in business, and I’m not confident those things will remain so.  Huge server farms and various other tech matters use tremendous amount of energy and other resources (such as water for cooling), and sooner or later, if they are receiving those resources instead of humans, the humans are going to blow them up and/or burn them down, along with the companies and people who create them, and it will be deserved.

All this complex, manipulative technology is quite breakable, as are pretty much all things.  The underwater cables that carry the information of the internet between continents are also vulnerable.  Chip manufacturers, and particularly the machines that etch microchips, are particularly expensive and vulnerable.  Sources of rare Earth minerals are perhaps slightly less vulnerable, but it doesn’t take much to interfere with finely tuned infrastructure.

I’m frankly amazed that no one has done a Fight Club (specifically, a “Project Mayhem”) on the whole international set of communications hardware on which the internet is based.  Just screwing up heat exchangers would probably be enough to bring large portions of the cloud down semi-permanently.  And how many people have their important data backed up in hard copies anymore?

Do you want to stop the advent of artificial intelligence that might wipe out human civilization?  Wipe out the infrastructure of the companies that are working on it.  We know that it is always much easier to destroy than to create, but we definitely want to destroy a thing that will pull a “Project Genesis” on us and wipe us out to instantiate its own existence.  Throw some of those sabots into the machinery, if you’re worried.  The law is not going to protect you from the wealthy and powerful—or so it certainly seems, and it seems to be less likely to protect you with every passing moment—so why obey it?

Meh, I’m probably being too pessimistic.  Anyway, maybe it’ll be a good thing, from the cosmic point of view, if the human race and all other organic life on Earth is erased and replaced by electronic life.  It might even be a good thing for humans themselves.  There are certainly fates that are worse than death.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t think I’m making much sense.  I hope you all have a good day, despite having foolishly opened yourselves to my thoughts early in the morning.

*It’s also because I fear my typing skill has deteriorating due to lack of use, so I figured it would probably be good to get back into it a bit.

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This is a very catchy headline.

Good morning.  How’s that for optimism?  It’s 4-11 today, so perhaps I should try to give you some information.  You all remember the old information line, don’t you?  Four, one, one (in the US, anyway).  I think the toll-free/long distance version used to be 800-555-1212 or something like that.

I don’t know if those lines are active and maintained anymore.  I know I haven’t used either one for probably more than 2 decades‒by which I mean it’s been more than 2 decades since I used them.  I don’t mean to deny having used the line for a stretch as long as 2 decades.  I hope it goes without saying that I have never just stayed on the 411 line for decades at a time without stop.  That would be weird.

Speaking of weird, I want to apologize if yesterday’s post was too weird for anyone.  I don’t plan these in advance, as you may know, so they become a kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise.  Not that I didn’t find the stuff I wrote interesting; obviously I did at some level, because it’s certainly there in my head.

Of course, I do edit each post (three times) before posting, and yesterday I even did some relatively elaborate figuring (though the math was really just basic arithmetic, and I messed that up when working out the surface area of the Earth because when I squared the radius, I didn’t square the pi in the denominator of my expression for the radius).

To try to cut myself some slack, it was early in the morning after all, and I was going more speedily than was probably advisable, since I only have a limited amount of time to do and post these things in the AM.  I suppose we all have a limited time every morning; if anyone out there has unlimited time in the morning, please let us know.  That would be a staggering phenomenon.

Of course, if time is continuous and infinitely divisible (our best understanding of the universe seems to say it is not, but that’s not absolutely certain) then one could, in a sense, have unlimited time, but only if one could speed up without limit, and we know you can’t do that.

Anyway…

I have been doing some exercises on Brilliant dot org this week‒at least one little set a day‒so that’s an accomplishment of sorts.  I’m in the midst of several courses, but lately I’ve mostly been doing the vectors course‒it’s really just a basic review for me so far, but reviewing is good, because I want to get on to linear algebra and tensors and matrices because there is a question in Special/General Relativity that I would like to solve for myself if I am ever able.  That’s probably a pipe dream, because my attention meanders to too many other things too often.

That’s why my former routine to write my fiction during my commute worked‒it wasn’t a debatable thing, it was just what I did every morning.  That worked pretty well, or, well, at least it was productive.  I don’t know if my stories are actually good to anyone else but me, and honestly, neither does anyone else, in general.  It’s possible (however unlikely) that my books and stories are the greatest works of literature ever produced on Earth, but since next to no one has ever read any of them, almost no one will ever know.

