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“You know the day destroys the night. Night divides the day.”

It’s Friday again.  But it’s not just any Friday‒it’s the Vernal Equinox, the day when the line between the Earth and the Sun is orthogonal to the line of the axis of the Earth, and so the day and the night will be (effectively) of equal length.  This is more fun in some ways than the solstices, because it’s the same for everyone, northern and southern hemispheres.

Of course, in the north it’s officially the Vernal Equinox, heralding the beginning of spring, whereas in the south it heralds the beginning of autumn.  I don’t know, however, if it is officially called the Autumnal Equinox in the south.  Probably it is.  After all, I’m sure they have their “official” winter solstice on what is “our” summer solstice and vice versa.  It would be a bit perverse for them to do otherwise.

It’s somewhat interesting to note, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson has pointed out with some ardor, that since, for instance, winter officially begins on the “shortest”* day of the year, the days actually get longer and longer through the winter (and the opposite happens in summer), until finally, on the Vernal Equinox, they break even with it and then daytime passes the night.

I wonder what Zeno would say about that race.

On a different topic, it’s quite rainy here this morning, and it’s a rather chilly rain, which is mildly unusual for south Florida.  It occurred to me, seeing just how sloppy it is here at the train station, that I hope it will not be so rainy at my destination.  What’s interesting about that is that it may not be rainy at all there, at work.  And yet, it could still be raining heavily down here in Hollywood.

In the modern world, weather can seem to change much more rapidly than it really does because we travel through the weather, whereas throughout all of our ancestral time we would merely have seen the weather passing over us.  It can give a somewhat misleading impression of how quickly the weather changes, even in Florida, where it can be raining on one side of a street and dry on the other**.

I recall when visiting my grandparents as a child, that there were times we would all be going somewhere in the car, and as we went along it would start to rain heavily, all of a sudden‒and then, just as suddenly, as we went along, it would stop.  And then it would suddenly start again, and then stop again, and so on.

But even in south Florida (or, well, west central Florida back then) the weather doesn’t change like that if you’re sitting still.  It changes quite rapidly compared to many other places, but not the way it seems to do when one is traveling in a modern vehicle.

For some reason, I feel as though there’s an analogy or insight available here with respect to special and possibly general relativity, but I don’t feel like trying to explore it right now.

I did bring my hardcover copy of General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum, which is part of Leonard Susskind’s Theoretical Minimum series, with me when I left the office yesterday, thinking I might read it while on the train last night.  I did not read it.  There are too many distractions, it seems, for me to be able simply to flip my attention into focus on that, however much I really am interested in it.  It’s frustrating.

I have read part of it, mind you, as well as parts of the other Theoretical Minimum series.  I have all of them in both physical copies and on Kindle, so really, I didn’t need to bring the physical book.  But it is a lovely hardcover edition, and I hoped that might make me more likely to read it, since reading a nice hardcover is much more pleasant than reading a Kindle book on one’s phone, though that can still be fun.

I also entertain the admittedly absurd fantasy that I might be reading the hardcover copy on the train some day and some other, like-minded person (preferably an attractive woman) might notice and be interested because she is into the subject as well, and so on.

This is particularly silly as pipe dreams go, because even if such an absurd event happened, I would definitely screw the whole thing up.  I tend to be quite terse when strangers try to speak with me, even if they are beautiful women.

Looking back on my life, I’m sure that there have been several occasions in which someone was expressing interest in me, but I didn’t get it or got too anxious and froze up.  Sometimes I figured it out soon after, and sometimes it took longer.  There are probably some cases that I never noticed at all, even in hindsight.

Of course, I was married for fifteen years, during some of which I was in medical practice, and so such interactions would have had a different character.  There were sometimes more flagrant and obvious “advances” in that time, because, well…doctor.  But I never had any inclination to pursue them, even when I recognized them; I’m not the kind to want to cheat on a partner.  Hell, I’m not even the kind to seek a new partner two decades after my wife divorced me (though I briefly tried a little).

I wouldn’t mind a nice relationship, but I know that I am difficult to handle in many ways (I try not to be, but I am weird, and not in some charmingly popular manner), and in certain senses, my standards are high, or at least they are fairly strict.  For instance, someone who doesn’t read for pleasure is unlikely to be terribly interesting to me.  It’s not impossible; there are other ways for people to be interesting and smart.  But not liking to read would definitely be an entry for the “con” column, not the “pro” one.

I don’t know what I’m doing, going on about such nonsense.  I am not going to have any more romantic relationships in my life.  I am going to die alone, as is only appropriate and to be expected for something like me.  And while I won’t say “it can’t happen soon enough for my taste”***, I do really feel impatient for it.  I wouldn’t say I am “eager” for it, because that’s a positive feeling.  I am just quietly desperate for it, like someone trying to find an exit from a (slowly) burning building.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you have a good one, and that you have a good weekend as well.  Yes, I mean you.

As for me, well, I am to be working tomorrow as far as I know, so I will be writing a blog post tomorrow, barring the unforeseen.

*Of course, this is a bit of a misleading characterization.  The day is the length that it is‒roughly 24 hours‒and does not change very quickly, for which fact we should all be grateful.  It’s just the length of time in a given day during which the sun is above the horizon (so to speak) that varies.

**This is not an exaggeration.  I have seen it myself on many occasions.  It seemed to happen more frequently in the area where my grandparents used to live (Spring Hill, north of Tampa) than it does down here‒or maybe I noticed it more because I was a kid‒but it is very real and quite impressive when it happens.

***Except to say that I won’t be saying it.

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“Silence will fall”

Oh, right, today is Saint Patrick’s Day, a holiday celebrated more intensely (but far less religiously, I suspect) in the US than in Ireland.  It’s a holiday in which everyone here is said to be a little bit Irish.  I am largely Irish, in fact (by ancestry), so I feel no need to put on an act.  I also am not going to wear green today‒it’s been a long time since I’ve worn anything but black‒and I don’t recommend pinching me, or the only green you’ll have to be concerned about will be whether that will be the color of your rotting corpse or just the color of the bile leaking from your perforated gall bladder.