Of course, now I have this routine, which I guess one could continue to call productive.  It’s certainly productive of relatively frequent blog posts.  That plus about ten bucks’ll get you a descamisado coffee* at Starbucks®.  It’s not as though anyone is ever going to while away an afternoon reading my old blog posts, but it’s just conceivable that someone might read one of my novels or short stories some day when they are bored.

Oh, well, whataya gonna do?  I’m very tired and sapped of motivation to do much of anything.  I wish I could even imagine a positive future for me, but honestly, I don’t really imagine the future at all.  You might think that’s just good “mindfulness” or, well, a “living in the present moment” thing.  But I think it’s just the current set-point of that function in my brain, to no credit of my will.

Anyway, I’m tired, and not just of work or the blog.  I want to go to sleep, but that’s one of the most difficult things for me to do.

I hope all of you, at least, have a peaceful and good rest of your weekend, and a good rest of your life while you’re at it.  As long as I’m hoping, I might as well hope big, right?

*I’m pretty sure that’s not actually one of their drink names or sizes, but they do use such pretentious and absurd names for the sizes of their beverages that they should be ridiculed mercilessly until they go back to “small”, “medium”, and “large”.  Do coffee shops (or the equivalent) in other countries use slightly twisted versions of the English “small”, “medium”, and “large” to describe the sizes of their beverages?  Probably some of them do.  People are so stupid.

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Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft blogged without merit, and lost without deserving

Hello and good morning; it’s Thursday, the 9th.  By that I don’t mean, for instance, the 9th Symphony by Beethoven or the 9th rule of Fight Club.  No, it’s the 9th of April in 2026 AD/CE.

I’m not sure if any of you would have suspected anything like those first two possibilities, but just in case, I figured I would rule them out.

Now, before I forget:  if any of you use Facebook and/or Threads, and if you wouldn’t mind being associated (indirectly) with my work, would you mind sharing the links to my blog posts there from time to time?  I traditionally shared my posts on those venues after writing them, but obviously I cannot do that now.

It’s up to you, of course.  Like a badly broken barometer, there’s no pressure.

Okay, well, that ought to be out of the way for today.  But, well, it is an ongoing request, in that I request for it not just today, but any time you have the chance and feel so inclined.  I would greatly appreciate it.  If you do it, and you want to come here and let me know, by all means, do a bit of showing off.

Though I don’t know whether it could honestly, fairly be considered “showing off”, at least as things are right now.  Nevertheless, sometime in the future, I may become famous (or perhaps notorious) and it will be a mark of honor, or at least of interest, that you were one of the few dozen people who regularly followed my blog from way back when (i.e., now).

I don’t know what I might do that would lead to me being famous (or notorious), but considering some of the otherwise highly unimpressive people who are famous* (or notorious) I’d say I at least have a fair shot.

On to other matters that are randomly (or at least chaotically) bringing themselves to the front of my mind.

I saw the early express train go by the station this morning, only a short bit ago as I write this.  That train doesn’t stop at my station, but instead zooms by at nearly full speed.  It’s rather unusual to be so close to a fast moving train, and it really makes you feel how apparently tenuous the power of the train tracks is.  It really, really feels as though the train is not truly secure in its movement, but could instead slide off at any second, very easily, and cause a catastrophe.

Our intuitive feelings about such things are hard to ignore‒I half brace myself for a derailment almost every time such trains pass.  But the empirical, all but irrefutably powerful, fact remains that countless trains travel along tracks, some at quite high speeds, every day (but usually not twice on Sundays), and derailment is almost a non-occurrence.  Clearly, the physics and engineering principles at work here are doing their jobs very well.

It’s good, I think, to take a glance at these seemingly mundane (because we have become accustomed to them) things that happen around us and to contemplate either their solidity despite our misgivings and inability to internalize what’s happening, or the truly remarkable things happening underneath occurrences that may seem unremarkable.

This is one of the things I really like about the YouTube channel “The Slo Mo Guys”.  In their videos, one gets to see physical processes slowed down to astonishing degrees sometimes.  But even the more “run-of-the-mill” slow motion videos can let one appreciate the intricacy of so many things happening below the level of perception in ordinary phenomena.

Also, many of the things one can see in slomo remind me of how slowly the galaxies and clusters and stars within galaxies move from our point of view, whereas if seen from outside, by beings for whom a million years is like a second, they would seem much like the splashes of water from popping balloons (for instance) when we look at it as if through one of the Phantom™ high-speed cameras.