I certainly don’t expect to drink any beer or stout or even Irish whiskey today.  I do like corned beef and cabbage, and there’s a restaurant near work that makes a great meal of that, but they will probably be a bit oversubscribed today, and I really hate having to jockey with other people for such things.  I would rather go without.

I guess I’ll see what happens.  Getting corned beef from the restaurant is the sort of thing that’s enticing from a (temporal) distance, but the closer one gets, the more it loses its charm and feels not at all worth the effort.

There is an astonishing number of such things.  So many things are so much better in the anticipation than in the experience.  Even James Bond, in the Ian Fleming novels, noted that his favorite drink of the day was the one he had in his head before the first actual one*.

So, the anticipation is better than the payoff in many cases, which goes right along with my recognition that pleasure and joy cannot ever be durable outcomes, biologically speaking.  It’s not an evolutionarily stable strategy.

One might imagine that one could build up one’s anticipation of a thing, but then trick oneself and not give oneself the reward in the end, but the anticipation modules only really become active if you believe that they will be satisfied.

Failure to get the reward after anticipation can be more unpleasant than never anticipating it, as I think most people would agree.  And then, of course, after repeated disappointments, one stops anticipating, so one loses even that positive aspect of the situation.  “Edging”, as they call it, is only reliably pleasurable because of the knowledge that eventually there will be release.

Okay, that’s enough vaguely risqué crap.  I guess it may be better than dealing with all my dark stuff, which I have been withholding deliberately and consciously of late, since it just seems to make people uncomfortable but doesn’t engender any useful ideas or beneficial interactions or anything remotely resembling help.

So, apart from minor stuff like this, I’m going to just hold the negative thoughts back from sharing, and when I break, that will be it.  Like Keyzer Soze ( “And then, like that [fwoof]…he’s gone!”) you’ll probably never hear from me again. 

That will probably not be today, by the way, just in case you’re worried.  If someone thought some crisis were imminent today they might panic and actually, accidentally do something.  But of course, that’s a horrible way to approach matters, only intervening in a panic when catastrophe is right in front of one, at the very last moment‒when success is least likely‒when intervening earlier might actually have a decent chance of producing a good outcome.

It seems so intuitive.  If you’re trying to go somewhere, the sooner you realize you’re headed in the wrong direction and correct your course, the easier it will be to get where you want to go.  It’s easier to steer the future in the direction you hope to reach if you start the steering early (if you do it intelligently, anyway‒randomly twirling the steering wheel will almost certainly be worse for you the sooner you start doing it).

As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  Sometimes the disparity is far more stark even than that.  Sometimes, without prevention, the possibility of a cure is moot, because a lost patient cannot be treated, let alone cured.

Enough.  This, like everything else, is stupid.  Where is Sailor Saturn?  Let there be no alarms and no surprises.  Let there be silence.

*This is second-hand information.  I did not read it myself.  I have tried on more than one occasion to read a James Bond novel, but I could barely last a few pages.  Somehow, I found it utterly non-gripping.  I’m glad other people liked the books enough to make movies, because I really like some of the movies, but man, based on my sample, those books are dry.  Pussy Galore would be ashamed**.

**I know, that’s a rather raunchy and not very good joke.  Sorry.  Let’s pretend I’m already drunk from celebrating the holiday, and that’s why my judgment is impaired.  It’s not true, but the fact that it isn’t true doesn’t stop us from saying it, curiously enough.

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I had a good headline idea, but it slipped my mind

I was surprised by how much response I’ve received to yesterday’s blog (and that of the day before) as well as the number of comments.  It’s very gratifying, and I appreciate it very much.  Thank you.

As for today, well, I am really not sure what to write, because yesterday’s blog was‒from my viewpoint, anyway‒about as free-form and chaotic and tangential and stochastic (not to say redundant) as anything I’ve written.  But maybe that’s just the experience I had while writing it; maybe it doesn’t actually come across that way to the reader(s).  It’s difficult for me to know, because even more than reading, writing is a solitary thing.

That’s not to say that people can’t write together.  Back when I was a teenager, I co-wrote some partial stories with one of my best friends, and we did it sitting next to each other and talking things through aloud as we typed.  That was a pretty active and interactive collaboration.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we got very far with it.  We made much more progress writing silly computer programs in Basic on the Apple II+ my father had bought.  This was in the days before there were any ISPs as far as I know, though we did dial onto a couple of local “billboard” services from time to time with my dad’s old modem (I think it was 600 baud*, but it may be some even divisor or even a very small multiple of that number).

One time, I even had a conversation with a girl (!) who was helping run one of the billboards.  She was (supposedly) about my age, and obviously she was much more into computers than I was for the time.  There was never (in my regretful mind) any possibility of an ongoing interaction, let alone a physical meetup or anything, however.  Even then, though I was reasonably confident when within my local group of friends and teachers, I was painfully shy and awkward, and could never make conversation other than about specific topics.

Goal-directed interactions are okay, as they tend to flow naturally from the process involved.  This is why I’ve made nearly all my friends at school or at work.  Purely social interactions were never really an option for me, except with people I already knew quite well.  And having a successful romantic relationship was unfortunately not in the cards for me.

It still isn’t, as far as I can tell.  I suspect the problem is that there’s no other member of my true species on this planet.  I did come reasonably close, or so I thought for a long time, but I’ve been divorced now about five years longer than I was married, so I apparently wasn’t all that successful.

Okay, well, sorry about the weird, ancient info-dump.  It’s not nearly as cool as the data that’s coming in from the recently-activated Vera Rubin observatory.  That, at least, is the sort of thing that helps restore my faith in humanity.  Or, well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that it shifts my Bayesian credence slightly away from the “humans are without net redeeming value” end and toward the “humans may not be all that bad in the end” end.

The credence is still quite low, though.  By which I mean I’m closer to the first end than the second most of the time.

Things might be a little bit better if the sort of people who do things like setting up the Vera Rubin telescope, and who set up and launched and now use the James Webb telescope, and the members of the former human genome project, and the people who study cognitive neuroscience, were the sort of people working in government, writing and administering laws.  Generally speaking, though, the first type of people don’t tend to want to do the governing nonsense, probably not least because a lot of that business is not about everyone trying to do the best they can for the people they represent.

The people who want to do astronomy and mathematics and biology and geology and neuroscience and meteorology and so on are probably some of the best people to do those things‒not just from their point of view but also from the viewpoint of civilizational benefit.  Unfortunately, many of the people who want to go into government and politics tend to be some of the worst people for those jobs, from the point of view of civilization.

I can’t say they are the worst possible group for the job.  The truly disaffected and uninterested or the misanthropic and nihilistic might well do a worse job even than the lot who do it now.  This is despite the fact that most of those latter people act on shallow and immediate self-interest.  Self-interest can do the job adequately when the incentives are structured such that one’s self-interest is served by serving the interests of the people of one’s community/city/nation/species.

Those incentives are very tricky to manage, unfortunately.  It would be much better if we could find people who had real enthusiasm and curiosity and an actually somewhat scientific approach to government.  If only we could find a group as committed to seeing a truly and objectively well-run society‒in which everyone was better off than they would have been in nearly any other‒as the group who set up the Vera Rubin observatory was committed to actually getting the observatory done so they and we could learn ever more about the universe on the largest scales, things might be quite a bit better than they are.  Maybe not, but my credence leans more toward the “maybe so” end.

Alas, politics and government were not born of human curiosity and creativity‒the things almost entirely unique to the species‒but of the old, stupid primate dominance hierarchy/mating drives, which are evolutionarily understandable, but which don’t make for pretty, let alone beneficial, government.  Think about it.  Would you want to put a bunch of self-serving apes doing the jobs of government?

Oh, wait!  That is the group doing the jobs of the government!  Of course, it’s also the group being governed.  Uh-oh.  This could be boding better**.

Not that being recognized as an ape is an insult per se; apes are all that we’ve had available, and they’re the best that’s come along so far.  Some of them are really not so bad.  Some of them figure out ways to launch immense telescopes into space, not so very long after one of them first created the telescope.  Some of them figure out ways to cure and even prevent unnecessary disease.  Some of them figure out ways to turn simple manipulations of base-two arithmetic into information processing that can be scaled up to any kind of logic and information that can be codified.

Some of them just write blogs and sometimes write stories and songs and such***.  But hopefully, that’s not too detrimental an endeavor.

*A baud is a bit per second being sent over the phone lines.  Not a meg, not a K, not even a byte, but rather a bit‒a binary digit, a one versus a zero, on or off.  If you listened to the sound of the modem, you could imagine you could almost hear the individual bits.

**Tip of the hat to Dave Barry’s “Mister Language Person”.

***Though I have done my very small part in advancing human scientific knowledge, in that I am a co-author and co-investigator on an actual published scientific paper.

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Give us this day our daily blog

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this on my mini lapcom.  I don’t know if I wrote any of my posts from last week on the lapcom*, but so far this week, this will represent 50 percent of the week’s posts so far.

Admittedly, that’s not saying much, and one cannot draw many conclusions from a two-item sample in which one is one way and one is another.  To presume that they will continue to occur in a 50/50 ratio would be a major statistical/probabilistic error.  At best, one can say that there are at least two ways in which my blogs can be written, since two have so far been sampled—and that is certainly true.

Anyway, speaking of twos, it’s Tuesday.  It’s the 10th of March, of course, and the second full weekday in Daylight Savings Time, or in non-Daylight Savings Time, whichever one it officially is now.  You can tell that I really don’t see the sense in the whole thing from the fact that I cannot even recall nor logically infer which of the two possibilities is correct.  When I am actually interested in something, I tend to try quickly to dispel any ambiguities in my understanding if I can.  With this, I really don’t care, because it’s all silly.

In fact, it’s so silly that I think that’s all that need be said about it.  On to better things, or at least to other things.  But, of course, the question now is:  What other things should I discuss**?  I don’t know, honestly.

I don’t know dishonestly, either, come to think of it.

Isn’t it weird how much of a habit it is to say things like, “honestly”, or “to tell the truth”, or “I swear”, or other similar words and phrases to try to emphasize the authenticity of our words?  But they don’t do anything at all to confirm our truthfulness; epistemologically, they’re almost without content.  If anything, the fact that we felt unsure enough to have to say we’re being honest might raise a so-called red flag in the mind of a given listener.

Does the fact that a person says “honestly” or “I’m not gonna lie to you” or any similar phrase actually provide any information about truthfulness, except for the fact that this person recognizes that truthfulness is valued, at least by the person to whom they are speaking?  It doesn’t really demonstrate truthfulness, I think that’s clear.

Some might be inclined to think that the words actually indicate falsity, but that’s not true, either (ha ha).  It may be the case, at times, that a person who is trying to deceive another may say “honestly” to reassure their interlocutor that their lies are true and also to relieve some of their own anxiety.  But people who are telling the truth may merely want to recognize and emphasize that fact, and so use the same phrases.  They may, for instance, realize that something true they are saying could seem improbable to some hearers.

If it were always a harbinger of a lie, then such a seeming reassurance would indeed be a reliable signal, but of the opposite state from that described in the message’s content.  People would very quickly stop using it—the honest ones wouldn’t want to use it, since it always implies dishonesty, and the dishonest ones wouldn’t use it because it would be a dead giveaway.

Somehow, seemingly at least partly because it is an ambiguous signal, it stays in our discourse and is used automatically, more for emphasis and for rhetoric than for its prima facie purpose.  I’m sure Steven Pinker could give a good explanation for why this is so, or at least part of an explanation.  I know he’s come out with a recent book about mutual implicit knowledge and its nature (and its implications), but I don’t have it yet, and I haven’t read it.

I’ve read some of his other books and enjoyed them.  I seem to particularly enjoy his work as audiobooks.  I listened to The Better Angels of our Natures in audiobook format during my then-commute, using a Bluetooth enabled motorcycle helmet.  That book is almost 40 hours long on audio, but I was sad when it was over.  There was not one dull moment for me (of course, I was riding a very fast and non-armored conveyance at the time, so even if the book were to have become dull, there would have been other matters to keep me alert).