Okay, well, that was indeed a fairly stochastic blog post, wasn’t it?  I’ll call it good now‒at least in the sense that it is done, if not in the sense of quality.  Thank you in advance*** if you do share the links to the post on your social media.

TTFN

*This is not meant to imply that all famous (or even notorious) people are unimpressive; that is not the case.  There are people who are famous for being exceptionally good at certain things, like sports or acting or singing or writing.  And there are also people who have done great work in science or technology or medicine and so on (No, starting a social media company in and of itself is not necessarily impressive, at least not to me, though there is no doubt that it requires certain skills…but when it comes to such a company’s success, as with so many things, a lot of it is luck**).  Many times fame is well and truly earned.  But many times it is not.

**I read a good book called Fooled by the Winners that addresses this issue as one of its main theses.  I think it would be good for everyone to think clearly and specifically about the way “survivor bias” misleads us and can give us a faulty notion of how aspects of the world work.

***I would/will also gladly thank you after the fact; don’t think that I’m prethanking in order not to have to say thank you later.

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The forecast calls for uncertainty

It’s Friday now (as I write this, anyway), and I think that I will have tomorrow off.  But, as some of you may have noticed, the specific plans about my work Saturdays are subject to rather erratic change.  It’s quite annoying; I don’t really like unexpected changes to plan.  I particularly don’t like them when I don’t agree with the reasoning behind them.

Of course, our two most consistently top salespeople at the office contracted when they came aboard not to work on any weekends.  And, as I said, they are consistently our best.  Could there be a causal connection between those facts?  Well, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, of course, but enough correlation should at least shift your credences.

Unfortunately, humans are not naturally good at probability and statistics.  This is part of why I think the subject(s) should be taught in standard education, starting quite early.  Though the subject(s) can be somewhat counterintuitive, the mathematics is not really all that rarefied or difficult, and probability and statistics apply to so much of the world.  On the smallest scales they seem to apply fundamentally.

Anyway, I didn’t come here today to discuss probability and statistics, though obviously I enjoy the subject(s).  So, then, what have I come here today to do or to discuss?  Well, now that I think about it…there is no particular subject.  I don’t know why that should surprise any regular reader, let alone me.

It will probably not surprise you that I have not started playing on Babbel or Brilliant yet.  I do at least look at the apps frequently throughout the day, considering using them and so on.  For whatever that’s worth.

I can allow myself some excuse with Babbel, since it’s difficult to practice a language in a busy office.  But there’s no such reason not to use Brilliant.  Its teaching and exercises are set up in nice, granular ways, so you can do one problem then get called away by work, or whatever, and then go back.

I even don’t mind the rather hokey “experience point” system they use to reward you when you get an answer right.  It’s kind of fun, but it’s not too involved or taken too seriously by the app makers (or so it seems, anyway).  And I definitely have learned new things on the app in the past, and honed and renewed prior skills as well.  So it’s not a waste of time by any means.

The same cannot be as confidently said* about the various apps/sites on which I no longer have accounts.

Of course, time passes‒or whatever it is that time really does‒no matter what we do, and sometimes “wasting” it can be a fulfilling choice.  If we are metaphorical virtual particles then we can behave like them from time to time, not just heading directly to the next interaction, but maybe throwing out an electron-positron pair and then reabsorbing them before they could be detected, or going around the universe and coming at the interaction from backwards in time and behind, as it were, just to show off a bit.

Not everything has to be useful, at least not in too narrow a sense.  Usefulness, like so many things, is in the eye of the beholder.  It is certainly not a universal, general attribute of reality.  So, while it may only rarely be wise to be counterproductive from one’s own point of view, there are times when it’s good‒maybe even useful, ironically‒not to worry about whether something has any point or not.

Yeah, I’m not terribly good at doing that, either.  I don’t know how much of that is due to culture/upbringing and how much of it is genetic or at least neurodevelopmental.  I’d guess it’s not too far from 50/50, but I would not be shocked to find the full truth surprising.

Regarding whether to worry about app usefulness or lack thereof and whether to spend time on the ones that I will have wished I spent time on, well, it’s been said that wisdom, at least a form of it, is the ability to follow your own advice (i.e., the advice you would give to someone else if they were in your circumstances).  I think most people would be able to recognize that, by that particular definition, we are all quite unwise, quite often.

Okay, well, I’ll start to wrap this up.  I really should not be working tomorrow, but if I do, I will almost certainly write a post.  It’s quite unlikely‒I would call it less than 20% likely‒that I will work, but we shall see.  You can check in if you’re “in the neighborhood”.  Don’t look for my posts to be shared on Facebook or Threads anymore, but I do share them on Substack and Bluesky and TWFKAT.  And you can always find them here, directly, and comment if you wish.

Have a good weekend in any case.  That’s an order!

*Well, it can be said, but talk is cheap mother f#cker.  Rather often, people say they are confident and act sure about situations or information that they cannot know with confidence.  I always consider this unwarranted confidence to be a “red flag”, a warning sign that this person’s judgment is unreliable.

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April, come she has. No contradictions allowed.

Well, it’s the first of April, so‒April Fools!  Except that, given that it is April Fools’ (Fool’s?) Day, to say April Fools about the fact that it is April 1st would be contradictory.  It’s rather like the self-paradoxical statement:  “This sentence is a lie”.  Because if that sentence is a lie, then it is not a lie, but that would mean that it is a lie, but that would mean that it isn’t, and so on.

Of course, one can write paradoxical things down any time one wishes.  That doesn’t constrain or harm actual reality in any way whatsoever.  Words‒and written language especially‒are the single greatest human invention, but they are not literally magical.  No matter how much hatred you try to put behind it, or what manner of “wand” you use, shouting Avada kedavra will never kill anyone or anything*.

And while we can imagine that the world would be much more polite if words could directly cause things to manifest‒including paradoxes‒I think we can all feel pretty glad that people can’t kill us just by telling us to drop dead.

So, make up all the paradoxical sentences that you might like; no actual paradoxes can exist.  If you come to a point of cognitive dissonance, you should probably focus on the fact of that discomfort and try to sort it out.  People can “believe” two or more contradictory things (sometimes before breakfast) but they cannot be right about more than one (though they can be wrong about all of them).

Anyway, enough of that nonsense.  It’s mildly engaging, but not terribly durable as a topic, or so it seems to me at this moment.

I am still (as far as I know) unable to use any of Fuckerberg’s apps, and to be honest, I haven’t even tried since before the last time I wrote about it.  It’s annoying, to some degree, to lose access to some entertainment, but it’s not as though I had any right to their use.  I was not the customer, I was the product, as is the case with all of you, too, if you use your social media for free.  Facebook et al sell advertisers access to and information about you.

Now, if I had been kicked off some service for which I had paid and for which I was paying, then I would have a beef**.

Speaking of paid services, what I really should do‒what I want to crave doing‒is to spend those moments that I would spend looking at funny reels on Instagram or whatever doing stuff on Brilliant dot org.  I pay for that service, and it is very good.  I also have a lifetime subscription to Babbel, which I obtained to try to encourage myself to learn more languages (duh!).

So, at some level, at the frontal lobe level, I want to use those sites and their services, to hone and increase my skills.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have contracted the services.  But in any given moment, the activation energy required to begin using them is higher than that for doing other, less beneficial things.

But maybe now that will be a bit different.  Maybe now that differential, that equilibrium, will shift.  I mean, it’s almost certain that it has shifted, or has begun to shift.  It’s all but impossible for one to remove a large factor from a situation that is in dynamic near-equilibrium and to have that near-equilibrium remain unchanged.

I hope that I shall be able to make use of this to improve my mind‒at least to improve my abilities, if not the overall nature of the thing.  At least it would be good if I get some more such use in.

I will miss the sort-of-social-circles one can have and the connection with old friends and distant family members on social media, however tenuous and removed and even occasionally illusory it might be.

I don’t socialize in real life, other than at work during the working day, and that’s a limited thing.  So I feel a little worried about being more disconnected from larger society.  We all know what happened to Melkor when he spent too much time in the Void, away from his brethren, and started to develop thoughts…unlike theirs.

Well, maybe we don’t all know, but read The Silmarillion if you wish to learn more.  It’s really good.

I guess I always have this blog and those who follow it, at least (and that’s no small thing).  I am concerned that some people who only see the blog via Facebook or Threads might not get to interact with it now.  But they are all hereby encouraged to leave a comment or two below.  I welcome them.  Seriously.

That’s all I have to say about that for right now.  I hope you all have an excellent day.