Okay, well, I’ve managed to meander about lexically—is that the proper term or not?—without any clear destination in mind, other than “at least 700 words”, and have written some vaguely coherent sentences about some distantly interrelated subjects.  I hope I have at least mildly entertained you, the reader.

I know, hopefully there is more than one of you, but only one of you can be reading this at one time in one place.  Now that’s a vaguely interesting thing to recognize:  reading is only ever a solitary process.  One can read alongside others, but one cannot share the process, even if several people are all listening to the same audiobook at once.  Reading does not add in parallel, only in series.

With that little tidbit that some of you will recognize and others will not, I’ll call this blog post to a close.  If there are no objections?  No further business?  Very well.  [Smacks the gavel on the table] This blog post is adjourned.

*I did not.

**Certainly not those round Frisbee® things they throw competitively in the Olympics.

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Is it mean not to know if one’s writing is above average?

It’s Friday again, but that’s not much consolation, since the office is open tomorrow and I will be working, unless I am lucky enough to get very sick or very injured or to die or something.

As usual, I have no idea what would be good to write today.  Actually, goodness—certainly in the moral sense, but possibly also in the sense of quality—probably doesn’t have much to do with my blog.  Perhaps weirdness would be a better adjective/measure to relate to my writing.

I’m probably not an objective judge of such things.  Then again, I don’t know of any fully objective judges.  Still, there is some degree of variability involved in such things, as in nearly everything else made up of smaller, more fundamental parts that are interacting in complicated ways producing so-called emergent behavior.  Nevertheless, cognitive biases are reasonably well studied, as are many emotional blind spots and the like.  And it’s certainly true that I have a difficult time being objective about myself and about my work.

Oddly enough for such a self-despising person, I actually like my own writing, especially my fiction.  When I reread my stories I don’t tend to see them as horrible or wretched or whatever traditionally happens with “artists” who look at their own work.  I think at least some of that sort of thing is probably affected, since our society (perhaps semi-deliberately) looks down upon artists who think highly of their own art.

If only we did that with politicians; there’s an area where humility would be welcome and beneficial, I think.

Anyway, I tend to like my stories—I wrote them, after all, because I wanted to tell and thereby hear those tales—but I don’t necessarily think they’re great or good or decent from anyone else’s point of view.  I honestly don’t know how good or how bad they might be from nearly any others’ points of view, except my sister’s, and she’s probably almost as prone to be biased about my work as I am.

Though, again, my attitude toward my writing is not akin to that oft-noted personal bias that leads more than 90% of drivers to think that they are in the upper 50% in ability (i.e., above the median), which is a mathematical impossibility* for them actually to be.  I don’t think of my writing as better (or worse) than average or the median.

I don’t really compare my writing to anyone else’s.  I just tend to like it.  That’s probably a very good thing, because I have to edit it myself.  Even these daily blog posts are run through three more times after my first draft.  My fiction I tend to reread and edit seven times (that took a very long time with Unanimity).  Why seven?  Well, I had to pick a number, and once or twice is clearly too few, and thirteen would just be unworkable.

Also, with my fiction, I tend to follow advice Stephen King repeated in his book On Writing by working to reduce my final word count by at least ten percent by the time I’m done editing it.  I used to try to do that here, but I sometimes add a bit during editing, so that becomes quite difficult and hardly worth the effort.

All that being said, it would really be nice to get some feedback on my writing, especially on my stories (from people who have read them).  Of course, I would love it if someone loved my stories and told me so and told me why.  The closest I think I’ve come is a review on Amazon of Welcome to Paradox City that was written by a former high school friend (he has since died of cancer, sadly) who had actually honestly bought the book for himself when it came out.  He wrote that the three stories in that collection each made him wish they were the beginning of a whole book, basically implying that he wanted to know what happens next.

That’s a good thing about short stories—you can leave people hanging and that’s just “too bad” for them (though it can be enjoyable).  Short stories also don’t have to have “happy” endings, which is good for me, since only one of the three in the above collection ends happily in any reasonable sense.

Of course, as I’ve noted before, my short stories are rarely short enough ever to have been, for instance, published in a magazine in the old days.  The only real exception to this is Solitaire, which I don’t think any magazine would have published, because it is very, very dark indeed.

Okay, well, I guess I ended up writing something today, even if it was all just figurative omphaloskepsis.  I don’t know whether you readers consider this good or bad or ugly, or how it compares in your estimation to posts like I posted yesterday and/or the day before.  If you’re so inclined, please let me know.

And if you have actually bought and read any of my books, I do beseech you to leave me a review on Amazon (or wherever) if you get the chance.  Thanks.

I’ll write at you tomorrow, barring—as always—the unforeseen.

*It is not, on the other hand, impossible for 90% of people to be above average (i.e., above the mean).  I’m sure I’ve addressed this before, but imagine one had administered a test, and 100 people took it.  Imagine that 90 of those people got 51/100 on the test, whereas the remaining 10 people scored zero.  Then, the arithmetic mean (what people usually mean by “average”) would be (90 x 51)/100**.  That goes to 4590/100, or a mean score of 45.9.  So, 90% of those people scored above average.  That’s not saying much, but it’s true.

** Yes I know I don’t really need the parentheses there, but I’m leaving them in for clarity.

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“‘Cause I’m your superhero. We are standing on the edge…”

Well, it’s Friday the 13th.  That’s at least one good thing about today.  And, of course, next month will also have a Friday the 13th, as I’ve noted previously (I don’t know specifically in which post I noted it, and I don’t really have the urge to go figure it out, so I’ll leave that to you to do if you’re interested).

It is slightly interesting to think about the fact that, on average, one of every seven Februarys will have a Friday the 13th, but not all of those will then lead to a subsequent Friday the 13th in March, because every 4th February will have 29 days*, by the Gregorian calendar, which is the one the world uses overall.