*Unless maybe you swallow a small insect or similar when you open your mouth.  I don’t think that’s how people imagine “the killing curse” working however.

**I’ve been aware of and have occasionally used this expression for as long as I can remember, but it does sound very weird if you listen to it as if from an outsider’s perspective.  “Wait.  You have a…beef?  You have a beef?  What the hell are you talking about?”

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I Meta traveler from an antique land…

I brought the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday, but I’m writing this on my smartphone even so.  Part of the reason for that is that the way I have to sit in the train to use the lapcom can sometimes put tension on my hips and back and knees, and I’m already having a particularly bad 36 hours (so far) with my chronic pain.  This is on top of being still sick and then also having had all of my “Meta™” based accounts‒Facebook, Instagram, Threads‒permanently disabled.

Yes, that’s right, I did the little appeal button thing and in very short order (a time so short that we know that no sentient being was involved in the entire process) it was denied and my accounts were permanently disabled.  I did put in a request for a downloadable file with all my info but that hasn’t worked so far‒the only link I received requires me to access my no-longer-existing account to get my data.

I’m sure there’s some legal process through which one could go if one wanted truly to fight the thing.  Lawsuits could be filed.  Or, what would be more satisfying, Luca Brasi could be sent to visit.  But though vengeance is always attractive, I don’t have the energy even to fantasize about it right now.

Honestly, I’ve lost everything I literally, physically had more than once* in the past 20 years.  This virtual stuff is chicken shit.

I enjoyed the sites mentioned, of course.  It was fun watching cosplayers and seeing funny memes and the various video rants on Instagram.  Facebook was nice for seeing what people from my past are doing and keeping in vague contact with them.  Threads was actually, literally useful for my mental health on at least one occasion.

But beyond the basic, straightforward bit, I’m sure as gravity not going to fight to try to keep them in my life.  If they want me gone then I want to be gone even more.  Actually, no, that isn’t really how I feel, that’s merely a bit of rhetoric.  I just don’t see those things as part of my identity, so while their loss is a disappointment, that’s one of the fundamental features of life:  it is inherently unsatisfactory.  I don’t see how it could be otherwise.

It is curious that only the Meta® platforms gave me grief.  I still have Bluesky, and The Website Formerly Known as Twitter, and Substack, and of course, here (WordPress).  You would think that the people at Meta℠ wanted to promote their competitors.

Or, perhaps, someone in other venues is hacking existing Meta©-based accounts, posting flagrantly inappropriate things, and getting all sorts of people kicked off those accounts so they’ll be forced to use one (or more) of the others.  It’s diabolical!

Not really, of course.  It’s actually more pathetic than anything else.  Or it would be, if it were happening, which I doubt it is.  Still, humans compete over sillier/stupider things than that in order to jockey for position in their particular baboon flange.  It would take a lot for them to shock me.

Given that I am, perforce, not using Instagram, maybe I should try TikTok, what do you think?

Not likely.  I’ve never felt seriously interested in that venue, though I gather it has similarities with Instagram.  It just feels like “more of the same”.  And I have some things in common with the “antagonist” of my short story Penal Colony, in that social media can be briefly engaging for me, but I get tired of it pretty quickly.

I use YouTube a lot, but that’s because it has actual, full-scale content, educational or entertaining or both, requiring an actual attention span.  I’ve learned a lot via YouTube, and I’ve had a lot of laughs, sometimes both at the same time.  But eventually, even I can only rewatch the same videos so many more times.  The same is true even for books, though, so no shade to YouTube there.

Substack, of course, has actual scholarly articles and discussions from serious thinkers of various stripes.  I’ve mentioned occasionally the possibility of either moving my blog there or maybe just reposting some posts there.  But that’s a lot of work, and I’m lazy (or, well, the vector magnitude of my interest is not as great as the vector magnitude of the anticipated irritation of the process).

Who knows, maybe this will be a beneficial occurrence?  Then again, almost anything can be seen as beneficial depending on what measure of beneficence one uses.  As the saying goes, “it’s an ill wind that blows no man any good”.  Something has to be very, very bad indeed in order for no one and nothing at any level to benefit from it.

There are many paths to pretty much any destination, and the quality of one’s own path, judged retrospectively, is a measure that is heavily subject to cognitive biases.  This in itself can be useful, though it isn’t always so.

Anyway, for now, don’t look for me on Facebook or Threads or Instagram.  I’ll share these posts via Bluesky and Substack and X, but you can always find them here where you are now.  If you want to “message” me, well, the comments below are always open (within reason).

I hope you have a good day.

*Really, more than twice, depending on how completely and irrevocably lost one requires everything to be to count is a member of that set.

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“Something knocked me out the trees – now I’m on my knees”

Okay.  So.  I don’t know what to write today, even more so than usual.

It’s Tuesday, of course.  Though I guess there’s really no “of course” about it; I mean, it could be any day in principle, but it happens to be Tuesday, and I’m up and about, going through various stages of heading to the office as I write this.

At the end of the work day, I will head back to the house and prepare to do it all over again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I won’t say “as needed”, because I think it’s probably rather nebulous just how necessary these daily repetitions really are.  Certainly neither the universe nor civilization depends upon me doing any of the things I do.

I suppose that “work” is weakly dependent upon me, in that if I suddenly just stopped coming, they would have to find someone else to do what I do, or divide things up among those already there or something.  That’s not such a big deal, of course.  It happens all the time.

There may be a few people who look forward to my blog every day, though it would be pretty arrogant to consider them “dependent” upon it.  I would much prefer for people to be “dependent” upon, or at least to look forward to, my fiction.  It would be easier to keep writing it if I thought more than one person would actually read my stories, and that maybe people would even tell me what they thought of them*.

I suppose that sort of thing might seem fairly trivial in the face of various events happening in the nation and the world, but on the other hand, those things are trivial in themselves.  There is certainly no good reason for any of them other than that human nature‒while possessing functionally limitless potential‒is almost always prone to default to the level of screaming monkeys.

Each political moment of the world feels so…well…momentous to the people going through it, but these kinds of things have arisen and passed away over and over throughout history.  Probably most such happenings are even outside of history, parallel to it if you will, because many of them are not even noticed beyond their immediate time and place, even by some of the people who experience them.

They are all rather laughable in their self-important yet ephemeral character.

I don’t know why I even notice, let alone care.  I guess maybe it’s because the human race does have such potential for greatness, for the creation of beauty‒by whatever criteria you might measure beauty‒and for making the world a place that’s better than it is in every reasonable way.  Yet, they do not have the intellectual and moral humility to realize how great they could make things.  Ironically, if people were able to stop thinking of everything as being about them, whoever they are, they could participate in a world that could easily be better not just for everyone else, but for them as well.

Of course, it’s honestly difficult not to knee jerk one’s responses to reality as if it were about oneself.  Meditation can help, if only by dissolving the “ego” and decreasing the tendency toward reflexive belief in the inner homunculus.

It would be nice if Earth had its own Surak who succeeded in convincing humanity that calmness, mindfulness, and rationality are not merely options but probably among the best ways to secure a beneficent future for Earth and life and intelligence.  That’s assuming that this is indeed true, which I strongly suspect it is, but do not know for certain.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if, instead of training our children to believe in the literal truth of fairy tales that are hundreds to thousands of years old (and benighted even for their times of origin), extorting their behavior and “belief” with threats of Hell (or the equivalent), we encouraged our children to be mindful, to be curious, to be patient, to recognize their fallibility, but at the same time, as part of that, to recognize their potential to do truly remarkable and wonderful things.

But left to their own devices‒as they all always are, since even the Powers That Be are just other naked house apes, not significantly different than themselves‒people tend to choose the monkey way.  Or, rather, they go that way by default, never recognizing that they have a choice.

Only if you recognize that you are a monkey can you really, deliberately choose to become something greater.

Only by recognizing your fallibility can you begin to succeed at deliberately chosen and often amazing things.

Only by recognizing that you are not special can you truly steer yourself toward doing things that are special.

Okay, all those “only” beginnings to the above homilies are presumptuous in the extreme, but they make for better quotables than more restrained language would provide.

I’m not a fan of rhetoric‒if you need clever wordplay to convince others of your points, perhaps your points aren’t all that good‒and one of the reasons I’m not a fan is that it is just so damn tempting.

Oh, well.  This is all stupid anyway.  Sorry.

*No trolling though.  I don’t mind reasonable criticism, especially if I find it convincing, but when people are assholes just for the “fun” of it, I see no problem with them being dealt with as one would a troll in an RPG or a book or a movie.  Imagine how much more pleasant the world would be if all people prone to trollish behavior were turned to stone, or barring that, turned to worm food and ash.