So, the total fraction of years with dual Fridays the 13th would be something like 1/7 minus a further ¼ of that one seventh—so 4/28 (i.e., 1/7) minus 1/28 (1/4 x 1/7), which leads us to the rough conclusion that only three out of 28 years will entail February and March each having a Friday the 13th.  That’s slightly less than one out of every nine years.  And since I’m 56, which is twice 28, I should have experienced about 6 such years in my life (perhaps counting this year).

Mind you, the numbers aren’t quite right overall.  The Gregorian calendar waives the extra day in February on years that are divisible by 100, i.e., the turns of centuries.  However, there’s a further exception to that:  the turn of a millennium, like what we all just had in the year 2000, does keep its 29 days in February.  So that brings the average closer to the raw number, but doesn’t account for the extra  ones that happen at more ordinary turns of centuries.

Of course, the only turn of a century through which I have lived—and through which I am likely to live**—was indeed the turn of a millennium, so I guess for me, the fraction 3/28 should be fairly accurate.

I could, if I were so inclined, go back to the first year in which I experienced a February—that would be 1970 (AD or CE)—and work through them to find out just how many dual Fridays the 13th I’ve experienced.  With modern computer-based calendars it would even be relatively easy.  But I don’t think I am so inclined.

Okay, that’s enough of that for now.  Actually, it’s probably too much of that, at least from any normal person’s (i.e., not my) perspective.  On to other things.

I’m writing this post on my mini lapcom, and I wrote yesterday’s post on the lapcom as well; I am doing this partly to spare my thumbs, but also to try to encourage myself to use the lapcom more and maybe even to write fiction again.  I don’t know whether or not that will happen, but it’s also just more natural for me to use the lapcom.  I’ve been typing, in one way or another, since I was 11 years old, if memory serves.  Clearly I have not been using a smartphone nearly that long, because they have not existed for that long.

Also, even when I saw the imagined future tech on Start Trek:  The Next Generation of tablets with virtual keyboards, I thought they looked like a terrible idea.  How lame, how unaesthetic, just to tap at a flat screen with no real keys.  Also, the “keys” on such devices in the real world are too effing small to be used to type in any traditional way.  Not but what one can get to be pretty speedy with them—I can zip along pretty well on my smartphone—but it’s nothing compared to being able to use one’s whole set of fingers to write.

Although, I’ve often touted the value of writing things longhand before retyping them into the computer, especially for fiction, because it can slow one down beneficially.  I did that—because I had no choice, being at the time a guest of the Florida DOC—with Mark Red, with The Chasm and the Collision, and with the “short” story Paradox City.  I don’t know whether they come across as better or worse or indistinguishable from the stories I have written directly onto the computer.

I would say that they might tend to be shorter, but Paradox City is a nominally short story that was about 60 hand-written pages long, so that didn’t make things much shorter.  Also, I think The Chasm and the Collision is longer than Son of Man, but that may just be a function of the nature of those stories.

Certainly Unanimity is longer than anything else I’ve written, by quite a margin, but that surprised me as much as it might anyone else.  I just started writing the story and it ended up taking that long to tell it.  That happens.  Outlaw’s Mind began as an idea for a short story, but there was definitely a lot there implicitly, even in the original idea, that made it unreasonable to plan to make it “short”.

Anyway, if any readers of this blog have also read my stories and have noticed any tendency toward difference between the initially handwritten and the entirely computer written (meaning written on a computer, not by a computer, unless one is referring to me as a computer) ones, I’d be pleased to get your feedback.

In other personal news, well…my pain is leveling off a bit, though my leg joints still feel loose and floppy and unstable, so I have to be careful, and I have my general persistent tension and neuropathic discomfort in my lower body.  I’ve tried to adjust (and decrease) my workout a bit to compensate, and that seems to be doing some good, but I cannot go without working out, because that tends to make my pain worse.

My mood is pretty much as it usually is, but I’ll spare you that hellscape out of courtesy.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I am not supposed to be working this weekend.  If that changes—in other words, if I do work—I guess I’ll write a post.  Though, really, I should try to get back into Outlaw’s Mind and finish what I had started earliest so I could then get on to newer things.  And if wishes were horses, we’d all be drowning in manure***.

Tomorrow is also Valentine’s Day, but this is of no relevance to me, and that holiday hasn’t been relevant to me for more than 15 years, possibly quite a bit more.  It is not likely to be relevant to me again this side of the grave (and even less likely to be relevant on the other side).

I hope you all have a good weekend, even those of you who have loved ones with whom you can revel in the romance of the holiday.  It’s not your fault that you piss me off.

*This means, of course, that there will be some March Fridays the 13th in years where there was no February Friday the 13th.  If my figuring is correct, those will be the leap-year Februarys in which the 13th falls on a Thursday.

**If I were to be alive in 2100, I would be 130 years old, which would make me even with the Old Took, and which would be substantially older than any human is known to have lived.

***And ironically, any wishes for the manure to go away would just make things worse!

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Solitary story telling in the desert

Told you, I did.  Saturday it is.  Now…there is a blog post.

That means, of course, that I am going to work today.

That’s not because of the fact that it’s Saturday, or because I’m writing a blog post, or even because I told you, though that may have some more causal input.  But otherwise the causality is very much:  I am going to work + I write blog posts on work days generally + I told you I would ⇒ I am writing a blog post.

It’s apparently been a sticking point in the history of statistics in the twentieth century that no one felt they could definitively infer actual causality by statistical testing (such as with medicine effects and so on) but only association.  Of course, this is a root problem in epistemology, not merely in statistics:  the question of how we know what we know or if we know what we think we know.  I’ve actually been dipping in and out of a book about the science of causality, called The Book of Why by Judea Pearl.  It’s good but somewhat dry, and that’s why I’ve had to keep dipping in and out of it between other things.

That latter is just an example of a frustration I’ve experienced throughout my life:  I have a hard time not getting distracted from one interesting thing by the next interesting thing, and so I don’t accomplish things I would like to accomplish.

In fact, the range of time from when I went to prison and the years following was a rare period during which I was able to commit to and follow through with (in this case) writing books and short stories, one at a time, finishing one before starting the next, which is the way I need to do things if I am to succeed.  And during that same time‒well, this started after prison really‒I practiced playing guitar and ended up writing and producing/performing/recording a total of six songs, four of which are published and streamable on all major platforms.

Since then, though, I have deviated from those habits, at least partly because of the utter lack of impact those things have had.  Telling stories while lost and alone to the struggling plants and rare animals in a desert oasis is not very fun.  Even though they don’t interrupt, they almost certainly don’t actually understand anything.  And they never give any feedback.

I’ve thought to myself many times recently that I wish I could form my own personal Tyler Durden.  For those of you who haven’t read or seen Fight Club, I will try to avoid any spoilers, but I will just say that Tyler Durden is Brad Pitt’s character in the movie (and one of the two main characters in both the book and the movie).  Those of you who have seen or read it will know what I mean when I say I need or want my own equivalent of Tyler.

In any case, I need to escape somehow.  I’m enraged by almost everything nowadays.  At least I feel rage.  It’s uncertain that rage is truly caused by the things toward which I feel it.  They may merely happen to be “there” when I’m prone to that feeling.

See what I mean about the whole causality thing?  One can sympathize with the statisticians who felt they could not firmly infer causality from association.  Human emotional states give us good reason to be cautious about drawing conclusions too quickly and recklessly.  As Radiohead sang, “Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”  Or, as I like to remind people, just because you infer it doesn’t mean it was implied.

One may feel what seems to be anger toward another person or circumstance, but then it turns out that one’s blood sugar is just low, and the body is secreting all sorts of sympathetic nervous system hormones to trigger the release and creation of glucose in the body.  But those hormones also influence the brain, and are associated with fight and flight.  The brain may then do its usual associational thing and draw mistaken conclusions about the source or cause of one’s anger.

It reminds me a little bit of the brilliantly acted scene in The Fellowship of the Ring (and the equivalent scene in the book) where Bilbo gets angry and snaps at Gandalf when Gandalf is encouraging him to leave the Ring behind for Frodo.  In this case, of course, it is the Ring itself that’s causing Bilbo’s ire, but he feels, at least for a moment, that it is Gandalf’s “fault”.

What point am I making?  I don’t know that I am actually coherently making any point at all.  But then, I’m thoroughly unconvinced that there’s any true point to anything (though certainly people can find their own internal, subjective meanings).  I have more than a little sympathy with (Health Ledger’s) the Joker, who wants to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

Of course, he is mistaken in one thing (well…almost certainly more than one), and that is his claim that when one upsets the established order and introduces a little anarchy, everything becomes chaos.  Everything does not become chaos; everything always has been chaos.  Chaos and order are not opposites; order is just a subset of chaos.  What we call order is just one of the things chaos does in some places, in some times, in some circumstances.

And chaos doesn’t need agents, anymore than death needs incarnations or servants, or anymore than gravity needs invisible angels to guide the planets in their orbits around the sun.  This shit is just the way things happen; it doesn’t require any agency.  It simply is.

As for why it is the way it is, well, that is an interesting question.  Actually, it’s probably a whole slew of interesting questions.  I don’t think any of these are answered in The Book of Why, despite its title, though.  It’s just not the sort of thing toward which it is addressed.

Wow, I’m all over the place, which is on brand at least.  I’m going to draw this post to a close now.  I hope you have a good weekend.  If you like football, the SuperBowl is on this Sunday.  Actually, it’s on even if you don’t like football.  The game is not conditional upon any one person liking football‒although, it requires a certain minimum number of people to like football or else it will stop occurring.  But what is that number?  Does it vary from moment to moment?

Agh, I need not to get started on questions like that right now.  It may be the question that drives us, Neo, but I’m getting too wordy for a Saturday blog post.  Hasta luego mis amigos and soredewa mata jikai, minasan.

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An angry and probably unpleasant rant

It’s Friday.  yay.

Today’s date (February 6, 2026 CE or AD) has a mildly amusing coincidence/repetition of digits, 2-6-26 in the shortened American version of the date layout.  In the European system, the date would be almost palindromic (6-2-26) but that’s leaving out the zeroes in front of the day and month digits and ignoring the number of the millennium.  So it’s not quite as cool as it could be.

Some might say that such numbers and the arrangements and the noticing thereof can never be “cool”, but such people are troglodytic idiots.  They live in a world full of and shaped by complex ideas, by innovation and technology they could not have invented themselves, and which they don’t bother to try to understand because other people take care of and do all that stuff.

I’ve said before, many times (with sadness and regret and yes, quite a lot of anger) that if it were up to most people, we would all still be living in caves (the few who remain alive, at least).  That’s metaphorical, mind you; very few humans actually ever lived in caves as far as we can tell.  It’s just that the remains of those who died in caves (and their artifacts) are much more likely to endure to be discovered than the tools and remains of those who lived on the savannahs and such.

Anyway, the troglodytes have a quite common attribute, one that might explain a good deal about them:  even though they may have the capacity to read, even though they may have been taught to read, they don’t choose to do it.  It’s both sad and quietly horrifying.

Even those who claim to read just one book (e.g., the Bible, the Koran, etc.) don’t even really read those books.  You can tell, because they clearly don’t live their lives respecting all the precepts of those books.

This fact can sometimes be bad, but more often than that, it’s just as well.  Those books are horrific (and often just horrible, aesthetically).  They also tend to be rather stupid by modern standards, but it’s hard to hold them too much to task for that.  They were, after all, written from depths of profound ignorance about the universe.  One cannot know a truth before it has been discovered.

Of course, if those books really had been written, or at least inspired, by an omniscient being or beings, they could reasonably be expected to be very smart books by any standards.  Alas, they are not.  Trust me, I’ve read many of them, as well as many other books that don’t claim to be the products of omniscience, but which would be far more convincing* if they did than those ancient compilations of legend and myth and mental illness that are the so-called holy books.

Ironically, the Tao te Ching is much wiser than the aforementioned holy books, and it was never said to be written by anything other than a man.  It’s not perfect, of course, but it doesn’t really claim to be so.  Perhaps some of its adherents think it’s somehow “perfect”, but that doesn’t really matter.  After all, there are probably those who “think” Mein Kampf and The Art of the Deal are perfect.

Weirdly enough, some of these people would probably also say the Bible is perfect [Disappointed shrug and heavy sigh].  People are stupid.  And there are none so stupid as those who refuse to think.

Sorry, I don’t even know how I got to dealing with this set of subjects today.  It certainly was not planned.  Then again, nothing here was planned, other than that I would write a blog post as usual, which is not surprising.

It’s not as though I have anything better to do with my life‒that is, nothing better other than to shut it off, I suppose.  But so far, I am too much of a coward to do that.

I know, I know, there are those who (with truly very good intentions) will call continuing to be alive a “brave” choice, but though I appreciate such people’s kindness, that “choice” is very much the default.  In a similar vein, it’s not brave to hunt, or to fish, or to farm, if hunting or fishing or farming  is what you must do to survive.  It’s just pragmatic.

I am not brave for still being alive.  This is not to say that it would be brave for me to kill myself, either.  But it also would not necessarily be cowardly.

Bravery in the usual sense is overrated, anyway.  We can (and should) all be glad, of course, that there are people like firefighters, as well as honorable soldiers and honorable police officers.  But if one stops to think about it, one can see that we should all very much wish to live in a world in which bravery was not required, a world where heroes are not merely not needed but are not useful.

It’s likewise with so-called leaders.  If a society were functioning well, it would not need (or want) heroes or leaders, at least not in the traditional sense.  In a well-functioning civilization, people would see their elected officials as their employees, as the public servants that they are.  They are not, and should not be thought of as, leaders.  That’s just a troglodytic way of thinking.

Alas, we are far from such a well-functioning civilization yet.  Who knows if we ever shall achieve it?

I do know, however, that I will probably be working tomorrow, which means I will write a blog post, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  Until then, I hope you each and all have a very good day by any reasonable criteria.

*Especially modern science books.

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Minding primes and priming minds

It’s Monday the 19th of January (in 2026 CA or AD).  19 is a nice prime number, but it’s one people don’t think about very often.  Stephen King turned it into an “evil” number in his extended universe, which is much less obvious and predictable than using the unjustly maligned number 13.  I’ve always* liked that he did that.  It was clearly chosen at least partly because it was (and remains, and always will be) a prime number.  But it’s not an obvious one.  So, nice job King-sensei (not that he needs my moral support, though I would welcome such support from him).

I occasionally think about mailing Stephen King a copy of one of my books just on the off chance that he might read it some day when he’s bored.  If I were to develop the chutzpah to do such a thing, what do those of you who have read my stories think would be the best one to send him?

Take your time, and don’t be shy.  I’d love to hear from all…what, one of you?  Two?

I don’t think there could be three, but I could be wrong.

Returning to the topic of prime numbers, I had a cool thing happen on Friday:  I bought some stuff at the local convenience store, and my total was $19.07.  I looked at it for a moment and thought that it was a cool-seeming number.  I know 19 and 7 are both prime, and the digits don’t add up to a multiple of 3, nor is the total number a multiple of 4 or 5, obviously.  I wondered if it might be prime.

Back in the day, I would have had to check that more or less manually, but nowadays, I was able just to type into the search bar “Is 1907 prime?”

It is!  Or so claims Google.  If necessary, I could check it myself, by hand, though that would be laborious.  I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to write a quick computer program to check all the possible factors (among numbers less than 954**).  I doubt that I will do either thing, though.  I’m pretty confident in Google on this point.

And now, having said that, I’m starting to feel uncertain.  Could Google be wrong about this?  Am I really going to have to check for myself?

I remember when I realized I had never seen the Pythagorean Theorem proven mathematically (I grew up in a declining school system, sorry).  So, I had to prove it to myself to my own satisfaction, which I did.  Thankfully, it’s easier to prove something like that when the answer (so to speak) is well known.

Okay, enough numeracy, or whatever the best term for the preceding matters might be.

I did not work on Saturday, which is why I didn’t write a blog post on Saturday.  The office was open, but my coworker was able to come in, and the boss specifically told me to take the day off.  Apparently, my exhaustion really was beginning to show, even to other people, which seems not to be the usual case.

Of course, having one day of actual rest doesn’t cure my situation, but it is a minor respite.  I have more fundamental issues than mere rest or lack thereof, but I am not sure there is any way to fix them, at least not in practice.

In principle, of course, it must be possible at least to improve the settings in my brain‒tweak this set of synapses and adjust sensitivity to this or that neurotransmitter, increase (or decrease) the blood flow to this and that region of the brain, etc.  That sort of thing, done precisely and judiciously, could in principle correct or adjust any parameter of brain function one might want, in whatever ways lie within the realm of the brain’s potential.

We’re a long way from being able to carry out such manipulations, and it’s by no means certain that we will exist long enough for neuroscience to achieve such things.  But there’s no principle of nature that precludes it.

Of course, people might be quite leery of even researching such things, even when we finally know enough to do so.  After all, if we can adjust the brain specifically and precisely to make it less depressed or less anxious or less forgetful, we can adjust it in other ways, too.  One could adjust someone’s brain to make them fall in love with a particular other person, like the mythical old magic love potion.  I think most people would rather not fall in love that way (though there’s no reason to think such love would be any less delightful to experience than ordinary, clumsy, stochastic love such as what we have now).

Indeed, one could adjust human minds to make them happy, no matter what the circumstances.  Of course, this could well be used to dominate whole populations of people; one could keep them under constant control because they would be happy, and you could keep them motivated and loyal and satisfied with whatever their lot might be.  I think most people would find that notion repugnant, but it is at least somewhat morally ambiguous, because such people would be as legitimately happy as anyone who becomes happy “on their own”.  Indeed, they might well be happier than any person had ever been before, and more “well-adjusted”, and more creative, and more psychologically healthy.

I get near some of these concerns in my book(s) Unanimity:  Book 1 and Unanimity:  Book 2.  I wouldn’t say those specific ideas figure centrally, though matters of mind and free will and the nature of a person’s character and how it can be changed by physical events are a big part of it.  Also, all sorts of horrible things happen, since it is a horror novel.  And there’s a lot of room for all of it, since it’s as long (total) as the unabridged The Stand and It, to bring us back to Stephen King.

With that, I guess I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, I won’t already be exhausted by tomorrow.  I hope you have a good day.  And if any of you know Stephen King, please ask him which of my books he might think he would want to read.  I’d really appreciate it.

*Well, not always.  I didn’t like it before it happened or before I knew about it.

**Incidentally, 953, which is the rounded-down answer to 1907 divided by 2, is also a prime number.  That’s kind of nice.

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“In an interstellar burst, I’m back…”

I wish that I could honestly tell you that the reason I didn’t post a post yesterday was because I had been working on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and so I decided to leave the blog dormant.  Alas, that was not the reason for my absence yesterday.  Instead, it was something far more prosaic:  I was out sick.  The cold I’d been fighting for days worsened, and I was very worn out after going to work Monday, and my voice was pretty rough, and I was coughing a bit, and, well…you know, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all that.

I’m not feeling a whole lot better today, to be fully forthcoming, but I need to do payroll, and of course, when I’m gone for a day or longer, things pile up that I take care of gradually most days, and it can be that much more overwhelming to catch up with everything.  I suppose none of it really matters much.  It probably wouldn’t matter very much if I didn’t do any of the things I do at work.

Also, honestly, I still haven’t been paid last week’s pay.  I think it’s probably just an oversight on my boss’s part because of the chaos of recent weeks.  It’s unlikely that it’s a deliberate tactic to make me want to go away.  Nevertheless, the irrational, paranoid part of me—the part that assumes everyone else will eventually come to hate me, since I hate myself, and I know me better than anyone else does—is hyper alert for possible hostility.

Anyway, I haven’t actually gotten much done on my return to DFandD.  It was only in the evening yesterday that I started rereading it, but I’ve only gotten as far as the point where the Desperado looks into the well and suddenly hears the sound of rushing water.  If you don’t know what I mean, that’s just because you haven’t read any of what I’ve put up for you to read of that story, though it’s been available for months and months.

I wonder if anyone (other than my sister) has actually read it or any other fiction I’ve posted here.  I don’t recall getting any (non-sibling) feedback on any of it.

Maybe that’s to do with the short attention spans we all seem to have now, thanks to the overabundance of easy-to-consume-without-much-mental-effort-media.  Not only do we have all the easily consumable content on YouTube, which at least includes some very high-quality material, but we have little snippet “shorts” and “reels” on almost all sites now that are often heavily manipulative, but which perforce do not contain much information.

And the algorithms that try to steer us to things that will keep us on-site, or to steer those things toward us, seem to have become rather clunky and ham-handed, and they now push us (or at least me) away from things that would have been useful and interesting toward just boring shit that’s often absurd or stupid or at least just vapid.

Probably the lack of feedback on my stories is just because my stories are not that interesting to many people, or at least not to the sort of people who come to read my blog; I may be selecting for a group of readers who prefer nonfiction to fantastical fiction.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?  I started this blog as a way to promote my fiction writing by having a point of interaction with potential readers of my fiction, to give them some ”inside information” if they were interested in it.  Iterations of Zero was supposed to be the separate blog where I talked about my interests or concerns or issues related to science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, or what have you.

Of course, the phenomenon of such things evolving and changing in ways unforeseen during their inception is not unusual, online or in life.  Just look at early Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes (or even Dilbert) comics compared to later ones.  But it’s frustrating to see, in real time as it were, things evolving away from usefulness, evolving toward senescence.  I suppose, in a way, that’s the story of almost everything that evolves—most changes in any RNA world that predated what we would call true life, for instance, were prone to make things less useful.  And by “useful” here I mean just “liable to make many and good copies of itself”.

One would like to imagine that human society, or at least human technology, would be less prone toward changes that make things worse, since it’s guided by actual minds, and in the case of technology, some of these minds are quite high-quality.

And I think, when the technology was actual hardware and needed to compete against other hardware, the changes would tend to be good—not universally so, but pretty impressively so.  It was such technological advance guided by effective minds that led from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about 60 years.

However, computers have developed—and they have been prone to impressive improvement guided by some very fine minds indeed—and their products have become easier and more thoughtless to use, such that it required almost no mental skill or ability to interact with and consume those products.  And thus the tendency for things to head in good directions became less potent.

Even the finest associated minds, such as they are, don’t fully understand the specific inner workings of things like LLMs and other deep learning computer systems, which we loosely call AI.  And, of course, the computers don’t know how they work, either.  And the complex interactions of the millions and even billions of people who use social media every day and/or constantly is a complex system the dynamics of which can only be modeled for gross tendencies.  Chaos will always apply.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, other than that there seems to be no point, and that indeed there seem to be mostly anti-points, to so much of what happens in the world.  It’s terribly frustrating and pushes me toward full-on despair.  And I cannot seem to find interest in or derive joy from the things that used to make me at least temporarily joyous.  And that doesn’t really matter to anyone, to be honest.  Probably that’s appropriate.  I am probably not worth any effort from anyone at any level (though I would welcome it).

Or maybe I unconsciously drive people away, and that’s the problem.  Who knows?  I don’t.  And we can be sure that Socrates doesn’t and didn’t know, since reputedly the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and this marked him as the wisest person in the world.

As for me, I am not wise, or at least not very wise.  But I am about done, at least for today.  I feel almost done in general.  I’m very tired of going through these motions of pretending to be alive when really I am just a crude mockery of life.

As evidence of my mental stupidity:  When I wrote that last line, I could not help thinking of one of the female leads from Young Frankenstein singing, “Oh…crude mockery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

I hope you readers of my blog all have a good day, but that everyone who doesn’t read my blog has a bad day.  I don’t want them to have too bad a day—nothing tragic—but just enough for them to realize their mistake and come read my blog.